Echoes of Exile

Topical Hemostatic Agents in Surgery: A Surgeon's Perspective

Considering the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the criticisms levelled against it, and the literary response it has evoked in terms of a struggle over definitions of trauma and recovery can help the debate over the perceived monocultural bias of trauma theory in its ‘classical’, mid-1990s formulation and the fraught relationship between such tendencies and the commitment to social justice on which the field prides itself. Insofar as the TRC mapped Euro-American concepts of trauma and recovery onto an apartheid-colonial situation, it was subject to the same problems and limitations faced by trauma theory—problems and limitations which post-apartheid literature has not been slow to confront. Sindiwe Magona’s truth-and-reconciliation novel Mother to Mother, for example, can be seen to supplement the work of the TRC by critically revisiting its limits, exclusions, and elisions—and thus also to suggest a possible way for ‘traditional’ trauma theory to reinvent and renew itself.

Objective: Early trauma exposure has been demonstrated to significantly impact brain volume. Childhood trauma also contributes to onset of psychopathology, particularly depression. We sought to identify gray matter volume changes unique to trauma exposure in adolescent depression and hypothesized that adolescents with diagnosis of major depressive disorder (MDD) and childhood trauma would have smaller gray matter volume and thickness in areas previously identified as reduced with childhood trauma exposure relative to non-traumatized depressed adolescents and healthy controls. Methods: We obtained structural MRI scans for 120 adolescents with a history of past trauma exposure and a current diagnosis major depressive disorder (MDD, n=29), a diagnosis of MDD, but no trauma exposure (n=49), and healthy controls (n=42). Adolescents with a diagnosis of MDD and trauma exposure compared with adolescents with MDD and no history of trauma exposure showed increased gray matter volume in the right superior parietal lobe (p=0.001), a cortical region important for processing of visuospatial cues and implicated in traumatic memory. Positive trauma history status included sexual or physical abuse, or trauma with risk of death or bodily harm. Results: Our findings indicate increased right superior parietal volume in depressed adolescents with history of trauma exposure that is distinct from findings related to depression or suicidal behavior. Conclusion: Our finding of increased superior parietal volume in adolescents exposed to past trauma compared with adolescents not exposed to past trauma may indicate differences in information processing, particularly visuospatial processing and working memory, in trauma exposed, depressed adolescents. The absence of any significant relationships between superior parietal lobe volume abnormality and measures of present symptom severity, suicidal ideation, past suicide attempt and medication in adolescents with history of depression and past trauma suggests that increased right superior parietal lobe volume may be related to trauma exposure in adolescents with depression.

Narrating Violence, Narrating Self: Exodus and Collective Identity in Early Rabbinic Literature

In view of the current challenges to reconciliation and unity between the DRC and the URCSA this article attempts to join in the transdisciplinary discourse on cultural trauma and collective memory in order to find a way of dealing collectively with past traumas in a constructive way. It argues that the concepts of cultural trauma and collective memory are significant in dealing with distresses of the past, in order to create a collective memory, which implies taking responsibility for the present and the future. It further introduces a collective pastoral hermeneutics to assist both churches to take responsibility for the past by embodying collective memory shared with the ‘other’ in order to transform the past in the present for the future.

How do bodies communicate in the analytic relationship? What is the therapeutic action of embodied communication? In this paper, I examine the effects of a form of embodied communication that I refer to as “embodied resonance.” Using a model of mind that is comprised of multiple self states that become dissociated in response to trauma and that are carried, unsymbolized, in body and mind, I suggest that “embodied resonance” enables patient and analyst to make initial contact with dissociated self-states. Consequently, the analyst helps her patient understand, verbalize, and incorporate a greater and truer sense of himself into his life story. I present a detailed clinical example of my work with Jon, an elderly patient suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, to illustrate how understanding the impact of a patient’s traumatic past can be a freeing experience that allows him to come to terms with his particularly traumatic aging experience. Changes in self understanding were reflected in changes in my patient’s body and changes in his experience of himself as an aging person. I also suggest that whether implicitly known or explicitly verbalized, embodied resonance can offer enriching, mutative attachment experiences. Finally, the analyst’s somatic attunement to her own traumatic memories and dissociated self states is discussed as a way to inform clinical impasses in the analytic treatment.

This article examines the transformation of gender roles and marriage norms among Indian Muslim women within the framework of Islamic legal principles, modernity, and contemporary socio-political developments. Urbanization, inclusive education policies, and state-sponsored reforms have significantly enhanced the public visibility of Muslim women, particularly those from educated and socioeconomically advanced backgrounds. However, this transformation is not consistent; in communities shaped by traditionalism and religious orthodoxy, the pace of change remains slow and fragmented. The paper highlights how access to education and employment fosters economic independence and increased participation in family decision-making, while simultaneously giving rise to new syntheses between religious norms and modern aspirations. Core Islamic family law concepts such as nikāḥ (marriage contract), mahr (dower), nafaqah (maintenance), and polygyny are critically reinterpreted in light of evolving gender dynamics. The study critiques regressive practices like dowry demands and widow stigmatization as cultural deviations from Islamic ethics. It argues that Muslim women are not merely subjects of change but active agents who reconcile faith and autonomy in redefining their social roles. By bridging classical jurisprudence and contemporary realities, this article offers a holistic view of gender in Islam, foregrounding Muslim women’s agency in shaping family, marriage, and public life.

This paper deals with the consensus problem for heterogeneous multi-agent systems. Different from most existing consensus protocols, we consider the consensus seeking of two types of agents, namely, active agents and passive agents. The objective is to directly control the active agents such that the states of all the agents would achieve consensus. In order to obtain a computational approach, we subtly introduce an appropriate Markov chain to cast the heterogeneous systems into a unified framework. Such a framework is helpful for tackling the constraints from passive agents. Furthermore, a sufficient and necessary condition is established to guarantee the consensus in heterogeneous multi-agent systems. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.

This article draws upon Jenny Edkins’ notion of ‘trauma time’ and asks how it helps us to better understand entanglement with past trauma in the context of gender-based violence (GBV). Edkins argues that enacting trauma time allows for multiple narratives and resistance, challenging the normalisation of traumas by sovereign power within linear time. I propose that trauma time offers valuable insights into better understanding GBV by highlighting the socio-political nature of trauma and critiquing the linear narrative of healing and restoring social order. Through an analysis of debates over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in the United Kingdom, this article unpacks how social actors enact trauma time surrounding various forms of GBV, especially gendered violence against trans people. I argue that while sharing some similarities with gender critical feminists’ invocation of trauma time, the enactment of trauma time by trans rights activists troubles and challenges the reproduction of the linear narratives that hide multiple sites of violence. Going beyond examining individual temporal experiences of trauma, this article interrogates how different ways of enacting trauma time, originating from systemic sources of GBV, reveal non-linear and multiple temporalities. It also contributes to a deeper understanding of societal contestations over negotiating and challenging temporal order.

Alexandrium catenella cyst accumulation by passive and active dispersal agents: Implications for the potential spreading risk in Chilean Patagonian fjords

Metaphor analysis in real-world discourse is increasingly becoming the focus of many cognitive studies. Accordingly, this paper seeks to investigate how euro adoption in Lithuania in 2015 was metaphorically communicated by the media. The study is carried out within the framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA), which was developed byCharteris-Black (2005, 2011),Musolff (2008),Hart (2010). Thus, a three-step metaphor analysis procedure (Identified→ Interpreted→ Explained) was employed in order to analyze the attitude towards euro adoption presented in Lithuanian media. The findings show that the euro is most frequently conceptualized as aliving organismwith different scenarios (active agentandpassive agent) being realized linguistically. In the final stage – explanation – metaphors were analyzed from a rhetorical perspective, which means that an attempt was made to look into how metaphors communicate positive or negative attitudes about euro adoption in the media. The results demonstrate that personification of the euro makes the idea of euro adoption more understandable, it activates a range of emotions and evaluates it. This leads to further insights about the way the media exercises its power in an attempt to persuade people and manipulate their attitudes, emotions and opinions.

This work presents the performance of WLAN and MANET networks using the auto-configuration of Mobile IP Agents Protocol (DRMIPA). This scheme would allow groups of MIP nodes in WLANs or MANETs to enjoy IP mobility at any foreign or local network that doesn’t implement MIP. To maintain a failure free MIP network, a passive agent is elected from an active agent if this active agent leaves or ceases its participation from current network. The DRMIPA protocol is implemented in WLAN and MANET. A performance analysis is done using a real world testbed scenario.

In electricity markets with a dual-pricing scheme for balancing energy, controllable production units typically participate in the balancing market as “active” actors by offering regulating energy to the system, while renewable stochastic units are treated as “passive” participants that create imbalances and are subject to less competitive prices. Against this background, we propose an innovative market framework whereby the participant in the balancing market is allowed to act as an active agent (i.e., a provider of regulating energy) in some trading intervals and as a passive agent (i.e., a user of regulating energy) in some others. To illustrate and evaluate the proposed market framework, we consider the case of a virtual power plant (VPP) that trades in a two-settlement electricity market composed of a day-ahead and a dual-price balancing market. We formulate the optimal market offering problem of the VPP as a three-stage stochastic program, where uncertainty is in the day-ahead electricity prices, balancing prices and the power output from the renewable units. Computational experiments show that the VPP expected revenues can increase substantially compared to an active-only or passive-only participation, and in the paper, we discuss how the variability of the stochastic sources affects the balancing market participation choice.

This paper is a case study based on the research of the process of arranged marriages in Pesantren. Arranged marriages have basically been a tradition in the world for a long time. In the process, the women involved in arranged marriages are often put in the position of an object and are considered to have no voice. Women have been seen as passive agents that do not contribute anything in the process of arranged marriages, whereas those who have full power in the process of arranged marriages in Pesantren are the Kyai or other male family members. This study took place in the five major Pesantren in East Java. One female informant, the daughter of a Kyai, was taken from each Pesantren so there were five informants. This research was conducted through in-depth interviews using the capital theory by Pierre Bourdieu, power relation by Michel Foucault, and women's agency by Sherry B. Ortner. This study reveals that Kyai’s daughters and wives, Nyai, are active agents, as well. Using the capital they have, women played their agencies in different ways to achieve certain goals. They engage in critiques on the habitus practice of arranged marriages. They also negotiate and resist when the arranged marriage process runs. This study confirms that doing research focused on women’s voice can expose additional aspects of women’s agency that have been widely ignored. Keywords:Pesantren, Women’s agency, Arranged marriages

Working the Diaspora: The Impact of Labor on the AngloAmerican World, 1650-1850. By Frederick C. Knight. (New York: New York University Press, 2010. Pp. 240. Cloth, $48.00.)Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. By Jane G. Landers. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 340. Cloth, $29.95.)Reviewed by W. Bryan Rommel-RuizFrederick Knight and Jane Landers depict blacks in the Atlantic world as active agents who shaped the historical trajectory of the Anglo-American colonies. Working the Diaspora shows that labor skills and were important factors in the slave trade in the southern mainland North American and Caribbean Anglo-American colonies. Africans in the Anglo-American colonies were able to retain much of their indigenous culture and influenced the development of AngloAmerican slavery. Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions explores the history of Atlantic Creoles and their ability to use their unique skills to negotiate a better life as slaves and to take advantage of the tumultuous world created by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions to pursue their freedoms. Both books reveal that the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were critical periods in the history of slavery in the Black Atlantic, even as that institution came under assault during the Age of Democratic Revolutions.1Frederick Knight's Working the Diaspora is a thought-provoking study of slavery and culture in the southern mainland North American and Caribbean Anglo-American colonies. Although historians long have noted that English colonists sought slaves from specific tribes for their labor skills, few have emphasized the ways slaves were attractive laborers because of their African knowledge of tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation. In other words, Anglo-American slaveholders in the region Knight studies respected labor skills and that particular tribes brought to their plantations, and wanted them to transplant their culture to Anglo America. Drawing upon the works of historians such as Peter Wood as well as anthropologists, Knight examines material culture and traditional primary sources to demonstrate the ways slaves retained indigenous traditions and customs in the New World. Factors such as high slave mortality and the slaveholders' continued desire for particular Africans revitalized culture in southern Anglo-American colonies until the demise of the international slave trade in 1808.Knight also argues that slaves adapted their cosmology to life in the New World, especially as they understood the natural world. More than just transplanting labor and to cultivate particular staple crops, slaves drew upon an epistemology to make sense of their new life in the Anglo-American colonies. One of the longstanding debates among scholars of American culture centers upon the degree to which the slave trade emaciated culture. Some historians maintain that the slave trade and New World slavery were so brutal that they destroyed any vestige of culture, and the system of slavery itself shaped the black American experience. Other scholars argue that as brutalizing as the Middle Passage and slave trade were, certain cultural systems such as religious beliefs survived this horrific experience, becoming the foundation of a more syncretized and American slave culture.Knight clearly aligns with the latter argument. He advances this contention further by illustrating the ways slave owners were invested in the retention of customs. While historians such as Peter Wood, Charles Joyner, and Philip Morgan have also maintained that black slaves practiced culture and social systems in the colonial Lowcountry, their scholarship portrays planters as passive agents in this process, and retention was largely the result of a black demographic majority and planter absenteeism. …