Madonna and Child of Soweto: Black Life Beyond Apartheid and Democracy

ABSTRACT

South African artist Laurence Vincent Scully’s 1973 painting, Madonna and Child of Soweto, offers an analytical tool for understanding the capacity of public religion to advance black life. The author argues that this image censures apartheid violence against black persons and reimagines a just sociality by displaying sacred, black motherhood and infancy in the figures Mary and Jesus. Their temporality and corporeality, when analyzed with a queer womanist method, gestate sacred public religion that exceeds both the apartheid governance of the past and also the secular, post-apartheid democracy of today.     

Performing identity within a multicultural framework

The role of music in community festivals is often to assist in constructing a particular identity of place, and music functions in such instances as a means to provide a sense of belonging for participants. However, multicultural festivals complicate any simple relationship between place and identity, because such festivals demonstrate the heterogeneous state of both identity and place. Anxieties that arise around issues of cultural authenticity within such festivals point to concerns of hybrid identities that may challenge and threaten the maintenance of clearly demarcated identities in the face of transnational relations. Drawing on ethnographic material and theoretical conceptualizations of the self, this paper explores the dynamic and fluid constructions of identity at two Australian community music festivals, and raises questions on the sorts of practices that seek to regulate the ways in which these identities are constituted and performed.     

Engaging in the disablement process over space and time: narratives of persons with multiple sclerosis in Ottawa, Canada

This article presents an interpretive analysis of the narratives of 15 men and women who have been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) living in the city of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Relatively little is known about how people who are affected by MS cope with the challenges posed by social and physical barriers in their environment. Our research investigates two objectives: (1) to explore how those who have developed MS cope with their disease and resulting impairments, both in terms of the bodily experiences of becoming a chronically ill person and in terms of how they cope with changing relationships, changing identities and challenges in their physical environment; and (2) how they engage in the process of disablement over time and space as a result of these changing social and spatial relationships. We argue that the physical body and its social placings in public and private spaces are intertwined and both affect experiences of health, ability, impairment, disability and chronic illness. We further argue that these relationships are experienced across time and space, and in place, as people who have developed a chronic illness, such as MS, engage in, with and through the process of disablement. This article demonstrates the need for researchers to pay more attention to the role and significance of the simultaneity of space, place and time in shaping the experiences of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, as it has been shown that these variables played a significant role in regulating the everyday experiences of this study's respondents.     

The Stade de France. The Last Expression of French Centralism?

The Stade de France was built for the 1998 World Cup finals. The success of the French team and the substantial infrastructure investment that came with the stadium transformed the image of the formerly industrial suburb of Plaine-Saint-Denis where the stadium is located. However, the impacts of the Stade de France have been uneven and the northern suburbs still present substantial challenges for economic and social renewal. Whilst the key decisions about locating the stadium were taken by central government, the arrival of the Stade de France coincides with radical change in the governance of urban renewal, and future planning of the area will be managed through complex arrangements of inter-communal cooperation and inter-governmental coordination.     

Estimation of Spatio-Temporal Correlations of Prehistoric Population and Vegetation in North America

We discuss a simple methodology to enable a statistical comparison of human population with the vegetation of North America over the past 13,000 years. Nonparametric kernel methods are applied for temporal and spatial smoothing of point data obtained from the Neotoma Paleoecology Database and the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database, which results in sequences of maps showing the development of population and different plant taxa during the Holocene. The estimation of smooth spatial and spatio-temporal cross-correlation functions is proposed in order to detect relationships between population and vegetation in fixed time intervals. Furthermore, the effects of varying environment on demographic changes as well as potential impacts of populations on plant taxa over time are analyzed. Pointwise confidence bands for cross-correlation functions are computed and a robustness analysis is performed to assess the significance of obtained results. Considering the example of oak, an interpretation of our results for eastern North America shows the value of this methodology.