Using participatory workshops to assess alignment or tension in the community for minimally invasive tissue sampling prior to start of child mortality surveillance: lessons From 5 sites across the CHAMPS network

The Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) program is a 7-country network (as of December 2018) established by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to identify the causes of death in children in communities with high rates of under-5 mortality. The program carries out both mortality and pregnancy surveillance, and mortality surveillance employs minimally invasive tissue sampling (MITS) to gather small samples of body fluids and tissue from the bodies of children who have died. While this method will lead to greater knowledge of the specific causes of childhood mortality, the procedure is in tension with cultural and religious norms in many of the countries where CHAMPS works - Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and South Africa. Participatory Inquiry Into Community Knowledge of Child Health and Mortality Prevention (PICK-CHAMP) is a community entry activity designed to introduce CHAMPS to communities and gather initial perspectives on alignments and tensions between CHAMPS activities and community perceptions and priorities. Participants' responses revealed medium levels of overall alignment in all sites (with the exception of South Africa, where alignment was high) and medium levels of tension (with the exception of Ethiopia, where tension was high). Alignment was high and tension was low for pregnancy surveillance across all sites, whereas Ethiopia reflected low alignment and high tension for MITS. Participants across all sites indicated that support for MITS was possible only if the procedure did not interfere with burial practices and rituals

Toward a New Historicism Once More

The historicist approach to literary texts has not been in favor during the years when « new criticism », then « deconstruction » dominated the field, compelling critics to assess the very nature of historical discourse. There now seems to be developing in American literary criticism a new historicism which, aware of the perils involved, insists that historical dimensions must be reintroduced on theoretically acceptable grounds.L'approche historiciste des textes littéraires n'a guère eu de succès durant la période où dominèrent tour à tour la « new criticism » et la « déconstruction », en un temps où les critiques se voyaient contraints de mettre en cause la notion même de discours historique. Il semble qu'aujourd'hui dans la critique littéraire américaine, revienne sur le devant de la scène un nouvel historicisme qui, conscient des dangers, insiste sur la nécessité de réintroduire la dimension historique sur des bases théoriques acceptables.Elliott Emory. Toward a New Historicism Once More. In: Revue Française d'Etudes Américaines, N°31, février 1987. Histoire et fiction. pp. 19-30

Essential Bercovitch

Fifth contribution to the Serialized Forum Sacvan Bercovitch, Literary Historian and Theoris

Terror, Aesthetics, and the Humanities in the Public Sphere

<p>In the early days of the Iraq War, the United States used the power of images, such as those of the “mother of all bombs” and a wide array of weapons, as well as aesthetic techniques to influence and shape the consciousness of millions and to generate strong support for the war. The shock, fear, and nationalism aroused in those days after 9/11 have enabled the Bush administration to pursue a military agenda that it had planned before 9/11. Since then the extraordinary death and destruction, scandals and illegalities, and domestic and international demonstrations and criticisms have been unable to alter the direction of this agenda. Those of us in the humanities who are trained as critical readers of political and social texts, as well as of complex artistically constructed texts, are needed now more urgently than ever to analyze the relationships between political power and the wide range of rhetorical methods being employed by politicians and others to further their destructive effects in the world.</p&gt

Columbia Literary History of The United States

xxviii,1264hal.;24c

The Cambridge introduction to early American literature/ Elliott

viii, 198 hal.; 24 c