Supporting Father Involvement: An Intervention with Community and Child Welfare–Referred Couples

Objective: To expand the evidence base of the Supporting Father Involvement (SFI) intervention to include child welfare families. Background: Taking a preventive father-inclusive approach, SFI aims to strengthen coparenting, parent–child relationships, and child outcomes. This study replicates 4 prior iterations of the program using the same 32-hour curriculum facilitated by clinically trained staff, case managers, and onsite child care and family meals. Method: Participants (N = 239) included low-income (median = $24,000) coparenting pairs, typically mothers and fathers/father figures, half of whom were Mexican American, with toddlers (median age \u3c 3 years). Questionnaires assessing multiple family domains were administered verbally over an 18-month period. Intervention effectiveness was tested through a randomized control trial with immediate treatment or waitlist–control groups using a moderated mediator structural equation model. Results: The model explained 49% to 56% of the variance in children\u27s problem behaviors (intervention and autoregressive effects). The intervention reduced couple conflict, which reduced anxious and harsh parenting, leading to better child outcomes. The intervention was equally effective for community and child welfare–referred families and family dynamics pathways were similar across conditions. Conclusion: With its intentional outreach and inclusion of fathers, SFI offers an effective intervention for lower risk child welfare–involved families. Implications: Results argue for the utility of treating community and child welfare parents in mixed-gender prevention groups that focus on strengthening multiple levels of family relationships

Electrothermal soft manipulator enabling safe transport and handling of thin cell/tissue sheets and bioelectronic devices

“Living” cell sheets or bioelectronic chips have great potentials to improve the quality of diagnostics and therapies. However, handling these thin and delicate materials remains a grand challenge because the external force applied for gripping and releasing can easily deform or damage the materials. This study presents a soft manipulator that can manipulate and transport cell/tissue sheets and ultrathin wearable biosensing devices seamlessly by recapitulating how a cephalopod’s suction cup works. The soft manipulator consists of an ultrafast thermo-responsive, microchanneled hydrogel layer with tissue-like softness and an electric heater layer. The electric current to the manipulator drives microchannels of the gel to shrink/expand and results in a pressure change through the microchannels. The manipulator can lift/detach an object within 10 s and can be used repeatedly over 50 times. This soft manipulator would be highly useful for safe and reliable assembly and implantation of therapeutic cell/tissue sheets and biosensing devices

The Invisible City: Travel, Attention, and Performance

The Invisible City explores urban spaces from the perspective of a traveller, writer, and creator of theatre to illuminate how cities offer travellers and residents theatrical visions while also remaining mostly invisible, beyond the limits of attention. The book explores the city as both stage and content in three parts. Firstly, it follows in pattern Italo Calvino\u27s novel Invisible Cities, wherein Marco Polo describes cities to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, to produce a constellation of vignettes recalling individual cities through travel writing and engagement with artworks. Secondly, Gillette traces the Teatro Potlach group and its ongoing immersive, site-specific performance project Invisible Cities, which has staged performances in dozens of cities across Europe and the Americas. The final part of the book offers useful exercises for artists and travellers interested in researching their own invisible cities. Written for practitioners, travellers, students, and thinkers interested in the city as site and source of performance, The Invisible City mixes travelogue with criticism and cleverly combines philosophical meditations with theatrical pedagogy.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1155/thumbnail.jp

My Portrait Come to Life – Visions of Self in Pirandello\u27s \u3ci\u3eHenry IV\u3c/i\u3e

Luigi Pirandello imbues the visual world of his 1922 play Henry IV with a vivid antiquarian texture. The Holy Roman Emperor\u27s throne room, prop swords, and costumes are all painstakingly designed to replicate historical details of the eleventh century. As the audience comes to learn, however, the set\u27s claim to be what it appears depends on frames of reality established by valets and counselors who soon reveal themselves as actors in an elaborate charade. We discover that the character of Henry IV is in fact an identity clung to by an otherwise unnamed man who bumped his head on a stone when he fell off his horse in a costumed cavalcade twenty years ago. Surrounded by his still-costumed fellow masqueraders, he then awoke into the belief that he was identical to his costumed image of the Holy Roman Emperor. Ever since, Henry\u27s family has spared no expense setting him up in an Italian castle made over as the Royal Residence at Goslar. In order to be granted an audience with the monarch, visitors must dress up as historical personages of the eleventh century and adopt identities that conform to the spectacle. When mad Henry enters, everyone behaves as the visual world of the throne room demands. When Henry leaves, his valets light cigarettes; his counselors speak openly about his madness; the throne room\u27s authenticity flickers while maintaining its regal décor

Improvising New Rituals for \u3cem\u3eThe Bacchae\u3c/em\u3e

In this essay, I discuss the process of rehearsing the chorus of Euripides’ The Bacchae for a production I directed at Trinity University in January and February, 2011. Negotiating the pull between improvisational exploration and choreographic fixity, I led twelve undergraduate chorus members to explore a tension that lies at the root of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous definition of Greek tragedy as the collision between the Apollonian and Dionysian, between the plastic visual arts like sculpture and the intoxicated impermanence of music

A Hole in the Paper Sky : Psycho-Scenographic Rifts in Pirandello\u27s \u3ci\u3eHenry IV\u3c/i\u3e

While I am generally reserved about the critical usefulness of diagnosing [End Page 55] fictional characters, the desire of so many critics to locate Henry\u27s crisis of modern consciousness 1 in actual mental disorders attests to what seems like a striking kinship between suspensions of disbelief on and off the stage. That is not to say that Pirandello fully captured what it is really like to be crazy, as Maxim Gorky\u27s The Lower Depths was said to capture what it was really like to be a poor bohemian Russian. That may be true as well, but what I mean is that Pirandello\u27s understanding of madness is both the vehicle and real world corollary to his inquiry into the ontology of theatrical illusion. What exists in reality as the troubled encounter between consciousness and the world unfolds on Pirandello\u27s stage as a complex interaction between the psychological realism of acting techniques and the authentic detail of scenic illusion

Thornton Wilder\u27s The Skin of Our Teeth

Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) telescopes an audacious stretch of western history and mythology into a family drama, showing how the course of human events operates like theatre itself: constantly mutable, vanishing and beginning again. Kyle Gillette explores Wilder’s extraordinary play in three parts. Part I unpacks the play’s singular yet deeply interconnected place in theatre history, comparing its metatheatrics to those of Stein, Pirandello and Brecht, and finding its anticipation of American fantasias in the works of Vogel and Kushner. Part II turns to the play’s many historic and mythic sources, and examines its concentration of western progress and power into the model of a white, American upper-middle-class nuclear family. Part III takes a longer view, tangling with the play’s philosophical stakes. Gillette magnifies the play’s ideas and connections, teasing out historical, theoretical and philosophical questions on behalf of readers, scholars and audience members alike.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1041/thumbnail.jp