Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Spectacle1

This paper argues that indigenous dance is a poetic politics of cross‐cultural encounter that engages Aboriginal identities with those of the Australian nation. I question the nature of this encounter in terms of a performative dialogue that is both musically and kinesically presented by indigenous communities and ‘translated’ into political discourse by the government. The sentiments of ‘translation’ raise questions as to how local ritual expressions of Aboriginal dance can mediate dialogue when presented as national spectacle. What is being meditated? What is happening in the process of evocation? In this performative nexus, I focus specifically on the poetic politics of Yolngu ritual as spectacle; the nature of performative dialogue in terms of shared dance forms between indigenous communities; the problem of the authentication of dance identities; and how corporeal dispositions of indigenous dance genres influence national sentiment by their symbolic power. I pursue these issues through an analysis of how ancestral dances have been repositioned in national performance venues, such as concerts, cultural centres and ritual arenas, as a means of asserting performative statements about indigenous positioning within the nation‐state. The nature of this dialogue raises questions of authenticity and processes of authentication. It highlights indigenous concerns to control representations of indigeneity as national event, as well as a desire to convey something of the sentiment and sentience embodied in the poetics of their ancestral performances.     

Seduced by Images: Identity and Schooling in the Lives of Puerto Rican Girls

Based on a two-year ethnographic study at an urban middle school, this article describes the power that images created by and about Puerto Rican girls hold in shaping their schooling experiences. Using a black, critical, feminist framework, I show how dichotomizing the sexuality of Puerto Rican females against their intellectual development obscures the complex ways that identities are co-constructed and then affirmed, appropriated, or resisted within their school site. I conclude that to resist the reproduction of educational inequality in the lives of Puerto Rican females, we must explore and seek to transform the influential ways that identities are mediated and educational outcomes are produced within the school contexts where Puerto Rican females are educated . [Puerto Rican, urban, educational equity, ethnicity, gender]     

Shaping Education through Diverse Funds of Knowledge: A Look at One Latina Paraeducator's Lived Experiences, Beliefs, and Teaching Practice

We examine the experiences of one Mexican immigrant paraeducator and how these translate into beliefs and teaching. Generally, the concept of "funds of knowledge" has been used with respect to students. We use this concept more broadly to consider the experiences of teachers as critical to their teaching and as resources for instruction. This paraeducator had markedly different experiences from those of the mainstream teaching force yet numerous factors mitigated against using these for instruction. Our work documents how the multiple sociocultural contexts of teachers' lives and their later beliefs and practices interact in particular institutional settings to impact teaching practices. Increased attention to the study of teachers' cultural beliefs and practices has important implications for the study of schooling and teacher education.     

Khoisan wind: hunting and healing

In this paper I draw on my findings and those of historical and recent Khoisan ethnography to attempt to explain how these southern African 'Khoi' and San peoples relate to wind and how the environmental phenomenon has informed their epistemology and ontology. I begin by fleshing out the knowledge and experience of wind among these past and recent hunter-gatherers and, pointing to continuity in wind relationships and the ideas that stem from them, I go on to demonstrate how wind weaves into Khoisan understandings of the body and illness. Despite extensive interest in Bushman healing, anthropologists have overwhelmingly concentrated on the 'trance' healing dance. My findings suggest this partiality has obscured the wider healing context in which the dance operates. Exploring the wider context, including massage, 'medicinal cuts', and witchcraft, reveals that the 'potency' conceived as central to the healing dance is, in certain contexts, equivalent to overlapping ideas of wind, arrows, and smell. Examination of the ethnography reveals that a number of the associations I make between wind and potency have been partially recognized in specific Khoisan contexts but, because comparative studies of Khoisan are difficult and unpopular, these similarities have gone largely unnoticed.     

Dance Education Matters: Rebuilding Postsecondary Dance Education for Twenty-First Century Relevance and Resonance

Postsecondary dance education is at a crucial juncture in its history in academe. Emerging from women's physical education programs in the 1930s, the profession's realignment with the arts broadly and arts-based education specifically has been characterized by ambitious goals and steady growth through the 1990s. However, a number of critical developments over the past decade have displaced many previous gains and undermined the overall stability and integrity of the field. Four primary challenges are investigated in this article: curricular equity, expansive dance education programs, graduate study opportunities, and national leadership. I urge dance educators and administrators to re-envision and expand P–12 dance education in the liberal arts tradition to include private studio, commercial-sector dance in community and related teaching professions. This article provides recommendations and strategies for developing relevant and resonant twenty-first-century dance education programs beyond current confines.     

Responsible choices: situating pregnancy intention among Haitians in South Florida

In this article, I focus on unintended pregnancy as a means to interrogate the intersections of abortion and prenatal discourses in the United States, and the ways in which these discourses assume certain kinds of moral, liberal subjects. Using media material, congressional legislation, public health policy, and ethnographic data from South Florida (2004-06), I trace how these discourses assume that women will behave in "rational," "responsible" ways to plan their reproductive futures, and how these assumptions intersect with Haitian women migrants' lived experiences in South Florida. My research illustrates how decisions about family planning are situated within particular local moral worlds, where gender relations, religion, power, and desires for children inform women's everyday lives.     

Crystallography, evolution, and the structure of viruses

My undergraduate education in mathematics and physics was a good grounding for graduate studies in crystallographic studies of small organic molecules. As a postdoctoral fellow in Minnesota, I learned how to program an early electronic computer for crystallographic calculations. I then joined Max Perutz, excited to use my skills in the determination of the first protein structures. The results were even more fascinating than the development of techniques and provided inspiration for starting my own laboratory at Purdue University. My first studies on dehydrogenases established the conservation of nucleotide-binding structures. Having thus established myself as an independent scientist, I could start on my most cherished ambition of studying the structure of viruses. About a decade later, my laboratory had produced the structure of a small RNA plant virus and then, in another six years, the first structure of a human common cold virus. Many more virus structures followed, but soon it became essential to supplement crystallography with electron microscopy to investigate viral assembly, viral infection of cells, and neutralization of viruses by antibodies. A major guide in all these studies was the discovery of evolution at the molecular level. The conservation of three-dimensional structure has been a recurring theme, from my experiences with Max Perutz in the study of hemoglobin to the recognition of the conserved nucleotide-binding fold and to the recognition of the jelly roll fold in the capsid protein of a large variety of viruses.     

Constituting ‘Asian women’: Political representation,identity politics and local discourses of participation

Political representation of ethnicized and other identities is a complex process, whereby identities are constructed and shaped through the competing claims of different collectivities. In the article I explore this process through a case study of a local authority community development project for Asian women. The analysis demonstrates that institutions are not neutral spaces in which contestations over collectivity are played out, but exert a constitutive impact upon the identities produced. Current theories of fluidity and instability in identities mean that collective identities must be staked strategically and contingently, determinant upon the political strategies appropriate within given institutional contexts.     

Afropolitan projects: African immigrant identities and solidarities in the United States

This article explores how Africans born or raised in the United States employ ethnicity to understand their racial and cultural identities. I argue that African immigrants engage positive narratives about Africa along with their experiences of anti-black racism to articulate identities as “Africans of the world”. I call this articulation of identity Afropolitan projects. The Afropolitan as an ethnicity is not meant to shield Africans from anti-black racism, but instead helps articulate a particular relationship to this form of inequality. The following analysis derives from a qualitative case study of a voluntary association comprising Ghanaians primarily raised in the United States. I find that the group’s identity is as much about being black, African, and American as it is about being middle-class, Christian, and heterosexual. Through their Afropolitan projects, this group emphasizes solidarities with a global middle-class heterosexual patriarchy while foreclosing solidarities with working class, queer, and other people of colour.     

Building on Iceland's ‘Good Reputation’: Icesave,Crisis and Affective National Identities

The paper claims that crisis is a fruitful way to analyse the interrelationship of local and global, neoliberalism and the nation-state, which scholars have explored for the past few years. During the Icelandic financial crash of 2008, the failed Internet bank Icesave became a source of intense disputes between the British and Icelandic governments. My paper uses Icelandic discussions of the bankrupt bank to explore how individuals negotiate their imagination of the global and the national and how national identity can be reaffirmed in the context of crisis. The discussion shows that the Icesave debate is based on reification of national communities as well as critical reflection on increased power of transnational institutions and global elites. The paper, furthermore, emphasises how crisis itself can be seen as constituting a field within which to exercise power, as well as a prism to investigate and understand national identities in a globalised world.     

Impossible presence: race,nation and the cultural politics of ‘being Norwegian’

Norwegians of African descent often find themselves at the centre of debates regarding the ‘problem’ of immigrant integration, the challenge of self-identification and the elusive nature of the multicultural promise. This essay examines how Norwegians of African descent perceive and (re)construct the ideological processes through which they are incorporated into understandings of the nation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2011, I analyse two extended interviews that represent key questions raised during discussions with forty interviewees. How does one engage the presumption of solidarity and universal goodness, common to characterizations of the Nordic region, which nevertheless render certain bodies and identities illegible and ‘impossible’? How is race ascribed meaning in the Norwegian context? My interlocutors invoke a particular moral vocabulary of belonging when describing experiences with implicit and explicit forms of racism. These ‘encounter narratives’ reveal national anxieties about race and cultural belonging, situated within historical preoccupations with identity and ‘sameness’.     

医学实验动物学专业英语教学方法初探

本文结合作者参加医学实验动物专业英语教学和在美国访问学习经历,介绍了几种在专业英语教学中强化学生综合运用语言能力的方法,希望能够起到抛砖引玉的作用,为促进学生掌握该专业英语语言特点,提高学习效率和实际应用能力提供有益的参考。     

Tensions and perplexities within teacher education and P–12 schools for music teachers with visual impairments

We have written this article seeking to connect societal perceptions of disability with P–12 schools and higher education institutions toward the goal of greater understanding and equitable employment opportunities for music teachers with disabilities, specifically teacher candidates with visual impairment. In our investigation, we examine the following questions: (a) How have special education programs within P–12 schools, universities, and schools of music reflected societal perceptions of persons with disabilities and how do those in turn influence perceptions of teacher candidates? (b) How have the essential functions of teaching been articulated by accreditation programs and what tensions arise when music teachers with visual impairments are considered for employment? and (c) What are potential ways forward for P–12 education, teacher education programs, and schools of music? To disrupt binaries between able and disabled in schools, we recommend embracing a broader, interdependent view of music education, one that is defined by and includes all teaching professionals and school communities. Additionally, we support recruitment of teacher candidates with disabilities to music education programs and consistent advocacy through matriculation and job placement to encourage entry into P–12 schools.     

The dialogical collective: mediumship,pain, and the interactive creation of Ndyuka Maroon subjectivity

This article explores how pain ritually assists in producing Afro‐Surinamese Ndyuka Maroon understandings of subjectivity and the self. Ndyuka discourses conceive persons as composites of multiple human and spirit others. I describe how these discourses emerge dialogically during oracular interactions between possessed mediums and their patients. Beginning as inarticulate sensations, personal pain is ritually transformed into identifiable spirits who expose their hosts as embodiments of past and present social relations. Over the course of oracular interactions, the qualities of physical pain are made to communicate that the pain is both an identity and a vital part of the sufferers’ embodied self. In parallel to this process, spirit mediums perform pain in possession to establish the origins of their authority in relations with spirits. Ritually transforming pain into identities of relation, Ndyuka oracular mediumship persuades patients to re‐evaluate their subjective experiences as innate evidence of Ndyuka social ideology.     

Identified ion channels in the squid nervous system

Our modern understanding of channels as discrete voltage-sensitive and ion-selective entities comes largely from a series of classical studies using the squid giant axon. This system has also been critical for understanding how transporters and synaptic transmission operate. This review outlines attempts to assign molecular identities to the extensively studied physiological properties of this system. As it turns out, this is no simple task. Molecular candidates for voltage-gated Na(+), K(+), and Ca(2+) channels, as well as ion transporters have been isolated from the squid nervous system. Both physiological and molecular approaches have been used to equate these cloned gene products with their native counterparts. In the case of the delayed rectifier K(+) conductance, the most thoroughly studied example, two major issues further complicate the equation. First, the ability of K(+) channel monomers to form heteromultimers with unique properties must be considered. Second, squid K(+) channel mRNAs are extensively edited, a process that can generate a wide variety of channel proteins from a common gene. The giant axon system is beginning to play an important role in understanding the biological relevance of this latter process.     

Undergraduate Music Program Alumni's Career Path,Retrospective Institutional Satisfaction,and Financial Status

The purpose of this study was to examine undergraduate music education and performance alumni's career path, retrospective institutional satisfaction, and financial status. Data for this study were drawn from respondents from the 2010 administration of the nationwide, multi-institutional survey conducted by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP). Regarding career path, nearly half of the music performance degree graduates reported performing as their current job, and slightly more than half of the music education degree graduates reported working in K–12 schools. Participants were generally satisfied with their institutional experiences, although relatively low levels of satisfaction were reported for networking and career advising services. The respondents reported being most satisfied with aspects of their current jobs that reflected the intrinsic benefits of contributing to a greater good, satisfying personal interests and values, and opportunities to be creative. The majority of the sample reported accruing student loan debt ranging between $10,000 and $30,000; however, no significant differences were found between groups, and 40 percent of the participants reported having accrued no debt at all. The reported annual income of the participants varied significantly, with music educators reporting higher earnings than performers.     

Evolution and nature of science instruction

In this article, I provide an analysis of my work (1985–present) with non-major biology students and science teacher candidates in developing strategies for teaching and enhancing learning with respect to evolutionary science. This first-person account describes changes in evolution instruction over the course of a career based on personal experiences, research-informed practices, and a critical collaboration with colleague Mike U. Smith. I assert four insights concerning the influence and efficacy of teaching nature of science (NOS) prior to the introduction of evolution within college courses for science non-majors and science teacher candidates. These insights are: (a) teach explicit NOS principles first; (b) integrate evolution as a theme throughout a course in introductory biology (but after NOS principles have been introduced); (c) use active learning pedagogies; and (d) use non-threatening alternative assessments to enhance student learning and acceptance of evolutionary science. Together, these insights establish a pedagogy that I (and my colleagues) have found to be efficacious for supporting novice students as they engage in the study of evolutionary science.     

Estranged Bodies and Vietnamese Identities

In this paper I will explore both the regulation of migrant bodies as well as the lived experience of migrant embodiment in order to develop an analysis of the body as a vortex of meaning in the displacement process. By examining the way in which the bodies of Vietnamese migrants are simultaneously object and agent, I will indicate how the relations between migrants and the wider society are felt and sensed through the bodily experiences of Vietnamese people. The dynamic between how Vietnamese bodies are represented and how they are experienced reveals the body to be a predominant marker of difference from both within and without, the mediator between experience and signification. I will indicate how the dominant media construction of Vietnamese bodies as defiled has sustained forms of exclusion and distancing which have influenced the way that Vietnamese bodies are lived. I thus explore the means through which the body has particular salience when attempting to understand the nature of migrant identities in Australia.     

Moved to Dance: Remix,Rasa, and a New India

This article looks at Bollywood dance to explore the production of the commodified bodies of global consumer culture. It focuses on “embodiment” to examine how dominant sensibilities are altered through changes in dance training and technological innovations. I argue that analyzing the dancing body as a locus of experience and expression shifts the ground from culture as text or discourse (popular in postcolonial, poststructuralist or choreographic analysis) to embodiment of subjectivity. “Remix” is the term that describes both the new training techniques and the aesthetics of Indian dances. Since the older boundaries of high and low, classical and popular are fluid under globalization, “remix” is replacing traditional codes and aesthetic experiences associated with rasa. I draw on my fieldwork among the “background dancers” in Bollywood films to argue that as consumer culture creates the dominant mode of cultural expression in India, the only durable form of dance practice seems to be the practice of consumption.     

Skin colour and race as analytic concepts

White working-class people have been portrayed in the media and political discourse as unable to keep pace with the demands associated with living in multicultural Britain. In this article, I shall challenge such representations of white working-class people's attitudes towards racialized ‘others’. To do this I explore the views of the members of a white working-class family to the changing racial composition of their once ethnically homogenous council estate (municipal housing). My ethnographic attention is directed to the connections, affective ties and emotional investments that the members of this family have with the estate and its community, and the ways in which BrAsians become configured in these narratives of belonging. I will show how analytical attention to the connections and attachments that white working-class people form with those whom they identify as ethnic and racial ‘others’ provides an account of white working-class identities that undermines popular representations of ‘them’.