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Organized Muslim Women in Turkey, authored by AySe Dursun, provides a comprehensive overview of the socio-political landscape in Turkey, particularly focusing on the role of organized Muslim women. The organized [...]

Background: This scoping review aimed to overview studies that used administrative data linkage in the context of child maltreatment to improve our understanding of the value that data linkage may confer for policy, practice, and research. Methods: We searched MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and ERIC electronic databases in June 2019 and May 2020 for studies that linked two or more datasets (at least one of which was administrative in nature) to study child maltreatment. We report findings with numerical and narrative summary. Results: We included 121 studies, mainly from the United States or Australia and published in the past decade. Data came primarily from social services and health sectors, and linkage processes and data quality were often not described in sufficient detail to align with current reporting guidelines. Most studies were descriptive in nature and research questions addressed fell under eight themes: descriptive epidemiology, risk factors, outcomes, intergenerational transmission, predictive modelling, intervention/service evaluation, multi-sector involvement, and methodological considerations/advancements. Conclusions: Included studies demonstrated the wide variety of ways in which data linkage can contribute to the public health response to child maltreatment. However, how research using linked data can be translated into effective service development and monitoring, or targeting of interventions, is underexplored in terms of privacy protection, ethics and governance, data quality, and evidence of effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indian fiction in English has generally evaded the ecological question. Most of Indian English literatures have focused on such aspects as gender, colonialism, post-coloniality and the subaltern. In this paper I intend to discuss the space accorded to Nature in postcolonial discourse and to focus on the subaltern status of Nature due to its lack of agency in the human dominated world, especially, the Andaman Rainforest. This paper will analyse Pankaj Sekhsaria's The Last Wave: An Island novel (2014) to posit the ecological crisis in the Andaman Islands due to anthropogenic interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social space largely decides the role of the human and the extent to which she controls or affects the physical environment. Any form of justice advocates and contends that instances of injustice are not simply arbitrary realities which occur in varying contexts. Rather, instances of injustice are the outcome of an institutional oppression and isolation which have set up an inevitable and sometimes invisible framework of colonization and the resultant anxiety and trauma by creating heterogenous spaces outside the accepted social space. More often than not, it is the effect of the gaze on the subject. In her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) Arundhati Roy, along with other stories, narrates the trauma of Anjum, a transgender, who was born a male, which forms one of the central threads of the narrative. Anjum, born Aftab, subsequently leaves her home to live with nine other transgenders who are 'othered' by the gaze and form a world of their own in a secluded, closely guarded and dilapidated home, the "Khwabgah" or "Palace of Dreams," in the lap of sophisticated New Delhi. Roy raises certain critical questions in this novel. One of them hitherto unexplored is the cultural trauma experienced by the transgender individual and the people associated with them. This paper attempts to bring to focus and analyse, with the tools of psychoanalysis, the effects of trauma in the construction of identity, specifically, with regard to the violated transgender psyche and their isolation in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, with special focus on Anjum as a case in point, so that the readers can connect, understand and sympathize the homonormative individuals. This study draws on various theories of trauma like Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection and Lacan's theory of gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writers are committed to the power of proof, reasoning and technical solutions to every possible problem faced by humanity. Convincing through proof and argument is construed to be the presentation of reality. Sometimes reality is so complex that it is not possible for the narrative to be rational and logical. Climate change induced disasters and famines are a reality today. Easterine Kire, a writer from Nagaland in the North East of India, expresses the pressing concern of climate change and the role of narrative retelling of a Naga creation myth in her novel Son of the Thundercloud (2016). The plot of the novel is the journey of Pele, a man who lost his family and happiness due to a devastating famine. His journey leads him to a drought affected "abandoned village", Noune, where he meets two sisters who were four hundred years old and had been living on "hope". They tell him of their wait for a prophesy, the birth of the Son of the Thundercloud, which would regenerate the land to its vegetative resplendence once again. Pele becomes a witness to extraordinary events of climate change and participates in the process of protecting the agents of the new environmental condition. The mythical narrative offers an alternative truth and points out that it is through language that the natural world is reduced to objects or resources to be subjectivized. Mythical discourse is beyond the rational and beyond the language dictated by culture that people respect and thus, care for the systems that support life. In this paper I propose to study Son of the Thundercloud in order to discover the mythical discourse that helps us to create a new human condition and offers a truth that allows us to rethink our responsibility to the environment we live in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In postcolonial times, language has become synonymous with nationality. This notion existed even in pre-historic times. Each nation aspires to be a linguistic entity. This presumption is drawn from evidence in Europe, as native speakers are identified by their language, such as native speakers of French, German, and Italian are Frenchmen, Germans and Italians, respectively. The single national language theory which is a product of European historical experience is problematic in South Asia, which has shown that linguistic identity and national consciousness are synonymous. Mother tongue is sacred and is a vehicle for all national endeavors. In an expanding global scenario, the survival of economy and borders depend upon communication and comprehension, English becomes the most unavoidable vehicle. While critics most often focus on religion, region and nationality within South Asia, they rarely focus on the linguistic regionalism inherent in this region and the position of English language therein. In this paper, I have concerned myself with the problems of identity and survival of English as a language of literature inside an important South Asian country, namely, Sri Lanka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A culture is perceived and experienced through certain perceivable entities that can be seen and embody essence of that particular culture. It is known as cultural myth that is created by the culture's value system and operates as a major influence on that society. C. Larson (Web) holds that, cultural myths are always carried through cultural images and are instrumental in influencing and persuading the public. In fact, these myths propagate that wisdom that is essential for good living comes through 'challenge and suffering.' Women in Indian myths have been constructs of culture oscillating between challenges of identity and suffering for family and state. Cultural myths therefore become fundamental aspects of a society and are intertwined into its fabric. They give one a sense of identity and space. This space has been usurped by patriarchy, which has marginalized the position of woman to that of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative of Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things, subtly allegorizes a Europe which is present as a subtext in this novel. Imperialism, communism, Cold War and Germany prevail as a leitmotif, especially, through multiple references to the American musical, The Sound of Music. Roy conveys the human experience communicated to her and incorporates it into the body of her narrative. This paper posits that the politics of the novel is encoded in the subtext of the narrative, where Roy uses her imagination of Europe, in and after the Cold War, as a vehicle of postcolonial resistance. This paper attempts to unravel the dialectics of Roy's perception in imagining a Europe in the postcolonial Indian scenario, exposing the mockery of social systems and human values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toni Morrison concerns herself with unheard voices of pain, suffering and betrayal that have always clamored to be heard but have been acknowledged and passed on as if it were an everyday normality. These broken, oppressed and untouchable children of God are a people who have held a central place in the imaginations of power and have been the 'other' in the binaries of civilizations. In this paper my focus is on the manner in which Toni Morrison negotiates the margins, deconstructing the sense of political utopia of the privileged classes and bringing to the forefront the tales of universal woe through myth and memory. I shall be discussing her novels to this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]