'What it feels like to be an other': imaginations of displacement in contemporary speculative fiction

This essay explores how contemporary speculative fiction can offer new ways of imagining the refugee experience. Looking at Omar El Akkad's American War (2017) and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), it argues that the cognitive estrangement effect, or the way in which each text encourages the reader to distance themselves from reality, can help the reader build a bridge between the world of the refugee and that of the reader. Central to the discussion will be the genre’s use of the term novum, with reference to concepts of time and space. Not only do these elements contribute to achieving cognitive estrangement, they also have a fundamental role to play in the lives of refugees. Drawing a parallel between the novum as speculative fiction’s most important trope and the role of the real novum in refugee lives shows how the genre reflects the disruptive changes brought about by the displacement of refugee populations. In addition, the flexible use of time in each text has proven to be a useful tool for helping the reader imagine how being a refugee impacts on one's sense of time and, subsequently, one's agency - an element which will be explored through an analysis of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus, as well as insights from David Hoy's reading of Martin Heidegger’s prioritisation of the future. As speculative fiction’s main task is to imagine alternative realities, a third central element of the discussion will be ways in which the genre utilises space. Ultimately, it is argued that refugee narratives do not have to be strictly realist, as fantastical elements help readers to transcend the personal imagination - and sometimes that is what is needed to envisage the unthinkable

Concealing Colonial Comparability

The 1845 Dahra Massacre, in which French troops killed hundreds of Algerians by ‘smoking out’ their cave refuges, instantly became (and remains) an emblematic case of colonial violence. In Britain, this atrocity came to stand for everything British colonialism supposedly was not, and thus buttressed the claim to British exceptionalism as having a supposedly ‘better’, less violent colonialism. And yet, such attacks on caves had featured regularly in nineteenth-century British warfare in southern Africa, smoke being supplemented by dynamite from the 1870s onwards, cumulating in the little-known but extensive cave dynamitings in MaShonaland 1896-1897. This article reconstructs that long history, describing not only how practitioners accepted the dynamitings largely unquestioned, but also asking how at the time the British claim to exceptionalism was sustained despite the more than apparent resemblances to foreign cases. Apologists of empire did not cover up the violence but rather defended it; what they chose to remain silent on were the foreign analogies – concealed comparability was key to successfully sustaining British exceptionalism. Given the continued influence of exceptionalist arguments in public debate and historiography, this article finally makes a case to more forcefully place histories of British colonial violence next to those of other empires in an explicitly transimperial framework

Strengthening suicide prevention networks: examining the relationship between interorganizational collaboration and tie strength

2013 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Despite extensive prevention efforts, suicide continues to be the tenth leading cause of death in the United States (Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 2012). One possible explanation may be lack of coordination between the organizations that provide suicide prevention services. Because client well-being often relies on the integrated actions of multiple organizations, the factors that promote interorganizational collaboration should be identified and fostered. The present study involved structured interviews with agency representatives in the suicide prevention network in one Colorado community. The objective of this exploratory study was twofold: 1) to assess the cohesiveness and pattern of relationships between organizations across seven collaborative domains related to suicide prevention, and 2) to identify the indicators of relationship strength that are most relevant to different domains of interorganizational collaboration and collaborative intensity. Results were examined through a combination of social network analysis and statistical correlation and regression analyses. Overall, organizations reported collaborating more on sharing information and resources and sending and receiving referrals than they did on developing service infrastructure, and coordinating training and screening activities. Across all seven collaborative domains, there was a subset of organizations that was well connected and another group of organizations that consistently played a more peripheral role in the network. Model comparisons revealed that the influence of relationship strength indicators varied across the seven collaborative domains and that trust was the most significant predictor of collaborative intensity. Strategies to improve collaboration among organizations are suggested

On Fast and Robust Information Spreading in the Vertex-Congest Model

This paper initiates the study of the impact of failures on the fundamental problem of \emph{information spreading} in the Vertex-Congest model, in which in every round, each of the $n$ nodes sends the same $O(\log{n})$-bit message to all of its neighbors. Our contribution to coping with failures is twofold. First, we prove that the randomized algorithm which chooses uniformly at random the next message to forward is slow, requiring $\Omega(n/\sqrt{k})$ rounds on some graphs, which we denote by $G_{n,k}$, where $k$ is the vertex-connectivity. Second, we design a randomized algorithm that makes dynamic message choices, with probabilities that change over the execution. We prove that for $G_{n,k}$ it requires only a near-optimal number of $O(n\log^3{n}/k)$ rounds, despite a rate of $q=O(k/n\log^3{n})$ failures per round. Our technique of choosing probabilities that change according to the execution is of independent interest.Comment: Appears in SIROCCO 2015 conferenc

Menger's covering property and groupwise density

We establish a surprising connection between Menger's classical covering property and Blass's modern combinatorial notion of groupwise density. This connection implies a short proof of the groupwise density bound on the additivity number for Menger's property.Comment: Small update