705 research outputs found
Migrant sites: America, place, and diaspora literatures
About the Book
In Migrant Sites, Dalia Kandiyoti presents a compelling corrective to the traditional immigrant and melting pot story. This original and wide-ranging study embraces Jewish, European, and Chicana/o and Puerto Rican literatures of migration and diasporization through the literary works of Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, Estela Portillo Trambley, Sandra Cisneros, Piri Thomas, and Ernesto Quiñonez. The author offers a transformed understanding of the ways in which the sense of place shapes migration imaginaries in U.S. writing. Place is a crucial category, one that along with race, class, and gender, has a profound impact in shaping migration and diaspora identities and storytelling. Migrant Sites highlights enclosure as a prominent sense of place and translocality as its counterpart in diaspora experiences created in fiction. Repositioning national literature as diaspora literature, the author shows that migrant legacies such as colonialism, empire, borders, containment, and enclosure are part of the American story and constitute the diaspora sense of place.
About the Author
Dalia Kandiyoti is a professor of English at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island.
About the Electronic Publication
This electronic publication of Migrant Sites was made possible with the permission of the author. University Press of New England created EPUB, MOBI, and PDF files from a scanned copy of the book. The Dartmouth College Library Digital Production Unit created the HTML file and performed quality assurance.
Rights Information
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License © Trustees of Dartmouth Collegehttps://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/dartmouth_press/1008/thumbnail.jp
Influence of Reactor Design on Product Distributions from Biomass Pyrolysis
This paper explores the elements of experimental design that affect outcomes of pyrolysis experiments. Primary pyrolysis products are highly reactive, and reactor properties that tend to promote or suppress their secondary reactions play a key role in determining final product distributions. In assessing particular experimental designs, it is often useful to compare results from different configurations under similar experimental conditions. In the case of pure cellulose, char yields from pyrolysis experiments were observed to vary between 1 and 26%, as a function of changes in reactor design and associated operating parameters. Most other examples have been selected from the pyrolysis of ligno-cellulosic biomass and its main constituents, although relevant data from coal pyrolysis experiments have also been examined. The work focuses on identifying the ranges of conditions where diverse types of reactors provide more dependable data. The greater reliability of fluidized-bed reactors for weight loss (total volatile) determinations in the 300–550 °C range, particularly relevant to the study of biomass pyrolysis, has been highlighted and compared with challenges encountered in using wire-mesh reactors and thermogravimetric balances in this temperature range
Disentangling Religion and Politics: Whither Gender Equality?
This article explores the ways in which both religion and gender equality are instrumentalised in the service of diverse political agendas. Building on illustrations from Turkey and Afghanistan, the argument is made that a moratorium should be declared on focusing on the binaries of religious vs secular, Western vs non?Western or global vs local in favour of more rigorous institutional analysis that will give a better understanding of the politics of gender. This will require detailed attention to fluid networks of influence at the global, national and local levels and engagement with a multiplicity of actors, interests and practices
Identifying Synergistic Effects between Biomass Components during Pyrolysis and Pointers Concerning Experiment Design
A review of existing data has shown that “char yield deficits” develop during the pyrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass, relative to char yields expected from pyrolyzing chemically isolated lignins and the proportion of lignin in the particular biomass. This paper describes two sets of pyrolysis experiments. The work done in a thermogravimetric (TG) balance was initiated to probe whether diminishing heating rates might reduce, or even wipe out, the “char yield deficits” identified in previous work, where a wide range of heating rates had been used. Experiments were performed at 2 °C min–1, a lower heating rate than that has hitherto been used to investigate char deficits. The effect was confirmed at this slow heating rate, using samples of birchwood and almond shells. A parallel set of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) experiments provided evidence that mechanisms by which biomass samples pyrolyze are distinct from those of biomass components pyrolyzing in isolation. Moreover, the observed effects could not be replicated by simply mixing the three biomass components in appropriate proportions. The “lignin char deficit” is consistent with chemical interactions between intermeshed biomass components during pyrolysis altering reaction pathways and product distributions relative to the pyrolysis of biomass components pyrolyzed in isolation. The present work also shows that sample mass loss in TG balances is affected by altering sample loading, leading to potential errors. The design of pyrolysis experiments is discussed and approaches are suggested to prevent masking of key pyrolysis phenomena, viz. synergistic effects between biomass components or onset-of-pyrolysis temperatures, through the appropriate selection of experimental parameters
Liquid biofuels from food crops in transportation – A balance sheet of outcomes
The production and utilization of biofuels from food crops have been reviewed. Developments in Brazil, the United States, the European Union and China have been assessed in relation to the aims of biofuels policies, their costs and outcomes. The energy input for making biofuels has been compared with energy released during their combustion. The effect of using crops for fuel on the cost of grain for food and of arable land have been examined. There is evidence that current international policies have caused environmental degradation greater than the fossil fuels they were purported to replace. However, policy choices are difficult to reverse. Despite vast effort and expense, the actual scale of biofuels production is small compared to the resources that have been mobilized. As these processes have evolved, new groups of commercial interests have coalesced internationally, to take advantage of the subsidies with little recognizable benefit to the environment
- …