Shut Up, Nobody Wants to Hear Your Poems!: Painter Versus Poet

This piece stages a friendly title bout between two male artists of my generation, painter Adam Cullen and poet Ted Nielsen. While my chosen exemplars share a ‘turn of the century’ cultural moment, there is also a large disparity in their respective levels of success (hence one possible reading of the ‘shut up, nobody wants to hear your poems!’ title). Though roughly the same age, Cullen is currently one of Australia’s most collectable artists and Nielsen is considered in poetry circles to be an ‘emerging’ poet (in a potentially ‘submerging’ art form). While I mayfall sway to the ‘glamour’ of a famous painter, one of the central investigations remains a questioning of how poetry sits within the montage effect of placing both artists’ work side by side, rather than, as the title suggests, simply squaring them off against each other

Specters of Kurdish Nationalism: Governmentality and Counterinsurgent Translation in Turkey

This essay examines translations of the Kurdish epic poem Mem û Zîn into Turkish, tracing the logics behind these state-sponsored translations and examining how acts of translation are also efforts to regulate, translate, and erase Kurdish subjectivities. I argue that the state instrumentalizes Mem û Zîn’s potent nationalist currency in order to disarm present and future claims of Kurdish national autonomy. Using translation as a counterinsurgent governmental tool, the state attempts to domesticate Kurdish nationalist discourses even as it reproduces them, thereby transforming Kurdish nationalism into a specter of itself. Attending to this specter, however, allows us to see how these texts resist domestication: conjured by the state’s technologies of counterinsurgency, the specter circulates as an inassimilable insurgent, an affect of resistance, the kernel of alternative social imaginings

Towards a Common Christology

Keskinäiset väärinymmärrykset ja jurisdiktioiden moninaisuus heikentävät orientaalisten ortodoksisten kirkkojen ja ortodoksisten kirkkojen yhteistä todistusta nykyajassa. Yhteistoiminnan sijaan tilanne kannustaa keskinäiseen kilpailuun. Orientaalisten ja ortodoksisten kirkkojen virallinen dialogi käynnistyi vuonna 1985. Sen saavutuksista on syytä korostaa etenkin vuoden 1990 Second Agreed Statementin toteamusta, että kumpikin perhe on säilyttänyt yhteisen ortodoksisen kristologisen uskon ja katkeama oman apostolisen perinteen – vaikkakin kristologia ilmaistaan erilaisin termein. Yhteisestä kristologiasta puhuttaessa tarkoitetaan juuri tätä vanhaa ja katkeamatonta oppia, ei mitään uudenlaista tai laimeaa kompromissien kristologiaa

Building Brand Kurdistan: Helly Luv, the Gender of Nationhood, and the War on Terror

In the early 2000s, the Kurdistan Regional Government hired a US-based firm to begin a public relations campaign called “The Other Iraq.” Since that time, it has worked with a number of PR and lobbying firms to build a cultural, political, and financial apparatus that I refer to as Brand Kurdistan. This apparatus aims to prove to Western audiencesthat the Kurds are a liberal exception in an illiberal Middle East, and to build prospects of KRG’s eventual national independence. This article explores the connections between Brand Kurdistan and the gendering of Kurdish nationalism, focusing particularly on Kurdish pop diva Helly Luv. In her music, Luv underscores the trope of the “badass” Kurdish woman in the service of Brand Kurdistan’s political and economic projects. Thus, Brand Kurdistan and Helly Luv mutually reproducethe binary world discourse of the war on terror, a discourse aligned with neoconservative American war making and exertions of US empire

Contrastive Mixture of Posteriors for Counterfactual Inference, Data Integration and Fairness

Learning meaningful representations of data that can address challenges such as batch effect correction, data integration and counterfactual inference is a central problem in many domains including computational biology. Adopting a Conditional VAE framework, we identify the mathematical principle that unites these challenges: learning a representation that is marginally independent of a condition variable. We therefore propose the Contrastive Mixture of Posteriors (CoMP) method that uses a novel misalignment penalty to enforce this independence. This penalty is defined in terms of mixtures of the variational posteriors themselves, unlike prior work which uses external discrepancy measures such as MMD to ensure independence in latent space. We show that CoMP has attractive theoretical properties compared to previous approaches, especially when there is complex global structure in latent space. We further demonstrate state of the art performance on a number of real-world problems, including the challenging tasks of aligning human tumour samples with cancer cell-lines and performing counterfactual inference on single-cell RNA sequencing data. Incidentally, we find parallels with the fair representation learning literature, and demonstrate CoMP has competitive performance in learning fair yet expressive latent representations

Breaking Binge: Exploring The Effects Of Binge Watching On Television Viewer Reception

The modern television viewer enjoys an unprecedented amount of choice and control - a direct result of widespread availability of new technology and services. Cultivated in this new television landscape is the phenomenon of binge watching, a popular conversation piece in the current zeitgeist yet a greatly under-researched topic academically. This exploratory research study was able to make significant strides in understanding binge watching by examining its effect on the viewer - more specifically, how it affects their reception towards a television show. Utilizing a uses and gratifications perspective, this study conducted an experiment on 212 university students who were assigned to watch one of two drama series, and designated a viewing condition, binge watching or appointment viewing. Data gathered using preliminary and post questionnaires, as well as short episodic diary surveys, measured reception factors such as opinion, enjoyment and satisfaction. This study found that the effect of binge watching on viewer reception is contingent on the show. Results also revealed that binge watching better delivers an escape gratification for viewers than appointment viewing