Johns Hopkins University

This study aimed to build the evidence base around human trafficking (HT) and health in the U.S. by employing a quantitative approach to exploring the notion that health care providers encounter this population. Furthermore, this study sought to describe the health care settings most frequented by victims of human trafficking. This was an anonymous, retrospective study of survivors of U.S.-based human trafficking. One hundred and seventy-three participants who endured U.S.-based human trafficking were surveyed. The majority (68%, n=117) of participants were seen by a health care provider while being trafficked. Respondents most frequently reported visiting emergency/urgent care practitioners (56%), followed by primary care providers, dentists, and obstetricians/gynecologists (OB/GYNs). While health care providers are serving this patient population, they do not consistently identify them as victims of human trafficking.

This paper proposes to investigate Emily Dickinson’s transatlantic literary connection with William Wordsworth. Her references to and appropriation of Wordsworth inform her critical understanding of the polarized reception of Wordsworth’s poetry and its potential impact on her own poetic experimentation. Dickinson’s role as a poetic heir of Wordsworth, particularly her relation to Romanticism, has been extensively explored. Critics such as Harold Bloom and Joanne Feit Diehl point out the antagonistic relationship between Dickinson and her male precursors. Robert Weisbuch and Inder Nath Kher, alternatively, see Dickinson’s quest poems as essentially Romantic. Scholars such as Margaret Homans consider Dickinson’s poems as deconstructing the binary structure embedded in the writings of her male precursors. More recently, critics such as Richard Gravil and Richard E. Brantley place Dickinson firmly in the literary tradition of Anglo-American Romanticism. This paper explores Dickinson’s engagement with Wordsworth further through her potential awareness of and response to Wordsworth’s mixed Anglo-American receptions. A number of Dickinson’s Wordsworthian allusions in her poems, such as daffodils, primroses, and the sunlight, borrow and appropriate images that Wordsworth’s poetry had made popular in the cultural consciousness. These poems of Dickinson conjure up the Wordsworthian imagery as objects of rare values or commodities, reflecting the polarized receptions of Wordsworth in the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, Wordsworth’s “joyful” message of nature, which Arnold and his contemporaries considered most valuable, played a role in Dickinson’s experimentation with her own poetic voices in the 1850s and 1860s. The paper examines how Dickinson might have been aware of Wordsworth’s poetic reputation, and how Wordsworth’s “joyful” nature poems are critically reviewed in the mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American world. I then scrutinize a number of Dickinson’s poems about Wordsworthian nature in relation to Dickinson’s tentative adjustment of her poetic expression for a “frostier” style at the inception of her poetic career. The paper suggests that Dickinson’s subtle engagement with Wordsworth provides a glimpse of how she is concerned about the positioning of herself, a New England poet, in a mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary tradition.

Predatory lending of subprime mortgages targeting the most economically vulnerable minority communities helped trigger the current global financial crisis. This special issue of the journal American Quarterly explores the ways in which "subprime" becomes a racial signifier in the current debate about the causes and fixes for a capitalism itself in crisis. It signifies both the accumulated dispossession of racial exclusion in the twenty-first century gilded age in the United States and Global North more broadly, as well as the imperial ambitions of three decades of U.S.-led neoliberal rule over the Global South. Essays are divided into sections: debt, discipline, and empire; the pathologies of debt; and security, space, and resistance in the post-racial urban setting. Focusing on race and empire, that is, on racial and global subjugation, the contributors expose the ethical-political underpinnings of the current global financial crisis. Contributors include: Radhika Balakri...

Abstract: This article explores the way vulnerability gets mapped onto some bodies and not others. It discusses how sociolegal frameworks of vulnerability have both significantly transformative and anti-democratic ramifications for feminist social justice projects. Vulnerability—as a bodily condition, basis for relating, and methodology for socio-political intervention—charts how social inequalities are produced and dismissed. It is a source of possibility and risk. Part 1 outlines a progressive framework of vulnerability methodologies, interweaving poststructuralist theories of relationality and feminist legal theory with queer and transnational women-of-color feminisms. Current poststructuralist and legal frameworks, however, often sidestep how political recognition of vulnerability can function as a mode of regulation, where the affects accompanying precariousness are directed toward antidemocratic policies. Part 2 therefore argues that vulnerability methodologies have ambivalent political ramifications, licensing forms of protectionist violence as well as drawing attention to systemic forms of precarity. It explores the racialized and gendered politics of vulnerability and protection undergirding the role of stand-your-ground laws in Trayvon Martin’s murder and George Zimmerman’s trial, highlighting the ambivalent ways sociolegal frameworks recognize some forms of vulnerability and write others out of existence. Part 3 concludes by discussing the practices that progressive vulnerability approaches should embrace and avoid.

This essay examines vacillating affective responses to pop star Britney Spears. I juxtapose Spears’s career ascent as a teen queen from the rural American South to her career descent into “white trash” rebellious adulthood. I contend that Spears exposes the cracks in the celebrity system: while it promises transformation to ordinary people, it treats cruelly those who fail to transform into the “right” kind of celebrity. In Spears’s case, she was chastised as a working-class woman from the rural South who could never rise above her roots. Ultimately, Spears’s “failure” became an individualized shame, which reifies a celebrity system built on neoliberal, bourgeois ideals of transformation.

This paper argues that the Hephaisteion was erected on Kolonos Agoraios as the spot identified in Athenian topographic myth with the place of Hephaistos’s pursuit of Athena that led to Erichthonios’s birth. The complex association of semen with pollution kept the location of the foundation story of Athens separate from the Acropolis, offering a visual and topographic counterpoint to Athena’s temple. Kolonos Agoraios also had powerful connections with the Philaid family, through the cult of Eurysakes, which made it attractive for a temple commemorating the successes of Miltiades and Kimon in the Aegean, notably on Hephaistos’s island of Lemnos.

Picture yourself on a train in a station. The presence or absence of Plasticine porters with looking-glass ties is irrelevant.1 For some reason, the station is called Entity. Entity Junction, in the county of Anywhere. There are two platforms in Entity Junction, and they consist just of the two sides of the concrete sliver on which the very occasional passengers pace up and down—after all, it’s just a junction. Rather than having numbers, the platforms have names. As you stand looking out towards the crisp blue sky of Anywhere in one direction, trains arrive on the platform called Platform Past. As you stand looking the other way, you see trains arriving on the platform called Platform Future. The station is quite narrow, which means that passengers in the train arriving at Platform Past can easily see the passengers leaving from Platform Future as the train begins to pull slowly out of Entity station. If you are sitting on one of the trains, or on one of the very few benches on thi...

According to the standard narrative of the outcome of Valens’s First Gothic War, the Goths sued for peace after being subjected to three years of conflict. Yet not only did the Romans fail to engage the Goths in a major battle, but they were also prevented from campaigning in Gothia during the second year of the war due to flooding of the Danube River. This article argues that the natural disaster described by Ammianus played a significant, and hitherto unexplored, role in compelling the Goths to surrender. It demonstrates how the hydroclimatological conditions that cause floods on the Lower Danube also tend to cause equally devastating flood events in other rivers that flowed through Gothia, thereby potentially wreaking havoc on Gothic territory that had remained unscathed by Roman raiding. It further utilizes Western and Central European dendroclimatological proxy evidence to show that the spring months of both 368 and 369 were among the wettest of the entire century, which provides corroboration for Ammianus’s account and raises the possibility of additional flooding in the final year of the war. Finally, the article explores the ways in which flooding could have had deleterious impacts on the Gothic agrarian economy and their war effort.

Abstract:The significance of fr. 134 DK (highlighting the φρὴν ἱερὴ καὶ ἀθέσφατος and its phrontides, the authentic Apollo) and fr. 29 DK (the σφαῖρος, ultimate offspring of Aphrodite/φιλότης) can be discovered by retracing Empedocles' steps through a matrix of echoes from the epic heritage common to him and his culture, a matrix that includes the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and Hesiod's Theogony. The genuine text of fr. 134 is preserved only in Olympiodorus' scholiast in his Commentary on Plato's Gorgias, and not in Ammonius as reported by DK. The "back-branches" in fr. 29.1 are shown to be wings (not arms as often interpreted). The context Ammonius provides for fr. 134 (Empedocles' anti-anthropomorphism with regard to divine beings) also fits fr. 29 (reported by Hippolytus). The φρὴν ἱερή with its phrontides is understood as a metaphor for the authentic Apollo as the sun; the σφαῖρος would be the authentic Eros, child of Aphrodite/Philoteēs, as opposed to a traditional winged Eros. Both would be subjects of a definitive theological discussion in Empedocles' third and final book of Περὶ φύσεως.

If a stone cannot be read, in the conventional sense, what do we see on, or in, or through stones? And what can we do with them? This essay begins in media res, with reading, writing, and things -- specifically stones – and considers them as sites for a new ecology of criticism. It wonders about stones, especially the ones we fancy extravagantly, and proposes these lapidary mirrors as places to reconsider the relationship between word, image, and looking – as provocations, that is, to a new style of reading. To begin, the use of beguiling rocks as objects of consumption, poetic inspiration, and artistic manipulation by Chinese artists and literati is considered through the lens of Roger Caillois’s writings about mimicry, particularly as applied to a Lacanian vision of human subjectivity as the play of picture and screen. Considered along with its etymological cousins “stun” and “stain” in the penumbra of Lacan’s reflections, this analysis proposes fetishized stones as a literalization of the screen’s petrifying function, the behind of the looking glass which renders everything in sight an impossible imago, a storied surface, a reified other. Where such speculation reveals stone as a grave site for critically sore eyes, this essay turns to the very different possibilities of stone-human interaction traced in the touching and disarming poetics of Ouyang Xiu’s “The Stone of Ling Stream.” In this case a stone morphs from object of desire into tactile companion as its human subject reshapes his connoisseur’s drive to know and own into a haptic meditation beside the stone. The essay argues that with this gesture Ouyang Xiu not only embraces a Chinese Buddhist aesthetic and spiritual tradition --contemplation of the void or lack -- but also gropes toward a fruitful ethics of “stone blindness” as a mode of understanding. By surrendering a visual drive that extends its instrumental aggression to every animal, plant and stone in sight, the poet writes himself out of the surveillance of the world-as-text. Instead, assuming a posture of quiet attention and openness, he re-approaches being obliquely and gently from another direction. In so doing he practices an art and poetics of “being with” that not only feels for the ends of critical vision, but also invites us to drop our gazes and egos alike to listen to Heidegger’s “call of the world.”

Abstract:This article aims to highlight the comic features of the composite attire worn by Menippus and Mithrobarzanes in Lucian’s Necyomantia. First, I discuss the literary tradition that Lucian draws on in order to depict Menippus’ costume, which enables him to pass himself off as Odysseus, Orpheus, and Heracles and enter the underworld while still being alive. Then, I propose that Mithrobarzanes also uses a costume to disguise himself as a Mage, since he is actually a Chaldean from Babylon. A terminological discussion of μάγος and Χαλδαῖος will highlight how Lucian plays with the meaning of these terms to mock Mithrobarzanes.

Resumen:Por su atención a diferentes orientaciones de género, carácter descomprometido y estética consumista, la revista CubaNEO provee algunas bases para evaluar repertorios emocionales en un nuevo tipo de comunidad en Cuba cuya identidad emerge y se negocia en los noventa. En general, los autores en CubaNEO se ubicaban por fuera de lo que Gayle Rubin en "Thinking Sex" llamó the charmed circle, un ejercicio de la sexualidad considerada normal, natural y apropiada: heterosexual, no-por-dinero, en la misma generación, en lugares privados, etc. En CubaNEO el objeto deseado es a menudo un medio y la escritura se realiza en clave de eros para reafirmar una subjetividad individual. Elaborada y distribuida en los noventa al margen de las instituciones culturales, en CubaNEO se observa una especie de re-territorialización que consiste en la utilización del espacio de la mercancía como un espacio de salida reclamando una imagen de libertad emocional en la presentación del yo.

This article discusses the development of Knowledge River, a program at the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science established through several Institute of Museum and Library Services grants designed to recruit Latino and Native American students to the library and information science (LIS) profession. Knowledge River (KR) was designed as a national model for increasing diversity in information organizations and LIS programs. The article describes the KR model and elements of the program that have increased its success. Included are participation in a residential cohort, real-world library work experiences, and formal mentoring by KR graduates and other ethnic minorities in the field. Knowledge River has served as a catalyst for increasing awareness of diversity issues and multiple perspectives in addressing issues in the LIS field. Knowledge River has also resulted in a requirement that all LIS students enroll in at least one diversity course. Thi...

Abstract:L'année 1957 est en France l'occasion de commémorer un Baudelaire récemment réhabilité et définitivement entré dans le canon littéraire. Ce centenaire des Fleurs du mal est cependant aussi l'occasion, pour certains poètes et écrivains, de prendre leurs distances avec un lyrisme encore souvent associé au romantisme et avec le refus baudelairien de tout engagement partisan. Le compagnonnage communiste, le surréalisme tardif mais aussi les doctrines poétiques élaborées par certains cercles comme l'Ecole de Rochefort produisent des éloges ambivalents, qui sont autant d'arts poétiques anti-baudelairiens. Cet article vise à mettre en évidence une lecture d'époque, qui, au-delà des spécificités esthétiques de chacune de ces réponses à Baudelaire, constitue un tournant majeur dans la réception de l'œuvre. Il explore le discours des écrivains sur la place de Baudelaire dans leur poétique propre et dans leur panthéon personnel, afin d'expliquer comment s'opère ce que l'on pourrait considérer comme un adieu aux Fleurs du mal au profit d'une relecture du Spleen de Paris, origine d'une nouvelle modernité.

This article reads Ovid's Metamorphoses through the lens of its contemporary art of pantomime dancing. With a focus restricted to narratives of animalization, it argues that the dancer's exquisite bodily expressiveness has been coopted and recalibrated for the demands of the poetic medium, as Ovid's sequences of animal metamorphosis have amalgamated aesthetic strategies borrowed from the pantomime stage. Far from having been shaped exclusively within the literary mainstream, Ovid's idiosyncratic look, astonishingly perceptive and concentrated on the movements and gestures, as well as the minutest parts of his characters' bodies, was the product of a bold, intermedial crossover between poetry and dance.

While a substantial amount of work has been done on the metaphors used in bioethics (such as the body as "property" or the ethics consultant as "engineer"), this essay focuses on the manner in which metaphors reside at the core of various bioethics theories. Drawing upon Stephen Pepper's (1942) notion that philosophical positions are expressions of specific "root metaphors" (similarity, machine, organism, act), the essay will look at the way theories such as principlism, rule-based ethics, casuistry, and phenomenological ethics are also grounded in particular root metaphors. These root metaphors express fundamentally different notions of the way the world operates, and thus arguments over the superiority of particular moral theories are actually disagreements over worldviews and cannot be resolved through rational discourse. To agree with an alternative theory would entail the adoption of a fundamentally different root metaphor for understanding the...