New ritual practices performed by Jewish women can serve as test cases for an examination of the phenomenon of the creation of religious rituals by women. These food-related rituals, which have been termed ‘‘amen meals’’ were developed in Israel beginning in the year 2000 and subsequently spread to Jewish women in Europe and the United States.…[Read more]

This study shows how Old Order Amish and ultra-Orthodox women’s discourse about television can help develop a better understanding of the creation, construction, and strengthening of limits and boundaries separating enclave cultures from the world. Based on questionnaires containing both closed- and open-ended questions completed by 82 p…[Read more]

Le Centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale marque une rupture : on ne commémorera plus jamais de la même manière les événements historiques, tout particulièrement en Belgique. Les entités fédérées y ont démontré le rôle qu’elles entendaient désormais jouer, en toute autonomie, dans de futurs événements de ce type. La Région de Bruxelles-capita…[Read more]

The 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium were the first instalment of the Games since before the war. The planned 1916 Games awarded to Berlin had been cancelled.

This paper attempts to provide answers to the following questions: What are the causes of political changes in Africa in the 21st century? Are these changes people-led? What are the challenges militating against people-led political changes in Africa? The paper takes a look at the nature of the post-colonial states of Africa since the Cold War…[Read more]

Es bien conocido que la Relación sumaria de la Historia verdadera del Rey Don Pedro (PhiloBiblon BETA Texid 3377) es una de las obras de mayor complejidad analítica en toda la literatura hispánica de finales de la Edad Media y comienzo del Renacimiento. No solo en lo que concierne a su laberíntico entramado ecdótico, del que se han ocupado inve…[Read more]

Rap superstar Eminem has become the new poster child for everything that’s dangerous about contemporary popular culture. He’s crude, juvenile, and foul-mouthed. His lyrics are violent, misogynistic, and homophobic. He’s corrupting our youth, poisoning our culture, and laughing about it all the way to the bank. Or so the story goes. This essay…[Read more]

Introduction to The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music.

Popular music artists, as performers in the public eye, offer a privileged site for the witnessing and analysis of ageing and its mediation. The Late Voice undertakes such an analysis by considering issues of time, age, memory, innocence and experience in modern popular…[Read more]

Syllabus for an undergraduate Honors course in robots, identity, and subjectivity.

With the public discourse around filesharing veering towards punitive extremes, our aim in this essay it to reframe the issue in two ways. First, we argue that the filesharing debates are “too economic,” insofar as they reduce a multi-faceted phenomenon to a single issue: financial loss resulting from the theft of intellectual property. Lost in…[Read more]

Academia.edu has been called “Facebook for academics,” and the analogy is fitting: Academia.edu mimics core social-media conventions, down to follower counts, curated profiles with pics, and a scrollable “News Feed” bulletin of followers’ uploads. But its reliance on user-facing metrics exceeds anything you’ll find on mainstream social media. It…[Read more]

‘Watch the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves’; so says the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But can we be so sure of this? The Duchess, like her creator Lewis Carroll, often seems to put more emphasis on the sound of words than their sense, a technique that can also be detected in other written texts and in works of so…[Read more]

This paper highlights the multiple modalities through which writer, activist, and educator June Jordan materialized a placemaking pedagogy, grounded in the art of structural critique and using language in the service of social change. In this paper, I show how Jordan “implicitly instructs” her students and young readers in cultivating a str…[Read more]

A critical analysis of (and intervention into) various misreadings of cultural studies.

Young Adult dark romance is often more questioning than its adult counterpart; different, less constraining commercial imperatives are perhaps at work, or readers’ expectations less fixed. This chapter will show how, woven into a sensitive coming-of-age narrative of first love and familial problems, Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver trilogy performs a f…[Read more]

Vampire literature since Le Fanu at least has been conspicuously about ‘Otherness’, that crucial term of identity politics, and has thus rendered itself most obligingly to interpretation in terms of those politics—at least, since the rise of that paradigm in cultural analysis, it has been available to be read that way. Appearing deceptively human…[Read more]

The split screen is a well-known multi-frame technique used in film, television, and video. This essay focuses on cases in which this denomination seems incorrect, but that are currently classified under the same heading. In these instances, images of usually distinct characteristics are arranged on screen. The aim is to explore and define this…[Read more]

Las películas de Maddin absorben al espectador inmediatamente al mismo tiempo que su complejidad resulta agotadora. Dejan una impresión perdurable de un mundo efímero y distanciado, extrañamente cercano al nuestro —como una sombra profunda de él—. Nuestro propósito es reflexionar sobre esta impresión, dando cuenta de cómo la obra del cineasta ca…[Read more]

The terms ‘fandom’, ‘fan’, and even ‘fan studies’ appear to be, at first glance, self- evident. But considered in the context of both fan cultures and scholarship outside the English language-centered West, we begin to see the assumptions that underlie them. Whether we are talking about Japanese fans of manga and anime (somewhat codified it…[Read more]