The Mobile Woman: Getting Around during the 1630 Plague in Bologna

Legal proclamations show that during the 1630 plague outbreak in Bologna, Italy, women were required to remain quarantined in their homes for the duration of the epidemic while men remained mobile. However, primary texts and visual sources demonstrate that despite these legal restrictions, women remained active players in the fight against the plague by circumventing regulations. Significantly, women played a key role in sustaining the Bolognese economy, in particular by travelling to work in the silk industry. Moreover, while male doctors enjoyed special dispensations to avoid visiting the sick directly, female nurses left their homes to care for the daily needs of patients in the lazzaretto, the plague hospital. Artworks and primary texts depict a mobile woman. They show women from the poorest of backgrounds who were compelled to move through the city’s public spaces, remaining active in the street life of the plagued city. For instance, along with unlicensed women healers and nuns, prostitutes commonly volunteered for service in the plague hospitals. This required a brief shift in the social status of these women as they moved from their brothels to the pestilent walls of the lazzaretto. This paper will address the contribution that these resilient women made to maintaining the family economy and the significant positions women held in administering care, which have been overlooked in the scholarship. It will argue that by performing these essential activities, Bolognese women enjoyed an increase in physical but also social mobility, albeit short-lived.

Building Bridges: A Conversation between Friends, about Language, Laziness, and Long-distance Running

This conversation took place in a shared Google Doc over several occasions in April and early May 2021, between friends and colleagues, artists and writers, Hannah Clarkson and Matilda Tucker, in the context of an ongoing experiment in collaborative writing. In their individual and collective practices, Clarkson and Tucker explore potential embodiments in language(s) of thinking and dwelling in the ‘here and elsewhere’ of places and spaces they may not physically be in, across cultural, geographical and/or emotional distance. They are interested in how language can be employed as a tool for empathy beyond concrete linguistic understanding; how translation as method opens up to modalities of fictioning and collective storytelling; and writing as an experiment in sharing everyday struggles and building collective narratives of care. An attempt to bridge gaps between the here and elsewhere of Stockholm, Berlin and all the other places that in this time of pandemic we cannot be, the text below is not a conclusion but a conversation. It is a thinking out loud - or rather, on screen - together, on themes of language and translation; belonging and resisting; work and laziness; former and formless selves.

Overcoming the Pandemic through Viral Poetry Games: The Phenomenon of Coronavirus-Inspired Digital Acrostic Poetry in South Korea

Following the outbreak of COVID-19 in South Korea in winter 2019, acrostic poems on the three-syllable word “Corona” became viral on major search engines and social media platforms across the country. The composition of acrostic poems, particularly in three lines, has been a popular cultural phenomenon in Korea since the 1980s when it became a participatory literary exercise and game featured on television entertainment shows. The digital revolution in the 2000s allowed the writing and sharing of these short and whimsical poems to expand into various digital platforms. Since 2010, PC and mobile games have been developed to further enhance the ludic approach to acrostic poetry composition and contests. While facilitating individual creativity, and as an interactive and ludic way of community building and branding, acrostic poetry contests have also been used to promote social and political campaigns and consumer products. This paper will investigate poetry games and contests of acrostic poems on the Coronavirus featured on South Korean digital platforms. It will analyze the various games and contests organized by schools, communities, consumer product brands, and social media circles. The poems, composed by children and adults, display a wide range of messages involving self-reflection, social campaign, political criticism, and subversive wordplay. Together, these viral poems and contests promoted values of collaboration, competition, and social exchange during the pandemic. All in all, the paper explores the viral powers of language and language art in the digital world, as well as digital poetry’s connections to networked self, social mobilization, and online activism.

"Struggling Right Along With You": Precarity and the Power of Medical Crowdfunding Campaign Narratives

Medical fundraisers—which feature patients or caregivers seeking funds for medical care, procedures, or other needs—are ubiquitous on social media, and US-based GoFundMe.com is one of the most popular platforms. The rise of platforms like GoFundMe as forms of medical care and triage is notoriously intertwined with the failures of the U.S. healthcare system. Medical crowdfunding campaigns in the U.S. span diverse topics, invoke a wide range of moral discourses, and are affected deeply by race, gender, class, religion, and (dis)ability. Drawing on insights from a discourse analysis of ten “trending” campaigns hosted on GoFundMe in 2019, I argue that campaigns are participatory narratives (because organizers, beneficiaries, and donors can interact within the campaign space) that rely upon an individualizing discourse of deservingness to create reciprocal ties within biosocial communities of care. As politico-moral projects, medical crowdfunding campaigns are at once reflective of and responsive to normalized precarity. Crowdfunding narratives are spaces in which idealized neoliberal citizen-subjects are produced and valorized collaboratively through the discursive work of campaign organizers and donors, limiting (and enabling) our imaginaries of community and care.

The Reception of Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune in Romania

Manning’s (1908-1980) novel The Great Fortune (1960) is the first Second World War novel of a six-part novel series titled Fortunes of War. Set in Bucharest, Romania, the novel portrays the historical events of the first year of the war (1939-1940) and how these affect Romanian society and the English community. The novel was well-received in England, and in 1987 was adapted to a television serial issued by BBC. In Romania, the response of the critics after the communist regime was rather harsh, accusing Manning of misinterpreting Romanian reality. Moreover, considering that Manning portrays not only the wealth of high society but also the misery and the political conflicts of those times with the fascist Guard in the background, it could be stated that in 1960 when the novel was reviewed by the censorship board, it might not have been positively evaluated. Therefore, this article analyses the reception of The Great Fortune in Romania during and after the Communist regime from a historical perspective focusing on critics and censors’ responses to determine whether censorship influenced the reception of the novel in Romania. To undertake this study the censorship files located at the National Archives in Bucharest, as well as articles guarded in various libraries in Romania, were consulted. Keywords: Manning, Second World War, Romania, Bucharest, censorship, criticism, history, reception studies