Foremothers: Neera Desai (b. 1925)

Neera Desai (b. 1925), best known as the founder of India's first Women's Studies Research Unit, also wrote the first analytical history of Indian women. In Woman in Modern India, published in 1957, the central concern is women's lack of opportunity and progress from the Vedic period to the 1950s. A college student at the time of the Quit India movement in 1942, Neera belongs to a generation of women who entered the professions in newly independent India and continue to ask the hard questions about gender and power.     

Neural Network-Based Damage Detection from Transfer Function Changes

This article puts forth the work on a neural network-based approach to determine the degree of damaged floors of the building considering changes in the transfer function. The transfer function is considered for that part of forced vibration in which system vibrates linearly after the structure has been damaged considering the building is instrumented during the earthquake. The results showed that accuracy of degree of damage detected increased with the increase in the number of combination of damages. The instrumentation of the first floor is expected to give best results for damage detection based on the transfer function-based approach.     

Identification of Modal Parameters of a Multistoried RC Building Using Ambient Vibration and Strong Vibration Records of Bhuj Earthquake, 2001

Modal parameters of an instrumented multi-storied reinforced concrete building (G +9) have been studied using strong motion records of Bhuj Earthquake, 2001. The Ambient Vibration Testing (AVT) is also conducted to measure the modal parameters of the same building under ambient environmental forces. Frequency Domain Decomposition (FDD) or Peak Picking (PP) in frequency domain and Stochastic Subspace Identification (SSI) technique in time domain is used for extracting the modal parameters. The observed natural frequencies during strong motion are smaller than the ambient vibration testing. The difference in the frequencies may be caused by interaction between structure and soil due to high level of strain during strong motion earthquake. The modal pattern of first five modes obtained from strong motion records and ambient vibration records are identical.     

The Perpetrating Victim: An Allegorical Reading of Pablo Larraín’s Tony Manero (2008)

This article positions the protagonist Raúl Peralta in Tony Manero (Pablo Larraín 2008) towards the perpetrator end of a victim–perpetrator continuum. With reference to Michael Rothberg’s work on the role of implicated subjects (2013), it acknowledges the character’s status as class victim but foregrounds the repetitive acts of physical violence that mark him out as much more of a perpetrator under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The article also mobilises theories of allegory developed by Walter Benjamin (1928) and Ismael Xavier (2004) to posit that acquisitive violence, cultures of imitation and façades of unity in the film all resonate with wider aspects of society during the dictatorship. Citing Idelber Avelar (1999), it concludes with the observation that the film’s conceptual engagement with the themes of forgetting and erasure has relevance to this day, both within and beyond Chile, in a neoliberalism-influenced culture of novelty and oblivion.