A Queer Perspective on Melodrama’s Social Life

A review of Jonathan Goldberg. 2016,' Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility', Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Consistency in Regularizations of the Gauged NJL Model at One Loop Level

In this work we revisit questions recently raised in the literature associated to relevant but divergent amplitudes in the gauged NJL model. The questions raised involve ambiguities and symmetry violations which concern the model's predictive power at one loop level. Our study shows by means of an alternative prescription to handle divergent amplitudes, that it is possible to obtain unambiguous and symmetry preserving amplitudes. The procedure adopted makes use solely of {\it general} properties of an eventual regulator, thus avoiding an explicit form. We find, after a thorough analysis of the problem that there are well established conditions to be fulfiled by any consistent regularization prescription in order to avoid the problems of concern at one loop level.Comment: 22 pages, no figures, LaTeX, to appear in Phys.Rev.

Political identity as temporal collapse: Ethiopian federalism and contested ogaden histories

Since the 1980s, analyses of African political identities have emphasized identity manipulation as a governance tool. In the Somali Horn of Africa, however, politicians’ efforts to reinvent identities confront rigid understandings of genealogical clanship as a key component of identity and political mobilization. This article explores how government efforts to construct a new ‘Ethiopian–Somali’ identity within Ethiopia’s ethnic-federal system are entangled with attempts to reinterpret clan genealogies and histories. We focus on efforts to revise the history of clans within the broader Ogaden Somali clan group and trace the possibilities and limits of these revisions in relation to legacies of colonialism as well as popular understandings of Ogaden identity. Drawing on feldwork and archival research, we show that political struggles over Somalis’ integration with Ethiopia orient around Somali clanship, but that clanship is not a mechanical tool of mobilization, as it is often portrayed. We suggest that genealogical relatedness does not equate to political loyalty, but genealogical discourse provides a framework by which various actors reinterpret contemporary events by collapsing history into the present to imbue clan, ethnic, and national identities with political signifcance

The legal life of objects : speaking evidence and mute subjects in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson

textIn this paper, I argue that legal authorities assign speaking power to objects and evidence in the courtroom in order to deny speaking power to racialized subjects and police racial identities. Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) demonstrates how the law transverses the human/object boundary in order to regulate legal definitions of identity. I examine the legal animation of the textual document, as exemplified by the last will and testament; the knife, a material object that as a murder weapon is responsible for condemning the accused; and the fingerprint, a unique form of bodily evidence that merges the textual and the material, in order to understand how these objects blur the line between the living and the deceased, between human and nonhuman agency, and between body and text. My methodology brings object studies into conversation with a literature and the law approach in order to show not only how the nineteenth-century American literary imagination was concerned with testing and regulating racial boundaries, but also how fictions employed by the law produce subjects and objects. My investigation reminds us that when evidence appears to “speak for itself,” this speech act has been carefully orchestrated by human legal authorities who determine what the evidence can be understood to mean and for whom it speaks.Englis

Strategies and challenges to facilitate situated learning in virtual worlds post-Second Life

Virtual worlds can establish a stimulating environment to support a situated learning approach in which students simulate a task within a safe environment. While in previous years Second Life played a major role in providing such a virtual environment, there are now more and more alternative—often OpenSim-based—solutions deployed within the educational community. By drawing parallels to social networks, we discuss two aspects: how to link individually hosted virtual worlds together in order to implement context for immersion and how to identify and avoid “fake” avatars so people behind these avatars can be held accountable for their actions

An analysis of the practical DPG method

In this work we give a complete error analysis of the Discontinuous Petrov Galerkin (DPG) method, accounting for all the approximations made in its practical implementation. Specifically, we consider the DPG method that uses a trial space consisting of polynomials of degree $p$ on each mesh element. Earlier works showed that there is a "trial-to-test" operator $T$, which when applied to the trial space, defines a test space that guarantees stability. In DPG formulations, this operator $T$ is local: it can be applied element-by-element. However, an infinite dimensional problem on each mesh element needed to be solved to apply $T$. In practical computations, $T$ is approximated using polynomials of some degree $r > p$ on each mesh element. We show that this approximation maintains optimal convergence rates, provided that $r\ge p+N$, where $N$ is the space dimension (two or more), for the Laplace equation. We also prove a similar result for the DPG method for linear elasticity. Remarks on the conditioning of the stiffness matrix in DPG methods are also included.Comment: Mathematics of Computation, 201

Remembering Hamlet : Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead and the tragic value of Hamlet

The canonical importance of Hamlet is indisputable, but the nature of its cultural value needs to be reconsidered in relation to our contemporary understanding of tragedy and death. Though the play has clearly stood the test of time, the shadow that Hamlet casts over literature and beyond has led to many reinterpretations, keeping the play’s cultural meaning in constant flux. Consequently, I would suggest that Hamlet’s original tragic value has in fact diminished and cannot be quite fully restored. I will argue that Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead holds a significant position in this history of Hamlet reworkings precisely because it captures the discontent and disillusionment that a contemporary audience might have with regards to the grandeur of Hamlet as a tragedy and its questionable treatment of death. Stoppard’s displacement of the iconic Hamlet gives us access to the play’s underbelly, which Stoppard attacks by questioning the credibility and relevance of the concept of agency in post-Beckettian theatre. As Hamlet, agency, and heroism are decentred, the tragedy of the unheroic non agent becomes all the more palpable, thereby resuscitating the poignancy of Hamlet without evoking its now inapt grandeur.peer-reviewe

Two's Company, Three's a Conversation: A Study of Dialogue Among A Professor, A Peer-Writing Fellow, and Undergraduates Around Feedback and Writing

A single teacher’s comments on student writing may feel less like a readerly interpretation of a text than directive instructions for writing “better,” closing possibilities for conversations about writing. Instead, when an instructor opens a space for feedback from multiple voices, the resulting dialogue could gesture toward the plurality of readings possible for one text and create a space for a writer to exercise and articulate choice. As a writing fellow in an art history class at an urban, private, religiously-affiliated university, I worked with the professor to provide feedback to student writers that modeled a multiperson conversation around their writing. Using Microsoft Word’s “Review” function, the professor and I commented on both student writing and each other’s comments. At the end of the semester, I reviewed these comments and noticed an interesting record on the page. These collaborative comments, along with e-mails and my logs from conferences with students in the University Writing Center, reveal the development of a conversation that recognizes a multiplicity of readerly interpretations. This method of feedback has the potential to invite students and teachers to enter into an interactive and stimulating discourse that re-positions the authority of both, encouraging students to more freely discuss their writing as authors.University Writing Cente