Search Results (21)

This article offers a unique interdisciplinary theoretical examination of the stigmatisation of ‘drug addicts’ and its impacts on health and wellbeing. In the present conjuncture, drug addiction has become a metaphor for a ‘wasted’ life. The stigmatisation of addicts creates artificial monsters. They constitute matter out of place—addiction is dirt and the addict a form of symbolic pollution—as their excessive consumption means they are ostracised and branded as failures. Providing a tripartite framework—of failure, feast, and phoenix—this article will suggest that addiction occupies a contradictory social and conceptual space, at once cause, effect, and solution. It is in this context that the stigmatisation of addiction operates, despite the fact addicts constitute a consumer par excellence, solicited by the very system that seeks to punish, control, and cure them. Drawing on Girard’s generative scapegoat alongside the philosophical concept of the Muselmann, which parallels it, this paper will examine the hypocritical and contradictory portrayal, consumption and treatment of addiction; the social harm and stigmatisation arising from this portrayal; the systems of power and privilege that reproduce this; and how these systematically affect not only the health and wellbeing of addicts, but also their medical care and treatment. The health impacts arising from this framework will illustrate how scapegoating can lead to worsening mental and physical health, social isolation, and create barriers to treatment, which ultimately perpetuate the cycle of addiction that create public health challenges (e.g., drug-related deaths). The ensuing discussion will show how the addict is a symptom of capitalism and colonialism before it, sustaining it as well as serving as a convenient distraction from the systematic problems and illustrating the brutal realities of biopolitical power and its inherent contradictions. Only by understanding the broader socio-cultural and political implications of addiction within the context of late capitalism can we start to reduce stigma and scapegoating and focus on addiction as a medical issue rather than a moral and/or criminal one; a key to improving health outcomes. Full article

Mitigating human–wolf conflict is crucial, yet conventional approaches often overlook the broader socioeconomic challenges faced by farming communities. Wolves frequently become scapegoats for deeper rooted issues such as economic disadvantages, policy deficiencies, and rural depopulation. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 118 livestock farmers to examine (a) farmer profiles and wolf-related interactions, (b) professional challenges and proposed solutions, (c) reasons for perceiving wolves as a major problem, and (d) the impact of wolf presence on job dissatisfaction. Farmers reported low specialized education and job satisfaction, particularly regarding income. Many struggled to afford or find shepherds, especially sheep/goat farmers. Guardian dog poisoning incidents and dissatisfaction with the damage compensation system were prevalent. Key challenges included economic marginalization, wolf presence, climatic factors, inadequate grazing policies, infrastructure deficits, distrust in policy, rural depopulation, and a lack of services. Farmers who perceived wolves as a major problem implemented weaker preventive measures and moved herds seasonally over longer distances. Job dissatisfaction was linked to wolf presence, livestock type, and economic marginalization. Our findings emphasize that while wolves impact farmers, economic and policy-related factors play a greater role. Educational initiatives, supportive policies, effective depredation mitigation, and fair compensation systems are essential for sustainable livestock farming and coexistence with wolves. By tackling socioeconomic challenges, enhancing policies, and supporting farmers to adapt to evolving circumstances, the livestock farming sector can thrive while minimizing conflicts associated with wolves. Full article

Human beings are prone to violence of all kinds, and they are generally religious. Violence and religion are also thick, difficult-to-define concepts. Are they related? Two seminal thinkers stand as cornerstones in this modern debate. For Emile Durkheim, religion is both a cohesive social force and potential antagonist, uniting the community around ritual norms at odds with outsiders, against whom violence is routinely justified. For Rene Girard, internal mediation of mimetic desire generates rivalries that are assuaged through the ritual sacrifice of scapegoats to hold off social chaos and anomie. Girard writes from within a Christian tradition he argues overcomes this scapegoat doom loop. While Durkheim is a skeptical empiricist about religion, and Girard is a literary man writing from within the Christian tradition, both conclude that religion reduces violence and does not increase it. Full article

“Mystery” is a term with divergent meanings in the religious and secular worlds. This term bears history in the philosophical and theological worlds. The meaning of the term includes concepts of secrecy, mysteriousness, incomprehensibility, and transcendence on the one hand and its connection with religious rituals on the other hand. This nature of the term recommends that we re-read its original meaning. This article tries to understand the connection of this term with archaic religious rituals based on mimetic theory. This article finds that the mysteriousness behind the archaic religious rituals is related to the scapegoat mechanism. The hidden process of deification in primitive religions and cultures is the reason behind the meaning of the term mystery. Using mimetic theory as a tool, this article asserts that only "revealed mysteries" remain in human history following the Christ-event and defines mystery as a process of deification. Full article

In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the postsecular emerges as a critical framework to understand the characters’ search for home amidst the remnants of South Africa’s colonial legacy. This essay proposes an exploration of how the novel’s engagement with the postsecular scriptures and moments offers a nuanced perspective on the religious impulse within the literary form. I focus on the protagonist, Lurie, whose journey from a sexual scandal to a commitment to animal welfare symbolizes a broader quest for redemption and atonement. Contrasting Lurie’s postsecular odyssey is his daughter Lucy’s steadfast attachment to her farm, which becomes a battleground for historical racial tensions. Through a mythological critical approach, I interpret Lucy’s experience as a contemporary iteration of the scapegoat, embodying the sacrificial role in a society seeking reconciliation and healing. My analysis extends to the novel’s esthetic and ethical dimensions, examining how Coetzee’s narrative challenges and reframes traditional religious narratives. By situating my discussion within the fields of the sciences of religions, theology, and mythology, I contribute to the understanding of literature as a vital medium for engaging with religious and theological themes. The essay concludes with a reflection on the implications of Coetzee’s postsecular discourse for the individual’s search for home and belonging in a post-apartheid context. Full article

This paper examines the writings of European travelers, chaplains, and resident doctors on pandemics in the Mediterranean regions from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Using French comparative literary theory, the article highlights how Muslim communities in Egypt, Turkey, Aleppo, and Mecca were stereotyped based on their belief in predestination, their failure to avoid contamination, and their lack of social distancing during plague outbreaks. This paper argues that travelers were influenced by Renaissance humanism, Ars Apodemia, religious discourses, and texts, such as plague tracts, model town concepts, the book of orders, and tales, and that they essentialized Mediterranean Islamicate societies by depicting contamination motifs supposedly shaped by the absence of contagion theory in prophetic medicines. Regarding plague science, this paper concludes that Christian and Muslim intellectuals had similar approaches until the Black Death and that Arabs were eclectic since the Abbasid period. This paper further maintains that the travelers’ approaches fostered chauvinism and the cultural hegemony of the West over the Orient since the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, driven by eschatology, conversion, and power structure narratives. Full article

Structural racism is increasingly recognized as a key driver of health inequities and other adverse outcomes. This paper focuses on structural racism as an “upstream” institutionalized process, how it creates health inequities and how structural racism persists in spite of generations of efforts to end it. So far, “downstream” efforts to reduce these health inequities have had little success in eliminating them. Here, we attempt to increase public health awareness of structural racism and its institutionalization and sociopolitical supports so that research and action can address them. This paper presents both a theoretic and an analytic approach to how structural racism contributes to disproportionate rates of HIV/AIDS and related diseases among oppressed populations. We first discuss differences in disease and health outcomes among people who use drugs (PWUD) and other groups at risk for HIV from different racial and ethnic populations. The paper then briefly analyzes the history of racism; how racial oppression, class, gender and other intersectional divisions interact to create health inequities; and how structural racism is institutionalized in ways that contribute to disease disparities among people who use drugs and other people. It examines the processes, institutions and other structures that reinforce structural racism, and how these, combined with processes that normalize racism, serve as barriers to efforts to counter and dismantle the structural racism that Black, indigenous and Latinx people have confronted for centuries. Finally, we discuss the implications of this analysis for public health research and action to undo racism and to enhance the health of populations who have suffered lifetimes of racial/ethnic oppression, with a focus on HIV/AIDS outcomes. Full article

The influence of the 1918 pandemic was overshadowed by the catastrophe of the First World War. The current COVID-19 pandemic leads the academic attention to how the 1918 pandemic shaped literature of that period. Elizabeth Outka’s book brings the history of the pandemic into the study of modernism. The vast scale of a sudden outbreak of pandemic disease had made decent burials and mourning very difficult. Outka argues that The Waste Land mourns the deaths during the pandemic. The traumatic experience of the pandemic can also be found in the difficulty of speech and the fragmentation of ghostly existence in The Waste Land. Building upon Outka’s work, this essay will engage with the cultural influences of the pandemic in Eliot’s other works and reveal how the famous touchstones of modernisms are shaped by such an event. I will specify how the war and the pandemic were connected in the following section on historical backgrounds. Immunity aims to fight against foreign invaders such as viruses on a micro-level. However, on a macro-level of politics, the logic of the immune system often wrongly identifies certain groups as the scapegoats for contagious diseases. My article aims to reveal the underlying metaphor of immunity in Eliot’s writing of the abject in the late 1910s. By doing so, I hope to contribute to current academic discussions of Eliot and the writing of the pandemic, anti-Semitism and post-colonialism. Full article

Many countries adopted lockdown measures to curb the spread of the outbreak in 2020, while information about COVID-19 has dominated various media outlets, which has led to information overload for people. However, previous research has mainly focused on cancer information overload and the corresponding consequence, and failed to examine its adverse effects in the context of major public health events. Based on the Frustrate Aggression Theory and the Scapegoat Theory, the present study established a moderated mediation model to investigate the emotional and behavioral outcomes of COVID-19 information overload. The mediating role of depression/anxiety in the association between COVID-19 information overload and cyber aggression, as well as the moderating role of Confucian responsibility thinking, were tested. This model was examined with 1005 Chinese people (mean age = 26.91 years, SD = 9.94) during the COVID-19 outbreak. Mediation analyses revealed that COVID-19 information overload was positively related to cyber aggression, depression, and anxiety, parallelly and partially mediated this relationship. Moderated mediation analyses further indicated that Confucian responsibility thinking not only moderated the direct link between COVID-19 information overload and cyber aggression, with the effect being significant only for people with a low level of Confucian responsibility thinking, but also moderated the relationship between COVID-19 information overload and depression/anxiety respectively, with the associations being much more potent for individuals with low levels of Confucian responsibility thinking. These findings have the potential to inform the development of prevention and intervention programs designed to reduce the negative emotions and cyber aggression associated with information overload in public health events. Full article

Hybrid aerial underwater vehicles (HAUV) are a new frontier for vehicles. They can operate both underwater and aerially, providing enormous potential for a wide range of scientific explorations. Informative path planning is essential to vehicle autonomy. However, covering an entire mission region is a challenge to HAUVs because of the possibility of a multidomain environment. This paper presents an informative trajectory planning framework for planning paths and generating trajectories for HAUVs performing multidomain missions in dynamic environments. We introduce the novel heuristic generalized extensive neighborhood search GLNS–k-means algorithm that uses k-means to cluster information into several sets; then through the heuristic GLNS algorithm, it searches the best path for visiting these points, subject to various constraints regarding path budgets and the motion capabilities of the HAUV. With this approach, the HAUV is capable of sampling and focusing on regions of interest. Our method provides a significantly more optimal trajectory (enabling collection of more information) than ant colony optimization (ACO) solutions. Moreover, we introduce an efficient online replanning scheme to adapt the trajectory according to the dynamic obstacles during the mission. The proposed replanning scheme based on KD tree enables significantly shorter computational times than the scapegoat tree methods. Full article

This paper analyses the myriad perceptions about coastal fisheries in Sierra Leone expressed by respondents in 66 interviews conducted in 2017 and 2020 during two periods of fieldwork in two coastal communities (Tombo and Goderich). Most of these perceptions focused on the respondents’ explanations for the dire state of the coastal fisheries, and often these explanations sought ‘scapegoats’ to blame. Our findings are that the main ‘scapegoats’ were foreigners, industrial trawlers, artisanal fishers, fishers’ unions and the government. Other interpretations focused on the respondents’ recommendations for restoring the health of the coastal fisheries, and our findings here are that the main ‘panaceas’ were coercion, sensitisation, and co-management. In discussing these findings, we came to the conclusion that both the identification of scapegoats and the search for panaceas were unhelpful ways of understanding and alleviating the problems facing Sierra Leone’s coastal fisheries because they polarised and over-simplified the issues, sowing divisions between the stakeholders, thereby reinforcing and prolonging the crisis. A more fruitful approach is to look for ways of forging links and establishing partnerships between the disparate players, especially between the government and community organisations. Full article

Towards the end of the twentieth century, religion re-emerged as a topic of pressing concern in a number of the most self-consciously secularized states of the global north. From disputes over the wearing of headscarves in schools to debates over accommodations for religious practices in the public sphere, religion, particularly the ‘foreign’ religiosity of migrants and other minority religious subjects, appeared on the scene as a phenomenon whose proper place and role in society required both urgent and careful deliberation. This article argues that in order to account for the affective potency produced by the immanence of the figure of the ‘foreign’ religious subject, it is necessary to understand secularization as fantasy. It is within the fantasy of secularization that the secular emerges as an object of desire—as something that, if attained, appears as a solution to the problem of ‘foreign’ religiosity—and figures of inassimilable religiosity assume the role of scapegoats for the failure to resolve these concerns. In this sense, within this fantasy scene, the secular promises to provide ‘us’ with something that we are lacking. However, this promise has been undermined by the apparent persistence of religious difference. As such, as a result of their continued religiosity, ‘they’ appear to be taking something from ‘us’. Full article

This article is a comparison of two works of fiction, a film and a novel, that both address the question of how people deal with intense memories of tragic events from their past. Both works are characterized by crucial references to religious phenomena. In the Belgian cult horror film Calvaire and the bestselling Dutch novel These Are The Names, stories are told about the desire to restore what was lost. In order to deal with past realities, the characters in these works of fiction impose the past, in an imaginative form, upon the present, which inevitably seems to create violence and conflict. The introduction of violence, and the way this violence destroys identities as a means to restore a lost world, calls the possibility and credibility of restoration into question. In order to explore the phenomenon of restoration, we introduce a concept of substitution (inspired by René Girard) to investigate the power of violence in these two narratives. In Calvaire, violence leads to the perversion of identity, ultimately leading to the latter’s destruction, yet at the same time it can be understood to result in love and absolution. In These Are The Names, sacrificing acts first seem to bring a new beginning but in the end redemption is substituted by accusations of severe crimes. However, in this novel the past is also present in such a way that lost identities could be restored. How both stories look at the relation between past and present and in which way they present the possibility of restoring painful events, will be our main questions. Full article

Given the centrality of Shakespeare to the Western canon and, more specifically, to the idea of a national English literary tradition, and given that Shylock is one of his most (in)famous creations, it is hardly surprising that he has proved irresistible to a number of Anglo-Jewish authors. Attempts to rehabilitate Shylock and/or to reimagine his fate are not a recent phenomenon. In the post-war era, however, the task of revisiting Shakespeare’s play took on a new urgency, particularly for Jewish writers. In this essay I look at the ways in which three contemporary British Jewish authors—Arnold Wesker, Howard Jacobson and Clive Sinclair—have revisited The Merchant of Venice, focusing on the figure of Shylock as an exemplar of what Bryan Cheyette has described as “the protean instability of ‘the Jew’ as a signifier”. Wesker, Jacobson and Sinclair approach Shakespeare’s play and its most memorable character in very different ways but they share a sense that Shylock symbolically transgresses boundaries of time and space—history and geography—and is a mercurial, paradoxical figure: villain and (anti-)hero; victim and perpetrator; scapegoat and scourge. Wesker’s play is more didactic than the fiction of Jacobson and Sinclair but ultimately his Shylock eludes the historicist parameters that he attempts to impose on him, while the Shylocks of Shylock is My Name and Shylock Must Die transcend their literary-historical origins, becoming slippery, self-reflexive, protean figures who talk back to Shakespeare, while at the same time speaking to the concerns of contemporary culture. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic is not a “great equaliser” as some have claimed, but rather an amplifier of existing inequalities, including those associated with migration. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is refugees, often the most marginalised of all migrants, who have had the most to lose. Refugees and displaced populations living in crowded and unhygienic conditions have often been unable to protect themselves from the virus, face increasing economic precarity and often find themselves excluded from measures to alleviate poverty and hunger. The threat to refugees comes not only from material (in)security, but from increasing exclusion and exceptionalism associated with the politics of protection. Evidence from the first nine months of the pandemic suggests that some governments, in Europe and US but also the Global South, are using COVID-19 as an excuse to double-down on border closures and/or dip into their migration policy toolboxes to demonstrate the robustness of their response to it. Refugees are increasingly prevented from accessing the international protection to which they are potentially entitled or used (alongside migrants more generally) as scapegoats by populist leaders exploiting the pandemic for political mileage. Some states have used the pandemic to push through controversial policies that further limit access to protection and/or institutionalize the marginalization of refugees. In this context, it seems likely that COVID-19 will accelerate the course of history in relation to refugee protection, rather than changing its direction. Full article