The Double Play of Mirrors: Anna Kavan,Autobiography and Self-Portraiture

Abstract

Better known as the author of complex visionary novels of female experience, it is important to note that Anna Kavan was not only a writer, but also an artist, painting throughout her adult life in tandem with her writing. This article considers the nature of the relationship between her literary life and her artistic life, and what her novels tell us about her relationship to the cultivation of her self-image. Famously destroying her personal archive, shirking notable correspondents and recapitulating a mental disquiet across many of her paintings and prose works, it is of little surprise that Kavan’s enigmatic presence often figures more prominently than serious discussion of her literary and artistic achievements. How did this mercurial relationship to identity shape the ways in which Kavan explored her self-image?     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Hanging On</Emphasis>: Reflections on visual reproduction and the UK Abortion Act 1967

This is a reflection on the visual installation piece, Hanging On, produced collaboratively for the Feminist Legal Studies ‘At the Kitchen Table’ zine in 2016. The author and co-artist considers the research that informed and helped conceptually drive the aesthetics of the piece, including academic research on abortion within literary aesthetics. How these concepts ‘translated’ into hands-on artistic practice and physical materials is discussed, including the difficulties and knowledge gained from the process. The author finally considers the benefits of such interdisciplinary, aesthetic encounters within contemporary feminist knowledge production.     

Elevator-Related Deaths

Elevators are mechanical transportation devices used to move vertically between different levels of a building. When first developed, elevators lacked the safety features. When safety mechanisms were developed, elevators became a common feature of multistory buildings. Despite their well-regarded safety record, elevators are not without the potential for danger of injury or death. Persons at-risk for elevator-related death include maintenance and construction workers, other employees, and those who are prone to risky behavior. Deaths may be related to asphyxia, blunt force, avulsion injuries, and various forms of environmental trauma. In this review, we report on 48 elevator-related deaths that occurred in nine different medicolegal death investigation jurisdictions within the United States over an approximately 30-year period. The data represents a cross-section of the different types of elevator-related deaths that may be encountered. The review also presents an overview of preventive strategies for the purpose of avoiding future elevator-related fatalities.     

A Small Population Study on Friction Skin Ridges: Differences in Ridge Widths Between Latent and Inked Fingerprints

Morphological changes in the width of latent fingermark ridges occur naturally over time. This could be used to examine the aging process of latents and eventually estimate time of deposition. In a crime context, it is common practice to compare a questioned (aged) fingermark with a database of known (inked) prints. Therefore, in the absence of fresh fingermarks for aging purposes, it is of interest to reveal correlations between these two categories of fingerprints with regard to the widths of their ridges. The present study explores correlations of ridge widths between flat and rolled inked prints with latent fingermarks visualized with carbon black (CB) and titanium dioxide (TiO₂)-based powders among a small population of ten donors. Results revealed consistent differences between the ridge widths of latent and inked prints as well as flat and rolled impressions. Latent fingermarks visualized with CB and TiO₂ powders showed ridges with comparable widths.     

COVID-19 and the policy sciences: initial reactions and perspectives

Policy Sciences - The world is in the grip of a crisis that stands unprecedented in living memory. The COVID-19 pandemic is urgent, global in scale, and massive in impacts. Following Harold D....     

Policing alienated minorities in divided cities

Minority groups frequently challenge the legitimacy of legal authorities, particularly the police. Without trust and legitimacy, the police encounter constant conflict and cannot function effectively. While past research has examined minorities’ perceptions of the police, national minorities provide an interesting and under‐investigated test case because of their inherent identity conflict with the state. The current research examines three factors to explain minority–majority disparities in views of the police: (i) police effectiveness and fairness; (ii) intergroup discrimination (termed relative deprivation in policing); and (iii) identification with the state. Findings from a survey of Jewish and Arab residents of nationally mixed neighborhoods in Israel (n = 394) suggest that while all of these factors account for minority–majority discrepancies in views of the police, perceptions of police fairness are particularly important. Furthermore, feelings of discrimination and low levels of identification with the state are less important than evaluations of fairness in explaining minorities’ negative perceptions of the police.     

(Re)Claiming Our Expertise: Parsing Large Text Corpora With Manually Validated and Organic Dictionaries

Content analysis of large-scale textual data sets poses myriad problems, particularly when researchers seek to analyze content that is both theoretically derived and context dependent. In this piece, we detail the approach we developed to tackle the analysis of the context-dependent content of political incivility. After describing our manually validated organic dictionaries approach, we compare the method to others we could have used and then replicate the method in a different—but still context-dependent—project examining political issue content on social media. We conclude by summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of the approach and offering suggestions for future research that can refine and expand the method.     

Media Use and Political Predispositions: Revisiting the Concept of Selective Exposure

Today, people have ample opportunity to engage in selective exposure, the selection of information matching their beliefs. Whether this is occurring, however, is a matter of debate. While some worry that people increasingly are seeking out likeminded views, others propose that newer media provide an increased opportunity for exposure to diverse views. In returning to the concept of selective exposure, this article argues that certain topics, such as politics, are more likely to inspire selective exposure and that research should investigate habitual media exposure patterns, as opposed to single exposure decisions. This study investigates whether different media types (newspapers, political talk radio, cable news, and Internet) are more likely to inspire selective exposure. Using data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey, evidence supports the idea that people’s political beliefs are related to their media exposure—a pattern that persists across media types. Over-time analyses suggest that people’s political beliefs motivate their media use patterns and that cable news audiences became increasingly politically divided over the course of the 2004 election.