... Hushiari, see Morgan). The short, poetic film Nafir (Plaintive song, 1982), made by Jahanshah Ardalan in San Francisco, takes its title and its poetic sensibilities from Rumi's "Song of the Reed," quoted here. Nahid Rachlin's exile ...

The process of imagining the culturally constrained Victorian woman is familiar in contemporary cinema, especially in film musicals. From Baz Lurhmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) to Tim Burton’s Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables (2012), contemporary film musicals seek to deconstruct the gender politics of Victorian society. These films present the nineteenth-century past as cultural memory, wherein women’s lives were shaped by inherently restrictive Victorian gender norms. A specific metaphor – the caged bird – is used to aesthetically and thematically present the restrictions placed on women in Victorian society. Yet the caged bird metaphor presents a monolithic view of Victorian gender roles. The female characters imagined through this metaphor become disempowered, their tragic fates overdetermined. Many historians, especially feminist historians, attest to the restrictions Victorian women faced, but they also demonstrate the many ways in which women resisted patriarchal society. When contemporary film musicals use the caged bird metaphor, it is positioned as a neo-Victorian remediation for restrictive gender roles. Ultimately, however, these films depict Victorian women as restricted and – more problematically – as passive to these restraints.

Avian Illuminations Avian Illuminations tells in detail about the many roles of birds in human society, including omens, food, messengers, deities, pets, muses, timekeepers, custodians, hunting companions, environmental indicators, decorative motifs, and, most importantly, embodiments of our aspirations. It narrates the history of human relationships over the centuries with crows, owls, parrots, falcons, eagles, wrens, nightingales, chickens, turkeys, hummingbirds, and many other birds. It describes in detail how the nesting behavior of birds has provided models for human romance and domestic life, while their ability to fly has inspired millennia of inventors. Finally, the book concludes that the interconnections between birds and human beings are so manifold that a world without birds would effectively mean an end to human culture, even if we continued to pass on some lonely strands of our DNA.

I.H. Rizvi was a well-known and well established poet, who attained name and fame both in India and abroad. He was an editor of Canopy a biannual English poetry journal, besides being a bilingual poet, critic and retired professor of English. He had been a long standing poet penning verses in Urdu and English, having brought out nine collections of English verses and several anthologies. He had received critical acclaim and awards. What is it that is so enamoring and pleasing to another author/bilingual poet that requires mentioning and to be written? It is the uniqueness is composing poems not only based on themes and churning out poems, romantic in nature but also being socially conscious, ironical, and critical of the society and the yearning of the poet for peace and to achieve happiness despite so much of pain, despair and despondency experienced by the poet in his long march of life. In his erudite forward, the poet had described the nature of ‘Human Heart’, what it bears and how the poetry is born therein

El trabajo docente es un mirador central de diversas preocupaciones sobre lo educativo. La construcción de un determinado rol para la tarea de educar tiene una rica historia de prácticas, luchas, debates, disputas y de propuestas. Esas expresiones consolidaron también una imagen social acerca de qué es un/a docente, qué debe esperarse de él/ella y cuáles son sus atributos. La docencia –como trabajo y como rol pedagógico y social– es una de esas prácticas sociales que han sedimentado y cuyos puntos de origen, así como las decisiones que contribuyeron a su conformación, han ido volviéndose cada día menos evidentes. Este libro ofrece un recorrido por una agenda de investigación sobre formación y trabajo docente que vincula las ideas pedagógicas con la materialidad de la escuela, la productividad del currículum, las estrategias de enseñanza, los vínculos y las relaciones que se despliegan con el conocimiento. Para ello, se incorpora, además, una mirada multidimensional sobre los diversos entretelones de la formación y el trabajo docente. A lo largo del trabajo, nos preocupamos por mirar a las instituciones educativas –y a las posiciones docentes en ellas– con una perspectiva compleja, abriéndonos a interpretar más que a validar o a invalidar.