Mothering, Resistance and Survival in Kathleen Mary Fallon’s Paydirt and Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby

The systematic removal of Indigenous Australian children was officially exposed over two decades ago, and the Australian Federal Government made an official apology for the practice in 2008, yet the removal rate of Indigenous Australian children by authorities remains disproportionately high. Child removal, inequalities in health, educational, and financial outcomes, and the pervasive ongoing cultural and systematic hostility against First Nations Australians, combine to create a hostile external culture for Indigenous children to grow up in. This article examines how the struggle to raise Indigenous Australian children within this hostile external context manifests in contemporary Australian literature, with respect to two texts: Paydirt (2007) by Kathleen Mary Fallon and Mullumbimby (2013) by Melissa Lucashenko. Both novels have partially autobiographical elements and feature women mothering teenage Indigenous Australian children. In each novel, the threat of child removal is used as a framing device, and reconnection to traditional Indigenous Australian culture forms both a remedy and an essential component of the survival of the children concerned. This article provides a close reading of the themes and narratives of these novels in relation to the Australian political and cultural context in order to examine how it is that the texts’ authors integrate their characters’ maternal practice with their essential resistance to hostile external forces and cultures

Fire and Ice: Lessons Learned from Superstorm Sandy, and the California Wild Fires

Seven years ago last month, Superstorm Sandy ravaged the Northeast generally and coastal CT-NY-NJ particularly. Hospitals were inundated with rising storm waters forcing the displacement of elderly and infirmed. Under-street wiring shorted then corroded from seawater intrusion. Near ground level generators supporting emergency operations similarly failed. So what power technology worked per specification for the whole of Sandy? More importantly, what “lessons learned” can be applied to future challenges, such as California’s fight with wild fires, and the just-announced use rolling blackouts (PSPS: Public Safety Power Shutoff) for the next fifty years

Depression and anxiety in the postnatal period : an examination of mother–infant interactions and infants’ language development

Infancy is a time period associated with significant and rapid social-emotional and cognitive development. Environmental influences, particularly the quality of the mother–infant interaction, assist in shaping these early capacities. Maternal factors such as depression and anxiety can have a negative impact on a mother’s sensitivity towards her infant and indirectly compromise child developmental outcomes. However, little is known about the impact of depression and anxiety on communicative interactions and language outcomes in young infants. This thesis reports a longitudinal study, which primary objective was to examine the mechanisms through which maternal depression and anxiety influence infant language development via the quantity and quality of mother–infant interactions. The second objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of a video feedback intervention aimed at promoting maternal responsiveness, a construct that captures the quality of early mother–infant interactions. To address these objectives this longitudinal study followed a sample of mother–infant dyads in which the mothers were or were not affected by anxiety and depression symptoms, between the infants’ ages of 6 to 18 months. The study included four components that measured the quantity and quality of the mother–infant interactions and infant developmental outcomes between groups and across time. The first component of the longitudinal study involved home recordings examining the quantity of maternal speech input to the infants at 6 and 12 months of age. The second component involved the assessment of infants’ lexical abilities at 18 months of age. The third component consisted of assessments of the quality of mother–infant interactions at 9 and 12 months. The final component involved the evaluation of a short intervention aimed at promoting maternal responsiveness within mother–infant interactions. Findings demonstrated that maternal depression and anxiety have an effect on infants’ early lexical abilities via both the quantity and quality of mother–infant interactions. These results suggest that variability in mothers’ emotional health influences infants’ home language experience, the concurrent frequency of vocalisations, and their later vocabulary size and lexical processing efficiency at 18 months. Maternal responsiveness, a measure of the quality of mother–infant interactions, emerged as the strongest predictor of infant vocabulary size

Alien Registration- Brookman, George (Sanford, York County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/3369/thumbnail.jp

GIANTS OF EASTER ISLAND (Review)

GIANTS OF EASTER ISLAND A Multimedia Presentation on the Web at: Review by David Brookman </p