Re-Imagining Home in Transnational Narratives

Diaspora and Cultural Negotiations: The Films of Gurinder Chadha explores critical and theoretical conceptualizations of identity, globalization, intersectionality, and diaspora, among other topics, in the films of Gurinder Chadha. This book argues that Chadha’s work offers relevant and sensitive portrayals of the members of the diaspora community that make these films of contemporary and enduring value, highlighting their challenges in hybridization and acculturation in the societies they migrate to and the historical and political exigencies that influence their everyday existence. Contributors analyze Chadha’s films in the context of cultural milieus including multiculturalism, narration and representation, ethnicity, literary adaptation, and intercultural negotiations, while also exploring Chadha’s own role as an auteur. Scholars of film studies, Indian cinema, diaspora studies, sociology, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

The societal impact of sport extends far beyond the realm of entertainment, positioning it as a vital cultural and political institution embedded within the fabric of everyday life. Rather than functioning solely as leisure or spectacle, sport operates as a dynamic arena where collective identities are forged, contested, and reimagined. Through the shared rituals of athletic performance and spectatorship, sports arenas emerge as charged public spaces in which social tensions-be they political, ideological, economic, or cultural-are not only reflected but also enacted. These spaces become focal points for expressions of national pride, political resistance, and cultural negotiation. Historically and in contemporary contexts, sport has served as both a mirror and a motor of social transformation. By examining sport stadiums as socially responsive environments, this article argues that they act as ‘social barometers’-structures capable of revealing underlying societal shifts and offering early insights into emergent forms of public sentiment, conflict, and change.

This study investigates how Belarusian migrants and political exiles reconfigure the meaning of home and belonging following forced displacement after the 2020 political crisis. The object of inquiry is the emotional and symbolic reconstruction of home in exile, shaped by practices of homing, relational care, and identity negotiation. The main task is to examine how migrants experience and enact belonging in uncertain sociopolitical landscapes, and how emotional geographies and symbolic rituals serve as coping mechanisms amid loss, mobility, and precarity. This study asks: how is home performed beyond physical space? What makes belonging possible in contexts of rupture? The study employs a qualitative methodology, grounded in reflexive thematic analysis of 13 in-depth interviews with Belarusian migrants living in Lithuania, Poland, and Georgia. Data were coded to trace patterns in affective spatial practices, identity transformations, and diasporic community formation. The analysis draws on theoretical frameworks from diaspora studies, emotional geography, and feminist theory, particularly the works of Brah, Ahmed, and Blunt & Dowling. Findings reveal that home is not a static location but a mobile, affective infrastructure — reassembled through sensory cues, symbolic objects, and everyday rituals. Belonging emerges through emotional labor, repetition, and relational investments, often despite legal and spatial instability. Participants describe homing as a dynamic process: making spaces livable through routine, care, and memory. Communities in exile are revealed as fluid emotional cartographies rather than fixed social networks. The study concludes that emotional displacement creates both fragility and opportunity: while rootedness is undermined, new forms of resilience, identity, and political imagination emerge. These insights contribute to migration scholarship by foregrounding the intimate, embodied, and relational dimensions of belonging, offering a nuanced understanding of exile not only as loss but also as a site of becoming.

This article analyzes the transnational features of narratives between Galicia and Australia from the year 1519 to the Present-day. Sailors like Pedro Fernandez de Quiros and Luis Vaez de Torres, who reached Australia in the sixteenth century, will be considered as the starting point of a cultural dialogue still going on in today’s literature not only as regards the geography of the continent but also in the collective imagination of the country. Other connections between these countries are also established by contemporary novelists such as Peter Carey, Sally Morgan and Murray Bail, who use Galician history and places, filtered through British sources, to address Australia and its present-day characters and decolonizing conflicts. Finally, the works of other authors such as Robert Graves and Felix Calvino, who also deal with this literary dialogue in their fiction, are explored.

New Geographies of China and Latin America Relations:Introduction to the Special Issue Julie Michelle Klinger and Tom Narins The geographic relations between China and Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) have deepened and diversified in the twenty-first century, coinciding with the ebb and flow of the "pink tide" in Latin America, massive Chinese economic growth, and a recalcitrant United States. Accordingly, grounded, transnational, and ethnographically driven research on this relationship has emerged in recent years, with contributions coming from across the social sciences (Lau-sent-Herrera, 2013; Kong & Gallagher, 2016; Oliveira, 2016; Klinger, 2017). This special issue of the Journal of Latin American Geography presents a collection of articles that broaden and deepen the scope of geographic literature on China and Latin America in light of contemporary change in both regions. We note that Latin America is a cultural and geographic construct that includes territories, people, and politics throughout the Americas, and as such the entire hemisphere is a valid site of inquiry for China–Latin America relations. Latin America is not simply a neutral site that is impacted by China, nor China by Latin America; rather, the articles in this issue question the forms of agency exercised by multiple actors constituting China-LAC/LAC-China relations in diverse locations and sectors. We further note that there is no single monolithic "China" acting across global space; rather, there are specific actors with distinct sets of interests, even within the same sector and site. In the present global political juncture where social and environmental justice, international cooperation, government transparency, corporate accountability norms, and human rights are under siege, it is especially important for scholars to advance understandings of the dynamic and multiscalar processes that shape the future of Latin America in broader regional and global perspectives, including in relation to China. Toward that end, the articles in this issue explore specific dimensions of the geographies of China-LAC relations, delving into themes as diverse as migration and ethnic politics, local and transnational food justice movements, infrastructure construction, the seafood trade, defense partnerships, and outer [End Page 6] space cooperation. These investigations use an array of methodological approaches to advance grounded empirical work on actually occurring spatial practices. In this introduction to the special issue, we briefly review some major trends in the literature on research of the geography of LAC-China, discuss contemporary developments, and put forth some questions for further inquiry. approaches to the geography of china-lac relations While the literature on LAC-China relations has grown prodigiously over the past fifteen years, work that focuses on the spatial aspects of this relationship has grown more slowly. This is in part due to the methodological commitments of grounded empirical research, which often involve extensive ethnographic fieldwork, sometimes in multiple languages and countries. In the twentieth century, the most robust research on the spatiality of LAC-China relations occurred in the areas of historical and diaspora studies (Chang-Rodriguez, 1958; Farley, 1968; Conrad, 1975). A strong tradition of historical, ethnographic, oral history, and multilingual archival research has since emerged, tracing the movement of Chinese people to and from the Americas over the past three centuries (Hsu, 2000; Quiros, 2016; Seijas, 2016), revealing transnational relations that decenter overwhelmingly Euro-American and white definitions of settlement and belonging in the western hemisphere (Siu, 2007; McKeown, 2010; López, 2013; Young, 2014). This is part of a larger project to recenter Latin America in world history (Benton, 2004; Besse, 2004; Vaughan & Weinstein, 2004; Sebastiani, 2012). Deploying post-colonial and critical race theory, many of these histories examine how the multiple pathways through which people from China came to the Americas were crucial to the formation of race, national identity, and labor relations in the Americas (Jung, 2006; Roediger & Esch, 2012; DeLugan, 2016; González, 2017). Histories of the introduction of coolie labor to the cane fields, gold mines, and railroads of the Americas lend considerable empirical and theoretical richness to the important Anglophone histories of "the Chinese" in "America" (that is, the United States) (Lee, 2003; Jung, 2008; Meagher, 2008; Zhou, 2009). The persistent official categorization of people of Chinese descent as "other" in much of Latin America erases both the...

Music listening is a dynamic process that entails complex interactions between sensory, cognitive, and emotional processes. The naturalistic paradigm provides a means to investigate these processes in an ecologically valid manner by allowing experimental settings that mimic real-life musical experiences. In this paper, we highlight the importance of the naturalistic paradigm in studying dynamic music processing and discuss how it allows for investigating both the segregation and integration of brain processes using model-based and model-free methods. We further suggest that studying individual difference-modulated music processing in this paradigm can provide insights into the mechanisms of brain plasticity, which can have implications for the development of interventions and therapies in a personalized way. Finally, despite the challenges that the naturalistic paradigm poses, we end with a discussion on future prospects of music and neuroscience research, especially with the continued development and refinement of naturalistic paradigms and the adoption of open science practices.

This introduction offers a survey of Border Studies and Diaspora Theory to contextualize the ways in which contemporary fictions of migration in the 21st century have reinterpreted classic paradigms. Literature has played a paramount role in illustrating many of the challenges of narrating the experience of migration. This role is the motivation for this Special Issue as it examines the literary mechanisms that engage with current social, economic, and political issues and shows how discourses on migration contest perspectives on concepts such as “mobility” or “space.” Thus after contextualizing “the Black Atlantic,” “diaspora space,” “third scenario,” “necropolitics” or “gore capitalism,” this introduction describes the contributors' diverse critical readings, which are presented and organized to illustrate the evolution of academic research around Diaspora Studies. The new avenues of research that 21st‐century migration has fostered bear witness to the complex and intricate phenomena of human mobility.

Studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) have shown that affectively arousing stimuli enhance attention and perception. In addition, simple neutral stimuli, when paired with emotionally engaging unconditioned stimuli (i.e., the CS+) in classical conditioning paradigms, were found to evoke increased sensory responses as learning progresses, compared to responses elicited by the same stimuli not paired with a noxious stimulus (CS-). To date the detailed trial-to-trial temporal dynamics of this sensory facilitation process is not known. Signal averaging required for the ERP analysis eliminates trial-to-trial information of temporal cortical dynamics. In the current study, a novel single-trial analysis method called Analysis of Single-trial ERP and Ongoing activity (ASEO) was adopted to study the detailed electrocortical dynamics of sensory processing during classical aversive conditioning. Focusing on the P1 component of the ERP evoked by simple grating patterns serving as CS+ and CS-, we found that over a session of conditioning trials, there were three phases of P1 amplitude changes for both CS+ and CS-: (1) an initial decrease phase, (2) a subsequent increase phase, and (3) a final habituating phase. Tests on the rates of P1 amplitude changes in each of the three phases between CS+ and CS- conditions revealed differential effects of CS+ and CS- for all three phases. No such effects were found for a session of control trials where the same grating patterns were paired with checkerboards. We interpret these results as providing evidence supporting the view that emotional experience can modulate early visual processing and dynamics of perceptual learning.

Cockroaches orient towards and track plumes of airborne odours using simple yet sophisticated processing of odour concentration stimuli. Their orientation behaviour is driven not only by instantaneous sampling of odour concentration but by temporal dynamics of the odour signal which are processed by specialised On/Off olfactory receptor neurons encoding rate of change of odour concentration. We present a neurorobotic model for chemotaxis that implements such sensory processing. The model consists of a sensorimotor connection embodied in a simulated Braitenberg vehicle with a dynamic sensory processing variant which extends existing functional models, and the model parameters are tuned via an optimisation algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the vehicle with the contribution of temporal dynamics and optimised parameters is able to localise the odour source in both a simplified odour plume characterised by a steady state Gaussian distribution of odour concentration and a realistic odour plume based on filament-based gas dispersion modelling.

The semantic characteristics of the postmodern worldview and its mostly destructive influence on the state of solving the existing problems of psychological science are analyzed at the methodological level. In this worldview, the image of the world is seen as a multidimensional, heterogeneous, mosaic formation, and culture is seen as a sphere of manifestation of the ecstasy of communication; emphasis is placed on the dynamics of processes and no attention is paid to stable modes; the order is sought in chaos, which somehow helps to maintain a sense of stability of the system in a deficit of order, the opposite processes of structuring and chaos are reflected and the idea of multiplicity of beauty is developed. In the bosom of this worldview, life is seen as a text, and communication (dialogue) as a key moment in the personality’s social existence, the contextuality (dependence on socio-cultural influences) of human’s everyday life is proclaimed, procedures of controlling the discourses are characterized, which is caused by “linguistic turn”, concentration of considerations on the texts. It is noted that postmodern ideology actually declares a taboo on science, objectivity in the world cognition, because imitation is attributed to reality itself, the possibility of constructing a systematized theory and philosophy is denied, the network principle of knowledge organization is proposed, and to ensure its “objectivity” it is proposed to abandon the category of subject in order to get rid of the subjectivity of cognition, which seems to be manifested in the adherence to values and meanings of cognitive activity, and to define the structure of cognition the concept of “epistem” is operated, which characterizes the structure of historically variable cognition. In general, in the postmodern worldview it is promoted to achieve objectivity through dialogue, communication, and convention, when intersubjectivity is a criterion of truth, and methodological progress is associated with interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. In this worldview dimension, against the background of nihilism, the personality is considered as dynamic, flowing, changeable, polyphonic, not rigidly determined, emancipated structurally, and without a stabilizing core (spiritual Self, gender, Self-concept), individually unique is exaggeratedly interpreted, that one which is not combined with universal and neutral in relation to objective values (for example, amoralism). Freedom is misinterpreted as permissiveness, even in the field of self-realization and self-creation. The postmodernist idea of narrative as a textual interpretation of the world, one’s personality and one’s life is analyzed. It is argued that there can be different relationships between the processes of real life and narration, because a person is able to live fully without resorting to narration. It is noted that postmodernism neglects the stabilizing phenomena of the human’s inner world, the eternal meanings of life (creation of faith, love, good and the fight against evil, the spread of authentic freedom and responsibility, hope, happy moments, healing states of humility and repentance for unworthy deeds, spiritual understanding of suffering). It is argued that due to the focus on the spiritual in his inner world and life, personality constructively overcomes chaos, organizes worries, thoughts, intentions, she has great hope, realizes great life goals, finds authentic meanings of being and then she really feels happy. The spiritual Self makes us stronger, allows us to act intelligently in conditions of uncertainty, the pressure of complex problems allows us to overcome stressful situations, to benefit from our own spiritual suffering.

Molecular mechanisms of neuronal specification

Biochemical reactions that take place concurrently in a cell can be explored and analyzed by symbolic systems biology. These cellular processes can be modeled with symbolic mathematical models through the use of rewrite rules. Our goal is to define formal models that capture biologists intuitions and reasoning. Pathway Logic is a system for developing executable formal models of biomolecular processes. Analyses of biological facts can be obtained from such models. Ocular melanoma is the most frequent malignant primary intraocular tumor in adult population and the second most common site of malignant melanoma in the body. The knowledge of the signaling pathways involved in melanoma offers new treatment strategies. In this paper, we provide a symbolic system that explores complex and dynamic cellular signaling processes that induce cellular proliferation and survival in choroidal melanoma.

Results obtained using continuous and discrete wavelet transforms as applied to problems in neurodynamics are reviewed, with the emphasis on the potential of wavelet analysis for decoding signal information from neural systems and networks. The following areas of application are considered: (1) the microscopic dynamics of single cells and intracellular processes, (2) sensory data processing, (3) the group dynamics of neuronal ensembles, and (4) the macrodynamics of rhythmical brain activity (using multichannel EEG recordings). The detection and classification of various oscillatory patterns of brain electrical activity and the development of continuous wavelet-based brain activity monitoring systems are also discussed as possibilities.

Purpose The objective was to explore the judgment and decision-making in rainfall adaptation as experienced by the civil servants adapting to local climate-change vulnerabilities. Design/methodology/approach Eight civil servants in Swedish municipalities working with heavy rainfall adaptation were interviewed. The interviews were open-ended, and the interview data were used in descriptive phenomenological analysis. Findings The results revealed three key themes: (1) Complex decision-making, highlighting the handling of uncertainty; (2) reference points as inner compass, emphasizing the applying of appropriate strategies; and (3) overarching factors, including organizational and contextual influences. The main conclusion is that the municipal civil servants experience decision-making as a lived, situated and dynamic process that unfolds as intentional acts and is embedded in social, temporal and environmental contexts. This experience emerges from the interplay between felt uncertainty and the structuring of an imagined “safe city” emotionally invested in. Limited frontline experience, societal norms resistant to climate action, ambiguous adaptation objectives and organizational insufficiencies can undermine the quality of the decision-making process. Originality/value This study emphasizes important decision factors or processes in the dynamic handling of heavy rainfall at the frontline, which may contribute to risk management, public administration and resilience by furthering climate adaptation efforts.

This volume interrogates the assumption that Visigothic practices and institutions were mere imitations of the Byzantine empire. Contributors rethink these practices not as uncritical and derivative adoptions of Byzantine customs, but as dynamic processes in dialogue with not only the Byzantine empire but also with the contemporary Iberian context, as well as the Roman past. The goal of the volume is to approach Visigothic customs not as an uncritical adoption and imitatio of contemporary Roman models (an 'acculturation' model), but as unique interpretations of a common pool of symbols, practices, and institutions that formed the legacy of Rome. The contributors argue that it is necessary to reconsider the idea of imitatio imperii as a process that involved specific actors taking strategic decisions in historically contingent circumstances.