Oxford University Press's Blog, page 228

Multiple inheritances: how the art of Romare Bearden reflects 21st century identities

On his way to becoming a successful artist, Romare Bearden was a promising varsity baseball player at Boston University, who occasionally played for The Boston Tigers, a Negro League team. Once during his student years, major league talent scouters tried to persuade him to try out for a professional team. He turned down their offer. Playing professional ball would require him to pass for white. A staunch race man in the 1930s, in a pre-Jackie Robinson world, the future artist was not willing to repudiate his blackness in order to play pro-ball.

Bearden went on to become a great 20th century artist. A hallmark of his art was his capacity to anchor himself firmly in his own identity as a black citizen and confidently claim his place in a tradition of western European modernism. Working primarily with the medium of collage, he created work that joined a modern lineage of abstract painting that begins with Pablo Picasso, George Braque, and Henri Matisse, and continued with the World War I work of Hannah Hoch and Kurt Schwitters. At the same time, in his stark and poetic representation of black culture, he remains a harbinger of the 21st century, a major influence on generations of black artists who have constructed and assembled work out of the multiple cultural inheritances they feel free to claim.

I thought about Bearden’s baseball choice and his career as an artist, when the comedian and talk show host, Trevor Noah, quipped that the French soccer team’s 2018 World Cup Success was an African success. Indeed, as reported in the 14 July 2018 edition of The Baltimore Sun, the French team’s players come from families that “recently immigrated to France from places like Zaire, Cameroon, Morocco, Angola, Congo or Algeria.” They went on to report that “Forward Antoine Griezmann, the team’s leading scorer, is half-German and half-Portuguese. Defender Samuel Umtiti, who scored the goal that sent France to the final, was born in Cameroon. Teenage prodigy Kylian Mbappe is part Cameroonian, part Algerian.”

Romare Bearden photograph attached to his 1929 application to Lincoln University; Courtesy of Langston Hughes Memorial Library, Lincoln University.

Noah’s comments set off a firestorm of French indignation. Officials of the French government argued vehemently and publicly that, by virtue of their citizenship, team members were French, not African. Noah responded by insisting that identity was not a matter of either or. Claiming African heritage was not the same as rejecting French identity. Quite the contrary, it was an expansion of their French identity and acknowledgment that contemporary identity can contain, in the words of the poet Kevin Young, “multiple inheritances.”

Image credit: “Romare Bearden – The Calabash, 1970, Library of Congress.” Provided by the U.S. Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.

It was easy to consider this quarrel as typically French, since France is a country notoriously proprietary about its language and culture. But, no sooner had the French quarrel erupted, another cultural identity challenge became public, this one from the German soccer team. In the German case, German team officials and some German citizens sharply criticized a player of Turkish heritage for posing in a photograph with the President of Turkey. From the player’s point of view, his photo opportunity was an expression of his pride in his Turkish heritage. To the German officials, the photograph privileged his Turkish heritage over his German national citizenship. The player resigned the German team in anger.

Bearden’s collages, which burst onto the art world scene in the fall of 1964, made a compelling aesthetic argument for multiple cultural inheritances. He called his vision “the Prevalence of Ritual,” and it was first manifest in Projections, black and white photographic blow-ups of collages. The billboard size works, presented a world of black life and culture as Bearden remembered it, studied it, and experienced it by constructing scenes of Black life from an encyclopedic set of fragments of myriad artistic heritages. Bits and pieces of Benin sculptures merged with 17th century Dutch genre paintings to convey the multiple cultural heritages that Bearden claimed as his.

Collage, a medium Bearden explored thoroughly in the 20th century, is a medium that is even more relevant in the 21st century. Collage captures the incessant voyaging that has transformed and shaped the modern world. Hundreds of years of the transatlantic slave trade uprooted multitudes. The voyages of European explorers imposed colonialism in virtually every corner of the world. 20th century modernism is built on these cultural appropriations. In the post-colonial world, populations often took to whatever vessels they could find to cross national boundaries. Collage, with its implications of rupture and disruption, fracture and re-assembly capture the post-colonial voyaging as much as it captures the modernism that was one of the vital sources of Bearden’s mature artwork.

Modern soccer teams are much like Bearden’s collages. They claim a national identity constructed of many identities, each critical to the unified whole. Like Bearden’s collages, the 2018 French and German soccer players can claim their personal history and heritage; they can immerse themselves in the cultural practices of their memories and their families. But they can also claim the national identity, language, culture, and citizenship of the country they now claim and, in terms of national sports, lead to victory.

Featured image credit: dirt-dirty-fingerprints-forensics-88363/ by byrev. CC0 via Pixabay .

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What would Margaret Cavendish say?

Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was a philosopher, poet, essayist, and fiction writer, and she had opinions. Lots of them, on topics from the cause of thunder, to the qualities of a good book translator, to the value of diverse opinions themselves (her assessment on this last point: “Several Opinions, except it be in Religion, do no harm.”).

In her 1666 work of science fiction, Blazing World, Cavendish imagined a lady, abducted from her own planet into another one and made Empress, who interrogates the most learned inhabitants of that world about science, philosophy, and religion. In some cases, the Empress is “very well satisfied with their answers”, in other cases she is “amazed”, and in a few cases she is “displeased.”

What if we imagine Margaret Cavendish transported into our world today? Like the Empress, she would be curious about what we believe and do in the 21st century – and she would have plenty of opinions.

About panpsychism: In some half-dozen books published over almost two decades, Cavendish developed a metaphysics and natural philosophy that steered a middle path between Hobbesian materialism and Cartesian dualism. According to her theory, all of nature is composed of matter, but a matter that can think and perceive. Philosophical systems that grant humans a privileged status because of their ability to think are really only motivated more by a desire to elevate humans above nature, Cavendish thought.

Developments in both physics and philosophy of mind over the past 30 years would intrigue Cavendish. Panpsychism – roughly, the view that the mental is a fundamental, pervasive feature of the universe – has become, if not mainstream, at least a respectable contender in the marketplace of ideas. Like Cavendish, contemporary panpsychists seek middle ground between the physicalist view that mental events are physical events in the brain and nothing more, and the dualist view that the mental and the physical both exist and are fundamentally different. Panpsychism promises a way to explain the mental without trying to eliminate it or carve it off from the rest of nature, by treating the world as conscious all the way to the subatomic level. Cavendish might well feel vindicated by learning that views related to her own are getting a hearing some 350 years later.

About our treatment of the environment: Cavendish’s belief that all of nature consists of the same thinking, perceptive matter allows her to argue for a more compassionate, egalitarian relationship between humans and the natural world: against Descartes and other dualists, she denies that humans have some special feature that makes us better than everything else. Thus, we should not see the natural environment as solely for our use. Of course, all living creatures must use other natural resources to survive, and so Cavendish thought humans may do so too. What she objected to was profligate, wasteful uses of natural resources, and uses that merely promote human arrogance and pride. In a remarkable poem told from the perspective of a hunted hare, she writes:

 And [Man] is so Proud, thinks only he shall live,
That God a God-like Nature did him give.
And that all Creatures for his sake alone,
Was made for him, to Tyrannize upon.

What would she say about watering golf courses in the Arizona desert? About destroying rain forests to support the fast-food industry? About burning fossil fuels to fuel the one billion cars on Earth? I think she would say that we lack humility; we consider ourselves like gods, free to use whatever we want for whatever purpose we want.

Image credit: Margaret Newcastle 1668 Grounds frontis. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

About social media: What would Cavendish say about Facebook and Twitter? Would she use them? She might feel conflicted. Cavendish clearly wanted her views to be known. In a preface to her Poems and Fancies, for example, she writes:

For all I desire is Fame, and Fame is nothing but a great noise, and noise lives most in a Multitude; wherefore I wish my Book may set awork every Tongue.

If anything can be described as noise living in a multitude, it is surely social media. And many of Cavendish’s pronouncements seem made for Twitter. “Essay” #55 in Worlds Olio, for example, is only 143 characters long:

What hopes can People have of a King to govern a Kingdom, when he doth not reform his own Household, but lets it run into Faction and Disorder?

Her “Allegories” also tend to be brief aphorisms, witty sayings – too long for Twitter, but apt for a Facebook post:

The Head of Man is like a Wilderness, where Thoughts, as several Creatures, live therein, as Coveting Thoughts which hunt after our Appetites, which never leave feeding untill their Desires are satisfied, or indeed they are glutted; others so fearfull that every Object is apt to startle them; and others so dull and slow, like crawling Worms; others so elevated, like Birds. They fly in Aery Imaginations, and many above all possibility.

Yet Cavendish condemns people who waste their time seeking public approval and gossiping about others. Defending her publication of Poems and Fancies, she says that writing is a “harmless pastime,” better than focusing on (and criticizing) what others are up to:

for sure this work is better than to sit still, and censure my Neighbours action, which nothing concerns me, or to condemne their Humours, because they do not sympathize with mine, or their lawfull Recreations, because they are not agreeable to my delight; or ridiculously to laugh at my Neighbours Clothes….

She claims to prefer a “retired Life, a Home Life, free from the Intanglements, confused Clamours, and rumbling noise of the world,” where she can “live in a calm Silence, wherein I have my Contemplations free from Disturbance.”

Thus, I suspect that while our imaginary 21st century Cavendish might be tempted to use social media to get her views known, she would see its use as a distraction from worthier pursuits. Perhaps a YouTube channel for telling her stories and poems would be more fitting.

Image credit: Media Social Apps by Pixelkult. CCO via Pixabay .

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Philosopher of the Month: Arthur Schopenhauer [slideshow]

This September, OUP Philosophy honors Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) as the Philosopher of the Month. Schopenhauer was largely ignored by the academic philosophical community during his lifetime, but gained recognition and fame posthumously. He arrived at his philosophical position very early on and his philosophy can be seen as a synthesis of Plato and Kant, whom he greatly admired, along with the Upanishads and Buddhist literatures.

Schopenhauer only wrote one seminal work of philosophy, The World as Will and Representation, which he published in 1818. The work was intended as a continuation of Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’: ‘My philosophy is founded on that of Kant, and therefore presupposes a thorough knowledge of it.’ Kant argued that the world is not the ‘thing-in-itself’, but rather a complex of mere appearances. Schopenhauer, however, tells us that the world must be viewed at a deeper level, as will. What determines and governs our actions is will –  a range of emotions and desires which result in actions. The world as Will in reality, according to Schopenhauer, is pure willing or a blind force/craving in the sense that it is undirected, futile, illogical and unmotivated. For this reason, Schopenhauer was known for being the philosopher of pessimism.  The world as Will is thus objectified as driven by the desire to survive at the expense of others. The human condition is characterized by universal conflict, envy, competition, opposition and above all suffering.

Schopenhauer did, however, offer ways to escape this suffering; one temporary and the other permanent. A temporary solution is through aesthetic contemplation, whereby our faculty of knowledge stops oneself from perceiving the world as just representation and allows one to be fully immersed in the beauty and sublime nature of art.

The permanent solution comes when we become so aware of our sufferings as a result of ‘will’ or ‘blind urging with no directed object’ that we relinquish our desires for satisfaction, pleasure and gratifications, and eventually our craving for life. Like an ascetic, one who gains this intuitive knowledge is no longer concerned with worldly matters or materials. Schopenhauer also advocates compassion for the suffering of others as an important driving force in altruistic behaviour.

Schopenhauer exerted a considerable influence on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writers, artists, and thinkers, such as Tolstoy, Turgenev, Maupassant, Wagner, Nietzsche, Proust, Hardy, Conrad, Mann, Joyce, and Beckett.

For more on Schopenhauer’s life and work, browse our interactive slideshow below:

Birth

Schopenhauer was born in 1788, in the city of Danzig to a wealthy family of German-Dutch origins. He was the son of Johanna Schopenhauer (née Trosiener) and a rich merchant, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, and had one sister. His father moved the family to Hamburg in 1793, which was then a free republican city protected by Britain and Holland against Prussian invasion. Tragedy occurred in 1805 when his father died by drowning in a canal by their home in Hamburg. This affected Schopenhauer so much that he developed anxiety and depression at that very young age.

Early Education

Shortly after her husband’s death, Johanna moved with her daughter Adele to Weimar, a centre of literary culture. Schopenhauer remained in Hamburg to take up a merchant apprenticeship for two years in memory of his dead father and found the training very tedious. He didn’t undertake a formal academic education and regretted the choice. He later spent some time studying at the Gotha gymnasium in Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg.

Living in Weimar

Schopenhauer moved to Weimar in 1809 to be close to his mother, with whom he had a difficult relationship. Johanna by that time had started a literary career and had established a popular salon frequented by intellectuals of the day and writers such as Goethe, Wieland, and Friedrich. Arthur didn’t move in with his mother but stayed with a German classical scholar, Franz Passow, who held a professorship at the Weimar gymnasium.

University Education in Philosophy

Schopenhauer enrolled as a student at the University of Göttingen in 1809, a university of science and medicine. He studied metaphysics, psychology, and logic under the direction of the Gottlob Ernst Schulze, a German philosopher in the tradition of Kant. He continued his philosophical studies at the University of Berlin between 1811-1812. During this period he read and studied intensively the works of German and English philosophers such as Schelling, Fries, Jacobi, Bacon, and Locke, while supplementing his reading with scientific literatures.

Early Work

Schopenhauer moved to Rudolstadt in 1813 due to fear of the war against France, and wrote the dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, considered an important work for laying out the powerful principle that everything must have a reason and a cause. Republished in 1847, it articulated the central concern that would dominate his later work.

Friendship with Goethe

The work made a strong impression on Goethe, who was Schopenhauer’s intellectual hero. The two developed an intellectual friendship for a brief period and met to discuss Goethe’s newly published work on colour theory, Theory of Colours, of 1810. Schopenhauer published his own treatise, On Vision and Colours, in 1816 but his disagreement with some of Goethe’s views in the book caused Goethe to distance himself from the philosopher.

Interest in Eastern Philosophy

The philosopher was introduced to Eastern Philosophy during his stay in Weimar when he became acquainted with Friedrich Majer, a historian of oriental religion and a follower of Johann Gottfried Herder. He showed interests in the Upanishads and Buddha.

Published The World as Will and Representation in 1818

Schopenhauer moved to Dresden in May 1814 and in 1818 he published his seminal philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation, a summation of Kant’s transcendental idealism.

Later Life

He had a brief and unsuccessful academic position at the University of Berlin, where G.W.F. Hegel lectured. After the failure of his academic career, Schopenhauer travelled extensively across Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. During his stay in Munich, his health suffered. He tried to find work by contacting his publisher, offering to translate the works of David Hume into German and Kant into English, but was rejected. In Frankfurt, he suffered a period of depression and ill health and remained there for the rest of his life. He died in 1860 of respiratory failure. 

Featured image credit: Frankfurt on the Main: Saalhof as seen from the Eiserner Steg (Iron Bridge), in the background the spire of Frankfurt Cathedral. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia.

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Pain is real to patient and provider when empathy is present

“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

― George Orwell, 1984

n 2004, the World Health Organization in cooperation with the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and the European Federation of IASP Chapters (EFIC) announced the first Global Day Against Pain. The culmination of over 30 years of effort to acknowledge the major role of pain in human experience and the need to recognize that “Pain is real” and  “Pain relief is a human right”.

Fourteen years later, pain plagues a billion or more globally, and pain-associated conditions, including low back pain and headache, cause more years lost to disability than any other illness group. In addition to wide variability in access to basic pain care and treatment, troubling disparities exist between countries where opioids are so scarce that a person with advanced cancer faces an agonizing death, and countries where opioids are so accessible that a generation is decimated by overdose deaths.

Biologically, pain is a sophisticated aspect of sentient corporeal existence: evolved to defend living beings from inadvertent harm, pain results in decreased biological fitness both in excess and deficit. Foremost, the pain system is a deeply ingrained protective system necessary for flourishing and survival. Those with absent pain perception will experience recurrent wounding and shortened life-spans. By contrast, those with excessive pain perception suffer harm, their internal experience makes social engagement and productive life impossible. Severe pain causes ruinous suffering so that healthcare providers must attend to the deeper dimensions of pain, not failing to provide treatments that are timely, safe, and cost-effective. Because pain is complex and distinguishing ‘superfluous’ pain from ‘sentinel’ pain requires cautious discernment, the clinical challenge of pain is compelling; unfortunately most health professionals receive only minimal formal training in pain management.

For decades, pain has been dismissed by the privileged and pain-free as ‘subjective’ and still today efforts continue to identify the objective measure of pain. Even once visualized on a computer screen however, pain will remain an intensely personal experience. One person can only understand another’s experience by dint of conscientious effort. It is time to dispense with calling pain subjective, it is not; It is intersubjective. Developed by philosophers to communicate the idea that one person’s internal experience could be understood by an observer under certain conditions, one of those being empathy, intersubjectivity is a far more appropriate term to describe pain as we understand it today. To declare pain ‘subjective’ perpetuates outdated and inhumane misconceptions, reflecting persistent denial of empathy combined with slow diffusion of knowledge. What is empathy? Listening to others when they tell us about their experiences; with compassion, we respond to alleviate pain.

I recently saw a patient I first met three years ago when she was seeking treatment for intractable severe headaches. The headaches had started during a medical procedure and her symptoms were initially dismissed. She endured years of pain as doctor after doctor minimized the pain or proposed stop-gap solutions. She was frustrated by health system failures and contemplating litigation. Over several meetings, we worked together and developed a comprehensive treatment plan for her headaches, adopting solutions based on her preferences and inclinations. The treatment required a lot of effort on her part and tolerant sensitivity on mine. We settled on combining a low-dose pain-active antidepressant with daily transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, a physical therapy-based home exercise program, activity modification, and sleep hygiene as well as non-opioid rescue medication. The patient learned a lot about her condition and was now in charge of her pain management. The critical step on her journey was to find a trained practitioner to listen to her and accept her pain without judgment: someone prepared to learn about her life, her values, her personality, and her pain; ready to explore the options for self-management, and take time to discover what that pain was telling us both.

At the national and global levels, the situation appears quite dire, although there are glimmers of hope: 1) Highly motivated individuals are constantly pushing for change: the IASP has declared a Global Year for Excellence in Pain Education, local pain societies hold annual meetings, patient-based pain organizations offer support, and local pain champions advocate for improved education. 2) Progress toward understanding the need to prepare healthcare providers to understand and address pain continues with validated curricula in pain, teaching materials such as the NIH Pain Consortium Centers of Excellence in Pain Education (CoEPEs), EFIC teaching programs, and expert-defined competencies to ensure licensure-level preparation in pain. 3) There are spontaneous efforts around the world to innovate more effective ways to convey pain knowledge and instantiate competency in pain care such as the IASP Developing Countries grant program and Interprofessional Pain Competencies initiative.

Once the ‘lightbulb’ goes on and policymakers and stakeholders recognize the value of pain management, change will follow. The pain champions are ready, won’t you join us?

Featured Image Credit: “Woman” by rawpixel. CC0 via Pixabay.

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A bright spot in the dark: Gamma and X-rays tell us the story of the Galactic Centre

The central regions of galaxies are extremely crowded places, containing up to a few hundreds of millions of stars. They are generally extremely dense environments, where a variety of phenomena occur frequently. The closest galactic nucleus within our reach is the Milky Way centre, usually referred to as Galactic Centre, which offers us a clean window on the interesting lifetime of these astrophysical objects.

Our Galactic Centre hosts a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* (SgrA*), weighing 4.5 million times the mass of our Sun, which is surrounded by a dense conglomerate of stars called nuclear cluster. Many detectors in the past years looked at the Galactic Centre, providing among the most beautiful observations to date at all the wavelengths.

In the last decade, the FERMI satellite revealed an intense flux of gamma-rays coming from the Galactic Centre, whose origin represents a still partly unsolved puzzle. One possible cause of the so-called “gamma-ray excess” is related to high-energy emission from a class of neutron stars, called millisecond pulsars (MSPs), that rotate extremely fast, several hundred times per second. The basic idea is that the cumulated emission of thousands MSPs could explain the observed Gamma-ray excess.

Shortly after FERMI, NuSTAR and the Chandra satellites directed the gaze toward the Galactic Centre as well, detecting a large number of sources emitting in the X-ray. The most likely candidates to explain this “X-ray excess” seem to be magnetic cataclysmic variables (CVs), a class of white dwarfs that live in binary systems and accrete gas from the companion star. Moreover, at the beginning of 2018, Chandra observations revealed the presence of several neutron star and black hole (BH) binaries also feeding from their respective Sun-like companions, all inhabiting the SgrA* neighbourhoods. Hence, it seems that compact objects are likely to live in such densely packed galactic regions, at least in our own Galaxy. Understanding how it is possible to get such a large and heterogeneous population of compact objects inhabiting galactic nuclei would unveil several aspects of galaxy formation and evolution processes.

For instance, the current paradigm for MSPs formation suggests that their number in the centre of galaxies should be much smaller than that inferred from Gamma-ray observations.

However, the discrepancy between theory and observations can be alleviated if the MSPs formation process and the galactic centre origin are put together in the same context.

Image Credit: Author owned, used with permission. Figure 1. Left panel: Gamma-ray emission coming from MSPs inhabiting the inner 2.5 pc in one of our Milky Way simulations. Right panel: the same as in the left panel, but here we show the X-ray emission coming from CVs.

Making use of state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Milky Way inner regions, a team led by Manuel Arca Sedda, researcher at the Heidelberg University, together with Bence Kocsis (Eotvos Lorand University) and Tim Brandt (University of California Santa Barbara), have shown that the observed Gamma and X-ray fluxes and the origin of the Galactic nuclear cluster are tightly connected.

These simulations show that the Milky Way centre, and in particular its nuclear cluster, formed through the so-called “dry-merger” scenario, according to which it emerges from a series of repeated collisions among massive star clusters born in the inner galactic regions.

Manuel Arca Sedda says: “Star clusters are perfect factories of MSPs, CVs and BHs, making the ‘dry-merger’ scenario an appealing mechanism to accumulate these sources into the Galactic Centre. Our models suggest that during the cataclysmic phases driving the nuclear cluster formation, the disrupting star clusters deposit their population of high-energy objects into the growing nucleus. Our results reproduce very well the observed Gamma- and X-ray fluxes (Figure 1), and allowed us to infer a number of BHs inhabiting the Galactic Centre perfectly compatible with the observational limits.”

This movie shows the Milky Way central region as seen by the Spitzer satellite (credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech) and our modelled star clusters overlapped. The big black dot in the centre of the movie represents the Galactic SMBH. The 11 conglomerates of particles with different colors represent the star clusters. Small black spots represent stellar black holes, while blue circles (white filled) represent MSPs.

Featured image credit:  Twinkling stars surround the milky way over a lake and trees in British Columbia, Canada  by James Wheeler. Licensed image via Shutterstock.

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The price of precarious labour in contemporary warfare

“Can we go a little lower? Could we find someone that will do it for board and room, you know, that has such a terrible country, that maybe they’ll just go out of the country and be a free security guard?” So the co-chairman of the Commission of Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan rhetorically asked during a hearing on private security contractors in Washington on June 21, 2010. One year previously, a British private security company providing services for the US government reached an agreement with the Sierra Leonean government to employ up to 10,000 Sierra Leonean ex-servicemen for security contracting in Iraq. In a competition for ‘the lowest price technically accepted’ (LPTA), it was decided that the Sierra Leonean contractors should replace the Ugandan guards against a monthly pay of 250 USD for providing static security in Camp Shield – an American military base in Baghdad.

In the context of the gradual withdrawal of the standing armies, the deployment of private security contractors is part of the Pentagon’s strategy to replace ‘boots on the ground’. In order to reduce labour costs and maximise profit, the companies have turned to recruitment sites such as Peru, Colombia and Uganda – countries, and in particular former colonies and post-war settings from where so-called ‘third country nationals’ (TCNs) can easily be recruited. Hosting a large population of military-trained, unemployed youth waiting for opportunities to emerge, Sierra Leone constitutes a fertile ground for recruitment.

When the recruitment was announced in Sierra Leone, it was referred to as the ‘Overseas Youth Employment Programme’. Among ex-soldiers and ex-militias this programme was considered a chance to finally contest their self-ascribed position as ‘victims of peace’. When peace was declared in 2002 after a decade of devastating civil war in Sierra Leone, they became positioned as violent perpetrators who constituted a threat to national security. While the transition from war to peace was supposed to mark a positive process of reintegration and reconciliation, it became instead a process marked by experiences of being stuck and a struggle to carve out space for survival and recognition. Against this background, deployment in Iraq was envisioned as a junction for a better life.

Sabre training in Camp Lion May 2010. Image used with author’s permission.

As the first batch of contractors left for deployment in Iraq, they had no idea for how long they would be deployed, under what conditions they would work, or what salary they might receive. This uncertainty was coupled with anxiety about venturing into a new warzone. Having been disarmed for almost a decade, they once again had to carry weapons, and this time in an environment in which their combat skills from West African warfare could not be directly transferred. But evaluating the balance between risk and profit, the Sierra Leonean contractors were optimistic that their work would pay off.

“We are slaves”. Soon after arriving at Camp Shield, this was how the Sierra Leonean contractors came to describe the exploitative conditions that characterised their deployment. In Iraq, they found themselves positioned at the bottom of a racial hierarchy of security workers in which they were reduced to bodies rather than recognised labourers. When the Sierra Leonean contractors were being mocked by the Indian workers cleaning their toilets due to the low salary level, they eventually went on strike. But their protest did not inspire any improvements. In May 2010, 150 contract recruits were instead deported back to Sierra Leone without pay.

Contemporary warfare increasingly depends on precarious labour. Today, private security contractors outnumber regular troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, the presence of the growing workforce of TCNs from the global South receives little attention in public and scholarly debates. Operating largely outside the reach of international conventions, and in a context where their legal status tends to be suspended, the status of these contractors falls into a shadowy area. They receive no medals or pensions, and their deaths are considered insignificant to a national audience. They constitute the hidden underbelly of global security.

Private security companies profit from an invisible army of precarious labourers. But for contractors from the poorest countries around the globe, the supply of security comes with a price. The Sierra Leonean contractors have endured long duty hours without proper pay. They have fallen ill due to lack of proper medical supplies. They have left their families behind. And they have returned home with little to show for their labour. Rather than leaving their position as victims of peace behind, they have been further victimized by uneven distributions in the economy of global warfare.

The long-term effects of these uneven distributions for security contractors are yet to be seen. While attention is currently being devoted to the impact of private contractors on military effectiveness and local populations in host countries, we know little of the post-deployment trajectories of contractors upon their return to their home countries. For the Sierra Leonean contractors, homecoming was characterized by experiences of degradation and traumatic memories. In a comprehensive RAND study of the health and well-being of private security contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2011 and 2013 it was found that 25 percent screened positive for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – a significantly higher rate than military personnel. This is just one out of several costs of facilitating the supply of security for the lowest price possible.

Featured image credit: ‘Sunset over Makeni, Sierra Leone’ by  Red Morley Hewitt.  CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons . 

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Changing migrants’ mindsets can improve their intercultural experiences

 “After all those years dreaming of America, I hated it…. I couldn’t understand anything. I didn’t talk. I was afraid someone would laugh at my pronunciation. And they did make fun of me. I thought to myself, I was a good student in Korea. Here I am stupid…. Finally I realized I had to reach out. To be a better speaker I had to be active and overcome my fear.”

— Clara, a seventeen-year-old girl

From “The Colors of Freedom: Immigrant Stories” by Bode (1999)

For many immigrants, Clara’s experience depicts their difficulties associated with learning a second language. Immigrants who are not fluent in the local language not only have trouble communicating, but may also feel that they don’t fit into the society in which they live, or that majority members might reject them due to their lack of fluency. Such fear of rejection can cause people from minority groups to experience negative interethnic relations and maladaptive adjustment to the mainstream society.

Despite these obstacles, as we can also see from Clara’s story, it is possible to overcome the fear of using a new language. Why is this the case and how can we help immigrants to “reach out” and overcome their fears? Addressing immigrants’ mindsets about language learning might be one answer. There are two types of mindsets: a fixed mindset is the belief that one’s level of language aptitude is not changeable; a growth mindset is the belief that language aptitude can be improved with enough practice. Everyone probably believes both of these claims, to some extent; some may have more fixed than growth mindsets, some may have more growth than fixed mindsets. According to a recent study, a fixed mindset is linked with possessing a fear of rejection. This relation exists because those who hold a strong fixed mindset believe they can do little to change their poor language skills, and therefore they feel that rejections by native speakers are inevitable and detrimental. Those who hold a growth mindset, rather, believe that they can better their language aptitude, and see challenges as potential opportunities for growth.

Since immigrants can be convinced to hold one mindset over another, depending on what they are exposed to, it follows that by emphasizing a growth mindset, teachers and other people who work with immigrants can help immigrants to experience less fear of rejection.

Moreover, researchers found that migrant students could be primed to hold either a fixed or growth mindset, which then influenced how much they expected rejection from native language speakers. Those migrant students who read an article that supported growth mindsets, compared to those who read an article that supported fixed mindsets, experienced less fear of rejection, which resulted in greater confidence to interact with locals and to adapt to the new society. These results have important implications for overcoming fears of using a new language. Since immigrants can be convinced to hold one mindset over another, depending on what they are exposed to, it follows that by emphasizing a growth mindset, teachers and other people who work with immigrants can help immigrants to experience less fear of rejection. This kind of feedback could thereby help migrants’ adaptation.

Think back to Clara’s experience from the beginning. Initially, Clara possessed a fixed mindset and believed that she was “stupid” because of her lack of English fluency. Eventually, she realized that, by adopting a different mindset, she could better this situation. The results of this study show that such change in mindsets, by adopting the notion that language-learning ability is improvable, can motivate new immigrants to engage actively in the new language in the new society. Settlement programmes and ESL teachers, should, therefore, attempt to promote the importance of possessing growth mindsets to new immigrants.

Featured image credit: ‘Luggage’ by  Rene Böhmer. CC0 Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Do you know your Broadway show tune covers? [quiz]

Broadway musicals have enchanted America for decades, so much so that show tunes have made their way into popular culture via recordings by famous artists. These Broadway covers have launched these show tunes into legendary pop culture fame. Test your Broadway and pop culture knowledge with this quiz on popular covers with roots on the Great White Way.

 

Featured image credit: “Music” by  Brandon Giesbrecht. CC BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Of course, “our objectionable phrase”

Of course is such a trivial phrase that few, I am afraid, will be interested in its history. And yet, what can be stranger than the shape of this most common two-word group? Course in it is evidently a noun. Why then does it not need an article? Is of course one of such adverbial locutions as go to bed, study at school, and stay in town? The OED traces the history of our idiom (I think it can be called an idiom) to the sixteenth century, but all the riddles remain. Of course was first used in the sense of a matter of course (one could also say a thing of course), and meant as a natural result, but the earliest citation of the phrase of course “naturally, certainly,” as we all know it, is amazingly late (1823).

It would not have occurred to me to deal with the phrase if I had not run into a discussion of it in my beloved periodical Notes and Queries. The discussion dates to 1879. It will be useful to quote one of the opening paragraphs of the article that set off the exchange. I stand in awe of Victorian English, and, although I realize that speaking so today would be ridiculous, preposterous, absurd, I cannot conceal my admiration of something like the following statement about of course: “It may be admitted that, just as some habitually disfigure their conversation with an oath, more from heedlessness than of malice prepense, so many use this expression from the thoughtlessness rather than from a desire to wound…. it is, in my opinion, a phrase of sinister and odious intendment.”

Malice prepense: a gesture of sinister and odious intendment. Image credit: Shirtless boy squeezing large inflatable ball by Vance Osterhout. Public Domain via Unsplash.

The author goes on to say that no language has an equivalent of the idiom now current in English (as noted, it seems to have become common property about fifty years before the publication of this article). “Our barbarous law Latin, it is true, had its writs ‘of course’ (de cursu), and our legal staff its ‘Cursitor clerk’ (whose employment it was to copy those writs) and even its ‘Cursitor baron’; but it is hardly necessary to say that, though the same in name with our objectionable phrase, they had no further connexion with it.” Perhaps so, but cannot of course be a so-called calque, or translation loan, of de cursu (a process by which every word or even morpheme of a foreign language is translated into the speaker’s native language)?

The author, C. F. Trower, an active writer on legal and religious questions, divided the uses of the phrase of course into five categories. 1) “Peevish, the peevishness being always marked by the asperity of tone with which it is uttered, as if the remark to which it is the reply were thought a truism, or too trite, or too uninteresting, or too troubles ome to be worth attending to.” (For instance, “Have you had a wet spring?” –“Of course we have.”) 2) “The ‘of course’ Supercilious, where the offensiveness of it lies rather in the question than in the answer. (“Of course you saw the eclipse last night?”) The ungraciousness would be avoided and the information required equally obtained by the simple omission of the expletive” (mind the traditional sense of the word expletive “a filler used without adding to the sense of the utterance”).

Of course you did not forget to take the number of that cab. Image credit: The Flatiron District by The Vantage Point. Public Domain via Unsplash.

3) ”Incriminatory”: “Of course you did not forget to take the number of that cab.” Yet it is granted that this use does not necessarily presuppose the speaker’s intention to attach blame to the interlocutor, as in: “Of course I should say: by all means let those who so desire go through all the examinations.” 4) “The of course meaningless, where it is purely an expletive, and might be omitted without altering the sense, being redundant,” as in “of course there are always faults on both sides.” 5) C. F. Trower found only two situations in which, according to him, of course is legitimate: when it is “confidential” (“Of course, old fellow, the next time you are our way you will stay to dine and sleep”) and when the sense is self-depreciating or humbling, as in “Of course you are the best judge, and know better than I do.”

The diatribe against of course evoked two responses. One writer agreed with Trower and added a “specimen, calculated for the meridian of London”: “Me and Jim was a-keepin’ company, and of course we were cousins, which it were only natural.” He called this usage of course Vulgar. But the case he cited is hardly special: we see the familiar redundant of course (an expletive). The sole defendant of the phrase quoted Bacon: “And if time of course alter things to the worse….” But perhaps here of course means something like “in due course,” de cursu, as it were.

In most of Trower’s examples, of course looks like a filler. Such fillers change, but their function remains the same: in most cases, the speaker prefers to sound (mildly) defensive and ward off possible objections. “He came, you know, and said….” (= “amazing, you won’t believe it, but that is what really happened”). The same holds for the universally denigrated but indestructible like: “He came, like, an hour late and did not even apologize” (= “ridiculous, isn’t it, but none of it is my fault; I am only reporting the facts as I know them”). I often see the “reassuring” of course in scholarly works (“Shakespeare, of course, couldn’t predict that four centuries later….” = “I understand it, and you are equally smart to share my opinion and won’t accuse Shakespeare of the nonsense some fool might impute to him—just common knowledge, my dear Watson”).

H. W. Fowler, whose book Modern English Usage is sheer delight, whether you agree with his recommendations or not (but if you decide to read it, use only the first or the second edition), included in his book an entry titled “Superiority.” In the introductory paragraph, he wrote: “Much misplaced ingenuity in finding forms of apology is shown by writers with a sense of their own superiority who wish to safeguard their dignity and yet be vivacious, to combine comfort with elegance, to touch pitch and not be defiled.” In the entry course (it is related to “Superiority”), he, too, offered a classification of the instances in which of course turns up. Of course, he did not read the exchange in Notes and Queries but more or less repeated Trower’s conclusions: “There are three common cases of of course as an adjunct to a statement of fact: the polite (‘I am sure you must be intelligent enough or know this already, but I may as well mention it’), the disdainful, and the showing off.”

H. W. Fowler, lexicographer and a teacher of good English. Image credit: FowlersModernEnglishUsage by JohnArmagh. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons Wikimedia.

One can classify and reclassify the utterances with of course in them, but most will probably agree that the one undoubtedly legitimate use of the phrase is in situations like: “Will you come to dinner, as you promised? –Of course” (= “Naturally, why even ask, rest assured that I’ll come. Do I ever break my word?”). In other cases, pause before you write of course, though in oral speech we are so often apologetic, needlessly cautious, emphatic, indignant, or uncertain of what we are saying, and so much depends on the intonation that censure and ridicule should perhaps be avoided or at least tempered. Yet a caveat won’t hurt: Don’t abuse of course. It may, like, hurt or make you sound stupid, you know.

Featured image credit: Diamond Ring #2 by Jim Strasma. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Is the American special education system failing children with autism?

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) give parents the option to enroll their child with autism in an inclusive education program: that is, in a classroom designed for non-disabled peers, with additional 1:1 aid and/or a modified curriculum. Millions of dollars are spent on inclusive education—but little evidence shows its effectiveness. These children still struggle to obtain greater independence, greater academic advancement.

About 90 percent of adults with autism spectrum disorders, including the intellectually most able ones, are unemployed as adults. Why? They are un­employable. We have failed to prepare them for jobs where they can succeed. Much of special education for individuals on the autism spectrum in middle and high school is inadequate. Teachers can have their heads in the sand when it comes to where they believe their pupils will ultimately be able to go—even though teachers have the clearest idea of what a given child knows and what it takes to teach that child. Educational administrators prevaricate to parents and set unachievable benchmarks with unrealistic goals. Doctors very often equivocate and sidestep questions about prognosis, even when parents directly ask about their child’s future capabilities. There are many children with au­tism who are painstakingly taught academic subjects for years and years by the most excellent and caring educators and therapists—though it is plain to any truth teller that such a child will never get to the point where he or she can take a place in a society that requires real reading comprehension, writing compo­sition, or the math needed to manage income or a household. Imagine being a child, then a teen, then a young adult drilled incessantly in things you can’t fully understand or remember, rather than being allowed to develop relative strengths and talents as a way of finding your niche.

Outside America, where academic education is not considered a birthright or a prerequisite for a good life, individuals with autism and other disabilities may actually have more opportunity to take part in meaningful societal activity—from work on a farm or in a factory to community-based centers of care for the young, disabled, and elderly. In many places outside America—some places with as many resources as in America, some places with far fewer—raising a child with a disability is not all about getting the child academically trained. Such children may be trained to care for themselves first, then to participate in family and community life, and then to participate vocationally, as they can, if they can. This is simply accepted to be what is possible.

In America, we do a disservice to individuals on the autism spectrum by often teaching children with autism things that are unbearably hard for them to learn. When it seems they can’t learn it, we say they are inattentive and can pre­scribe a medication for that. When we keep trying to teach those same things, still beyond the individual’s capacity, and they become angry and agitated, we also have a medication for that. We just keep trying to teach things the in­dividual shows little inclination to learn. Meanwhile, we ignore the teaching of more simple skills that improve a person’s independence and thereby the quality of daily life—like taking care of personal needs, preparing the foods they eat, caring for the place where they live, and developing a range of healthy leisure activities. As we keep trying to teach things that are insurmountable, we risk making the individual feel like a failure, anxious, or depressed. We risk having parents feel they have failed their child and that the system of care they depended on has also failed them because the system has not delivered on its promise to teach their child to read, write, and do math. These parents are infuriated, and there is no one to reassure them when, in fact, most often they have done their best by their child, maybe even more than for their typically de­veloping children, who may have not seemed to need them so much.

There are a tremendous number of us who want to help in whatever way we can…. However, altruism alone does not necessarily lead to success.

Americans care a great deal about helping those less able. Absolutely, eve­ryone deserves a chance to get better. There are a tremendous number of us who want to help in whatever way we can. Altruism is very American. When we are 10 years old, it makes us Girls Scouts and Boy Scouts. When we grow up and go to war and win, it leads us to “nation building” to affirm that our victory is meaningful to the conquered.

However, altruism alone does not necessarily lead to success: Only a small number with autism will get “better” enough to make decent adjustments and find a niche for themselves in life. A few will thrive.

I am not trying to lower expectations for children with autism and their families, but rather introduce realism to our discussion about what autism is for most families and what can be done to instrumentally help children and their families living with autism in America today.

We have had rainbow-high horizons in autism for a long time now. We’ve been chasing the pot of gold, the cure for autism, for a good 30 years, but the cure still is not in sight. I’ll argue here that for families living with autism today, their lives will not be shaped by any cure at any time in their lives or the life of their child. Rather, we need to turn attention to “saying it like it is,” and then doing something about what “it” is. This means parents need to know both what to do and what may result from the help they provide. A child’s prognosis can be ascertained to some degree with increasing detail as different treatments are given, response to those treatments is examined, and the child continues to develop.

Featured image credit: backpack-child-walking-child-1149461 by Free-Photos. CC0 via Pixabay .

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