Does Culture Matter? Young and Middle-Aged Iranian-American Adults’ Perspectives Regarding End-of-Life Care Planning

Background: An increase of cultural diversity and treatment options offer opportunities and challenges related to end-of-life (EOL) care for healthcare providers and policymakers. EOL care planning can help reduce confusion and uncertainty when individuals and family members need to make decisions about EOL care options. Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate preferences, attitudes, and behaviors regarding EOL care planning among young and middle-aged Iranian-American adults. Methods: A cross-sectional national sample of 251 Iranian-American adults completed surveys. Paper and online surveys in English and Persian were offered to potential participants. Results: All the participants completed online survey in English language. In incurable health conditions, 56.8% preferred hospitalization and intensive treatments. From the 40.6% participants who preferred comfort care, most preferred care at home (29.5%) compared to an institution (11.1%). Those who preferred hospitalization at EOL mostly preferred intensive and curative treatments. The mean score of attitudes toward advance decision-making was moderately high (11.48 ± 2.77). Favorable attitudes were positively associated with acculturation (r = .31, p < .001), age (r = .15, p < .05), and number of years living in the U.S. (r = .26, p < .001). Conversely, spirituality and favorable attitudes were negatively associated (r = −.17, p < .05). Conclusion: Immigrant and culturally diverse individuals have experienced different living and healthcare environments. These differences can influence their EOL care planning and decisions. Knowledge of diverse perspectives and cultures is essential to design culturally congruent plans of EOL care.

Relationship Between the Journal Self-Citation and Author Self-Citation and the Impact Factor in Iranian, American ,and European ISI Indexed Medical Journals in 2014-2021

Background: Author and journal self-citation contributes to the overall citation count of an article and the impact factor of the journal in which it appears. Little is known, however, about the extent of self-citation in the general clinical medicine literature. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of self-citation (Journal and Author) on the impact factor of Iranian, American, and European English medical journals. Methods: IF (Impact Factor), IF without self-citations (corrected IF), journal self-citation rate, and author self-citation rate for medical journals were investigated from 2014–2021, by reviewing the Journal Citation Report. Twenty Iranian English medical journals in WoS indexed were selected and compared with twenty American and twenty European English medical journals. The correlation between the journal self-citation and author self-citation with IF was obtained. We used Spearman’s correlation coefficient for correlation of self-citation and IF. A P. value of0.05 was considered as significant in all the tests. Results: The overall journal citations were higher in the American and European journals compared to the Iranian ones between 2014 and 2021. There was a significant relationship between journal self-citation rates and impact factor (P

Shattered Identity of Immigrant Artist and Creation of Art in a Hybridized Space: The Case Study of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

In this article, first the “paradox of assimilation and difference” and its consequences will be discussed in the film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour who is an immigrant Iranian-American director. The aim is to show how her shattered identity as an immigrant is represented in her art. Her movie is an amalgamation of different signs from both cultures. These signs are not completely related to host culture (American) or local culture (Iranian). Although this impossible situation seems very painful at the first glance, it is beneficial for immigrant artist. In this hybridized space, she creates a kind of art which is very innovative and unique, because she is not forced to follow the cliché styles which those cultures are dictating her.

Locating Sickness: Disability, Queerness, and Race in a Memoir

This paper re-reads Sick: A Memoir (2018) by Porochista Khakpour, as a transnational feminist and queer text, to investigate how the author locates her disability and queerness with the diaspora, homelessness, and rise of governmental violence. Through the lens of feminist and disability studies, Sick can be read as an outstanding narrative of the queerness, disability, in-between-ness, and of course, resistance of a queer and disabled woman of color. The paper argues that Khakpour’s story should be regarded as an attempt to write complexities of intersectional and multi-layered identities that challenge the discourses of detection and diagnosis; criticize the politics of race among the community of Iranian-diaspora and in America; and highlight the role of home, belonging, and the feeling of homelessness caused by state policies of nation-building and exclusion. Further, Khakpour proposes a new guideline for feminist geography that accommodates female, queer, disabled, and diasporic Iranian-American bodies on the expanding map of excluded and erased subjects.

Milestones in the biography and the problem of periodization for Reza Valiʼs creativeness

The purpose of this scientific article is to study the facts of the biography of the world-famous, celebrated contemporary (the turn of the XX – XXI centuries) Iranian-American composer Reza Vali. The aim for this represented investigative item is learning of the periodization concerning the Reza Valiʼs creativeness, his artistically musical compositions, setting the boundaries and names of periods of his creativity. In addition, the goal concerning submitted scientific article is considering the aspect of the influence of Western European and Iranian traditional music on the academic professional masterpieces were written by composer Reza Vali, revealing the composer's attitude to the ancient modal system Dástgâh / Mághâm. Methods. There are historical, genre-style, systemic as well as structural-analytical methods in the represented scientific article. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the article for the first time in world musicology presents biographical material about Reza Vali, also developed the periodization of his work, the boundaries and names of the periods of the composer's creative heritage have been established. Conclusions. Based on the study, the following conclusions were made: the periods of creativity of Reza Vali and their boundaries were established, a two-stage periodization of the composer's work was proposed and developed; the date of the beginning of the first and second periods in creativity has been clarified; the names of two periods of Reza Vali's creativity are proposed and substantiated; the stylistic features typical for the first and second periods of Reza Valiʼs creativity are revealed, a namely, the first Pittsburgh period of the composer's creativeness (from the 1978 to the 2000) and the second Pittsburgh period of the musician's creativity (from 2000 to the present).

‘Personal Effects’

Solmaz Sharif’s debut poetry collection, Look (2016), has been hailed by critics for its formal experimentation and as a searing indictment of war. Using various words from the 2007 Department of Defense (DOD) Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Sharif highlights the sterility of the official vocabulary of the US military machine and the ‘war on terrorism’. The poet juxtaposes the DOD’s lexicon with reflections on personal relationships, family, love and loss along with traces of the multiple sites of home of an Istanbul-born, Iranian-American poet. In this essay, I argue that throughout the collection, the poet engages in a subversive, translative act; Sharif presents an intralingual mode of translation in which her poems destabilize the seeming neutrality and sanitizing effect of military vocabulary by consistently juxtaposing it with representations of the effects and consequences of violence, as well as images of intimacy, in order to articulate an anti-war stance.