Rebels in Northern Uganda after their return to civilian life: between a strong we-image and experiences of isolation and discrimination

This article is based on biographical interviews and field research carried out in two adjacent regions of northern Uganda on local peace and post-war processes. It focuses on the situation of former rebel fighters following their return to civilian life. In the case of Acholiland, these are primarily former “child soldiers” of the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army who were recruited by violent abduction; in West Nile they are primarily men who more or less voluntarily joined local rebel groups as adults. The following questions were investigated: How do rebels who have returned from the “bush” speak about their past and their present? What discourses do they confront within the groupings, or we-groups, to which they are regarded as belonging and whose collective knowledge they refer to? What is the nature of their present situation and how can it be socio- and psychogenetically explained and interpreted?     

Psychosocial and Symbolic Dimensions of the Breast Explored through a Visual Matrix

This article explores knowledge about the breast in lived experience, addressing a gap in empirical research on a highly gendered cultural trope and embodied organ. We present findings from a study that used a free-associative psychosocial method—the Visual Matrix—in order to stimulate expressions of tacit aspects of the breast, aiming to generate an understanding of relations between embodied and enculturated experiences. Our data revealed how an aesthetic of the grotesque in one matrix allowed the mainly female group to use humour as a “creative psychic defence” against culturally normative and idealized aspects of the breast. This was expressed through symbolizations, affectively delivered in an exuberant mode, emphasizing the breast‘s potency and its potential for nurturance and “weaponization”. Through this feminine poetic, life and death became inseparable yet ambiguous dimensions of breasts. The breast’s life-affirming qualities included the sensual, the visceral, and the joyful—a material-semiotic knowing. This was incontrast to a second matrix, which expressed a more ambivalent and troubled response, and in which associations were weighted towards the spectacular breast of an ocular-centric culture that privileges hetero-masculine looking. We discuss differences between the two matrices in terms of psychosocial tensions between embodied and enculturated experiences.     

Creating capacities for peacebuilding citizenship: history and social studies curricula in Bangladesh,Canada, Colombia,and México

Public education is one influence on how young people learn to navigate social conflicts and to contribute to building democratic peace, including their sense of hope or powerlessness. Social studies curricula, in particular, introduce core concerns, geographies, governance and civil society, and participation skills and norms. History education narratives frame identity, (dis)trust or peaceful coexistence, and provide exemplars of how social conflicts and injustice have been handled in the past. To shed light on these peacebuilding and peace-blocking choices, this paper examines government-sanctioned social studies and history curricula in contrasting contexts of violent conflict and peace: Bangladesh, Colombia, México, and (Ontario) Canada. Our comparative analysis shows how these official curricula (de)normalize violence and militarism, present national identities as hegemonic/exclusive or plural/inclusive, and create opportunities for teaching/learning peacebuilding citizenship competencies such as conflict dialog, human rights awareness, and engagement in collective processes of civil society and governance.     

Black organs and optics: gazing at viscera in the work of Doreen Garner

Between Doreen Garner’s performance The Observatory and sculpture Black Ocean/Big Black, a significant divergence in gazes and spaces emerges. On the one hand, The Observatory arguably evokes a metaphorical nexus between body, flesh, organs, and land – a move that integrates archaeological and clinical gazes into a black female optic of pleasure wherein an oppositional gaze disidentifies the theatrical and scopophilic framing of black women’s bodies. The author argues that while Garner’s vitrine-enclosed performances, which elicit several gazes at once, signify a geological position and attempt to exhume the gory archives of black women’s bodies in art and science, her sculptural installation Black Ocean signals a queer liquidation and kinetics of black flesh.     

Transnational Reception: Nordic Women Writers in Fin de Siècle Finland

Abstract

This article investigates the transnational and translingual reception of Nordic women’s writing (among authors writing in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish) in a multilingual country, Finland, around the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This contribution is a component of our work for the international Joint Research Project, Travelling TexTs. We concentrate on the presence of Nordic women’s writing in various languages in fin de siècle Finland by investigating a library collection from that time. We look at the complexities in the reception of Nordic women’s writing in translation in Finland, making use of the concept of the Nordic dimension of translation history, and introducing the notion of intranational reception. We emphasize the role of women translators as cultural transmitters, and the intertwining of national and transnational (or, even, in today’s terms, feminist) agendas. We also investigate the reception of Nordic women’s texts in the press of that time, by examining both literature written for adults and literature for girls. Working with large-scale digitized sources has enabled us to examine the question of reception broadly.     

Party animals,career changers and other pathways into parliament

Research on parliamentary careers has paid little attention to variations in pre-parliamentary career patterns and their value in explaining legislators’ parliamentary success. Using sequence and cluster analysis, this article identifies typical career tracks taken by Party Animals, Local Heroes, Late Bloomers, Land Legislators, High-Flyers and Career Changers based on a comprehensive dataset of German parliamentarians’ biographies (1998–2014). The analysis confirms the role of the party as the primary career facilitator before and within parliament. Nonetheless both Career Changers and High-Flyers climb the greasy pole all the way to the national parliament without much service to the party. The former type, however, suffers from a lack of networks and experience, which is reflected in the limited career success within parliament. This article demonstrates that the use of sequence analysis on career paths offers a promising approach in distinguishing and explaining the opportunities, choices and obstacles MPs face in parliament.     

Dancing Sita/reinventing a body disappeared: Notes from from Sita: Lament,fury, and a plea for peace

Richard Shannon's solo performance piece, The Lady of Burma, takes his audience inside Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's imprisonment as she tells her story, moving between memory and the present. This excerpt begins as Suu Kyi has returned to Burma to care for her ailing mother, just as students begin to take to the streets against the ruling junta. In this sequence, Suu Kyi re-enacts the early violence subjected to the democracy activists (scenes that are eerily reminiscent of the spectacle of violence documented in Iran over the past year). As the scene continues, Suu Kyi describes her gradual engagement with the democracy activists, building to her famed address at the sacred Shwedagon Pagoda, in which Suu Kyi mobilized many of the nation's population in their struggle for liberation. The excerpt ends as Suu Kyi continues her struggle to lead the Burmese people to freedom through peaceful revolution, at the same time that her mother's life is coming to a close.     

Literature,trauma and the African moral imagination

Trauma theory claims to represent a ‘new mode of reading and of listening’, but its Eurocentric roots lead to the question of whether or not this approach is relevant in postcolonial contexts. This essay makes the case that engaging trauma theory through African literatures is in fact a productive exercise, mostly because of what it does for the former. African social thought, expressed through its writers and critics, allows us to refine and address crucial problems in trauma theory, including questions about the representation of trauma and strategies for trauma healing. African writers' deployment of images such as the railroad, which is closely linked with discourses of trauma and of modernism, illustrates how their works can reframe trauma studies from an African perspective. An appreciation of the continent's traumatogenic contexts, of writers' cultural resources and strategies for speaking to those contexts, and of the intrinsically transformational impulse of the African moral imagination, suggests that African literatures are grounded in the types of imaginative ‘re-membering practice[s]’ that promote recovery and healing from the destructive effects of trauma.