Remember Gerhard Richter in the Thunderstorm of Beethoven: The Influence of Cross-Sensory Coupling on Memory, Intercultural Communication, and the Verbalization of Paintings and Sounds

This interdisciplinary study focuses on the perception and verbalization of messages conveyed through instrumental music, soundscapes, and contemporary paintings. International young-adult university students learning German participated in a series of experiments conducted at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. To incorporate globalization and cultural difference into this analysis, the author compared the reactions of Western and Asian participants to auditory and visual stimuli. This paper explores the concepts of mixed media, cross-sensory coupling, and esthetic synesthesia, and throws new light on the contribution of cross-sensory coupling to verbalization and to long-term memory processes, from encoding to retrieval. In addition, the author demonstrates how intercultural communication is based upon universal emotions aroused by contemporary paintings, instrumental music and soundscapes

Operating between Cultures and Langugages: Multilingual Films in Foreign Language Classes

Our societies have undergone two major changes during the last decades: firstly, the continuous rise of cultural and linguistic diversity, due to the global economy, migration and universal mobility, and secondly, the steady expansion and gathering impetus of the new communication media (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, 2012). In consequence, multilingualism, acquired or learned, has shaped our living together and pertains to our learners in the classroom. Similarly, polyglot movies, literatures and other cultural productions have become symbolic expressions for worldwide cross-cultural movements for all age groups. Both the multilingualism and the multi-/transculturalism inherent in the texts and images constitute a rich cultural resource for the Foreign Language (FL) classroom. This article argues that the creative potential of transnational film, to be found in its multilingualism and transculturalism, should be used as a complementary field of teaching film beyond the traditional and curriculum-bound (English only) English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom in Germany and therefore supports multicultural, multilingual and multimodal learning. The article uses examples from Quentin Ta­rantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), Gonzalez Iñarritu’s Babel (2012) and Wim Wenders’ documentary Pina (2011)

The Timing and Experience of Menopause among British Pakistani Women in Bradford and Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK

Previous studies have shown considerable differences at both the population and individual levels in the timing of menopause and the experience of physical and emotional changes related to menopause (generally called symptoms). Attempts to understand this variation have not found a consistent pattern, suggesting that the existing approaches to the study of menopause may have failed to capture some of the complexity of the phenomenon. Previous research on British Pakistanis has not included in-depth study of menopause. The present study has sought to demonstrate that a biosocial research design can improve our understanding of the menopause transition both among British Pakistanis and more generally. This study used a range of methods including semi-structured questionnaire-based interviews and anthropometrics (n=257), life history interviews (n=19), and daily participant observation among middle-aged British Pakistani women in the Leeds/Bradford area of West Yorkshire. Statistical procedures were used on the quantitative data using SPSS 15; qualitative data were analysed using a thematic coding system and NVivo software. This study found that British Pakistani women of a higher occupational social class were more likely to experience hot flushes than women from lower social classes and women who perceive themselves to be of higher status were more likely to have an earlier menopause than their lower status counterparts. Women from the Choudhary Jatt biradari (a caste-related kinship group) were more likely to have a later menopause and were less likely to experience hot flushes than women from other biradaris. Levels of reported anxiety and acculturation were both positively associated with hot flush severity. Women reported a wide range of changes due to menopause and attributed changes to menopause that previous researchers considered to be unrelated to menopause. Attribution of symptoms to menopause was associated with menopausal status, age, and migration status. Women interpreted some items from a standard checklist in ways other than intended by the checklist‘s developers, based on local ideas about menopause. British Pakistani women‘s understandings and perceptions of menopause are intimately linked with their understandings of Islam, sexuality, menstruation, and ageing, as well as their ethnic identity and notions of purity and modesty. Social issues like acculturation, social support, kinship networks, class, and the history of tensions between Pakistanis and the wider society appear to be very important to consider in understanding menopause among British Pakistani women. Social issues such as these may play a role in influencing both the timing and the experience of menopause among women in other groups and thus should be considered in future studies

The interview as narrative ethnography : seeking and shaping connections in qualitative research.

Acts of counter-subjectification in qualitative research are always present but are often submerged in accounts that seek to locate the power of subjectification entirely with the researcher. This is particularly so when talking to people about sensitive issues. Based on an interview-based study of infertility and reproductive disruption among British Pakistanis in Northeast England, we explore how we, as researchers, sought and were drawn into various kinds of connections with the study participants; connections that were actively and performatively constructed through time. The three of us that conducted interviews are all female academics with Ph.Ds in anthropology, but thereafter our backgrounds, life stories and experiences diverge in ways that intersected with those of our informants in complex and shifting ways. We describe how these processes shaped the production of narrative accounts and consider some of the associated analytical and ethical implications

Determinants of Age at Menarche in the Newcastle Thousand Families Study

Early life determinants of age at menarche were investigated for female participants in the longitudinal Thousand Families Study based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Age at menarche was collected retrospectively from 276 participants at the age 50 follow-up in 1997. Birth weight, length of gestation, height, weight, duration of breast feeding, social class, periods of infection, and quality of housing conditions in childhood were collected prospectively. Ordinal logistic regression was used to test univariate and multivariable associations of fetal and childhood data with menarcheal age group membership. Separation into 3 menarcheal age groups was made with respect to distance in standard deviations from the sample mean: early (μ->1 SD), middle (μ±1SD). Regression models were also used to test univariate and multivariable associations between fetal and childhood data and age at menarche as a continuous variable. Two main independent associations were observed: girls who experienced a shorter gestation and girls who were heavier at age 9 had earlier menarche. Birth weight adjusted for gestational age was found to have different relationships with age at menarche depending upon how heavy or light a girl was at age 9. The results of this study support the hypothesis that fetal conditions are associated with the timing of menarche and the hypothesis that greater childhood tissue growth is associated with earlier menarche. It is suggested that future work should focus on illuminating the mechanisms underlying these statistical relationships

Maritime safety administration for Gambia - is there a need?

This paper looks at the present status of some important maritime related matters in the Gambia, and identifies the possible roles a specialised arm of the Government, a Maritime Safety Administration, could play in these fields. As supporting information, some of the basic problems of developing maritime nations are enumerated, and an introduction to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), how it works, and where and how the organisation can help with its Technical Assistance Programme, is given. Also a brief note on maritime legislation and the roles and functions of an MSA. The conclusion arrived at warrants the establishment of a sound Maritime Safety Administration within the Ministry of Works and Communications, and in fulfilling this, a set of recommendations on the steps to be taken ensues

Reproductive justice for the haunted Nordic welfare state : Race, racism, and queer bioethics in Finland

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors. Bioethics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.The Nordic welfare state aims to offer universal healthcare and achieve good health, bar none. We discuss past and present moral blind spots in welfare state bioethics through reproductive justice and queer bioethics, particularly focusing on race and racism, based on ethnographic data from Finland. Globally portrayed as aspirational and mostly uninterrogated, it is crucial to have a thorough bioethical evaluation of a Nordic model informed by Black and queer perspectives. We have come to conceptualize the Finnish welfare state as haunted. We fear that the seemingly non-racial racial hygiene continues to haunt bioethics of the welfare state as structural racism. A key cause for this concern is the lack of racial awareness in public politics and the reluctance in discussing racism due to the national agenda of color-blindness. This crucially compounds to our findings that medical professionals prefer to think they operate on “purely medical” reasoning as opposed to nuanced ethical contemplation, the latter associated with “social issues” that allegedly cannot be resolved and are outside medical interest. We discuss how the bioethical aftermath of eugenics remains unresolved. Racist, classist, sexist, ableist, and cis- and heteronormative stratification of reproduction requires a nuanced moral compass for Nordic welfare state bioethics, not “strictly medical practice.” We suggest queer bioethics as a moral theory for recalibrating this compass, joining forces with other justice movements to tackle racism in healthcare and further to interrogate racism, sexism, ableism and cis- and heteronormativity in bioethics.Peer reviewe