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Increasingly, adults and children socialise and communicate online. Children's safe and secure online communication with people from all over the world can increase their understanding of other cultures, which is an important goal in today's multicultural world. Our research studied such interactions between children from three countries, Hungary, Mexico, and the USA. The goals of our research were to study how children represent their identity online and what the implications are for the design of children's online communities. We used qualitative methods to derive a deep understanding of children's behaviours and motivations. Our results show that children exposed their true and complete identities online. They focused on sharing and learning about personal, ethnic, and gender identities via online media and largely ignored cultural identity. They learned about children from other countries and developed positive attitudes towards them. Based on our results we describe design guidelines for children's online identity tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spoken exchanges between members of Cosa nostra are governed by the twofold restriction of the law of silence toward the world outside and the obligation of speaking the truth inside. To this purpose, Mafia's language obeys a semantic obliqueness which provides speakers with a margin of freedom by preserving the unpredictability of their intentions, which led Tommaso Buscetta to qualify Cosa nostra as «the realm of incomplete speech». Mafia order is based on the practise of malentendu doublement bien entendu, in the meaning of Jankélévitch, which includes not only a fake relationship but also a fake situation, maintaining mutual knowledge of deception thereby permitting an infinite, dialectic game. This game, and its unspoken side (involving political affairs and crimes), are here explored during a judicial confrontation between Gaspare Spatuzza, a former man of honour who became a state witness and Filippo Graviano, who was, with his brother, the capomandamento of Spatuzza's same «family». [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review examines the rising challenge of self-represented litigants in America's courts. It begins with a history of the right to represent oneself and the right to counsel and then considers the dearth of empirical information about those who proceed on their own-in other words, pro se. The article examines the shortcomings of the available data about how pro se litigants are treated as compared with those represented by counsel. It then considers the importance of how the unrepresented feel about their experience-most particularly regarding their opportunity for 'voice.' The article then explores judicial attitudes about pro se litigants, arguing that judges may be resistant to reforms to help these parties because such reforms raise fears about judicial neutrality and fair resolution of the merits. The review concludes by briefly considering the cost of not addressing the pro se challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how personal name changes are situated within their sociological context in the United States. Reviewing both popular and scholarly texts on names and name changes, I draw on recent work on identity and narrative by Oriana Bernasconi (2011) to argue that voluntary personal name changes are made in relation to a sense of narrative elasticity or identity elasticity, and act symbolically to make a shifting identity or self-narrative manifest in the social context. Drawing out these themes through an exploration of name changes for ethnic self-definition or religious purposes, I conclude with a reflection on the unstable social balance between an individual's interest in self-expression and society's priority on the stable identification of persons within a given social sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Supreme Court of the United States held in Indiana v. Edwards (2008) that states may limit the self-representation rights of criminal defendants with mental illness when such persons are incapable of acting effectively as their own counsel. This article--the first of two by the authors on this topic--reviews the ramifications of the Edwards decision in terms of the fate of criminal defendants who are allowed to represent themselves in court, and substantiates the need to develop operational schemata that courts, attorneys, and forensic mental health experts can utilize in assessing relevant competencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the discourses of citizenship through which the museum institution is currently framing its public: museum-goers as participants. Drawing on qualitative research on the London's Voices project at the Museum of London, and 1934: A New Deal For Artists at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, this paper examines the ways in which the contemporary museum, and cultural policy internationally, has converged around the activity of inviting members of the public to 'speak for themselves' through a variety of media technologies. Discursive analysis of such mediated activities as activities of self-representation suggests that this strategy of participation is simultaneously both productive and uneasy, as questions of institutional legitimacy and citizen empowerment co-exist within the broader social context of the self-speaking or auto/biographical society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roman Catholic Irish nuns formed a large part of the American Civil War nursing experience in both the North and the South. In fact, when Confederate President Robert E. Lee beseeched the assistance of Irish-born Patrick Lynch, then Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina, to provide nurses for his hospitals, Roman Catholic sisters from a local convent were pressed into service. Sister M. De Sales (Brennan), born in County Kilkenny, Ireland, became instrumental in establishing two hospitals in the Virginias. During the war years she penned over 1000 pages of letters to him. Initially, the paper provides an overview of the cultural milieu and medical knowledge that existed prior to the onset of the conflict. Attending to soldiers whose wounds changed both the nature of medicine and the approach to it, women willing to move beyond the confines of predominantly private and family-oriented care assisted on battlefields and in field hospitals of various kinds. In these settings, widows, adventure seekers, good-hearted women and Irish Catholic nuns alike offered many kinds of on-the-job training. Their duties ranged from the more traditional tasks of setting up kitchens, organising laundries and writing letters, to the more daunting services of 'cupping', administering anaesthetics such as whiskey and chloroform, and surgically removing limbs. By virtue of the sheer magnitude of the suffering, the experiences endured by these women altered their confidence in their abilities to minister, changed their perspectives on public life, and ultimately redefined their futures in organisation and administration. De Sales' letters serve as a case study by which to examine how, as a result of the American Civil War, the Roman Catholic Church gained ground and its Irish nuns acquired a stronger foothold in American nursing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spoken exchanges between members of Cosa nostra are governed by the twofold restriction of the law of silence toward the world outside and the obligation of speaking the truth inside. To this purpose, Mafia's language obeys a semantic obliqueness which provides speakers with a margin of freedom by preserving the unpredictability of their intentions, which led Tommaso Buscetta to qualify Cosa nostra as «the realm of incomplete speech». Mafia order is based on the practise of malentendu doublement bien entendu, in the meaning of Jankélévitch, which includes not only a fake relationship but also a fake situation, maintaining mutual knowledge of deception thereby permitting an infinite, dialectic game. This game, and its unspoken side (involving political affairs and crimes), are here explored during a judicial confrontation between Gaspare Spatuzza, a former man of honour who became a state witness and Filippo Graviano, who was, with his brother, the capomandamento of Spatuzza's same «family». [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]