When Free Speech Disrupts Diversity Initiatives: What We Value and What We Do Not

In this essay, I argue that the debate on free speech as pushed by the conservative right is a strategic apparatus to undermine the various diversity initiatives on college and university campuses. While supporters of the right wing extremists around the globe have pushed for various modes of exclusions (social, racial, ethnic, cultural, religious and sexual), here in the United States, such exclusions are most evident in the collapse of academic freedom and the rise of civility codes as students and educators use the platform of free speech to promote various forms of injustices and exclusions. Our neoliberal college and universities and their administrators, I argue, are caught in this precarious and tenuous conflict of protecting academic freedom against the pressures from the outside (the political right) to stage ideas and ideologies that are harmful for the public good in the name of “free speech.

Challenging Calls for Civility

In conjunction with her article When Free Speech Disrupts Diversity Initiatives: What We Value and What We Do Not, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt writes about civility codes and free speech for Academe Blog

In the Name of Merit: Racial Violence in the Academy

Racial violence in the academy is enacted upon faculty of color, particularly women, in multiple disciplines. This essay attempts to both expose and suggest that everyday systemic racism has become a pervasive and normalizing feature within disciplines that continue to privilege white and Eurocentric forms of knowledge-making while devaluing others. Furthermore, attempts to challenge such supremacies are immediately countered by calls and charges of incivility. This is an essay about the costs of unmasking norms of civility as it bears upon constructions of both whiteness and meritocracy

A liquid xenon imaging telescope for 1-30 MeV gamma-ray astrophysics

A study of the primary scintillation light in liquid xenon excited by 241 Am alpha particles and 207 Bi internal conversion electrons are discussed. The time dependence and the intensity of the light at different field strengths have been measured with a specifically designed chamber, equipped with a CaF sub 2 light transmitting window coupled to a UV sensitive PMT. The time correlation between the fast light signal and the charge signal shows that the scintillation signals produced in liquid xenon by ionizing particles provides an ideal trigger in a Time Projection type LXe detector aiming at full imaging of complex gamma-ray events. Researchers also started Monte Carlo calculations to establish the performance of a LXe imaging telescope for high energy gamma-rays

Reconciling Identities: The Diasporic Bengali Woman in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Themes of home, belonging and space reverberate through Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel, The Namesake. This paper focuses on the negotiation of diasporic identities in transnational and transcultural spaces by the three main women protagonists in the narrative. Ashima, Moushumi and Sonia all shape and reshape their diasporic identities through personal ideologies which are located within the outlines of broader postcolonial and sociological discourses. The paper uses certain postcolonial and cultural studies insights along with sociological concepts in the process of highlighting the similarities and differences in the women’s transcreation of their identities

Neurocognitive Predictors of Drug Relapse

Worldwide, about 35 million people, that is 0.8% of the world’s adult population, use heroin and/or cocaine and more than 10-13% of these drug users are or will become drug dependent (UNODC, World Drug Report, 2012). Drug dependency is characterized as a chronic relapsing disorder (Leshner, 1997; McLellan et al., 2000). Substance dependent individuals often relapse, despite their efforts to stay abstinent (APA, 1994). Hence, the major goal of treatment facilities is to prevent treatment dropout and subsequent relapse. Unfortunately, about 50% of heroin and cocaine dependent patients already dropout in the first phase of clinical treatments, which is the detoxification phase. These dropout rates are consistent across several countries and remained steady over the years (the Netherlands: Franken and Hendriks, 1999; Switzerland: Hättenschwiler et al., 2000; United Kingdom: Gossop et al., 2002; Day and Strang, 2011). In addition, treatment dropout is associated with higher relapse rates (Gossop et al., 1987, 2002). There is ample room for improving these dropout and relapse rates of substance dependent patients. To improve treatment for these patients we first have to know the factors predicting relapse

Review of Deranged Marriage: A Memoir by Sushi Das

Review of Deranged Marriage: A Memoir by Sushi Da