Black and White Landscapes: Topographies of Disorientation in the Works of Carrie Mae Weems and Claudia Rankine

n this essay, I explore how the contemporary black female artists Carrie Mae Weems and Claudia Rankine work with photography and text to develop what I call, after the famous American landscape photography exhibition, a new, anticolonial, topographics. Connecting the geographical and anatomical meanings of the word “topography,” I approach their works via the phenomenology of Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon, tracing how the two artists decentre and throw into relief what Ahmed terms “whiteness as orientation.” Enacting an affective, visual politics of discomfort and disorientation, Weems and Rankine, this essay contends, open new terrain from which to encounter the American landscape in visual, corporeal, and phenomenological terms

Temporal changes in grazing intensity and herbage quality within a Swiss fen meadow

Güsewell S., Pohl M., Gander A. and Strehler C. 2007. Temporal changes in grazing intensity and herbage quality within a Swiss fen meadow. Bot. Helv. 117: 57 - 73. Grazing is a possible tool for conservation management in wetlands, but a frequent problem is spatial variation in grazing intensity, which may promote the degradation of the vegetation. Temporal changes in grazing patterns may reduce this problem by leading to a more homogeneous overall use of the area. In a lakeshore wetland (2.8 ha) grazed by Scottish Highland cattle from May till September, we studied how the grazing of nine vegetation types changes seasonally and between years, and how this is related to the quantity and quality of the herbage. We observed cattle activity weekly throughout two grazing periods, determined the biomass and nutrient concentrations of the vegetation, analysed dung samples, and carried out clipping experiments to assess shoot regeneration after grazing. The annual grazing intensity varied seven-fold among vegetation types, and this pattern was closely similar in both years. In several vegetation types, however, grazing intensity changed seasonally. Cattle first grazed tall grassdominated vegetation (Phragmition, Phalaridion), which had the most digestible and nutrient-rich herbage, but the poor regeneration of dominant species forced the cattle to then graze small-sedge dominated, nutrient-poor fen vegetation (Caricion davallianae). These temporal changes in grazing patterns slightly reduced the spatial variation in grazing intensity. To take advantage of this effect, relatively long grazing seasons are preferable to shorter ones. Four years of grazing reduced the above-ground biomass production and nutrient concentrations of several vegetation types. Therefore, years without grazing may be needed to prevent a degradation of palatable plant communities with low grazing toleranc

Effect of a pediatric early warning system on all-cause mortality in Hospitalized pediatric patients: The epoch randomized clinical trial

IMPORTANCE: There is limited evidence that the use of severity of illness scores in pediatric patients can facilitate timely admission to the intensive care unit or improve patient outcomes. OBJECTIVE: To determine the effect of the Bedside Paediatric Early Warning System (BedsidePEWS) on all-cause hospital mortality and late admission to the intensive care unit (ICU), cardiac arrest, and ICU resource use. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: A multicenter cluster randomized trial of 21 hospitals located in 7 countries (Belgium, Canada, England, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, and the Netherlands) that provided inpatient pediatric care for infants (gestational age ≥37 weeks) to teenagers (aged ≤18 years). Participating hospitals had continuous physician staffing and subspecialized pediatric services. Patient enrollment began on February 28, 2011, and ended on June 21, 2015. Follow-up ended on July 19, 2015. INTERVENTIONS: The BedsidePEWS intervention (10 hospitals) was compared with usual care (no severity of illness score; 11 hospitals). MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: The primary outcome was all-cause hospital mortality. The secondary outcome was a significant clinical deterioration event, which was defined as a composite outcome reflecting late ICU admission. Regression analyses accounted for hospital-level clustering and baseline rates. RESULTS: Among 144539 patient discharges at 21 randomized hospitals, there were 559 443 patient-days and 144539 patients (100%) completed the trial. All-cause hospital mortality was 1.93 per 1000 patient discharges at hospitals with BedsidePEWS and 1.56 per 1000 patient discharges at hospitals with usual care (adjusted between-group rate difference, 0.01 [95% CI, -0.80 to 0.81 per 1000 patient discharges]; adjusted odds ratio, 1.01 [95% CI, 0.61 to 1.69]; P =.96). Significant clinical deterioration events occurred during 0.50 per 1000 patient-days at hospitals with BedsidePEWS vs 0.84 per 1000 patient-days at hospitals with usual care (adjusted between-group rate difference, -0.34 [95% CI, -0.73 to 0.05 per 1000 patient-days]; adjusted rate ratio, 0.77 [95% CI, 0.61 to 0.97]; P =.03). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Implementation of the Bedside Paediatric Early Warning System compared with usual care did not significantly decrease all-cause mortality among hospitalized pediatric patients. These findings do not support the use of this system to reduce mortality

Rereading Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry: a Textual Practice special issue

Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry is a difficult text to define. Written first as a series of lectures between 1940 and 1948, and published in 1949, the book is partly a defence of poetry as a vital means of truthful communication; partly a clear-eyed commentary on American culture and social realities in the midtwentieth century; partly a wide-ranging exposition of the relationality of all forms of human knowledge; partly a memoir of the most open and useful kind; partly a careful critique of the forms, images, meanings, effects, and implications of poetry – of the pacts poetry makes with its readers (and vice versa) – in aesthetic, personal, and ethical terms. I write ‘partly’ with the acknowledgement that the word does not suffice. The Life of Poetry is an extraordinary book not least because it is wholly all of these things, while encompassing and embodying many more – stretching, as it does, across topics that include politics, music, visual art, physics, philosophy, history, advertising, film, literature, religion, childhood, narratives of the marginalised and disenfranchised. As Rukeyser was fond of saying, quoting the physicist Willard Gibbs (whose biography she wrote), ‘the whole is simpler than the sum of its parts’. Perhaps above all, The Life of Poetry is an education. Framed as a response to a fellow refugee, who was sharing Rukeyser’s boat as it sailed away from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, The Life of Poetry answers the man’s question as to the importance of poetry to such historical moments. As the essays in this special issue demonstrate, Rukeyser’s response affords a variety of perspectives on a myriad of connected issues pertaining to being in the world, with others. As such, it is a rousing call to put poetry to use, an activation of our shared ‘capacity to make change in existing conditions

Mixed messages:American correspondences in visual and verbal practices

Offering a major contribution to the field of American culture and aesthetics in an interdisciplinary frame, this collection assembles the cutting-edge research of renowned and emerging scholars in literature and the visual arts, with a foreword by Miles Orvell. The volume represents the first of its kind: an intervention in current interdisciplinary approaches to the intersections of the written word and the visual image that moves beyond standard theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive and experiential terms. Tracing a strong lineage of pragmatism, romanticism, surrealism and dada in American intermedial works through the nineteenth century to the present day, the editors and authors of this volume chart a new and vital methodology for the study and appreciation of the correspondences between visual and verbal practices

The Senses of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead

When Muriel Rukeyser travelled to Gauley Bridge in 1936 to report on the industrial disaster that had led to the deaths of over 700 miners, her findings led her to write what is arguably her masterpiece - the 1938 poem series The Book of the Dead. Of all Rukeyser's writings, this hybriit work bf documentary techniques and metaphors, of testimony and elegy, has attracted the most critical attention. However, analyses of the series have tended to focus on the ways in which the poet adopted and adapted documenta.ry methods in order to offer a leftist ideological critique on capitalist-born social injustice. The purpose of this article is not to negate such readings, but to offer alongside them insight into a more ethical-philosophical approach that [ believe guided Rukeyser's entire career. Via an examination of the ways in which Rukeyser employs the human senses to articulate the complexities of human political, metaphysical and social relations, this article explores the influence of the Zionist Martin Buber on the poet. Rukeyser acknowledged Buber's writings in her later work, but I contend here that they played a large part in the formation of her poetics, especially in connection with her documentary aesthetic. Whilst several critics have noted, albeit often superficially, the Marxist flavour of Rukeyser's poetry in The Book of the Dead, I argue for the influence of Buber over Marx in terms or responsibility, community and dialogue? Both Rukeyser's and Buber's methods of expressing and promoting these ethical necessities rely on a synaesthetic response to the world. Where Buber advances a dialogue between the self and alterity through transcendent personal encounter, Rukeyser locates such encounter in the poem, arguing for an exchange that leads to creation, and to personal and interpersonal growth

Facing the Fact: Word and Image in Muriel Rukeyser’s 'Worlds Alongside'

In 1939, the small format picture magazine Coronet featured two photo- textual experiments. These were arranged as a “portfolio of photographs” supported by a poetic prose “narrative” by Muriel Rukeyser. They were published in the September and October issues, and were titled, respectively, “Adventures of Children” and “Worlds Alongside.” The photo-narratives were experimental not least in the fact that they did not adhere to established contemporary formulae regarding the presentation of word- image pairings in magazine reports, such as those featured in Life or Time since the height of the Great Depression, as well as those featured previously in the more arts-orientated Coronet. Hailed by the editors of Coronet as “infinitely superior to the usual picture-gallery treatment” of photographs and descriptive captions in the publication (120), Rukeyser’s photo-narratives nevertheless puzzled several readers, offended some, and remain an intriguing and, I argue, vital part of her oeuvre. For the purposes of this essay, which will attempt to unravel the complexity of Rukeyser’s use of word and image, tracing the aesthetic, ideological, and poetic implications of her photo-narrative work, I will dedicate my analysis to the second of the pieces, “Worlds Alongside.” Although both photo-narratives utilize the format of the picture magazine to explore dual aspects of modern life—the separate yet parallel social spheres of wealth and poverty, of civilized sophistication and primitive simplicity, for example—“Worlds Alongside,” as its title would indicate, provides a richer text through which to interrogate these themes, as well as Rukeyser’s management of them