Affective continuities across Muslim and Christian settings in Berlin

This article, a reflection on collaborative fieldwork involving a Sufi Muslim and a Pentecostal Christian setting in Berlin, examines whether distinct and diverse religious groups can be brought into a meaningful relation with one another. It considers the methodological possibilities that might become possible or foreclose when two researchers, working in different prayer settings in the same city, use affect as a common frame of reference while seeking to establish shared affective relations and terrains that would otherwise be implausible. With two separately observed accounts of prayer gatherings in a shared urban context, we describe locally specific workings of affect and sensation. We argue that sense-aesthetic forms and patterns in our field sites are supralocal affective forms that help constitute an analytic relationality between the two religious settings

Politicizing Elsewhere(s) Negotiating Representations of Neo-Pentecostal Aesthetic Practice in Berlin

Drawing on ethnographic research in a Nigerian-based Pentecostal church in Berlin, this article explores the discussions that emerged when my scholarly representations of the congregants' aesthetic engagements with the Elsewhere diverged from the church leadership's expectations. More specifically, it interrogates my representational practice in relation to the stakes of the diasporic congregation, which is operating at the political margin of Berlin's widely diverse religious landscape. In exploring the collision of my analytical focus on the affect-charged elements of the believers' routines of connecting to the Elsewhere with the church's emphasis on affective discipline and moderation, the article demonstrates how aesthetic practices that engage with the Elsewhere not only have a religious but inevitably also a political bearing

Embodied Belonging: In/exclusion, Health Care, and Well-Being in a World in Motion

In this introduction, we propose the notion of ‘embodied belonging’ as a fruitful analytical heuristic for scholars in medical and psychological anthropology. We envision this notion to help us gain a more nuanced understanding of the entanglements of the political, social, and affective dimensions of belonging and their effects on health, illness, and healing. A focus on embodied belonging, we argue, reveals how displacement, exclusion, and marginalization cause existential and health-related ruptures in people’s lives and bodies, and how affected people, in the struggle for re/emplacement and re/integration, may regain health and sustain their well-being. Covering a variety of regional contexts (Germany/Vietnam, Norway, the UK, Japan), the contributions to this special issue examine how embodied non/belonging is experienced, re/imagined, negotiated, practiced, disrupted, contested, and achieved (or not) by their protagonists, who are excluded and marginalized in diverse ways. Each article highlights the intricate trajectories of how dynamics of non/belonging inscribe themselves in human bodies. They also reveal how belonging can be utilized and drawn on as a forceful means and resource of social resilience, if not (self-)therapy and healing

Rethinking sociality and health through transfiguration

In this introductory article to the Special Section, we intend to literally bring sociality to (bodily) life and ask what medical anthropology might gain by using the lens of sociality for a better understanding of the phenomena it is concerned with. Conversely, we probe how the field of health and illness – including themes concerning embodiment, vulnerability, suffering, and death – might help to further spell out the notion of sociality both conceptually and methodologically. Drawing on the contributors’ ethnographic enquiries into contemporary health phenomena in East Africa, South America, and Western Europe, we do so by bringing sociality into conversation with transfiguration. By this we refer to: (1) the constantly unfolding processes of particular extended figurations encountering, affecting, and becoming enmeshed in each other; as well as (2) the (temporarily) stabilized figurational arrangements emerging from these enmeshments. It is our hope that this notion of transfiguration will help render visible the modalities through which human engagements with each other and the world form diverse arrangements. Moreover, we aim to better understand the processes by which these arrangements – which we term ‘extended figurations’ – interact with each other, change over time, and possibly vanish and make way for others. A detailed appreciation of the workings of these extended figurations, we believe, can significantly enhance our comprehension of the particular processes of change that stand at the center of our ethnographic interest. In this sense, the concept of transfiguration constitutes one possible way of structuring the messiness and complexity of sociality for analytical purposes

Modeling the Formation of Urea-Water Sprays from an Air-Assisted Nozzle

Ammonia preparation from urea-water solutions is a key feature to ensure an effective reduction of nitrogen oxides in selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems. Thereby, air-assisted nozzles provide fine sprays, which enhance ammonia homogenization. In the present study, a methodology was developed to model the spray formation by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for this type of atomizer. Experimental validation data was generated in an optically accessible hot gas test bench using a shadowgraphy setup providing droplet velocities and size distributions at designated positions inside the duct. An adaption of the turbulence model was performed in order to correct the dispersion of the turbulent gas jet. The spray modeling in the near nozzle region is based on an experimentally determined droplet spectrum in combination with the WAVE breakup model. This methodology was applied due to the fact that the emerging two-phase flow will immediately disintegrate into a fine spray downstream the nozzle exit, which is also known from cavitating diesel nozzles. The suitability of this approach was validated against the radial velocity and droplet size distributions at the first measurement position downstream the nozzle. In addition, the simulation results serve as a basis for the investigation of turbulent dispersion phenomena and evaporation inside the spray

Grundlagen des Autonomen Rechnens

Das vegetative Nervensystem (engl. autonomous nervous system) des Menschen kann das, wovon in der IT-Industrie noch geträumt wird. Abhängig von der aktuellen Umgebung und Tätigkeit reguliert das vegetative Nervensystem mandatorische Körperfunktionen wie Herzfrequenz und Atmung. Reflexe, die dem Selbstschutz dienen, werden automatisch ausgelöst. Verletzungen heilen von selbst, ohne dass man seine normalen Tätigkeiten dafür unterbrechen müsste. Im Rahmen des Seminars „Autonomic Computing“ im Sommersemester 2003 am Institut für Programmstrukturen und Datenorganisation der Universität Karlsruhe wurden Grundlagen dieses Autonomen Rechnens besprochen. Als Basis für Selbstkonfiguration und Selbstoptimierung werden in „Kontextbewusstsein: Ein Überblick“ Techniken zur Erfassung des physischen und sozialen Kontexts einer Anwendung erläutert. Die dienstorientierte Architektur und konkrete Implementierungen wie z.B. UPnP, Jini oder Bluetooth werden in „Aktuelle Technologien zur Realisierung dienstorientierter Architekturen“ behandelt. Die Arbeit „Service- Orientierung und das Semantic Web“ beschreibt, wie Semantic Web Technologien zur Beschreibung von Web Services verwendet werden können mit dem Ziel der automatischen Dienstfindung. Danach wird der Begriff „Selbstbewusstsein“ in bezug auf Software anhand zweier komplementärer Forschungsprojekte definiert. Technologien zur Überwachung des Laufzeitverhaltens von Rechnersystemen mit dem Ziel der selbstständigen Optimierung sind Gegenstand der Arbeit „Selbst-Überwachung und Selbst-Optimierung“. Der Artikel „Selbst-Schutz“ fasst die Sicherheitsanforderungen zusammen, die an ein autonomes Computersystem gestellt werden müssen und die Techniken, um solche Anforderungen zu erfüllen. Ansätze aus dem Bereich wiederherstellungsorientiertes- und fehlertolerantes Rechnen werden in „Selbst-Heilung“, „ROC – Recovery Oriented Computing“ und „Recovery Oriented Computing: Modularisierung und Redundanz“ vorgestellt. Alle Ausarbeitungen und Präsentationen sind auch elektronisch auf der diesem Band beiliegenden CD oder unter www.autonomic-computing.org verfügbar

Im/mobilities and dis/connectivities in medical globalisation: How global is Global Health?

The interdisciplinary, politically contested field of Global Health has often been described as a consequence of, and response to, an intensification of the mobilities of, and connectivities between, people, pathogens, ideas, and infrastructure across national borders and large distances. However, such global mobilities and connectivities are not as omnidirectional and unpatterned as the rhetoric of many Global Health actors suggests. Instead, we argue that they are suffused by a plethora of institutional, national, and global political agendas, and substantially shaped by transnational and postcolonial power relations. Furthermore, the configurations that are typically subsumed under the category of Global Health represent only a minor part of the range of im/mobilities and dis/connectivities that are essential for understanding transformations of epidemiological patterns, health care infrastructures, and the responses to health-related challenges in a globalising world. In order to broaden such a limiting analytical perspective, we propose to expand the analytical focus in studying Global Health phenomena by paying close attention to the myriad ways in which particular im/mobilities and dis/connectivities constitute medicine and well-being in global and transnational settings. Pursuing a conceptual shift from studies of ‘Global Health’ to studying ‘medical globalization’ may carve out new analytical ground for such an endeavour

Elsewhere Affects and the Politics of Engagement across Religious Life-Worlds Introduction

Imagine a divided mountain-scape. A line of ceasefire. Fog. Imagine coming to a clearing. In a mist-covered, militarized order of here and there, affection makes way where vision or bodies cannot. Mothers call out to daughters; sons identify their mothers’ voices in two-way traffics of sound. So long as the vocal exchange lasts, somewhere along the disputed territory of the Golan Heights, an Elsewhere opens

Effects of barefoot and footwear conditions on learning of a dynamic balance task : a randomized controlled study

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