Reflections on North Dakota’s Sustained Solitary Confinement Reform

2019 ◽  
pp. 325-334
Author(s):  
Leann K. Bertsch

As director of the North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (ND DOCR), I have overseen its adult, juvenile, and community corrections services for the past thirteen years. This chapter will focus on the broader systems reforms that were implemented prior to solitary confinement reform at the ND DOCR, why it was necessary to change the way we use solitary confinement or restrictive housing, the specific changes we made within the unit, how we improved transitions from the unit, the challenges associated with this work, and the successes we have seen as a result of the reforms.

Author(s):  
Anna Clayfield

This chapter investigates the on-going legacy of the guerrilla struggle between 2006 and 2018, the period of Raúl Castro’s tenure as Cuban President. It argues that, while many foreign commentators viewed the political, social, and economic change of these years as evidence that the Revolution and its socialist model were on the way out, the discursive phenomenon of guerrillerismo still very much anchored it in the past. Such an anchor remained of high importance to the leadership at a time of not only domestic upheaval but also shifting relations with its long-standing enemy to the north: the United States.


Author(s):  
Ольга Борисовна Степанова

Традиционная игрушка северных селькупов, сегодня ими почти забытая, до сих пор никем не исследовалась. Между тем, она представляет собой яркий фрагмент традиционной селькупской культуры. Исследование ставило своей задачей вернуть селькупскому народу этот элемент его культуры в форме научного описания. На основе главным образом музейных материалов и отчасти полевых материалов автора были выявлены и рассмотрены пять типов игрушки северных селькупов, включая шесть видов куклы. Из-за нехватки селькупского материала в исследовании активно использовался метод научной реконструкции. Описания зафиксированных у селькупов типов и видов игрушки воссоздавались по материалам игрушки соседних народов. Попутно устанавливалось, какие традиции — западносибирские и восточносибирские — оказывали влияние на формирование облика того или иного типа/вида игрушки у селькупов. Был рассмотрен вопрос о связи североселькупской игрушки — вещи утилитарного значения — с сакральным или, иными словами, вопрос ее символических смыслов. Автор пришла к выводу, что все типы и виды селькупской игрушки в прошлом были сакральными обрядовыми предметами, и что в семиотическом статусе игрушки соотношение «знакового» и «вещного» со временем сдвинулось в сторону «вещного». Завершенный вид исследованию придали включенные в него материалы по современному состоянию традиционной североселькупской игрушки. The traditional toy of the northern Selkups, today almost forgotten by them, has not yet been studied by anyone. Meanwhile, it is a vivid fragment of the traditional Selkup culture. The research aimed to return this element of their culture to the Selkup people in the form of a scientific description. Based mainly on museum materials and partly from the author's field materials, five types of toys of the northern Selkups were identified and considered, including six types of dolls. Due to the lack of Selkup material, the method of scientific reconstruction was actively used in the study. Descriptions of the types and types of toys recorded by the Selkups were recreated based on the materials of toys of neighboring peoples. Along the way, it was established which traditions — West Siberian and East Siberian — influenced the formation of the appearance of a particular type / type of toy among the Selkups. The question of the connection between the North Selkup toy — a thing of utilitarian meaning — with the sacred, or, in other words, the question of its symbolic meanings, was considered. The author came to the conclusion that all types and types of Selkup toys in the past were sacred ritual objects, and that in the semiotic status of a toy, the ratio of “sign” and “thing” over time shifted towards the “thing”. The study was completed by the materials included in it on the current state of the traditional North Selkup toy.


2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 717-745 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Condos

AbstractDuring the past decade, discussions of religious extremism and “fanatical” violence have come to dominate both public and academic discourse. Yet, rarely do these debates engage with the historical and discursive origins of the term “fanatic.” As a result, many of these discussions tend to reproduce uncritically the same Orientalist tropes and stereotypes that have historically shaped the way “fanaticism” and “fanatical” violence have been framed and understood. This paper seeks to provide a corrective to this often problematic and flawed understanding of the history of “fanaticism.” It approaches these topics through an examination of how British colonial authorities conceived of and responded to the problem of “murderous,” “fanatical,” and “ghazi” “outrages” along the North-West Frontier of India. By unpacking the various religious, cultural, and psychiatric explanations underpinning British understandings of these phenomena, I explore how these discourses interacted to create the powerful legal and discursive category of the “fanatic.” I show how this was perceived as an existentially threatening class of criminal that existed entirely outside the bounds of politics, society, and sanity, and therefore needed to be destroyed completely. The subjectification of the “fanatic,” in this case, ultimately served as a way of activating the colonial state's “sovereign” need to punish and kill. Finally, I deconstruct these reductive colonial representations of fanaticism in order to demonstrate how, despite British views to the contrary, these were often complex and deeply political acts of anti-colonial resistance.


Prospects ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 169-192
Author(s):  
Kathleen Brogan

Part German-American and part Chippewa, Louise Erdrich has described the “mixed blood's” quest as a search for parentage, an attempt to understand self by interrogating genealogy. In the opening paragraphs of Tracks, a novel set on a North Dakota Chippewa reservation in the early 20th century, Erdrich reveals that the investigation of background necessarily entails an entrance into the world of ghosts. When the narrator Nanapush addresses the young woman listening to his unfolding account of her familial and tribal past as a “child of the invisible, the ones who disappeared,” he simultaneously connects an awareness of the ghostly presence of the dead with the discovery of identity and the creation of history. The narrator's conjuring of “invisible ancestors and “ghosts” (2) who inhabit tribal woods introduces haunting as Erdrich's central metaphor for the way the past shapes and is shaped by the present.


Author(s):  
James J. Coleman

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry


The Eye ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (128) ◽  
pp. 19-22
Author(s):  
Gregory DeNaeyer

The world-wide use of scleral contact lenses has dramatically increased over the past 10 year and has changed the way that we manage patients with corneal irregularity. Successfully fitting them can be challenging especially for eyes that have significant asymmetries of the cornea or sclera. The future of scleral lens fitting is utilizing corneo-scleral topography to accurately measure the anterior ocular surface and then using software to design lenses that identically match the scleral surface and evenly vault the cornea. This process allows the practitioner to efficiently fit a customized scleral lens that successfully provides the patient with comfortable wear and improved vision.


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Clinton D. Young

This article examines the development of Wagnerism in late-nineteenth-century Spain, focusing on how it became an integral part of Catalan nationalism. The reception of Wagner's music and ideas in Spain was determined by the country's uneven economic development and the weakness of its musical and political institutions—the same weaknesses that were responsible for the rise of Catalan nationalism. Lack of a symphonic culture in Spain meant that audiences were not prepared to comprehend Wagner's complexity, but that same complexity made Wagner's ideas acceptable to Spanish reformers who saw in the composer an exemplar of the European ideas needed to fix Spanish problems. Thus, when Wagner's operas were first staged in Spain, the Teatro Real de Madrid stressed Wagner's continuity with operas of the past; however, critics and audiences engaged with the works as difficult forms of modern music. The rejection of Wagner in the Spanish capital cleared the way for his ideas to be adopted in Catalonia. A similar dynamic occurred as Spanish composers tried to meld Wagner into their attempts to build a nationalist school of opera composition. The failure of Tomás Bréton's Los amantes de Teruel and Garín cleared the way for Felip Pedrell's more successful theoretical fusion of Wagnerism and nationalism. While Pedrell's opera Els Pirineus was a failure, his explanation of how Wagner's ideals and nationalism could be fused in the treatise Por nuestra música cemented the link between Catalan culture and Wagnerism.


2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cary Carson

Abstract Are historic sites and house museums destined to go the way of Oldsmobiles and floppy disks?? Visitation has trended downwards for thirty years. Theories abound, but no one really knows why. To launch a discussion of the problem in the pages of The Public Historian, Cary Carson cautions against the pessimistic view that the past is simply passéé. Instead he offers a ““Plan B”” that takes account of the new way that learners today organize information to make history meaningful.


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