Introduction

This collection seeks to encourage new ways of thinking about the connections and tensions between sexual politics, citizenship and belonging by bringing together a diverse range of critical interventions within sexuality and gender studies. The book is organised around three interlinked thematic areas, focusing on sexual citizenship, nationalism and international borders (section 1); sexuality and ‘race ’ (section 2); and sexuality and religion (section 3). In revisiting notions of sexual citizenship and belonging, contributors engage with topical debates about ‘sexual nationalism’, or the construction of western/European nations as exceptional in terms of attitudes to sexual and gender equality vis-à-vis an uncivilised, racialized ‘Other’. The collection explores macro-level perspectives by attending to the broader geopolitical and socio-legal structures within which competing claims to citizenship and belonging are played out; at the same time, micro-level perspectives are utilised to explore the interplay between sexuality and ‘race’, nation, ethnicity and religious identities, both in individuals’ lived experiences and in activism and forms of collective belonging. Geographically, the collection has a prevalently European focus, yet contributions explore a range of trans-national spatial dimensions that exceed the boundaries of ‘Europe’ and of European nation-states. They consider, for example, links between former European imperial powers and their former colonies; the construction of a European ‘core’ and its ‘peripheries’ in discourses on sexual and reproductive rights; and forms of belonging shaped by migration from within and outside ‘fortress Europe’

Errand into the Past: Perry Miller, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Interpretation of American History

From the Washington University Office of Undergraduate Research Digest (WUURD), Vol. 13, 05-01-2018. Published by the Office of Undergraduate Research. Joy Zalis Kiefer, Director of Undergraduate Research and Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences; Lindsey Paunovich, Editor; Helen Human, Programs Manager and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences Mentor(s): Abram Van Enge

Studying and Assessing the Impact of Peer Mentoring on Students from Working Families: A View from Teachers’ Perspectives

This study focused on the impact that a specific after school peer-mentoring program had on students from working families based on their teachers’ perspectives. The research surveyed teachers from a local elementary school who had students enrolled in the SOAR after school program. The teachers were interviewed, and data was collected and coded according to trends in responses. Teacher responses were then analyzed in a cross-case analysis to recognize trends among teacher responses in the categories of program participants, resilience, school performance, school motivation, school perception, and self-efficacy among SOAR students. The research lasted one semester. Through the study, the data suggested that the SOAR after school peer-mentoring program had a positive impact on students from working families

Filling factors and scale heights of the DIG in the Milky Way

The combination of dispersion measures of pulsars, distances from the model of Cordes and Lazio (2002) and emission measures from the WHAM survey enabled a statistical study of electron densities and filling factors of the diffuse ionized gas (DIG) in the Milky Way. The emission measures were corrected for absorption and contributions from beyond the pulsar distance. For a sample of 157 pulsars at |b| > 5 degrees, mainly located in interarm regions within about 3 kpc from the Sun, we find that: (1) The average volume filling factor along the line of sight is inversely proportional to the mean electron density in clouds. (2) The average volume filling factor increases towards larger distances from the Galactic plane. (3) The local volume filling factor may reach a maximum near |z| = 0.9 kpc, whereas the local electron density continues to decrease at higher |z|, thus causing the observed flattening in the distribution of dispersion measures perpendicular to the plane above this height. (4) The scale heights of the electron density, the volume filling factor and the emission measure are the same and in the range 250-500 pc.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figures. Accepted for publication in A

FMRI Clustering and False Positive Rates

Recently, Eklund et al. (2016) analyzed clustering methods in standard FMRI packages: AFNI (which we maintain), FSL, and SPM [1]. They claimed: 1) false positive rates (FPRs) in traditional approaches are greatly inflated, questioning the validity of "countless published fMRI studies"; 2) nonparametric methods produce valid, but slightly conservative, FPRs; 3) a common flawed assumption is that the spatial autocorrelation function (ACF) of FMRI noise is Gaussian-shaped; and 4) a 15-year-old bug in AFNI's 3dClustSim significantly contributed to producing "particularly high" FPRs compared to other software. We repeated simulations from [1] (Beijing-Zang data [2], see [3]), and comment on each point briefly.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure. A Letter accepted in PNA