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This article approaches personal memory travels with the aim of investigating people's encounters with the changing environment in relation to time. It centers on the intra-actions with perceptual ephemera as immaterial non-solid entities to argue that our relational reality is a cyclical, dis-continuous process of past and present encounters. The study is grounded in the post-humanist performativity approach and based on personal life histories of memory trips gathered in Slovenia with the help of in-depth interviews and photo-elicitation. Findings suggest that travelers' engagements with ephemera at site illustrate complex entanglements between human and other (immaterial) entities as co-constituted in time and from within time, provoking the production of situated and temporally sensitive knowledge about the more-than-human world. The article endorses the significance of memory work and human engagements with absences and resonances, both allusions to other (past) contexts, as fundamental for cultivating post-anthropocentric attitudes and advancing the habit of timefulness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing up in a military family with long-term and frequently absent parents presents unique psychosocial challenges to children and families. The purpose of this paper is to examine what growing up in a military family with absent parents looks like from a child's perspective, what the biggest challenges are, and how children cope with them. We took a life course approach and conducted retrospective, semi-structured in-depth interviews with 13 adult children from 11 military families in Slovenia, which revealed that prolonged parental absences leave a strong impression on children's individual biographies and everyday life. This influence is evident in their present and past everyday life throughout their life trajectories. It particularly affects relationships with parents and relationships between parents, leads to frequent changes in daily routines and disrupts the family balance as well as causes anxiety and fear for the parent. From the children's perspective, it also affects their parents' parenting practices (how their parents raised them) and how they manage their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the death of a significant person, when the subject is called upon to painfully acknowledge the loss of the bond with the absent person, therapy can create a transitional space in which it is possible to facilitate the process of transforming that bond, through the activation of symbolic capacity, which makes it possible to retain something of what was lost and move toward a new and more satisfying future adjustment. Clinical examples show the different symbolic forms that symbolization process can create. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ignorance becomes a philosophical issue when it is first-personal, i.e., x's awareness about x's own ignorance. It raises exciting and apparently paradoxical questions about cognition. Keeping first-personal experience of ignorance at the centre, some Indian philosophical schools discuss extensively the nature of ignorance. Vyāsatīrtha from the Dualist school (Dvaita Vedānta), along with the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school propound that ignorance belongs to a negative category (abhāvapadārtha) or in other words, that it must be understood as an absence of some cognition. The Non-dualist school (Advaita Vedānta) thinks that ignorance is not an absence of cognition, but a positive entity (bhāvarūpa) that obstructs our cognition. The first group objects for considering ignorance as a positive entity arguing that it leads to the problem of profligacy of ontological entities, whereas the Non-dualists argue that considering ignorance as an absence of cognition leads to contradictions in cases of first-personal experiences of ignorance. In this paper, I present a small segment of the extensive arguments from both sides, alongside two Western philosophical theories that support the views of the Dualists and the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika. Through a critical analysis of these arguments, I demonstrate that, with respect to the specific set of arguments examined, the view of ignorance as an absence of cognition fails to sufficiently account for cases of first-personal experiences of ignorance. In contrast, the Non-dualist conceptualization proves more robust, given its successful applicability to all instances of ignorance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Burnout among the paramedic profession is an increasing problem and not enough is being done to improve the current climate. It is for this reason that paramedics should individually contribute to the reduction of this issue by developing their own leadership characteristics, such as emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and stress and conflict management. Evidence suggests that these qualities and behaviours reduce the possibility of being subject to burnout symptomology. Implementing positive stress and conflict-management strategies will create a healthcare environment, which will be more enjoyable to work in. Emotional and social intelligence increase the resilience of prehospital clinicians who are subject to occupational challenges on a daily basis. Wider influences such as ambulance trusts, health services and governing bodies have implemented strategies to tackle this issue but clinicians can lead the change from the front line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The magical realism artistically defines Latin America. The literature of this cultural area is marked by the dual rootedness of the mentalities of this geographical area. Pure materiality versus diaphanous absence, telling silence versus muffled noise, clear contours versus dilution of forms are all ways of literary or cinematographic representation of this form of artistic manifestation called realismo magico. La Casa de Los Espíritus is Isabel Allende’s debut novel and a literary work in which the undeniable elements of magical realism are present both in the construction of the plot, in the creation of the characters and in the recurring themes specific to this literary movement. Isabel Allende’s novel tells the story of the Trueba family in Latin America over four generations, with a historical background from the early 20th century to the 1970s. The narrator’s narrative act is doubled by another defining narrative for Clara, the youngest daughter of the del Valle family: the diary she keeps assiduously until the day she dies. This diary becomes one of Clara’s “voices” when she chooses muteness as a form of expression of rebellion. Clara, Blanca and Alba - feminine names with an obvious symbolism, referring to light, to the diaphanous - are the female figures that represent the generations around which the story is articulated, while the figure of Nivea, representing the first generation, is less well defined in Allende’s novel. Also built around female figures is Billie August’s screenplay, with Clara’s almost obsessive presence beyond silence or death. The aim of our paper is to approach a unique subject reflected, with the respective tools, in two different arts. Starting from a literary text, La Casa de Los Espíritus, by Isabel Allende, and from the dramatization of the book, in Bille August’s directorial vision, released by Miramax in 1993, we want to detect, classify and analyse different types of forms of absence and the ways of constructing and representing it, in the literary text and in the cinematographic transposition. We consider that absence, through the establishment of a two-faced world - the spoken and the unspoken, the seen and the unseen, the material and the non-material, the solid and the vague - is the recurrent, strong and defining theme for the framing of these artistic productions belonging to the artistic current of the magic realism. Absence can be actualized, for example, in muteness and silence, in death, in escape into the imaginary. Marked negatively, absence, however, establishes a meaning, conveyed precisely through the absence of signal (auditory, visual, tactile). Literary and cinematographic resources for the representation of absence are obviously different, and our work aims to approach them in parallel, in order to observe similarities and differences in the process of production and reception.

The solute carrier family 6 member 1 (SLC6A1) gene encodes GAT-1, a γ-aminobutyric acid transporter expressed on astrocytes and inhibitory neurons. Mutations in SLC6A1 are associated with epilepsy and developmental disorders, including motor and social impairments, but variant-specific animal models are needed to elucidate mechanisms. Here, we report electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings and clinical data from a patient with a variant in SLC6A1 that encodes GAT-1 with a serine-to-leucine substitution at amino acid 295 (S295L), who was diagnosed with childhood absence epilepsy. Next, we show that mice bearing the S295L mutation (GAT-1S295L/+ ) have spike-and-wave discharges with motor arrest consistent with absence-type seizures, similar to GAT-1+/- mice. GAT-1S295L/+ and GAT-1+/- mice follow the same pattern of pharmacosensitivity, being bidirectionally modulated by ethosuximide (200 mg/kg ip) and the GAT-1 antagonist NO-711 (10 mg/kg ip). By contrast, GAT-1-/- mice were insensitive to both ethosuximide and NO-711 at the doses tested. In conclusion, ECoG findings in GAT-1S295L/+ mice phenocopy GAT-1 haploinsufficiency and provide a useful preclinical model for drug screening and gene therapy investigations.

Palestinian identity is symbolic of the struggle against elimination, against becoming absent. The pervasive use of social media today has been pivotal in revealing this struggle, enabling the direct and unrestricted sharing of Palestinian suffering in the face of unremitting destruction and displacement. Across the globe, people bear witness to Palestinians fighting for survival amidst the mass bombings, field executions, and engineered famine in Israel’s current military operation in the Gaza Strip. This campaign, which began as a response to Hamas’ attack on October 7th 2023, has led to the extermination of Palestinian people at a level and pace that likely exceeds any conflict in modern history. Consequently, many experts consider this military operation a plausible genocide. Yet, despite its shocking and unfiltered nature, this recent incursion is only the latest example in a series of violent aggressions against Palestinians that have lasted nearly a century. This article aims to analyse works of speculative fiction that tackle these issues.

This article is dedicated to the absent presence and mnemonic remains of the socialist-era monuments in eastern Europe. Mnemonic remains is a metaphor I employ in this paper to direct our attention to the physical absence of monuments after their removal. But it also speaks of a monument's role in absentia , its continued existence in and its effects on the collective memory beyond its physical presence. The phenomenon, sporadically acknowledged but rarely subject of investigation in academic literature, is explored and illustrated through the lens of the removed V.I. Lenin monument in Riga. The absent monument, I contend, performs the function of a phantom monument, exerting mnemonic agency beyond its physical presence through its representational value for other memory projects. This is highlighted through the study of the proposed and completed, but never unveiled, monument to Konstantīns Čakste on the site of the former Lenin monument in Riga. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In STS, there has long existed an unease about the analysis of powerful actors and dominant technoscientific narratives. A core concern for the field has been how particular objects, phenomena, and people are excluded from technoscientific realities. However, a key problem in dealing with exclusion in STS is that our methods call us to 'follow the actors,' which often leads to reifying our interlocutors' matters of concern. This paper proposes an analytical strategy that turns our analytical attention to the actors' work rendering things absent—a strategy of analyzing ontological overflows. The aim of this analytical move is to shift focus from construction to de-construction and to highlight the importance of processes of exclusion. By exploring the actors' making of the absence of Zika—and by extension, the construction of the absence of various technoscientific phenomena—an analytical strategy is outlined that allows us to attend to the overflows of technoscience. Four types of overflows are analyzed: conglomeration, exclusion, scarcity, and indeterminacy, each illustrating how the making of absences shapes technoscientific objects. For instance, the decision of what counts as a thing, the handling of absent data, and the translation of computational uncertainties into absence of prediction. This analytical strategy highlights where there exist spaces for power and choice—where choices can be made, by whom, and by what means. By analyzing the making of absence, we can explore how objects, phenomena, and people are marginalized or rendered absent in technoscientific processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of some of the key issues raised, but left unresolved, by Beckett exposing the ways the (typically concealed) notion of identity is constructed and the non-concomitant representation(s) of surrogacy which develop from it in Malone Dies. Involved in both enterprises are fabrications of artifice, themselves very much vulnerable to differential inspiration, which are set over against, but apparently complicit with, a supposedly 'natural' continuity, with both subject to the presumed proximity of death. The coda of the novel, very much a 'codetta', demonstrates how imagined fact and imagined fiction can always be revised, but can never be made to cohere. Malone Dies is throughout seen either as (a) an investigation into whether the body can ever make up its mind when the mind can only partially accommodate the intrinsic shortcomings of the body, or as (b): a demonstration that what the notes for Film think of as 'merely structural and dramatic convenience' is very much subject to the inconvenient truth that there is always some 'deep common point of divergence' to which they can never be satisfactorily reduced; or as both in more or less equal measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Country participation in one-state, one-vote forums like the United Nations General Assembly often reflects underlying power asymmetries and endogenous political processes. Voting alignment is undoubtedly an important preference indicator. However, this paper contends that it is incomplete; silence is politically significant as well. Weak states use absence as a form of institutional power that shields them from geopolitical pressure and competing-principals problems. While abstention is a public signal of neutrality that undercuts voting unanimity, the ambiguous intent of absence makes it a distinct form of political expression. We examine the politics of absences at the General Assembly, highlighting how states may be strategically absent from select votes for political reasons. Building on the Bailey et al. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 61(2), 430–456, 2017 roll-call voting data, we distinguish strategic absences from other types of absence and provide evidence that such behavior is linked to US interests and competing-principals problems. Taking these non-random reasons for missingness into account provides a fuller picture of how weak states engage with international institutions and highlights how silence can be a consequence of larger political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I follow the mystery of millions of tons of materials washed out to sea by the March 2011 Japan tsunami: a massive wave of lost materials expected to reach North American shores that never seems to officially arrive. I bring Gordon's conceptualization of haunting together with STS conversations about absence and invisibility to build on feminist approaches that do not take as given what is missing or what should be done. I begin by situating efforts to respectfully distinguish materials survivors call 'floating things' amidst a sea of concern for ocean plastic pollution. These efforts are then contrasted with what I initially perceived as the institutional erasure of floating things at sea, re-counting how some practices work to ensure materials can be ignored, cleaned-up, or used for other kinds of ocean science research. Yet, floating things refuse to disappear completely, as potential traces wash up on beaches, trajectories are modeled back into existence, and individual practices exceed institutional obligations. I argue that attending to hauntings by listening to ghosts and drifting with them is necessary for justice-oriented forms of care for absences. In the case of floating things, this means honoring survivor relations while resisting the perpetuation of Pacific narratives of danger from the outside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Leisure/Loisir: Journal of the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article draws on fieldwork in the West Bank (2007–2017) to understand how dispossession and ruination are not only spatialized, but engaged and remade. It examines experiences of a settler frontier in Faqu'a, a Palestinian village. People there have a visual vantage point onto the majority of the village lands, which have been expropriated by Israel. Following a demolition by Israel, Faqu'ans have transformed this frontier site from a place for home-building, first into a garbage dump and then, most recently, into a garden. Faqu'ans' shifting engagements with this site reveal that edgeness, which seems to characterize this location, is not a naturally occurring status. Edges are made. Faqu'ans periodically adjust their proximity to Faqu'a's eastern edge. By examining different people's engagements with one site over a long duration, what the article calls "absenting" comes into view as a primary means by which people adjust proximity to an edge. Proximity can be temporal, spatial, and affective. Absenting is a particularly useful technique under conditions of extreme duress, such as those arising out of life on a frontier that seeks one's disappearance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) today is an epicenter for the theorization of absence. Scholars, in efforts to counter the politics that have erased and continue to erase humans and places from the region, frequently assert the microdynamics of resistance, resilience, and memory. The editors of the special section, "Following Absence," acknowledge the urgent need for narratives of overcoming destruction and for acts of care and repair. However, this introduction articulates a different intellectual labor—one that examines the ways absences linger and perdure across the MENA. Rather than restoring or recuperating modes of presence, the editors ask, in what ways might absence be told and accounted for? How might new plotlines widen the scope of what can be perceived as absence, its work in the world, and the forms of agency and injury it shapes? In dialogue with the environmental humanities, this thematic section approaches human lives in embodied proximities to the nonhuman. It also relinquishes the need for storytelling to begin from a moment when annihilating violence has ceased, as though erasure could be safely contained in the past. Repetitive and accumulating, recursive and anticipatory, absences inhabit the present and future. Acknowledging these branching, seeping plotlines, the editors urge against any unified theory of absence for, or from, the MENA. Absence is defined by negation, fragments, and residues. By refusing its systematization in scholarship, this introduction calls for modes of attention that refuse the logics of power and foreground instead the flourishing of ongoing life. It then previews the special section's themes and articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is presence really? What are we talking about when we talk about presence? For a performer, it seems such an obvious thing but the closer you look, the more elusive it becomes, like one of those optical illusions which can only be perceived sideways through the eyes; looking directly makes it immediately disappear. And the whole thing becomes even more sideways when we take presence and put it in the middle of a classroom. Is it possible that we might have been over emphasising presence in the search for the elusive-mysterious? Have we been overly focused on presence in our pursuit of the qualities that make teaching and learning truly transformative? And obviously, what sort of transformative are we talking about in the fractured times that we live in? What is the other side of the story? What can Absence tell us about its polar twin? Does the absent become present by its very absence? And what or who is it that is absent? In my talk which I've framed as a set of field notes, entirely subjective observations gathered over a period of time, I am drawing upon my experience as a performer in search of the elusive-mysterious; my experience as a teaching artist in a teacher education program at Delhi University; and as a researcher investigating teacher agency in the classroom. In interrogating the binary of presence/absence, I seek to throw some light into that liminal space where these two intersect and collide, and begin to reveal the elusive-mysterious so that pedagogical practices can be reimagined and reenacted.

Generalized epilepsy affects 24 million people globally; at least 25% of cases remain medically refractory. The thalamus, with widespread connections throughout the brain, plays a critical role in generalized epilepsy. The intrinsic properties of thalamic neurons and the synaptic connections between populations of neurons in the nucleus reticularis thalami and thalamocortical relay nuclei help generate different firing patterns that influence brain states. In particular, transitions from tonic firing to highly synchronized burst firing mode in thalamic neurons can cause seizures that rapidly generalize and cause altered awareness and unconsciousness. Here, we review the most recent advances in our understanding of how thalamic activity is regulated and discuss the gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms of generalized epilepsy syndromes. Elucidating the role of the thalamus in generalized epilepsy syndromes may lead to new opportunities to better treat pharmaco-resistant generalized epilepsy by thalamic modulation and dietary therapy.

For some children and young people (CYP) with long-term physical health conditions (LTPHCs) attending school can be difficult. There is a lack of evidence documenting their school attendance experiences, how schools manage absence for these children, and subsequent effects. This study utilised an existing dataset from eighty-nine 11–18-year-olds in mainstream secondary schools in the United Kingdom across 11 LTPHCs that provided first-hand accounts about the children’s experiences of school. Data pre-coded “attendance” were subject to thematic analysis to explore issues emerging. Findings showed attendance patterns varied, with some CYP missing little and others significant amounts of education. Children with LTPHCs wanted to attend school and did their best to navigate education alongside health. School systems for attendance were inconsistent and adversarial. Remedial and supportive action emerged as lacking, and children felt it was their personal responsibility to make up for lost time and missed work when absent. Decisions on whether they attended school, coupled with practices promoting high attendance had detrimental consequences for CYP with LTPHCs educationally, emotionally and socially. Overall, children with LTPHCs felt punished, stigmatised, unfairly treated, unequal and excluded. Results have implications for education, health, and policy practitioners to better plan and target attention so that the LTPHC cohort are treated sensitively and equitably and afforded their entitlement to education when they cannot go to school for health reasons often outside of their control.

Historically Wales has been regarded as a country with relatively low levels of school exclusion, particularly in comparison with England. This has been used as an indicator of Wales' commitment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which foregrounds a rights-based agenda that would argue school exclusion is a consequence of broader socio-economic structures than individual actions. However, simple analyses may mask a different picture of school exclusions in Wales. In this article, we study more detailed information on formal school exclusions by looking at 'instances' of school exclusion, which considers the frequency and length of formal school exclusions in Wales, and alongside recorded school absence. The article also demonstrates that the pupils 'at risk' of formal school exclusion varies by when they experience school exclusion during their educational lifecourse. The article concludes by highlighting that patterns of school exclusion are complex, and that interpretation of these patterns depends on what kind of measure of school exclusion is used. By publishing these results, the article hopes to persuade policymakers and practitioners to re-examine their processes of exclusion to ensure they are commensurate with the law and to prevent unnecessary school exclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist scholars have focused on paid domestic labour as a site of gendered inequalities structured by race, gender, class, and citizenship. However, men are largely absent from feminist intersectional understandings of everyday interactions within paid domestic labour. This paper draws on an interview study of South African domestic workers focusing on their talk about interactions with male employers. The analysis demonstrates that talk about routines of the physical and symbolic absence of men can become normalised within domestic labour discourse. This is a narrative that is only brought to light once men's (lack of) presence is made a topic. The conspicuous absence of analyses of this kind within paid domestic labour studies points to unfinished and troubling feminist projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical reflection on the ways extractive industries manifest within and across place. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Mexico over 8 months in 2019–2020, this paper focuses on the experiences of residents living in a town adjacent to an underground silver mine in Valles Centrales, Oaxaca, Mexico. I argue that a focus on lived, sensory and long-term engagement between people and mining opens new avenues for geographers to consider 'what mining does'. Looking beyond the language of 'impacts', I build upon work on cultural geographies of presence and absence to put forward the notion of 'mining presence': mining's present and absent affects and materialities that interweave with residents' everyday lives, homes, bodies, and landscapes. In other words, I explore the qualities of mining that bring the San José mine into a neighbouring town and mediate spaces of daily life. In doing so, this paper contributes to the geographies of the extractive industries by showing that attention to life with mining requires a re-thinking of the spatiotemporal relations of extraction itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Psicoterapia y Psicosomática is the property of Instituto de Estudios Psicosomaticos & Psicoterapia Medica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay frames the Last Words' script and how an audience participates in the performance to create meaning and enhance relational aesthetics. I use a second-person narrative to focus on the audience, both as the subject and the play's content, and to demonstrate the performance indeterminacy of the experience. I present the author as an equal audience member rather than from an authoritarian perspective (Gesuato) to help consider how an audience participates in making meaning. Finally, through Last Words, I posit the structure I used to create the script can be applied to various epistolatory documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documentary film and essay film have historically been a potent ground for researching the relation between subjectivity and representation, or production and reception of images, and what happens in between, the forming, transforming and deforming subjectivities in the process. This paper aims to explore the practice of visualising memories and subjectivities in the form of fragmented or personal videos, focusing on two case studies – documentary films Asmat – names (2015) by Dagmawi Yimer and Purple sea (2020) by Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed. The paper argues for the affective power of documentary image which is not used as a visual synecdoche of migrant issues, nor to idolise the omnipotence of visual representation. On the contrary, the films in question open a space to draw us near and distance us from the suffering at the same time. But. in the refusal to show migrants ‘literally’, they refuse to see them in the way longdistance surveillance cameras and biometric passports see them when crossing the borders. Both films, I argue, show that the ‘right to look’ at the image can be accompanied by the ‘right to act’ (through the image). This perspective stands at the heart of a visual culture that places ‘visuality’ not as a self-explanatory notion, but at the centre of analytic investigation.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies / Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Metabolism regulates neuronal activity and modulates the occurrence of epileptic seizures. Here, using two rodent models of absence epilepsy, we show that hypoglycaemia increases the occurrence of spike-wave seizures. We then show that selectively disrupting glycolysis in the thalamus, a structure implicated in absence epilepsy, is sufficient to increase spike-wave seizures. We propose that activation of thalamic AMP-activated protein kinase, a sensor of cellular energetic stress and potentiator of metabotropic GABAB-receptor function, is a significant driver of hypoglycaemia-induced spike-wave seizures. We show that AMP-activated protein kinase augments postsynaptic GABAB-receptor-mediated currents in thalamocortical neurons and strengthens epileptiform network activity evoked in thalamic brain slices. Selective thalamic AMP-activated protein kinase activation also increases spike-wave seizures. Finally, systemic administration of metformin, an AMP-activated protein kinase agonist and common diabetes treatment, profoundly increased spike-wave seizures. These results advance the decades-old observation that glucose metabolism regulates thalamocortical circuit excitability by demonstrating that AMP-activated protein kinase and GABAB-receptor cooperativity is sufficient to provoke spike-wave seizures.

The subject of conflict remains one of the important topics that have always held the same priority and significance in research and study, and this importance perhaps increases with the passage of time and its expiration, in accordance with new perspectives and contents that proportionally correspond to the nature of daily life on one hand, and the evolution of views, concepts, standards, and perspectives on the other hand. The theme of conflict manifests in various forms. It could be between humans and their own kind, or between them and non-rational beings represented by nature and animals. It often extends to the individual's inner conflict with themselves, meaning that the individual enters into a conflict with themselves. This phenomenon is influenced by circumstances, context, and even daily living reality, which is what we perceive today in our natural lives. So, man, according to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, is the only being capable of perpetually transcending himself towards the possible, thus achieving existence through it. Meanwhile, other entities do not possess the ability to transcend themselves as they are either animalistic or otherworldly. The primary idea of this research emerges from the Mu'allaqa of Tarafa Ibn al-Abd, carrying within it various visions, challenges, and manifestations. Additionally, numerous studies have been conducted from different perspectives, including the subject of conflict, which presents a single title but with various approaches. Consequently, I seek a poem to be suitable for the theme of conflict and find, many poems that can be sufficient, the L-Poem of Aws ibn Hajar is the most fertile, for various reasons such as the aspects which relates to the poet himself, the nature of the poem, its numerous elements of renewal, as well as its expression of the real situation and the image of that era. The poem of this research encompasses many manifestations of existential conflict within its folds, ranging from selfhood, isolation, rebellion against reality, victory for the self, to the ending with the dialectic of presence and absence. These are manifestations brought forth by the eternal conflict between the self and the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leslie Kaplan's Excess – The Factory (1982, translated in 2018 by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap) and Joseph Ponthus's On the Line: Notes from a Factory (2019, translated in 2021 by Stephanie Smee) are rare poetic depictions of industrial environments. Kaplan dwells on the manufacturing setting as exemplifying overproduction, whereas Ponthus attends to how precarious work in globalized supply chains gives rise to localized pressures. The two from-within stagings of labor offer testimony of dehumanizing infrastructure by pointing up intensities and ruptures in the margins of everyday capitalist cycles. They thereby demonstrate how poetry can perform a "critical unsiting" of the factory-site. In the light of this out-of-the-ordinary concept, our article identifies key aspects of (a) absence, (b) dispersal, and (c) density so as to show how poetic language can spark collective awakening and resistance to dehumanizing conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Qurʾan, the sense of hearing and its agent the ear are both linked to the heart whereas sight and its organ the eye are associated with the head. The sense of hearing, which is a channel to spiritual knowledge, is privileged to the sense of sight, the gateway to the realm of carnal knowledge. The ear and the heart are channels to the sphere of absence while the eye and the head are associated with the realm of presence. Knowledge of the world of absence is twofold: The first incarnates in the type of knowledge obtained from God and his angels and the other is that which is acquired from Satan and Jinn. The primacy of the ear over the eye is further substantiated by the Qurʾanic repudiation of the charges that the origin of the Prophet Muhammad's words is fables breathed into his ears from the underworld of absence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Estudios Filosóficos is the property of Estudios Filosoficos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Palestinian identity is symbolic of the struggle against elimination, against becoming absent. The pervasive use of social media today has been pivotal in revealing this struggle, enabling the direct and unrestricted sharing of Palestinian suffering in the face of unremitting destruction and displacement. Across the globe, people bear witness to Palestinians fighting for survival amidst the mass bombings, field executions, and engineered famine in Israel’s current military operation in the Gaza Strip. This campaign, which began as a response to Hamas’ attack on October 7th 2023, has led to the extermination of Palestinian people at a level and pace that likely exceeds any conflict in modern history. Consequently, many experts consider this military operation a plausible genocide. Yet, despite its shocking and unfiltered nature, this recent incursion is only the latest example in a series of violent aggressions against Palestinians that have lasted nearly a century. This article aims to analyse works of speculative fiction that tackle these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iconic hero of the famous decadent Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel, A Rebours, Des Esseintes collects in his library a precious collection of ancient and contemporary works, made up of his favorite readings including the works of Flaubert and Mallarmé.In this study, we continue to walk in the footsteps of A Rebours’s protagonist to offer a comparative reading of the texts of its two revered authors. For Flaubert, our main corpus will be Madame Bovary, for Mallarmé, it will be the poem published in gratitude to Huysmans, Prose pour Des Esseintes. This choice may be surprising: why compare the novel traditionally – and possibly mistakenly – considered to be a first masterpiece of realism, and the poem taken for one of the most enigmatic texts of symbolism? It seems to us, and we will try to demonstrate it here, that Flaubert's novel proposes possible interpretations which justify the connection with the mysterious Mallarmé’s poem. After a brief introduction devoted to the relationships between Huysmans, Flaubert and Mallarmé, as well as the evocation of their works in A Rebours, we will develop the triple theme of the absence, the unreal and the silence, as it presents itself in Flaubert's novel and in Mallarmé's poem. The conclusion will allow us to reinscribe A Rebours in this same theme.

In this study, I tried to analyze the subject of poetry’s relationship with “absence” through Jean Paul Sartre’s (1905-80) work titled Being and Nothingness. I utilized the concept analysis method to uncover the idea of nothingness in the “Adem Kasidesi” using Sartre’s concepts of “alienation, “being-in-itself,” “being-foritself,” and “being-for-others.” Absence appears in the poetry in two different ways, resulting from the weakening of the subject’s bond with external reality. This study asserts that absence appears in poetry as “glorification” rather than “objectification of the self.” The latter means the disengagement of the subject from the social sphere. However, the subject does not entirely disconnect from external reality in the poetry but ignores the public sphere and threatens it with absence. Absence is exalted and disturbs the existence. The subject in the poetry is alien to the external world. It constructs a new “self,” albeit fragmented. The subject in the poetry positions itself, with a concept outside of the established consciousness, therefore, as nothingness. Consequently, the subject initiates alienation. According to Sartre, the Ego (being-for-itself) defines the cultural subject that is outside the primordial and natural being (being-in-itself). Alienation results from one’s recognition and rejection of the cultural subject. The subject of poetry becomes alienated initially as it exits the public sphere. Afterward, glorifying absence alienates external reality. Therefore, the presence-absence relationship does not complement each other, as in common sense. Absence contributes to the re-subjectivation process as a glorifying value that determines presence. The subject’s lack-desire-completeness relationship is problematic, and in poetry, the subject seeks completeness with absence. The desire to constantly threaten with absence indicates a continuous process of subjectivation. Absence in poetry is a symptom healing the subject or an additional value. Absence is a possibility for constructing a unified “being-foritself,” giving the impression of a complete subject, though illusion.

Hyperventilation and seizures have a long association in the clinical literature and were known to have a relationship long before the electroencephalogram (EEG) was used to record changes in brain activity. As the use of EEG recording progressed, hyperventilation was the first activation method used to assist with diagnosis of epilepsy. Along with slowing of brain activity, hyperventilation can activate epileptiform spiking activity in patients with epilepsy. Currently, hyperventilation is used in standard practice to assist with the diagnosis of epilepsy during EEG recording. Hyperventilation activates epileptiform spiking activity more often than seizures but can trigger clinical seizures in up to 50% of patients with generalized epilepsy. It is more likely to trigger events in children with absence seizures than adults, and it acts as a trigger in patients with focal epilepsy far less often. However, while some clinicians suggest that its diagnostic value is limited, especially in adults with focal epilepsies, others suggest that it is simple, safe, and an important diagnostic tool, even in these patients. This review presents the history of hyperventilation and seizures, its use in the clinical practice, and possible mechanisms involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some studies of self and landscape in festival events emphasise presence, closeness, and connectedness and focus on embodiment, inhabitation, and dwelling. But in the COVID-19 pandemic, absence and distance appear as increasingly common terms to describe festival events and landscapes that have changed in unanticipated ways. The risk that festivals would become hotspots of virus transmission requiring physical distancing and limits on movement resulted in significant alteration of festivals or their cancellation and absence from people's lifeworlds. In this study, we explore how absence and distance have unfolded in lived experiences of altered festival landscapes during the pandemic and reflect on how care has been mobilised and emplaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no complete description of either the term "mannerism" or its associated features. Contradiction, paradox, and ambiguity may have been the terms most referential for mannerism since the 1950s, but this article poses a unification of opposites as another important feature, specific to modern and contemporary architecture. We analyse three series of works by Andrea Palladio against another three pairs of opposing concepts—absence versus presence, frontality versus foreshortening, and grid versus assemblage. An analysis of each pair of concepts using commonly accepted examples from late twentieth-century architecture, following Venturi in the way of "both-and," allows us to argue how this merging of opposites in the same element, blends into, and participates in both characterisations. The pairings of opposites maintain their features, becoming simultaneous complementary characters. These mannerist characterisations are less common in current architecture, but they can, we claim, be easily detected in various recent projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes as its starting point an uncanny dialectics of alienation, desire and connection that permeates Tsai Ming-liang's oeuvre. Through approaching the non-intersecting parallel narratives in What Time Is It There? (2001) with the Epicurean and Lucretian notion of clinamen and the Deleuzian concepts of any-space-whatevers, percepts and affects, this article explores the relation between non-intersecting parallel spaces and times and a liminal, spectral cinematic space and time that is created by moving images themselves, which makes the dialectics of alienation and connection possible. This article argues that What Time involves Tsai's meta-cinematic approach to cinema's potentiality that enables both characters and spectators to engage directly with moving images and reimagine the world through its spectrality and non-human perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent works in media and communications studies have increasingly embedded the analysis of publicness within Science and Technology Studies (STS) and, interrelatedly, the new materialism. The result has emphasized the significant role that everyday objects play in engendering various publics. Yet, the uncritical incorporation of the new materialism and its bias toward present forms of materiality has led many scholars of the media to ignore the relationships between absent material objects and publicness. This is a key shortcoming since absent material realities are actively, and not so innocently, produced as non-thinkable alternatives to what exists, impeding externalized material worlds from becoming pronounceable as a need or an aspiration within the contexts of hegemonic globalization. In this essay, I draw on emerging works in media and communications studies, along with the social and political history of revolutionary Iran, as touchstones for a critical discussion on the linkages between publicness, materiality, and absence. I conclude with some observations and questions on publicness amid emergency climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Loneliness is a near-universal experience. It is particularly common for individuals with (so-called) psychopathological conditions or disorders. In this paper, we explore the experiential character of loneliness, with a specific emphasis on how social goods are experienced as absent in ways that involve a diminished sense of agency and recognition. We explore the role and experience of loneliness in three case studies: depression, anorexia nervosa, and autism. We demonstrate that even though experiences of loneliness might be common to many psychopathologies, these experiences nevertheless have distinctive profiles. Specifically, we suggest that: (i) loneliness is often a core characteristic of depressive experience; (ii) loneliness can drive, and even cement, disordered eating practices and anorectic identity in anorexia nervosa; iii) loneliness is neither a core characteristic of autism nor a driver but is rather commonly experienced as stemming from social worlds, environments, and norms that fail to accommodate autistic bodies and their distinctive forms of life. We aim to do justice to the pervasiveness of loneliness in many — if not all — psychopathologies, while also highlighting the need to attend to psychopathology-specific experiences of loneliness, agency, and (non-)recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To compare the efficacy and safety of antiseizure medications (ASMs), both as monotherapies and adjunctive therapies, for idiopathic generalized epilepsies (IGEs) and related entities. Methods: Two reviewers independently searched PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library for relevant randomized controlled trials from December 2022 to February 2023. Studies on the efficacy and safety of ASM monotherapies or adjunctive therapies for IGEs and related entities—including juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, childhood absence epilepsy (CAE), juvenile absence epilepsy, or generalized tonic–clonic seizures alone (GTCA)—were included. Efficacy outcomes were the proportions of patients remaining seizure free for 1, 3, 6, and 12 months; safety outcomes were the proportions of any treatment-emergent adverse event (TEAE) and TEAEs leading to discontinuation. Network meta-analyses were performed in a random-effects model to obtain odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals. Rankings of ASMs were based on the surface under the cumulative ranking curve (SUCRA). This study is registered with PROSPERO (No. CRD42022372358). Results: Twenty-eight randomized controlled trials containing 4282 patients were included. As monotherapies, all ASMs were more effective than placebo, and valproate and ethosuximide were significantly better than lamotrigine. According to the SUCRA for efficacy, ethosuximide ranked first for CAE, whereas valproate ranked first for other types of IGEs. As adjunctive therapies, topiramate ranked best for GTCA as well as overall for IGEs, while levetiracetam ranked best for myoclonic seizures. For safety, perampanel ranked best (measured by any TEAE). Conclusions: All of the studied ASMs were more effective than placebo. Valproate monotherapy ranked best overall for IGEs, whereas ethosuximide ranked best for CAE. Adjunctive topiramate and levetiracetam were most effective for GTCA and myoclonic seizures, respectively. Furthermore, perampanel had the best tolerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper analyzes Juan Manuel Echavarríaʼs photographic project Silences as a piece of a visual culture produced in the last years to represent and memorialize the war in Colombia. I used Michele Kennerly’s concept of rhetorical transport to describe these images’ power to bring before the spectator’s eyes and mind people, places, or things that are absent. I argue that these images fail to present empty and quiet spaces since it is unfeasible to see them without the presence of bodies. The stillness and immobility transmitted by them are disrupted by the viewer, who is moved to fill those spaces of emptiness with voices, sounds, and movements. In these images, the rhetorical power of condensing simultaneously the present and the absent offers contrasting sensorial experiences.

This is a short introduction to this journal section on the work and life of Mary-Jo Nadeau. In this introduction, I ask what is our responsibility to the absent-presence of this remembrance and representation of Mary-Jo while we grapple with our grief and melancholic attachments. Ultimately, it is Mary-Jo's exemplary integration of scholarship and activism that inspires the writings in this section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social robots are increasingly being deployed to address social isolation and loneliness, particularly among older adults. Clips on social media attest that individuals availing themselves of this option are pleased with their robot companions. Yet, some people find the use of social robots to meet fundamental human emotional needs disturbing. This article clarifies and critically evaluates this response. It sets forth a framework for loneliness, which characterizes one kind of loneliness as involving an affective experience of lacking human relations that provide certain social goods. Next, the article discusses social robots and critically reviews the literature on the ethics of using them in light of this loneliness characterization. Third, we present a normative argument connecting the philosophical critique of loneliness-as-absence with the design and deployment of social robots. Finally, we draw out the implications of our analysis for public health and for interrogating the aims of commercial companies who make social robots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Raymond Federman was a French-American Jewish writer whose works embodied postmodern literary tendencies of the time. His tragic experience with the Holocaust greatly influenced his worldview, leading to the creation of a unique literary theory and style of writing. His works show a defiant stance against the imposed literary norms of the previous decades with central themes being those of absence, loss, historical manipulation and erasure, cancellation and ultimately, silence. His novel The Twofold Vibration, however, adds an additional element to his literary opera -- that of nostalgia. It being Federman, that nostalgia does not necessarily refer to actual times past, but to a hypothetical past, a what-could've-been. In this novel, Federman displaces this particular feeling of sorrow for something that was not allowed to happen. In this novel, Federman explores the concepts of silence, absence, historical erasure and nostalgia in the aftermath of historical atrocities. One could say that it was in this novel where Federman masterfully manages to make his readers feel nostalgic for a vision of the past. This paper aims to recognize the intricate and subtle application of different language devices Federman used to establish these themes and will also deal with specific instances of the appearance of these themes in the novel. Finally, the author hopes to demonstrate how skillfully Federman managed to convey the strength of an everlasting emotional burden behind these themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]