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legallybrunettedotcom · 3 months

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BUFFY READING LIST

As promised @possession1981 and I have compiled a list of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and Angel) related academic text and books. I think this is a good starting point for both a long time fan and for someone just getting into the show, or just someone interested in vampire lore. I have included several books about the vampire lore and myth in general as well. Most of these are available online.

BOOKS

Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox & David Lavery

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy - Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale by James B. South

Buffy Goes Dark: Essays on the Final Two Seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Television, edited by Lynne Y. Edwards, Elizabeth L. Rambo & James B. South

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor and Morality by Mark Field

Televised Morality: The Case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Gregory Stevenson

Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Elana Levine

The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Matthew Pateman

Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks by Emily Pohl-Weary

Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Ronda Wilcox

Into Every Generation a Slayer Is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts by Evan Ross Katz

The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction, and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Milly Williamson

Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel by Jes Battis

Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan by Lorna Jowett

Diseases of the Head: Essays on the Horrors of Speculative Philosophy; edited by Matt Rosen (chapter 2 Death of Horror)

Public Privates: Feminist Geographies of Mediated Spaces by Marcia R. England (chapter 1 Welcome to the Hellmouth: Paradoxical Spaces in Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead From the Enlightenment to the Present Day; edited by Sam George and Bill Hughes (chapter 8 ‘I feel strong. I feel different’: transformations, vampires and language in Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

The Contemporary Television Series; edited by Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon (chapter 9 Television, Horror and Everyday Life in Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Joss Whedon and Race: Critical Essays; edited by Mary Ellen Iatropoulos and Lowery A. Woodall III

Buffy and the Heroine's Journey: Vampire Slayer as Feminine Chosen One by Valerie Estelle Frankel

The Existential Joss Whedon: Evil and Human Freedom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and Serenity by J. Michael Richardson and J. Douglas Rabb

Buffy the Vampire Slayer 20 Years of Slaying: The Watcher's Guide Authorized by Christopher Golden

Reading the Vampire Slayer: The Complete, Unofficial Guide to 'Buffy' and 'Angel' by Roz Kaveney

Hollywood Vampire: The Unnoficial Guide to Angel by Keith Topping

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Monster Book by Christopher Golden

Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon by Michael Adams

What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide by Jana Riess

ARTICLES, PAPERS ETC.

Bibliographic Good vs. Evil in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by GraceAnne A. DeCandido

Undead Letters: Searches and Researches in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by William Wandless

Weaponised information: The role of information and metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Jacob Ericson

Buffy, Dark Romance and Female Horror Fans by Lorna Jowett

My Vampire Boyfriend: Postfeminism, "Perfect" Masculinity, and the Contemporary Appeal of Paranormal Romance by Ananya Mukherjea

Buffy, The Vampire Slayer as Spectacular Allegory: A Diagnostic Critique by Douglas Kellner

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer": Technology, Mysticism, and the Constructed Body by Sara Raffel

When Horror Becomes Human: Living Conditions in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" by Jeroen Gerrits

Post-Vampire: The Politics of Drinking Humans and Animals in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight", and "True Blood" by Laura Wright

Cops, Teachers, and Vampire Slayers: Buffy as Street-Level Bureaucrat by Andrea E. Mayo

"Not Like Other Men"?: The Vampire Body in Joss Whedon's "Angel" by Lorna Jowett

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Domestic Church: Revisioning Family and the Common Good by Reid B. Locklin

“Buffy vs. Dracula”’s Use of Count Famous (Not drawing “crazy conclusions about the unholy prince”) by Tara Elliott

A Little Less Ritual and a Little More Fun: The Modern Vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Stacey Abbott

Undressing the Vampire: An Investigation of the Fashion of Sunnydale’s Vampires by Robbie Dale

"And Yet": The Limits of Buffy Feminism by Renee St. Louis & Miriam Riggs

Meet the Cullens: Family, Romance and Female Agency in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight by Kirsten Stevens

Bliss and Time: Death, Drugs, and Posthumanism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Rob Cover

That Girl: Bella, Buffy, and the Feminist Ethics of Choice in Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Catherine Coker

A Slayer Comes to Town: An Essay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Scott Westerfeld

Undead Objects of a “Queer Gaze” : A Visual Approach to Buffy’s Vampires Using Lacan’s Extended RSI Model by Marcus Recht

When You Kiss Me, I Want to Die: Gothic Relationships and Identity on Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Ananya Mukherjeea

Necrophilia and SM: The Deviant Side of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Terry L. Spaise

Queering the Bitch: Spike, Transgression and Erotic Empowerment by Dee Amy-Chinn

“I Want To Be A Macho Man”: Examining Rape Culture, Adolescent Female Sexuality, and the Destabilization of Gender Binaries in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Angelica De Vido

Staking Her Claim: Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Transgressive Woman Warrior by Frances H. Early

Actualizing Abjection: Drusilla, the Whedonversees’ Queen of Queerness by Anthony Stepniak

“Life Isn’t A Story”: Xander, Andrew and Queer Disavowal in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Steven Greenwood

S/He’s a Rebel: The James Dean Trope in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Kathryn Hill

“Once More, with Feeling”: Emotional Self-Discipline in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Gwynnee Kennedy and Jennifer Dworshack-Kinter

“The Hardest Thing in This World Is To Live In It”: Identity and Mental Health in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Alex Fixler

"Love's Bitch But Man Enough to Admit It": Spikes Hybridized Gender by Arwen Spicer

Negotiations After Hegemony: Buffy and Gender by Franklin D. Worrell

Double Trouble: Gothic Shadows and Self-Discovery in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Elizabeth Gilliland

'What If I'm Still There? What If I Never Left That Clinic?': Faërian Drama in Buffy's "Normal Again" by Janet Brennan Croft

Not Gay Enough So You’d Notice: Poaching Fuffy by Jennifer DeRoss

Throwing Like A Slayer: A Phenomenology of Gender Hybridity and Female Resilience in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Debra Jackson

“You Can’t Charge Innocent People for Saving Their Lives!” Work in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Matt Davies

Ambiguity and Sexuality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: A Sartrean Analysis by Vivien Burr

Imagining the Family: Representations of Alternative Lifestyles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Vivien Burr and Christine Jarvis

Working-Class Hero? Fighting Neoliberal Precarity in Buffy’s Sixth Season by Michelle Maloney-Mangold

A Corpse by Any Other Name: Romancing the Language of the Body in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for the Adam Storyline in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Amber P. Hodge

Sensibility Gone Mad: Or, Drusilla, Buffy and the (D)evolution of the Heroine of Sensibility by Claire Knowles

"It's good to be me": Buffy's Resistance to Renaming by Janet Brennan Croft

Death as a Gift in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work and Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Gaelle Abalea

“All Torment, Trouble, Wonder, and Amazement Inhabits Here": The Vicissitudes of Technology in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by James B. South

Staking Her Colonial Claim: Colonial Discourses, Assimilation, Soul-making, and Ass-kicking in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Jessica Hautsch

“I Run To Death”: Renaissance Sensibilities in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Christine Jarvis

Dressed To Kill: Fashion and Leadership in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Christine Jarvis and Don Adams

Queer Eye Of That Vampire Guy: Spike and the Aesthetics of Camp by Cynthea Masson and Marni Stanley

“Sounds Like Kinky Business To Me”: Subtextual and Textual Representations of Erotic Power in Buffyverse by Lewis Call

“Did Anyone Ever Explain to You What ‘Secret Identity’ Means?”: Race and Displacement in Buffy and Dark Angel by Cynthia Fuchs

“It’s About Power”: Buffy, Foucault, and the Quest for Self by Julie Sloan Brannon

Why We Love the Monsters: How Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Wound Up Dating the Enemy by Hilary M. Leon

Why We Can’t Spike Spike?: Moral Themes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Richard Greene and Wayne Yuen

Buffy, the Scooby Gang, and Monstrous Authority: BtVS and the Subversion of Authority by Daniel A. Clark & P. Andrew Miller

Are Vampires Evil?: Categorizations of Vampires, and Angelus and Spike as the Immoral and the Amoral by Gert Magnusson

BOOKS ABOUT VAMPIRE LORE AND MYTH IN GENERAL

The Vampire Lectures by Laurence A. Rickels

Our Vampires, Ourselves by Nina Auerbach

Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber

The Secret History of Vampires: Their Multiple Forms and Hidden Purposes by Claude Lecouteux

The Vampire Cinema by David Pirie

The Living and the Undead: Slaying Vampires, Exterminating Zombies by Gregory A. Waller

Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origins of an Enduring Legend by Mark Jenkins

Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead by Bruce A. McClelland

The History and Folklore of Vampires: The Stories and Legends Behind the Mythical Beings by Charles River Editors

Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology by Theresa Bane

Vampires of Lore: Traits and Modern Misconceptions by A. P. Sylvia

The Vampire: A New History by Nick Groom

Vampyres: Genesis and Resurrection: from Count Dracula to Vampirella by Christopher Frayling

Race in the Vampire Narrative by U. Melissa Anyiwo

Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods by Dale Hudson

#btvs #buffy #buffy the vampire slayer #💾#buffy summers #ats #angel the series

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nansheonearth · 3 months

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(if you prefer, you can listen to the article by clicking the link. it is 4:13 long)

Inside the ‘high-conflict’ parenting class some Mass. judges require for separated couples

Jenifer B. McKim

January 17, 2024

Updated January 17, 2024

Melissa was filled with dread in early 2022 when ordered by a Massachusetts family court judge to take a parenting class with the estranged father of her child.

She had no desire to participate in sessions with the man she says abused her and her elementary school–aged child.

But fearing losing custody, Melissa — who asked us not to use her last name — agreed to pay $900 to take a remote course titled “High-conflict Parent Education” from William James College in Newton.

“I left my abuser, and I expected protection,’’ Melissa told GBH News recently. Instead, she said, “I have been court-ordered to be back in a relationship with him.”

What followed were nine weeks of 3-hour classes. The “high-conflict” parenting course involved homework assignments where parents were asked to find "positive traits" about each other, consider ways not to irritate one another, and phone calls to discuss common goals.

Supporters of the class — estimated to have been taken by some 600 parents over the last decade — say it is meant to protect children from the debilitating “toxic stress” caused by living between battling parents. But critics say the course is causing unneeded trauma, especially for victims of domestic violence.

The debate comes amid a broader discussion about how to improve court-order classes for separated parents — and, in some circles, whether there is any benefit at all. For years, divorcing parents in Massachusetts were required to take a shorter, less expensive parenting course — one of 17 states to do so. But the requirement has been suspended since 2021 over questions about the classes’ consistency and effectiveness.

Melissa is one of a handful of women who talked to GBH News about their concerns with the more intensive class for “high-conflict” parents. It's the only known such program in the state, distinctive because of its cost, length and requirement that "high-conflict" parents take the class together. All of the women say they were too frightened of repercussions to their fragile families to speak on the record. They describe the class as, “shaming,” “cult-like” and “creepy.”

Several women told GBH News they felt unsafe in the class, even when held remotely during the pandemic, sometimes forced to be in unmonitored breakout sessions with their estranged partners.

One woman from Middlesex County told GBH News said she was horrified her case’s judge ordered her to take the class. “I was very sickened that I would have to attend such an intimate class with my ex-husband, who is a very abusive man,’’ she said.

She took the class, but said it felt like a cult. “They would literally call you out, right in front of everybody and say, ‘You’re doing it wrong, you’re damaging your child. You do it our way,’” she said.

Another woman sent GBH News an essay she wrote about the experience — written to express her frustration. In it, she said, “I was instructed to write down the ways that I trigger my abuser's anger and what I can do different in the future, so my children would enjoy better academic and emotional outcomes. I was tempted to write down, ‘breathing.’”

Now a Boston College law lab is circulating a “white paper” that substantiates some of the women’s concerns. The authors say the “high-conflict” course is not regulated by the state, can take months to complete, and, “most worryingly,” forces some parents who’ve suffered domestic abuse to take classes at the same time.

“Parents ordered to take the class have legitimate worry,’’ the paper concludes. If the state suspended a parenting class out of concerns about “compliance with certification criteria,” the report questions, how can a class not regulated by the state be allowed to continue, and parents ordered by judges to participate?

Claire Donohue, an assistant clinical professor at Boston College Law School and lead author of the report, says she launched the inquiry at the behest of two former participants, one of whom was Melissa. Researchers asked for information from William James about the program, she said, but never received any documentation or response.

Donohue hopes that the report will fuel a conversation about the program and a wider debate about court-ordered parenting classes in Massachusetts.

“It feels a little weird. It’s like being sent to the school of good parenting,’’ Donohue said. “Who’s to say just because my marriage falls apart ... now all of sudden I have to open myself to the advice and the opinions of absolute strangers?”

Court officials declined to comment specifically about the Boston College report. In an email response to questions last year, court officials said the court does “not regulate or oversee” the William James course and directed a GBH News reporter to reach out to the college with further questions.

“The Probate and Family Court is aware of concerns from some [participants] and lawyers related to high conflict parenting courses,” the statement said. “The general focus of most parenting courses is to educate parents on the harm that can occur to children when exposed to parental conflict and how to co-parent.”

In July 2021, John Casey, chief justice of the Probate and Family Court, suspended the mandatory class for all divorcing parents after determining that the class could not prove its effectiveness and individual providers "failed to adhere" to reporting guidelines. The chief justice's decision followed an article published in Boston Magazine titled, “Is Massachusetts shaming divorced parents?” — a story Casey pointed to while explaining his decision.

Court officials told GBH News that they are working to re-launch the state-required program with an “updated, evidence-based” curriculum. State guidelines from 2010 mandate the program runs for at least two sessions totaling at least five hours at a cost of no more than $80 per parent, with the possibility of a fee waiver. Spouses were required to attend different sessions.

Court officials originally planned to start a new course in the fall, but delayed the launch after concerns from some legal service attorneys. The new course will apply to “married and unmarried parents where there are contested issues of custody and parenting time,” court officials told GBH News earlier in January.

Jamie Sabino, attorney with the Boston-based Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, told GBH News that a group of lawyers had raised issues with the new program, partly concerned that victims of domestic violence would feel they needed to attend courses, even separately. However, she said court officials are working to address those concerns, providing clearer notice to victims they can ask for a waiver.

Sabino says she's much more concerned about problems with the William James course.

“I’ve heard many reports of people, where there’s domestic violence, where there have been restraining orders — and they’re cooking dinner for the other side and being told they have to say nice things about their partner,” she said. “Our clients are trying to figure out how they can parent on their own after the trauma of the relationship and the divorce. And this is extremely traumatic.”

Jenifer McKim GBH News

William James officials defended the program in several emails to GBH News over the last year.

Kelly Casey, managing director of the college's Department of Forensic & Clinical Services, wrote in an email earlier this month that the course is based on a “successful” Kids First Center in Maine and was designed by experienced behavioral health practitioners.

“Research finds that children in high conflict home environments show the significant effects of psychological stress,” she wrote. “Over many years, the Courts and participants have seen great value in the program and continue to recommend it to parents and their coordinators.”

In another email last year, Jessica Greenwald O'Brien, then-director of the school’s Center of Excellence for Children, Families and the Law, wrote that people who have active restraining orders can ask a judge to pull them out of the class — but the judge has final say. In general, college officials don’t accept parents who have experienced “violence within the six months prior to intake,” she wrote.

“We are attempting to move coparents to a point where they can have basic, civil, information-based communications on their own regarding their children,” said O’Brien, who has since left the college for another job.

Melissa says she was required to take the class amid continuing conflicts with the father of her child, someone she never married and had been with for less than two years before their separation.

She felt obligated to comply or risk losing custody of her child. “You don’t really have a choice, especially when [the judge] says you can’t come back to court until you’ve passed the class,” she said.

In late December 2022, Melissa completed the course. It wasn’t until the following November she received notice that she had passed. She said even receiving the certification brought back unwanted emotions of dread and shame. Over the last year, she joined a group of women who connect online to discuss the trauma they experienced while in the class and seek ways to shine light on the problem.

“Everyone is complaining about it. Everyone is experiencing trauma. Everyone thinks it’s inappropriate,’’ she said. “This will keep going until we call them out.”

#jennifer mckim #gbh #boston #judicial #domestic violence #patriarchy #male violence #institutional misogyny #misogyny #o #radfem #women's rights #spousal abuse #feminism #npr

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binaural-histolog · 4 months

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Zotoro, Scihub, and more Cool Hypnosis Papers

CW: severe nerdery

I don't have an academic background, and while I've been poking around at hypnosis nerdery for a while, I was limited to an extent by what I could get my hands on.

This is especially important when it comes to the academic texts. There's only so many books out there on theory, and a bunch of it doesn't make sense until you go back and read the actual papers.

For example, I knew that Kirsch had something to do with placebo and expectations, but I only had a vague understanding of what and how. A paragraph critique in Theories of Hypnosis wasn't enough to give me the proper context.

Until I decided I was going to rewrite the newbie guide to explain hypnosis from a modern neuroscience perspective and then I was committed to pulling the citations and digging up the actual papers.

At first I was doing it by hand by pasting things into Scihub and downloading the PDFs. This sort of worked, but at some point there are just too many PDFs and it's work to keep them consistent.

This is where Zotero comes in. It's a PDF database that is set up to scan for academic fields and give you a UI for finding, reading and annotating the PDFs. It syncs between MacOS, Windows, and iOS and keeps the annotations and highlights. And even better, it's got plugins.

Specifically, it's got a plugin for Scihub. You can add a DOI number and it'll pull the abstract data for the paper, and then you can right click and it'll download the paper from Scihub automatically.

It doesn't cover everything. Some stuff is too new for Scihub, and I've had to fallback to https://reddit.com/r/scholar to request articles, but there's so much stuff.

In particular, you get the sense of how academic papers can be a conversation, an argument, or a lawsuit. You get to see the most brutal putdowns phrased as passing comments. And the grudges and ego can go on for decades.

There are a couple of papers that I recommend everyone read, because they're just great at summarizing the field and current thinking.

The response set theory of hypnosis reconsidered: toward an integrative model

I love this paper not just because it goes over response expectancy theory from the inception to the general whittling down from "Once expectancy effects are eliminated, there may be nothing left" to response expectancy as 25%-35% of suggestibility and the addition of a "readiness response set" to cover the rest of it... but also because despite Kirsch's hand in response set theory and response expectancies and being in a journal issue devoted to Kirsch's career and achievements, he is not an author to this paper that is reconsidering his work. Instead, he gets a hand clap.

In closing, Irving Kirsch has greatly advanced our understanding of hypnosis. The construct of expectancies that he articulated and championed for decades has well withstood the test of time and replication. We extend our personal gratitude to him for his shaping influence on our personal views of hypnosis and for his many contributions to the field of hypnosis that he so immensely enriched.

I'm not sure what I'm looking at, but I love it.

How Hypnotic Suggestions Work – A Systematic Review of Prominent Theories of Hypnosis

This is a preprint, but it's comprehensive not just in how it picks out theories of hypnosis that are more recent than the book, but also in how it pokes holes and points out weak points in the various theories. It's also recent enough to talk about fun new things like predictive coding and interoception and somatosensory feedback.

Hypnosis and top-down regulation of consciousness

Devin Terhune's papers are always good to read. His papers read like a story where every chapter builds on the last one. This one is a "synthesis of current knowledge regarding the characteristics and neurocognitive mechanisms of hypnosis" and I can't tell you how many times I've read through this paper by accident because I wanted to pick a point out of it and got sucked into it all over again.

#binauralhistolog #hypnosis #nerdery

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ghelgheli · 5 months

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17! but also using the opportunity of the ask game to get to know more about the effortless worldbuilding in sff :)

from the end-of-year book ask

17: Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

I think Three Body Problem is the only one meeting this condition this year so I'll have no trouble staying on topic :> but I'm gonna specifically talk about "hard" SF as I conceive of it—I haven't read any analysis so this may just be a jumble of improvised thoughts.

SF, being "speculative" fiction, of course has to take on the problem of speculating and of presenting things that don't (and perhaps cannot) happen. On average this is accomplished thru a healthy combination of scientific grounding and good-natured handwaving: I drop a few sentences about "quantum entanglement" and you go along with my ansible, or you tell me about "positronic circuits" and I agree that you can make a brain with them. This is the compact that makes SF work because you fundamentally cannot expect speculation without, well, ceding ground on reality.

But at least a subset of SF readers are of the kind to really want to grok how it is that this or that scientific feature of the world works or may come about. Every contraption and novel technology is like a puzzle to be riddled out. This is the place where speculation becomes sincere mechanical prediction, and it's why I love hard SF.

This subset of readers can be matched to a subgenre of writers who commit fully to filling in as many blanks in their technological, biological, etc. speculation as possible. The rows of astronomical data can't be left vague—tell me what frequency of light we're dealing with here—xenobiology isn't taken for granted—what is the neurology of your aliens??—and so on. The dots are connected, the rest of the owl is drawn for real, the image is made crisp. Like fireworks for the reader's brain.

When this kind of worldbuilding is executed well imo it looks effortless. Looks, not is, because behind every explanation of near-c travel is hours of research into at least special relativity and time dilation, along with calculations by-hand. Behind every account of an exoplanet's atmosphere is probably a few papers perused on the subject and several articles on scientific american. Peter Watts, in the note at the end of Blindsight, includes a fucking bibliography of a hundred or so references as well as thank-yous to many an academic he split handles of liquor with. And this is only the visible fragment of what has to be a library of knowledge accumulated both passively and actively to make a speculated world feel as concretely plausible as possible.

None of this is necessary for good SF. The aforementioned compact means any author can opt out of this commitment at any time. But it's what it takes to make tightly-written hard SF, where your conceptual hands are kept diligently at your side, waving an idea through maybe once every five chapters when you have no other choice.

So anyway, Three Body Problem is a tour de force in doing this and doing it cleanly. It uses a storytelling device a lot of hard SF employs to make it work: rather than stuffing dense exposition into narration (at which point, just read the source papers) it deploys a cast of characters who more than anything else, really know their shit. We get exposition trickle-fed through experts who are trying, along with us, to make sense of their novel environments and unfamiliar technologies using their knowledge of the present limits of human understanding. This is what Watts does in Blindsight too, by the way: a claustrophobic ship crewed by technical specialists makes first contact, so everyone has something encyclopedic to say about everything and it's only natural.

What astounded me about Cixin Liu's writing is that he made it work just when I least thought he would be able to. I was sure I was being shown things completely inexplicable and necessarily supernatural until he went and explained them in plain terms; better yet, he explained them in ways that made so much sense in retrospect that I was kicking myself for not seeing the answer. This has exactly the flavour of a good puzzle.

The trade-off hard SF makes is that you are often limited in the metaphorical/thematic work you can do through your speculation. I think the contrast between "calendrical science" in Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series and Asimov's "psychohistory" illustrates this well.

Yoon Ha Lee has mathematical training, and calendrical science is a speculative field consisting of theorems, conjectures, proofs, etc. in the language of mathematics that stand in for cultural hegemony and power projection. This makes for a great operationalization of soft power: space is filled and distorted by the quantifiable effects of whatever regime is dominant there (the "calendar" here being synecdoche for culture writ large). But obviously he can't fill in the blanks of how a calendar causes spacetime distortions that specifically make one side's weapons more effective, or provide certain formations with shielding effects. This is, I guess, semi-hard (lol) SF—you can see how it's supposed to work, but it's clear that it just won't. What you get in return is pretty politically interesting storytelling.

Psychohistory is the converse: a deterministic-enough lovechild of economics and sociology explained in the Foundation series as using all the familiar methods of linear algebra and differential equations together with unfamiliar innovations of just how to quantify human behaviour in order to make reliable predictions. There are entire chapters dedicated to explaining the conceptual nuance that went into developing psychohistory ("the hand on thigh principle" from prelude to foundation is just about how the theory resolves divergence by reducing insignificant terms to zero) and an entire book to exploring one of its limitations. It's fascinating to read. But you also get little narrative depth out of it, because hard SF, even when done well, is not guaranteed to make a story thematically interesting or politically compelling. This is the Three Body Problem problem too: its political commitments are threadbare and unserious because that's just not what it's about. I couldn't recommend it on those terms, but that's not what I like so much about it. I will say the conceptualization goes a little off the rails in the final chapters, but I think most SF authors were in some kind of string theory inspired fugue state at the time.

What I would love to see (and I'm sure exists) is hard SF that also has interesting politics. Unfortunately that's an intersection of two already-narrow intersections.

ty for ask✨🐐

#ask answer #idk if that's what u were asking about but. well.#got some sleepy thoughts out #also this is not to say that there isn't tons of research in “soft” SF #it's just that it would be a different kind of research and a different library of knowledge

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trans-cuchulainn · 6 days

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unfortunately i think my discovery of a 17th century reference to an 18th century story might actually be significant for the relative dating of them both and. sigh. I really don't want to have to do actual academic work about this but SOMEBODY'S gotta

the thing is. this edition was done in 2008 but it's an unpublished thesis. it doesn't reference that story at all. the most recent thing written about that story was published in 2009, by somebody who did know about this thesis (he's mentioned in several footnotes) but who didn't cite it in that article and who wasn't really focused on the aspect of the story that corresponds with this other text. so. essentially the scholarship on these two texts has not yet overlapped

which means i might be the only person to have noticed that it is very specifically referencing events that only happen in that story

and either this editor fucked up and got the manuscript date wrong by a century... or i'm about to fuck everybody's established dating of that other story. woohoo. which means fucking the dating of another story also since it's been demonstrated they're by the same author. lol whoops.

the GOOD news though is that this text is also written in ulster, like that one, so it is clearly a northern tradition they're drawing on (and arguably could be a ref to some local oral tales that hadn't been written yet so the story could be later even if this is referencing its contents)

#néide vs academia #kinda #need to put this somewhere i can find it at not 2.15am

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zaobitouguang · 1 year

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Chinese Ethnic Minority Literature

I just finished taking an incredibly eye-opening class about Chinese ethnic minority literature. China has a thriving minority literature scene, and it's absolutely fascinating and full of interesting works, so I wanted to share some of the authors that I learned about this semester! This is, obviously, an incomplete list-- it's pretty heavily biased towards what we read about in class, and there's probably a lot I've missed!

For any authors with full works that have been translated into English, I've listed it under their names. Some other authors may also have poems or short stories published in translation online or in anthologies.

Hani 哈尼

Mo Du 莫獨 (b. 1963) - poems

Hui 回族

Huo Da 霍達 (b. 1945) - novels

The Jade King: History of a Chinese Muslim Family (1992)

Zhang Chengzhi 張承志 (b. 1948) -novels, short stories

The Black Steed (1990)

Korean 朝鮮族

Jin Renshun 金仁順 (b. 1970) - novels, short stories

Jin Wenxue 金文學 (b. 1962) - novels

Manchu 滿族

Duanmu Hongliang 端木蕻良 (1912-1996)

Lao She 老舍 (1899-1966) - novels, short stories, plays

Rickshaw Boy (1945, 2010)

Miao (Hmong) 苗族

He Xiaozhu 何小竹 (b. 1963) - poems, novels

Shen Congwen* 沈從文 (1902-1988) - novels, short stories

Imperfect Paradise (1995)

Border Town (2009)

Mongolian 蒙古族

Altai 阿爾泰 (b. 1949) - poems

Bao Liying 包麗英 (b. 1968) - novels

Baoyinhexige 寶音賀希格 - poems

Chen Ganglong 陳崗龍 (b. 1970) - poems

Guo Xuebo 郭雪波 (b. 1948) - novels, short stories

The Desert Wolf (1996)

Malaqinfu 瑪拉沁夫 (b. 1930)- novels

Naxi 納西族

Sha Li 沙蠡 (1953-2008) - novels

Yang Zhengwen 楊正文 (b. 1943) - novels

Qiang 羌族

Qiang Renliu 羌人六 (b. 1987) - poems

Yangzi/Yang Guoqing 羊子/楊國慶 - poems

Tibetan 藏族

Alai 阿來 (b. 1959) - novels, short stories

Red Poppies (2003)

The Song of King Gesar (2013)

Tashi Dawa 扎西達娃 (b. 1959) - novels, short stories

A Soul in Bondage: Stories from Tibet (1992)

Yangdron 央珍 (b. 1963) - novels

Uyghur 維吾爾族

Alat Asem 阿拉提·阿斯木 (b. 1958) - novels, short stories

Confessions of a Jade Lord (2019)

Wa/Va 佤族

Burao Yilu 布饒依露 - poems

Yi 彝族

Aku Wuwu 阿庫烏霧 (b. 1964) - poems, essays

Tiger Traces: Selected Nuosu and Chinese Poetry of Aku Wuwu (2006)

Coyote Traces: Aku Wuwu's Poetic Sojourn in America (2015)

Bamo Qubumo 巴莫曲佈嫫 (b. 1964) - poems, academic articles

Eni Mushasijia 俄尼·牧莎斯加 (b. 1970) - poems

Jidi Majia 吉狄馬加 (b. 1961) - poems

I, Snow Leopard (2016)

Words from the Fire: Poems by Jidi Majia (2018)

Jimu Langge 吉木狼格 (b. 1963) - poems

Lu Juan 魯娟 (b. 1982) - poems

Ma Deqing 馬德清 (1952-2013) - poems, novels

Na Zhangyuan 納張元 (b. 1966) - essays

*Shen has both Miao and Tujia ancestry, as well as Han. However, I see him listed most frequently as Miao.

More Resources on Ethnic Minority Literature:

Altaic Storytelling: The blog of translator Bruce Humes (translator of Confessions of a Jade Lord, among other works). Has a fairly broad focus, but he's written a lot about ethnic minorities.

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Ethnic Literature: China has a thriving infrastructure to support the writing of and research into ethnic minority literature, and this is one of the larger institutions. I believe their research focuses more on oral traditions, but they have some information about contemporary writers as well.

Chinese Women Writers on the Environment: An anthology of eco-fiction by female ethnic minority writers.

Golden Horse Award 駿馬獎: This is an annual award for ethnic minority literature. The wikipedia link lists all the previous winners.

The Leeds Center for New Chinese Writing: Again not specific to ethnic minorities, but features several ethnic minority authors.

Paper Republic: This organization is devoted to translated Chinese writing and isn't specific to ethnic minority literature but has information about and translations of some of the writers on this list.

Poetry International: This website isn't specific to ethnic minorities or even to China, but many of the poets on this list have pages there with a few poems translated into English.

#chinese #mandarin chinese #langblr #studyblr #books #my posts #literature #ooh boy this is a long one!#i'll reblog a version with my own commentary in a few

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lesbiancassius · 1 month

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@lesbiancassius' (very late) february reads

yes I will do this monthly now.

books (as it turns out, I was busy. one book)

Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad - An actor, Sonia, returns to visit her sister Haneen in Haifa and gets caught up in playing Gertrude in a Hamlet production in the West Bank. Stellar.

short fiction & poetry

Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole, Isabel J. Kim - obsessed with this on title alone. It has such a feel to it in the way it moves that I envy.

Parthenogenesis, Piya Patel - horror that makes me want to peel out of my skin and/or get a hysterectomy.

Eschatology, Eve L. Ewing - poem that was circulating recently and God. Fuck, dude. Yeah. Yeah.

Ouroboros, Megan Xing - The to-do lists in this got me because I was having my little freak out before my show went up where you think you can fix everything with to-do lists. Also heavily feeling replacing ineffective psych meds with yogurt, a pickle, and two advil.

I also read Cancer Buffet by Mary Hannah Terzino and Soft Opening by Elle Nash, but I was tired and don’t remember them.

(some) articles

Who Was Barbie? (A Symposium), n+1 magazine - this cemented to me that I truly, truly do not care about Barbie or the Barbie movie and if I have to hear anything about it ever again I'm smashing a bowl on purpose

A bunch of Hera Lindsay Bird’s advice column, which is delightful.

Let’s talk about Goodreads, Nicole Brinkley. There are many days I am glad I do not want to pursue a career as solely an author of novels. Godspeed to the authors out there you're braver than I will ever be.

Saving a Life, Patricia Lockwood - my god I have got to read a Patricia Lockwood book, and also my god getting grievously ill on vacation is one of my greatest fears so this one made me a little bit crazy.

The Secret Life: On the poet Molly Brodak, Patricia Lockwood - again, my god, I need to read a Patricia Lockwood book.

A Final Checklist Before You Print up Your Play, Rick Roberts - this reminded me so much of Joshua McGuire’s Rules For Writing Libretto, which I think of a lot.

“I think the word is dignity” — Rachel Corrie’s Letters from Gaza — I don’t know what to say. Read these if you can. They’re striking.

The Sexual Status of Aeschylus’ Cassandra, Paula Debnar - I can put an academic paper here you're not the boss of me. why I opened this one I don't remember but I was fervently texting friends in the middle of a certainly unrelated class about it because I've never been normal about Kassandra and Klytemnestra and I'm not going to start now.

tv/movies

Rewatching Severance, slowly.

Rewatching Sort Of, less slowly - this is probably niche to non-Canadian readers but it is a very good show.

Watched The Prince, which was a long time coming, and then wrote a paper about it. Bless.

tbr/nightstand

in the midst of Salvage the Bones, which is of course very good

Helen of Troy: from Homer to Hollywood

I'm gonna be rereading like every play off my Shakespeare class syllabus for the final which I wish I was more excited about

#june reads #june.txt #sorry for posting this more than 2/3 through march at 4am. except i'm not <3

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mariacallous · 23 days

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Whether you're a student, a journalist, or a business professional, knowing how to do high-quality research and writing using trustworthy data and sources, without giving in to the temptation of AI or ChatGPT, is a skill worth developing.

As I detail in my book Writing That Gets Noticed, locating credible databases and sources and accurately vetting information can be the difference between turning a story around quickly or getting stuck with outdated information.

For example, several years ago the editor of Parents.com asked for a hot-take reaction to country singer Carrie Underwood saying that, because she was 35, she had missed her chance at having another baby. Since I had written about getting pregnant in my forties, I knew that as long as I updated my facts and figures, and included supportive and relevant peer-reviewed research, I could pull off this story. And I did.

The story ran later that day, and it led to other assignments. Here are some tips I’ve learned that you should consider mastering before you turn to automated tools like generative AI to handle your writing work for you.

Find Statistics From Primary Sources

Identify experts, peer-reviewed research study authors, and sources who can speak with authority—and ideally, offer easily understood sound bites or statistics on the topic of your work. Great sources include professors at major universities and media spokespeople at associations and organizations.

For example, writer and author William Dameron pinned his recent essay in HuffPost Personal around a statistic from the American Heart Association on how LGBTQ people experience higher rates of heart disease based on discrimination. Although he first found the link in a secondary source (an article in The New York Times), he made sure that he checked the primary source: the original study that the American Heart Association gleaned the statistic from. He verified the information, as should any writer, because anytime a statistic is cited in a secondary source, errors can be introduced.

Dive Into Databases

Jen Malia, author of The Infinity Rainbow Club series of children’s books (whom I recently interviewed on my podcast), recently wrote a piece about dinosaur-bone hunting for Business Insider, which she covers in her book Violet and the Jurassic Land Exhibit.

After a visit to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Malia, whose books are set in Philadelphia, found multiple resources online and on the museum site that gave her the history of the Bone Wars, information on the exhibits she saw, and the scientific names of the dinosaurs she was inspired by. She also used the Library of Congress’ website, which offers digital collections and links to the Library of Congress Newspaper Collection.

Malia is a fan of searching for additional resources and citable documents with Google Scholar. “If I find that a secondary source mentions a newspaper article, I’m going to go to the original newspaper article, instead of just stopping there and quoting,” she says.

Your local public library is a great source of free information, journals, and databases (even ones that generally require a subscription and include embargoed research). For example, your search should include everything from health databases (Sage Journals, Scopus, PubMed) to databases for academic sources and journalism (American Periodical Series Online, Statista, Academic Search Premier) and databases for news, trends, market research, and polls (the Harris Poll, Pew Research Center, Newsbank, ProPublica).

Even if you find a study or paper that you can’t access in one of those databases, consider reaching out to the study’s lead author or researcher. In many cases, they’re happy to discuss their work and may even share the study with you directly and offer to talk about their research.

Get a Good Filtering System

For journalist Paulette Perhach’s article on ADHD in The New York Times, she used Epic Research to see “dual team studies.” That's when two independent teams address the same topic or question, and ideally come to the same conclusions. She recommends locating research and experts via key associations for your topic. She also likes searching via Google Scholar but advises filtering it for studies and research in recent years to avoid using old data. She suggests keeping your links and research organized. “Always be ready to be peer-reviewed yourself,” Perhach says.

When you are looking for information for a story or project, you might be inclined to start with a regular Google search. But keep in mind that the internet is full of false information, and websites that look trustworthy can sometimes turn out to be businesses or companies with a vested interest in you taking their word as objective fact without additional scrutiny. Regardless of your writing project, unreliable or biased sources are a great way to torpedo your work—and any hope of future work.

For Accuracy, Go to the Government

Author Bobbi Rebell researched her book Launching Financial Grownups using the IRS’ website. “I might say that you can contribute a certain amount to a 401K, but it might be outdated because those numbers are always changing, and it’s important to be accurate,” she says. “AI and ChatGPT can be great for idea generation,” says Rebell, “but you have to be careful. If you are using an article someone was quoted in, you don’t know if they were misquoted or quoted out of context.”

If you use AI and ChatGPT for sourcing, you not only risk introducing errors, you risk introducing plagiarism—there is a reason OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is being sued for downloading information from all those books.

Historically, the Loudest Isn’t the Best

Audrey Clare Farley, who writes historical nonfiction, has used a plethora of sites for historical research, including Women Also Know History, which allows searches by expertise or area of study, and JSTOR, a digital library database that offers a number of free downloads a month. She also uses Chronicling America, a project from the Library of Congress which gathers old newspapers to show how a historical event was reported, and Newspapers.com (which you can access via free trial but requires a subscription after seven days).

When it comes to finding experts, Farley cautions against choosing the loudest voices on social media platforms. “They might not necessarily be the most authoritative. I vet them by checking if they have a history of publication on the topic, and/or educational credentials.”

When vetting an expert, look for these red flags:

You can’t find their work published or cited anywhere.

They were published in an obscure journal.

Their research is funded by a company, not a university, or they are the spokesperson for the company they are doing research for. (This makes them a public relations vehicle and not an appropriate source for journalism.)

And finally, the best endings for virtually any writing, whether it’s an essay, a research paper, an academic report, or a piece of investigative journalism, circle back to the beginning of the piece, and show your reader the transformation or the journey the piece has presented in perspective.

As always, your goal should be strong writing supported by research that makes an impact without cutting corners. Only then can you explore tools that might make the job a little easier, for instance by generating subheads or discovering a concept you might be missing—because then you'll have the experience and skills to see whether it's harming or helping your work.

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 4 months

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By: Aaron Sibarium

Published: Dec 11, 2023

Harvard University president Claudine Gay plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work, according to reviews by several scholars.

In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.

The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that "it's not enough to change a few words here and there."

Rather, scholars are expected to cite the sources of their work, including when paraphrasing, and to use quotation marks when quoting directly from others. But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences—even entire paragraphs—with just a word or two tweaked.

In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their "decrease" to "increase" because she was studying a different set of data.

The four papers that include plagiarized material comprise a sizable portion of Gay’s academic work. Gay, who is Harvard's 30th president, has authored just 11 peer-reviewed articles.

"If this were a stand-alone instance, it would be reprehensible but perhaps excused as the blunder of someone working hastily," said Peter Wood, a former associate provost of Boston University, where he helped investigate several cases of suspected plagiarism. "But that excuse vanishes as the examples multiply," said Wood, who now serves as the director of the National Association of Scholars.

Some of the most clear-cut cases come in Gay’s 1997 dissertation, "Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics," which copied two paragraphs almost verbatim from Palmquist and Voss.

The paragraphs—from a paper Palmquist and Voss had presented a year earlier, in 1996—do not appear in quotation marks. One is unmodified but for a handful of words, and Gay does not cite Palmquist or Voss anywhere in her dissertation.

"This is definitely plagiarism," said Lee Jussim, a social psychologist at Rutgers University, who reviewed 10 side-by-side comparisons provided by the Free Beacon, including the paragraphs from Gay’s dissertation, which received a prize from Harvard for "exceptional merit."

"The longer passages are the most egregious," he added.

Academics say the pattern raises serious questions about Gay’s scholarly integrity and her fitness to lead the nation’s oldest university, which has been at the center of a political firestorm under her watch, particularly since Oct. 7. Student activists have blamed Israel for the Hamas terrorist attack and Gay herself offered equivocal testimony before Congress about whether calls for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s code of conduct.

Donors, alumni, and over 70 congressmen have called on Gay to resign. University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, who testified alongside Gay, tendered her resignation on Saturday.

"The question here is whether the president of an elite institution such as Harvard can feasibly have an academic record this marred by obvious plagiarism," said Alexander Riley, a sociologist at Bucknell University. "I do not see how Harvard could possibly justify keeping her in that position in light of this evidence."

Neither Gay nor Harvard responded to a request for comment.

Other cases of near-verbatim quotation occur in two peer-reviewed journal articles from 2017 and 2012, when Gay was a tenured professor at Harvard, as well as in an essay she published one year out of college, in 1993. Along with her dissertation, the decades-long pattern paints a picture of sloppiness, at best, and willful dishonesty at worst.

"It seems clear that Gay had a habit of using others' words in ways that violated Harvard's policies," a professor at a top research university, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard’s government department, told the Free Beacon. "And several examples would land any student in serious trouble."

Gay’s 1993 essay, "Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations," lifts sentences and historical details from two scholars, David Covin and George Reid Andrews, with just a few words dropped or modified. Covin is not cited anywhere in the essay.

In a section called "Suggestions for Further Reading," Gay does include Andrews’s 1991 book, Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988, but not his 1992 paper, "Black Political Protest in São Paulo, 1888-1988," from which the offending text was drawn.

The 1993 essay "concerns me less," Riley said, given how early it was in Gay’s career. "However, it shows a quantity of plagiarism so egregious that minimally Dr. Gay should stop putting it on her CV."

The two peer-reviewed papers, by contrast, are "much more serious," Riley said.

In "Moving To Opportunity: the Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment," Gay borrowed language from a 2003 report by eight researchers—three of them Harvard economists—prepared for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

And in "A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing," Gay borrowed language from a 2010 book by Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, and from a 2011 paper by Matthew Freedman and Emily Owens, "Low-Income Housing Development and Urban Crime."

Freedman and Owens are never cited, though Gay thanks them for letting her use their data. Gay does cite Schwartz and the eight researchers elsewhere in "Moving to Opportunity" but not in the sentences where their quotes appear. None of the passages have quotation marks, creating the impression that they are Gay’s own language and ideas.

Some examples are more borderline than others, scholars who reviewed them said, but clearly violate Harvard’s guide on sourcing, which requires citations even when using "ideas that you did not think up yourself," regardless of how much the language has changed. Plagiarism, the guide adds, is "unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident."

Even crediting a source in the wrong sentence, as Gay did repeatedly, is a serious offense under Harvard’s policies. The school’s sourcing guide includes multiple examples of "mosaic plagiarism," in which placing a citation too late or too early in a passage causes "confusion over where your source's ideas end and your own ideas begin."

Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that several portions of Gay’s work met the definition of "mosaic plagiarism" outlined in Harvard’s guide. So did Steve McGuire, a member of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and a former professor of political theory at Villanova University, who said the examples "violate the expectations Harvard has for its own students."

"As a professor, I would not have accepted this kind of work from a first semester freshman," McGuire told the Free Beacon. "It’s appalling to see it in the work of Harvard’s president."

Rossman, who specializes in quantitative research, noted that some of the examples involve technical descriptions of statistical methods, which "can require very precise wording" and are often repeated between authors, a potentially mitigating factor. But an editor at one of the five most-cited academic journals in the world pushed back on that notion, arguing that even that sort of duplication in academic prose is difficult to defend.

"The text duplication points to carelessness, sloppiness, and short-cut taking," said the editor, who has edited journals in both the natural and social sciences.

Some of the victims of Gay’s plagiarism were more sanguine. Jeffrey Liebman, one of the Harvard economists who prepared the Department of Housing report, said he and four of his coauthors did "not see any signs of plagiarism." Like Rossman, he argued that it was defensible for scholars to crib technical descriptions from each other.

Gay "had the right to use and adapt this common language," he said.

Voss, who coauthored the 1996 paper with Palmquist, said that although the paragraphs Gay quoted were "technically plagiarism," they were "not terribly important" to her argument.

"If I caught a student doing that, I would tell them it was inappropriate," Voss said. "But I would never consider taking action against the student."

But Wood, the former Boston University associate provost, said the feelings of the plagiarized are irrelevant.

The "willingness of the actual author to go along with the copying (whether before the fact or afterwards) doesn't change the deceptive nature of the act of plagiarism," he said. "The plagiarist is breaking the trust of the community of readers. In the case of scholarship, the whole university community is the victim."

It is common for plagiarized authors to come to the defense of their plagiarizer, Wood said. When Princeton historian Kevin Kruse was accused of plagiarizing Ronald Bayor, a historian at Georgia Tech, for example, Bayor dismissed the accusations as "politically motivated."

Other cases of possible plagiarism—all from Gay’s dissertation—were uncovered Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Rufo and Karlstack’s Brunet. Though the revelations are new, rumors of Gay’s plagiarism have been circulating on econjobrumors.com, a popular message board for social scientists, since at least January 2023.

"Most plagiarists turn out to be serial thieves," Wood said. "If the offense is discovered in one publication, typically it will be found in others."

In a statement to the Boston Globe, Gay said she stood by the integrity of her scholarship.

The Harvard Corporation, which held an emergency meeting over the weekend after Gay’s disastrous testimony on Capitol Hill last week, did not respond to a request for comment.

Update 10:10 p.m.: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Gay had not cited Alex Schwartz in the paragraph where his quote appears. She did cite him in that paragraph, but not in the sentence where she quoted him.

This is what happens when you hire for DEI, not merit.

In spite of all of this, Claudine Gay should not be fired for plagiarism, any more than Kendi should be rejected for his financial mismanagement. Because this misses the point.

Harvard's own paper, The Harvard Crimson, reports that over 700 staff and faculty are in support of her remaining on. They cite "university independence." Which should reasonably be taken as an agreement to no longer accept public funding, even though that level of integrity is not what they meant.

What the 700 supporters does indicate is how far and how extensively the ideological corruption has set in. That's the reason she should be dismissed. She should be let go because Harvard has decided to abandon intersectional DEI garbage as its primary telos, and to reclaim its academic integrity and rebuild its - perhaps irreparably - damaged reputation.

The problem is that, unsurprisingly, its council have officially chosen the intersectional DEI garbage over any pretence to integrity.

#Claudine Gay #Harvard University #Claudine Gay is corrupt #academic corruption #plagiarism #eradicate DEI #diversity equity and inclusion #diversity hire #diversity #equity #inclusion #DEI bureaucracy #unethical #ethics violations

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germiyahu · 2 months

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Can I see the paper you mentioned about the supposed racism that idf is racist for not touching Palestinian women l. Not that I don’t believe you I just need to see it for myself

I can’t find the paper itself, but several blog posts and articles and websites mention such a paper. It’s an argument made by a doctoral candidate, Tal Nitzan. Some of the arguments made by that paper are discussed in the website linked, but the author admits that he nor the person he talked to could find the paper, even though it had been published.

There’s also an Intifada II era article by Ronit Lentin that does talk about historical sexual violence committed by Israeli troops (but feels no need to mention sexual violence historically committed by Arab troops interestingly). In it she cites Suheir Aszzouni Mahshi, who wrote in 1995 about two Palestinian women she knew who were assaulted in prison.

Her complaint was that the guards used sticks because (by her assessment) the Palestinian women “were not worthy to be touched.” So not only is that source anecdotal, but her conclusions are based on her own intuition and not rigorously conducted academic research. But her conclusion fits this pattern of trying to racially politicize a lack of penile rape. For instance, she doesn't consider that perhaps these guards knew that should they be caught, using a stick instead of their penises might incur a lesser punishment? I don't know anything about Israeli laws, but "they're so racist omg" is not the first conclusion I would come to?

Ronit Lentin's paper however does assert that Israeli soldiers have committed sexual violence in the past, and that there's an aversion to discussing that today. That's still true. We know this is true. Jewish and Arab armies used sexual violence or the threat thereof as a weapon during the war.

The reason the IDF today doesn't really rape anyone is not because Palestinian women are too icky to inflict that kind of violence on (historically that's not the case). It's also not that they're more moral, but because they're more well trained. They're a professional citizen army. They're answerable to the politicians who are answerable to the electorate, but they also are the electorate. The IDF is structured so that a soldier who engages in misconduct can be held accountable.

To call the absence of a certain abuse proof of an underlying abusive motivation is bizarre, and not really how evidence is treated in the West, so granted. But these ideas are not fringe per se. I know many pro Palestinian voices know about them, because they invert them to use against Jews. That's why they specifically target Mia Schem, claim she's offended that the man holding her wouldn't assault her.

If you read/listen to her testimony, she was afraid that he would! But that is used against her too, wow how dare she assume the Brown man (who is probably the same skin tone as her lol) would ever be a sexual threat! White woman tears! This is just like Emmitt Till!

The entire reason they invert claims like this is because they know the original claim is absurd, that Jewish men are racist for not raping Arab women. So they repackage it as something they want you to believe Jews are saying instead, so that you can bask in the absurdity of the lie of Zionist Victimhood. And for some of them, I'm willing to bet they secretly wish they could assault girls like Mia Schem.

Because to say Jewish women are lying about being raped but also have some kind of fixation with being raped, are offended they weren't raped... you know "it didn't happen but the bitch wanted it/deserved it" type talk... the men claiming this want to rape Jewish women. It's obvious. And the women claiming this want to watch men rape Jewish women.

They're rapists but for lack of opportunity. And I'm comfortable claiming that.

#rape tw #antisemitism

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eretzyisrael · 8 months

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By TAMMI ROSSMAN-BENJAMIN

In March 1941, Nazi theorist and ideologue Alfred Rosenberg launched the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. Its inaugural conference, “Research in the Struggle against World Jewry,” featured talks by many scholars, including the Institute’s director, historian Wilhelm Grau, who concluded that the only viable solution to the Jewish question was for the Jews to disappear.

Rosenberg’s Institute was one of several established to support the Third Reich’s efforts to provide an empirical basis for their anti-Jewish policies. To that end, the scholars affiliated with these institutes endeavored to put in place a new interdisciplinary field of study that would draw on various academic disciplines to promulgate antisemitic scholarship about the Jews.

According to Alan Steinweis’ book, “Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany,” this new brand of scholarship, which he dubs “Nazi Jewish Studies,” demonstrates its practitioners’ “cynical manipulation of scientific knowledge, historical events, religious texts, and statistical data” in the service of “justifying the disenfranchisement, expropriation, and removal of Jews from German society.”

Fast forward to August 2023.

Two academic leaders of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) – San Francisco State University Professor Rabab Abdulhadi and University of Massachusetts Boston Professor Heike Schotten - co-authored an article explaining why they recently established the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ).

Describing ICSZ as “explicitly anti-Zionist” and “strictly committed to abiding by the BDS picket line,” Abdulhadi and Schotten link their new Institute to “the long history of struggle” against efforts “to conflate Zionist politics and ideology with Jews or Jewishness.”

In October, the Institute will be holding an inaugural conference entitled “Battling the ‘IHRA definition’: Theory & Activism” to provide academics and activists with tools for delegitimizing the most widely accepted definition of antisemitism, which rightly identifies anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, but is being portrayed by conference organizers as “a tool of and a shield for repressive state power.”

#usacbi #rabab abdulhadi #heike schotten #institute for the critical study of zionism #icsz #bds #nazis #bds nazis #research on the jewish question #alfred rosenberg

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mixxdpunch · 2 months

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This is basically a link dump in context for this -> post , but I'm organizing the links and adding more that I've found. This is specifically for Jouno and Tecchou, since there isn't a lot out there on them and they both are kinda my bsd favs lol.

For context -> either i've found their actual writings, journals/articles that translate their writings, or academic stuff that gives context to it that we don't have because nothing is translated from the original Japanese

-> plum blossoms in the snow, it's in Japanese though but it's the best I've found so far. If anyone has a translation, hmu

-> Shunshoku Edomurasaki, a story Jouno wrote. it's in Japanese but it's at least google translatable. this one I believe was a hit with the young female audience, but that's all I know

-> This journal is very long but it explains a lot about Japanese political novels and Tecchou's novels are talked about in context of the time. we have no English translations of them, so this has been a nice resource. there are snippets of his novels that are translated in here

-> japanese to english dictionary that Jouno wrote. it's an article from Princeton, but it explains a lot about the transition authors were going through at the time as well

-> article that goes in-depth about one of Tecchou's novels, his political beliefs, and his relationship with Joze Rizal, who he travelled with for a few months when he traveled abroad

-> collection of prints from Tokyo nichinichi shinbun, which Jouno founded and wrote for. The ones with the name 'Sansantei Arindo' or 'Arindo' are his. They do feature partial/full translations.

-> This text talks in depth about Tecchou's and Joze Rizal's encounter. Also about the politics of the time. It's probably not the most interesting stuff if anyone isn't interested in Filipino-Japanese relations, but it has several translated passages from his works.

I will probably keep adding to this post, but if you wanted knowledge about the IRL authors for context about the characters, then this is what I've found that hasn't been two-sentence Wikipedia articles.

I'm hoping to find any knowledge on how any of the hunting dogs reacted to the Boshin War, since all of them besides Teruko were old enough to have lived through it and it was a pretty significant event for the era. So if anyone has stuff on that or anything more, literally feel free to add on

#im not really an analysis person #but this is just stuff i found and i needed to share it somewhere #bsd #bungo stray dogs #bungou stray dogs #bsd tecchou #bsd jouno #long post #anyway ik the irl authors arent the same as the characters but i think they provide a lot of context for them

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ladykf-writes · 3 months

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FF7 Fanfic, Best In Class

Fic Summary: This world of ours is starting to strain along its fault lines, threatening to reach a breaking point that no one can imagine let alone fix. This is something that needs to be taken care of before it happens. Changes need to be initiated from a civilian level up. In this essay I will —

——— save the world.

This is the fic we did the poll about, guys; canon divergent ReGen goodness to the tune of 'what if Genesis and Angeal had been kicked out of SOLDIER before their journey's ever began?'

Because you know having one path cut off isn't enough to send Genesis home.

TAGS: Genesis Rhapsodos/Reeve Tuesti, Fix-It, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Scholar!Genesis Rhapsodos, Inspire!Reeve Tuesti, Magic Meta, Character Study, Worldbuilding, FF7 Lore

Chapter 1: A New Face in an Old Debate

Summary: Even in a world where he's not a famous SOLDIER, Genesis Rhapsodos knows how to make an entrance.

Reeve laughed, short and sharp and knew there was a very good chance that his smile could be described as ‘wickedly gleeful’ but Odin’s lance he had been waiting for this. For someone, anyone to take that old man and publicly call him out as the hypocrite he was.

Well. The day had come in the form of one Genesis Rhapsodos. He was looking through the citations and noticed several of Bugenhagen’s works from over the years, several people he didn’t recognize but made note of, as well as citations from Gast, Ironheart, Hojo and—

— and him; Reeve himself was cited.

The Lifeblood of a City was, if not the first interview he’d done as ShinRa Director, one of the first, and that was why he remembered it so clearly even some eleven years later. He’d figured it was as good as any place to start, familiar with the people at Junon Academic Press as having handled articles and interviews with and about his favorite instructors and lecturers. Genesis had also grabbed The Power of Midgar which Reeve had agreed to a year ago, more or less because PR said it would be good for the department, to remind the city of its stewards’ hard work.

The fact that someone would not only find his work, but cite it in a formally presented paper that would surely not be overlooked by greater academia was a funny feeling. And it wasn’t that he didn’t recognize he was the authority in his field, he did. But it was a small group indeed who really, truly understood that.

Rhapsodos talked about his work like someone who didn’t know was majorly out of the loop. Like Reeve’s voice mattered beyond the walls of Urban Development, beyond ShinRa. It gave him a flustered, fluttery sort of feeling that he couldn’t articulate.

“I have to meet him,” Reeve whispered to his empty office.

#best in class #regen #reeve tuesti/genesis rhapsodos #reeve tuesti #genesis rhapsodos #ff7 meta #10% talking shit 40% flirtation and 50% fixing the world with sciencey meta #sometimes those last two overlap #a lot

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baeddel · 8 months

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@elancholia ty for your reply i always like them ^/////^ i will try and respond better to your whole post another time. obviously the conversation has evolved into more of a larger discussion about plagiarism & intertextuality in general, but i wanted to point out something w/r/t what i was originally asking. when you say:

The specificity of citations means that each claim is easy (for a specialist) to find and address; the points of dispute are very clear. And it's possible to pick out anomalous patterns, like century-spanning claims being sourced from one very specific document, or a consistent overreliance on "problematic sources" which are known to have been "heavily edited and sanitized" at the time they were originally compiled.

you understand that this is again not the kind of knowledge that i'm talking about in that post. if i learned how to make an argument (in this example, a 'dialectical' argument) from a really problematic and flawed book, it wouldn't really help you at all in evaluating my argument—my entire argument is transparent to you as soon as you read it, and if you tried to attack (using my example) my post based on a criticism of Clausewitz it would just be irrelevant, because i'm not actually saying anything he said.

i realize that i muddied the waters in my wording by at the end saying "in philosophy or non-fiction" in general, but my surprise was about this kind of thing, not about claims. w/r/t the kind of citation in the quote i don't feel confused about it, i try to cite my posts as much as possible for several reasons, both practical and ethical (one tumblr specific reason is that it helps to avoid establishing onesself as a kind of priestly authority with access to secret knowledge & instead invites the reader into your context so they can argue with you as an equal—since a lot of people who read your post may not know how to access the information otherwise, a concern which arises strictly in a non-academic situation).

you get where i'm coming from right—i have textbooks that are supposed to show how to make a kind of argument, which forms are valid, etc. they're aimed at training you to argue in a certain way and they don't expect you to cite them or even really remember them. why does it change when you learn how to argue that way from another kind of text?

when i went to read some of the literature on plagiarism i was similarly surprised to find other things which are considered plagiarism at least by some definitions. in one study that looked at Iranian Applied Linguistics researchers' views of plagiarism & intertextuality (click), the questionnaire included the following questions:

Creating a new piece of work structured according to a documentation standard, by referring to existing work of the same type.

and

Using a published work to identify important secondary citations that make a particular logical argument and then citing only those secondary sources to support your own use of the same logical argument.

the first one (copying the structure of another article) was considered plagiarism by 68% of respondents (15% said it wasn't and 17% said they didn't know). it surprised me a lot to learn that anyone would consider that plagiarism. the second one (copying an argument and just borrowing the citations necessary without saying where you learned the argument) is quite close to what i was talking about, and the responses were: 32% yes plagiarism, 57% no plagiarism, 11% don't know.

my takeaway is that there is not a lot of certainty about what counts as plagiarism on offer & i'm probably not the first person to experience this kind of surprise, confusion or skepticism about it.

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thewhumpyprintingpress · 5 months

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Resources for Academic Publishing

This post I made a while back got quite popular. One of the things that showed up often in the tags is "what about paying for academic publishing?"

Basically, the same idea applies. If a journal approaches you and says "hey, we'll publish your article super fast and your just need to pay us this fee," be wary. Academic publishing is slow by design to allow for the peer review process. Predatory journals will take your money and publish your article, but skip the peer review process that makes sure your research is sound. So if you publish with them, not only will you be out a boatload of money, but your integrity as a researcher will be tainted.

That being said, there are many academic journals that do charge fees to publish with them. This article does a good job explaining the different fees that a journal might have.

Since we live in a capitalist society, academic publishers need to make money. To do this, they have to charge the reader and/or the author. Because the potential audience of an academic article is much smaller than the potential audience for, say, the latest vampire romance, publishers by necessity often have to charge authors to publish.

In the rest of this very long post, I'll try my best to give you an overview of ways to publish your research without breaking the bank.

So what's an aspiring academic to do? You are probably not swimming in cash (I just finished grad school, l feel your pain). That's where the magical world of grants comes in. If you are associated with a college or university, see if they offer publication grants. These are often administered through the library, but they can also be available by a department. At my university, the Graduate and Professional Student Association offered quarterly publication grants of up to $1,200 for graduation students to publish their research. There were several funding cycles a year where nobody would apply, which was always sad. There's money out there, if you know where to look!

Also look at professional organizations in your field. Many offer financial assistance to graduate students through grants or fellowships. When you are applying for a grant, make sure to include publishing expenses in your cost breakdown!! This is something that so many people forget to do. And don't just look at the biggest, national/international organizations in your field. There are probably smaller regional organizations that offer funding as well, and they probably aren't as competitive as those national ones.

A pro tip from me is to think outside of the box in terms of what grants/fellowships you apply to. For example, my research focus is the historical archaeology of caves in the southeast US. So I can apply to grants for research in archaeology, caves, history, historical archaeology, cave archaeology, cave history, southeast American history, southeast American archaeology, etc. Look at your research topic and make a list of all of the different umbrellas it can fit under. Then search for organizations that are related to those projects. You might be surprised by what's out there! And if you're unsure if you research topic fits into the scope of a program, it never hurts to send the coordinator a quick email.

Another option is to carefully consider what journals you submit to. A highly prestigious journal is likely to have higher fees than a less prestigious one. As long as your article is peer reviewed, the prestige of a journal is not as important as you might think (The only time is might be important is if you're trying to get tenure).

If you take nothing else from this post, take this: do not self reject! Imposter syndrome is real, and you might feel that you don't deserve funding. That's the devil talking. You, my friend, are an academic badass. Your research is awesome, you're awesome, and you deserve to share your awesomeness with the world. So apply to that grant, even if you don't think you'll get it. You might be surprised.

#academic publishing #academic validation #studyblr

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