Daring to tilt worlds: the fiction of Irenosen Okojie.

In much recent criticism and commentary, black British literature and culture has either been used to reflect or interrogate the state of the nation, or as an educational tool, to shine a light on hidden histories and the shadowy margins of the present. As a result, the work’s formal structures and particularly writers’ experiments with linguistic forms and textual or performative structures is often bypassed in favour of a realist or literalist approach to content. Focusing on Okojie’s novel, Butterfly Fish (2015) and her collection of short stories Speak Gigantular (2016), I argue that this work creates what Marie-Laure Ryan has defined as ‘impossible worlds’ that is, fiction that demands ‘new strategies for making sense of the text’ (p. 369) and that tests habitual assumptions about black women’s fiction and the worlds their texts create. Her work produces instabilities; it settles on strangeness, reflecting what Tobias During (2017) describes as a startling ingenuity that presents the possibilities of different worlds and different geographies. Okojie’s work experiments with new forms of contemporary prose and challenges readers to see worlds and words differently

“Qu’est-ce Qu’elle Dit? What she say, what she say?” Translating the Resisting Other in Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Writing

I focus my discussion of Amryl Johnson’s poem “Qu’est-ce Qu’elle Dit”, Erna Brodber’s second novel Myal, and Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting, on the texts’ representations of cultural difference and cultural transformation. The poem and the novels, I argue, present a version of Caribbean history that resists colonial discourse and that effects a process of healing and recovery from the epistemic violence of colonial historiography and the continued imposition of its cultural norms. At the same time I suggest that part of the process of resistance involves a radical reconceptualising and transformation of the Other. In these texts, what Nathaniel Mackey defines as “artistic othering”(55) is, as I wish to demonstrate in this article, a mode of resistance, a textual strategy that confronts, resists and refuses a too easy reappropriation of meaning, and yet insists on possibility. I approach the three texts as examples of counterdiscursive praxis, as texts which make “an intervention into postcolonial theoretical discourse” (O’Callaghan “Play It Back” 67). Amryl Johnson’s poem, from which the title of this paper comes, is emblematic of the tensions that arise in seemingly paradoxical processes of othering, reintegration and recovery in a creolized Caribbean context

Re-mapping women's testimonies into networked subjectivities: The Quipu Project

Purpose: This chapter analyses a range of media outputs produced to raise awareness of the campaign of forced sterilisation conducted in Peru during the period 1993-1998. Focusing in detail on the Quipu Project the authors investigate the ways in which different media configure differently witness subjects, audiences and listeners. The chapter also analyses the effectiveness of these media outputs within the contexts of human rights discourses. Design/methodology/approach: The chapter is framed by narrative theories of documentary video production, new media technology and intermediality. The authors also draw on theories of witnessing that have emerged in critical studies of witness testimony in video and new media. It uses secondary data, that is, the testimonies of women already collected, selected and, in most cases, edited by documentary makers and campaigners. Findings: The case studies compare the ways in which conventional video documentary and techniques of digital storytelling transform the content of women's testimony. Research implications/limitations: Funding limitations have meant that progress on the site was, at the time of writing, temporarily suspended. We therefore analysed the pilot, or prototype, of the Quipu Project, which should be viewed as a work in progress. However, a more developed site for the Quipu Project went live after the chapter was completed. Originality/value: This chapter represents the first attempt to analyse the effectiveness of an experimental project such as the Quipu Project. The authors were given access by the curators of the project to the site at various stages of its construction. The chapter provides insights into the potential of digital technology to create opportunities for media outputs to internationalise interventions into campaigns for justice and reparation. Abstract Copyright © 2016 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Collaborating with Big Brothers Big Sisters and Parents to Develop CareGiver-Initiated Mentoring

Research shows that youth enrolled in formal mentoring programs often wait months before being matched with a mentor. This paper describes the development and pilot test of Caregiver-Initiated Mentoring (CG-IM), a program originally designed to equip caregivers to assist Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) mentoring program staff in identifying and recruiting mentors from their social network. Using a mixed-methods design, the initial efficacy of the CG-IM program was evaluated via a small pilot test. I broadly explored caregivers’ experiences participating in the CG-IM program and a BBBS staff member’s experience implementing it. Caregivers completed a post-survey that included quantitative measures assessing their knowledge, attitudes, efficacy, and intentions in identifying potential mentors, as well as their impressions about the appropriateness, acceptability, feasibility, and general satisfaction. Semi-structured interviews were used to gather qualitative feedback from caregivers and the BBBS staff member. A total of 15 caregivers completed the CG-IM program and the quantitative survey. Eight caregivers and one BBBS staff member participated in qualitative interviews. I report what I learned from caregivers and the BBBS staff member who engaged in the pilot test. Caregivers described gaining knowledge and feeling empowered by their involvement in identifying potential mentors, challenges experienced identifying such adults, and recommended changes for the CG-IM program. The BBBS staff member reported on the benefits and utility of the CG-IM program within BBBS, observed challenges, and recommended revisions to the program. I describe how data gathered from this study can be used to inform future collaborations between mentoring organizations and caregivers to promote safe and supportive relationships within and outside of BBBS via the CG-IM program

An investigation of the relationship of teacher effectiveness and teacher and student social styles.

Teachers' and students' social styles responses were classified into one of four social styles: analytic, amiable, driver, or expressive. Results showed that teacher effectiveness was significantly related to teachers' and students' social styles, but the amount of variance accounted for between teacher effectiveness and social styles, r('2), was not meaningful. Results of an independent measures t-test showed that students who were similar (homophilous) to their teacher's social style rated their teacher significantly more effective than students who were dissimilar (heterophilous) to their teachers' social style. A 2 x 2 x 2 way factorial analysis of variance (high and low responsiveness, assertiveness, and versatility) showed non-significant results for all except the main effect versatility and the interaction effect for assertiveness and responsiveness.This study investigated the relationship between students' perceptions of their teacher's effectiveness and teachers' and students' social styles. Social style was measured by the use of the Social Style Profile Instrument (Buchholz, Lashbrook, and Wenburg, 1976). Teacher effectiveness was measured by a 21-item factor-analyzed unidimensional scale obtained from items taken from the Purdue Rating Scale and the Idea Form.Further research needs to be conducted using quartiles instead of medians to calculate an individual's social style

Group Testing As A Pedagogical Technique To Enhance Learning In Difficult Subjects

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of group testing as a pedagogical technique to enhance learning in a difficult subject such as statistics. Individual test scores were compared to their group test scores for the same, identical test. A t test was used to compare the scores for 157 randomly selected MBA students enrolled in a graduate level quantitative research methods course. Results of the t test were significant (t= -14.807, p= .000) illustrating that individual scores were significantly lower than the group scores

Now the half has been told: Resistance and the fiction of four contemporary Caribbean women writers.

This thesis focuses on the articulation of political resistance in contemporary fiction by Caribbean women writers and, by using a dialogic approach to reading selected texts, theorises the difference that gender makes in the representation of these dominant themes. Representations of political resistance and transformation in novels by Merle Collins, Zee Edgell, Brenda Flanagan and Erna Brodber are examined in the context of an analysis of Caribbean fiction by male and female writers, which spans a seventy-year period. It begins by arguing that, although Caribbean writers have traditionally used creatively transformed linguistic and textual strategies to signify resistance to colonial domination. Merle Collins' first novel, Angel, extends these traditions of novelistic transformation to produce a text which is more radically oppositional and at the same time dependent for meaning on its literary precursors. Subsequent chapters focus on different aspects of resistance and trace dialogic connections between fiction by contemporary women writers, colonialist narratives and writing by earlier canonical and non-canonical Caribbean novelists; these connections are used to reveal the ways in which ideologies of gender shape the character of resistance and determine the conditions and possibilities of political, social and cultural transformation. The study concludes by arguing for the need to resist merely reproducing the over-determining categories of resistance and liberation that have characterised fictional and theoretical treatments of these themes: it argues for a need to take into account women's complex and sometimes contradictory interventions in the process of anti-colonial resistance and for the construction of a model of resistance which is inclusive, plural and dialogically defined

Student Perceptions Of Faculty Credibility Based On Email Addresses

The purpose of this study was to evaluate students’ perceptions of faculty credibility based on email addresses.  The survey was conducted at an upper division business school in Michigan where all students have completed at least two years of college courses.   The survey results show that a faculty member’s selection of an email address does influence the student’s perception of faculty credibility.  An email address that consists of a nickname reduces the student’s perception of faculty credibility.  The reduced creditability may have a negative impact on the faculty member as well as the college.&nbsp

Mutations in SLC12A5 in epilepsy of infancy with migrating focal seizures

The potassium-chloride co-transporter KCC2, encoded by SLC12A5, plays a fundamental role in fast synaptic inhibition by maintaining a hyperpolarizing gradient for chloride ions. KCC2 dysfunction has been implicated in human epilepsy, but to date, no monogenic KCC2-related epilepsy disorders have been described. Here we show recessive loss-of-function SLC12A5 mutations in patients with a severe infantile-onset pharmacoresistant epilepsy syndrome, epilepsy of infancy with migrating focal seizures (EIMFS). Decreased KCC2 surface expression, reduced protein glycosylation and impaired chloride extrusion contribute to loss of KCC2 activity, thereby impairing normal synaptic inhibition and promoting neuronal excitability in this early-onset epileptic encephalopathy