Journal articles on the topic 'Oral history – congresses'

SUMMARYSome of the main activities of the Balkan Stomatological Society (BaSS) over a rich 19-year history are presented. These activities have been aimed at improving oral health care provided by the dentists throughout the Balkans, and to establish ties of friendship and collaboration between researchers and clinicians in this region, creating a foundation for mutual understanding and peace. To accomplish these goals, the BaSS annually organizes congresses and publishes a scientific journal, beside many other activities, such as public oral health promotion, bringing into accordance study programmes and curricula, supporting student exchange programmes, etc.

Family history has become a matter of concern for both academics and policy makers in recent years. During the same period oral history has emerged as a method used in many scholarly studies. For some it is a discipline in its own right, for some it is a technique to be used field by field, while for others it is viewed as a part of the popular culture. After the television adaptation of Alex Haley's somewhat controversial but highly influential book, Roots, use of genealogical materials at the Library of Congress increased markedly, giving a real boost to the popular pursuit of the past. This article will discuss the role of oral history in the documentation and interpretation of family history.

Abstract Background Acromegaly is a rare, lifelong disorder characterized by excess growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). Extended dosing intervals (EDIs) of pharmacological treatments may reduce patient burden and costs compared with standard dosing. This systematic literature review (SLR) investigated outcomes in patients with acromegaly receiving treatment at EDIs. Methods MEDLINE/Embase/the Cochrane Library (2001–June 2021) and key congresses (2018–2021) were searched for relevant literature; identified SLR bibliographies were also reviewed. A dual reviewer process was utilized. Included publications reported clinical effectiveness, safety, humanistic, and economic outcomes in longitudinal/cross-sectional studies in adult patients with acromegaly. Interventions included EDIs of lanreotide autogel (LAN), octreotide long-acting release (OCT), and pasireotide (all administered less often than every four weeks), oral octreotide (less than twice daily), pegvisomant (PEG; less than once daily), and cabergoline (less than twice weekly), with no comparator required. PROSPERO 2021: CRD42021278922. Results In total, 35 publications reported on 27 studies: 14 on PEG, 9 on LAN, and 4 on OCT as monotherapies or combination therapies at EDIs. No identified studies assessed EDIs of oral octreotide, pasireotide, or cabergoline. At Baseline, disease control and treatment history differed across studies. As compared with Baseline, treatment at EDIs resulted in reduced IGF-1 levels in 12/16 studies assessing LAN, OCT, or PEG (7–104 patients treated at EDIs) and GH levels in 5/6 studies (LAN/OCT; 15–32 patients). Normalized IGF-1 and/or GH, using study definitions, was achieved/maintained in 70%–100% of patients in 12/13 studies (LAN/OCT/PEG; 15–124 patients). Proportions of patients experiencing adverse events (n=4 studies reporting overall events; LAN/OCT/PEG; 8–96 patients) or discontinuing treatment (n=9; LAN/OCT/PEG; 7–124 patients) were similar across EDI and standard regimens. Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) improvement from Baseline was reported in 9/10 studies after treatment at EDIs (LAN/OCT/PEG; 7–109 patients); HRQoL did not deteriorate versus standard regimens. Patients preferred EDIs (2/2 studies; LAN/OCT; 8–112 patients), and satisfaction with EDIs was high (2/2 studies; LAN/OCT; 13–109 patients). Substantially reduced costs were observed with EDIs versus standard regimens in 3/3 studies (9–23 patients) with LAN (120 mg every 6 versus 4 weeks), OCT (20–30 mg every 6–12 versus 4 weeks), and PEG (40–160 mg weekly versus 15–60 mg daily, both with LAN/OCT). Conclusion Clinical, safety, and HRQoL outcomes in patients with acromegaly were similar and costs lower with EDIs versus standard regimens. Satisfaction was high with EDIs. Limitations, including variation in study design and endpoints, and small, heterogenous patient populations, precluded conducting meta-analyses. Physicians should consider EDIs where appropriate. Further clinical research may substantiate reduced patient and healthcare system burden with EDIs versus standard regimens. Study funded by Ipsen. Medical writing support provided by Costello Medical. Presentation: Monday, June 13, 2022 12:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Public libraries can use digital oral history projects (1) to teach digital literacy skills to teens in accordance with national and state information literacy standards and (2) to develop local digital collections. The technical standards for such projects are modest, and the Library of Congress Veterans History Project provides an ideal template with which to begin. This article highlights the benefits of using the Veterans History Project for library programs and events and summarizes how the Veterans History Project can be collaboratively implemented across libraries. Suggestions for curriculum-based program development for young adult users of public libraries are also outlined.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine how the University of Wisconsin Law School Library sought to create easily searchable oral histories by partnering with the University of Kentucky and the University of Wisconsin Oral History Program. Through this partnership, a digital archive of fully searchable and indexed oral histories with links to relevant articles, Library of Congress keywords, summaries and maps is being created, giving users the ability to delve into the Law School’s history more deeply and with more historical perspective than ever before. Design/methodology/approach The implementation of the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) and the development of a daily workflow for adding University of Wisconsin Law School oral histories to the program is closely examined. The pros and cons of the program are discussed as well as the future of the Law School oral histories. Findings The OHMS program is a powerful tool that allows researchers to quickly and easily locate relevant portions of an oral history, saving the time required to review hours of an interview. OHMS also allows archivists and librarians to better organize and catalog each oral history by providing important metadata tools that provide context and background on each unique oral history. Originality/value The University of Wisconsin Law School is the first law school to implement the OHMS program in concert with an institutional repository. The program, which is free and open source, may be of great value to historians, archivists and non-profits who wish to make their content more visible and more searchable.

The article presents the monograph by Piotr Sitarski, Maria B. Garda, and Krzysztof Jajko Nowe media w PRL [New Media in the Polish People’s Republic]. The authors of the book presented how technological development was assimilated by society in the final stage of the existence of the Polish People’s Republic. Individual chapters describe the process of social assimilation of video, microcomputers, and satellite television in Poland. Referring to social history, the authors show the beginnings of the Polish digital society in the 1980s. They do this using modern methodologies from history of technology, social history, and oral history. The aim of the article is to show the processes discussed in the book against the background of social and political changes of the epoch. The documents cited (Uchwała generalna VI Kongresu Techników Polskich [Resolution of the VI Congress of Polish Technicians]) and events (Rok Nauki Polskiej [Year of Polish Science], II Kongres Nauki [II Congress of Science]) allow us to see the links between the modernization of the Polish and communist propaganda. The technology was aimed to certify the strength of the socialist system.

Este artigo analisa um conjunto de teses apresentadas por cirurgiões dentistas durante o III Congresso Odontológico Latino-americano realizado no Rio de Janeiro, em 1929, que discutiam as precárias condições de saúde oral das Forças Armadas brasileiras, particularmente o Exército e a Marinha, e as tentativas de implantação do serviço de saúde bucal. No artigo, analisamos a regulamentação do serviço odontológico nas Forças Armadas, no início do século XX e as reivindicações feitas por essas corporações ao governo brasileiro para que o serviço médico-odontológico fosse implantado em todo o território nacional. Como fontes de pesquisa, além dos Anais do III Congresso Odontológico Latino-americano, pesquisamos nos relatórios do Ministério da Marinha (1903-1922), na Revista Médica Militar (1913) e no jornal carioca O Paiz (1907-1910).

ABSTRACTIn 1952, the African National Congress (ANC) initiated its Defiance Campaign, opposing apartheid laws through organized civil disobedience and African nationalism. On Sunday 9 November, the city of East London became a site of political mobilization when 1,500 Xhosa-speaking ANC sympathizers peacefully protested in Bantu Square, the hub of a township named Duncan Village. Police arrived and fired on the crowd, igniting ‘spontaneous riots’. An Afrikaner salesman and an Irish nun were killed in the ensuing unrest. Rumours circulated that a mob ate the white woman; troop reinforcements then fanned into the township to wage a retaliatory war, shooting and bayoneting their victims. Upwards of 200 Africans may have died but only nine fatalities were recorded. If the revised toll is credible, the bloodshed exceeds that of Sharpeville, the worst one-day massacre in apartheid South Africa. Oral sources explain why the slaughter in Duncan Village is not widely known. Township residents secretly carted the dead to rural graves, fearing to report their losses as people mourned the tragic slaying of the nun named Sister Aidan. Today, ANC rulers of East London seem content to silence the memory of a mass killing reputedly spawned by chaos and cannibalism. At the centre of this incident is Sr Aidan's mutilation for the purpose of makingmuthi, a shocking incident that dominates the story of violence on Black Sunday. Using archival documents and oral histories, and incorporating the methodologies of Jennifer Cole, Donald Donham and Veena Das, this article reconstructs a narrative of ‘critical events’ surrounding the nun'smuthimurder. The scrutinized witness testimonies relay how township residents framed their fierce encounters with a symbolic (white person) and ubiquitous (militarized police) enemy. Oral sources reject the notion that an aimless ‘riot’ occurred on 9 November. Instead, they reflect on cultural enactments of purposeful violence through scripted assaults andmuthiritual. Ultimately, they view the fatal attack on Sr Aidan as an evolving customary act of defensive retribution and symbolic warning, submerging truths in apartheid and hindering reconciliations in democracy.

Purpose Oral histories (OHs), as primary sources of information, are used as evidences of the past and inculcate human memory. It is a real testimony of our history. However, OHs are now neglected and somehow unpopular. Strategies must be done to make sure that OH projects should continue to be used as proofs. The purpose of this paper is to go back in time and review the OH in Asia, in the Philippines, and the collection at De La Salle University. Design/methodology/approach This study explores the OH collection of the DLSU Archives. Data are extracted from the Sierra library system. Extracted subjects are arranged alphabetically. They are presented and summarized below. Historical data coming from the correspondences kept at the archives are also used to understand how the collection accumulated and how they are being organized, classified, and used by the patrons. Literature reviews are also consulted to learn more about the background of OH in the Philippines. Findings A total of 176 subjects are identified. These subjects are selected on the basis of the Library of Congress Classification Scheme which is re-categorized according to the Philippine Standard Industrial Classification to identify which type of industry does each OH belong to. The category on professional, scientific and technical activities had 30 LCC-related subjects or 16.95 percent of the total number of subjects, next is 15.25 percent or 27 LCC-related subjects which comes from the arts, entertainment and recreation, and top three is Public Administration and Defense; Compulsory Security with 10.23 percent. Research limitations/implications This paper shares the challenges and experiences of establishing and maintaining OHs. Practical implications The paper presents new ways or initiatives to capture OH other than the traditional and usual process. Social implications Oral interviews are given proper attention as part of the local history. Originality/value There is a scarcity of OH papers written by librarians; therefore, this paper presents the current status of OH in the country.

Este es un testimonio, o historia oral, basado en algunas de las experiencias vitales de Bert Corona. Destacada figura de la historia chicana debido al papel que ha desempeñado por largo tiempo como activista y organizador tanto en cuestiones laborales como de la comunidad, Corona partició en la campaña inicial sindicalista del CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations, Congreso de Organizaciones Industriales) a finales de la década de los años treinta. Este testimonio se ocupa particularmente de su bautismo en el movimiento sindical y de su rápida maduración como lider obrero. Su compromiso en las luchas para obtener un cambio social en Los Angeles durante la depresión enfatiza la participación y el liderazgo de los mexicanos americanos en el hacer de la historia.

Oral therapies, including levodopa, dopamine agonists and monoamine oxidase type B (MAO-B) inhibitors, form the mainstay of medical treatment for Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, over time, chronic treatment with multiple daily doses of oral agents is often associated with the development of motor fluctuations and dyskinesias. Alternative methods of dopaminergic drug delivery, particularly if they bypass the gastrointestinal system, may be of value for PD patients who have developed motor complications despite optimised oral therapy, in particular those with gastrointestinal absorption issues, including gastroparesis. This satellite symposium, held at the XX World Congress on Parkinson’s Disease and Related Disorders, Geneva, Switzerland, from 8–11 December 2013, was chaired by Professor Werner Poewe (Austria) and Professor Andrew Lees (UK) and discussed recent evidence regarding the benefits of using non-oral drug-delivery strategies with therapies such as subcutaneous apomorphine. Beginning with the history of apomorphine and its well-established use in PD both as an intermittent injection and a continuous infusion, the presenters set out the evidence for its efficacy in managing both motor and non-motor symptoms in PD. The significance of gastrointestinal involvement in PD and how this may influence responses to oral medications was also reviewed. Interim results from the ongoing Apokyn for Motor IMProvement of Morning AKinesia Trial (AM IMPAKT) study of the use of subcutaneous apomorphine in PD patients with morning akinesia were also presented and the continuing main role of apomorphine in the treatment of PD was discussed, including the selection of the most appropriate patients for this effective yet underused therapy.

<p>"Mothers of the Nation" or <em>ibuism</em> is a term that is often considered negative in the study of women's history. This is related to the nation's political journey, during which the New Order regime took power, the terminology was used to control and dominate women in Indonesia. Further explored, in the 1920s, the spirit of nationalism are grew, including among the (<em>priayi</em>) noble women. They formed an association and held the Indonesian Women's Congress I in 1928. According to Susan Blackburn, what women did at the time was their nationalistic form, becoming "Mothers of the Nation." Using a historical approach, this paper seeks to retrace how early noble women came into existence and formulated their ideas of nationalism. The sources used are the result of literature studies, whether magazines, books, scientific papers, memoirs or biographies of women movement. This paper also use oral and photo sources to complete the experiences of women who involved in this topic.</p><p> </p>

Abstract This article examines the case of Karla Galarza v. Washington, DC Board of Education. On April 3, 1947, Karla Galarza refused to accept the board's directive to withdraw from the Black segregated Margaret Murray Washington Vocational School. Her father, Dr. Ernesto Galarza, supported her decision and worked to challenge the expulsion, and the system of segregation, as unconstitutional. The authors analyze materials from regional and national archives, oral accounts, legal documents, and personal collections, focusing on Dr. Galarza's voice in over one hundred pages of correspondence. Dr. Galarza brought together an interracial legal team, including Charles Hamilton Houston, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Jewish Congress, and the National Lawyers Guild. Dr. Galarza lauded the pedagogy of a Black teacher and the pluralism cultivated in a Black school community as evidence of democracy in action. The legal team proposed that Karla's expulsion constituted a violation of the Fifth Amendment, naming education as a property right. However, after extensive research and discussion across ten months, the organizations determined they should not pursue the case in court. The authors assert that this attempted legal intervention is an unnamed forerunner in the attack on Plessy v. Ferguson and complicates previous narratives of the long struggle to end school segregation.

Introduction. Oirat old-script texts tell us about the prominent historical figure of Noyon Galdma (Kalm., Oir. Һалдма, Һалдмба; Mong. Галдамаа, Галдамбаа), son of Khan Ochirtu-Tsetsen, grandson of Khan Baibagas of the Khoshuts and Khong Tayiji Erdeni-Baatar of Dzungaria. The image and memory of Galdama has been preserved in oral folklore of Mongols. Goals. The article attempts a review of studies to have dealt with Galdama, seeks to analyze the reasons underlying his popularity in Mongolic folklore traditions, and reveal peculiarities of the image characteristic of different genres. Results. The historical figure — the son of Khan Ochirtu-Tsetsen — is widely known in written and oral traditions of Mongolic peoples, e.g., Galdama is mentioned in Ratnabhadra’s Biography of Zaya Pandita and other narratives. Mongolists have been dealing with epic songs of Galdama for over a century already, a total of circa twenty legends about this hero have been recorded. The seventeenth-century Oirat nobleman’s name is nowadays integral to diverse Mongolic cultures, such as Kalmyks and Buryats of Russia, Oirats of Western Mongolia and China’s Xinjiang (Torghuts, Upper Mongols, Olots), as well as Alasha Khoshuts and Ejine Torghuts inhabiting Inner Mongolia (PRC). So, versions of Galdma-related songs number over thirty. Conclusions. The dissemination of folklore texts centered around the renown protector of native territories believed to have been a skilful warrior and chieftain of border detachments is associated with the theme of homeland defense that was most urgent during the lifetime of Noyon Galdama (1635–1667) — when all Mongols faced an increasing threat of Manchu invasion, and the Congress of 1640 developed The Great Code of Laws that proclaimed defense of Mongol-inhabited domains a supreme goal and virtue. Mythologization of Galdama’s image also attests to the significance of his personality in Oirat history, which can be traced in Oirat folklore heritage.

Mammographic screening for breast cancer is a widely used public health approach, but is constantly a subject of controversy. Medical and historical research on this topic has been mainly conducted in Western Europe and North America. In Brazil, screening mammography has been an open topic of discussion and a challenge for health care and public health since the 1970s. Effectively, Brazilian public health agencies never implemented a nationwide population-based screening programme for breast cancer, despite the pressures of many specific groups such as advocacy associations and the implementation of local programmes. This article examines the complex process of incorporating mammography as a diagnostic tool and the debates towards implementing screening programmes in Brazil. We argue that debates about screening for breast malignancies, especially those conducted in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, took place in a context of change and uncertainty in the Brazilian health field. These discussions were strongly affected both by tensions between the public and the private health care sectors during the formative period of a new Brazilian health system, and by the growing role of civil society actors. Our study investigates these tensions and their consequences. We use several medical sources that discussed the topic in Brazil, mainly specialised leading oncology journals published between 1950 and 2017, medical congress reports for the same period, books and theses, institutional documents and oral testimonies of health professionals, patients and associations collected in the framework of the ‘The History of Cancer’ project from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and Brazilian National Cancer Institute.

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) will be studied by law students for generations, in much the same way that Bakke and Grutter were studied before. But there is much more to SFFA than the final decisions about Harvard University and the University of North Carolina will reveal. This Article, published for a symposium by the SMU Law Review, focuses on three stages of the litigation: the petitions, the oral arguments, and the decision. Part I recounts the complex procedural history, which began in federal courts in Massachusetts and North Carolina. The Harvard case reached the Supreme Court first, while the UNC case lingered in district court. The Supreme Court called for the views of the Solicitor General. By doing so, the Court could punt the case to the following term, which allowed the UNC case to catch up, and Justice Breyer’s replacement to be confirmed. Both cases would be argued on October 31, 2022. Part II parses the questions asked by all nine Justices during oral argument. Chief Justice Roberts signaled up front that he would rule against the universities. Justice Thomas repeated his charge that arguments in favor of racial preferences mirror the arguments made by segregationists. Justice Alito worried about discrimination against Asian-American applicants. Justice Sotomayor focused on the detailed findings of the trial courts. Justice Kagan questioned whether SFFA would favor universities with few or no racial minorities on campus. Justice Gorsuch looked to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Justice Kavanaugh suggested preferences could be reserved for the descendants of slaves. Justice Barrett inquired about the expiration date of Grutter. And Justice Jackson recounted how the Reconstruction Congress used racial preferences for the freedmen. Finally, Part III breaks down four aspects of the Court’s decision. SFFA eliminated the “educational benefits” rationale for affirmative action. Chief Justice Roberts continues to take inconsistent positions in similar cases during the same term. Justice Kavanaugh continues to follow the lead of Chief Justice Roberts in leading cases, including SFFA. And I defend Justice Jackson’s likely involvement in the Harvard case, notwithstanding her recusal.

The 30th Congress of the International Union of Game Biologists (IUGB) and Perdix XIII was held at the ‘Hotel Juan Carlos I’ in Barcelona, Spain, from 5 to 9 September 2011. The event was organised by the University of Barcelona, the Regional Government of Catalonia Department of Agriculture, Farming, Fish, Food and Environment, the Spanish Institute of Game Resources Research (IREC), and the British Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust. Every two years since the mid–1950s, the International Union of Game Biologists (IUGB) has brought together international wildlife biologists, forestry scientists, veterinarians, game managers, hunters and others with an interest in game or wildlife biology. The IUGB encourages the exchange of scientific and practical knowledge in the field of game and wildlife management, the broad field of game biology, and international co–operation in game and wildlife management. The aim of the conference is to build bridges between scientists, wildlife managers and authorities, and those studying the human dimensions of wildlife management. Following the meetings in Limassol (Cyprus) in 2001 and Braga (Portugal) in 2003, Perdix XIII joined the IUGB Congress series for the third time in its history. Founded in the 1960s, the Perdix series has traditionally attracted partridge, quail and francolin researchers and conservationists from across Europe and North America. To make the Perdix series even more attractive to gamebird biologists, specialists in any Galliform species —whether pheasants, cracids, megapodes or grouse— is welcomed. This joint congress provided a forum to share current developments in gamebird and mammal wildlife research and management, offering an excellent opportunity to identify research gaps, to determine conservation action needs, and to co–ordinate research projects. The congress was attended by 397 researchers and wildlife managers from 37 different countries from the five continents, and included many of the world’s leading wildlife biologists. The general topic was ‘Human–wildlife conflicts and peace-building strategies’. The objective was to summarise the general philosophy of the organising and scientific committees to try to overcome the simple collection of problems derived from human–wildlife interactions by proposing solutions on the basis of scientific knowledge of wildlife and management. A total of 260 contributions were presented. Sixty–eight Perdix XIII communications were related to galliform species (38 oral communications and 30 posters). Additionally, keynote plenary lectures were given by renowned experts, each of whom opened one of the eight main topics of the Conference: – First plenary session: ‘Veterinary aspects of wildlife and conservation’ Bushmeat hunting regulates ebola emergence. Speaker: Dr. Peter D. Walsh – Second plenary session: ‘Species extinctions and population dynamics’ Galliform species and species extinctions: what we know and what we need to know. Speaker: Dr. Philip K. J. McGowan Third plenary session: ‘Wildlife law and policy’ Policy responses to human-wildlife conflicts. A perspective from the convention of migratory species (CMS). Speaker: Dr. Borja Heredia – Fourth plenary session: ‘Conservation and management of migratory species’ Conservation and management of the Common quail (Coturnix coturnix) in Europe: past, present and future. Speaker: Dr. Manel Puigcerver – Fifth plenary session: ‘Wildlife biology, behaviour and game species management’ The Grey partridge in the UK: population status, research, policy and prospects . Speaker: Dr. Nicholas Aebischer – Sixth plenary session: ‘Interactions humans–wildlife’ Managing conflicts between conservation and gamebird management. Speaker: Dr. Steve Redpath – Seventh plenary session: ‘Methodologies, models and techniques’ Molecular genetic tools and techniques for improving management of wildlife and game species. Speaker: Dr. Lisette Waits – Eigth plenary session: ‘Human dimensions of game wildlife management’ Sustainable hunting: an exploration along ecological and social dimensions. Speaker: Dr. John Linnell Of these eight lectures, four were clearly focused on Galliformes species and the others were of general interest to the audience. Six specific workshops were also presented during the Conference, three of which were of particular interest to Perdix attendees: – Sustainable management of migratory birds – what may hunters and game biologists expect from each other?, led by Dr. Yves Lecocq and Dr. Conor O’Gorman. – GALLIPYR: Pyrenean Network for the mountain game fowl, led by Dr. Virginie Fabre (geieforespir@forespir.com) and sponsored by the GALLIPYR INTERREG Project. – Reconciling agricultural management, small game production and biodiversity conservation: recommendations for the CAP reform, led by Drs. J. Viñuela, F. Casas, F. Ros, D. Villanúa, P. Ferreras, J. Torres, I. Leranoz, J. Ardaiz, V. Alzaga, A. Cormenzana and E. Castién. Further information can be found on the Conference web page (www.iugb2011.com) where the final programme, the abstract book (in PDF format), and extended abstracts of some contributions can be downloaded. Some of the most outstanding contributions, selected by the scientific committee of the Conference, are now published in this special issue of the international scientific journal Animal Biodiversity and Conservation. We wish to thank the scientific and organising committees, the sponsors, and the participants for making this meeting such an interesting, friendly and highly valuable event.

Perhaps it is best to summarize what this article is not about, and then highlight what it seeks to do instead, finally surmising those strands together cohesively. This article is not on Urdu as a medium for self-fashioning elite Ashrafi Muslims in Lucknow who lamented the “death of the city” in shahr-i-adab (the city of high culture and noble manners) kind of literatures, instead it is about how Ashrafis came to be normatively portrayed by prominent leaders of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh as “foreigners.” This article is not exclusively about caste politics, but rather how the trope of the foreigner was used as a way to otherize and prevent some of the most downtrodden Muslims from availing affirmative action policies and how lower caste and Dalit Muslims themselves tried to find liberation away from their stigmatized caste histories, unfortunately without success as conversion did not eclipse casteist tropes against them. This article is not just about the institutional history of the fall of Urdu in Uttar Pradesh, but it focusses on how Urdu was used to shape the minority citizen status of Muslims, and how it impacted their political economy and caste histoies in Lucknow by using both written materials documenting these issues and oral testimonies of Ashrafi and Pasmanda Muslims in Lucknow. In the process, this article is about the contours that defined the production of Muslim minoritysm in India, externally by Post Colonial governmentality of the 1950s and internally by Muslims themselves who were compelled to “self homogenize” despite political and social fractures within the community in the face of demonizing and ahistoric stereotypes of the Muslim community as “backward Musalmaans” that ignored their multiple layers of institutionally created marginalization.

В статье проанализированы публикации, в которых нашла отражение недавняя история российской повседневности — обыденная жизнь Мурманска и отчасти всего региона русского Заполярья в 1980-е — 1990-е гг. Обнаружена крайняя скудость исследований, посвященных изучению повседневной жизни женщин этого города и региона, в то время как он представляет интерес как один из первых, в котором возникли снизу независимые женские общественные организации, впоследствии слившиеся в «Конгресс женщин Кольского полуострова». Целью статьи было выявление общей тенденции в освещении вопросов, связанных с бытом женщин этого малоизученного региона Российской Федерации, генерализация всех сведений, которые можно собрать в современной российской научной литературе по этому вопросу за последние 35 лет. Проведенный анализ привел к выводу о том, что несмотря на высокую социальную активность женщин Кольского региона в целом и Мурманска в частности в изучаемое время, повседневный опыт женщин в различных общественных сферах не был тематизирован в научной литературе. Перспективными источниками исследования повседневности мурманчанок в 1985–2000 гг., полагает автор, могут служить периодическая печать и собственно «устная женская история» — нарративы активисток женского движения, их публикации и выступления, рассказы очевидцев. В статье обосновывается необходимость и актуальность такого рода исследования. The article analyzes publications that reflect the recent history of Russian everyday life — the everyday life of Murmansk and partly the entire Russian Polar Region in the 1980s–1990s. It reveals the extreme scarcity of studies devoted to the everyday life of women in this city and region, while it is of interest as one of the first cities where independent women's public organizations emerged from below, which later merged into the «Congress of Women of the Kola Peninsula». The aim of the article was to identify a general trend in the coverage of the everyday life of women in this little-studied region of the Russian Federation, to generalize all the information that can be collected in modern Russian scientific literature on this issue over the past 35 years. The analysis has led to the conclusion that despite the high social activity of women in the Kola region in general and Murmansk in particular in the time under study, women's everyday experience in various social spheres has not been thematized in the scientific literature. The author believes that periodicals and "women's oral history" — the narratives of women activists, their publications and speeches, and eyewitness accounts — can serve as promising sources of research into the everyday life of Murmansk women in 1985–2000. The article highlights the importance of this kind of research.

Abstract Background Amcenestrant is an optimized oral SERD with potent dual activity of ER antagonism and degradation resulting in inhibition of ER signaling. Amcenestrant monotherapy or combination with palbociclib showed antitumor activity and a favorable safety profile in postmenopausal women with heavily pretreated ER+/HER2- mBC. PIK3CA mutations are associated with endocrine resistance in ER+/HER2- patients (pts). Published data support the addition of the PI3Kα inhibitor alpelisib to SERD therapy for these pts. Methods AMEERA-1 (NCT03284957) is an open-label, non-comparative, dose escalation and dose expansion Phase 1/2 study of amcenestrant as monotherapy, then in combination with other anti-cancer targeted therapies. Parts F and G investigate safety run-in and dose expansion, respectively, of amcenestrant in combination with alpelisib. Postmenopausal women with ER+/HER2- advanced breast cancer, PIK3CA mutated in tumor tissue or cfDNA, ECOG performance status 0-1, and ≥ 6 months prior endocrine therapy are eligible. Pts must have progressed on an aromatase inhibitor plus CDK4/6 inhibitor as first-line therapy for advanced disease. Part F allows ≤ 1 prior chemotherapy for advanced disease; no prior chemotherapy is allowed in Part G. Exclusion criteria in Parts F and G include prior drugs targeting the PI3K axis, type 1 diabetes, uncontrolled type 2 diabetes, history of severe cutaneous reactions, and ongoing osteonecrosis of the jaw. Part F assesses dose-limiting toxicities and pharmacokinetics (PK) of a standard dose of amcenestrant plus the approved dose of alpelisib (300 mg once daily). Additional amcenestrant doses or a lower dose of alpelisib may be explored based on safety and PK. The primary objective in Part F is to confirm the recommended phase 2 dose (RP2D) of amcenestrant in combination with alpelisib, based on safety. In Part G, approximately 34 pts will be treated at the RP2D, the primary endpoint being safety and tolerability. Secondary endpoints include PK and antitumor activity. This study is currently recruiting participants. This abstract was previously submitted to the 2021 European Society for Medical Oncology Annual Congress. Funding: Sanofi. Citation Format: Mario Campone, Aditya Bardia, Peter Kabos, Sarat Chandarlapaty, Patrick Neven, Valentina Boni, Simon Lord, Sylvaine Cartot-Cotton, Marina Celanovic, Alice Gosselin, Vasiliki Pelekanou, Hannah M Linden. AMEERA-1 : Phase 1/2 study of amcenestrant (SAR439859), an oral selective estrogen receptor (ER) degrader (SERD), with alpelisib in postmenopausal women with ER+/human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-negative (HER2-)PIK3CA-mutated advanced breast cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2021 Dec 7-10; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(4 Suppl):Abstract nr OT2-11-03.

TPS9159 Background: RET gene fusions have been identified as oncogenic drivers in multiple tumor types, including 1–2% of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Pralsetinib is a potent, selective RET inhibitor, approved in the US and EU for the treatment of metastatic RET fusion–positive NSCLC based on the phase 1/2 ARROW study (NCT03037385). In the ARROW study (data cutoff: Nov 6, 2020), patients who initiated 400 mg once daily (QD) of pralsetinib after platinum-based chemotherapy achieved an overall response rate (ORR) of 62%, per independent central review. In the treatment-naïve group, the ORR was 79%. Most treatment-related adverse events were grade 1–2 across the entire safety population treated at 400 mg QD (n=471). AcceleRET Lung, an international, open-label, randomized, phase 3 study (NCT04222972), will evaluate the efficacy and safety of pralsetinib versus standard of care (SOC) for first-line treatment of advanced/metastatic RET fusion–positive NSCLC. Abstracts for this study were previously submitted to the European Lung Cancer Congress 2020, the American Society of Clinical Oncology 2020 annual meeting, and 2020 World Conference on Lung Cancer. Methods: Approximately 226 patients with metastatic RET fusion–positive NSCLC will be randomized 1:1 to oral pralsetinib (400 mg QD) or SOC (non-squamous histology: platinum/pemetrexed ± pembrolizumab followed by maintenance pemetrexed ± pembrolizumab [at investigator’s discretion]; squamous histology: platinum/gemcitabine or platinum + pembrolizumab + paclitaxel/nab-paclitaxel followed by maintenance pembrolizumab). Stratification factors include intended use of pembrolizumab, history of brain metastases, and Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group Performance Status. Key eligibility criteria include no prior systemic treatment for advanced/metastatic NSCLC; RET fusion–positive tumor by local or central assessment; no additional actionable oncogenic drivers; no prior selective RET inhibitor; measurable disease per Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST) v1.1. Patients with central nervous system metastases were permitted if asymptomatic and on a stable dose of corticosteroids. Cross-over to receive pralsetinib upon disease progression will be permitted for patients randomized to SOC. The primary endpoint is progression-free survival (blinded independent central review; RECIST v1.1). Secondary endpoints include ORR, overall survival, duration of response, disease control rate, clinical benefit rate, time to intracranial progression, intracranial ORR, safety/tolerability and quality of life evaluations. Identification of potential biomarkers of antineoplastic activity and resistance was an exploratory endpoint. Recruitment has begun with sites (active or planned) in North America, Central America, Europe and Asia. Clinical trial information: NCT04222972.

Abstract Abstract 171 Introduction: SVT is a common disease, associated with risks of clinically relevant venous thromboembolic complications. Currently, treatment of isolated SVT (i.e. without concomitant deep-vein thrombosis, DVT, or pulmonary embolism, PE) is based on analgesic agents, topical or oral nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, elastic stockings and occasionally surgery. Previous clinical trials have suggested the benefit of an extended antithrombotic therapy. Yet the optimal antithrombotic treatment remains unknown. Fondaparinux (Arixtra®) is a synthetic selective inhibitor of factor Xa with a favorable benefit-risk profile in the prevention and treatment of venous and arterial thrombosis in various medical and surgical settings. The large-scale, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, CALISTO trial was designed to evaluate the benefit-risk ratio of fondaparinux 2.5 mg subcutaneously once daily during 45 days in 3000 patients with symptomatic, isolated SVT of the lower limbs documented by compression ultrasound (CUS). Methods: The study concerned male or female patients 18 years of age or greater with acute symptomatic isolated SVT of the lower limbs at least 5 cm long documented by standard CUS. After randomization (Day 1), subjects received fondaparinux 2.5 mg or placebo subcutaneously once daily up to Day 45. Study treatments were administered on an outpatient basis. Follow-up continued up to Day 75. Permitted medications included analgesic agents, topical non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, graduated compression (elastic) stockings, aspirin at low dose (up to 325 mg per day) and other oral antiplatelet agents if the subject was receiving these drugs at the time of screening for a chronic medical condition. The primary efficacy outcome was confirmed symptomatic thromboembolic complications (a composite of PE, DVT, extension of SVT with thrombus head ≤3 cm from the saphenofemoral junction or recurrence of SVT) or all-cause death up to Day 45. Safety outcomes included major bleeding, clinically relevant non-major bleeding and death. All efficacy and safety outcomes were adjudicated by a central adjudication committee, unaware of treatment assignment. Results: The study started in March 2007 and inclusions were completed on May 15th 2009, with the recruitment of 3002 patients. The follow-up of the last patient was completed on July 31st 2009. Overall, on blinded preliminary data available on June 23rd 2009 (n=2994), the median age of patients was 58 [range: 19-92] years; 63.9% were women; 37.0% were obese (BMI ≥30 kg/m2). The main predisposing risk factors for SVT were varicose veins (88.6%) and a history of SVT (11.9%). More than one SVT was observed on baseline CUS in 19.2% of patients. The qualifying SVT predominantly involved the great saphenous vein alone (64.6% of patients). At Day 45, the overall incidence of adjudicated and adjudicated-pending symptomatic thromboembolic complications or death was 4.4% (Table). There was one adjudicated major bleeding. The final results according to treatment groups will be presented during the congress. Conclusions: There is an unmet medical need for an evidence-based anticoagulant treatment for isolated SVT. CALISTO is the first large randomized, controlled trial designed to establish standard anticoagulant therapy in patients with isolated SVT. It also provides a large database on the clinical characteristics of this disease. Disclosures: Décousus: GSK: Consultancy, Research Funding. Leizorovicz:GSK: Consultancy.

Aim: This study aimed to examine digital game addiction and attitudes towards sports in adolescents. Method: The screening model was used in our research. After giving preliminary information about the questionnaire to the participants, a total of 191 volunteers, 113 (59.5%) females and 77 (40.5%) males participated in the study voluntarily. In the research, the 'Digital Game Addiction Scale (DGAS-7) and the 'Sports Attitude Scale ' (5-point Likert Type) consisting of 22 items were used as data collection tools. The research data were analyzed with the SPSS 22.0 package program and the margin of error was taken as p<0.05. Results: When the results were examined, it was seen that 59.5% of the participants were women, 40.5% were men, and 45.8% participated in the exercise activity. At the same time, it was understood that the total scores of psychosocial development, mental development and attitude towards sports, which were sub-dimensions of the sports attitude scale, of the participants who exercise had higher scores than the participants who did not exercise. In this context, it can be said that the attitudes of the participants who exercise were more meaningful. Conclusion: As a result, young adult individuals who were connected to games may have difficulties in fulfilling their daily responsibilities and may cause mental and cognitive disorders as a result of establishing a connection between real life and the virtual world, which can negatively affect their academic achievement levels. Moreover, individuals should be encouraged to participate in sports, because it was thought to have a positive effect on the mental and physical development of young adults. Keywords: Adolescent, Sports and Digital Game This Research Was Present at as Oral Presentation the 8th International Congress on Science, Culture and Sports

BackgroundRecurring cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) remains an area of high unmet medical need. While anti-PD-1 antibodies are now approved for this diagnosis, more than half the patients will need more effective treatments, supporting the development of new or combination regimens. Weekly cetuximab targets EGFR and has anti-tumor immunogenic properties that could complement anti-PD-1 immunotherapy. Cetuximab is being evaluated in combination clinical trials. Panitumumab also targets EGFR but is felt to function as a signal transduction inhibitor with weaker anti-tumor immunogenic properties; however, this medication is dosed every two weeks rather than weekly and has a relatively favorable toxicity profile.MethodsTwo consecutive elderly patients with significant comorbidities presented with a performance status of ECOG 3 and rapidly progressive recurrent cutaneous SCC of the face. The patients were presented treatment with an anti-PD-1 antibody, with an option - were there an inadequate palliative response - to include an EGFR antibody provided tolerance was adequate and molecular markets supported so doing. Each patient signed consent for treatment and consent for photographs. Dosing was per package insert, starting conservatively with pembrolizumab 2 mg/kg or nivolumab 3 mg/kg, respectively, escalating in both cases to flat dosing once it was apparent that tolerance was acceptable. The first cycle of panitumumab (6 mg/kg), when needed to be invoked, was administered solo between two cycles of PD-1 inhibitor, then every two weeks while the PD-1 inhibitor continued every two - four weeks.ResultsA 78 year old women with significant cardiac disease and a St Jude tissue aortic valve, had undergone prior surgeries and radiation therapy for her recurring SCC of the face followed then by major resection, parotidectomy, flap reconstruction, and supraomohyoid neck dissection; only two weeks after the latter surgery, she presented with over 20 new in-radiation field metastases (see photo below). A 90 year old woman with emphysema on home oxygen and living in a facility presented with diffuse local recurrence 4 months after orbital exenteration, parotidectomy, neck dissection, and flap. Both patients‘ tumors were characterized: PDL1 (clone E1L3N) 2% and 10%, respectively; scant peritumoral or intratumoral lymphocytes; tumor mutation burden high (33 and 30 mutations per megabase, respectively); epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) high 3+ by IHC, but with no gene mutations detected in EGFR, kras or nras; microsatellite stable. In the 78 yo woman, after two cycles of pembrolizumab, the ~ 5 mm pink nodules grew further to up to 3 cm with facial erythema, edema, sealing the eye closed. Only by criteria was this not considered pseudoprogression, Panitumumab was integrated between cycles 2 and 3, resulting in a dramatic abrupt response: the masses became centrally necrotic, flaking, pouring off her face with prompt resolution in edema and complete response (CR) within 2 months - now lasting over 18 months - a period during which pembrolizumab and panitumumab were continued for 27 and 26 cycles respectively). Her major toxicity was diffuse erythema involving ~ 30% of her torso; this resolved early on with triamcinolone 0.1% cream. She also developed scabs in her uninvolved scalp - some where other squamous and basal carcinomas had previously been resected and these all healed slowly (see photo), suggesting we were preventing similar future cancers from emerging in these areas. Similarly, the 90 yo woman achieved only a mixed response to nivolumab over 3 months with shrinking level V neck node but continued stubborn diffuse disease over her face and into the exenteration field. When panitumumab was added, however, there was clear improvement (See photo). With each of eight cycles, prolific crusting/scabbing would occur, shed, and reoccur, some in areas of the face without visible tumor, Mild acneiform rash and mild hypomagnesemia were readily managed. Her performance status and appetite improved and she gained back 14 pounds. After only 6 months, with pathologically confirmed CR, treatment had to be held because she was restricted to her assisted living facility in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now after a year, the remaining scabs are largely gone (see photo).Abstract 467 Figure 1Panitumumab + pembrolizumab for metastatic cutaneous SCC #1Dramatic durable response in 22 metastases on face and also scabbing then healing on scalp where there was no evidence of tumor but history of prior resected.squamous cell and basal cell carcinomas, suggesting effective prevention of future such lesionsAbstract 467 Figure 2Panitumumab + pembrolizumab for metastatic cutaneous SCC #2Durable response lasting a year after 6 months of treatment in a 90 yo womanConclusionsThe excellent tolerance of multiple cycles of out-patient combination treatment in these two consecutive patients with the same diagnosis, coupled with the observed durable anti-tumor clinical activity lasting now over a year - all support further exploration of panitumumab in combination with anti-PD-1 antibody treatment. A randomized trial would be needed to establish whether outcomes are truly better with the combination. Deciding on hyperprogression v pseudoprogression while getting anti-PD-1 antibody treatment remains a challenge. Laboratory studies would evaluate how such specific signal transduction inhibition by panitumumab might interfere with immune suppressive mechanisms in metastases, rendering them more sensitive to an induced anti-tumor cellular immune response by an anti-PD-1 antibody. Finally such combination treatment should help reduce the need for increasingly cosmetically and functionally altering surgeries.Ethics Approval‘Per our Hartford Health Care IRB, case series of three or less patients does not constitute research.’ConsentWritten informed consent was obtained from the patient for publication of this abstract and any accompanying images. A copy of the written consent is available for review by the Editor of this journal.ReferencesChen A1,2, Ali N3,4, Boasberg P5,6, Ho AS7,8. Clinical Remission of Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the Auricle with Cetuximab and Nivolumab. J Clin Med 2018 Jan 10;7(1). pii: E10.Foote MC, McGrath M, Guminski A, Hughes BG, Meakin J, Thomson D, Zarate D, Simpson F, Porceddu SV Phase II study of single-agent panitumumab in patients with incurable cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma. Ann Oncol 2014 Oct;25(10):2047–52.Ferris RL, Gillison ML, Harris J, et al. Safety evaluation of nivolumab concomitant with cetuximab-radiotherapy for intermediate and high-risk local-regionally advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC): RTOG 3504. Oral presentation at: 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting; June 1–5, 2018; Chicago, IL.Jong Chul Park, Lori J. Wirth, Keith Flaherty, Donald P. Lawrence, Shadmehr Demehri, Stefan Kraft, Immune checkpoint inhibition in advanced cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma: Clinical response and correlative biomarker analysis. Journal of Clinical Oncology36, no. 15_suppl (May 20 2018) 9564.FDA approves pembrolizumab for cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma. FDA website. Published June 24, 2020. fda.gov/drugs/drug-approvals-and-databases/fda-approves-pembrolizumab-cutaneous-squamous-cell-carcinoma.Edith Borcoman, MD, Amara Nandikolla, MD, Georgina Long, BSc, PhD, MBBS, FRACP, Sanjay Goel, MD, and Christophe Le Tourneau, MD, PhD. Patterns of Response and Progression to Immunotherapy American Society of Clinical Oncology Educational Book 38 (May 23, 2018) 169–1787.Migden MR, Rischin D, Schmults CD, Guminski A, Hauschild A, Lewis KD, Chung CH, Hernandez-Aya L, Lim AM, Chang ALS, Rabinowits G, Thai AA, Dunn LA, Hughes BGM, Khushalani NI, Modi B, Schadendorf D, Gao B, Seebach F, Li S, Li J, Mathias M, Booth J, Mohan K, Stankevich E, Babiker HM, Brana I, Gil-Martin M, Homsi J, Johnson ML, Moreno V, Niu J, Owonikoko TK, Papadopoulos KP, Yancopoulos GD, Lowy I, Fury MG. PD-1 Blockade with Cemiplimab in Advanced Cutaneous Squamous-Cell Carcinoma. N Engl J Med 2018 Jul 26;379(4):341–351.Eve Maubec, Marouane Boubaya, Peter Petrow, Nicole Basset-Seguin, Jean-Jacques Grob, Brigitte Dreno,. Pembrolizumab as first line therapy in patients with unresectable squamous cell carcinoma of the skin: Interim results of the phase 2 CARSKIN trial. Journal of Clinical Oncology 36, no. 15_suppl (May 20 2018) 9534.Burtness B, et al. First-line pembrolizumab a new standard for recurrent, metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. Abstract LBA8_PR. Presented at: European Society for Medical Oncology Congress; Oct. 19–23, 2018; Munich. 10. Teruki Yanagi,* Shinya Kitamura, and Hiroo Hata. Novel Therapeutic Targets in Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma. Front Oncol 2018; 8: 79.

The Collegium Internationale Allergologicum (CIA) was founded on 15 October 1954 in London by a group of 48 international allergists and immunologists from 18 countries of all continents, among them such distinguished scientists as Carl Prausnitz-Giles, Sir Henry Dale, Paul Kallos, and many others. Contrary to other international associations in the field, this Collegium limited the number of members in order to allow more intense and open discussions in “the humble spirit of scientific enquiry, friendly cooperation, good fellowship and professional relationships in the field of allergy” as stated in the statutes. It is not possible to apply for membership, and one has to be proposed by at least 2 CIA members and invited to present at least once at a symposium. Over the decades, a rhythm of biannual symposia developed, the 32nd held in Palma de Mallorca in October 2018. These symposia went around the world from London, Rome, Copenhagen, New Orleans, Puerto Vallarta, Nantucket, Hakone, Konstanz, Goeteborg, and Sorrento, just to name a few places. Preferably they were held on islands such as Capri, Corfu, Martinique, Curacao, Bornholm, Malta, and Ischia in order to make it more difficult for people to arrive late or leave early. It is expected that participants stay over the whole length of the 5-day symposium. On these symposia, it is good custom to also present unpublished data, so participants get the latest news. The most important developments in the field of Allergy and Clinical Immunology have been discussed at early stage and sometimes by speakers who later won the Nobel Prize. While all presentations are equal, be it oral communications or posters, there are 3 special lectures, namely the Carl Prausnitz lecture, the Paul Kallos lecture, and a “Relaxing from Immunology” lecture which can be devoted to any interesting topic not necessarily related to medicine or allergy. Since many years, the contents of the symposium are published in a proceedings volume, over a longtime printed within the “International Archives of Allergy and Immunology” which until now is the official journal of the Collegium. Participants agree that in the flood of more and more scientific congresses and larger events, the CIA Symposia are unique in their openness and friendly scientific interchange.

In this interview, conducted during the XXIII International Congress of Historical Sciences in Poznań (2022), Olufunke Adeboye (Professor of Social History at the University of Lagos, Nigeria) discusses the problems of decolonisation of African history, the relations between academic historiography and popular history, new trends in historical writing, the importance of theory for historical research, and the problems of historical education in Nigeria.

Dear Colleagues, In the previous editorial paper published by Balat et al. [1] as an Early View Article a few months ago, it was reported that there were changes in the Editorial Team of the European Journal of Therapeutics (Eur J Ther). During these few months, while the preparations for the new issue (June 2023, volume 29, Issue 2) continued, the editorial board also was revised. We would like to inform you that the Editorial Board has been strengthened by academics who are competent in their fields from many countries of the world and will continue to be strengthened in the future. As it is known, Eur J Ther started broadcasting in 1990 as a Journal of the Faculty of Medicine University of Gaziantep (In Turkish: Gaziantep Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi Dergisi). In the first paper titled “While Starting” (In Turkish: Başlarken) of the first issue, Prof. Sabri Güngör, who was the first Editor-in-Chief, stated that the aim of the journal is to have an influential place in the field of science [2]. Over the past three decades, the journal has continued to advance. At the present time, it is inevitable to reorganise the editorial board of the journal and enrich it with leading international editors in order to move the journal to better places. This editorial will explain essential developments in the journal in the last few months, and the new Editorial Board Members of the Eur J Ther will be introduced. Changes are inevitable, and we are delighted to announce that this issue marks several significant improvements. Specifically, we bolstered our editorial team with esteemed international academics and expanded our pool of referees. Consequently, the evaluation period for the submitted articles was significantly reduced. In the last two months, the journal metrics are as follows: Acceptance rate: %29 Average time until the final decision: 24.4 days Average time to publish as Accepted/Early View Article, after acceptance: 4.8 days. Thanks to these improvements, as you will notice, there are 25 articles in this issue. In this way, this issue has been the issue in which most articles have been published so far. In addition, applications were made to DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), among the most essential open-access databases in the world, in May 2023. Moreover, cited references to the previous and/or alternative names of the journal (Gaziantep Medical Journal, Gaziantep Med J, Gaziantep Tıp Dergisi and Gaziantep Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi Dergisi) in Web of Science that were not reflected in the journal metrics were identified and reported to the Web of Science. Some of these correction requests have been finalized and corrected, and thus the total number of citations and the H-index of the journal increased [3]. After all these data are updated, it will be seen that the citation values of the Eur J Ther will increase even more. We will also update the guidelines for the authors and reviewers with respect to the ICMJE [4] and EQUATOR Network [5], which will enhance the quality of research in the medical fraternity. Additionally, the use of DOI for articles published in the journal started in 2011 (2011, volume 17, Issue 2). In order to facilitate the recognition and access of the articles, DOIs have also been defined for all articles published in previous issues. Editors Ayşe Balat, MD, became the new Editor-in-Chief of Eur J Ther for the second time, the first between 2007-2010. She is a Professor in Pediatrics and a specialist in Pediatric Nephrology and Rheumatology. She has been working as Vice President of Gaziantep University since October 2020. She was the Dean of Gaziantep University Medical Faculty (2007-2010), President of the Mediterranean Kidney Society (MKS) between 2015 to 2018, and Secretary beginning in 2018. She is also President of the International Association for the History of Nephrology (IAHN) since 2022. In Gaziantep, she first established Pediatric Nephrology and Pediatric Rheumatology Units, and the first peritoneal dialysis was performed by her. She has several studies published in international and national peer-reviewed scientific journals (H-Index: 26, i10-index: 59 and approximately 2500 citations). She was the Guest Editor of the International Journal of Nephrology in 2012 (special issue titled “Devil’s Triangle in Kidney Diseases: Oxidative Stress, Mediators, and Inflammation”). She is a member of many national and international associations related to her field, including membership in the Turkish Pediatric Nephrology Association board in the past. She has several scientific presentation awards at national and international congresses. She has been joined as an “invited speaker” at 20 International Meetings. As of 2007, she organizes World Kidney Day activities within the scope of the “Survival is not Enough” program (in the first rank among European pediatric nephrologists as an organizer of those activities). Recently, she was elected as a “lifelong member of the Academy of Medicine and Surgical Sciences” of the University of Naples, which is one of the four important academies in Naples. Şevki Hakan Eren, MD, is the new Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Eur J Ther. Dr Eren graduated from the Medical School, University of Gaziantep, Turkey and completed Emergency training at Cumhuriyet University. He has been working as a Professor at Gaziantep University, Department of Emergency Medicine, Gaziantep, Turkey. He is interested in traumatology, and toxicology. Mehmet Sait Menzilcioğlu, MD, is the new Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Eur J Ther. Dr. Menzilcioğlu graduated from the Medical School, University of Gaziantep, Turkey and completed Radiology training at the same University. He has been working as an Associate Professor at Gaziantep University, Department of Radiology, Gaziantep, Turkey. He is interested in neuroradiology, ultrasonography, doppler Ultrasonography, Computerized Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, interventional radiology, and obstetric sonography. İlhan Bahşi, MD, PhD, is the new Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Eur J Ther. Dr Bahşi is also on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Craniofacial Surgery, Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, and Mersin University School of Medicine Lokman Hekim Journal of History of Medicine and Folk Medicine. In addition, he has published more than 80 articles (H-index: 12 and i10-index: 15) and has been a referee for more than 600 academic papers in many internationally indexed journals. Dr Bahşi, who has been working in the Department of Anatomy at the Gaziantep University Faculty of Medicine since 2012, completed his doctorate education in 2017 and obtained the title of PhD. Besides anatomy, he is particularly interested in the history of medicine, medical ethics, and education. İlkay Doğan, PhD, is the new Editorial Board member of the Eur J Ther for Statistics and Methodology. He is in the Department of Biostatistics at the Gaziantep University Faculty of Medicine. His professional focus lies in research about Structural Equation Modeling, Multivariate Analysis. With a wealth of experience spanning over 15 years across multiple disciplines, including veterinary, nursing, sport and medicine, Dr Doğan has held various notable articles. He is a member of the Turkish Biostatistics Association. Ahmet Acıduman, MD, PhD, graduated from Ege University Faculty of Medicine in 1987 and later specialized in Neurosurgery in 1997. Dr Acıduman further expanded his academic credentials by completing a PhD in the History of Medicine and Ethics in 2005. Currently, he is a Professor in the Department of History of Medicine and Ethics at Ankara University Faculty of Medicine. With a notable record of over 200 academic publications, Dr Acıduman’s contributions to the field continue. Bilal Çiğ, PhD, is a new Editorial board member of the Eur J Ther. Associate Prof Bilal Çiğ is a Postdoctoral researcher at King's College London Wolfson Card. He has been investigating the roles of ion channels in neurological diseases using the patch clamp technique for nearly 15 years. For the past few years, he has focused on the interactions of TRPA1 and Kir 4.1 channels in demyelination. He has 40 SCI-E and international publications, with about 1300 citations. Tsvetoslav Georgiev, MD, PhD, holds an esteemed position as an associate professor at the First Department of Internal Medicine in Varna, Bulgaria, while also working as a clinician at the University Hospital St. Marina. He has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation in 2018 at the Medical University in Sofia. Having obtained a specialization in rheumatology that same year, Dr Georgiev has extensive expertise in this intricate field of medicine. He further expanded his knowledge and skills by attending comprehensive courses on imaging diagnostics and musculoskeletal ultrasound in rheumatology held in various locations. Dr Georgiev has been involved in formulating the Bulgarian consensus on osteoarthritis and EULAR recommendations for the non-pharmacological core management of osteoarthritis. Notably, Dr Georgiev has received recognition for his outstanding contributions as a reviewer, earning awards in 2019 and 2021 from the Korean Academy of Medical Sciences. Davut Sinan Kaplan, PhD, is a new Editorial Board Member of the Eur J Ther. Dr Kaplan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology at Gaziantep University Faculty of Medicine. He is also the Graduate School of Health Sciences’ Director. He has taken involved in a wide variety of research with animal models. His research generally focuses on Endocrinology, Metabolism, Physical Activity, and Breast Milk. He has mentored a large group of master’s and PhD students. He has served for many years as a member of the local animal experiments ethics committee. Mehmet Karadağ, MD, is a new Editorial Board Member of the Eur J Ther for Psychiatry. Dr. Karadag is an Associate Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He is in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Gaziantep University School of Medicine. He has experience on Posttraumatic Stress, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity, Autism Spectrum, Anxiety, Depressive Disorders and EMDR Therapy. He is also EMDRIA accredited EMDR Consultant. Murat Karaoglan, MD, is a new Editorial Board Member of the Eur J Ther for Endocrinology. Dr. Karaoglan is an Associate Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology. He is in the Department of Pediatric Endocrinology at the Gaziantep University School of Medicine. He has experience on growth disorder, diabetology and disorder of sexual development. Waqar M. Naqvi, PhD, is a faculty in the Department of Physiotherapy at the College of Health Sciences, Gulf Medical University, Ajman, UAE. His professional focus lies in the development of the research ecosystem within healthcare education, with a particular interest in AI, AR, VR, Sensors, and innovation in health sciences. With a wealth of experience spanning over 14 years across multiple countries, including India, Canada, Cameroon, Hong Kong, and Saudi Arabia, Dr Naqvi has held various notable positions. These include his roles as the Associate Director of Research at the NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences, Acting Dean and Vice Dean of the Physiotherapy College, Convener for the International Admission Office, International Accreditation and Quality Assurance Wing, Staff Selection Committee, and Coordinator for a Staff-Student Exchange Program. In recognition of his outstanding contributions, Dr Naqvi was honored with the Distinguished Service Award and Young Achiever Award from the Indian Association of Physiotherapy. Dr Naqvi is widely recognized for his expertise in conducting seminars and workshops on research, publications, and intellectual property rights. Specializing as a research trainer in the fields of medicine, dentistry, physiotherapy, and health sciences, Dr Naqvi's unwavering commitment to research excellence and his genuine passion for mentoring aspiring researchers are instrumental in shaping the future of healthcare. He firmly believes in the power of evidence-based practice and actively advocates for its implementation. Ali Nasimi is a neuroscientist in the field of central regulation of the cardiovascular system. Victor Nedzvetsky, PhD, DrSc is a full professor of Physiology, Biochemistry and Lab Diagnostics, where coordinates courses on Neurochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology. Additionally, he is a vice-director of “The Biosafety Center” research and development company (Ukraine). He obtained PhD in biochemistry at Dnipropetrovsk University, Ukraine (1990). After postdoctoral training, he received a degree of Doctor Science at Kyiv National University (2006). Since 2015 he was involved as an invited professor of Bingol University, Turkey as a supervisor of PhD projects on genetic and molecular biology. He has participated in both the education and research work of the Dept. Art and Science of Bingol University from 2015 to 2021. His current research interests are focused on intestinal barrier function, brain blood barrier, astrocytes, cognitive deficits, bioactive compounds as anticancer agents, nanomaterials, and neuroprotection. He is the author of over 230 research publications and ten patents. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal “Regulatory Mechanisms of Biosystems”. Raphael Olszewski, DDS, MD, PhD, DrSc is a full professor of oral surgery and dentomaxillofacial radiology at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Brussels, Belgium. Professor Olszewski is an oral surgeon and member of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Cliniques Universitaires Saint Luc, UCLouvan, Brussels, Belgium. Prof Olszewski is the Editor-in-Chief of NEMESIS: Negative effects in medical sciences: oral and maxillofacial surgery. Janusz Ostrowski, MD, PhD. Internal medicine, nephrology, and public health specialist. Former Head of the Department of Internal Medicine and Nephrology at the Provincial Hospital in Wloclawek, Poland. Director for Peritoneal Dialysis in Diaverum Company Poland. Secretary of the Historical Section of the Polish Society of Nephrology. Former President of the International Association for the History of Nephrology. Professor, Vice Dean of the School of Public Health and Head of the Department of the History of Medicine in the Centre of Postgraduate Medical Education in Warsaw, Poland. Ayşe Aysima Özçelik, MD, is a new Editorial Board member of Eur J Ther for Neurology. She is the head of the pediatric neurology department and works at Gaziantep University Faculty of Medicine. She is the regional manager for the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy disease. She is an experienced physician in the treatment and follow-up of genetic neurological disorders, epilepsy, and neuromuscular diseases. Maria Piagkou, DDS, MD, MSc, PhD is a new Editorial Board member of Eur J Ther for Neurology. She is an associate professor at the Department of Anatomy, School of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is a Deputy Vice-President of the Hellenic Association of Public Health in Greece and a President of the printed material handling committee of the National Organization for Medicines. She has twenty-one years of teaching activity in the field of anatomy, focused on head and neck, oral and maxillofacial area, as well as on skull base anatomy and anatomical variants. Her main areas of interest are head and neck anatomy and surgery, skull base anatomy, oral surgery, maxillofacial and dental trauma, rehabilitation, intraoral fixation after condylar fractures, and teeth replantation. She is an associate editor in 2 journals of Anatomy and acts as Editorial Board Member in six other journals. She authored six chapters in neuroanatomy and oral and maxillofacial surgery and thoracic surgery books, two monographs, and edited the translation of 9 books. She is a reviewer in 30 international scientific journals. She authored 156 publications in PubMed, 91 abstracts in 26 international congresses, and 318 abstracts in Greek scientific meetings. She is General Secretary of the Sports Medicine Association of Greece and treasurer of the Hellenic Association of Anatomy. Halima Resić, MD, PhD is a Professor of Internal medicine – nephrology in Sarajevo. Professor Resić studied medicine at the University of Belgrade where she also undertook a clinical fellowship in nephrology. She finished her postgraduate studies also at the University of Belgrade in 1987. Professor Resić worked at the Clinical Centre of Belgrade from 1972. to 1992. In 1993. She worked at the Marmara University of Istanbul. Also, in the period from 1994. to 1996. she took part in projects for refugees in Munich with the support of the Ministry of Health of the city of Munich. From 1996. till 2019. professor Resić worked at the Clinical Center University of Sarajevo, where she was head of the Clinic of Hemodialysis. In 2001. She obtained her PhD degree in Nephrology. She became a professor at the Medical Faculty of the University of Sarajevo in 2013. Professor Resić published about 180 professional and scientific papers in relevant journals. She has been a president of organizations of a few national congress and nephrology schools, and also an active participant of ERA congress and WCN congress. She has also been invited lecturer in over 60 different international and national congresses. Professor Resić was President of the BANTAO Society (2017-2019), and President of the Mediterian Kidney Society. She has been President of the Society of Nephrology, Dialysis and Kidney Transplantation in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2010-2020) and also, she is President of Donor’s network of Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is a member of ERA EDTA and ISN, and also a member of the Committee of SRC by ISN. She is a member of the Council of EAPE (European Association of Professor Emerita). She is also vice president of IANUBIH (International Academy of Science and Arts in Bosnia and Herzegovina) and a member of the board of South Eastern Europe by ISN. In her carrier, she obtains many international awards for her work in the field of Nephrology. Aldo Rogelis Aquiles Rodrigues is a new Editorial Board member of Eur J Ther for Neurology. Currently, he is an associate professor in physiology at the Federal University of Triângulo Mineiro, MG, Brazil since 2006. Before that, he worked as a research associate at the Department of Neurophysiology, Madison, USA from 2002 to 2005. He has experience in auditory neurons electrophysiology, enteric neurons and ion channels in general. Domenico Santoro is a Full Professor of Nephrology, Director of the Division of Nephrology and Coordinator of the Nephrology Fellowship Program University of Messina, AOU G. Martino – Messina. He is s a clinical expert in glomerular disorders with a scientific formation at the section of renal Pathology of the CSMC UCLA Los Angeles. He collaborated in genetic studies in glomerular disease. He coordinates as principal investigators several studies in glomerular disease both in clinical/therapeutical as well genetic aspects. He is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Nephrology and MBC Nephrology. Author of more than 270 scientific publications indexed on Scopus, H-index in Scopus: 38; H-index in Google Scholar: 46. Onur Taydaş, MD, is a new Editorial Board Member of the Eur J Ther for Radiology. Dr Taydas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology at the Sakarya University School of Medicine. He has a Turkish Society of Radiology Proficiency Certificate, a European Diploma in Radiology, and a Turkish Interventional Radiology Diploma. He has experience in neuroradiology, musculoskeletal radiology, and interventional radiology. Gregory Tsoucalas (or Tsoukalas), born in 1974 and originated from the Island of Skopelos in the center of the Aegean Sea, he had studied Medicine in the University of Saint Kliment Ohridski in Sofia Bulgaria. He had then continued his studies in Lyon France and Athens Greece. He had been a Nuclear Medicine-Oncology-End stage physician in Saint Savvas Anticancer Hospital of Athens. He had after that moved to the city of Volos where he had been a physician in the Saint George Clinic for Alzheimer and Related Dementia Syndromes-End stage. He had finally moved to the General Clinic Anassa of Volos in the Internal Pathology Department. He currently holds the position of the Assistant professor of the History of Medicine, and head of the Department of History of Medicine and Medical Deontology, Medical School, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece. Specialized in Nuclear Medicine, MSc in Palliative Medicine and PhD in the History of Medicine from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, History of Medicine Diploma from Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University, post-doc in Anatomy from Democritus University of Thrace, Anthropology Course Diploma from Leiden University. He holds diplomas in Mastology and Clinical Nutrition for the related European Societies. He is the General Secretary of the Hellenic Branch of the Balkan Medical Union. Interested in the fields of History of Medicine, Deontology, Bioethics, Anatomy and Humanities, he is the writer of more than 200 articles in the PubMed database and more than 200 in other bases. He loves books and had published 10, while he had participated with chapters in various publications. Member of the International Society of the History of Medicine he had presented more than 130 speeches and 50 lectures in international level. Member of DELTOS (Hellenic Society) he had presented more than 400 speeches in local level. He enjoys more than 2500 citations, H-index: 17, and i10-index: 41. Hamit Yıldız, MD, PhD, is the new editorial Board member for Internal Medicine. Dr Yildiz is an internal medicine specialist and practices in Gaziantep University Hospital. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine. He completed his internship at Gaziantep University in Gaziantep and also graduated with a PhD in molecular biology. He has more than ten years of experience as a specialist who focuses on patients with diabetes, hypertension and thyroid diseases. His special interest is recombinant DNA technologies and the development of biotechnological drugs. Betül Yılmaz Furtun, MD, FASE, FAAP, is a new Editorial Board Member for the Eur J Ther. She is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Texas Children's Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine and Associate Medical Director of the Fetal Cardiology/Fetal Cardiac Intervention Program at Texas Children's Hospital. Dr Yilmaz Furtun is also a Course Director of Fetal Cardiology Education/Curriculum Development for advanced and categorical cardiology fellows and an Associate Director of the Fetal Care Center Steering Committee for fetal cardiology at Texas Children's Hospital. Dr Yilmaz Furtun is a pediatric cardiologist with expertise in advanced imaging modalities including fetal echocardiography, transthoracic and transesophageal echocardiography. Dr Yilmaz Furtun completed her pediatrics training at Washington University in St. Louis, pediatric cardiology training at Columbia University Medical Center, New York Presbyterian Hospital, and fetal cardiology/advanced imaging training at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Dr Yilmaz Furtun actively participates in fetal and pediatric echocardiography laboratory protocol development and fetal and echocardiography lab and Fetal Care Center quality and improvement initiatives. Dr Yilmaz Furtun has been a member of the American Society of Echocardiography, the International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, the Fetal Heart Society as well as American College of Cardiology. Dr Yilmaz Furtun’s clinical and research focus relates to cardiac imaging by echocardiography and fetal echocardiography. She utilizes her experience in these areas to study how we can use non-invasive imaging modalities for investigating normal and abnormal cardiac function in patients with congenital heart disease and in fetuses with cardiac compromise. Her primary research interests focus on fetal cardiovascular assessment and cardiac dysfunction in patients with congenital heart disease, in fetuses with congenital abnormalities, and in multiple gestation pregnancies complicated by twin-twin transfusion syndrome. Matthew Zdilla, DC, is a new Editorial Board Member for the Eur J Ther. Dr Zdilla was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Northeast College of Health Sciences. He serves as an Associate Professor at the West Virginia University School of Medicine in the United States of America. He is an award-winning, internationally recognized clinical anatomist who has published scores of high-impact research papers regarding human diversity and the impact of anatomical variation on clinical procedures. In addition to his experience as an accomplished researcher, Zdilla brings his experience as an ad hoc reviewer for nearly 40 journals to the European Journal of Therapeutics. Joseph Schmidt, MFA has taught academic writing for the University of Louisville and various campuses of The City University of New York (CUNY). An accomplished poet, he has contributed content to, and edited a number of small literary journals. At Gaziantep University, he has lent his editorial and native English language talents to some of his Turkish colleagues in the sciences. He teaches in the university’s School of Foreign Languages (YDO).

The article aims at contributing to the social history of the “Solidarity” movement by tracing the collective biography of its elected representatives. It will focus on the life trajectories of the 900 delegates to the First National Congress of Delegates. The convention, held in Autumn 1981, is commonly perceived as a focal moment in the history of Solidarity and plays a crucial role in almost every academic narrative on the anti-communist opposition. Often seen as a first genuine Polish parliament since pre-war times, its main task was to forge the political and economic programme thus furthering the revolution. The projected research will draw on genuine methodology, combining prosopographical and oral history approach. The research will address mainly the following issues: what social strata the elites came from, what was their cultural and educational background, what motives/causes/expectations drove them to engage with “Solidarity,” to what generations did they belong, how did they embrace the character of political transformation of 1989, and to what extent and how did they get involved in the political, economic, and social life of post-communist Poland. In general, the paper seeks to shed a new light on our understanding of Solidarity’s social roots—for instead examining to what extent the contesting, revolutionary elites were a product of the Stalinist social advancement. It also tries to depict the level of continuity between the elites of 1981 and post-1989—thus testing the common theories whether the Third Republic is (or is not) rooted in the legacy of Solidarity.

Purpose This paper aims to assess the role of archives in documenting African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) records on the liberation struggle of South Africa from 1960 to 1990 with a view to recommending the best method of collection and preservation of archival materials. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative data were collected through interviews with purposively selected employees of the African National Congress (ANC), the Nelson Mandela Foundation centre of memory, the national heritage and cultural studies at the University of Fort Hare, the National Archives of South Africa and provincial archives of South Africa. Interview data were augmented through content analysis of ANC documents such as policies, websites and annual reports. Findings The study found a gap of documentation of the role of archives in documenting ANCWL’s contribution to the liberation of South Africa. The National Archives of South Africa did not play a meaningful role to document the history of African National Women’s League in the liberation struggle of South Africa. There was also a lack of coordination of community archives that keep ANCWL archives materials. There is a need to embark on oral history and bilateral relations with overseas archival institutions to repatriate ANCWL archives to South Africa. Furthermore, contemporary history records about the ANCWL records need to be listed, arranged and described and made available to the public. Research limitations/implications The research is limited to the role played by the National Archives of South Africa and community archives such as the ANC archives, the Mayibuye Centre archives based at the University of Western Cape in documenting ANC and ANCWL and contemporary issues that impact the development of ANCWL records created from 1960 to 1990. Practical implications The findings are expected to be instrumental to document the history of women’s struggle for democracy in South Africa. The ANCWL collection may contribute to social cohesion to enable society to understand the role of ANCWL during the struggle for democracy in South Africa. While the literature on women’s archives is limited, there is still much research that needs to be conducted. Increasing the body of research will strengthen understanding of the role of the National Archives of South Africa and community archives on documenting women’s liberation struggle in South Africa. Social implications The document of women’s history would enrich the archival collection. This means that records with historical, cultural and social significance will be permanently preserved by archives. Originality/value The research appears to be the first of its kind to assess the documentation on the role of archives on documenting ANCWL. The archival heritage of women’s struggle for democracy forms part of the national archival heritage of South Africa as they bridge the gap of undocumented history of South Africa.

A good congress is always a mixing of an excellent scientific program, prepared by the Scientific Committee, and the “free communications” presented by some of the attendees. The COVID emergencies have contributed to rapidly modify the world of the scientific exchange of information and the presentation of the researches’ result by anyone interested in science evolution. In the past, the abstracts of lectures, posters and oral presentations were included in a volume that was distributed at the participants to the congress. That material had a clear destiny: a rapid oblivion. Since the first edition, the organizers of the Roma Pain Days, which was already an “hybrid” congress, have tried to publicize much more the results of the many, many researchers willing to present their results to the large public. In fact, all the abstracts of the #RPD2021 were published in the Cureus Academic Channel of the Paolo Procacci Foundation, organizer of the congress - https://www.cureus.com/channels/ppf/abstracts. This year the Scientific Committee has decided to publish the abstracts on an indexed journal, agreeing with the GM of Signa Vitae (https://www.signavitae.com) to have all the accepted abstracts published by them. Signa Vitae is a growing and thrilling journal whose impact in the scientific world interested in Anesthesiology, Emergency, Intensive Care, and Pain Medicine is already well established. The Scientific Committee of the #RPD2022 and I thank the General Management of the journal for their kindness and generosity. I am more than sure that this will be of a mutual benefit for the researchers and the journal’s visibility. Ad majora for a future, increasing cooperation in favor of the science diffusion.

Oliver Tambo dedicated most of his life to the liberation of South Africa from apartheid dominion, whereby he garnered international respect from his peers and contemporaries. He rose to prominence within the African National Congress (ANC) during a harrowing time in South Africa’s history by consistently demonstrating leadership and guidance. Tambo’s innate leadership skills originated through his unique mix of personality qualities that he steadfastly believed in his entire life. This tenacity and conviction allowed him to govern the leadership of the ANC—despite being in exile—in an efficient and systematic manner. The objective of this paper is to examine the different leadership traits Tambo possessed, which allowed him to steer his political party’s ship through the most turbulent of seas. Secondly, this paper examines the current political climate in South Africa with the aim of addressing leadership models required to mould and sculpt South African society into the Tambos of today. These two objectives will largely be pursued through oral testimonies of those who worked and interacted with Tambo closely over the years, as well as anecdotal stories which demonstrate the level of leadership Tambo always provided.

Abstract Background Nirmatrelvir-ritonavir (NMV-r) is an oral antiviral medication used for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in patients aged 12 years or older at high risk of progression to severe disease and hospitalization. Following real-world utilization beginning in late 2021, millions of patients worldwide have been treated with NMV-r and many studies have described outcomes following treatment. This systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to summarize the real-world clinical impact of NMV-r to inform healthcare decision-making. Methods Real-world studies of NMV-r use available in English, with ≥5 subjects, and reporting on hospitalization and/or mortality outcomes were identified from Embase, PubMed, and relevant congress abstracts. Studies were evaluated for eligibility using population, intervention, comparison, outcome, study design criteria and time period (Dec 2021-Nov 2022) (Table 1). Dual-independent screening was used at the title, abstract and full-text levels with third reviewer consensus; data were extracted by a single reviewer with validation by a second reviewer prior to a quality rating assessment.Table 1.Population-Intervention-Comparators-Outcomes-Study Design Criteria Results The SLR identified 28 eligible studies (Figure 1) representing 74,386 subjects that received NMV-r. The majority of studies reported on use in the United States (n=13) and patient vaccination status (n=25). Of the 16 studies that reported variant or sub-lineage data, all included patients treated during the Omicron period. Despite differences in baseline patient characteristics, treatment with NMV-r was consistently associated with a reduction in relative risk for hospitalization alone (n=5) or hospitalization and mortality (n=20). Studies that measured 30-day all-cause hospitalization (n=3) reported odds ratios (ORs) ranging from 0.43 to 0.54 (NMV-r vs. no NMV-r). Three studies measured 28-day all-cause mortality and reported ORs ranging from 0.05 to 0.23 (NMV-r vs. no NMV-r).Figure 1.Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Flow Diagram Conclusion Real-world studies show that NMV-r provides effective protection against hospitalization and death during the Omicron era among high-risk individuals. Outcomes following use of NMV-r in the real-world should be continually monitored as new studies are published and as the natural history of COVID-19 and treatment landscape continue to evolve. Disclosures Ashley S. Cha-Silva, PharmD, MS, Pfizer Inc.: Employee|Pfizer Inc.: Stocks/Bonds Meghan B. Gavaghan, MPH, Pfizer: Advisor/Consultant Jennifer L. Nguyen, ScD, MPH, MHCI, pfizer: employee Ronika Alexander-Parrish, RN, MAEd, Pfizer, Inc.: Employee|Pfizer, Inc.: Stocks/Bonds Jingyan Yang, MHS, DrPH, Pfizer Inc.: Stocks/Bonds Jaymin Patel, PharmD, Pfizer: Advisor/Consultant Denise A. Garner, PharmD, Pfizer: Advisor/Consultant Richard Stanford, PharmD, MS, Pfizer: Advisor/Consultant Genevieve Meier, PharmD, MSc, PhD, Pfizer: Advisor/Consultant

On the morning of Thursday, 4 May 2006, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing entitled “Terrorist Use of the Internet.” The Intelligence committee meeting was scheduled to take place in Room 1302 of the Longworth Office Building, a Depression-era structure with a neoclassical façade. Because of a dysfunctional elevator, some of the congressional representatives were late to the meeting. During the testimony about the newest political applications for cutting-edge digital technology, the microphones periodically malfunctioned, and witnesses complained of “technical problems” several times. By the end of the day it seemed that what was to be remembered about the hearing was the shocking revelation that terrorists were using videogames to recruit young jihadists. The Associated Press wrote a short, restrained article about the hearing that only mentioned “computer games and recruitment videos” in passing. Eager to have their version of the news item picked up, Reuters made videogames the focus of their coverage with a headline that announced, “Islamists Using US Videogames in Youth Appeal.” Like a game of telephone, as the Reuters videogame story was quickly re-run by several Internet news services, each iteration of the title seemed less true to the exact language of the original. One Internet news service changed the headline to “Islamic militants recruit using U.S. video games.” Fox News re-titled the story again to emphasise that this alert about technological manipulation was coming from recognised specialists in the anti-terrorism surveillance field: “Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games.” As the story circulated, the body of the article remained largely unchanged, in which the Reuters reporter described the digital materials from Islamic extremists that were shown at the congressional hearing. During the segment that apparently most captured the attention of the wire service reporters, eerie music played as an English-speaking narrator condemned the “infidel” and declared that he had “put a jihad” on them, as aerial shots moved over 3D computer-generated images of flaming oil facilities and mosques covered with geometric designs. Suddenly, this menacing voice-over was interrupted by an explosion, as a virtual rocket was launched into a simulated military helicopter. The Reuters reporter shared this dystopian vision from cyberspace with Western audiences by quoting directly from the chilling commentary and describing a dissonant montage of images and remixed sound. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults. Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001, statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity. According to the news reports, the key piece of evidence before Congress seemed to be a film by “SonicJihad” of recorded videogame play, which – according to the experts – was widely distributed online. Much of the clip takes place from the point of view of a first-person shooter, seen as if through the eyes of an armed insurgent, but the viewer also periodically sees third-person action in which the player appears as a running figure wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh, who dashes toward the screen with a rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder. Significantly, another of the player’s hand-held weapons is a detonator that triggers remote blasts. As jaunty music plays, helicopters, tanks, and armoured vehicles burst into smoke and flame. Finally, at the triumphant ending of the video, a green and white flag bearing a crescent is hoisted aloft into the sky to signify victory by Islamic forces. To explain the existence of this digital alternative history in which jihadists could be conquerors, the Reuters story described the deviousness of the country’s terrorist opponents, who were now apparently modifying popular videogames through their wizardry and inserting anti-American, pro-insurgency content into U.S.-made consumer technology. One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular “Battlefield 2” from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as “mods,” to video games. “Millions of people create mods on games around the world,” he said. “We have absolutely no control over them. It’s like drawing a mustache on a picture.” Although the Electronic Arts executive dismissed the activities of modders as a “mustache on a picture” that could only be considered little more than childish vandalism of their off-the-shelf corporate product, others saw a more serious form of criminality at work. Testifying experts and the legislators listening on the committee used the video to call for greater Internet surveillance efforts and electronic counter-measures. Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source. Ironically, the moment in the movie from which the sound clip is excerpted is one about intelligence gathering. As an agent of Team America, a fictional elite U.S. commando squad, the hero of the film’s all-puppet cast, Gary Johnston, is impersonating a jihadist radical inside a hostile Egyptian tavern that is modelled on the cantina scene from Star Wars. Additional laughs come from the fact that agent Johnston is accepted by the menacing terrorist cell as “Hakmed,” despite the fact that he utters a series of improbable clichés made up of incoherent stereotypes about life in the Middle East while dressed up in a disguise made up of shoe polish and a turban from a bathroom towel. The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists. It wasn’t intended for the purpose what it was portrayed to be by the media. So no I don’t regret making a funny video . . . why should I? The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters was objective and always right. The least they could do is some online research before publishing this. If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video, that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is everything al-Qaeda? Although Sonic Jihad dismissed his own work as “silly” or “funny,” he expected considerably more from a credible news agency like Reuters: “objective” reporting, “online research,” and fact-checking before “publishing.” Within the week, almost all of the salient details in the Reuters story were revealed to be incorrect. SonicJihad’s film was not made by terrorists or for terrorists: it was not created by “Islamic militants” for “Muslim youths.” The videogame it depicted had not been modified by a “tech-savvy militant” with advanced programming skills. Of course, what is most extraordinary about this story isn’t just that Reuters merely got its facts wrong; it is that a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play. Based on their exchanges in the public record, elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal. This environment of cultural reaction can be used to explain why policy makers’ reaction to terrorists’ use of networked communication and digital media actually tells us more about our own American ideologies about technology and rhetoric in a contemporary information environment. When the experts come forward at the Sonic Jihad hearing to “walk us through the media and some of the products,” they present digital artefacts of an information economy that mirrors many of the features of our own consumption of objects of electronic discourse, which seem dangerously easy to copy and distribute and thus also create confusion about their intended meanings, audiences, and purposes. From this one hearing we can see how the reception of many new digital genres plays out in the public sphere of legislative discourse. Web pages, videogames, and Weblogs are mentioned specifically in the transcript. The main architecture of the witnesses’ presentation to the committee is organised according to the rhetorical conventions of a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, the arguments made by expert witnesses about the relationship of orality to literacy or of public to private communications in new media are highly relevant to how we might understand other important digital genres, such as electronic mail or text messaging. The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property. To explain embarrassing leaks of infinitely replicable digital files, witness Ron Roughead says, “We’re not even sure that they don’t even hack into the kinds of spaces that hold photographs in order to get pictures that our forces have taken.” Another witness, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and International Affairs, Peter Rodman claims that “any video game that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and change the game for their needs.” Thus, the implication of these witnesses’ testimony is that the release of code into the public domain can contribute to political subversion, much as covert intrusion into computer networks by stealthy hackers can. However, the witnesses from the Pentagon and from the government contractor SAIC often present a contradictory image of the supposed terrorists in the hearing transcripts. Sometimes the enemy is depicted as an organisation of technological masterminds, capable of manipulating the computer code of unwitting Americans and snatching their rightful intellectual property away; sometimes those from the opposing forces are depicted as pre-modern and even sub-literate political innocents. In contrast, the congressional representatives seem to focus on similarities when comparing the work of “terrorists” to the everyday digital practices of their constituents and even of themselves. According to the transcripts of this open hearing, legislators on both sides of the aisle express anxiety about domestic patterns of Internet reception. Even the legislators’ own Web pages are potentially disruptive electronic artefacts, particularly when the demands of digital labour interfere with their duties as lawmakers. Although the subject of the hearing is ostensibly terrorist Websites, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) bemoans the difficulty of maintaining her own official congressional site. As she observes, “So we are – as members, I think we’re very sensitive about what’s on our Website, and if I retained what I had on my Website three years ago, I’d be out of business. So we know that they have to be renewed. They go up, they go down, they’re rebuilt, they’re – you know, the message is targeted to the future.” In their questions, lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions. Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) compares the polluting power of insurgent bloggers to that of influential online muckrakers from the American political Right. Hastings complains of “garbage on our regular mainstream news that comes from blog sites.” Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) attempts to project a media-savvy persona by bringing up the “phenomenon of blogging” in conjunction with her questions about jihadist Websites in which she notes how Internet traffic can be magnified by cooperative ventures among groups of ideologically like-minded content-providers: “These Websites, and particularly the most active ones, are they cross-linked? And do they have kind of hot links to your other favorite sites on them?” At one point Representative Wilson asks witness Rodman if he knows “of your 100 hottest sites where the Webmasters are educated? What nationality they are? Where they’re getting their money from?” In her questions, Wilson implicitly acknowledges that Web work reflects influences from pedagogical communities, economic networks of the exchange of capital, and even potentially the specific ideologies of nation-states. It is perhaps indicative of the government contractors’ anachronistic worldview that the witness is unable to answer Wilson’s question. He explains that his agency focuses on the physical location of the server or ISP rather than the social backgrounds of the individuals who might be manufacturing objectionable digital texts. The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries. The residual subtexts in the witnesses’ conjectures about competing cultures of orality and literacy may tell us something about a reactionary rhetoric around videogames and digital culture more generally. According to the experts before Congress, the Middle Eastern audience for these videogames and Websites is limited by its membership in a pre-literate society that is only capable of abortive cultural production without access to knowledge that is archived in printed codices. Sometimes the witnesses before Congress seem to be unintentionally channelling the ideas of the late literacy theorist Walter Ong about the “secondary orality” associated with talky electronic media such as television, radio, audio recording, or telephone communication. Later followers of Ong extend this concept of secondary orality to hypertext, hypermedia, e-mail, and blogs, because they similarly share features of both speech and written discourse. Although Ong’s disciples celebrate this vibrant reconnection to a mythic, communal past of what Kathleen Welch calls “electric rhetoric,” the defence industry consultants express their profound state of alarm at the potentially dangerous and subversive character of this hybrid form of communication. The concept of an “oral tradition” is first introduced by the expert witnesses in the context of modern marketing and product distribution: “The Internet is used for a variety of things – command and control,” one witness states. “One of the things that’s missed frequently is how and – how effective the adversary is at using the Internet to distribute product. They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of oral tradition, if you will.” Thus, although the Internet can be deployed for hierarchical “command and control” activities, it also functions as a highly efficient peer-to-peer distributed network for disseminating the commodity of information. Throughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order. Witness Eric Michael describes the “oral tradition” and the conventions of communal life in the Middle East to emphasise the primacy of speech in the collective discursive practices of this alien population: “I’d like to point your attention to the media types and the fact that the oral tradition is listed as most important. The other media listed support that. And the significance of the oral tradition is more than just – it’s the medium by which, once it comes off the Internet, it is transferred.” The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era. The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A[n] event takes place. There is an explosion in a city. Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is doing indiscriminate killing. This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution. It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the story and broadcasts it, at which point it’s now a fact. In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go back to this false initial report on network television and continue to reiterate that it’s a fact, even though the United States government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the network has since recanted the broadcast. In this example, many-to-many discussion on the “street” is formalised into a one-to many “sermon” and then further stylised using technology in a one-to-many broadcast on “network television” in which “propaganda” that is “false” can no longer be disputed. This “oral tradition” is like digital media, because elements of discourse can be infinitely copied or “recycled,” and it is designed to “reiterate” content. In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.” The film by SonicJihad is chosen as the final clip by the witnesses before Congress, because it allegedly combines many different types of emotional appeal, and thus it conveniently ties together all of the themes that the witnesses present to the legislators about unreliable oral or rhetorical sources in the Middle East: And there you see how all these products are linked together. And you can see where the games are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces. You can see how they use humor. You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct that response in the direction that they want. Jihadist digital products, especially videogames, are effective means of manipulation, the witnesses argue, because they employ multiple channels of persuasion and carefully sequenced and integrated subliminal messages. To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses. This sharp criticism of the artful use of a presentation style that is “crafted” is ironic, given that the witnesses’ “compilation” of jihadist digital material is staged in the form of a carefully structured PowerPoint presentation, one that is paced to a well-rehearsed rhythm of “slide, please” or “next slide” in the transcript. The transcript also reveals that the members of the House Intelligence Committee were not the original audience for the witnesses’ PowerPoint presentation. Rather, when it was first created by SAIC, this “expert” presentation was designed for training purposes for the troops on the ground, who would be facing the challenges of deployment in hostile terrain. According to the witnesses, having the slide show showcased before Congress was something of an afterthought. Nonetheless, Congressman Tiahrt (R-KN) is so impressed with the rhetorical mastery of the consultants that he tries to appropriate it. As Tiarht puts it, “I’d like to get a copy of that slide sometime.” From the hearing we also learn that the terrorists’ Websites are threatening precisely because they manifest a polymorphously perverse geometry of expansion. For example, one SAIC witness before the House Committee compares the replication and elaboration of digital material online to a “spiderweb.” Like Representative Eshoo’s site, he also notes that the terrorists’ sites go “up” and “down,” but the consultant is left to speculate about whether or not there is any “central coordination” to serve as an organising principle and to explain the persistence and consistency of messages despite the apparent lack of a single authorial ethos to offer a stable, humanised, point of reference. In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.” Of course, to maintain their share of the government market, the Science Applications International Corporation also employs practices of publicity and promotion through the Internet and digital media. They use HTML Web pages for these purposes, as well as PowerPoint presentations and online video. The rhetoric of the Website of SAIC emphasises their motto “From Science to Solutions.” After a short Flash film about how SAIC scientists and engineers solve “complex technical problems,” the visitor is taken to the home page of the firm that re-emphasises their central message about expertise. The maps, uniforms, and specialised tools and equipment that are depicted in these opening Web pages reinforce an ethos of professional specialisation that is able to respond to multiple threats posed by the “global war on terror.” By 26 June 2006, the incident finally was being described as a “Pentagon Snafu” by ABC News. From the opening of reporter Jake Tapper’s investigative Webcast, established government institutions were put on the spot: “So, how much does the Pentagon know about videogames? Well, when it came to a recent appearance before Congress, apparently not enough.” Indeed, the very language about “experts” that was highlighted in the earlier coverage is repeated by Tapper in mockery, with the significant exception of “independent expert” Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If the Pentagon and SAIC deride the legitimacy of rhetoric as a cultural practice, Bogost occupies himself with its defence. In his recent book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost draws upon the authority of the “2,500 year history of rhetoric” to argue that videogames represent a significant development in that cultural narrative. Given that Bogost and his Watercooler Games Weblog co-editor Gonzalo Frasca were actively involved in the detective work that exposed the depth of professional incompetence involved in the government’s line-up of witnesses, it is appropriate that Bogost is given the final words in the ABC exposé. As Bogost says, “We should be deeply bothered by this. We should really be questioning the kind of advice that Congress is getting.” Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see. References ABC News. “Terrorist Videogame?” Nightline Online. 21 June 2006. 22 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2105341>. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Game Politics. “Was Congress Misled by ‘Terrorist’ Game Video? We Talk to Gamer Who Created the Footage.” 11 May 2006. http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/285129.html#cutid1>. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. julieb. “David Morgan Is a Horrible Writer and Should Be Fired.” Online posting. 5 May 2006. Dvorak Uncensored Cage Match Forums. http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,130.0.html>. Mahmood. “Terrorists Don’t Recruit with Battlefield 2.” GGL Global Gaming. 16 May 2006 http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3090>. Morgan, David. “Islamists Using U.S. Video Games in Youth Appeal.” Reuters online news service. 4 May 2006 http://today.reuters.com/news/ArticleNews.aspx?type=topNews &storyID=2006-05-04T215543Z_01_N04305973_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY- VIDEOGAMES.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc= NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2>. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Methuen, 1982. Parker, Trey. Online posting. 7 May 2006. 9 May 2006 http://www.treyparker.com>. Plato. “Gorgias.” Plato: Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Shrader, Katherine. “Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites.” Associated Press 4 May 2006. SonicJihad. “SonicJihad: A Day in the Life of a Resistance Fighter.” Online posting. 26 Dec. 2005. Planet Battlefield Forums. 9 May 2006 http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefield/topic.asp?fid=13670&tid=1806909&p=1>. Tapper, Jake, and Audery Taylor. “Terrorist Video Game or Pentagon Snafu?” ABC News Nightline 21 June 2006. 30 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Technology/story?id=2105128&page=1>. U.S. Congressional Record. Panel I of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Subject: “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Communications.” Federal News Service. 4 May 2006. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and the New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Losh, Elizabeth. "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>. APA Style Losh, E. (Oct. 2007) "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>.

“I’m saying let’s make it 84 percent turnout in two years, and then see what happens!” …“Oh, yes! Vote! Dress yourself up, and vote! Even if you only go into the voting booth and pray. Do that!” Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toni Morrison on the 2000 Presidential election in June Jordan’s essay, “The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage” (2001) On September 17, 2003, Citizenship Day, the United States was to adopt a new version of its Oath of Allegiance. The updated version would modernize the oath by removing cumbersome words like “abjure” and dropping anachronistic references like “potentate.” Thus the oral recitation marking the entrance into citizenship would become more meaningful—and more manageable—for the millions of immigrants eligible for naturalization. The revised version, however, was quickly canned after conservative organizations, senators, and other loud political leaders decried what they saw as an attack on a timeless document and a weakening of the military obligation foundational to entrance into the American citizenry. The Heritage Foundation, one such organization opposing the perceived attack on citizenship, issued an executive statement decrying “the Department of Homeland Security's misguided attempts to make U.S. citizenship more ‘user-friendly’ for those who want the benefits of our country, but don't care to accept the responsibility” (n.pag.). Indeed, the thwarted attempt to make citizenship procedures more welcoming arose at a curious time. Though the proposed changes arose from a long, rather mundane administrative initiative to reconsider various procedural issues, the debate over the Oath of Allegiance politicized the issue within the context of the war on terror and the constriction of entrances into the national turf. The Bush administration responded to events referred to as 9/11 with vigorous efforts to shore up national borders within a language of terrorism, evildoers, and the dire need for domestic security. The infamous Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) became the consumerist, welcome-sounding Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services when it was placed it under the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. The consolidation of citizenship services and disparate border policing programs further bolsters the longstanding scrutiny of immigrants—especially those considered not-white—for their ideological commitment and adherence to current national ideals. Naturalization requires a uniform recitation of unhesitant adherence to official doctrines—and a stated commitment to fight and die for those ideals. War, it seems, and its necessary division of friends and foes (“evildoers”), occupies the dead center of official ceremonies of citizenship. Naturalization procedures demonstrate how the figure of the immigrant undergoes rigorous scrutiny and thus defines the bounds of American citizenship. However, as immigration scholars like Bonnie Honig, Mai Ngai, Linda Bosniak, and Judith Shklar have shown, the specter of the immigrant also serves as an exculpatory device for preexisting inequities by obscuring internal division. While immigrants perform allegiance publicly to obtain citizenship status, birth-right citizens are presumed to have been born with a natural allegiance that precludes multiple allegiances to ideologies, projects, or potentates outside national borders. Ideas about the necessity of pairing exclusive ideological commitment with citizenship are as old as the American nation, notwithstanding the tremendous volume of announcements of a new world order in the wake of 9/11. In all incarnations of the citizenship oath, full membership in the nation-state via naturalization requires a simultaneous oath of allegiance and renunciation. Entrance into the nation-state requires exit—from ideological turf more than geographic turf—from the newly naturalized citizen’s former home country. Though scholars of diasporic and cosmopolitan identities like Aihwa Ong, Phengh Cheah, Bruce Robbins, and Brent Edwards have questioned the viability of the nation-state in postmodernity, official American articulations of citizenship adhere to a longstanding phenomenon whereby inclusion within the polity requires a simultaneous exclusion or renunciation. Or, in the realm of rhetoric, any articulation of a “we” requires a simultaneous citation of a “not-we.” At the heart of citizenship is a cleavage: a coming together made possible by a splitting apart. It is not mere historical curiosity that the notorious utterance of “We” in the Action of the Second Continental Congress popularly known as the Declaration of Independence is forged in direct opposition to a “He” (King George III)—repeated no less than nineteen times in the short document. In contrast, “we” appears only eleven times. What the Declaration shows, and what the Oath of Allegiance insists, is that the constitution of a bounded polity in America emphasizes external difference in order to create the semblance of an internally homogeneous “we.” Thus arises the potency of national documents that announce equality amidst a decidedly unequal social order. These documents provide the ring of broad inclusion for what Rogers M. Smith has described as “civic myths”: ideals of full equality that politicians cite enthusiastically without worrying about their veracity in the everyday lives of the citizenry. Yet American archives and literary histories teem with protest writing that makes visible the internal divisions of American publics. In these literatures arises a figure that threatens the fragile story of a finished “we” based on uniform allegiance: the partial citizen speaking. The partial citizen speaking—from experience, on behalf of others—and addressing the real divisions within a national audience is situated at a strategic site at which to simultaneously claim and critique the inclusive pronouncements of the American Republic in order to make them real. The best example is Frederick Douglass who, having been invited to celebrate the nation in 1848, capitalized on his tenuous claim to citizenship status and delivered the speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In the speech, Douglass excoriates his audience in Rochester, New York on behalf of the slaves absent from Corinthian Hall because they are toiling on Southern plantations. To his “fellow-citizens” Douglass cries, “This Fourth of July is yours not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (116). In contradistinction to leaders’ duplicitous uses of civic myths eschewed by Smith, protesters like Douglass use their partial citizenship to gain a toehold on the viable, but unfinished project of full democracy for all. By claiming the essential American-ness of their projects, protesters like Douglass position their present projects as the fulfillment of previous national promises. In her study of foreigners’ critiques of America, Bonnie Honig shows how “[Foreigners] make room for themselves by staging nonexistent rights, and by way of such stagings, sometimes, new rights, powers, and visions come into being” (101). In the wake of 9/11, we must be interested in the rhetorical means of similar stagings by those already inside presumed national borders who have been denied full access to, or enjoyment of civic, economic, and/or social rights. These partial citizens speaking and writing stage heretofore nonexistent rights by claiming preexisting civic myths by, for, and on behalf of voices that were never meant to speak such civic myths as truths. Sometime after 9/11, President George W. Bush took the virtually unprecedented step of labeling U.S. citizens like Yasir Hamdi and José Padilla “enemy combatants” in order to circumvent the guaranteed legal rights to counsel and trial afforded to all U.S. citizens. The arbitrary nullification of Hamdi’s and Padilla’s citizenship rights was not entirely new given that protest has often been seen as forfeiture of citizenship. In addition to the obvious example of the allegiance-renunciation pairing in the citizenship oath, we can turn to Emma Goldman’s deportation to Russia in 1919, or to the odd favor with which the exit plans of Garveyites and their predecessors have been received. Or, squarely within American borders, Henry David Thoreau’s blueprint of civil disobedience pairs protest with the withdrawal from collectivity (his refusal to pay poll taxes in protest of the Mexican War), a move which bolsters the notion that dissent necessitates a retraction from participation in the public sphere. However, there is another option: collectivity in the face of division. Protesters like Douglass occupy the outposts of real publics that can deliver the ineffable social equality of the modern democratic state. Here, those whose very citizenship is in question are the ones to sift through the promises of the nation-state and to hold them against the evidence of experience—their own and that of others for whom they speak. Participation in the state is more than adherence and renunciation. If Toni Morrison would just as soon have us enter a polling station to pray as to vote; so, too, protesters like Douglass demand hope amidst despairing situations of inequality—often state-sponsored. Their projects are never to simply unveil inconsistency between state promises and the experiences of subsets of its citizenry. Squarely within the circuitous myths that enshroud the state’s turf, these protesters stake claims to the very national myths that threaten their existence. Works Cited Bosniak, Linda. “Citizenship.” The Oxford Handbook of Legal Studies. Eds. Peter Can & MarkTushnet. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 183-201. Cheah, Phengh, and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Douglass, Frederick. “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” 1848. Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 108-30. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Govindarajan, Shweta. “Criticism Puts Citizenship Oath Revision on Hold; Conservatives Pan Immigration Officials’ Modernization of the Long-Used Pledge.” Los Angeles Times 19 Sep. 2003, sect. 1:13. The Heritage Foundation. First They Attacked the Pledge, Now the Oath. 10 Sep. 2003. <http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/meeseletter.cfm>. Honig, Bonnie. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Jordan, June. “The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage.” Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan. New York: Basic Books, 2001. 16-19. Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. Shklar, Judith N. American Citizenship and the Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Websites Department of Homeland Security: www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Norman, Brian J. "Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/04-allegiance.php>. APA Style Norman, B. (2004, Mar17). Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/04-allegiance.php>

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. 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