Wounding and Healing: dealing with difference in Christian narratives of migrant women in East London since the 1980s

Setting oral histories conducted with a group of female Christian migrants to East London from various backgrounds and different stages in the life cycle alongside interviews with male migrants and non-migrant women, this article seeks to explore the relationship between gender, mainstream religious affiliation and the negotiation of the migratory experience. Informed by mimetic and feminist theory on religious subjectivities, the article focuses on the preoccupation with sacrifice and healing which emerges from these life stories and highlights the ways in which the emotional realities of pain, separation and suffering also give rise to powerfully reconceptualised, individual faith resources and creative strategies for claiming agency within familial, vocational and religious settings. Through a focus on domestic life, work and church leadership within ‘mainstream’ Christian churches, this article complicates assumptions about the nature and historical trajectory of ‘traditional’ religious organisations, and interweaves migrant women's experience closely with that of other members of their church communities. Through these ‘moving stories’, gender forms an integral part of these women's spiritual narratives and is constitutive of their articulation and negotiation of their faith, migration and inculturation.     

Dominion Cartoon Satire as Trench Culture Narratives: Complaints,Endurance and Stoicism

Abstract

Although Dominion soldiers’ Great War field publications are relatively well known, the way troops created cartoon multi-panel formats in some of them has been neglected as a record of satirical social observation. Visual narrative humour provides a ‘bottom-up’ perspective for journalistic observations that in many cases capture the spirit of the army in terms of stoicism, buoyed by a culture of internal complaints. Troop concerns expressed in the early comic strips of Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and British were similar. They shared a collective editorial purpose of morale boosting among the ranks through the use of everyday narratives that elevated the anti-heroism of the citizen soldier, portrayed as a transnational everyman in the service of empire. The regenerative value of disparagement humour provided a redefinition of courage as the very act of endurance on the Western Front.     

They Persist: Parent and Youth Voice in the Age of Trump

In recent decades, parents and youth involved in the child welfare and foster care systems have created myriad ways to have their voices heard and their concerns appreciated, including through collective self‐advocacy efforts. New forms of individual and communal advocacy have emerged, including with supportive professionals, that acknowledge the centrality of parents and youth in every decision being made about their lives and about the systems that control their lives. Nevertheless, studies of youth and parent engagement identify the numerous individual and systemic barriers to meaningful participation and self‐advocacy efforts and the challenges to overcoming those barriers. This essay explores how empowered parents and youth can surmount those barriers with the assistance of their professional allies. Ultimately, this individual and communal engagement will strengthen a family‐oriented child welfare system and a more responsive government in these uncertain times.     

Inconsistency in 9 mm bullets measured with non-destructive X-ray computed tomography

Fundamental to any ballistic armour standard is the reference projectile that is to be defeated. Typically, for certification, consistency of bullets is assumed. Therefore, practical variations in bullet jacket dimensions can have far reaching consequences. Traditionally, internal dimensions could only be analysed by cutting bullets which rules out any subsequent ballistic assessment. Therefore, the use of a non-destructive X-ray computed tomography (CT) method is explored in this paper. A set of 10 bullets (9 mm DM11) was taken for analysing both intra and inter bullet jacket thickness variation. CT measurements of jacket thickness were validated with high resolution scanning electron microscope (SEM) images. An image based analysis methodology has been developed to extract the jacket thickness map and the centre of gravity. Thickness variations of the order of 200 μm were found commonly across all the bullets along the length and an angular variation of up to 100 μm was found in a few bullets. Jacket thickness and centre of gravity were also calculated for the same bullets after impact and the variations between the pre- and post-impacted bullets were compared, by establishing a common physical reference. The results show that the proposed CT scanning approach and subsequent image analysis method can bring out the statistical variations in bullet geometry pre- and post impact effectively.