In today’s digital world where presence is often equated with personal visibility, the choice of Emirati women to remain faceless on social media presents a powerful counter narrative—one that reveals the complexities of identity, modesty and belonging in a hyperconnected multicultural society. This study takes a closer look at how these women manage their online identities by intentionally choosing not to show their faces on Instagram. Using digital ethnography and thematic analysis, this article explores how they navigate the balance between global expectations of self-expression and the traditional values of modesty and honor. Over a three-month period, the study observes their activity on Instagram, analyzing shared images to see how facelessness becomes a form of agency. The findings highlight the tension between Western-centric paradigms of identity and selfhood, proposing digital veiling as a transferable framework for understanding how modesty, discretion and agency are negotiated across digital cultures. This article contributes to the broader conversation on digital identity, gendered representation and intercultural negotiation by foregrounding the silent yet strategic practices of women who remain unseen but not unheard.
This essay examines relationships between adoptees and the (extended) adoptive family, focusing on the inheritance rights of adopted persons as entry points into levels and cycles of their belonging and un-belonging. The essay contextualizes a case report (or summary reports) on the kind of estrangement in the adoptee world that is fueled by inheritance disputes. It delves into postadoption perceptions and thus into the “unwritten” truths about adoption and its possible fallout. It draws from archival sources, semi-structured interviews (life-story interviewing), and life writing by adoptees, and also from a sequence of real-life exchanges dating back to 2018. All these sources focus on the contested inheritance of children, now older adults, who were adopted from Greece in the 1950s–60s and who became (or should have become) subsequent heirs to the estates of their adoptive parents and/or relatives. The Greek out-of-country adoptions of the postwar and early Cold War era involved more than 4000 children, most of whom were sent to the United States. The various testimonies and sections reflect critically on the continuing trend to infantilize the adopted persons, forever the adopted children, to push their origins back into the past and into geographical distance, to untie the family connections they have forged over the course of half a century. The examples take the reader from the adoptive family’s pre-adoption attempts at disowning the child through the postadoption stage of the end of an adopted lifetime, including cases of the extended adoptive family’s attempts at “de-adopting” the adopted person. This essay includes various sources of life-cycle documentation, among them an extensive case study and online obituaries. It adheres to truth and authenticity by incorporating fairly long original quotations, which, in the case study of the second half especially, assist the reader in comprehending much historical information in a question-and-answer format. This bolder structure offers the advantage of taking the reader step by step through the transactions of a prominent Greek adoption scheme (Rebecca and Maurice Issachar) and also through the various layers of the postadoption mindset and minefield. The material presented here is intended to raise awareness that change can and must still benefit the Greek adoptees today, whose lives may have been permeated by conditionality and nonlinearity. I conclude that, in the cases discussed here, the child’s orphanhood may well be a perpetual state, with the adoptee being orphaned of individuality and of a protective family on more than just one occasion.
Investigative forensic genetic genealogy (iFGG) was successfully used in the United States to solve the Golden State Killer case in 2018 and in Sweden to solve the Linköping double-murder case in 2020. However, further use of iFGG in Sweden was temporarily suspended due to concerns about its legitimacy. This article evaluates the legitimacy of iFGG within what we name, the European Court of Human Rights' (ECtHR) four-fold privacy test: the preliminary interference test, the lawfulness test, the legitimate aim test, and the proportionality test. The use of iFGG is an interference with an individual's right to respect for private life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Its lawfulness requires the creation of an iFGG-enabling law or amendment of an existing law to allow iFGG use by law enforcement. Its legitimate aim—criminal identification through data derived from DNA deposited at crime scenes—falls squarely under Article 8 § 2 ECHR. The proportionality of its use largely depends on the provision of appropriate safeguards in an iFGG-enabling law that would protect genetic data privacy. Although iFGG is a powerful tool to help solve cold cases, it has to stand on a solid legal ground that allows its use while respecting the right to privacy. It should be able to withstand any legal challenge before the ECtHR in the future. The safeguards identified in this article, if incorporated in an iFGG-enabling law, hope to prevent such legal challenge.
The aim of this paper is to locate critique at the intersections of the genealogy of knowledge in anthropological thinking and the decolonising movement. The paper approaches the decolonising movement as one of the most crucial points in anthropological thinking. It is built on the premise that the decolonising movement is set to go beyond filling the gaps in genealogies and it can do so by: (1) revising the ‘dismissed’ genealogies that have contributed to the formation of the contemporary classical theory and (2) thinking creatively in implementing the critical thinking tools to the dismissed scholarship, in an equal manner to the Eurocentric scholarship. To illustrate, it uses the case of Ibn Khaldun, an Arab scholar of social sciences and historical analysis from the 14th Century, often referred to as the first sociologist. On the one hand, his influence on classical Western thinking is largely dismissed. On the other hand, as a counter-response to this dismissal, the new Islamic revivalist intelligentsia in the Muslim right engages with him in a selective manner that not only rejects that central critical thinking but, even worse, sanctions the local regimes of power, including that local canon. By locating his scholarship to multiple tropes in anthropological theory and reading his evolutionist thinking vis-à-vis the post-colonial literature in anthropology and sociology, I question the limits and possibilities of critical thinking within and beyond the decolonising movement.
Introduction: Emblems are visual and identity structures with special characteristics. Knowing the components of this type of emblem with the aim of analyzing the visual components and practical needs is a suitable field of study. In the past, emblems were systematic structures aimed at introducing communities related to military and fighting forces in a region. As time passed, its practical application was expanded in many fields, and in various societies, people with certain social ranks took advantage of the identity and visual capabilities of the emblem structure. Emblems in a variety of combinations represented the authenticity and descent people on their belongings such as clothes and shields. The study of emblems can be considered a documented process in social-historical studies and provides visual perception and evaluation of the status of individuals or institutions. The main issue in this article is that carpets were also one of the vast areas showing emblems between the 15th and 17th centuries AD. The diversity in these visual components is very rich and it becomes possible to understand their differences and commonalities by analyzing and comparing the case studies. Considering that most of the past research on emblems in the field of genealogy and their associations with different families have been carried out in a specific times and places, and their use in artworks has received less attention, the importance of this article lies in its limited, but different study of emblems in artworks which is worth considering. The necessity of the study lies in the fact that carpets of the 15th-17th centuries are a platform that can be studied in connection with various emblems, to the extent that some carpets with emblems display emblems that were not considered as part of visual-social culture of that weaving area and were non-native.Purposes & Questions: The purpose of this article is to analyze the emblems of carpets in a specific time and diverse geography in order to reveal their differences and commonalities in productions of different regions with a specialized approach arising from the visual frameworks governing the emblems. This article addresses the following questions: The emblems reflected on the carpets of 15th-17th centuries AD have which visual elements in the standard structure of the emblems? According to the analysis of the emblems’ characteristics, what practical requirements do the depicted emblems in the carpets follow?Methods: The present article uses descriptive-analytical method based on library data. The statistical population with a purposeful selection method includes 9 complete carpets: Iran (2), India (2), Spain (3), England (2) and partial carpets from Spain, which were analyzed by thematic analysis. Based on this, samples were selected to achieve representativeness and comparability in a homogeneous class. The research method, relying on details of the data, is the analysis of the samples by observing the studied texts (analyzing the background and conventional structure of the emblems) on the first step, then the analysis of the research data (introduction of the emblems in the carpets), and then presentation of the information in a detailed classification format based on certain axes (as the means of distinguishing the identified emblems from each other, a way to display the emblems on carpets and their use). In the obtained results, to answer the first question of the article, the main structure of the emblems depicted in the carpets was analyzed from various aspects such as the elements that make up the emblems, the number of emblems in the same or non-identical form, and their location separately.Findings & Results: In most cases, the shield and its decorative images are considered as the main and common aspect of the emblems, and all the elements of a standard emblem were visible in few cases in terms of the convergence of the parts. In relation to the number of emblems depicted in carpets, some samples were limited to displaying one or several repeated similar emblems, and in two cases, more than one non-identical emblem was included by the designer. Identical or non-identical emblems were generally arranged singly or in groups of three, four and five in vertical or horizontal axes within the carpets. Borders were also the second option for placing the emblems; observed in two of the study’s samples. In response to the second question of the article, it was confirmed that most of the time, the emblems woven into the carpets were commissioned by special families such as nobles and royal dependents, and because they were generally woven into the body of carpets, they conveyed a high degree of identity. Also, emblems were displayed under the supervision of people who were connected with commercial companies, and their commercial function was more tangible. The third function of the emblems reflected on carpets of the 15th-17th centuries AD was slightly different from the necessities due to which the emblems were created, and while conveying the degree of religious beliefs, carpets acquired a richer religious aspect due to the display of such emblems.
To understand the changing trends in Jewish Genealogy over the past 40 years, the author has interviewed more than one hundred genealogists around the world. All of them are connected to the two most important genealogy organisations, JewishGen and JRI-Poland. They range from hobbyists researching their own families to professionals researching specific prewar Polish shtetls and those serving the entire genealogical community. Based on their responses to 26 questions, the author has identified two important features of contemporary Jewish genealogy: its democratisation and institutionalisation. The democratisation of genealogical research has contributed to a great expansion of the field. The focus of interest is no longer limited to only rabbinical families but is also concerned with the common man. Thus, genealogists today speak not only on behalf of sheyne yidn and otherwise distinguished families but also on behalf of the millions of murdered „ordinary” Jews who once lived in Poland. The institutionalisation of genealogy refers to the degree to which genealogical research organisations like JewishGen or JRI-Poland now provide some of the same functions provided years ago by the landsmanshaft institutions. Today, descendants of a particular shtetl often discover and connect to each other through genealogical researchers and these genealogical organisations. How these Jewish genealogical practices can be/are used to strengthen the landsmanshaft-like function will be examined.
Rommel Utungga Pasopati, Riska Dewi Ramadhani, Kusuma Wijaya
This article underlines tensions between medical tourism and radical democracy in Indonesian sense. Medical tourism tends to prioritize those who have money to gain more options, yet change the ideas of medical aspects into such trivial recreations. Meanwhile, radical democracy works to realize such welfare states in which all people could reach better options in life. Radical democracy, as indicated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, is analyzed through genealogy of hegemony as discourses that are used to be owned by several people are distributed to every person’s needs. Through qualitative method and explorative approach, the analysis of this paper emphasizes on how radical democracy promotes undeveloped people to have better access to basic needs but medical tourism still asks answers from capitalism itself. The discourses will only remain as dialogues while the applications of being ideational have shifted into matters of being recreational. Intertwinements of medical aspects and tourism indeed focuses on those who travel and stay, but will slowly eradicate the truth of the needs of those who need better medical assistances. In conclusion, while radical democracy would like to erode hegemony, medical tourism worsens the situation by pushing more trickle-down effects than fairness and equality before everyone.
This paper investigates the relationship between Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and chemistry / chemical engineering education at university level. It does so by describing the genealogy of the RRI concept as well as outlining three different interpretations of what RRI refers to and combining them into the hexagon model of RRI. This model constitutes the theoretical framework for this work. The second part of the paper addresses how the science and engineering education research literature has embraced insights from RRI. The hexagon model of RRI explicitly includes a dimension on (science and engineering) education, and this paper will contribute to this dimension by investigating and discussing how research literature can link RRI and tertiary chemistry and chemical engineering education. The paper shows that very limited work has been done to liaise chemistry higher education and chemical engineering education with the RRI framework. In the concluding section of the paper, we discuss how the reported educational experiences on RRI in STEM can be translated into higher education in chemical engineering and chemistry. Hereby a proposal to fill the identified knowledge gap is made. The core of the paper is conceptual, and its central purpose is to introduce RRI to a chemical engineering and chemistry ethics education audience. As mentioned, the RRI approach has gone largely unnoticed within engineering ethics education, and only received limited attention within ethics of chemistry education. We hope that these research communities will find it inspirational to get involved in the RRI framework and to actively enact RRI insights.
The identification of orthologous genes forms the basis for most comparative genomics studies. Existing approaches either lack functional annotation of the identified orthologous groups, hampering the interpretation of subsequent results, or are manually annotated and thus lag behind the rapid sequencing of new genomes. Here we present the eggNOG database (‘evolutionary genealogy of genes: Non-supervised Orthologous Groups’), which contains orthologous groups constructed from Smith–Waterman alignments through identification of reciprocal best matches and triangular linkage clustering. Applying this procedure to 312 bacterial, 26 archaeal and 35 eukaryotic genomes yielded 43 582 course-grained orthologous groups of which 9724 are extended versions of those from the original COG/KOG database. We also constructed more fine-grained groups for selected subsets of organisms, such as the 19 914 mammalian orthologous groups. We automatically annotated our non-supervised orthologous groups with functional descriptions, which were derived by identifying common denominators for the genes based on their individual textual descriptions, annotated functional categories, and predicted protein domains. The orthologous groups in eggNOG contain 1 241 751 genes and provide at least a broad functional description for 77% of them. Users can query the resource for individual genes via a web interface or download the complete set of orthologous groups at http://eggnog.embl.de.
We live in a world that desperately wishes to ignore centuries of racial divisions and hierarchies by positioning multiracial people as a declaration of a post-racial society. The latest U.S. 2020 Census results show that the U.S. population has grown in racial and ethnic diversity in the last ten years, with the white population decreasing. Our U.S. systems of policies, economy, and well-being are based upon “scientific” constructions of racial difference, hierarchy, Blackness, and fearmongering around miscegenation (racial mixing) that condemn proximity to Blackness. Driven by our respective multiracial Latinx and Asian experiences and entry points to anti-Blackness, this project explores the history of Latinx and Asian racialization and engagement with anti-Blackness. Racial hierarchy positions our communities as honorary whites and employs tactics to complicate solidarity and coalition. This project invites engagement in consciousness-raising in borderlands as sites of transformation as possible methods of addressing structural anti-Blackness.
Rose Selwyn (1824–1905) was a first wave Australian feminist and public speaker. The poetry, art, and scraps of writing Rose left in her archive allow the reader to piece together an intellectual history, a genealogy of the making of self. Rose attained her way of being through several contemporary influences—the mysticism of Tractarianism, a concern with death and its meanings, an interest in the literary edges of the world, a concern with the suffering body, and a passion for women and a woman-centred world. From these tangled contemporary concerns, she made a feminism for all non-Aboriginal women apparent in her speeches. Her role as a colonising woman in a violent landscape created a complex relationship with Aboriginal people where she may be seen to be criticising her elite landholding (squatter) peers and introducing concepts such as an Aboriginal parliament.
Analysis of refugee experiences often stands in the context of broad and visible experiences, despite the accounts of child refugees consistently recalling their experiences through domestic, everyday experience. Over 80 years since the Kindertransport, the autobiographical literature bears witness to the lived realities of Kindertransport refugees, standing as memorials to their alternative experiences of the Holocaust. This paper addresses accounts shared through autobiographical texts, arguing that the Kinder constantly negotiated their identity performance in response to new ‘home’ spaces, creating new relationships with space in the homes of others. This article discusses spatial theory and identity performance to analyse the ways in which domestic spaces were a defining factor in the Kinder’s experiences and identity development, and likewise, how the Kinder’s experiences shaped their perceptions of domestic space. Everyday experiences exert affective impacts through repetitive encounters, and the Kindertransport saw children immersed in new everyday norms. Entering new, shared spaces during childhood, the Kinder experienced long-lasting impacts on identity development as they became distanced from familiar norms and suddenly immersed in new alternatives. Kinder found themselves with limited privacy in seemingly private homes as they entered into already-inhabited domestic environments. Blurred boundaries between public and private within these spaces contributed to an unusual constancy of performance as the Kinder were constantly before an audience.
ABSTRACTThis article outlines the use of a novel research method, Korikori Kōrero, with a group of physically active Māori women. The research aimed to identify common traits or ways of knowing and being, by engaging with Māori women in their chosen physical activities and preferred environments. Korikori Kōrero draws from both Indigenous and Euro-Western research methodologies to ultimately bring the research relationship and associated power dynamic into balance. Māori women have experienced an exaggerated imbalance of power resulting from the patriarchal dominance of colonisation, and their contemporary realities often reflect this. However, it was the intention of this research and method, to privilege the stories of Māori women, successful in navigating contemporary realities – through physical activity, a known protective health behaviour. This article will share the rationale behind this novel mobile method; how it was implemented; and its relevance in generating an understanding of physically active Māori women.Glossary of Māori words: mātauranga: Māori knowledges, processes of learning; kanohi kitea: the seen face; whakapapa: genealogy and background; whakawhanaungatanga: connectedness and building relationships; wānanga: gathering or a meeting where there is an exchange of knowledge; Hinetuākiri, Hineuku, and Papatūānuku: Māori feminine deities connected to the earth (gravel, clay, earth); hongi: Māori greeting/gesture demonstrated by pressing noses and sharing breath; whanaungatanga: established connections/relationships; wahine/wāhine: woman/women; mana: authority; tikanga: cultural practices; mihi: introductions, acknowledgements; whanau: immediate and extended family; toa: relates to strength, skillfullness; teina: younger sibling or less experienced; tuakana: older sibling or more experienced; Whakataka te hau ki te uru, whakataka te hau ki te tonga: the opening lines of a popular karakia, translates to: Cease oh winds of the west and of the south; karakia: incantation, prayer, ritual chant; te taiao: the natural environment; maunga: mountain; korikori tinana ā tinana: physical activity in person.