Violent Resistance

Why do communities form militias to defend themselves against violence during civil war? Using original interviews with former combatants and civilians and archival material from extensive fieldwork in Mozambique, Corinna Jentzsch's Violent Resistance explains the timing, location and process through which communities form militias. Jentzsch shows that local military stalemates characterized by ongoing violence allow civilians to form militias that fight alongside the government against rebels. Militias spread only to communities in which elites are relatively unified, preventing elites from coopting militias for private gains. Crucially, militias that build on preexisting social conventions are able to resonate with the people and empower them to regain agency over their lives. Jentzsch's innovative study brings conceptual clarity to the militia phenomenon and helps us understand how wartime civilian agency, violent resistance, and the rise of third actors beyond governments and rebels affect the dynamics of civil war, on the African continent and beyond.

“FLORA CAPILAR” Y OTRAS TRANSGRESIONES FANTÁSTICAS DEL PELO EN LA NARRATIVA HIPERBREVE DEL COLECTIVO MICROLOCAS

Pelos (2016), del colectivo Microlocas, es un libro de microrrelatos cuyas autoras despliegan un imaginario compartido donde el vello, denominador común del conjunto, a menudo cobra vida propia, en sentido figurado o literal. Este artículo se centra en los relatos propiamente fantásticos de la obra, con el objetivo de analizar las diversas formas de distorsión imposible que experimenta el cuerpo en sus narraciones, especialmente en aquellas en que dicha distorsión no solo transgrede lo humanamente posible, sino que también pone en entredicho las convenciones sociales tradicionalmente impuestas a una parte del cuerpo de naturaleza tan cambiante como es el pelo. Abstract: Pelos (2016), by Microlocas collective, is a book of flash fictions whose authors display a shared imaginary where hair, the common denominator of the whole, often takes on a life of its own, figuratively or literally. This article focuses on the actual fantastic stories of the collection, with the aim of analyzing the various forms of impossible distortion that the body experiences in its narratives, especially those in which such alteration not only transgresses what is humanly possible but also questions the social conventions traditionally imposed on a part of the body with such a changeable nature as the hair.

CHALLENGING TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE LAWS IN THE DUCHESS OF MALFI: LOVE OR LONGINGS OR DEFYING PATRIARCHY?

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster speculates into the tradition of Elizabethan marriage, laws regarding marriage, its violation and the consequences it brings. The drama continues to reverberate among today’s audiences because of the majestic appeal of the Duchess and her enterprising tryst at rebuffing the ‘authority of social conventions and norms’. The Duchess has been credited for her attempt and bravery to choose and win over a spouse for love. Wedding, one of the most important moment of a woman’s life, was seen from a completely different perspective, temperament and in a ‘non-secular’ impression. The woman during the Elizabethan age had absolutely no choice in selecting her prospective groom. Women were seen subservient to men. Elizabethan woman were raised to believe that they were inferior to men and that they must abide by ‘the other’s verdicts’. Disobedience was a crime against religion and the consequences were monstrous. Webster uses majestic traits to exemplify the Duchess’ feminine strength of virtuosity and greatness which instil in the modern audience’s empathy and respect for the Duchess. This paper tries to revisit The Duchess of Malfi, decoding these socio-cultural and religious perspective and the ways of the aristocracy used by Webster, contributing to the eventual downfall of the Duchess. This paper also delves deep into documenting Webster’s attempt to portrays her as a tragic heroine and victim of law. KEYWORDS: The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster, Elizabethan marriage laws, Violation of laws, Tragedy

The Power of Women in Gabriel García Márquez’s World

A palette of vibrant and resilient female characters delineates García Márquez’s work. His heroines are the material and spiritual axis of families and communities whose survival depends on women’s most ordinary skills as much as on the supernatural expressions of their strength, fecundity, and knowledge. Yet echoing the tensions surrounding women and women’s power in Caribbean and Latin American cultures, most of García Márquez’s protagonists are primarily defined by their roles in the lives of the men they are intimately linked to. A complex hierarchy of women, and men, emerges from those intimate relationships. This article delves into García Márquez’s portrayal of women both to celebrate his powerful female protagonists and to explore the contradictions that the notions of gender, love, and sexuality embedded in his work impose on women’s bodies and subjectivities. Although many of his characters are fully desiring women reluctant to surrender their autonomy and their right to pleasure, those who openly defy social conventions or fail to subjugate their desires to the needs and initiatives of men are often faced by a variety of reprisals, ranging from isolation to magical disappearances and not excluding physical violence and death. Beyond the private negotiations of power, affective and sexual relations in García Márquez’s work speak of the intimate anchors of social (public) power. By grounding the reading of García Marquez’s women in studies of gender and sexuality in the Caribbean, this article also contributes to the analysis of two other major topics of his work, power and love.

Preschoolers Learn New Moral and Conventional Norms from Direct Experiences

By observing others, children can learn about different types of norms, including moral norms rooted in concerns for welfare and rights, and social conventions based on directives from authority figures or social consensus. Two studies examined how preschoolers and adults constructed and applied knowledge about novel moral and conventional norms from their direct social experiences. Participants watched a video of a novel prohibited action that caused pain to a victim (moral conditions) or a sound from a box (conventional conditions), and then saw a transgressor puppet, who had either watched the video alongside the participant or not, engage in the prohibited action. Preschoolers and adults rapidly constructed distinct moral and conventional evaluations about the novel actions. These distinctions were evident across several response modalities that have often been studied separately, including judgments, reasoning, and actions. However, children did not reliably track the puppet’s knowledge of the novel norms. These studies provide experimental support for the idea that children and adults construct distinct moral and conventional norms from social experiences, which in turn guide judgments, reasoning, and behavior.

Preschoolers Learn New Moral and Conventional Norms from Direct Experiences

By observing others, children can learn about different types of norms, including moral norms rooted in concerns for welfare and rights, and social conventions based on directives from authority figures or social consensus. Two studies examined how preschoolers and adults constructed and applied knowledge about novel moral and conventional norms from their direct social experiences. Participants watched a video of a novel prohibited action that caused pain to a victim (moral conditions) or a sound from a box (conventional conditions), and then saw a transgressor puppet, who had either watched the video alongside the participant or not, engage in the prohibited action. Preschoolers and adults rapidly constructed distinct moral and conventional evaluations about the novel actions. These distinctions were evident across several response modalities that have often been studied separately, including judgments, reasoning, and actions. However, children did not reliably track the puppet’s knowledge of the novel norms. These studies provide experimental support for the idea that children and adults construct distinct moral and conventional norms from social experiences, which in turn guide judgments, reasoning, and behavior.

Personalization and Localization in Human-Robot Interaction: A Review of Technical Methods

Personalization and localization are important when developing social robots for different sectors, including education, industry, healthcare or restaurants. This allows for an adjustment of robot behaviors according to the needs, preferences or personality of an individual when referring to personalization or to the social conventions or the culture of a country when referring to localization. However, there are different models that enable personalization and localization presented in the current literature, each with their advantages and drawbacks. This work aims to help researchers in the field of social robotics by reviewing and analyzing different papers in this domain. We specifically focus our review by exploring different robots that employ distinct models for the adaptation of the robot to its environment. Additionally, we study an array of methods used to adapt the nonverbal and verbal skills of social robots, including state-of-the-art techniques in artificial intelligence.

“A Thing of Dreams and Desires, a Siren, a Whisper, and a Seduction”: Mermaids and the seashore in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine

The Sea Lady (1901) is one of the more neglected early novels of H. G. Wells, particularly compared to his more famous scientific romances. Both a social satire and a mediation on the limits of human imagination, Wells’s only mermaid story has drawn surprisingly little attention as a mermaid story. The novel is highly intertextual with legends, written tales, and artwork about mermaids in the 19th Century, which, I argue, Wells deploys in pursuit of the narrative’s interests in gender politics, the critique of social conventions, and philosophical reflection on the possibility of reaching for greater knowledge. Traditional associations of mermaid figures with sexual and ontological transgression and with liminal zones of the sea and the seashore are used to invite reflection on late Victorian social practices around sea-bathing and clothing, as the mythological mermaid’s incursion into the real everyday world exposes its profound vulnerability to radical alternative ways of thinking and being.

Understanding Socially Aware Robot Navigation

Navigation is an essential skill for autonomous robots and it becomes a cumbersome task in human populated environments. Robots need to perform the tasks without disturbing the humans around them and ensure comfort and safety of humans as well. It is further influenced by various factors like social norms, geometry of environment and surrounding people. It is essential to comprehend three components i.e. Social Conventions (SC), Human Motion (HM) and Context Aware Mapping (CAM) for establishing effective socially aware robot navigation (SARN). This article discusses these different aspects of these components which should be taken into consideration while designing an efficient and optimal SARN. Further, it reports recent experiments conducted by different institutes pertaining to these components.

Nature as Space: Gender Roles and Subversion in Edna O’Brien’s “A Scandalous Woman”

The rigid social conventions for women in rural twentieth century Ireland, specifically that of the nun and the mother, are illustrated and subsequently subverted by the figures of the scandalous woman and the witch in Edna O’Brien’s short story, “A Scandalous Woman”. Most of the scholarship on this short story and O’Brien’s work in general has been focused on the gender roles in terms of women’s rights. The purpose of this paper, however, is to explore the interrelationship between both the accepted and subversive roles of women, and at the same time demonstrate how social conventions are made subversive by the natural surroundings, outlining both the conventional and subversive nature symbolism which underpins conventional morality. Nature takes on various guises in the story: it has symbolic importance as spiritual sustenance, it has an underlying psychological component, and finally it is present in both erotic and esoteric situations. Spaces are inexorably intertwined with religion and the role of the women in the story, specifically in the context of Eily, the protagonist, and her progression from an innocent girl to a scandalous woman. These connections also serve to illustrate the main character’s progression from innocent girl to scandalous woman in terms of the interactions of gender, nature, and space.