Digital Commons Network^™

Mechanism Of Impaired Cd8+ T Cell Activation During Ross River Virus Infection, Christopher Bullock

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Ross River virus (RRV) is a mosquito transmitted virus endemic to Australia that infects humans and causes acute symptoms of rash, fever, myalgia, and fatigue. Although systemic viral infection subsides within a few weeks, joint pain lingers in many patients for months. Active viral replication is not readily detected in this chronic phase, although persistent viral RNA has been found in the synovial fluid of patients. This can be studied in mice, which can be productively infected with RRV when inoculated in the foot. Like in humans, in the chronic phase of disease, viral RNA is still present in the …

Exploring The Homeostatic Functions And Driving Forces Of Lymphatic Outflow Pathways From The Central Nervous System, Zachary Matthew Papadopoulos

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Lymphatic drainage from the central nervous system (CNS) has been noted and described for several hundred years, yet its physiological roles have remained unclear. The fluid homeostasis of the CNS has long stood as an area of scientific interest due to primary disorders including hydrocephalus. However, the early days of neuroimmunology leaned on the lack of lymphatic vasculature in the CNS as a contributing explanation for ‘immune privilege’ in the CNS. As a result, the importance of lymphatics in CNS homeostasis has remained poorly understood and controversial. Following a renaissance in interest in the contribution of lymphatics to CNS homeostasis, …

Pediatric Providers' Views On Participating In An Hpv Vaccine Quality Improvement Intervention: A Qualitative Analysis, Edan Leshem, Sara Malone, Andrew Solsrud, Sherry Dodd, Shannon Rook, Sharon Graham, Lauren Ericson, Ruoyun Wang, Katie Plax, Jason Newland

2020-Current year OA Pubs

BACKGROUND: Human papillomavirus (HPV), a common sexually transmitted infection in the US, contributes to oropharyngeal and urogenital cancers. To improve HPV vaccine uptake, quality improvement (QI) interventions that address barriers to vaccination in primary care may help. This study aims to understand pediatric primary care providers' (PCP) perspectives on participating in an HPV QI intervention that utilized practice facilitation to improve HPV vaccine uptake in pediatric primary care clinics.

METHODS: Participants were pediatric PCPs whose clinics completed a QI intervention that utilized practice facilitation led by an outside facilitator. One PCP from each practice completed a 15-min semi-structured exit interview. …

Brain Volumes, Cognitive, And Adaptive Skills In School-Age Children With Down Syndrome, Rebecca Grzadzinski, Kelly Botteron, Natasha Marrus, Robert Mckinstry, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

BACKGROUND: Down syndrome (DS) is the most common congenital neurodevelopmental disorder, present in about 1 in every 700 live births. Despite its prevalence, literature exploring the neurobiology underlying DS and how this neurobiology is related to behavior is limited. This study fills this gap by examining cortical volumes and behavioral correlates in school-age children with DS.

METHODS: School-age children (mean = 9.7 years ± 1.1) underwent comprehensive assessments, including cognitive and adaptive assessments, as well as an MRI scan without the use of sedation. Children with DS (n = 35) were compared to available samples of typically developing (TD; n …

The Effect Of A Low-Carbohydrate Diet On Evoked Pain And Quality Of Life In Non-Hispanic Black Women With Knee Osteoarthritis: A Pilot Study, Asia M Wiggins, Larissa J Strath, Gray E Mcpherson, Barbara A Gower, Amy M Goss, Burel R Goodin, Robert E Sorge

2020-Current year OA Pubs

BACKGROUND: Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a prevalent chronic pain condition that can significantly impact quality of life and contribute to recognized chronic pain racial disparities. We have shown that a low-carbohydrate diet (LCD) can reduce KOA-related pain. Our previous work suggested that the LCD was more beneficial for women and non-Hispanic Black (NHB) adults, but our sample was not sufficiently diverse. Thus, we sought to determine whether the LCD may be beneficial for NHB women with KOA on measures of self-reported and evoked pain.

METHODS: Fourteen NHB women (M = 55.93, S.D. = 7.79 years of age) with KOA were …

Chaotic Waters And Well-Tempered Specters: The Philippnes As Source Of Overseas Labor, Joel David

Kritika Kultura

The precolonial territory that became the Philippines was a participant in maritime Asian politics and warfare that made the Southeast Asian region appear unstable and undefined to newly arrived Western observers. In truth, regional network-building amid labor shortages was a constant concern of the various peoples, with their interdependent arrangements occasionally readjusted because of piratical raids conducted by more capable or determined centers in order to increase their working populations. The Western occupation forces (themselves also subject to limitations in their number) sought to stabilize the communities they subjugated in order to more effectively bankroll their colonial projects, an arrangement …

Mobility Necropolitics And Harmless Islanders, Jinhyoung Lee

Kritika Kultura

This article critically discusses the wartime mobilization policies implemented by the Japanese Empire on the Korean peninsula during the Pacific War (1941-1945) in terms of mobility necropolitics, a framework that combines mobility studies and Achile Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics. In particular, by examining the lives of the Korean islanders on the imaginary Julan island in Kim Sa-ryang’s novel Bada-ui Norae [Songs of the Sea] (1943-1944) through Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of “harmless” and “desubjectivation,” this paper seeks to excavate a postcolonial moment in colonial Korea. In the “death worlds” of the dead and those who will die on the battlefields, “harmless …

The Island Literature Museum In Korea, Inseop Shin

Kritika Kultura

The literature museum serves as a unique locale that emits the symbolism and cultural essence of literature, enhancing the image of a region. However, in Korea, islands have long been estranged from literature due to insufficient literary infrastructure. Conversely, from a mainland-centric perspective, islands have often been considered as peripheral cultural spaces for poetry and novels. This study focuses on the regional characteristics of islands in Korea and examines the relationship between literature and islands through case studies of Jeju Island’s Literature Museum, Yun Seon-do Literature Museum of Bogildo, and Literary Island Nodo. Each of these island literature museums presents …

Island And Mobility In The Face Of Climate Change: Robert Smithson's Floating Island, Jaeeun Lee

Kritika Kultura

This essay aims to examine the entropic landscape in motion that appears in Floating Island by Robert Smithson, a distinguished earth artist active in the 1970s. Floating Island was a temporary artificial mobile island made with earth, rocks, native trees, and shrubs, towed by a tugboat around Manhattan Island. Smithson attempted to combine his artistic imagination with the theory of science, particularly entropy, a pivotal concept in the second law of thermodynamics while also developing an original idea of his own, namely “dialectics of entropic change” that combined entropy with dialectic. He believed that the dialectic could go beyond entropy …

Where Island Studies Meets Mobility Studies In Literary And Cultural Studies, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes, Luisa Gomez

Kritika Kultura

This special section challenges the conventional view of islands as isolated entities, aiming to portray island life through various lenses like literature, geography, and history. By merging mobility studies with island studies, it explores how movements within and around islands shed light on societal phenomena such as climate change, infrastructure development, migration policies, and trauma borne out of violent historical events. The articles, stemming from a conference on Jeju Island, South Korea, analyze power dynamics, imagination, and re-imagination between mainland and island, center and periphery. They reflect on islands as subjects for social scrutiny and platforms for cultural expression. Through …

Cry For Me, Argentina!: Taiwanese Soap Opera Diplomacy In Latin America, Adam Lifshey

Kritika Kultura

This essay examines the intersections of Taiwanese soap operas and foreign policy in Latin America, the one area of the world where Taiwan has retained some degree of formal diplomatic recognition despite the pressures of China. Yet has the decline in official Taiwanese power even in this region been compensated by a new kind of cultural power? The distribution of Taiwanese soap operas dubbed into Spanish from the mid-2010s to the early 2020s marks the first time that Taiwan tried to cultivate favor among Latin American publics at large. This was an explicitly diplomatic maneuver. But was it perceived as …

Re-Entering Fandom Pages In The Era Of New Media Ecosystems: The Case Of Turkish Television Series And Their Devoted Viewer Communities, Orhun Yakun, Serhat Kaymas

Kritika Kultura

Given the global prominence of Turkish television series, there is a strong necessity for re- evaluating the constitution of transnational fandom groups in new media ecosystems. Hence, the reasons and motivations of multinational fandom communities are something of a blind spot in fandom studies, especially in the case of devoted fan communities of Turkish television series. Most contemporary studies in fandom literature have mainly focused on television viewers’ experiences in individual countries due to cultural proximity and cultural discount theories rather than the constitution of multinational fandom groups in the new media ecosystem. However, this article argues that such existing …

Practicing The Sublime, Raising The Marginal Self: The Chinese Muslim Writer Zhang Chengzhi's Narrative Of Adventure, Xiayin Dang

Kritika Kultura

This paper examines the concept of “adventure” in a series of stories by a well-known Chinese Muslim writer Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948). Zhang is famous for searching out and depicting landscapes, especially in northwest China. This paper will explore in what ways adventures in landscapes become a crucial mechanism for advancing plot development. How do adventures in Zhang’s stories create grand space-time in novels through transformations of different geographic topographies and historical moments? Why are these adventures depicted with attributes of the sublime? More importantly, what is the intertextual relationship between the adventures of the characters in the text and …

Comradeship, Remolding, And Rectification In Norman Wilwayco's Gerilya, Laurence Marvin S. Castillo

Kritika Kultura

In this article, I examine the representation of the long-running Maoist national democratic (NatDem) revolution in Norman Wilwayco’s award-winning novel Gerilya (2008), which centers on the uneasy, often violent encounters between petty bourgeois revolutionaries from the city and revolutionary peasants in the countryside. By engaging with the issues of revolutionary errors, remolding, and rectification, I explore how the novel’s predominantly unflattering depiction of revolutionary guerrillas track the difficulties that underpin the process of revolutionary remolding and the formation of comradely relations. Such portrayal conceives of the revolution as a complex social process marked by the tension between, on the one …

Front Matter, Kritika Kultura

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

Porno, Peera Songkünnatham

Kritika Kultura

This article consists of “Porno,” an English translation of a Thai short story titled “หนังโป๊” by Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa, and an introduction explicating literary and cultural issues that arise from the translation process. First published in 2018 in an ad-hoc anthology to fundraise for families of Thai political prisoners, the story captures the atmosphere of political repression— masked as depression—in Bangkok after the death of King Bhumibol in 2016, as refracted through the character of an overseas Filipino worker named Angele, herself no stranger to political repression. The connection between Thailand and the Philippines begins at the story’s inception: the Thai …

Nationalism, Feminism, And Modernity And Maria Paz Zamora-Mascuñana's Mi Obolo, Diana Villanueva Romero

Kritika Kultura

This article aims to discuss Maria Paz Zamora-Mascuñana’s Mi obolo (1924) in light of biographical and culturally meaningful findings obtained through archival work conducted in 2018 and 2022 using the Library of Congress’s holdings of Philippine periodicals from the American colonial period as well as those of the Southeast Asian Newspaper collection at the East View Global Press Archive (GPA).3 The main claim here is that, with the publication of Mi obolo, Zamora-Mascuñana materialized her political will to contribute to the construction of the nation at a time when women’s participation in Filipino politics was met with resistance due to …

The Forming Of Ethical Evaluation Of Shuihu Zhuan In The Context Of Guanxi Culture, Ruihui Han

Kritika Kultura

Shuihu Zhuan, a work of fiction with a perverse narrative of atrocities, has been criticized as a novel with serious ethical demerits. Yet, this novel remains widely appreciated within Chinese society, with many holding its morals in high esteem. This presents an apparent paradox when juxtaposed against the ethical criticisms directed at the novel. Understanding the forming of the ethical evaluation is pivotal, especially given the significant role of ethical references in literary commentary—a backdrop further intensified by traditional Chinese literary theory, which is deeply influenced by Confucian moral teachings. Since interpretations of Shuihu Zhuan should consider its context, this …

Resisting And Transgressing White Patriarchal Constructions Of Race And Gender, Danica Čerče

Kritika Kultura

Until recently a marginalized voice in Australian literary studies, Australian Indigenous literature has gained an important role in the articulation of Indigenous peoples’ political thought. As one of the most frequent media of Indigenous Australians’ artistic expression, poetry presents a commanding exposé of the logic and hypocrisy of whiteness and a potent denunciation of the ongoing racialized and gendered violence in Australia. This essay is focused on the works of Romaine Moreton and Lisa Bellear, which is particularly powerful in addressing violence against Aboriginal women and girls. Framed by an interest in the radical potential of postcolonial literature to dismantle …

The Multispecies Soundscape In Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, Qianqian Chen, Joan Qionglin Tan

Kritika Kultura

Red Sorghum, the masterpiece of Mo Yan, the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, is an exemplar of the Chinese root-seeking literature in the 1980s. Comparing the red sorghum field to an auditory field accommodating diversified species, the article unveils that its multispecies soundscape is characterized by its animated liveliness, tumultuous polyphony, and acoustic harmony between sound and silence. By delving into the historical and cultural context of the novel, as well as Mo’s personal background, this paper concludes that the clamorous multispecies soundscape in the red sorghum field can be attributed to Chinese ancient ecological philosophy, Gaomi …

Ethical Dilemma And Narrative Strategies In David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988 And 2017), Xin Zhang, Shumin He

Kritika Kultura

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988), the first play written by an Asian American playwright to win the Tony Awards, remains his most renowned and controversial play. The play has been criticized for catering to mainstream discourse for reproducing the rather negative “Dragon Lady” stereotype in the name of subverting the “Madame Butterfly” stereotype. However, with the unreliable narration, the play connotes dual narrative dynamics which creates great aesthetic tension and powerful ironic effect. But such a rhetorical device has, to some extent, also led to the alienation between the play’s representing strategies and the implied author’s intention, which results …

Front Matter, Kritika Kultura

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

Soundscape : Transmit, Jen Mutia Eusebio

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

"Effable Nature In Unheard Stories": Tishani Doshi's Poetics Of Discovery, Juan Ignacio Oliva

Kritika Kultura

This article aims to study the multiple nature metaphors used in Tishani Doshi’s poetry to convey messages of understanding and epiphany. Born in 1975 in Madras (now Chennai), Doshi is an Indian author and academic who has gained indisputable reputation as a novelist and poet, with other cultural and artistic interests like dancing and writing journal articles. She is especially devoted to narrating the urges of contemporary human existence, and to defending class, gender, and racial rights violated by capitalist patriarchal anthropocentrism, all while embracing the aesthetic beauty of artistic creation as a weapon to change the world. Therefore, in …

Lindey Collen: Indoceanic Solidarity, Felicity Hand

Kritika Kultura

The 2020 oil spill in Mauritius and the fictional events portrayed in Lindsey Collen’s novels both point to the major issues that recur in her work: the struggle for class equality, environmentalism, women’s rights, and the struggle for a communal-free society. In this article, I explore Collen’s novel Boy in order to tease out the concerns that link Mauritius to a larger Indoceanic community. The novel maps out the geography of Mauritius by which the local landscape is foregrounded as an active participant in the colonial history of the nation. Likewise, Collen underscores the importance of human contact and commitment …

"Such A Nice Little Place": Rhizomatic Partnership In Nayomi Munaweera's Island Of A Thousand Mirrors, Isabel Alonso-Breto

Kritika Kultura

This article provides a rhizomatic partnership reading of diasporic Sri Lankan author Nayomi Munaweera’s novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors. The novel is analyzed in the light of the bio-cultural partnership-domination lens developed by Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry and underscores the fact that the rhizomatic quality of Indoceanic cultures can be traced even when it appears to be severely in jeopardy. Carrying out an analysis of different forms of domination and partnership models in the narrative thread, this article defends that the novel resolves that it is only outside of Sri Lanka, in diasporic territory, that the devastating …

Kaleidoscopic Visions Of South Africa: A Study Of State And Station In Imraan Coovadia's Tales Of The Metric System, J. Coplen Rose

Kritika Kultura

This paper discusses the structure of Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System: A Novel. Drawing inspiration from Karina Szczurek’s review of Coovadia’s book, the article explores the kaleidoscopic view of the South African state that emerges across the storylines in the novel. Critically, this paper connects Szczurek’s terminology to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome. The multiple perspectives that intersect over the course of Coovadia’s text foreground the polyvalent bonds connecting characters across space and time. These links form a web between characters which closely resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the rhizome in A Thousand …

Ronnie Govender And Asian Belonging Within South Africa, Maurice O'Connor

Kritika Kultura

This paper explores the Asian presence in South Africa through the work of Ronnie Govender. One of its concerns is how fictional worlds based on real-life experiences become a means to counter the discourses of apartheid that insisted upon the incommensurability of cultural difference as regards Asian and African communities. In this light, the paper references how a white hegemony sets about compromising an already fragile co-existence that existed between the Black, Coloured, and Asian communities and considers the body of Govender’s work as a repository which aids future generations to connect with the traumatic nature of apartheid so as …

Indian Ocean Nomadic Diasporas: Destabilizing Master Narratives Of Belonging In M. G. Vassanji's Short Fiction, Dolors Ortega

Kritika Kultura

M. G. Vassanji’s evocative short fiction delves into the complex and intertwined tapestry of cultures that Indian Ocean communities represent. His characters lead border and nomadic lives and they occupy in-transit subject positions. Signs of constant navigation between different cultural contexts abound in stories about diasporic subjects who try to negotiate the in-between worlds they inhabit by crossing identity thresholds, such as the ones built around the secular- religious, Western-Eastern, and present-past divide. This article explores the potential that the Indian Ocean experience offers and seeks to unravel the extent to which Indian Ocean migration can effect transformation within more …

Gurnah's Men: Rethinking Muslim Masculinities In The Indian Ocean World, Felicity Hand

Kritika Kultura

This article explores how Abdulrazak Gurnah illustrates the varieties of Muslim masculinity in the Indian Ocean world through an analysis of two of his youthful characters, Hassan Omar, from his debut novel Memory of Departure and Salim Yahya, from his more recent Gravel Heart. Both young men find themselves pitted against a more traditional male role which stifles them while, at the same time, encourages them to envisage a more fluid understanding of what it means to be a man in a predominantly Muslim society like Zanzibar. The fissures in the relationship that Hassan and Salim have with their fathers …