Exploring Community Tuberculosis Program in the Pastoralist Setting of Ethiopia: a Qualitative Study of Community Health Workers' Perspectives in Borena Zone, Oromia Region

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the top ten causes of death and thee first cause of death due to single infectious disease in the world. Nevertheless, access to TB prevention and control is not uniform even within a country, The community TB program is designed to improve the access in Ethiopia. Exploring the program performance from the perspectives of its implemters in a pastoral setting remains important.Method: We conducted a qualitative study using an interpretive description method in the pastoralist community setting of Ethiopia. Study participants were recruited from geographically dispersed areas. Data were collected through in-depth interview using semi-structured guides and audio recordings during February 01-30, 2020. The interview guide was developed based on consultation with TB program experts and clinicians treating TB patients in the study area. Notes were taken at the interview to enrich the transcription of the data. The interview was conducted by the principal investigator. The subsequent data collection was informed by emerging ideas from forgoing interview transcriptions. The interview continued until data saturation was achieved.Results: One hundred and fisty six codes, nine categories and three themes emanated. The first theme was an inadequate community TB performance and some of its codes include inadequate presumptive TB case identification and compromised DOTs service delivery. The second theme was factors contributing to the performance. Community factors, lack of physical access to health facilities and indirect non-medical cost are some of categories under this theme. The final theme was related to solutions and its categories include a need for active community involvement and modification of service delivery approaches.Conclusion:Community TB performance is inadequate in the pastoralist community and many factors contribute to the inadequate performance. Aligning the program to the context of the pastoralist community setting is required to improve the performance.

Rainfall shocks, cognitive development and educational attainment among adolescents in a drought-prone region in Kenya

There is growing evidence that early life conditions are important for outcomes during adolescence, including cognitive development and education. Economic conditions at the time children enter school are also important. We examine these relationships for young adolescents living in a low-income drought-prone pastoral setting in Kenya using historical rainfall patterns captured by remote sensing as exogenous shocks. Past rainfall shocks measured as deviations from local long-term averages have substantial negative effects on the cognitive development and educational achievement of girls. Results for the effects of rainfall shocks on grades attained, available for both girls and boys, support that finding. Consideration of additional outcomes suggests the effects of rainfall shocks on education are due to multiple underlying mechanisms including persistent effects on the health of children and the wealth of their households, underscoring the potential value of contemporaneous program and policy responses to such shocks.

The Politics of Happiness in Richard Brome’s The Queen and Concubine

In this article, I discuss Richard Brome’s tragicomedy The Queen and Concubine (1635–1636), focusing on how the play reflects the iconography of Charles I as well as Stuart ideals of statecraft. I argue that the play’s representation of a royal ruler in a pastoral setting draws on Van Dyck’s portraiture and on Charles I’s masques, as well as on Lipsius’s political concept of ‘love’. I claim that the play promotes a ‘politics of happiness’ which affirms the Caroline ideology of royal rule. My reading of Brome’s play aims at furthering the critical understanding of the cultural and political concerns shared by court drama and drama written for the commercial theatre in the Caroline period.

“A Little Smackerel of Something”

The narratives of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner serve collectively as a Künstlerroman—a narrative about an artist’s growth—and Pooh’s development as poet is structured around three nodes: food, sociability, and creativity. Pooh’s obsession with food, especially honey, is not mere oral greed: his desire for food in company is frequently linked to his practice and performance of poetry. Using anthropologist Mary Douglas’s analysis of meal structure, which encodes social relationships and creates social boundaries through food meanings within individual meals, this chapter examines how the metonymic triad of food, social connections, and creativity structure the social relations among the animals. Meals and food provide the occasions for this triad to operate: both formal meals (the banquet in Winnie-the-Pooh) and lighter meals (such as “elevenses” and teas). The meals and food provide occasions within the pastoral setting of the Hundred Acre Woods for Pooh to develop his poetic art, from spontaneous hums to his heroic epic about Piglet.

Franz Caucig’s „Phaedrus”

The article interprets Franz Caucig’s Socrates with a Disciple and Diotima?, one of several paintings commissioned for Palais Auersperg in Vienna, now housed at the Slovenian National Gallery. Socrates and a young man are in a pastoral setting beneath a plane tree near a river. They are addressed by a woman, and a chariot with maidens can be seen in the background. The scene is from Plato’s Phaedrus, since Socrates never leaves Athens, except for military service and in this scene from the Phaedrus. The woman addressing Socrates and Phaedrus in the painting cannot be Diotima because her chariot has two white horses, indicating a goddess. The most likely goddess would be the goddess in the poem of Parmenides of Elea, the source of the soul-chariot analogy in the Phaedrus. The setting of Caucig’s Socrates painting bears a remarkable similarity to his Amnytus painting, which features political references to Napoleon’s subjection of Gorizia, Caucig’s homeland. Caucig’s Phaedrus remarks upon Napoleon’s conquests, Hegel’s lectures on Parmenides, and David’s idealized painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps.

World Ecology in Martineau’s and Gaskell’s Colonial Pastorals

The pastoral tends to offer a retreat from modern life, but Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell reverse this pattern. They both turn to the colonies to reconcile the pastoral mode with capitalism, and, in their pastoral depictions of colonial life, we witness that mode’s peculiar capacity to narrate what the environmental historian Jason W. Moore calls ‘the capitalist world ecology’ – the globally systemic way of putting nature to work in the service of capitalism. Set in natural environments marked by human influence, the pastoral is a mode that can register economic relations with their ecological dimensions. In Martineau’s Homes Abroad and Cinnamon and Pearls – tales in Illustrations of Political Economy – and Gaskell’s Mary Barton, the pastoral aestheticizes the role that natural environments play in the development of capitalism. Homes Abroad presents peaceful agrarian life in Van Diemen’s Land as a lucrative enterprise in accord with modernization. Turning to Ceylon, Cinnamon and Pearls imagines an organic capitalism in which the celebration of plant life goes hand in hand with emergent property borders. In Mary Barton, the final pastoral setting in Canada is home to peace and progress. The felled trees in that setting signal the appropriation of nature for profit in the timber trade. These works of fiction capture the accumulation of capital in rural and suburban areas, which was historically key to the emergence of capitalism. The pastoral’s ability to depict the capitalist world ecology reflects a preoccupation with historical forces that is already present in the mode’s roots in antiquity.

Actual/Virtual: Bovines ou la vraie vie des vaches

Gras’s Bovines/A Cow’s Life is a contemplative documentary reflection on a herd of Charolais cows, offering up delayed, wandering images of bovine life. The film invites particular links to be drawn between the ‘pure optical and sound situations’ of the Deleuzian time-image and the account of animal art and expressive territory given by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?. Building also on Bailly’s notion of pensivity, while expanding this account beyond its privileging of the gaze (through attention to bovine sounds in the film), this chapter allows for further development of dynamics of worlding traced in previous chapters. Yet it also suggests that Bovines allows us to probe the possible limitations of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. In risking a privileging of what Hallward calls, in his critique of Deleuze, ‘virtual creatings’ over ‘actual creatures’, the film’s time-images might be seen as aestheticising political paralysis over political action, favouring a celebration of biovitality over a critique of biopolitics. While Bovines’s pastoral setting and lingering, durational aesthetic thus stage a set of ambivalences and contradictions, the film also points to the limitations, as well as the ongoing possibilities, of a Deleuzo-Guattarian engagement with cinema’s animal worlds.

Chaste Lovers, Umayyad Rulers, and Abbasid Writers

This chapter focuses on a set of Arabic stories from the Umayyad period (661–750) that were further elaborated in the literature of the Abbasid period (750–1258). These tales about chaste lovers typically feature a pastoral setting, a male point of view, a melancholy mood, and lovers who live, suffer, and die for love—providing delight for the court audiences for whom they were performed. Not all stories about chaste love, however, fit the dominant paradigm, and unusual cases can shed light on ways in which the Umayyads were viewed in the Abbasid imagination, point to intersections between love story and political life, and show how stories of chaste love live on in courtly, orthodox Islamic, and Sufi discourse.

Tourist Opinions on Animal Culling: A South Australian Example

Environmental education is commonly used to satisfy the natural curiosity of tourists, increase conservation awareness and strengthen pro-conservation values. Yet it does not always address the more sensitive ecosystem management issues such as animal culling as it may be seen to upset the balance of the positive tourist experience. For this reason, this study compared acceptance and non-acceptance of animal culling from two angles: for tourists either provided or not provided with a brief passage of information regarding why animals may be culled; and tourists’ opinions on the culling of native versus non-native animal species. Conducted in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia where conservation and tourism co-exist within a traditional pastoral setting, 789 self-administered questionnaires were analysed. Results highlighted the differences in tourists’ acceptance levels for the culling of native and non-native species, as well as the possible influence of environmental information on these acceptance levels.