Contesting Thistlewood: slavery, agency and the limits of representation

This piece is a contribution to the exhibition catalogue of Barbadian / Canadian artist Joscelyn Gardner's exhibition, 'Bleeding & Breeding' curated by Olexander Wlasenko, January 14-February 12, 2012 in the Station Gallery, Whitby, Ontario, Canada. The piece examines the ways in which Gardner's Creole Portraits II (2007) and Creole Portraits III (2009) issue a provocative and carefully crafted contestation to the journals of the slave-owner and amateur botanist Thomas Thistlewood. It argues that while Thistlewood’s journals make raced and gendered bodies seemingly available to knowledge, incorporating them within the colonial archive as signs of subjection, Gardener’s portraits disrupt these acts of history and knowledge. Her artistic response marks a radical departure from the significant body of scholarship that has drawn on the Thistlewood journals to date. Creatively contesting his narratives’ dispossession of Creole female subjects and yet aware of the problems of innocent recovery, her works style representations that retain the consciousness and effect of historical erasure. Through an oxymoronic aesthetic that assembles a highly crafted verisimilitude alongside the condition of invisibility and brings atrocity into the orbit of the aesthetic, these portraits force us to question what stakes are involved in bringing the lives of the enslaved and violated back into regimes of representation.

Outward bound: women translators and scientific travel writing, 1780–1800

As the Enlightenment drew to a close, translation had gradually acquired an increasingly important role in the international circulation and transmission of scientific knowledge. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the translators responsible for making such accounts accessible in other languages, some of whom were women. In this article I explore how European women cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations. Focusing specifically on the genre of scientific travel writing, I investigate the narrative strategies deployed by women translators to mark their involvement in the process of scientific knowledge-making. These strategies ranged from rhetorical near-invisibility, driven by women's modest marginalization of their own public engagement in science, to the active advertisement of themselves as intellectually curious consumers of scientific knowledge. A detailed study of Elizabeth Helme's translation of the French ornithologist Françoise le Vaillant's Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique [Voyage into the Interior of Africa] (1790) allows me to explore how her reworking of the original text for an Anglophone reading public enabled her to engage cautiously – or sometimes more openly – with questions regarding how scientific knowledge was constructed, for whom and with which aims in mind.

All friends now? Critical conversations, West Indian literature and 'The Quarrel with History'

In this essay Alison Donnell returns to the material object of Edward Baugh's essay, published in the pages of the Trinidadian little magazine Tapia in 1977, in order to re-read the force of its arguments in the context of its own politicocultural history and to assess the significance of its publication venue. Donnell attends to Baugh's own standing in the highly charged field of Caribbean literary criticism as a critic of both Walcott and Naipaul, and acknowledges his creative contribution to this field as a poet. She also considers how, in the years between the original publication of Baugh's article and its republication, the questions of historical invisibility have entered newly disputed territories that demand attention to how gender, indigeneity, spirituality, and sexuality shape ideas of historical and literary legitimacy, in addition to those foundational questions around a politics of race and class.

Mobile sink based fault diagnosis scheme for wireless sensor networks

Network diagnosis in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a difficult task due to their improvisational nature, invisibility of internal running status, and particularly since the network structure can frequently change due to link failure. To solve this problem, we propose a Mobile Sink (MS) based distributed fault diagnosis algorithm for WSNs. An MS, or mobile fault detector is usually a mobile robot or vehicle equipped with a wireless transceiver that performs the task of a mobile base station while also diagnosing the hardware and software status of deployed network sensors. Our MS mobile fault detector moves through the network area polling each static sensor node to diagnose the hardware and software status of nearby sensor nodes using only single hop communication. Therefore, the fault detection accuracy and functionality of the network is significantly increased. In order to maintain an excellent Quality of Service (QoS), we employ an optimal fault diagnosis tour planning algorithm. In addition to saving energy and time, the tour planning algorithm excludes faulty sensor nodes from the next diagnosis tour. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms through simulation and real life experimental results.

Den kroppsliga differentieringens praktik : övervikt och nätdejting på intimitetens marknad

The practice of bodily differentiation: Overweight and internet dating on the market of intimacy With the emergence of Internet dating, the procedure for choosing a partner has been radically changed. Given the initial invisibility of the body when Internet dating, one might presume that looks become less important when searching for partners online. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Based on twelve interviews with Internet daters of which six define themselves as overweight, the reproduction of bodily distinction in both mediated and direct communication is here being studied. A recurrent theme among the interviewees is the disappointment of the first date face to face. Ironically the importance of looks (or bodily capital) appears to be even more vital when dating on Internet than when building relationships “in real life”. Besides the disappointment of the first date in real life, the obese women in this study could also gather information of their value on the market of intimacy through being met by serious harassments and in exclusively being treated as sexual objects. Despite its strong association with the physical body, bodily capital can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from other forms of capital. From this point of view, the possibility of less repressive forms of intimacy is discussed.

Sociabilidade homoerótica masculina no Rio de Janeiro na década de 1960: relatos do jornal O Snob

Este trabalho estuda uma rede de sociabilidade homoerótica na cidade do Rio de Janeiro na década de 1960 através da análise dos relatos contidos no jornal doméstico – produzido por um dos grupos e que circulava entre os participantes da rede – O Snob. A rede era composta por vários grupos de convivência que se vinham formando desde a década de 1950, e a maioria dos participantes elaborava suas identidades pessoais compartilhando com a sociedade maior a crença de que pertenceriam ao “terceiro sexo”, “sofrendo” inversão sexual. Assim se desenvolveu uma forma de sociabilidade peculiar, caracterizada por encontros festivos em domicílios como estratégia de sobrevivência, visto que as expectativas sociossexuais dos grupos eram envoltas em hostilidade da sociedade maior. Desta maneira esse estudo aponta processos de sociabilização empreendidos pela rede, moldados na invisibilidade, configurando-se, ainda que de maneira não articulada (ou involuntária), em experiência de conquistas dos direitos civis e sociais ao promover ações práticas que possibilitavam encontros de seus membros e que podem ser traduzidas como o direito de ir e vir, o direito de livre expressão, ainda que num espaço segregado (ou segredado?), direitos básicos, que, no entanto, não eram garantidos aos participantes da rede. Evidencia, nessa trajetória, os processos de ressignificação identitária que os grupos vivenciaram ao longo do período estudado.

O trabalho doméstico de adolescentes: naturalização da exclusão e submissão

This work demonstrates important aspects of domestic work performed by adolescents between 16 and 18 years in residential spaces. This is to highlight the process of naturalization of invisibility, their source of insecurity and social exclusion, in view of the strong personal relationship of domination. Pointing out the relations of pseudo-affection that can obscure the exploitation of domestic labor. Highlight a preliminary discussion on the composition of social relations embedded in the context of domestic work, with emphasis on reflection on the condition of subordination of young domestic workers as a result of a process of socialization consists of relations of domination - gender and social class, resulting in formation of social identity-forming negative stigma. This paper results from a survey of the work of young maids, held in the city of Aracaju, whose main objective was to understand how they operated the differences and inequalities in the relations of domestic based, including information on adolescents' own. Fieldwork was conducted from August 2009 to January 2010 and data collection techniques were used oral history / life history, questionnaires and use of semi-structured interviews, as well as secondary data from PNAD / IBGE which formed the basis of comparative national situation and local context. It emphasizes the links of domestic work involving teenagers question the lifestyles of working class who are confronted by the various "systems" for each home, which leads to the development of adaptation strategies that make possible the coexistence of a stranger the house at the other. It focuses on how the work goes into their lives in terms of socialization offered by working families to their children's, and as this class habitus is adequate for the job market in domestic employment through a socialization process that sometimes opposes and now reinforces the practices and values seized in family socialization

Paulo Freire e a pedagogia do oprimido: afinidades pós-coloniais

The main objective of the present research is to reflect on the affinities between post-colonial theories - analytical perspectives directed toward the discussion of colonialism and its effects on the contemporary social fabric - and Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire‟s (1921-1997) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written at the end of the 1960‟s. The study aims to make the argument that the present reflections on the featured work is an example of a post-colonial theoretical framework, delineating a critical modus operandi of colonialism, particularly in its cultural and epistemic dimensions, delineating a problematization of the processes of cognitive domination set, above all, by the European colonization of the Latin American continent, with the formation of the modern-world-system (WALLERSTEIN, 2007), dated from the 16TH Century forward. From this stand point, and especially supported by the contributions of Boaventura de Sousa Santos on the sociology of absence, the present work accentuates Pedagogy of the Oppressed as a set of reflections that bring the possibility of a pedagogy of absence (SANTOS, 1996), having in mind that, this book deals with, the presuppositions of an educational action, which considers the plurality of knowledge and social practices by way of the establishment of a pedagogical practice of collective construction, emancipator and dialogic that arises from the encounter to the indolent reason (SANTOS, 2009) in which the silencing of the voices of the oppressed, construct their conditions of invisibility, promoting also the absence of the social questions inherent to the processes of teaching and learning. It is with this perspective, however, that post colonialism is considered a theoretical site for the affirmation and the reinvention of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, an obligatory reference in the construction of a prudent knowledge for a decent life (SANTOS, 2006)

A inserção das mulheres na Câmara Municipal de Natal (1988 - 2004)

This work has as objective to reflect about the insertion of the women in the City Council of Natal in the period from 1988 to 2004. We focused our discussion in the context of the politics of quota that has with objective to decrease the frame of inequalities existent between women and men in the politics, besides of to analyze which the determinants responsible for the women's sub-representation. The research still consists of an analysis of the councilor s women profile and how they were seen in that space of power. We analyzed our study object in a gender vision, since this is related intrinsically the social relationships and the relationships of power. The women, for a long time, they were excluded of the participation in the public life, being just seen as mere expectants. This research is informed mainly by studies which discuss the Gender (Scott, 1990), (Perrot, 1988), (Badinter, 1995), (Bruschini, 2002). We also analyzed the power, politics in the vision of Marx (1996), Foucault (1982) and (Arendt, 2001). We tried to analyze the women's presence in the spaces public and private, showing your conflicts and contradictions faced in the society, focalizing the political character of the women's inclusion in the spaces in that are inserted. The instrument of collection of data was the semi-structured questionnaire, descriptive and analytical - critical. The analyses of the interviews show to the sub-representation of women over the years as a determining factor for these women continue in the invisibility. The women were interviewed councillora ex- bounded from 1988 to 2004. The conclusion the one that we arrived is that this sub-representation has as decisive the patriarchal system that prevailed for a long time in our society and still dominates and affects women in all areas of your life. This becomes more serious in the capitalist society in which prevail the interests of those that it stops the produced wealth

Ecologia humana e manejo participativo da pesca do búzio Anomalocardia brasiliana (Gmelin, 1791) (Bivalvia: Veneridae) na Reserva de Desenvolvimento Sustentável Estadual Ponta do Tubarão (RN)

Coastal and marine protected areas are created to protect habitat, avoid biodiversity loss, and to help maintain viable fisheries. However, most of these areas in tropical countries occurs in impoverished regions and directly affect the livelihood and survival of coastal communities which directly depend on fisheries and shellfisheries. Therefore, socioeconomic and conservation goals overlap. In this context, fishers should have a central place in resource management. They are critical resource users and their behavior directly affects the system. Shellfish resources are important sources of food, employment and income to fishing communities in Latin America. But despite its widespread use for food and income, there is an urgent need of more research on shellfish management. This research discusses the artisanal fisheries of Venus clam (Anomalocardia brasiliana) (Gmelin, 1791) (Bivalvia: Veneridae) in Brazil, and points out strategies to improve the system. Venus clam is a small and commonly exploited species for food and income on the Brazilian coast. This research was carried out at Ponta do Tubarão Sustainable Development Reserve (Brazilian Northeast coast), where there was no information available about who harvest, where or how much Venus clam has been harvested, despite this resource being exploited for generations. Clam fishery follows the pattern of socio-economic invisibility that general clam exploitation has in Brazil. Methods used were interviews, participatory monitoring and focal follow observation from January 2010 to May 2011. Results include: (a) the identification of shell fishers, (b) how harvest and meat processing are performed (mollusk beds, time spent, gross and net production), (c) the analisis of shell fisher income and their economic sustentability, and (d) the involvement of shell fisher families in data gathering and analyses for the first time. Based on the acquired knowledge, we propose a new institutional arrangement for clam fishery including co-management, fisheries agreement, compensatory arrangements and improvements for the Venus clam value chain such as the establishment of a minimum price for clam meat. This research also includes two other results: a general description for Venus clam harvesting in the Brazilian Northeast coast and a specific discussion about co-management of Venus clam in Brazil. The first one was possible through the meeting of several shell fisherwomen from other states during activities promoted by People of the Tides (PoT) project. PoT was an international initiative aiming to develop coastal communities that depend on mollusk for their livelihood. The second one is a comparison between PoT and Venus clam management at Pirajubaé Marine Extractive Reserve (Santa Catarina). It evaluates the success and failures of these only two initiatives involving co-management of A. brasiliana in Brazil

Entre o êxito e a frustração com a sistematização da assistência de enfermagem

Pesquisa qualitativa orientada pelos referenciais teórico-metodológicos: Interacionismo Simbólico e Grounded Theory para compreender o processo planejamento-implementação da Sistematização da Assistência de Enfermagem (SAE), segundo dois grupos amostrais: enfermeiros e auxiliares/técnicos de enfermagem de um hospital universitário, e desenvolver uma síntese dos modelos teóricos representativos dessas experiências. A saturação teórica configurou-se mediante a análise da 24ª entrevista não diretiva de 12 enfermeiros e de 12 técnicos de enfermagem, lotados em unidades de internação. da análise emergiram dois modelos teóricos, cuja síntese originou o terceiro, intitulado Entre o êxito e a frustração com a operacionalização da SAE: recursos humanos como componente determinante para a visibilidade do enfermeiro no processo de trabalho. Este modelo desvela o déficit de recursos humanos, impulsionando o enfermeiro a realizar uma SAE ilusória, e perpetuando um processo cíclico de sofrimento, por vivenciar a invisibilidade de sua práxis no processo de trabalho.

A clínica psicológica e o público LGBT

Tendo como base os estudos recentes sobre as sexualidades e os gêneros e, em especial, os relativos à diversidade sexual, este artigo promove uma discussão ética sobre as vicissitudes da clínica psicológica com a população LGBT (lésbicas, gays, bissexuais, travestis e transexuais). Para tanto, problematizamos a construção sócio-histórica-cultural da homossexualidade e da heterossexualidade, as hierarquias das sexualidades e algumas ações terapêuticas na clínica direcionada ao público não-heterossexual, tendo em vista a Resolução do Conselho Federal de Psicologia nº 1/99 que estabelece normas de atuação para os psicólogos em relação à questão da orientação sexual. Desse modo, matizamos o discurso da clínica usualmente orientada para o trabalho com pessoas heterossexuais, pensando de modo crítico o trabalho desenvolvido com sujeitos que transitam entre a vulnerabilidade e a invisibilidade devido a sua dissidência dos preceitos heteronormativos.

Understanding poverty from a gender perspective

Includes bibliography

As múltiplas fontes de renda e a pluriatividade nos bairros Aeroporto, Cedro, Córrego da Onça, Ponte Alta e Gramado no município de Presidente Prudente-SP

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)