Exorcism as Empowerment: A New Idiom

During the years 1610 and 1611, two Ursuline novices underwent an exorcism in southern France. In the spring of 1611, their confessor, Father Louis Gaufridy, was condemned of witchcraft and rape by Dominican inquisitors, and burned at the stake by state officials. The Dominican inquisitors found Father Gaufridy guilty of causing the Ursulines to be possessed by demons, and luring the young women to caves where they participated in illicit activities. Rather than accepting the role of victim, the Ursulines, working in collusion, accomplished the miraculous: public exoneration, and reintegration into their religious community accompanied not only by a reclaimed stature as women religious, but by an elevated stature. Through an intricate play of accusation and expiation, carefully worked through the demons that possessed them, the Ursuline novices reconstructed themselves as virtuous women religious.     

Where the heart is: home space transitions for residential college students

Home and the transition to adulthood are related temporal and spatial constructs. Building upon Kenyon’s [1999. “A home from home: Students’ transitional experience of home.” In Ideal homes? Social change and domestic life, edited by T. Chapman, 84–95. New York: Routledge] categorization of physical, social, personal, and temporal elements of home for college students, we analyze survey responses from 256 students at a 4-year U.S. residential college in order to uncover how perceptions of home-like spaces change as students move from pre-college homes, through on- and off-campus home spaces, and toward imagined future homes. Our quantitative findings show that the four home elements matter differently across time and type of home, supported by qualitative findings wherein students articulate how they conceptualize similarities and differences between the different home spaces. This study adds to ongoing conceptualizations of the transition to adulthood as placed (for four-year residential college students especially), and as fluid and multilayered in terms of social actors’ views of their past, present, and imagined future homes and accompanying identity transitions.     

Gender, Development, and Empowerment in Qinghai Province

A report on the initiatives of Shem, a Qinghai-based Tibetan women＇s group dedicated to empowering Tibetan women and their communities through grassroots development.     

‘Playtime in the Borderlands’: Children's Representations of School,Gender and Bullying through Photographs and Interviews

Photography has been commonly used as a research tool in studies of childhood/children. However images of school children in official documentation are rarely taken or chosen by children and may not reflect their real experiences. This research considered the photographs taken by year six primary school children of their school and the images they chose to represent themselves. Subsequent interviews with children revealed attitudes to school, the importance of playground relationships in the construction of gender, leading to the concept of ‘borderlands’ inhabited by some boys who adopt non-hegemonic masculinities.     

Description and Thermoluminescence (Tl) Dating of An Alleged Hopewell Mobiliary Clay Human Figurine from Hopeton Earthworks,Ross County,Ohio

During a reorganization of the collections at Kent State University (KSU), a fired-clay human figurine was discovered. Beyond the fact that KSU obtained the specimen from a collector, and the alleged origin was the Ohio Hopewell site of Hopeton Earthworks, information on the specimen’s provenience and chain of custody was lacking or ambiguous. To determine whether the artifact was consistent in style and age with Hopewell, we conducted a comparative study, as well as a direct chronometric assessment using thermoluminescence (TL) dating. The comparative study was equivocal: The figurine possessed some attributes consistent with Hopewell, but other features were not consistent or missing. TL dating revealed an age of 4590?±?270, exceeding the Hopewell period by over 2,000 years. These results suggest two mutually exclusive hypotheses, neither of which is relevant to Hopewell: Either the figurine is one of the earliest examples of ceramic technology in eastern North America or it is a “fake,” perhaps from the Old World, and the object entered the KSU collections under pretense. More broadly, we suggest that archaeologists take a much more circumspect approach to collector-acquired objects and perform their due diligence in verifying the stories associated with them, even if that means increased use of destructive testing procedures.