Visualizing Girlhood: Visibility and the Power of the Black Girl Gaze to Understand Adolescent Girls’ Identity

Black feminist scholars have highlighted the various ways Black women and girls are rendered invisible throughout many U.S. institutions. In the past few years, advocates have called attention to the ways gendered-racialized biases contribute to the punitive and dehumanizing treatment of Black girls in school. This study will demonstrate how Black adolescent girls negotiate their identity at school through the creation of self-portraits. By using dual self-portraits, in which girls are able to express their own perspective and imagine the perspective of their teacher, Black adolescent girls are allowed the space to explore the relationship between power, culture and their identity development. Overwhelmingly, the visual and interview data in this study suggested two major ways girls are experienced in relation to their teachers. Their inner selves are rendered invisible (i.e. Girls believed their teachers did not know or see their inner selves) or fully visible (i.e. Girls believed their teachers knew and saw their complete selves). The findings of this research study provide information for teachers to understand how to engage Black girls in ways that support their multiple identities. This study contributes new knowledge to the field of teacher education and Black Girlhood Studies

The world of the landscape

In his article "The World of the Landscape" Bart Verschaffel analyzes the visual logic of the landscape genre in painting, as it was developed from the sixteenth century on. He argues that the structure of a minimal foreground, a middle ground cut off from the foreground, and a background that gives way to the distant, corresponds to a meditative attitude, proper to the nature of the image as such. The landscape is essentially a calm image. Second, Verschaffel puts forward that the middle ground in landscape images is not, as in history painting, a waiting room adjacent to the action in the foreground, but is rather oriented towards the horizon and beyond: a landscape always represents the world. In the romantic landscape tradition, moreover, the vagueness resting on the horizon comes to the fore and creates an "atmosphere" that touches a lonely soul and transforms an image of the world into an intimate encounter

Charles Darwin’s final book on earthworms, 1881

This article focuses on the publication of Darwin’s final book (1881) in the context of Darwin’s larger attempts to resist the habitual anthropocentrism of human beings. It begins with Darwin’s discussion of animal cognition and the senses of worms. It concludes with his emphasis on the significant effects worm digestion has on the landscape and the fertility of the earth. The article links Darwin’s Worms Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland, arguing that both texts are engaged in dismantling human perceptions that stem from possessing a highly visual brain, and that both throw doubt on the belief that a single objective world exists independent of particular observers.http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anna-henchman-charles-darwins-final-book-on-earthworms-1881http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anna-henchman-charles-darwins-final-book-on-earthworms-1881Published versio

Shadows over Shulamith: Giordano Bruno's De umbris idearum and the Song of Songs

This article focuses on the use of one verse from the Biblical Songs of Songs in central passages of Giordano Bruno's first published book on the art of memory. De umbris idearum [On the Shadows of Ideas] not solely aims at improving mnemonic capacities, it also envisages the preconditions and limits of cognition in Bruno's new inifitist cosmology. Taking relevant scholarly literature on the topic as a point of departure, this contribution presents De umbris in the context of Bruno's philosophy in general; it focuses on Bruno's evocation of Origen's commentary on that passage in the Song of Songs. The article analyzes in detail the reasons for Bruno's subversion of the traditional exegetic tradition that was massively influenced by Origen's spiritualized reading of the Song of Songs. Bruno's misappropriation of the Origen's commentary turns out to be a mise en abyme, a mannerist strategy of representation. It not only reflects the very method that underlies Bruno's art of memory, but is also to be understood as a conscious subversion of exegetic traditions in general

Relighting the fire : visualizing the lesbian in contemporary India

This article revisits the controversy surrounding Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996), India's first publicly released film depicting female same-sex desire. The film has become a touchstone for discussions of the representation of queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives in India. While the majority of critical accounts of the film have rejected the use of “lesbian” on the basis of its Anglo-American specificity, this article seeks to recast lesbians at the heart of Fire by filtering them through the lens of transnational protest, and by offering a close reading of the film's own play on religious and cultural symbolism. Viewed almost two decades after its release, in the light of the Delhi rape case of December 2012 and subsequent events, including the upholding of a law criminalizing gay sex in November 2013, the film now more than ever seems to offer a fantasy of the future, rather than a viable reality in the present day. Within Fire, the circumnavigation of heteronormative power and desire is certainly queer, but the film's labeling as “lesbian” subsequent to its release in India opened up an important public forum for a debate about female desire and independence that continues to resonate today. This article does not attempt to offer a conclusive argument about the use of the term “lesbian” to label the relationship between women that is depicted within the film, but it does examine the way in which the film itself visualizes desire between women, and in particular the use of Hindu narratives, imagery and motifs. The film's interpellation into lesbian politics is facilitated by the strong emphasis on a female-centered desire that is not defined by motherhood, that cannot be contained, and that demands to be seen

How Do You Build a "Culture of Health"? A Critical Analysis of Challenges and Opportunities from Medical Anthropology.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Culture of Health Action Framework aims to "make health a shared value" and improve population health equity through widespread culture change. The authors draw upon their expertise as anthropologists to identify 3 challenges that they believe must be addressed in order to effectively achieve the health equity and population health improvement goals of the Culture of Health initiative: clarifying and demystifying the concept of "culture," contextualizing "community" within networks of power and inequality, and confronting the crises of trust and solidarity in the contemporary United States. The authors suggest that those who seek to build a "Culture of Health" refine their understanding of how "culture" is experienced, advocate for policies and practices that break down unhealthy consolidations of power, and innovate solutions to building consensus in a divided nation

Reading comprehension : what strategies make a difference?

A literature review was conducted on comprehension strategies. The comprehension strategies that are being reviewed were chosen based on past research of reading comprehension.This literature review will explore six comprehension strategies that have been found to improve students\u27 comprehension abilities

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing