The Animal Eye and Refugee Vulnerability in Wajdi Mouawad’s Anima

Anima, by Lebanese-born Canadian-raised author Wajdi Mouawad, is a road novel that takes the reader through different locations on the North American continent in order to explore the darkest side of humankind. This approach will focus on the provocative narrative technique used by Mouawad, filtered through the eyes of a significant number of animals and insects, in order to consider the different representations of vulnerability that articulate the text. In the novel, animals and insects are not only the narrators but also fundamental characters. As this analysis will show, their vulnerability represents the uncertainty of fate in contemporary society, being in the hands of those apparently superior creatures that decide when they can live and when they have to die. As an example of a vulnerable text, Anima relies on the theatricality of this animal Greek chorus to represent the need for humans to undergo a process of animalization. The protagonist, Wahhch Debch, reaches a stage of symbiosis with his animal side that allows him to transcend his vulnerability as a child refugee and as an adult who lost his wife, and this new sense of animal self serves him as an empowering element to break ties with his past.

#BlackLivesMatter and Twitter

Scholars agree that the Untied States is experiencing a new Black civil and human rights movement called #BlackLivesMatter and that the internet is pivotal to that movement. Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and in Baltimore, Maryland, dominated national attention for months through 2014 and 2015. Protesters have successfully gained the attention of elite power brokers, which collective action scholars have identified as a necessary step in the social movement process. #BlackLivesMatter still has many insights to provide about mobilization, if researchers are willing to take Black American discursive power and intellectual production more seriously as subjects of analysis. This chapter argues that a dramaturgy framework helps reveal the structure and meaning making that occurs on the periphery of a social movement. In this periphery, or “margin,” the analysis in the chapter shows that Black social media publics are harbingers of racial progress. Additionally, introducing the concept of a Greek chorus to the dramaturgy framework better clarifies how outside observers negotiate their own meaning-making surrounding the movement’s claims and strategies. This analysis provides a clearer understanding of the importance of digital media in the contemporary Black civil rights movement.

An epic journey in sharing: The story of a young researcher's journey to share her data and the information professionals who tried to help

Sharing data can be a journey with various characters, challenges along the way, and uncertain outcomes. These “epic journeys in sharing” teach information professionals about our patrons, our institutions, our community, and ourselves. In this paper, we tell a particularly dramatic data-sharing story, in effect a case study, in the form of a Greek Drama. It is the quest of – a young idealistic researcher collecting fascinating sensitive data and seeking to share it, encountering an institution doing its due diligence, helpful library folks, and an expert repository. Our story has moments of joy, such as when our researcher is solely motivated to share because she wants others to be able to reuse her unique data; dramatic plot twists involving IRBs; and a poignant ending. It explores major tropes and themes about how researchers’ motivations, data types, and data sensitivity can impact sharing; the importance of having clarity concerning institutional policies and procedures; and the role of professional communities and relationships. Just like the chorus in greek drama provides commentary on the action, a a chorus of data elders in our drama points out larger lessons that the case study has for research data management and data sharing. Where actors in the greek chorus were wearing masks, our chorus carries different items, symbolizing their message, on every entry. [i] The narrative structure of this paper was inspired by the IASSIST 2018 conference theme of “Once Upon a Data Point: Sustaining Our Data Storytellers.”

Drama

This chapter pushes against the notion that Eva Palmer Sikelianos's work in Greece was disconnected from her non-Greek past and indifferent to “archaeological problems.” Digging deep into her papers and other sources dating between 1903 and 1940, the chapter pieces together Eva's dialogue with artists from Isadora Duncan to H. D. to George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell to Angelos Sikelianos, who were all familiar with archaeological problems but standing at an oblique angle to them as they thought about how to stage the ancient Greek chorus. This transatlantic genealogy allows reflection on how creative work happening near ruins, yet outside the formal discipline of archaeology, responds to the place, takes on the feel of archaeological discoveries, and generates further rounds of imaginative reworking. The same genealogy brings into view how Eva's efforts to revive the tragic chorus, having transformed Isadora's experiments, traveled across the Atlantic to inform the work of Ted Shawn.