Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015), ed. by Ralph C. Wood

Book review by Robin Anne Reid of Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015) ed. by Ralph C. Woo

Women & Tolkien: Amazons, Valkyries, Feminists, and Slashers

This paper reports on an early pilot project that asks women who self identify as readers or fans of Tolkien\u27s work and/or teachers who have taught Tolkien\u27s work, and/or scholars who have published on Tolkien\u27s work to answer a few open-ended questions about their reasons for enjoying his work. By women, I mean anybody who identifies as a woman. By Tolkien\u27s work, I mean any of his published novels, stories, poems, or academic essays. The study arises from the question that is often asked of fans of Tolkien\u27s work: why do women so enjoy it, given the relatively minor narrative roles women play

Authorizing Tolkien: Control, Adaptation, and Dissemination of J.R.R. Tolkien\u27s Works

This article is the introduction to the special theme issue consisting of four essays on Authorizing Tolkien. Reid and Elam discuss medieval and postmodern theories of adaptation and interpretation and introduce the essays in the issue

J.R.R. Tolkien, Culture Warrior: The Alt-Right\u27s Crusade against the Tolkien Society\u27s 2021 Summer Seminar on Tolkien and Diversity

In Verlyn Flieger\u27s GOH speech at MythCon, The Arch and the Keystone (2019), she argues that the contradictions in Tolkien\u27s own writing (fiction, non-fiction, and letters) is a primary cause of the increasing fragmentation and polarization [among readers and scholars], concluding that [e]verybody has their own private Tolkien, more Tolkiens than you can shake a stick at (9). In this presentation, I trace some attributes of the alt-right\u27s private Tolkien which they have made public in forty plus online articles, some receiving a hundred or more public comments, during 2021-22. The articles (in periodicals and personal blogs) attacked, variously: The Tolkien Society The 2021 Seminar, Tolkien and Diversity The seminar presenters The Superbowl Amazon Prime trailer The marketing photos of characters of color I use a linguistic method that involves collecting and creating a corpus (an electronic database of articles and comments) and identifying key words and collocations (words and phrases associated with key words. My goal is to analyze how these writers construct their crusading version of Tolkien, using it to attempt to repress the existence and interpretations of others, while situating my analysis in the context of contemporary religious-political conflicts

Race in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and in Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor

Recent scholarship on how Tolkien\u27s Orcs influenced popular fantasy agrees upon the spread of racist clichés and stereotypes. Dieter Petzold, in \u27Oo, Those Awful Orcs!\u27: Tolkien\u27s Villains as Protagonists in Recent Fantasy Novels, analyzes how four novels attempt but fail to present orcs as focal and sympathetic characters. In Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, Helen Young argues that the influence Tolkien\u27s Orcs had on fantasy literature, film, and games is that of structural racism in which race [is] the conventional framework around which difference is built (35). She acknowledges that critical reading of Tolkien\u27s works can provide background and nuanced understanding but warns that the larger genre of fantasy--especially, I would note, in the present under Trump in which racists draw on their imagined White Middle Ages to justify hate crimes--makes such nuanced readings unimportant (35). In this presentation I consider Tolkien\u27s goblins (in The Hobbit) and Orcs (in The Lord of the Rings) and Elves along with Katherine Addison\u27s Goblins, Elves, and most importantly, Goblin-Elf characters, from The Goblin Emperor in the context of Young\u27s analysis of how racialized tropes which manifested in the Classical period as concern about monstrous races were applied to Jews, Mongols, and Muslims in the Middle Ages, and then adapted further in Tolkien\u27s legendarium and have spread throughout popular culture (88). The four tropes contrast the Whiteness of Men and Elves to the Otherness of the Orcs who are always marked as evil through skin color...aggressiveness and irrationality; primitive, disorganized cultures; and homelands which are outside the borders of civilization (89). I argue that Addison continues the tradition of women writers critiquing power and hierarchy through the mode of fantasy that Faye Ringel identified in Women Fantasists: In the Shadow of the Ring, shifting from focusing on gender to race

Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut\u27s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien

Making or Creating Orcs is a close reading of an Alternate University fan fiction, The Free Orcs AU, by Thorinsmut, which is based on the premise that Erebor was not attacked by Smaug and that some Orcs have fought and freed themselves from Sauron and have established a homeland in Gundabad. Working in the context of the scholarship on racist stereotypes relating to Tolkien\u27s Orcs, I argue that Thorinsmut is able to write back to colonial narratives (Baker) through the AU premise and the associated deletions and transformations of Tolkien\u27s characterizations, plot, setting, and themes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The narrative focus on trade and political alliances between Dwarves and Orcs (and the removal of Elves and Men) transforms Tolkien\u27s plot from a quest to destroy Sauron\u27s Ring to a story about Dwarf and Orc relationships, personal and cultural, and the experiences of Orcs who were enslaved by Sauron and fought for their freedom

Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015), ed. by Ralph C. Wood

Book review by Robin Anne Reid of Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015) ed. by Ralph C. Woo

New Models for Medical Education: Web-Based Conferencing to Support HIV Training in Sub-Saharan Africa

Background: Healthcare workers in Africa managing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected patients often receive inadequate HIV-specific medical education. The acceptability and feasibility of Web-based distance learning tools to enhance HIV training in Africa have not been extensively evaluated. Materials and Methods: In this prospective observational study, we assessed the feasibility of Web-conferencing to deliver HIV-specific medical training to clinicians supporting HIV care and treatment across 12 Sub-Saharan African countries over a 10-month period. Webinar attendance, technical quality, and participant satisfaction were measured for each Webinar. Demographic details about participants were recorded. Results: Attendance increased from 40 participants in Month 1 to over 160 in Month 10. Thirty-six percent of participants were physicians, and 21% were in allied health professions. A mean of 95% of respondents found the content to be relevant. Participants reported that the opportunity to interact with HIV clinicians from other countries and expert teaching from leading scientists were major reasons for attendance. Audio quality was variable across countries and over time. Barriers to attendance included lack of information technology (IT) literacy and Internet connectivity. Conclusions: This analysis demonstrates that Webinars are feasible and acceptable to support HIV training. Significant impediments to scale up in use of Web-conferencing for HIV education in resource-limited settings include lack of IT hardware and limited IT literacy. Strengthening IT capacity and Internet infrastructure is necessary to support expanded use of Webinars as a tool for continuing HIV education

Efficacy of manual therapy treatments for people with cervicogenic dizziness and pain : Protocol of a randomised controlled trial

BACKGROUND: Cervicogenic dizziness is a disabling condition characterised by postural unsteadiness that is aggravated by cervical spine movements and associated with a painful and/or stiff neck. Two manual therapy treatments (Mulligan’s Sustained Natural Apophyseal Glides (SNAGs) and Maitland’s passive joint mobilisations) are used by physiotherapists to treat this condition but there is little evidence from randomised controlled trials to support their use. The aim of this study is to conduct a randomised controlled trial to compare these two forms of manual therapy (Mulligan glides and Maitland mobilisations) to each other and to a placebo in reducing symptoms of cervicogenic dizziness in the longer term and to conduct an economic evaluation of the interventions. METHODS: Participants with symptoms of dizziness described as imbalance, together with a painful and/or stiff neck will be recruited via media releases, advertisements and mail-outs to medical practitioners in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia. Potential participants will be screened by a physiotherapist and a neurologist to rule out other causes of their dizziness. Once diagnosed with cervciogenic dizziness, 90 participants will be randomly allocated to one of three groups: Maitland mobilisations plus range-of-motion exercises, Mulligan SNAGs plus self-SNAG exercises or placebo. Participants will receive two to six treatments over six weeks. The trial will have unblinded treatment but blinded outcome assessments. Assessments will occur at baseline, post-treatment, six weeks, 12 weeks, six months and 12 months post treatment. The primary outcome will be intensity of dizziness. Other outcome measures will be frequency of dizziness, disability, intensity of cervical pain, cervical range of motion, balance, head repositioning, adverse effects and treatment satisfaction. Economic outcomes will also be collected. DISCUSSION: This paper describes the methods for a randomised controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of two manual therapy techniques in the treatment of people with cervicogenic dizziness for which there is limited established evidence-based treatment. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ACTRN1261100007390

Strong exciton-photon coupling with colloidal nanoplatelets in an open microcavity

Colloidal semiconductor nanoplatelets exhibit quantum size effects due to their thickness of only few monolayers, together with strong optical band-edge transitions facilitated by large lateral extensions. In this article we demonstrate room temperature strong coupling of the light and heavy hole exciton transitions of CdSe nanoplatelets with the photonic modes of an open planar microcavity. Vacuum Rabi splittings of $66 \pm 1$ meV and $58 \pm 1$ meV are observed for the heavy and light hole excitons respectively, together with a polariton-mediated hybridisation of both transitions. By measuring the concentration of platelets in the film we compute the transition dipole moment of a nanoplatelet exciton to be $\mu = (575 \pm 110)$ D. The large oscillator strength and fluorescence quantum yield of semiconductor nanoplatelets provide a perspective towards novel photonic devices, combining polaritonic and spinoptronic effects.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure