We live at a time when Anthropocentrism, neoliberalism and neo-colonialism, alongside wars, persecution and violence, are creating unsustainable modes of living and precarities that result in forced migration [...]
This article focuses on the genealogy of the Mackintosh archive, showing how subjects are interpellated through archival networks that span imperial and metropolitan sites, linking people, ideas, knowledge and material resources. By tracing the Mackintosh archive across generations of family members embedded in British imperial society, it shows how archives call forth an individual—Sir James Mackintosh—as a symbol and a site of the interconnections between the patriarchal family, the male-dominated state and the production of cultural imaginaries of belonging. Tracing this archive, it argues that the ‘society’ to which James Mackintosh belonged is both reflected in, and constituted through, the letters and journals that comprise his archive. In form and content, they provide the material evidence for the interconnectedness of social, familial, intellectual and political lives. They function both as fantasies and representations of belonging to a social network—a community—and a constitutive part of the consolidation of that network. The letters and diaries that comprise the Mackintosh Archive bear witness to the formation of a literary elite at the turn of the nineteenth century and the mobility of that elite around European-imperial space. Thus, the Mackintosh Archive illustrates the point, made by an increasing number of imperial and global historians, that ideas and identities were forged through inter-connections across space.
This research explores how Native Hawaiian–led efforts to protect sacred lands and waters reveal forms of Indigenous survivance and resistance to the logics of settler colonialism. These forms range in visibility from direct protest to the perpetuation of Indigenous practices, values, and knowledge systems. Inspired by movements for social justice on the North American continent, the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s saw a reawakening of pride in Hawaiian culture within the context of the rapid changes brought by statehood in 1959. In response to the forceful thrust of Americanization and physical displacement of rural communities, young Native Hawaiians rose to defend their right to live as Hawaiians in their own homeland. As a result of the activism of the Hawaiian Renaissance, the 1978 Constitutional Convention reaffirmed Native Hawaiian rights previously codified by Kingdom law, which included a unique public trust doctrine grounded in Indigenous land and water management. My research is guided by the moʻolelo (oral histories) of nā kūpuna who were once the “radical” activists of the Hawaiian Renaissance. Their stories shed light on a history unaccounted for in standard textbooks and reveal a genealogy of Native Hawaiian resistance that was reawakened under the banner of Aloha ‘Āina (reciprocal love of land).
What leads people to believe in conspiracy theories? While scholars have learned much about both the psychological, social, and political factors associated with individuals’ receptivity to conspiracy theories, and the rhetoric with which these ideas are communicated, these two lines of research have often proceeded in isolation, leaving scholars not fully understanding if rhetoric persuades audiences of conspiracy theories. Employing two U.S. national survey experiments, we test the effect of six rhetorical devices on respondents’ endorsements of eleven different conspiracy theories. Across both studies, we fail to find evidence showing that these rhetorical devices increased the endorsement of any of the eleven conspiracy theories. These findings suggest that conspiracy theory beliefs are more the product of worldviews and group identities than of leaders’ communication styles.
Since Norwegian compulsory education increasingly recognises Sámi rights and the Sámi as an Indigenous people, the question of how we can provide inclusive education for Sámi pupils by recognising Sámi culture in teaching remains. I argue in this literary research, that inclusive education, both as a concept and as a practice in school, stems from a pathological field, targeting individual needs, and therefore misses the target when educating pupils with an Indigenous cultural belonging. Inclusion as a concept centres on practices such as fellowship, participation, equal access, quality, equity and justice, but its legacy is anchored in individual needs, influencing how we think about inclusion and implementing inclusive measures. This way of thinking still guides the national strategy for inclusive education but will not be sufficient for Sámi pupils, since they, as a group, are not disabled. So-called inclusive measures will rather enhance the integration of Sámi pupils into the Norwegian framework of schooling defined by the majority’s expectations for fellowship, participation and so forth. While Indigenous inclusion takes integrative measures which uphold the status quo, thus dependent on a majority perspective, indigenising has an Indigenous baseline. I argue that non-Sámi society needs to re-contextualise itself towards the Sámi society if we want an education for all.
In 2019, a noise complaint from a new, white resident of Shaw, a historically Black neighborhood of Washington, DC, led a local MetroPCS store to mute the go-go music that the storefront had played on its outdoor speakers for decades. The cultural and social implications of muting go-go music, a DC-originated genre of music that has played a central role in DC Black culture, inspired a viral hashtag, #dontmutedc, on social media, as well as a series of high-profile public protests against the muting. The #dontmutedc protests highlighted the increasing impact of gentrification on DC’s Black communities, and connected gentrification to several other important social issues affecting Black DC residents. In the wake of the #dontmutedc incident, several DC-area activist organizations have integrated go-go music into major, public-facing racial justice projects. The first part of this article presents a brief history of go-go music and race in DC community life, mainstream media, and law enforcement in order to contextualize the work of go-go-centered activist work in the aftermath of the #dontmutedc protests. The second part of this article highlights the go-go-centered activist work of three organizations: the Don’t Mute DC movement, Long Live Go-Go, and the Go-Go Museum and Café. These movements’ projects will be used to categorize three distinct approaches to go-go-centered racial justice activism in the Washington, DC, area.
Fillipe D. M. de Souza, Hubert de Lassus, Ro Cammarota
Abstract Background Forensic analysis heavily relies on DNA analysis techniques, notably autosomal Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), to expedite the identification of unknown suspects through genomic database searches. However, the uniqueness of an individual’s genome sequence designates it as Personal Identifiable Information (PII), subjecting it to stringent privacy regulations that can impede data access and analysis, as well as restrict the parties allowed to handle the data. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) emerges as a promising solution, enabling the execution of complex functions on encrypted data without the need for decryption. HE not only permits the processing of PII as soon as it is collected and encrypted, such as at a crime scene, but also expands the potential for data processing by multiple entities and artificial intelligence services. Methods This study introduces HE-based privacy-preserving methods for SNP DNA analysis, offering a means to compute kinship scores for a set of genome queries while meticulously preserving data privacy. We present three distinct approaches, including one unsupervised and two supervised methods, all of which demonstrated exceptional performance in the iDASH 2023 Track 1 competition. Results Our HE-based methods can rapidly predict 400 kinship scores from an encrypted database containing 2000 entries within seconds, capitalizing on advanced technologies like Intel AVX vector extensions, Intel HEXL, and Microsoft SEAL HE libraries. Crucially, all three methods achieve remarkable accuracy levels (ranging from 96% to 100%), as evaluated by the auROC score metric, while maintaining robust 128-bit security. These findings underscore the transformative potential of HE in both safeguarding genomic data privacy and streamlining precise DNA analysis. Conclusions Results demonstrate that HE-based solutions can be computationally practical to protect genomic privacy during screening of candidate matches for further genealogy analysis in Forensic Genetic Genealogy (FGG).
Saeedeh Jannesari, Amir Ahmadnezhad, Mohammad Ali Mahdavi Rad
The list of the order of revelation according to Jābir ibn Zayd represents one of the notable hadith-based chronologies in the dating of the Qurʾān. A majority of Qurʾānic scholars, when reporting or utilizing this order, primarily reference al-Itqān by Suyūṭī, disregarding other sources and versions of this narration. However, this narrative has been transmitted in earlier sources, such as al-Bayān fī ʿAdad Āyāt al-Qurʾān by Abū ʿAmr al-Dānī, through different chains of transmission and with a more complete text. Furthermore, discrepancies and omissions in various manuscripts and printed editions of al-Itqān have occurred, leading to erroneous assumptions in contemporary works that this list lacks certain surahs such as al-Nūr, al-Ḥujurāt, and al-ʿĀdiyāt. Additionally, the list in al-Itqān includes al-Fātiḥah, and several Qurʾānic scholars have used this version to date the revelation of al-Fātiḥah. Investigating the various texts of Jābir’s narration across different sources reveals that the inclusion of al-Fātiḥah in this list might be the result of subsequent scholarly interpretations. This article, by consulting the oldest available manuscripts and sources, introduces the sources of Jābir ibn Zayd’s narration and conducts a genealogical analysis, comparing different hadith lists, to explore the nature, validity, and foundational principles of this chronology. The findings demonstrate that some minor discrepancies in Jābir’s list compared to other hadith-based lists could be attributed to errors in transmission or transcription. However, significant differences, such as the placement of Sūrah al-Mā’idah among the earliest Medinan surahs and the omissions and additions concerning Sūrah al-Fātiḥah, cannot be explained as mere errors. These divergences likely arise from deliberate scholarly interpretation and adjustments in the foundational list in favor of alternative opinions.
Beatrix Frangepán (* c. 1480, +(27 March) 1510) from the Counts of Veglia (Krk), Modrus and Zengg was a descendant from one of the leading families of the Hungarian–CroatianHungarian–Croatian late Medieval Kingdom. She became wife of Crown Prince János Corvinus-Hunyadi and later of Margrave Georg Hohenzollern-Brandenburg. From her first marriage, she had three children. One of these, Kristóf, who died young, was buried together with his father in Lepoglava (Croatia). Recently, successful archaeogenetic analyses have been performed on the remains of János and Kristóf Corvinus-Hunyadi; and in the course of these studies, the family background of Kristóf’s mother, Beatrix Frangepán, became an important factor. The present study provides a nine-generation family tree of Beatrix Frangepan as a complementary data pool for an eventual expansion of the archaeogenetic studies. Preliminary results of archaeological study of the supposed grave of Beatrix Frangepán are also reported.
The semiosphere reflects universal and culturally determined characteristics. Heraldry is one of the most complex sign systems. Alive and flexible semiotics is urgent for studies. The aim of this paper is to mark the axiological character of Russian and British sovereign state armorials with an accent on animals. Based on both Russian and British research, this paper focuses on syntactics and pragmatics of arms analyzed in a synchronic and diachronic manner. A cross-cultural comparative approach to Russian and British armorial bearings can be viewed as a novel contribution. The paper embraces structural and semantic aspects, the temporal and pragmatics sphere and Jargon du blazon. English heraldry is relevant to the European tradition, and the Russian one has political value. For both countries, it is associated with foreign influence. The system of European coats of arms is coherent with the institution of property and war, and the Russian one with inheritance. For Britain, heraldry was one of the culture-forming components, and for Russia, it was just one of the elements of culture.
The article traces the process that led to the shift of the concept of solidarity from the domain of feelings to political rationality. Going through the genealogy of the term, its polysemy emerges: from the juridical meaning to the sentiment, sense of the bond and the political rationality suggested by Leon Bourgeois. According to Bourgeois, solidarity is based on the reciprocal relationship that all individuals have among themselves, on the intergenerational debt and on the “quasi contract”. The path proposed by Bourgeois can be a starting point for elaborating a possible social and political principle that is alternative to the neoliberal model of governance centred on competition.
Social sciences (General), Human ecology. Anthropogeography
Jenny Lee-Morgan, Kim Himoana Penetito, Jo Mane
et al.
The supply of, and demand for, housing in Aotearoa, New Zealand, is in a state of crisis. With all other areas of social deprivation, Māori are impacted disproportionately in the housing space, and have been locked out of the housing market. In order to address this crisis, a range of government, community and iwi initiatives have been established in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) to provide various housing interventions, from emergency housing, accommodation supplements and subsidies to transitional housing, home ownership programmes and papakāinga (Māori settlement, village) development opportunities. Marae Ora, Kāinga Ora (MOKO) is a Kaupapa Māori (Māori approach) research project created to explore the role of marae (cultural centre) and kāinga (village, settlement) in supporting the wellbeing of whānau (family group), hapū (extended kinship grouping), iwi (extended kinship–tribal grouping) and communities, which includes the potential provision of housing. Five marae in the South Auckland landscape are partners in this research and bring to life the prospect of their contribution to housing solutions for their local Māori communities. This article presents some valuable insights into the aspirations of each whānau involved with the five marae with regard to their perspectives and developments with marae-led housing provision.
The article presents the Starkus (Latvian: Starks) family of farmers from the Daunorava (Latvian: Dundurmuiža, German: Donnerhof) Latvian dundurnieki community in Bertaučiai Village, Joniškis Parish, and the research sources on the subject matter. The research covers the following issues: (1) the 18th–19th century sources of family origin in memory preservation institutions, problem of the family origin and genealogy, the most well-known members of the family; (2) farms and sources of community demographics; (3) egodocuments and their specific features (photography collection, memoirs, diaries and letters) reflecting the economic, cultural, and social life of the community, reminiscences and genealogy of the family, kinship, and everyday activities. The sources used for the research are divided into the following categories: (1) documents in memory preservation institutions (documents of Daunorava Manor in the Latvian State Historical Archive, the Lithuanian State Historical Archives, and the Lithuanian State Central Archives: manor inventories from 1779–1797; census of souls from 1795–1834; farm censuses of 1846 and 1860; other documents from the first half of the 20th century); (2) egodocuments (1941–2007) of the Starkus Family: memoirs of the three generations of women – mother, daughter and granddaughter-niece; letters from Siberia (1948–1950); diaries of the secret agent, son-in-law Voldemaras Briedis (Voldemārs Briedis, 1944–1949); photographs from personal albums (from beginning of the 20th century to the 1970s, 285 pieces), with all digital copies stored in Aušros Museum in Šiauliai.
The analysis of the Starkus case enables addressing the issue of the origin of the Latvian community of Daunorava. The community began to dominate in the area in the 18th century after massive arrival of people from Rindzele and Lēne Manors owned by German barons von der Brüggen and, possibly, from Rideļi and Balklāvi Manors owned by their relatives von Hohenastenberg gen. Wigandt in the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia. The movement most probably occurred after the plague outbreak in 1709–1710 amid the Great Northern War, when new inhabitants settled or were resettled into the considerably depopulated countryside. The question of origin may also be partly answered by means of the genealogical method, which reveals that, in the mid-18th century, most of the dundurnieki families (the Starkus, the Kaseliūnas (Latvian: Kaseļūns), the Bulis (Latvian: Bullis), the Krūminis (Latvian: Krūmiņš), the Užtupiai (Latvian: Užtupis)) had a single ancestor. The question that remains to be answered is whether a single, but well-documented case of one family can reflect the life of the community as a whole. Although comprehensive reminiscences about individual communities are lacking, several well-documented family stories can also give insight into the micro-history of the entire dundurnieki community and identify methodological access to and problems with this type of research.
Language and Literature, Philosophy. Psychology. Religion
TikTok is the fastest growing short video application and immensely popular with younger generations to express their thoughts, ideas, and most relevant to this issue, their identities including mixed-race identity. This paper asks: How did young mixed-race people choose to express their identity on TikTok in the #wasian trend and how does the app shape these mixed-race identity expressions? The answer lies in how the emotional affordances of TikTok app itself shape how it is used by creators in mimicking and mimetic ways and how people respond, through video and text. The article argues that the #wasian trends reinforce the racial and genealogical legacy of mixedness, often through showing parents or blood relatives, which is in creative tension with simultaneously remixing and asserting racial multiplicity. The claim to wasianess moves the private sphere (bedroom culture, family and notions of race) into the public and in so doing creates new potentialities for the creation of a global #wasian community on TikTok.
Direct-to-consumer DNA testing is increasingly affordable and accessible, and the potential implications from these tests are becoming more important. As additional people partake in DNA testing, larger population groups and information will cause further refinement of results and more extensive databases, resulting in further potential opportunities to connect biological relatives and increased chances of testers potentially having their identities re-aligned, reinforced or solidified. The effects of DNA testing were explored through 16 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with participants who had received their DNA test results. These participants came from diverse groups, genders and ethnic backgrounds. A thematic analysis found that notions of family were frequently challenged with unexpected DNA test results causing shifts in personal and social identities, especially in their family and biological identities. Discrepancies in DNA test results prompted re-negotiation of these identities and affected their feelings of belonging to their perceived social groups. Participants’ identities were important to them in varying degrees, with some feeling stronger connections with specific identities, thus having significant re-alignment of these identities and feelings of belonging. This article discusses the thematic analysis’s findings and explores how identities of the participants, many of whom took the test for genealogical purposes, were affected by DNA test results. As more people undertake DNA testing, it is important to explore how it may change the notions of family in the future and how their biological and family identities are affected.
Beurla an donais. The language of the devil. This is how my great-great-great grandfather, Neil McLeod, described English in his native Gaelic as he grieved the loss of his wife Rebecca Henry in 1886. Even as he tried to distance himself socially and linguistically from the Anglophone world, however, he had already long since been caught up in its colonial machinery. After being cleared from his ancestral homeland of Raasay, Scotland in 1864 and relocated to the colonial frontier in Aotearoa New Zealand, Neil went on to spend more than fifteen years in the New Zealand Armed Constabulary and its reconstituted form, the New Zealand Police Force, before being killed on the job in 1890. Drawing on critical family history literature, firsthand accounts from Neil’s personal diaries, other family accounts and additional historical research, this article retraces Neil’s assimilation into white New Zealand. By unsettling the “constitutive forgetting” by which Neil and his descendants forsook our connection to Raasay and the Scottish Gàidhealtachd to become Pākehā settlers, I explore a history prior to and concurrent with the colonisation of Aotearoa which accounts for multi-ethnic Pākehā origins, beyond the Anglo-Saxon, and enables a deeper understanding of how and why Gaels such as Neil participated in the British Empire. I conclude by considering how Neil’s story deepens our understanding of how the settler-colonial subject is produced by highlighting the occasionally fine but always distinct line between coloniser and colonised.
In the 1580s and 1590s, the English state required that all subjects of the crown attend the Protestant state church. Those who refused (called recusants) faced imprisonment as part of the government’s attempt to bring them into religious conformity. Those imprisonments forced involuntary marital separation onto Catholic couples, the result of which was to disrupt traditional gender roles within Catholic households. Separated wives increasingly fulfilled the work their husbands performed in addition to their own responsibilities as the matriarch of a landed estate. Gentlewomen were practiced at estate business since they worked in partnership with their husbands, but a spouse’s imprisonment often meant that wives wrote more petitions and settled more legal and financial matters than they did when their husbands were at liberty. The state also imprisoned Catholic wives who undermined the religious conformity of their families and communities. Spousal imprisonment deprived couples of conjugal rights and spousal support and emphasized the state’s power to interfere in marital relationships in early modern England.
Tracing family lineage through women has unique challenges that are made only more difficult when a woman has resided in a state-run social institution and is Black. This article focuses on six pregnant Black women who were residents at the Tewksbury Almshouse in Massachusetts between 1854 and 1884. I examine the way the women’s names and other aspects of their identities were recorded in the intake records and in state birth and U.S. Census records. I contend that the women were not treated with dignity and respect, such that their names were often misspelled, shortened, and documented incorrectly. Part of my argument is that this was done partially because many of the women were pregnant with a white man’s baby and were poor, domestic Black women carrying a bi-racial baby out of wedlock. All of this has made it challenging to trace the family ties of the women once they left Tewksbury. I argue that the way in which these women were treated and documented (or not) reflects the devaluing of Black women and, especially, Black pregnant women.
As Diné, we must understand the traditional teachings that were once in place through oral traditions and teachings. There are many troubles Diné (Navajo) women and Nadleeh (Two-Spirit) people face from outside the community, but due to western influence, we endure the same effects from within our own Nation. Through this paper, I aim to propose resolutions to move our Nation in the right direction for social change and build a community of acceptance by reaching back to traditional teaching philosophies without the influence of cis-heteronormative patriarchal structures. I argue that adoptions of these western institutions have severe effects on Diné women and Nadleeh (Two-Spirit) livelihood and well-being. In this paper, I examine three areas of Diné philosophy and cosmology: (1) the central role of K’é (family) and the matrilineal clanship, (2) Diné women and Nadleeh voices in our creation stories, and (3) Hozhó, the beauty way, to understand the masculine and feminine energies of Diné cosmology in order to address the importance of women and Nadleeh on Dinétah.