ME and Julie:a study in narrative of illness experience and therapy in a Myalgic Encephalomyelitis sufferer

This article uses what Atkinson and Walmsley (1997) refer to as an ‘autobiographical account’ to explore the themes and relationships between narrative, illness experience and therapy in a Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) sufferer. Julie is a chronic ME sufferer, having lived with ME for the past 12 years. Her life-story over those years, as she presents it, casts our attention to the intrinsically personal nature of her ‘illness experience’ and to her distinctively artistic therapeutic responses to her condition. Julie’s autobiographical narrative reveals how ME has penetrated both her body and her sense of self, her limbs as well as her dreams; as though it were a parasite feeding off her fight to regain health. In terms of narrative, Julie’s ME illness progresses from past to present, but never to the future which lies beyond contemplation. Despite this denial of the future, Julie does think of ME as a liminal phase which is to be coped through. As both spatial object and temporal event, Julie conceptualises her ME variously, dealing with it on a day-to-day basis, increasingly turning to landscape painting as a form of escapism which parallels her former physical outward bound activities. This personal therapy, so this article concludes, constitutes both narrative performance and narrative text (as canvas), both of which can only cautiously be independently interpreted by the (inter)viewer.

Courts and Consociations:How human rights courts may destabilize power-sharing settlements

We consider the use of consociational arrangements to manage ethno-nationalist, ethno-linguistic, and ethno-religious conflicts, and their compatibility with non-discrimination and equality norms. Key questions include to what extent, if any, consociations conflict with the dictates of global justice and the liberal individualist preferences of international human rights institutions, and to what extent consociational power-sharing may be justified to preserve peace and the integrity of political settlements. In three critical cases, the European Court of Human Rights has considered equality challenges to important consociational practices, twice in Belgium and, most recently, in Sejdic and Finci, concerning the constitutional arrangements established for Bosnia Herzegovina under the Dayton Agreement. The Court’s recent decision in Sejdic and Finci has significantly altered the approach it previously took to judicial review of consociational arrangements in the Belgian cases. We seek to account for this change and assess its implications. We identify problematic aspects of the judgment and conclude that, although the Court’s decision indicates one possible trajectory of human rights courts’ reactions to consociations, this would be an unfortunate development because it leaves future negotiators in places riven by potential or manifest bloody ethnic conflicts with considerably less flexibility in reaching a settlement. That in turn may unintentionally contribute to sustaining such conflicts and make it more likely that advisors to negotiators will advise them to exclude regional and international courts from having standing in the management of political settlements.

Cinematic and Architectonic Space in Tarkovsky's Solaris

Architecture plays an important role in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films in defining the atmosphere of a space and memory of a place. This paper is a study of how the settings in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) are used to provoke and convey feelings to the audience through architectonic space depicting the city, library, home and aspects of the home such as paintings and mirrors. The rooms depicted in Solaris (Fig. 1) are filled with symbolism and detail. They are imbued with a poetic quality rarely seen in cinema. The everyday places of city, library and home in Solaris are given an emotional depth not usually found in these spaces in reality. Solaris is an anomaly among Tarkovsky’s films in that the majority of the narrative takes place in an enclosed built set. Rarely do Tarkovsky spaces exert so much control over the actors’ movements within a meticulously designed and detailed set. This paper analyses how the director uses constructed sets in Solaris to confront our perception of memories, dreams and reality.
The intent of this study is to gain better understanding of the link between architecture and other art forms such as painting and cinema through spatial analysis. This study also relates to our imagination and how we perceive architectonic space portrayed through cinematic images. The architectural theory of Juhani Pallasmaa forms the basis of this paper.

A cultural practice of drinking realgar wine leading to elevated urinary arsenic and its potential health risk

Toasting friends and family with realgar wines and painting children's foreheads and limbs with the leftover realgar/alcohol slurries is an important customary ritual during the Dragon Boat Festival (DBF); a Chinese national holiday and ancient feast day celebrated throughout Asia. Realgar is an arsenic sulfide mineral, and source of highly toxic inorganic arsenic. Despite the long history of realgar use during the DBF, associated risk to human health by arsenic ingestion or percutaneous adsorption is unknown. To address this urine samples were collected from a cohort of volunteers who were partaking in the DBF festivities. The total concentration of arsenic in the wine consumed was 70 mg L(-1) with all the arsenic found to be inorganic. Total arsenic concentrations in adult urine reached a maximum of ca. 550 mu g L(-1) (mean 220.2 mu g L(-1)) after 16 h post-ingestion of realgar wine, while face painting caused arsenic levels in children's urine to soar to 100 mu g L(-1) (mean 85.3 mu g L(-1)) 40 h after the initial paint application. The average concentration of inorganic arsenic in the urine of realgar wine drinkers on average doubled 16 h after drinking, although this was not permanent and levels subsided after 28 h. As would be expected in young children, the proportions of organic arsenic in the urine remained high throughout the 88-h monitoring period. However, even when arsenic concentrations in the urine peaked at 40 h after paint application, concentrations in the urine only declined slightly thereafter, suggesting pronounced longer term dermal accumulation and penetration of arsenic. Drinking wines blended with realgar or using realgar based paints on children does result in the significant absorption of arsenic and therefore presents a potentially serious and currently unquantified health risk. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Two Trilogies:On Stewart Parker and Tom Murphy

This chapter discusses the relations between Irish cinema and the other arts- chiefly, literature, theatre, painting, and photography. It provides a critical overview of the main scholarly approaches to those forms of adaptation and citation that have tended to dominate Irish film production. It argues that factors such as the historic marginalization of non-literary modernist art in Ireland, a deep cultural resistance to intellectual and politically-engaged filmmaking, and a commercially-driven attachment to formulaic narrative structures, are among the reasons why Ireland has generally failed to produce a distinctive and successful cinema. The chapter concludes by discussing some films that have resisted this trend by offering their audiences a more creative approach to -- or poetics of -- adaptation that has more in common with the visual -- rather than literary -- arts in Ireland.

Portraying Human Dignity

I consider whether Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) in his painting Las Meninas has conveyed several aspects of the idea of human dignity in ways that not only echo some aspects of contemporary philosophical and legal analysis, but transcend them, bringing into our understanding aspects of dignity, and the controversy surrounding it, that otherwise might be underestimated.

Modulating mythology in a post-traumatic era: Murals and re-imaging in Northern Ireland.

Arguably the most ancient of the social media, wall paintings have been a persistent vehicle of cultural meaning management. The dynamics of myth markets are reflected in the sectarian murals of Northern Ireland. In this paper, we draw from consumer research literature on mythology and street art to explore the continuous revision of these wallscapes that seeks to address the enduring contradictions of civic ideology in contested political space. In particular, we focus on the use of classical, historical and pop-cultural mythologies to transform private space into public place. We examine the decommissioning of murals occurring in the wake of the Peace Accords, and speculate on the implications of the creation of a shared mythology for the future of mural painting and the state.

Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices

Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.

Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.

Voir Hitler en peinture

Voir Hitler en peinture / On Seeing a painting of Hitler
The article “Voir Hitler en peinture” (literally “On Seeing a painting of Hitler”) focuses on a painting by Oliver Jeffers entitled “Ginger Hitler”. This article suggests that, whatever Jeffers’ intent and inspiration were, his painting “defamiliarizes” Hitler (V. Shklovsky) and forces us to look at him afresh. For decades, Hitler has been demonised and dehumanised; yet, however unsettling this may be, he was human. As Professor Richard Evans, a leading expert in the history of Nazism, put it recently: “Viewing Hitler as a human being, which he undoubtedly was, is more challenging to our understanding, surely, than simply writing him off as a cartoon villain” (The Guardian, 30/04/2015).

Bouyid v Belgium: The “minimum level of severity” and Human Dignity's Role in Article 3 ECHR

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights recently delivered an important judgment on Article 3 ECHR in the case of Bouyid v Belgium. In Bouyid, the Grand Chamber was called upon to consider whether slaps inflicted on a minor and an adult in police custody were in breach of Article 3 ECHR, which provides that ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. Overruling the Chamber judgment in the case, the Grand Chamber ruled by 14 votes to 3 that there had been a substantive violation of Article 3 in that the applicants had been subjected to degrading treatment by members of the Belgian police; it found that there had been a breach of the investigative duty under Article 3 also. In this comment, I focus on the fundamental basis of disagreement between the majority of the Grand Chamber and those who found themselves in dissent, on the question of whether there had been a substantive breach of Article 3. The crux of the disagreement lay in the understanding and application of the test of ‘minimum level of severity’, which the ECtHR has established as decisive of whether a particular form of ill-treatment crosses the Article 3 threshold, seen also in light of Article 3’s absolute character, which makes it non-displaceable – that is, immune to trade-offs of the type applicable in relation to qualified rights such as privacy and freedom of expression. I consider the way the majority of the Grand Chamber unpacked and applied the concept of dignity – or ‘human dignity’ – towards finding a substantive breach of Article 3, and briefly distil some of the principles underpinning the understanding of human dignity emerging in the Court’s analysis.