Special Double Issue: The Im/Possibility of Finding Home in Academia—Personal Narratives of Transnationally Minoritized Scholars in Higher Education: Part 1Theorizing Mishritata: A Queer Desi/South Asian Making Meaning of Multiple Minoritization in a Transnational Context

Scaffolding poetry, drawing, and narrative fragments from lived experience, I offer mishritata (mixedness) as a way to make meaning of multiply minoritized identity through the “doing” of dissertation research with one’s communities. Conceptualized as an orientation, mishritata is an indigenized embodied borderlands positionality that recognizes and celebrates the mixedness of the Queer Desi/South Asian experiences: an interplay of histories and contexts, of people and places, and of structures and systems that organize them across borders, both real and imagined.

The Devil in Latvian Charms and Related Genres

In Latvian folklore, the Devil is a relatively common image, represented in all the genres. This paper analyses the verbal charms that mention the Devil or Thunder together with the motif of pursuing the Devil. The corpus of charms consists of texts taken from the first systematic collection of Latvian charms, published in 1881. Examples of charms are accompanied by a comparative analysis of folk legends and beliefs. There are correspondences in charms, legends and beliefs regarding the appearance and traits of the Devil as well as his activities and dwelling places. These genres also share the motif of pursuing the Devil. Texts from different genres complement each other by providing missing narrative fragments and aspects of meaning. In the legends and charms, black and red dominate in the Devil’s appearance, and the Devil can also appear in the form of animals. The Devil’s activities and presence are linked with the origins of evil and associated with a variety of diseases which, like the Devil himself, are overcome by similar techniques. These legends and beliefs help us understand the similarities expressed in the charms, deepen and expand the semantics of the images, and explain the associative links and anchoring of specific actions in the broader folklore material. The plot and length of texts in charms are determined by the specific style, structure, and function of this genre. Therefore, content is not expanded in detail; instead, only key figures or images, the foundation of the plot, and its most important elements are mentioned. The comparative material found in legends and beliefs provides more in-depth explanation of the concise messages expressed in the charms.

Cinema is a country: The transgressive power of images in The Sea is Behind by Hicham Lasri

Since 2013, the Moroccan filmmaker Hicham Lasri has released a film each year, each of which has met with success at international festivals. All of these films transgress narrative and aesthetic cinematic boundaries, and The Sea is Behind (2015) is no exception: in a fable about the relations between human beings in a society that is losing its ethical and moral orientations, it invites us to consider our perception of the Other. The first part of the article addresses the active construction of its narrative from narrative fragments; the second part focuses on the ways in which the film's fragmented/composite narrative structure is reinforced by aesthetic means, so that, as the complex theme of the position and perception of marginalized groups is developed, new perspectives open up at the interstices, creating an impression of the dehumanizing conditions of life in this society.

Biomedicalization and Globalization

This chapter presents a discussion of the book’s theoretical framework and central argument, arguing that the everyday practice of biomedicine and the social process of biomedicalization rest on the foundations of relatively widely shared narratives within communities. As these narratives and narrative fragments are accessed selectively and deployed with creativity and contradiction, the transformations social scientists call biomedicalization are necessarily inflected and informed by their sociocultural context through what is available from the cultural repertoire or “tool kit” and how those cultural materials are deployed. As a result, biomedicalization does not eradicate diversity in “things medical,” but rather produces it. The following chapters explore this argument empirically, organized in descending order of imagined social space: world, nation, exam room, and home. Each is a site at which the meaning of the diabetes epidemic is imagined, negotiated, contested, and reimagined.

Bypassing the Supercrip Trope in Documentary Representations of Blind Visual Artists

Mainstream narratives depicting blind people who create visual art have repeatedly used the supercrip trope. For a seeing audience this trope highlights an artist's extraordinary skill and perseverance in creating aesthetic artefacts despite lacking – what is presumed to be – the essential sensory input of sight. This type of representation fails to portray the diversity and complexity of individual character traits but conveniently places blindness at the story's center; this turns the artistic process into a simplistic manifestation of 'abnormality' and 'otherness'. My own documentary practice explores filmic strategies that bypass the supercrip trope by emphasizing the 'everydayness' of the artistic creation process. The aim is for a seeing audience to experience the creation process as an ordinary, everyday act – amongst many others – in which blindness is neither foregrounded nor 'backgrounded'. This is illustrated through discussion of my documentary The Terry Fragments (2018), a film that represents a blind artist's painting process through narrative fragments and the depiction of improvisation and failure. These strategies evoke the multi-layered and heterarchical plurality of everydayness, which potentially resists the formation of the supercrip trope. This method can be applied to a variety of disability contexts that are prone to perpetuating the supercrip stereotype.

NON-VERBAL REPRESENTATION OF NARRATIVES IN THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE

The considerations of scientific prestige, global competition among scientists, the speed and dynamics of modern life have led to the modifications in scientific discourse. Currently, scientists pay even more attention not only to the content of a message, but also to its form. The esthetic mode and narrativization have become the features of modern Anglo-American scientific discourse. The article deals with the narratives in the language of science through the prism of polycode nature of academic discourse. Various non-verbal research narratives are represented via book covers, pictures, images, graphs, diagrams and so on. The main characteristics of the research narrative, such as descriptive instruments, narrative intentionality, actionality, understandability, accessibility, creativity, logic, intrigue, esthetical mode were extensively illustrated with non-verbal narrative fragments found in scientific discourse. Narrative discourse stands out due to its eventfulness. We have paid special attention to the structural characteristics of the change of state, or condition, considering it as the main narrative feature. The action has been also considered in terms of singularity, fractality and intentionality. The action, together with the esthetical mode make the narrative scientific discourse stand out from the regular modes of research genres. The more narrative features we observe, the more evident is the narrative nature of a scientific discourse fragment. The language of science in the modern world is becoming more and more polycodal. Our research proves the polycode nature of narration in scientific discourse.

The influence of subliminal crosstalk in dementia narratives

Ethnographic audio-visual research data recorded in a busy dementia care environment were initially considered to be ‘contaminated’ by unwanted background noise. This included a variety of elements: ambient sound, mechanical noise, non-narrative vocalisation and narrative fragments from parallel conversation. Using the methodological lens of conversation analysis, we present an exploration of the striking temporal and sequential resonances between the narrative of one man with dementia and a group of care staff holding a separate conversation some distance away. We suggest that in this and similar settings, where random and intrusive background sounds and conversation form a ubiquitous backdrop, the presence of such ‘noise’ can have a detectable influence on the content and direction of situated narratives. We argue that rather than attempting to filter out these apparently intrusive sounds from micro-interactional data, interference elements can usefully be incorporated into the analysis of interactions.

I’m not afraid: Zombies, video games, and life after death

My daughter has always been drawn to the frightening and the spooky, with a special interest in zombies. When she was four years old, she and I played a zombie video game together which instigated a series of zombie-related events. This article is a collection of metonymic moments rendered in comics and writing, that revisits these events as memories and experiences grouped conceptually, aesthetically, and narratively around zombies. Presented as a series of narrative fragments, this article explores the tension between parenthood and childhood, and considers the chaotic, unpredictable, and pedagogical entanglements between storytelling, literacy, drawing, and playing.