Wartburg College

Yōkai, understood broadly as supernatural beings or forces, are rooted in elements of traditional Japanese beliefs, practices, and lore. In the modern (post-Meiji) era, and especially in recent decades, yōkai often function as nostalgic iconographic callbacks to an “Old Japan,” a world which is regarded as already lost or actively fading in a modern world which privileges efficiency, dominance, and a rather humorless rationalism. While stereotypical assumptions and depictions of Old Japan can be problematic, the elements of the traditional Japanese past as represented in yōkai texts, particularly recent films, can serve as useful wayfinders in identifying elements that were, and are, important in various facets of traditional Japan. This article discusses three yōkai-related films in which specific details invoking and portraying Old Japan—in this instance, agrarian landscapes, community rituals, and social relationships—can be identified and analyzed: My Neighbor Totoro (dir. Miyazaki Hayao, 1988); The Great Yōkai War (dir. Miike Takashi, 2005); and Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura (dir. Yamazaki Takashi, 2017). These films serve as examples of the ways in which yōkai—as characters, story elements, and metaphors—can serve as evocative guides within various areas of Japan studies.

The work represented in the following essay explores meaning-making in the context of creating in a digitally saturated culture. The digital imperative, with its binary oppositional structure (ones and zeroes), has increasingly asserted itself as the only option, from learning management systems (LMSs) to nearly all financial transactions, to the deepening gulfs between very rich and very poor, to increased extremes in left- and right-wing politics, and has deepened an already-entrenched binary oppositional thinking in creativity, nature, identity, and how we imagine the future itself, i.e., the extinction ending versus the techno-utopia. Binary oppositional thinking persists when people want simple, direct answers to complex questions. We are living in such a time when anxiety and grief over climate change have left many people with deep uncertainties about the future. How might an embrace of complexity and creativity help us transmute binary oppositional thinking in the face of these challenges? Through personal and scholarly narrative, this study addresses this question through an exploration of narrative experiences.

Bill Sherman's contribution explores a subject that Ernst Gombrich returned to again and again - a subject which, at first glance, looks trivial, but which, in Gombrich's hands, provides unexpected evidence for the intersection of mind, art and value: doodling. The Story of Art and Art and Illusion invited their readers to carry out their own experiments with doodling, to explore the psychology of characterisation. His 1991 essay, ‘Four Centuries of Doodles’, saw him examine the history, from Vasari's account of Cimabue, who “instead of attending to his lessons, he spent the whole day … painting in his books … men, horses, houses and various other fantasies.’ In Gombrich's treatment, Sherman reveals, playful scribbles had a role not just in concentration but in creation itself; for Leonardo, they aligned with the very “flow of his imagination.”

Glycoconjugates are ubiquitous and of tremendous significance in biological systems. To understand their function, it is critical to be able to accurately elucidate their precise structure, even when only minute amounts can be obtained from cells or tissues. We will present new analytical tools for the analysis of glycosphingolipids (GSLs) and other glycoconjugates. GSLs are a group of glycolipids with a glycan head glycosidically linked to the C-1 hydroxyl group of a ceramide tail. While some diversity in GSLs is due to the ceramide group, the primary structural and functional categorizations are based upon glycan variability with impacts in cell adhesion, signaling, proliferation, endocytosis, intracellular transport, inflammation, and apoptosis. This study adopts a comparative approach for identification and quantification of GSLs. Therefore, two methods for analyzing GSLs were compared. In the first experiment, isolated GSLs were permethylated and analyzed using nanospray tandem mass spectrometry (nESI-MS/MS). In the second experiment, GSLs were first cleaved with endoglycoceramidase (EGCase) II, and the released glycans were fluorescently labeled and analyzed with UPLC-FLR-MS/MS. Notably, the UPLC approach led to greater resolution and higher sensitivity resulting from reduced heterogeneity by removing the ceramide. The EGCase II released glycans comprised both neutral and sialylated species of varying sizes. MS/MS was used for structure assignment confirmation in both methods. Since permethylation and procainamide labeling changes the m/z value of GSLs and glycoforms, the limited existing online databases and tools for lipids and metabolites are of small use for data interpretation. A database of possible m/z values for GSLs and glycoforms was compiled for assistance in data interpretation. Finally, we found that utilization of an internal standard can be helpful for quantification of GSLs. This work was supported by NIH R24GM137782, GlycoMIP, a National Science Foundation Materials Innovation Platform funded through Cooperative Agreement DMR1933525 and the the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences Division, under award #DE-SC0015662.

Abstract The Effect of Summer Engineering Camps on Rural and Urban Students' Interest in STEM (Work-in-Progress) This paper investigates how living in an urban versus rural area influences students' interest to pursue a career in STEM. Data collected for this research came from a summer engineering camp held at a local university and is a part of the Department of Education's GEARUP program. The camp enabled students to learn more about STEM as a future career choice. As a part of the camp, the students worked in teams and engaged in various activities involving engineering research. The camp included activities such as, remotely operated vehicles (ROV's) which were used to collect water samples and measure various water properties. Students also built simple sensors to measure air quality and collected stream data. During the camp, students developed engineering research hypotheses with the help of their teachers. The students then tested those hypotheses, and thought like engineers. At the end of the camp, the student teams presented what they learned and their findings. Data was collected through pre and post camp surveys. The data included questions about students' interest in STEM, the factors that influence their interest, as well as their parents and friends' perceptions about STEM. Furthermore, the parents were surveyed about their education, income, and their perception of math, science, and engineering. The students also indicated whether they live in a rural or urban area. While the parents did not attend the camp, they were involved through viewing a blog that was updated daily to include activities of the camp as well as pictures and comments from the students' journals. Data was collected and analyzed over a 3 year period as part of a longitudinal study. The analysis involves both quantitative and qualitative data which was collected simultaneously. Both streams of data are analyzed concurrently in a mixed methods research design to offer a deeper understanding of what influences student interest in STEM. The results are broken down and compared based on whether students live in a rural or urban areas. Quantitative data is analyzed using a statistical analysis software to determine if there was a statistically significant increase in interest (after the STEM camp) among rural and urban participants. In addition, if an increase in interest is present in both groups (or absent in both groups) we determine if the increase is significantly greater for one of the groups. These tests have the potential to provide evidence that the STEM camp was more effective at increasing interest among either rural or urban students. Qualitative data will be analyzed using a specialized qualitative software (MaxQDA) to find themes in the data. The quantitative and qualitative data is combined and presented in a mixed methods format. This research focuses on the differences in interest in STEM between students living in rural and urban areas. The knowledge gained could help in designing future camps to better align with the different needs of the two groups of students.

Chapter 3 focuses on the Lamb’s place on a heavenly throne, which is viewed in light of the ancient practice of divine throne-sharing. Widely attested in the ancient Mediterranean world, throne-sharing occurred when one entity shared the throne of a deity or occupied a throne in close proximity to a deity. Most often throne-sharers were kings, and the king’s place on a divine throne functioned to demonstrate the divine legitimacy of their rule. Chapter 3 surveys the evidence for throne-sharing in various ancient Mediterranean contexts in order to shed light on the appropriation of this ideology in Revelation. In short, the Lamb’s position on the heavenly throne thus designates the Lamb as a divinely-elected king. At the same time, it functioned as an implicit rejection of imperial claims of the divine legitimacy of the emperor’s rule.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was the second highest-grossing movie of 1991. Its fuzzy version of the Middle Ages invokes the Angevins only in cameo and revises a genre of medievalism I call ‘Robin Hood Times’. This medievalism claims a specific setting, usually during the reign of King Richard I, even while it generalizes that setting enough to comment on contemporary problems. In Prince of Thieves, the characters Azeem and Mortianna serve as opposites, their racialized bodies participating in an individualized discourse about race that ultimately upholds a neoliberal, ‘colorblind’ form of white supremacy. Azeem’s physical competence and ability also contrast sharply with Mortianna’s physical frailty and deformity in a classic example of what Mitchell and Snyder (2000) call ‘narrative prosthesis.’ The intersections of race and disability in the fantasy setting of Robin Hood Times suggest that the solution to social injustice is individual rather than systemic. The return of the ‘good’ King Richard I restores order, virtue, the Locksley lands—and the status quo. The Robin Hood story has revolutionary potential, but this version of Robin Hood Times chooses to reinforce neoliberal ableism and ‘colorblind’ racial tolerance instead of the utopian promises of equity that the forest society could provide.

In late eighteenth-century West Africa, cycles of increasing violence and slave raiding sparked a desire for new modes of political organization. In the Sahel and savannah lands, there was a wave of military campaigns to establish Muslim-ruled states. In the western Sahara Desert, however, the Sufi Muslim theologians Sīdī al-Mukhtār (d. 1811) and his son and successor Sīdī Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826)—founders of the Kunta scholarly network—adopted a different model. Drawing on material and social capital acquired through trans-Saharan trade and pedagogical networks, they consolidated their position as socioreligious leaders, playing a pivotal role in the political developments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In Sorcery or Science? Ariela Marcus-Sells tells the story of Sīdī al-Mukhtār and Sīdī Muḥammad al-Kuntī through the prism of their writings on ‘the sciences of the unseen’ (ʿulūm al-ghayb). Through close analysis of these texts, Marcus-Sells looks at how the Kunta scholars defined and limited access to legitimate knowledge and practice, thus responding to—and shaping—the social authority under which they lived.