Souls intact: The soul performances of Audre Lorde,Aretha Franklin,and Nina Simone

This article redefines and regenders the meaning of soul in black expressive culture. The author argues that by the late 1960s the term encodes a narrative whereby racialized struggle yields a culturally superior style, and it shows how black women artists use literary and musical techniques to perform this recuperative alchemy. Reading Audre Lorde’s 1982 biomythography Zami as a paradigmatic soul text, the author contends that this text invites us to deprioritize concerns about the commodification of soul and to show instead how precisely black women artists such as Lorde, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin draw energy from the movement of the spiritual into the secular to create virtuosic, inclusive, and transformative forms of survivorship; the article suggests that they do so by weaving many genres together to create a home out of no home in the body, on the page, and on the stage. This analysis challenges interpretations of soul that privilege its marketization and appropriation and that reproduce a masculinist, heteronormative account, either as “fact,” in histories of popular music, or as the grounds for critique, in recent scholarship on “post-soul aesthetics.”     

Agenda-Setting in Greenpeace and Amnesty: The Limits of Centralisation in International NGOs

While international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) have been heavily studied for their role in transnational advocacy, most research has ignored their internal organisation and the relationships between international and grassroots offices. Intuition suggests that INGOs should face structural imperatives to balance maintaining global brands while simultaneously mobilising disparate publics in local contexts. However, this intuition has not yet been systematically studied. We address this with a paired comparison of Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Using case studies and an original dataset of website attributes, we show that campaigns promoted by international offices and their national counterparts reflect a balance between local diversity and global unity, revealing organisational structures that combine centralised agenda-setting with decentralised agenda implementation. Our research identifies a “measurement gap” with implications for understanding INGO accountability and effectiveness, and indicates that a more complete research programme on INGOs must include attention to internal organisation and structural diversity.     

The Cultural Transfer In Legal Translation

This paper will first explore legal translation from the semiotics approach. The sign developing process demands that in legal translation linguistic units cannot be exchanged in isolation from the legal cultural concepts. Some scholars equate legal equivalence with the extent to which the same legal effect can be produced in the target text. This paper will show the difficulties of achieving the same legal effect in the target text in view of the indeterminacy of word meaning in the source text, and will conclude from the analysis the best way of translating a legal text.     

Potential and pitfalls in establishing the provenance of Earth-related samples in forensic investigations

Earth scientists are often asked to establish or constrain the likely provenance of very small quantities of earth-related material as part of a forensic investigation. We tested the independent and collective interpretations of four experts with differing analytical skills in the prediction of sample provenance for three samples from different environmental settings. The methods used were X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, the assessment of pollen assemblages, and structural characterization of organic matter at the molecular level. Independent interpretations were less accurate than those where multiple techniques were combined. Collective interpretation was very effective in the assessment of provenance for two of the three sites where the mineralogy and plant communities were distinctive. At the other site, although the mineralogical analysis correctly identified the Triassic mudstone soil parent material, Carboniferous spores from domestic coal were initially interpreted as deriving directly from bedrock. Such an interpretation could be a common pitfall owing to anthropogenic redistribution of material such as coal.