ABSTRACT Despite Institutional Review Board concerns about psychological harm arising from research participation, evidence from trauma-questionnaire research suggests that participation is typically well-tolerated by participants. Yet, it is unclear how participant experiences of in-lab trauma simulations align with IRB ethical guidelines. Thus, we compared reactions to a trauma film paradigm with reactions to a positive film task or cognitive tasks. Overall, relative to other conditions, the trauma film was well-tolerated by participants: they generally reported low-to-moderate negative emotions, moderate benefits, and (...) that participation was not worse than everyday stressors. Our results have implications for the research community in designing trauma-based research. (shrink)

As it stands, Derrida’s protest is deficient in any sense of how the discourses of South African racism have been at once historically constituted and politically constitutive. For to begin to investigate how the representation of racial difference has functioned in South Africa’s political and economic life, it is necessary to recognize and track the shifting character of these discourses. Derrida, however, blurs historical differences by conferring on the single term apartheid a spurious autonomy and agency: “The word concentrates separation…. (...) By isolating being apart in some sort of essence or hypostasis, the word corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation” . Is it indeed the word, apartheid, or is it Derrida himself, operating here in “another regime of abstraction” , removing the word from its place in the discourse of South African racism, raising it to another power, and setting separation itself apart? Derrida is repelled by the word, yet seduced by its divisiveness, the division in the inner structure of the term itself which he elevates to a state of being.The essay’s opening analysis of the word apartheid is, then, symptomatic of a severance of word from history. When Derrida asks, “Hasn’t apartheid always been the archival record of the unnameable?” , the answer is a straightforward no. Despite its notoriety and currency overseas, the term apartheid has not always been the “watchword” of the Nationalist regime. . It has its own history, and that history is closely entwined with a developing ideology of race which has not only been created to deliberately rationalize and temper South Africa’s image at home and abroad, but can also be seen to be intimately allied to different stages of the country’s political and economic development. Because he views apartheid as a “unique appellation” , Derrida has little to say about the politically persuasive function that successive racist lexicons have served in South Africa. To face the challenge of investigating the strategic role of representation, one would have to part ways with him by releasing that pariah of a word, apartheid, from its quarantine from historical process, examining it instead in the context of developing discourses of racial difference. Anne McClintock is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia University. She is working on a dissertation on race and gender in British imperial culture and is the author of a monograph on Simon de Beauvoir. Rob Nixon, in the same program at Columbia, is working on the topic of exile and Third World-metropolitan relations in the writing of V. S. and Shiva Naipaul. (shrink)

The era from the late fifties to the early seventies was marked in Africa and the Caribbean by a rush of newly articulated anticolonial sentiment that was associated with the burgeoning of both international back consciousness and more localized nationalist movements. Between 1957 and 1973 the vast majority of African and the larger Caribbean colonies won their independence; the same period witnessed the Cuban and Algerian revolutions, the latter phase of the Kenyan “Mau Mau” revolt, the Katanga crisis in the (...) Cong, the Trinidadian Black Power uprising and, equally important for the atmosphere of militant defiance, the civil rights movement in the United States, the student revolts of 1968, and the humbling of the United States during the Vietnam War. This period was distinguished, among Caribbean and African intellectuals, by a pervasive mood of optimistic outrage. Frequently graduates of British or French universities, they were the first generation from their regions self-assured and numerous enough to call collectively for a renunciation of Western standards as the political revolts found their cultural counterparts in insurrections against the bequeathed values of the colonial powers.In the context of such challenges to an increasingly discredited European colonialism, a series of dissenting intellectual chose to utilize a European text as a strategy for getting “out from under this ancient mausoleum of [Western] historic achievement.”1 They seized upon The Tempest as a way of amplifying their class for decolonization within the bounds of the dominant cultures. But at the same time these Caribbeans and Africans adopted the play as a founding text in an oppositional lineage which issued from a geopolitically and historically specific set of cultural ambitions. They perceived that the play could contribute to their self-definition during a period of great flux. So, through repeated, reinforcing, transgressive appropriations of The Tempest, a once silenced group generated its own tradition of “error” which in turn served as one component of the grander counterhegemonic nationalist and black internationalist endeavors of the period. Because that era of Caribbean and African history was marked by such extensive, open contestation of cultural values, the destiny of The Tempest at that time throws into uncommonly stark relief the status of value as an unstable social process rather than a static and, in literary terms, merely textual attribute. Rob Nixon is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia University. He is working on the topics of exile and Third World-metropolitan relations in the writing of V. S. and Shiva Naipaul. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry is “No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida’s ‘Le Dernier Mot du Racisme’ ”. (shrink)

A collection of articles about P.A. Sorokin's work are preceded by a Russian translation of selected chapters of his 1947 work "Society, culture and personality" and a collection of correspondence (also translated into Russian) between him and Robert Merton.

Razdel I. Obnovlencheskoe dvizhenie -- Razdel II. Politicheskiĭ islam -- Razdel III. Mezhdu neomodernizmom i islamizmom : otdelʹnye proekty -- Zakli︠u︡chenie.

One of the traditional ways mathematical ideas and even new areas of mathematics are created is from experiments. One of the best-known examples is that of the Fermat hypothesis, which was conjectured by Fermat in his attempts to find integer solutions for the famous Fermat equation. This hypothesis led to the creation of a whole field of knowledge, but it was proved only after several hundred years. This book, based on the author's lectures, presents several new directions of mathematical research. (...) All of these directions are based on numerical experiments conducted by the author, which led to new hypotheses that currently remain open, i.e., are neither proved nor disproved. The hypotheses range from geometry and topology (statistics of plane curves and smooth functions) to combinatorics (combinatorial complexity and random permutations) to algebra and number theory (continuous fractions and Galois groups). For each subject, the author describes the problem and presents numerical results that led him to a particular conjecture. In the majority of cases there is an indication of how the readers can approach the formulated conjectures (at least by conducting more numerical experiments). Written in Arnold's unique style, the book is intended for a wide range of mathematicians, from high school students interested in exploring unusual areas of mathematics on their own, to college and graduate students, to researchers interested in gaining a new, somewhat nontraditional perspective on doing mathematics. In the interest of fostering a greater awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and everyday life, MSRI and the AMS are publishing books in the Mathematical Circles Library series as a service to young people, their parents and teachers, and the mathematics profession. Titles in this series are co-published with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI). (shrink)

Tijdens zijn bewogen leven schreef Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert (1522-1590) vele teksten en voerde hij talloze gesprekken. Zijn doel: zijn medemensen overtuigen van het belang om niet slaafs achter anderen aan te lopen maar zélf na te denken. Want elk mens heeft voldoende redelijke vermogens om het leven zelfstandig vorm te geven en het goede te doen. De Kruidhofjes bevat twee bundels met dialogen – gesprekken die Coornhert zelf voerde of onderweg heeft gehoord. De dialogen zijn te zien als medicijnen tegen (...) wat Coornhert zag als de ziekte van zijn tijd: onnadenkendheid en religieuze scherpslijperij. Enerzijds probeert Coornhert obstakels voor een goed en gelukkig persoonlijk leven weg te halen. Hier gaat het vooral om het bestrijden van onbegrip en onwetendheid. Anderzijds probeert Coornhert obstakels voor vreedzaam samenleven op te ruimen. Dat is de reden waarom nogal wat dialogen ingaan op religieuze kwesties als kerkbezoek, de mis en kerkelijke ceremonies; onenigheid over deze onderwerpen vormde immers de belangrijkste oorzaak van de heftige onderdrukking, vervolging en oorlog in de zestiende eeuw. Dit verklaart ook de felheid van veel van de dialogen. Discussies over religieuze denkbeelden en gebruiken waren niet zomaar interessant tijdverdrijf voor bij de borrel. Het ging ergens om: om de waarheid, je zielenheil en de inrichting van de maatschappij. In 45 dialogen probeert Coornhert zo zijn medemens te motiveren tot eerlijkheid naar zichzelf en verdraagzaamheid naar de ander. (shrink)

The article discusses a key issue for Russian and international Max Weber Studies: the epistemological possibilities and place of Weberian sociology in modern social theory. Discussion articles by well-known Russian scientists — who sharply criticized the actualizing direction of Weberian studies in general, and the religious, cultural, and sociological orientation in particular — are contrasted with the re-actualization and rethinking of key Weberian themes in the “New Critical Theory” of the influential German sociologist Hartmut Rosa. Such a projection will make (...) it possible, on the one hand, to thematize the axiomatic assertion about the heuristic rather than concrete-content relevance of the classics; on the other hand, it will provide an opportunity to read Weber as a macrosociologist. In the original, criticized, and often rejected sociology of Rosa, Weber appears not only as a predecessor whose mention enhances the relevance of the new theoretical framework, but, above all, as an analyst and diagnostician of early modernity. Weber’s main ideas and theoretical constructions are organically built into Rosa’s methodological framework: analysis-diagnosis-praxis. The analysis of rationalization as a universal historical process of modernity in Weber’s sociology is rethought by Rosa as expansion and acceleration; disenchantment becomes a diagnosis of modernity and is recoded into alienation, while the concept of charisma is transformed into the key concept of resonance. (shrink)

The Hamilton–Jacobi (HJ) equation for the action function plays a fundamental role in classical mechanics. A known consequence of the HJ equation is a blow-up of a disturbed free-particle solution. Following the idea of Sivashinsky, we formulate an extension of the HJ equation in which perturbations eventually evolve into a finite autosoliton associated with an elementary particle. A novel element of the model is stability of the autosoliton. We link uncertainties in the position and momentum of a particle to a (...) width and amplitude of the autosoliton. We formulate restrictions on the coefficients of the model and compare the model with some existing theories of extended elementary objects. (shrink)