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Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call 'Realism about the Value of Suffering' by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study conducted an online experiment with 384 participants to explore the mechanisms through which viewers form initial impressions of strangers based on their emotional self-disclosure in social media profiles. The findings revealed that positive emotional expressions fostered a higher degree of interpersonal liking and trust than negative emotional expressions. The relationship between emotional valence and interpersonal liking was partially mediated by perceived appropriateness and perceived similarity. Judgments of interpersonal trust were fully mediated by the perceived appropriateness and perceived similarity of emotional expressions. The study further discovered an interaction between emotional valence and intensity, such that the effect of emotional valence on perceived similarity became more pronounced when emotional intensity was high. The findings underscored the significant influence of emotional expressions on the development of interpersonal liking and trust on social media. The study also specified two inferential processes (perceived appropriateness and perceived similarity) underlying these effects and highlighted the moderating role of emotional intensity. The theoretical and practical implications were also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Wollstonecraft's experimental first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788) in the context of Dissenting preoccupation with prejudice. It shows how Wollstonecraft shared the Dissenters' analysis that prejudice was the source of political and social oppression, and how she extended that insight into her account of the situation of women. She shared with Dissent a belief in education and in print culture as tools to combat prejudice, but her experimental textual strategies differ significantly from, for instance, that of Dissenter Anna Laetitia Barbauld, in her "Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts" (1790). Where Barbauld replicates in print the rhetorical strategies of public and political discourse, Wollstonecraft, in key moments in Mary, draws on the model, from Edward Young, of authentic, persuasive enthusiasm, to "steal into the soul" of her readers. Early in her writing career, she can thus be seen seeking to turn affective transport to political effect, and experimenting with the resources and registers of print culture to combat prejudice, and enact dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People commit to monogamous relationships with the intent of maintaining sexual exclusivity but often fail to do so. Existing research has focused on individual and relationship characteristics that render relationships more vulnerable to infidelity, paying less attention to strategies that decrease the likelihood of straying. Three experiments investigated the impact of one strategy that might encourage people to enact relationship-protective responses toward alternative partners, perspective-taking. In all studies, participants either adopted the perspective of their partner or not and then evaluated, encountered, or thought about attractive strangers, in Studies 1–3, respectively. Participants' pro-relationship orientation and reactions during these experiences (interest in alternative and current partners, commitment to current relationships, and fantasmatic themes) were recorded. Results showed that perspective-taking decreased sexual and romantic interest in alternatives, while increasing commitment and desire for current partners. These findings suggest that partner perspective-taking discourages engagement in behaviors that may hurt partners and damage the relationship with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a personal paper about the author's animus, Watsky explores his fascination with Louise Glück, after attempting to solicit first her poetry for Jung Journal and then an interview about her voice in her poetry shortly after her death. He realized he had projected his anima onto a complete stranger known only through her writing. Suspicious of his motives, he proceeds to read her entire oeuvre during a two-week period, exploring their intersections and their divergences. Watsky then narrates a previous projection onto the writer Joanna Field who turned out to be the Freudian analyst Marion Milner. After reading all of her work and convinced that she had been influenced by Jung, he sought her out in Hamstead, England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magdalena Holdar's book, "Fluxus as a Network of Friends, Strangers, and Things: The Agency of Chance Collaborations," offers a historical account of the Fluxus movement. Holdar takes an unbiased approach, focusing on the entanglements of archival materials rather than providing a precise definition of Fluxus. The book explores the transnational scope of Fluxus activities and highlights the contributions of artists, groups, and spaces that have been overlooked in previous historiography. Holdar's analysis emphasizes the importance of non-human agents within the network, such as objects and materials, in shaping the movement. Overall, the book provides new perspectives on Fluxus and its complexities, challenging traditional narratives and offering insights into the avant-garde more broadly. [Extracted from the article]

AbstractThe film All Of Us Strangers hit our cinema screens in January 2024, and made an instant big impact on the public and critics winning multiple awards. On the surface, it is the story of a gay screenwriter who begins to face the grief of the loss of his parents through writing. He recently moved in a new, empty building. He met the other occupant in the building, and embarked on an intimate relationship together. This film is much more than the surface description above. It is not what it seems at first glance. It is not only a love story or a grief story, it is actually a film that shows the deeper layers of the inner world of many gay men through symbolic representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a career spanning more than five decades Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons (Barcelona, 1945) has directed over 30 films. His eclectic filmography does not easily fit categories or labels of any kind, including queer cinema. However, the frequent presence of gay male characters and same-sex desire in his films is significant, especially given the advanced age of a very high proportion of those men. Pons’ camera does not shy away from presenting their bodies as both desirable and desiring, older bodies that don’t hide away from the camera. Starting with a re-reading of Amic/Amat (1998) from the perspective of aging studies, the article focuses on key examples of older gay and queer men in his work, with special emphasis on films that Pons directed in his sixties (Forasters (2008), A la deriva (2009), Mil cretins (2010)). It identifies recurring themes and tropes in this context, such as cross-dressing, memory or inheritance and finds that the filmmaker’s interest in queer memory is closely linked to arguably the main preoccupation of his work: the cultural history of Catalonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the ways in which media represent maternal femininity under the context of neoliberalism and migration, and how diasporic housewives rework such representations. By employing a mixed method that includes a textual and online audience analysis of the Korean reality show Strangers, we investigate how diasporic Korean women's online communities (DKWOC) related to the show's portrayal of Korean female migrants' racialized and gendered everyday lives in the US as trailing wives. We found that, while a critique of gender politics and class-ignorance in Strangers already existed, overall diasporic women blamed themselves by constantly comparing their motherhood performance to that portrayed on the show, and justified their sacrifice and hardships using the logic of "migration as a family strategy." However, the solidarity and comradeship among DKWOC built through positive psychology discourse easily diluted those critical reflections. We argue that a belief in resilience is problematic for the survival of trailing wives, since it casts a blind eye to their real experiences—which includes gender discrimination embedded in both public and domestic spaces—and legitimates backlash narratives, including the belief that the stay-at-home mother position is an active choice, rather than the result of unequal global, legal, and gender infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role that cosmopolitan love plays in the cinematic partnership of émigré director Jules Dassin and Greek star Melina Mercouri. In defining cosmopolitan love, it employs a conceptual framework informed by Simmel's theorisation of the 'stranger' and Barthes's analysis of 'a lover's discourse'. It offers a detailed and historically rooted understanding of stardom, performance, and aesthetics in the films of Dassin and Mercouri tracing changes in the director's film aesthetics and in the star's performance style. It argues that these transformations, demonstrated through a comparison between Never on Sunday and Phaedra, are substantially the outcome of a struggle to reconcile their cosmopolitan positions with love as a cosmopolitan disposition. The article uses this specific case study to propose an agonistics of cosmopolitan love that stands in opposition to ethical approaches such as Levinas's for whom love is a form of 'being-for-the-other'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia" is a book by Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr that explores the cultural pathways of traditional Scottish and Irish folk music as it traveled to Appalachia. The book examines the influences of Welsh, English, German, Dutch, French, African American, and Cherokee cultures on these songs. It is structured into three main sections and includes photographs, maps, and sidebars covering various topics related to folk music. The authors also exchange letters discussing their perspectives on Old and New World music. The book sheds light on the history of American folk music and its connection to immigrant experiences. It includes a contextual timeline, resource centers, a discography, and a bibliography for further exploration. Scholars and music enthusiasts will find this book to be a valuable resource. [Extracted from the article]

While scholars have long established that city dwellers choose with whom to develop relationships on the basis of social proximity, spatial proximity remains the basis for neighbour relations involving greetings, social conversation, and the exchange of services. Few studies have systematically compared the respective roles of spatial and social proximity in neighbour relations. In this paper, we investigate these two factors through statistical analysis of four social network datasets representing relationships within four rented apartment buildings in Geneva, Switzerland. Using a measure of distance that takes into account how the layout and materiality of buildings shape relationships through accessibility, visibility and audibility, we compare the effects of spatial proximity with the effects of individual determinants and similarity. Our study also breaks new ground by comparing weak ties – between people who interact regularly – and "invisible ties", or ties to familiar strangers. Our study confirms that spatial proximity increases the likelihood of weak ties and questions the underlying mechanisms. It also shows that in addition to sociability, familiarity and anonymity are constitutive dimensions of neighbouring, even at the scale of buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limited research has been conducted to better understand the trait predictors of trust in strangers and friends. Therefore, the current study aims to fill this gap and examine whether agreeableness and open-mindedness are indirectly related to trust in strangers and friends via self-focused and other-focused perspective taking, and subsequently via trustworthiness. A convenience sample of 217 Slovaks aged 20–37 years completed self-report scales measuring agreeableness, open-mindedness, self-focused perspective taking, other-focused perspective taking, trustworthiness of strangers, trustworthiness of friends, trust in strangers, and trust in friends. Indirect effects analysis was performed using the PROCESS macro for SPSS. The results revealed that agreeableness and open-mindedness were indirectly related to trust in strangers via either self-focused perspective taking or via other-focused perspective taking, and then via trustworthiness of strangers. Importantly, indirect relationships via other-focused perspective taking were negative, while an indirect relationship via self-focused perspective taking was positive. Additionally, agreeableness showed a direct relationship with trust in friends, and indirect relationships with trust in both strangers and friends only via trustworthiness. These findings imply that investigated trait factors play roles in trust in strangers and friends, although many of these factors seem crucial concerning trust in strangers; they also point out the significance of distinguishing different forms of perspective taking with different antecedents and consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In doing so it elicits parallels with the psychodynamic understanding that infants must go through the process of recognising the presence of another's mind - usually the mother's - and using the transitional space opened up in the experience of meeting that other mind in order to see oneself anew. The outside world, human and non-human, is not a painted backdrop to our lives and experiences, but makes them - is part of them. Straddling the transition - reviewing strangers: by Rebecca Tamás London, Makina Books, 2020, £12.99 This essay explores the concept that all of nature possesses a mind. [Extracted from the article]

How does the grand challenge of refugees influence nascent entrepreneurs in host countries? To explore this question, we build on social identity theory and analyse how the 2015 European refugee event is related to the strength of different founder social identities (i.e. Darwinian, Communitarian, and Missionary founder social identities) of nascent entrepreneurs in the countries accommodating the refugees. Using a dataset of 6,096 nascent entrepreneurs from 24 European countries, we reveal a positive relationship between the refugee event and the strength of the Communitarian founder social identity. This relationship is even stronger when the previous percentage of foreign migrants in a country is lower and is mediated by the human health and social work industry. Interestingly, we do not find significant relationships between the refugee event and the strengths of the Darwinian or Missionary founder social identity, respectively. Hence, refugees as a grand challenge are likely to have divergent influences on different types of entrepreneurship in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marc Adelman's Stelen is a collection of 150 images of men posing at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Germany. Understanding the photographs that compromise Stelen involves tracking a number of shifts that have taken place across different fields: a change in the understanding of the role of the public memorial which has seen the construction of 'anti-memorials' or 'counter-monuments' such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; a turn towards participatory memory practices in museums and at memorial sites; digital photography and the impact of social media. In the first part of this paper, I explore how these trends intersect in order to give an account of the conditions of production of the photographs. Adelman has proposed that the photographs might be understood in relation to the role that the memory of the Holocaust plays in contemporary queer life. In the second part of this paper, I use Michael Rothberg's concept of Multidirectional Memory to consider Stelen as a counter-archive that offers a multidirectional articulation of grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Neighbours and Strangers: Local societies in early medieval Europe" is a groundbreaking book co-authored by ten renowned academic experts from eight different countries. The book explores the interactions and networks of people living side by side, as well as the impact of strangers on local societies. It covers various aspects such as settlement, topography, legal status, socio-economic stratification, collective action, and the intervention of political elites. While the book provides valuable insights, it lacks comprehensive analysis and could benefit from the use of digital research methods such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Digital Humanities (DH). The book's production quality is disappointing, but it offers a good glossary, extensive bibliography, and weak indexing. Overall, it is an informative and comprehensive resource on a previously under-researched subject. [Extracted from the article]

Elder abuse is globally considered a hidden problem with great variations in its conceptualization across cultures, non-uniformity in understanding, and manifestations of abuse and neglect. Currently, there are no validated or culturally adapted screening measures for elder abuse in South Africa. The aim of this study was to test the cultural appropriateness of the Elder Abuse Screening Tool (EAST) and the Caregiver Abuse Screen (CASE) in two regions and four languages in South Africa. Using a cognitive interviewing methodology, 23 carers and 19 older adults were interviewed. Findings show that questions in the EAST and CASE are generally well understood, but that adaptations of both tools are necessary for use within South Africa. Fear, knowledge, and experience of crime also showed that strangers, like family, deliberately use deception to build trust and abuse. Further validation is needed to determine suitable scoring and use by health and social care practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various forms of public-private collaborative organizations have been emerging in the education sector, a development that has made managing public-private partnerships an unavoidable imperative for school managers today. Addressing interactions between the partnership manager of and partners in a public-private innovation partnership, this article explores the attachments public and private actors establish in the framework of such partnerships. While formal structures often bind partnerships together, open innovation partnerships have a more fluid organization in which the participants have to establish the ground for their common work. Specifically, the article presents a study of a Danish partnership project aimed at developing a new secondary school. Drawing on the sociology of engagements, the article sketches out the differing forms of mutual engagements at stake between the actors involved and the challenges they face. As the partnership studied lacked formal agreements, the manager's and partners' locally performed acts of proximity became a means of binding the partnership together. In these acts, a mutual explorative engagement intertwined with a familiar engagement, thus creating a distinct attachment of familiar strangers between the public and private actors – an attachment through which ideas on education and common educational visions could traverse the public and private sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China offers a natural laboratory for comparing the development of only children and children with siblings. We examined potential differences in the way that they expected a protagonist to allocate resources between two recipients with different social relationships, e.g. a sibling vs. a stranger, a friend vs. a stranger, and a sibling vs. a friend. Four- to six-year-old children participated in a third-party Resource Allocation Task and an Emotion Judgment Task. Children with siblings were more likely than only children to expect resources to be shared with a sibling over a friend. In addition, as compared to only children, children with siblings expected someone experiencing non-sharing behaviour to feel sadder. These findings suggest that the difference in kin-preference between children with siblings and only children is due to their respective life experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Likewise, without a more participant-centred approach, the sharing of immersive experience in digital space cannot afford remote spectators an engaging experience of I Tamara i . While remotely but closely following the participants' interactive experiences in this way, the viewers' indirect experience sometimes goes beyond the first-hand experience in the park. South Korean art group The Strangers' I Tamara i (written and directed by Eunju Hitchcock-Yoo, 2021) is a location-based theatre-game. [Extracted from the article]

Collaborative learning with a familiar partner can reduce age-related differences in learning and memory compared to learning alone. This study compares younger and older adults' learning with familiar and unfamiliar partners to determine whether familiarity is beneficial for collaborative learning. Twenty-four younger adults aged 18–28 years and 24 older adults aged 60–80 years participated in familiar and unfamiliar pairs. Participants were asked to arrange abstract tangram shapes in a specific order on a grid over multiple trials; the directors' tangram cards were arranged in a specific order on the grid and this order was communicated to the matcher. Older adults initially took longer to complete the task, using more words to correctly arrange the tangrams. Over multiple trials, a learning effect was observed in both groups, although older adults did not perform with similar efficiency to younger adults. Familiarity had no effect on performance. These findings suggest that the familiarity of a partner does not affect learning outcomes in younger or older adults when learning in a social context. Collaborative learning may be beneficial for older adults, even if they do not know their learning partner, which may have implications for adult education and lifelong learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pageantry marking James VI & I's royal entry into London in 1604 featured the participation of Italian and Dutch immigrants who contributed two of the entry's triumphal arches. This article examines the role of these immigrant communities within the production, and textual reproduction, of James's royal entry. The pageant records present contrasting approaches to the multiculturalism of early modern London. The first, represented by Thomas Dekker's official pageant text The Magnificent Entertainment, divides the city into 'the English' and 'the strangers', whose presence is celebrated for the symbolic possibilities of creating unity out of multiplicity. In the second approach, recoverable within the Italian and Dutch arches, immigrant populations maintain their distinct identities as unified communities possessing the historical and cultural right to welcome James to their city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans can readily and effortlessly learn new faces encountered in the social environment. As a face transitions from unfamiliar to familiar, the ability to generalize across different images of the same person increases substantially. Fast periodic visual stimulation and EEG (FPVS-EEG) was used to isolate identity-specific responses that generalize across different images of the same person from low-level visual processing and face-general processes that aren't identity-specific. We observed these signals emerge and increase in magnitude as a group of strangers became lab mates (N=9). The neural response to an unfamiliar identity that remained unfamiliar did not change. Comparison of the response to the newly familiarised face to a highly overlearned face (the own-face) showed that this identity-specific signal was modulated by level of familiarity. The study presents the first examination of identity-specific processing changes as they occur in situ from normal, everyday face experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates the role of Istanbul, and of drastic urban change, in the shaping of a particular form of autoethnograpy, and, reciprocally, the role of life writing as a particular constituent of the city's urban imaginary. The focus is the upscale cosmopolitan neighborhood of Nişantaşı, as seen largely through Jewish eyes, in the memoirs by the dissident writer and poet Roni Margulies: Jews Go Wild on Sundays [Margulies, Roni. 2006. Bugün Pazar Yahudiler Azar [Jews Go Wild on Sundays]. Istanbul: Kanat.], and My Family and Other Jews [Margulies, Roni. 2018. Ailem ve Diğer Yahudiler [My Family and Other Jews]. A published poet, journalist and member of the Turkish Workers Party, Margulies has been active in Turkey as a public intellectual. His memoirs are poetic, political, and humorous. They combine literary sensibilities with political commitments, addressing multiple tensions that have molded his identity as a Turkish Jew. The focus on Jewish lives provides a kaleidoscopic perspective to the city, the neighborhood, and to the practice of writing from the periphery. Retrospective but not nostalgic, Margulies takes issue with the notions of home and homeland, revealing the complexity of affinities. Margulies's memoirs help reconsider the parameters of autoethnography, a mode of reading that questions not only the links between the auto and ethnos, but also the hierarchies between minor and major, center and periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pursues three goals: First, to develop a lateral reading of Camus' Stranger. A lateral reading is characterized by the displacement of the central conflict. In the case of The Stranger, I argue that the central conflict in the novel lies in the relation between the author and the protagonist, not, as direct readings would have it, in the relation between the protagonist and his predicament. Second, to spell out more precisely why it should be read as an anti-existentialist novel. Here I argue that a lateral reading shows that the foundational existentialist opposition between telling and living is ironically dismantled by the very lateral structure of the novel. Third, to develop the notion of a lateral reading with a view to its potential advantages. Here, I point out that literalism involves positionalism and dynamicism. Positionalism refers to the reduction of fictional entities to their role in relation to each other. Dynamicism refers to the resulting view that those roles are further reducible to forces. I conclude that the lateral reading, with its commitments to positionalism and dynamicism is a model generalizable to the analysis of other fictional works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promoting social inclusion and supporting positive outcomes for marginalised groups through allyship has been a persistent feature of community-orientated psychological theories. Central to such works are mutually beneficial relationships between scholarly activists and communities. In considering such collaborations, the relevance of the Confucian concept of Ren (benevolent, human-heartedness) to allyship is clear. This approach features a Chinese form of relationalism, which involves transitions across different levels of interpersonal relations. From this perspective, establishing allyship involves a process whereby scholar activists' transition from being a stranger to a one-of-us community participant. This transition is exemplified through reflections on a reciprocal collaboration between the first author and the Townsville Chinese Club. In theorising this example of allyship from a Confucian standpoint, we highlight the importance of understanding and enacting cultural nuances for establishing ethical and effective allyship in contemporary multicultural societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big infrastructure responses to climate change seek to protect the heteropatriarchal capitalist status quo. In contrast, this article develops a theory and method of practice-led research to facilitate better weathering. In so doing the article contends that a transformative feminist response to climate change needs alternative, collective, feminist infrastructures. The feminist specificity of the infrastructure proposed here emerges through its proximity to the concept 'weathering'. As a feminist figuration, weathering attunes us to human embodiment and difference in a time of climate change, where 'weather' is not only meteorological, but the total atmospheres that bodies are made to bear. An infrastructure for better weathering thus centres opportunities to acknowledge and account for embodied difference and the differential effects of weather as a specifically feminist design feature. Better weathering is not neoliberal resilience, but rather attention to and redistribution of low-stakes vulnerability as an infrastructural politics. The article proceeds in two parts. We theorise a feminist infrastructure. We then pilot the infrastructure in a series of practice-led research activities. We argue these new infrastructures facilitate low-stakes vulnerability between strangers and so enable better weathering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores my reactions to evident suffering in strangers. How are they (partially) a product of many years of personal and professional experiences of witnessing pain? What are some results of defensively avoiding registering these moments? In addition to my own reflections, I call upon statements by some well-known poets, including Sherman Alexie, W. H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, and Rainer Marie Rilke. The interpersonal analytic writings of H. S. Sullivan offer one description of the process of defensive avoidance. More generally, when my "mind's eye" looks away, it might be imitating my reluctance to stare at sufferers on the visual plane. While this may offer me some protection, how does it limit my capacity for empathy? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most female homicides are perpetrated by an intimate partner, but this is not reflected in news media coverage of the murders of women, which tends to focus on killings committed by family members, friends, neighbours, co-workers, and strangers. Nearly 60% of South African media coverage of female homicide profiles non-intimate killings. This study looks at multiple-year news coverage of 284 incidents of non-intimate femicide that took place in South Africa between 2012 and 2013, and compares narrative content and news frames used to report non-intimate femicides with those frames most commonly found in media coverage of intimate partner violence. This analysis reveals conspicuous differences between how the "problem" of femicide is reported and understood depending on the status of the victim and her relationship with the perpetrator, and how this distorts the reality of who is at risk of becoming a victim and who is to be feared as a perpetrator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine the remarkable output of David Ruccio's Occasional Links & Commentary. I stress the multidisciplinary nature of Ruccio's blog (especially its relationship to the humanities), its ruthless criticism of capitalism and mainstream economics, its effort to link everyday and academic knowledges, and, ultimately, its pedagogical value for conveying vast amounts of economic information for a broad readership while exemplifying a non-essentialist approach to Marxian theory. I illustrate these points by examining two blog series in particular: David's extensive commentary on what he has called the "Second Great Depression" that followed the financial collapse of 2008 and his ongoing discussions of utopian thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jürgen Moltmann's theology of open friendship, which he has consistently explicated for the last forty years, has contributed greatly to the theological discourse of friendship. Here I attempt to demonstrate that Moltmann has not developed this subject much over his forty years of engagement with it. However, based on his valuable insights, I offer two constructive proposals to further his idea of open friendship. The first is more analytical in that I demonstrate that Moltmann's understanding of open friendship is close to what is called the 'drawing' model of friendship, although the advent of strangers among us necessitates that we take both Moltmann and the drawing model further. My second proposal is to construct imaginatively a new munus triplex of Jesus as Friend, Servant, and Stranger rather than following Moltmann who suggests a munus quadruplex focusing on Jesus the Friend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developed in 2011, WeChat integrated a digital wallet function two years later. It has since become a seemingly indispensable part of everyday life in China. Armed with this highly versatile app, users can now pay their bills, hail taxis, order food, book hotels, and even give alms to roadside beggars. However, research into WeChat sociality remains largely focused on the cities, and this urban bias obfuscates the social experiences of using WeChat for the vast number of people who still reside in rural regions. This article addresses this lacuna by presenting ethnographic data gathered in the remote mountains of Xishangbanna in Yunnan Province. Using the concept of strangership, we argue ethical ambiguity surrounds WeChat's arrival. The app affords more contact with the outside world for otherwise-isolated villages, but not all contact with strangers has brought about positive economic and social changes. Would-be adulterers also make use of WeChat to find extramarital lovers. As such, this article contributes to the anthropology of strangership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the occasion of celebrating the theoretical long durée of Strange Encounters to think about two radically different forms of strange encounters. At the moment when Strange Encounters is celebrating its 20th anniversary it is important for feminists and scholars of race and ethnicity to reflect on the possibilities that Ahmed's work has provided for our critical perspectives about contemporary formations of race, gender and sexuality. The article considers two case studies: an art installation titled Enemy Kitchen by Michael Rakowitz and the memoir Know My Name by Chanel Miller. The article begins by thinking through what it means to form eating publics that often draw strangers together. Intimacy formed through strangers in this context is to be understood as generative and enabling. The kinds of intimacy that are enabled and formed through encounters with the stranger, I argue, are constitutive of positive social change that implicitly jettison the heteronormative logic of familial and familiar intimacy to imagine social worlds and possibilities in which radically different possibilities for coming together – via acts of shared commensality – are imagined and realized. The paper then moves to a different example of the encounter with the stranger, Chanel Miller's memoir. Using Ahmed's work, I explore what it means to confront strange encounters that involve coming into proximity with strange bodies that actually mean to harm women of colour. I shift from thinking about the enabling possibility of coming into contact with strangers to examine the latent violence of the encounter with the stranger that is structurally embedded in the rape survivor narrative. Together, these two examples allow me to ask how Ahmed's work has generated possibilities for a critically engaged form of social critique in Asian American Studies that takes on the challenge of confronting different forms of injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a reflection on my book, Strange Encounters, 20 years after its original publication. It considers 'travelling with strangers' as a way of thinking of my own research trajectory as I deepened my thoughts and understanding of how strangers are recognised as strangers in a range of institutional as well as national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the perceptions of police who work in Queensland's discrete Indigenous communities. Given the strong relationship between policing practices and the environments in which police work, we examine how 'place' and 'space' – particularly the environmental context of Queensland's discrete Indigenous communities – can inform policing. Interviews with fifteen police officers who work in Indigenous communities across Queensland found that police felt like strangers in Indigenous communities; they were acutely aware of their status as a (predominantly) white minority in a (predominantly) non-white space, which had implications for their policing practices. This also contributed to their perceptions of discrete Indigenous communities as strange lands – spaces in which their own (settler) social norms did not necessarily apply, and within which the work of policing had to be adjusted and reshaped. Overall, police found it difficult to reconcile their experiences of policing in discrete Indigenous communities with their experiences of policing elsewhere in Australia. In many ways, they were not trained nor prepared for policing in these distinct contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People are often reluctant to talk to strangers, despite the fact that they are happier when they do so. We investigate this apparent paradox, meta-analyzing pre-conversation predictions and post-conversation experiences across seven studies (N = 2304). We examine: fears of not enjoying the conversation, not liking one's partner, and lacking conversational skills; fears of the partner not enjoying the conversation, not liking oneself, and lacking conversational skills. We examine the relative strength of these fears, and show that the fears are related to talking behavior. We report evidence that people's fears are overblown. Finally, we report two interventions designed to reduce fears: conversation tips, and the experience of a pleasant conversation. Ultimately, this research shows that conversations go better than expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young Muslims in the West are often at the forefront of efforts to explain, demystify and de-stigmatise Islam and Muslim identity through everyday knowledge-sharing – from formal initiatives such as Speed-Date-a-Muslim and Coffee and Islam to informal fielding of questions from classmates, colleagues and strangers. This paper draws on contact theory to investigate conditions and drivers for young Australian Muslims who seek to explain their religious community to outsiders. We consider how explaining can be situated in a shift in Australian multicultural politics towards intercultural communication and knowledge exchange. We investigate how this focus on cross-cultural awareness shapes young Muslims' everyday experiences of accounting for themselves, either reluctantly or enthusiastically, in the contact zones of Australian educational institutions, workplaces and neighbourhoods. We suggest that the work of young Muslims as everyday explainers should be acknowledged both for its contribution to social cohesion and the toll it exacts from them. We argue that while 'explaining' is often an agentic effort for connection and participation, it is also often unequally divided labour, and if over-determined as the key strategy to counter anti-Muslim sentiment can serve to assign responsibility to individuals and communities for social cohesion, and miscast racism as ignorance and misunderstanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The making of cosmopolitan cities necessitates competence to engage and live with difference and diversity. More often than not, diversity is treated as a challenge to social integration especially in urban areas with a short history of and less exposure to diversification. However, such overemphasis on diversity as a challenge overlooks a more nuanced approach to urban diversity that is lived and experienced by migrants and the local population. This paper explores 'diversity on the ground' transpiring in 'mundane' encounters between Filipino migrants and South Koreans in Seoul. I analyze how 'taken-for-granted' migrant-local encounters and the social processes surrounding these intercultural interactions are crucial in facilitating or impeding civility and mutual recognition that are crucial in the cosmopolitanization of a global city. Following Erving Goffman's theory of social interaction, I interrogate migrants' and local citizens' behavior towards each other in public spaces following a social script of 'getting along' despite the (in)visibility of differences and otherness. Based on interviews with migrants and Koreans and spatial ethnography of Catholic migrant spaces, I identify two types of encounters: purposeful encounters between migrants and Korean (non)Catholics in given contexts of interactions performing specific interaction rituals, and accidental encounters between Korean public and Filipino migrants when the latter perform both mundane activities and 'strange' sociocultural and religious activities in the sacred and public spaces. This paper concludes with some thoughts into how intercultural encounters within religious spaces contribute to the shaping of urban diversity and making of a cosmopolitan city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, introducing outer village lessees has been an important approach to increasing the marketization of land rentals in rural China. However, with large numbers of informal features among acquaintances, the effect of introducing outer village lessees is ambiguous. In this paper, data from the 2015 China Household Finance Survey are used to analyse the demonstration effect of land rentals between strangers on those between acquaintances, and land rent is used to represent the marketization of land rentals. The estimated results indicate that with the emergence of outer village lessees, lessors transacting with acquaintances are more likely to obtain high land rents and to rent out farmland for profit. Evidence shows that profit motives are the key pathway by which the presence of outer village lessees affects land rents. The analysis using the sample of lessees supports our findings. Our analysis implies that the demonstration effect exists in land rental markets, and also provides a feasible instrument for promoting market-oriented land rentals between acquaintances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present historical context, migratory flows have acquired a particular political and social relevance by showing a deep imbalance in the globalized world. Those who migrate to wealthy countries due to wars or extreme poverty do not have an identity that can be homogenized; they are aliens, strangers carrying destabilizing life experiences. The meeting between the new idea-content represented by the Stranger and the receiving group-container can therefore have catastrophic consequences. The author's reflection aims to focus on the significance of the figure of the Stranger and on the condition that might support an integration process, starting from an analogy between the collective dynamics of the social environment and the individual psychical ones as experienced in the psychoanalytic setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This gem of an article by Dr. Kate Marcus was tucked away for decades, comfortably settled in a drawer at the Library-Bookstore of the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, readily available as a reprint for those who knew to ask. While preparing for a recent presentation, I tracked it down to refresh my memory of it. Marcus's article is the text of a lecture she presented in May 1956 for the Analytical Psychology Club of Los Angeles. In 1971, her paper was published in The Well-Tended Tree: Essays into the Spirit of Our Times, a Festschrift edited by Hilde Kirsch in honor of James Kirsch on his 70th birthday. As we would expect, Dr. Marcus's article reflects the time period in which it was written. Despite some outdated notions about women and men, it provides interesting and useful interpretations of the male stranger in women's dreams—dreams that are still dreamt today, more than 60 years after her paper was written. Marcus saw into and beyond her era, identifying and celebrating the prospective elements such dreams can offer. Psychological Perspectives wanted to make the article available to an audience wider than those who frequent our institute library-bookstore, and we extend our special thanks to Janet Casewell, and the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York, for allowing us to reprint this wonderful article. We trust Dr. Marcus would be pleased to learn her work is still read and remains of value decades after her death. –Pamela Freundl Kirst, PhD [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on solo female travel indicates that women traveling alone in foreign countries are subject to different sociocultural and gender norms, and may bear more fear and constraints both temporally and spatially. Harassment from male strangers exerts considerable influence on women's perception of safety. However, issues of how solo female travelers confront stranger harassment remain untouched in tourism or leisure studies. Based on the perspectives of stranger harassment and cultural encounters, this article explores the experiences and interactions of 17 Taiwanese solo females with male strangers. Results revealed when facing harassment, they opted to neglect, forbear, or blame themselves; hardly had they actively fought back. Adding ramifications to the existing knowledge, this article contributes to the understanding of the theoretical conceptualization of stranger harassment of solo female travelers, and is in due response to the dearth of research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A so-called birth tourist travels to a country with birthright citizenship to give birth so that her child will be a citizen of that country. In Canada, hostility towards birth tourism has simmered since 2012. Situating this hostility within a history of Sinophobia, I analyze birth tourism websites, arguing that those who can access Canadian citizenship via birth tourism already possess network capital, a position that is not enabled but enhanced by their child's citizenship. I argue that public concern about birth-tourism in Canada turns on the willfulness of birth tourists as strangers who impose themselves upon the state. Birth tourists combine their reproductive capacity and their capacity for mobility to subvert the sovereignty of the Canadian state: their reproduction is inherently nationalized and produces citizens who have not been vetted by the Canadian state. In this way, birth tourists invoke mobility to access citizenship without commitments and without state sanction, creating strangers within the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined age-related differences in behavioral reactions to interpersonal conflict within an iterated prisoner's dilemma (PD). Participants completed an iterated PD game alone and with a partner, either a stranger or a friend who accompanied them to the session. The partner, however, was actually a program that occasionally behaved selfishly or always reciprocated. Afterwards, participants formed trait impressions of their partner's morality and competence. Participants cooperated more with friends than strangers and more with reciprocating partners than selfish ones. Older adults cooperated more with selfish partners and offered more favorable impressions than did younger adults. Overall, perceived partner trait morality was positively associated with cooperative behavior. Relative to younger adults, older adults were more passive during conflict but grew less so as selfishness continued. This passivity co-occurred with more favorable partner impressions and better objective performance, suggesting a degree of calibration not shown by younger adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recalling autobiographical memories with others can influence the quality of recall, but little is known about how features of the group influence memory outcomes. In two studies, we examined how the products and processes of autobiographical recall depend on individual vs. collaborative remembering and the relationship between group members. In both studies, dyads of strangers, friends, and siblings recalled autobiographical events individually (elicitation), then either collaboratively or individually (recall). Study 1 involved typing memory narratives; Study 2 involved recalling aloud. We examined shifts in vividness, emotionality, and pronoun use within memory narratives produced by different relationship types. In Study 2, we also coded collaborative dyads' "collaborative processes" or communication processes. In Study 1, all relationships showed decreased positive emotion and I-pronouns and increased negative emotion within collaboratively-produced memory narratives. In Study 2, all relationships showed increased vividness, reduced emotionality and positive and negative emotion, and increased I- and we-pronouns within collaboratively-produced memory narratives. However, strangers used collaborative processes differently from friends and siblings. Some collaborative processes were associated with memory qualities. Across studies, collaboration influenced memory quality more than did relationship type, but relationship type influenced dyads' recall dynamics. These findings indicate the complexity of social influences on memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a June 1979 homily he delivered shortly after unprecedented outbursts of state-sponsored violence, Romero preached, "Christ is no stranger here: Christ is the tortured person; Christ is the man unjustly executed; Christ is the innocent one criminally killed. We read part of an Advent homily from December 3, 1978, in which Archbishop Romero framed Advent as an encounter with Christ among our neighbors. By connecting worshipers to women in Elizabeth Detention Center and RCHP's ministry, the sending reminded the seminary community that the issue is very near to us, just as we remember that Christ draws near to us in Advent. [Extracted from the article]

The book ploughs a deep furrow between the 10th and 11th centuries, with the turn of the millennium resembling a time of fundamental change in the rural communities of western Europe, when "place" came to dominate group cohesion in a manner not previously seen. But I Neighbours and Strangers i applies new perspectives and the insights of recent scholarship in order to make the most of these source-types. Such an insight only emerged because the book's authors employed a comparative approach, working across their areas of specialism in order to attend to the local dynamics of different regions, without imposing a teleological view upon those early medieval rural settlements. [Extracted from the article]