The Fugue of Chronotope

As the survey by Nele Bemong and Pieter Borghart introducing this volume makes clear, the term chronotope has devolved into a veritable carnival of orismology. For all the good work that has been done by an ever-growing number of intelligent critics, chronotope remains a Gordian knot of ambiguities with no Alexander in sight. The term has metastasized across the whole spectrum of the human and social sciences since the publication of FTC in Russian in 1975, and (especially) after its translation into English in 1981. As others have pointed out, one of the more striking features of the chronotope is the plethora of meanings that have been read into the term: that its popularity is a function of its opacity has become a cliché. In the current state of chronotopic heteroglossia, then, how are we to proceed? The argument of this essay is that many of the difficulties faced by Bakhtin’s critics derive from ambiguities with which Bakhtin never ceased to struggle. That is, instead of advancing yet another definition of my own, I will investigate some of the attempts made by Bakhtin himself to give the term greater precision throughout his long life. In so doing, I will also hope to cast some light on the foundational role of time-space in Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialog as it, too, took on different meanings at various points in his thinking

Introduction

Introduction to the special issue on Mikhail Bakhti

Laws of War

Treatment of the trans-atlantic triangle of three Germanophone scholars of international law, and their contribution to forming the first conference for the laws of war

The Russian Revolution as Continuum and Context and Yes,—as Revolution

The author reviews recent English‑language works on the Russian Revolution, with particular attention to those works emphasizing the roles of war and violence. The review essay highlights the recent trends to present the Revolution as a part of a larger continuum, and to contextualize the period of war and revolution as compared to other societies. The recent focus on: 1) the role of the First World War; and, 2) on the role of empire in Imperial Russia’s deluge, is a very welcome development. Yet, the essay argues, we should not lose sight of the dynamics examined in an earlier literature on the Revolution, such as labor and agrarian unrest in European Russia.Dans cet essai, l’auteur analyse les derniers travaux parus en langue anglaise sur la révolution russe et porte une attention particulière à ceux d’entre eux qui soulignent le rôle de la guerre et de la violence. Il met ainsi en relief les tendances actuelles à présenter la révolution comme s’inscrivant dans une continuité et à placer la période de la guerre et de la révolution dans un contexte plus large mettant la société russe en regard avec d’autres sociétés. Les études récentes sur le rôle de la Première Guerre mondiale et sur le rôle de l’empire dans la chute de la Russie impériale sont des développements positifs. Cependant, l’essai fait valoir que nous ne devrions pas perdre de vue les dynamiques étudiées dans la littérature antérieure sur la révolution, telles que l’agitation ouvrière et paysanne dans la Russie européenne

Student Voice in Education Policy: Understanding student participation in state-level K-12 education policy making

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2019. Major: Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development. Advisor: Nicola Alexander. 1 computer file (PDF); xi, 338 pages.Purpose: K-12 education systems are expected to prepare students to participate in society, but education leaders often neglect to ask students how policy decisions affect their learning. Educators have begun to incorporate student voice into classroom, school, and district decision making. However, students are still a largely untapped resource in statewide K-12 education policy change. One reason may be that there is no clear understanding of how students may participate. The purpose of this study is to examine how students, through student voice efforts, collectively participate in and influence the policy-making process for state-level K-12 education decision making. Research Methods/Approach: This study employs a qualitative case study and utilizes document analysis, observations, and interviews with students and adults participating in two statewide student voice efforts. Findings: Students are able to participate in and advocate for policy reform adoption in the K-12 education policy process. Statewide student voice efforts are generally structured to include the following components: (a) power shifts, (b) shared practices, (c) adult supports, and (d) student relationships. Within these structures, students participate in the policy making process by (a) identifying a problem and policy solution, (b) assessing social, political, and economic capital available to move a policy forward, (c) building a coalition for support and to gain access to additional resources, and (d) engage in grassroots and grasstops advocacy. Students utilize their status to gain power in the grassroots arena; however, this status also decreases their power in the grasstops arena. Conclusions and Implications: This study reveals the importance of providing a structured space for students to access support from their peers as well as adults when engaging in student voice efforts. It also demonstrates the importance of shifting different aspects of power within student voice efforts, particularly social order power dynamics, to ensure that student voice efforts do not become homogeneous and representative of a particular student voice. Finally, it shows the ways in which students harness their own power and access the power of others in order to engage in the policy process

Direct Generation of Oxygen via Electrocatalytic Carbon Dioxide Reduction with an Ionic Liquid

The feasibility of long duration crewed space exploration missions will depend on the supply of consumables, such as oxygen, to keep the crew alive. Air revitalization is a function of environmental control and life support systems (ECLSS) employed on any crewed spacecraft. On longer duration missions, such as on the International Space Station (ISS), resource regeneration reduces the amount of consumables that must be provided for the mission. Systems on the ISS recover O2&nbsp;from metabolically produced CO2, which itself is collected from the ISS cabin where astronauts live and work. The current state-of-the-art for O2&nbsp;recovery onboard the ISS can only recover up to 54% of the O2&nbsp;available in respired CO2&nbsp;and relies on the resupplied H2O to the ISS. An alternative O2&nbsp;generation process is solvated electrochemical CO2&nbsp;reduction, enabled in spacecraft environments by using a non-volatile ionic liquid (IL) solvent, electrolyte, and catalysis promoter. An electrochemical CO2&nbsp;reduction system (ECRS) could improve O2&nbsp;recovery from CO2&nbsp;by up to 70%, or it could function to recover 50% O2&nbsp;from CO2&nbsp;without a net water loss, which can be advantageous in missions where in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) of Martian atmospheric CO2&nbsp;is desired. Ionic liquid supported electrochemical CO2&nbsp;reduction is evaluated to determine its feasibility for space applications. The requirements, sizing, and challenges of including an ECRS are considered for various possible ECLSS or ISRU architectures. The current state-of-the-art for IL supported CO2&nbsp;electrolysis is reviewed, and selections of ILs studied experimentally in this work are presented and justified. Thermophysical properties of the ILs as neat and aqueous solutions are measured to aid in understanding and design of the ILs themselves and in systems using them. Aqueous IL solutions are studied using cyclic voltammetry and constant potential electrolysis with gaseous product analysis to determine if and how the selected ILs promote electrochemical CO2&nbsp;reduction. A concept for a vacuum-assisted product removal (VAPR) CO2&nbsp;electrolyzer is presented as a possible solution to space application environmental conditions and requirements, and the concept is demonstrated through the design and testing of a prototype electrolyzer.</p

Increases in Perspective Embedding Increase Reading Time Even with Typical Text Presentation: Implications for the Reading of Literature

Reading fiction is a major component of intellectual life, yet it has proven difficult to study experimentally. One aspect of literature that has recently come to light is perspective embedding (“she thought I left” embedding her perspective on “I left”), which seems to be a defining feature of fiction. Previous work (Whalen et al., 2012) has shown that increasing levels of embedment affects the time that it takes readers to read and understand short vignettes in a moving window paradigm. With increasing levels of embedment from 1 to 5, reading times in a moving window paradigm rose almost linearly. However, level 0 was as slow as 3–4. Accuracy on probe questions was relatively constant until dropping at the fifth level. Here, we assessed this effect in a more ecologically valid (“typical”) reading paradigm, in which the entire vignette was visible at once, either for as long as desired (Experiment 1) or a fixed time (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, reading times followed a pattern similar to that of the previous experiment, with some differences in absolute speed. Accuracy matched previous results: fairly consistent accuracy until a decline at level 5, indicating that both presentation methods allowed understanding. In Experiment 2, accuracy was somewhat reduced, perhaps because participants were less successful at allocating their attention than they were during the earlier experiment; however, the pattern was the same. It seems that literature does not, on average, use easiest reading level but rather uses a middle ground that challenges the reader, but not too much

The carnival is not over: cultural resistance in dementia care environments

yesWithin the still-dominant medical discourse on dementia, disorders of language (such as dysphasia, aphasia, and perseveration) feature prominently among diagnostic criteria. In this view, changes in ability to produce coherent speech or understand the speech of others are considered to be a direct and inevitable result of neuropathology. Whilst an alternative psychosocial account of communicative challenges in dementia exists, emphasis here is placed largely on the need to compensate for deficits in the language or comprehension of the diagnosed individual and on his or her social positioning by ‘healthy others’. Rather less emphasis has been placed to date people with dementia as social actors who create meaning and draw on contextual clues in order to give shape to their interactions. In this article we draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the carnivalesque, heteroglossia, polyphony and dialogism to analyse a series of interactions involving people with dementia in day and residential care environments. Two main findings are foregrounded. The first, consistent with previous studies, is that many of the communicative challenges faced by people with dementia arise from the social environments in which they find themselves. The second is that the utterances of people with dementia in the face of these social challenges show many of the hallmarks of cultural resistance identified by Bakhtin