The development of a scientific understanding of synesthesia from early case studies (1849-1873)

The first case of synesthesia was reported in 1812 ( Jewanski, Day, & Ward, 2009 ). However, it took almost seven decades before the idea of synesthesia entered the mainstream of science and, subsequently, art. There are no known new cases described between 1812 and 1848, but in the following three decades there are at least 11 reported cases of synesthesia and many reviews of these cases. This comes at an important period in the history of the neurosciences, and for sensory physiology in particular. However, the literature that describes synesthesia during this period is largely unknown to contemporary researchers and historians. The aim of this review is to discuss the reports of synesthesia during this period, providing translations of some key passages, and to place these reports within the contextual framework of nineteenth-century neuroscience.     

A battle worth winning: The service of culture to the Communist Party of Vietnam in the contemporary era

The Communist Party of Vietnam’s (CPV) market reform policies—introduced in the late 1980s and carrying on today—have opened the country to foreign investment, deregulated state-owned enterprises, decollectivized agricultural cooperatives, and encouraged foreign direct investment. However, what the Party has not wanted reformed, and has fought strongly on behalf of, is culture. Using primary source official CPV cultural policy documentation and secondary sources highlighting contemporary meanings of Vietnamese and foreign cultures, this paper evaluates the Party’s use of culture as a resource in the direction and regulation of the nation’s market economy with a socialist orientation. While culture is expedient for all governments, I argue that the CPV’s intent is unique in that it uses culture as an instrument to maintain its ownership, rather than simply to legitimize its regulatory ability, over the national political economy. This paper aims to show how culture is part and parcel of post-socialist governance’s political-economic framework and contributes to debates surrounding the reach and impact of neoliberalism in formerly command economies.     

Geographic accessibility to primary care providers: Comparing rural and urban areas in Southwestern Ontario

This research examines geographical accessibility to primary care providers (PCPs) across urban and rural areas of Southwestern Ontario and examines variations in the distribution of PCPs in relation to the senior population (aged 65 years and older). Information about PCP practices was provided by the HealthForceOntario Marketing and Recruitment Agency. Population data were obtained from the 2016 Census of Canada. To calculate scores for accessibility to PCPs (i.e., PCPs/10,000 population), we applied the enhanced 2-step floating catchment area method with distance decay effect within a global service catchment of 30-minute drive time. A geospatial mapping approach revealed disparities in the distribution of PCPs with a pattern of higher spatial accessibility in or around major urban areas in Southwestern Ontario. Comparative analyses were performed in association with the seniors’ population to identify how accessibility scores were mismatched with the population needs. The outcome of this study will assist researchers and health service planners to better understand the distribution of existing PCPs to address inequalities, particularly in rural areas.     

Audit Bodies: Embodied Participation,Disability Universalism,and Accessibility in India

Abstract: In this article we think critically about the role of the “access audit” in creating new forms of embodied participation, experiential and technical expertise, and imaginaries of what the modern Indian city should be. We analyze how disability activists make claims about the relationship between subjective bodily experiences and bodies of objective knowledge. We also explore the emergence of a professional access audit apparatus focused on technical standards. As neither volunteer nor professional access audits result in significant architectural or structural changes, we are interested in what other effects and affects these audits produce and what discursive authority claims of inaccessibility have. This article analyzes the practice of conducting “access audits” by lay and professional disability rights activists and organizations in urban India. We argue that access audits are overly focused and that they have limited impact. In overly focusing on physical and technical access, auditors miss the importance of programmatic and policy interventions as well as the need for a more collective contentious politics. Our research illustrates that the contested field of access auditing appears to prevent a unified disability coalition from forming. In addition, it is important for auditors to think critically about the concept of “access” and ask what social, economic, and political processes are embedded within the concept.     

Editorial

Abstract

In this way, archaeology, which had been born beside ruined abbeys and whose purpose has not been knowledge but to keep alive in a small community the sense of the past and the continuity of history, became one of the whore sciences whose poxy favours can be bought by any government prepared to pay for them (Butler 1984, 178).     

After the ‘king of beasts’: Samuel Baker and the embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon

This paper draws on and develops a range of concepts and methodologies from ‘more-than-human’ and animal geographies to map some embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon. It focuses in particular on the exploits of Samuel Baker and some of his contemporaries. The paper attends to the attachments, crossings and ethics that passed between hunted and hunting bodies to flesh out the colonial visions of these ‘seeing men’ of empire. It critically engages with existing work on hunting and colonial natural history by examining interwoven human and nonhuman experiences, exploring elephant hunting as a collection of embodied and co-evolutionary processes with complex material histories. Drawing out the importance of embodiment, affect and intercorporeal exchange the paper then reflects on the performance, epistemology and ethics of hunting practice and traces the role played by a code of sportsmanship in orientating and legitimating the ethical sensibility of hunting. In conclusion the paper details what is gained from this style of embodied historical analysis which unsettles any simple spatio-temporal territorialisation of (post-) colonial historical geographies.