Controversial Embodiment: Sport, Masculinity, Dis/Ability

This essay is an attempt at investigating visible forms of complex, indeed controversial embodiment, with the specific intention of concentrating on the ways they interrogate delicate issues such as disability, masculinity and prosthetic sport performance. I intend to sound the shifting boundaries between dis-ability and super-ability as manifested in iconic figures such as Stelarc and, in other fields, Oscar Pistorius, whose unsteady position as privileged/disabled bladerunner seems to require – and indeed to gather – particularly intense scrutiny. I shall introduce a few contemporary discourses on corporeality and embodiment, which focus on the ‘troubling’ nature of auxiliary organs Freud refers to in the much contended paragraph I adopt as epigraph and guiding procedural light; I shall move from Butler and Giddens to Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on transplants and/as prostheses to include theoretical debates on disintegrating embodiment and disability studies, in order to proceed towards an analysis of the short-circuiting of allegedly secure practices of (masculine) embodiment in sport culture and theory

Controversial Embodiment: Sport, Masculinity, Dis/Ability

This essay is an attempt at investigating visible forms of complex, indeed controversial embodiment, with the specific intention of concentrating on the ways they interrogate delicate issues such as disability, masculinity and prosthetic sport performance. I intend to sound the shifting boundaries between dis-ability and super-ability as manifested in iconic figures such as Stelarc and, in other fields, Oscar Pistorius, whose unsteady position as privileged/disabled bladerunner seems to require – and indeed to gather – particularly intense scrutiny. I shall introduce a few contemporary discourses on corporeality and embodiment, which focus on the ‘troubling’ nature of auxiliary organs Freud refers to in the much contended paragraph I adopt as epigraph and guiding procedural light; I shall move from Butler and Giddens to Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on transplants and/as prostheses to include theoretical debates on disintegrating embodiment and disability studies, in order to proceed towards an analysis of the short-circuiting of allegedly secure practices of (masculine) embodiment in sport culture and theory

Tracing/Tracking History’s Nightmares. The Wreck of the Batavia as Australian Foundational Myth

The wreck and subsequent mutiny of the VOC Batavia happened in 1629 off Western Australia mainland, became one of the Australian founding myths, and triggered many heated discussions about the concepts of nation, identity and cultural heritage. In European eyes, Australia was a land of exotic adventures and possible utopia, but also the land of very real and quite invasive encounters whose traces are dispersed in the collective memory of the native tribes. British Australia came into existence in 1770, when Captain Cook disembarked in Botany Bay and choose it as the ideal place for a settlement. The Batavia case and the textual and documental apparatuses linked to it trigger a series of discourses and reflections on concepts and ideological practices, such as nation, historical and cultural heritage, authenticity and identity politics. From institutional webpages, to history books and documentary films, from adult and juvenile fiction to opera and radio drama, the story of the Batavia has gone through a process of continuous rewriting. The essay focuses on texts, icons, and objects which capture and manipulate a supposedly documental history and refashion it into a source of continuous reverberations

Memory in T/Rubble: Tackling (Nuclear) Ruins

The 1945 bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to have recently started to recede back in the memory of Western culture. 9/11 and the age of global warfare which we are in have averted our gazes away from that past, in our tremulous expectations of the next traumatic event. In the twentieth century, poets like Tony Harrison have tackled this delicate topic, while Japanese culture has in many ways been forced and willing to reconsider its own agendas and sense of identity from those ‘ground zeroes’ onwards. In both A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), one of the most famous and truly global writers of our times, Kazuo Ishiguro, has offered his own complex views on the still vulnerable sites and lives those events ‘created.’ In these two novels, he attempts to rememorialize the numerous competing and often contrasting memories of the lit(t)eral aftermath of the Bomb: he recuperates and interpellates collective and individual pasts, and manages to construe unstable texts which mimic the urban spaces invaded, reconfigured by and in their human and material rubble, as much as in the irretrievable traces which mark its vanishing. I Harrison and Ishiguro to verify the unreliability of memory, its radically vulnerable state, but also the possibilities of recuperation, recovery and resistance works of imagination may offer

Solution of Ulam's Problem on Binary Search with Four Lies

In this paper we determine the minimal number of yes-no queries needed to find an unknown integer between 1 and 1000000 if at most four of the answers may be erroneous

Minimal Path Length of Trees with Known Fringe

In this paper we continue the study of the path length of trees with known fringe as initiated by [1] and [2]. We compute the path length of the minimal tree with given number of leaves N and fringe ∆ for the case ∆ ≥ N/2. This complements the result of [2] that studied the case ∆ ≤ N/2. Our methods also yields a linear time algorithm for constructing the minimal tree when ∆ ≥ N/2

Validazione di uno strumento per valutare la partecipazione alle attività extracurriculari in area STEM. Il questionario Science Activities Evaluation Engagement (SAEE)

In this study, we present a new questionnaire, the Science Activities Evaluation Engagement (SAEE) instrument, for the evaluation of the students’ engagement in STEM oriented extra-curricular activities. The questionnaire was administered to about 1000 secondary school students who participated in the activities of the Piano Nazionale Lauree Scientifiche in Biology, Chemistry and Physics. Through an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, it was possible to validate a four-factor structure of the instrument: Satisfaction with the followed activities; Utility of the activities; Difficulties in following the activities; Involvement of close people. The obtained factor structure shows a good model fit, with each of the obtained scales showing an excellent reliability. Criterion validity was established through the academic motivation scale. The proposed instrument shows also an adequate convergent validity and a sufficient discriminant validity. Implications of the study for the evaluation of Third Mission activities of the Italian universities are also briefly discussed