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During the COVID-19 pandemic, as shelter-in-place orders were issued in the United States, most people were confined to their homes and adjusted to new domestic routines. This essay traces my routine of walking through different landscapes in Santa Cruz and reflects on being in-between languages and continents. I entangle personal reflections with theory in an attempt to portray the experience of being quarantined across borders in an unfamiliar country with a foreign language and culture. I explore how being in between languages, being nomadic, can serve to deconstruct identity. I find myself observing and contemplating ideas of home and travel, as well as the diversity of landscapes and forms of existence. This essay is a first-person narrative observing the thoughts and sensations that occur in an attempt to disconnect from the saturated screen experience of everyday life and connect with nature and contemplative interior states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Deleuzian epistemology can inform a new framework for contemporary art therapy practice. The conception of the art therapist as a nomadic force within de-territorialized spaces may accurately reflect current employment realities in which art therapists must traverse diverse settings, populations, and client needs within a single practice. The Deleuzian concept of the rhizome, which is an organic structure that grows horizontally through nodal connections, is suggested as a valuable organizing principle for art therapists that resonates with clients and knowledge structures, and positions art making as central to a broadly conceived goal of becoming. Art therapists may discover in the metaphor of a nomad a sense of nonhierarchical, open space with emancipatory potential for both clients and art therapists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The artists of the Sixtiers generation in Soviet Kazakhstan have typically been understood as the creators of an authentic Kazakh style. This article demonstrates that a web of constructed vectors helped consolidate art as 'Kazakh' in the 1960s and early 1970s. I argue that the Sixtiers mined the history of nomadic populations in Central Asia for site-specific cultural forms as a means to connect with an expanding art world and the global context of decolonialization. Neither wholly official nor countercultural, the Sixtiers produced a cultural milieu that stretched the limits of the sayable in late Soviet socialism and defined the margins of modernity with which Kazakh artists continue to contend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real industrial studies often give rise to complex optimization problems involving mixed variables and time consuming simulators. To deal with these difficulties we propose the use of a Gaussian process regression surrogate with a suitable kernel able to capture simultaneously the output correlations with respect to continuous and categorical/discrete inputs without relaxation of the categorical variables. The surrogate is integrated into the Efficient Global Optimization method based on the maximization of the Expected Improvement criterion. This maximization is a Mixed Integer Non-Linear problem which is solved by means of an adequate optimizer: the Mesh Adaptive Direct Search, integrated into the NOMAD library. We introduce a random exploration of the categorical space with a data-based probability distribution and we illustrate the full strategy accuracy on a toy problem. Finally we compare our approach with other optimizers on a benchmark of functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portable document format (PDF) electronic files are by far the most popular format used to publish, store, and share scholarly journal articles. Recently, new tools for quickly finding and linking to journal article PDFs have been developed. These tools integrate into the researcher's web browser and scan for unique identifiers associated with a journal article. When a unique identifier is found, the tool attempts to locate a PDF copy of the associated article and provide a link. This article will explore how these full-text finders work and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these tools. Descriptions of several of the most popular tools are provided, and a short discussion of how librarians can facilitate the use of these tools at their institutions is included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the arrival in Canada of thousands of Hungarian Roma asylum seekers, a new and restrictive refugee regime was installed. Legislation included Designated Countries of Origin or “safe” countries from which refugee claimants were stripped of some entitlements. Acceptance rates fluctuate in loose reticulation with several factors. When negative decisions are made on refugee claims, conditions of persecution in Hungary are denied even though they are clearly demonstrable. Inclusion of claimants' voices substantiates a normalized violence. When decision makers parse the criterion of persecution and when political leaders dismiss claims as “bogus,” the consequence is the reconfiguration of the Roma as essentially nomadic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rosi Braidotti is a philosopher and distinguished university professor at Utrecht University and the founding director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht. Her first book,Patterns of Dissonance(1991), undertook the balancing act of connecting the redefinition of the feminine in post-Hegelian philosophy with the demand for feminist subjectivity. For Braidotti, becoming-woman is a qualitative multiplicity that simultaneously unfolds other becomings, including becoming-animal, becoming-minoritarian, becoming-machine, becoming-other and becoming-nomad, all from a politics of location that demands accountability.Nomadic Subjects(1994) signalled a new point of departure for feminist thinkers when it was first published, and has now gone into a thoroughly revised second edition (2011).Metamorphoses(2002) andTranspositions(2006) explore zoe as an affirmative, non-human force of connection, generating groundbreaking insights into the social imaginary and sexual and racial difference, as well as posthumanism, which is further developed inThe Posthuman(2013). Braidotti has also edited a number of influential volumes on Deleuze, post-secularism and cosmopolitanism, and, most recently, with Paul Gilroy,Conflicting Humanities(2016). Her influence and prestige continue to grow and, in March 2017, she gave the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University—two public lectures and a conversation with Rüdiger Campe (Professor of German and Comparative Literature) and Joanna Radin (Professor of History of Medicine and History) jointly titled ‘Posthuman, All Too Human’. This interview took place on 11 October 2016, during Braidotti’s time as the Hope Street Writer in Residence with the Department of English and Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The trope of boat figures centrally in Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman's travelling public artwork, Rubber duck (2007–2016); in the media images of migrant refugees arriving at European destinations by boat since 2015; and in British artist Paul McCarthy's Ship Adrift, Ship of Fools (2010). Functioning as a hybrid vessel containing conceptions of global and nomadic transitivity, the image of boat forms the coalescing crux of the discourse in this article. The boat is interpreted as figuratively representing vessel transporting the nomadic individual as an autobiographical subject positioned in liminal and polycultural circumstances. Following Russell West-Pavlov, it is argued that autobiographical discourse continues to manifest as one of the most potent forms of ideology and that subjective nomadic ideology is utopianistically coloured. In the course of the article, notions of polyculturalism; rhizomatic identity: the Foucauldian notion of a Ship of Fools; minor; minority; difference; and Otherness are explored as core aspects of the constructions around autobiographical trajectory in the nomadic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the social imaginary of higher education, there are many mutually constitutive forces shaping academic identities, such as academics’ habitus, dispositions, race, gender and student expectations. Our queer academic identities are furthermore robustly intertwined with, and emerging within, cultural, political and economic histories and realities. In post-apartheid South Africa, our academic identities are constituted in the nexus of historical white privilege on the one hand, and on the other hand, the prevailing heteronormative and homophobic public sentiment on the African continent. In the intersection of race and gender as technologies of power, we perform our identities as academics asprocessamidst often incommensurable and multiple claims and counterclaims. In the context of being and becoming academics, our identities asnomadsprovide a particular coherence, continuity and stability, albeit a continually ‘changing core but the sense of a core nonetheless – that at any given moment is enunciated as the “I”’ (Brah, A. 1996.Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 123–124). In this collaborative autoethnographic narrative, we explore becoming and being nomad as one particular lens among many others to describe our personal journeys and map a selection of issues of (dis)location and transitions that constitute our subjective and material experiences and our own trajectories of becoming. Three analytics constructs are explored: namely spaces of becoming, cycles of becoming and negotiating and performing becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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George Orwell is known as an acclaimed novelist, essayist, documentary writer, and journalist. But Orwell also wrote widely on a number of themes in and around popular culture. However, even though Orwell's writings might be considered as a precursor to some well-known themes in studies of popular culture his contribution to this area still remains relatively unacknowledged by others in the discipline. The aim of this article is simply, therefore, to provide a basis to begin to rethink Orwell’s contribution to contemporary studies of popular culture. It does so by demonstrating some comparable insights into culture and society between those made by Orwell and those found in the work of Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and Deleuze. These insights are also related to four main areas of discussion: debates in contemporary cultural studies about the contested pleasures of popular culture and experiences; the relationship between language and culture; how social class needs to be defined not just economically but also culturally; and how one might escape cultural relativism when writing about popular culture. The article concludes by suggesting that Orwell is a precursor to contemporary studies of popular culture insofar that some of the cultural themes he explores have become established parts of the discipline’s canon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nomadic groups are highly discriminated against in access to education services, and the 2010 Education For All Global Monitoring Report demanded urgent action to address their education deprivation. Mobile pastoralists, particularly, appear to be falling beyond the remit of migration studies in education, although they are among the most mobile people in the world. Pastoralists' education inclusion has been promoted by models of provision across the 'mainstream', 'alternative' and Open Learning traditions, but examples from around the world show that each broad approach comes with identifiable 'terms of inclusion' that, in different ways, reproduce and/or challenge pastoralists' marginalisation. Achieving political commitment to addressing the scale and extent of pastoralists' education deprivation is not unimaginable, but contingent on significant reappraisal of mobility as a livelthood strategy and of the legitimacy of pastoralism as a sustainable contemporary livelihood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes futurity in relation to the themes ofOstalgie, or nostalgia for the East, andIndianerfilme, East German western genre films, inThe Last Cowboy, a 1998 DVD artwork by international artist pair Nomad and one of the first artworks ever made for DVD. Borrowing analytical frameworks from digital media theory and aesthetics, the essay suggests alternatives to the liberal–humanist binary logic of exclusion, substitution, and exchange implicit in many discussions of German cultural experience after theWende. Rather than projecting desire for community and shared cultural memory onto an idealized, “utopian” past,The Last Cowboylocates them in an engaging frontier of representational possibility that might become the foundation for a more inclusive future and for new ways of conceptualizing cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An obscure text today, Giovanni Paolo Marana's novel Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, written in Paris in 1683, was a tremendously popular and influential work on both sides of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Marana's epistolary novel follows the career of “Mahmut the Arabian,” sent by the Turkish sultan to spy on the French court between the years 1637 and 1682. This article will survey the Turkish Spy's long period of circulation in the Anglophone Atlantic, from the work's first translation from French into English in 1687, to Daniel Defoe's sequel A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (1718) and finally to the publication in Philadelphia of Peter Markoe's The Algerine Spy (1787), a successor novel that adopts and adapts the Turkish Spy character to address the pressing concerns of postcolonial America. In the context of recent trends in transnational/transatlantic studies and the ongoing debate over what constitutes “world literature,” my argument focuses on how the translators’ prefaces attached to the various editions/adaptations of the Turkish Spy deploy translation as a trope to domesticate this nomadic and cosmopolitan text. I will argue that the repeated insistence on the spy's letters having been translated from “Arabick” reflects a search for unrecoverable origins that come to represent the common fictions of the nation itself. The translators of the Turkish Spy insist on a direct relationship between their national audiences and the Arabic original even as actual layers of translation and mediation accumulate. The unruly, rhizomatic history of the Turkish Spy makes the work both a rich case study in the territorialization of literary production in the eighteenth century and a strong candidate for inclusion in the evolving canons of Atlantic and world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Rafael Alberti's collection of short poems, Baladas y canciones del Paraná (1953–1954), was written in exile in Argentina and inspired by his discovery of the Paraná River and its vast marshlands. This article examines how his relationship with the South American flatlands evolves throughout the three chapters of Baladas. The first section studies his initial attempts to relate to the Paraná fen country. It considers how he uses key features of the landscape in order to explore and symbolise his feelings of displacement in Argentina. The second section concentrates on the book's later chapters in which the exiled poet superimposes memories of Spain onto his immediate surroundings and questions the purpose of his poetry in a foreign land. The paper contends that, as Alberti gradually develops a deep spiritual bond with the American countryside, he discovers new sources of poetic inspiration and gains considerable insight into his exilic condition and his identity as a nomad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses a set of contemporary art practices situated within a dialogical paradigm, also referred to as relational aesthetics, and discusses its potential for resistance against market-dominant art production and rather contentious creative industries discourse, particularly in relation to creative labour. These nuanced artistic treatments within a dialogic aesthetics frame, particularly those born out of an experience of 'displacement', alter the formation of subjectivity in multiple ways, including the processes of becoming as well as the paradigms of knowledge exchange, associated with artistic practice and research. The question is: how can artists resist a dominant system of art production today? Haunted by this question, I discuss some of the promises as well as threats that unpredictability and dis/placement hold for contemporary visual arts and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If 'struggle' is the foundation of the new postcolonial literature and state, 'the matter of Zimbabwe' secures unquestioned tenancy to literatures of the folkways of yore. In this article, this false binary is disputed in favour of fusions and continuities. The article discusses the 'matter of Zimbabwe' via two Shona song-dramas, whose construction and visions border on the timeless and mythopoetic. The two song-dramas, Chomtengure and Uyo Ndiani, are indeed the epitomes of the indestructibility as well as vulnerability of master narratives of history. The two songs represent the creative possibilities of this tension that ripples through the rather viscous content of the 'matter of Zimbabwe'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nicolas Bourriaud's 2009 Tate Triennial, titled 'Altermodern', claims to trace a profound shift in contemporary art. According to Bourriaud's catalogue essay, postmodernism has been superseded by a new 'altermodern' culture, the artist of today responding to the processes of globalisation in works that reflect his or her increasingly nomadic ways. The central problem here is that Bourriaud celebrates the artist-nomad without considering the diverse objectives and experiences of the various travellers, including the businessman, tourist, migrant and refugee, whose movements are directly or indirectly recast in the artist's work. Bourriaud's blindness to the larger sociopolitical implications of the artist's nomadism results in a peculiarly flat and uncritical perspective on globalisation. Fortunately, some of the works on display in the Triennial advance more lucid and nuanced visions of contemporary travel, artists such as Walead Beshty and Franz Ackermann inserting themselves into the pathways of global exchange and reflecting corrosively on the contradictions of globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several interdependent strategies have allowed pastoralists to survive for centuries in patchy and unpredictable low-productivity environments while sustaining their resource base: mobility, diversity, flexibility, reciprocity and reserves. Recent decades have witnessed curtailed mobility due to agricultural expansion into rangelands, the establishment and enforcement of political and administrative boundaries, the usurpation of local institutional control and disruption of local practices, increased labour costs, and the development of stationary goods and services. Pastoralists have responded by becoming sedentary, diversifying or intensifying their production strategies, leaving the herding sector, or adapting and transforming their practices and institutions. While these trends may be significant, an historical precedence of ebbs and surges in mobility indicates they may not be new or unidirectional. Emerging political trends and technologies may provide an opportunity for pastoral populations to maintain or increase their mobility in the future, but will the customary pastoral institutions that support sustainable practices still be viable, or will new, viable institutions emerge? These institutions are often subtle, contextual, and norm-based; 'invisible' and easily dismantled or replaced by more authoritarian regimes. There is relatively little understanding of how they work or how to support them. Without them, the trend may be towards open access or privatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addresses issues related to leaving and recreating a home from the perspective of different kinds of movements, transformations and diasporic ways of living. Global restructurings in the wake of neoliberal economic developments; Description of nomads; Discussion of contemporary global upheavals and displacements and the concomitant mix of old and new understandings of border-crossing, multiple or hybrid identities and neo/colonialism.

Introduces articles about the shifting meanings of home, published in the September 2005 issue of "Psychological, Political and Cultural Meanings of Home."

This paper argues that nomadological practices can be identified in cultural and critical interventions from feature and documentary film-making (Werner Herzog and Robert Gardener), through architecture and urbanist practices (Guy Debord, Nigel Coates, Lindy Roy, and Dre Wapenaar), the critiques of Lévinas and Derrida, and advertisements selling water or haute couture handbags. I suggest that, focused especially on the 'nomadic' Fulani of West Africa, an idea born in the colonial era was read from the positing of the notion of the 'nomad'. Its beginnings were, in the early postcolonial era, once radical and liberating, but have been slowly eroded, deformed, and transformed. I argue that nomadicity now represents the inverse of the oppositional idea to which it once referred. Things nomadic as metaphor and nomadology as an intellectual practice warring against both capital and the state serving its interests have both become absorbed, for example, into the advertising of major corporations. Although nomadology as a tactic can be seen as a recent strategy in the face ultimately of resistance's inability to remain effective in the postmodern, I indicate that as critique nomadology too has been exhausted (or become complicit). Progressively centered on metaphors of tourism as nomadic travel, the discourses of capital, in other words, also deploy its languages [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The humid zone of Nigeria has traditionally been considered unsuitable for extensive cattle production because of the prevalence of tsetse fly. Over the years, nomadic pastoralists, mainly Fulani, from the northern part of the country paid seasonal visits to this zone in search of pasture and water for their cattle during the dry season when the threat of the tsetse menace is less. The recent increase in the number of settled pastoralists has been associated with changing trends in the ecology and economy of the zone. Relying on recent survey data, this paper attempts a systematic analysis of the adaptive strategies of the Fulani in pursuit of a sedentary lifestyle in the humid frontier of southwest Nigeria. Some of the adaptive strategies identified include: establishment of grazing orbits within a 20 km radius of their settlements, adjustment of herd size and stricture, adoption ofa multiple livelihood system, production of arable crops and appropriation of traditional social structures and kinship networks for herdmanagement. Long-term insecure land-holding arrangements, incessantseasonal bush burning for regeneration of pasture by the Fulani and the gradual destruction of the native forest cover are some of the problems arising from the sedentarisation of livestock production in the area. It was observed that the present land-use arrangement, even though it appears to guarantee the pastoralists security of tenure in the short term, is not sustainable in the long run, given the increasing commercialisation of land in the area and rapid population growth. It was, therefore, concluded that government should put in place a land redistribution arrangement that will ensure secure land ownership by the Fulani. Development initiatives in the area should also focus on reinforcing those traditional practices of the Fulani that wouldguarantee a sustainable land-use system in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]