Articoli di riviste sul tema "Serious sin manifest"

Resumen: La impunidad se define como la ausencia de castigo a los responsables de cometer delitos. En el caso de México, destaca la impunidad por el crimen de desaparición forzada de personas. La desaparición forzada se ha manifestado en México al menos en tres periodos: la Guerra Sucia, el conflicto Zapatista y la guerra contra las drogas. Los crímenes que se han cometido en esos contextos permanecen sin castigo, por lo que las víctimas permanecen sin ser reparadas de manera integral.El artículo busca dimensionar el caso mexicano sobre el crimen de la desaparición forzada a la luz de los elementos que componen el concepto de impunidad. Además, plantea una serie de propuestas tendientes a contribuir a la erradicación de la impunidad por graves violaciones a derechos humanos.Palabras clave: Derechos Humanos, impunidad, desaparición forzada, crimen, violencia.Abstract: Impunity is defined as the absence of punishment for those responsible for committing crimes. In the case of Mexico, impunity stands out for the crime of enforced disappearance of persons. The enforced disappearance has manifested in Mexico in at least three periods: the Dirty War, the Zapatista conflict and the war on drugs. The crimes that have been committed in those contexts remain unpunished, so that the victims remain without an integral reparation.The article seeks to analyze the Mexican case on the crime of forced disappearance considering the elements that make up the concept of impunity. In addition, it explores a series of proposals tending to contribute to the eradication of impunity for serious human rights violations.Keywords: Human Rights, impunity, forced disappearance, crime, violence.

Utopia is a universal concept, as manifested by the fact that it has attracted readers of five centuries and has influenced numerous writers. It is obvious that people, recognizing the abundant stupidities, corruptions, and injustice prevalent in their society, should attempt to plan a better system for living together. Whether they can reach such a society or not is the fundamental question found in most Vonnegut’s works. The utopian schemes in Vonnegut’s works such as the settlement of San Lorenzo in Cat’s Cradle, almost always backfire, often bringing about more problems than they promise to solve. Therefore, in this paper, it is aimed to emphasize Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle regarding the concepts of utopia and dystopia as well as apocalyptical notions. Apocalypse can be investigated in Cat’s Cradle and it gives a serious quality to Vonnegut’s work. The emptiness of mere survival is painfully described in Cat's Cradle, in which the earth is locked in frozen death.

T. Kryukova’s fairy tale “Prisoner of the mirror”, the central part of the tetralogy about Queen Zlata and Moon Knight, accumulates various mythological, folklore and literary models. It contains various forms of literary intertextuality, the most important role for understanding the hidden meanings of a fairy tale is played by mythopoetic images and representative allusions. The leitmotif of the looking-glass world, which is the main one for the fairy tale “Prisoner of the mirror”, continues the traditions of ancient mythology, and then Russian and European literature of the 19th–20th centuries, representing the world in a reflected form. The phenomenon of the dialogue of text with other texts, proposed by M.M. Bakhtin, makes it possible to reveal the deep content layers of the work in question. The technique of mythological bricolage, which is manifested in the use of characters and plot moves of ancient Greek mythology, makes it possible to demonstrate, according to Bakhtin, the “holiday of the meaning revival”: the characters of ancient myths Pan, Narcissus symbolize the demonic beginning and the hopelessness of sin, with the exception of the nymph Echo, who appears as the personification of selfless love and acts in an unusual role for her mythological status as a magical assistant to children. In the fairy tale there is also a mixture of heterogeneous characters, some combine the features of an ancient prototype and a character of Russian folklore (Odarka). The traditional characters of Russian folk tales (Bear, Fox, Cat) receive a new status of arbiters of judgment and punishment. Reminiscences from the fairy tales of Ch. Perrault and H.-C. Andersen, L. Carroll and V. Gubarev complicate the artistic drawing of the work. The fate theme, fate, which runs through the work, undergoes a serious transformation in the fairy tale. In ancient fate, as the plot develops, the features of divine providence in the Christian sense become more and more distinct. The position of Varga, who denies personal guilt and responsibility for sin, appears as untenable, the image of the Mirror of Judgment directly refers the reader to the ethical teachings of Christianity. Fairy tale discourse allows the author to declare the Christian paradigm of moral values in a complex interaction of borrowed and original characters, motives, plot moves.

The focus of this scientific paper is ecological conversion. The author sees it from the perspective of Pope Francis Laudato Si's Encyclical. Today it cannot be hidden that injustice to the environment, flora and fauna, natural resources, and fellow human beings is a serious problem. The author can call this problem ecological injustice. Because of that, the author takes the theme of ecological repentance in the light of the Encyclical Laudato Si. The purpose of this scientific writing is that the writer discover the concept of ecological conversion and realizes the concept of ecological conversion in the light of Laudato Si's Encyclical. In the process of scientific writing, the author uses two sources. The first source, let's say as a primary source, is the Encyclical Laudato Si. The second source as a secondary source is an article that has been previously written by another author. The author searches for these sources by using Google. The trick is to search for Google Scholar. The author uses the method of reading and analyzing primary sources and secondary sources as a reference to further strengthen the author's argument. After about 1 month, the writer managed to find two points as the purpose of this writing. First, the concept of repentance according to Laudato Si, realizes that the earth belongs together as brothers and sisters. This requires confessing sin as a form of God's presence in the world. What is prioritized is the motivation born of spirituality to preserve nature. Second, realizing the concept of ecological repentance. we must have education and spirituality as capital to view other creations as brothers. This from the Encyclical Laudato Si is proof that the Catholic Church has a living love, so that love is manifested with a sense of concern for God's fellow creatures.

Abstract Central nervous system (CNS) prophylaxis has led to a significant improvement in the outcome of patients with acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL). Liposomal cytarabine (Enzon Pharmaceuticals, Piscataway, NJ; Skye Pharma, San Diego, CA), an intrathecal (IT) preparation of cytarabine with a prolonged half-life, has been shown to be safe and effective in the treatment of neoplastic meningitis. Liposomal cytarabine was given for CNS prophylaxis to 31 patients with newly diagnosed ALL. All patients were treated concurrently with hyper-CVAD chemotherapy (fractionated cyclophosphamide, vincristine, doxorubicin, and dexamethasone) including high-dose methotrexate (MTX) and cytarabine on alternating courses. Liposomal cytarabine 50 mg was given intrathecally on days 2 and 15 of hyper-CVAD and day 10 of high-dose MTX and cytarabine courses until completion of either 3, 6, or 10 IT treatments, depending on risk for CNS disease. Five patients (16%) experienced serious unexpected neurotoxicity, including seizures, papilledema, cauda equina syndrome (n = 2), and encephalitis after a median of 4 IT administrations of liposomal cytarabine. Toxicities usually manifested after the MTX and cytarabine courses. One patient died with progressive encephalitis. After a median follow-up of 7 months, no isolated CNS relapses have been observed. Liposomal cytarabine given via intrathecal route concomitantly with systemic chemotherapy that crosses the blood-brain barrier such as high-dose MTX and cytarabine can result in significant neurotoxicity.

Abstract Introduction: Allogeneic stem cell transplantation (alloSCT) can provide a cure for myeloid malignancies partially through the graft-vs-leukemia effect (GVL), wherein donor-derived alloreactive T cells attack recipient leukemia cells. Preclinical data strongly suggested IFN-γ is crucial for effective GVL against myeloblastic leukemia. IFN-γ receptor gene-deficient myeloblastic leukemia were resistant to GVL in mouse models (Matte-Martone, Shlomchik JCI 2017). IFN-γ upregulated HLA expression in relapsed myeloblasts in vitro (Christopher NEJM 2018, Toffalori Nat Med 2019). We hypothesized that IFN-γ would sensitize myeloblasts to alloreactive T cells and promote GVL. Here, we present the results of a phase 1 study to evaluate the safety of IFN-γ combined with donor leukocyte infusions (DLI) for relapsed myeloblastic malignancies post-transplant (NCT04628338). Methods: HLA-matched donor alloSCT recipients with relapsed acute myeloid leukemia (AML) or myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and no active graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) were eligible. Patients self-administered 100mcg IFN-γ (Actimmune, Horizon Therapeutics) three times a week for 4 weeks (cohort 1) or 1 week (cohort 2), followed by DLI and concurrent IFN-γ for a total of 12 weeks. Flow cytometry-based surface HLA expression and single-cell RNAseq (scRNAseq) were analyzed using bone marrow (BM) collected before and after IFN-γ. Results: Seven patients with high-risk diseases (2 MDS and 5 AML) were enrolled. There were no serious adverse events during IFN-γ monotherapy. After DLI, 5 patients developed grade I-II GVHD along with immune effector cell-associated neurotoxicity syndrome (grade 1 or 2; n=2) and idiopathic pneumonia syndrome (IPS; n=1). All immune-mediated toxicities, including IPS, resolved with corticosteroids. 4 out of 6 DLI recipients achieved minimal residual disease negative complete remissions and full donor hematopoietic cell reconstitution. The median overall survival was 579 days (range, 97-906) in responders. Myeloid blasts upregulated HLA-DR after IFN-γ, and enrichment of recipient malignant hematopoietic stem cells expressing CIITA was observed in post-IFN-γ BM by scRNAseq. Conclusions: This first in human use of IFN-γ to treat post-transplant relapse was safe, with a promising efficacy signal when combined with DLI. Correlative studies support our hypothesis that in vivo IFN-γ activates myeloblasts, manifest by HLA-DR upregulation and CIITA induction. We plan to design a phase 2 trial to formally test the efficacy of this novel immunotherapeutic approach to boost GVL in alloSCT. Citation Format: Sawa Ito, Emily Geramita, Kedwin Ventura, Biswas Neupane, Shruti Bhise, Scott N. Furlan, Warren D. Shromchik. IFN-γ and donor leukocyte infusion to treat relapsed myeloblastic malignancies after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 2 (Late-Breaking, Clinical Trial, and Invited Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(7_Suppl):Abstract nr CT143.

AbstractBackground: Stigma towards severe mental illness manifests in different ways across cultures and only recently has a theoretical perspective emerged to understand such cultural differences. The ‘What Matters Most’ framework identifies culturally specific dimensions of stigma by identifying the interactions between cultural norms, roles, and values that impact personhood.Objective: This study explores the cultural underpinnings that create and maintain stigmatizing attitudes towards severe mental illness in Chile.Methods: In-depth interviews developed using the ‘Scale of Perceived Discrimination and Devaluation’, and the ‘What Matters Most’ framework were conducted with twenty people identified as having a severe mental illness. Interviews were coded and discussed until agreement was reached, then analyzed by an independent reviewer to determine inter-rater reliability.Results: A key factor shaping stigma among women was the loss of capacity to accomplish family roles (i.e. take care of children).or men, cultural notions of ‘Machismo’ prevented them from disclosing their psychiatric diagnosis as a means to maintain status and ability to work. A protective factor against stigma for men was their ability to guide and provide for the family, thus fulfilling responsibilities attributable to ‘Familismo’. Social appearances could play either a shaping or protecting role,contingent on the social status of the individual.Discussion: In Chilean culture, stigma is rooted in gendered social characteristics and shared familial roles. Interventions should aim to address these norms and incorporate culturally salient protective factors to reduce stigma experienced by individuals with serious mental illness in Chile and other Latin American settings. ResumenAntecedentes: Estigma hacia la enfermedad mental se manifiesta en diferentes formas dependiendo de la cultura, sin embargo solo recientemente se ha desarrollado una perspectiva teórica para entender dichas diferencias culturales. El abordaje de ‘what matter most’ es capaz de identificar dimensiones culturalmente específicas relativas al estigma por medio de la identificación y extracción de las normas culturales, roles y valores que impactan la identidad de las personas.Objetivo: El presente estudio explora los cimientos culturales que crean y mantienen las actitudes estigmatizantes hacia las enfermedades mentales en Chile. Métodos: Se desarrollaron 20 entrevistas en profundidad en personas con trastorno mental severo utilizando la ‘Escala de Discriminación y Devaluación Percibida’ y orientadas por el enfoque ‘What Matter Most’. Las entrevistas fueron codificadas y discutidas hasta alcanzar grados de acuerdo apropiados, cuestióndeterminada por un revisor independiente que calculó el grado de acuerdo inter-jueces.Resultados: Un aspecto clave para moldear la expresión del estigma entre mujeres fue la pérdida de la capacidad para cumplir con su rol de dueña de casa (i.e. cuidar de sus hijos), mientras en los hombres nociones culturales asociadas al ‘Machismo’ impidieron que ellos develaran sus respectivos diagnósticos psiquiátricos para mantener su estatus social y habilidad para trabajar. Por otra parte, un factor protector en contra del estigma en hombres fue mantener su habilidad para guiar y proveer a su familia, y así cumplir plenamente con las responsabilidades atribuidas al ‘Familismo’. Finalmente, las apariencias sociales pueden jugar tanto un rol moldeador o protector en contra del estigma, y esto parece ser contingente al estatus social del individuo.Discusión: Estigma se asocia a características sociales y roles familiares enraizadas en la cultura Chilena. Intervenciones deberían abordajes éstas dimensiones e incorporar aquellos factores protectores que son potenciales recursos para reducir el estigma hacia la enfermedades mentales en Chile y en otros contextos Latinoamericanos.

Abstract Introduction: Hepatopulmonary syndrome (HPS) is characterized by hypoxemia, portal hypertension, and intrapulmonary shunting and manifests as dyspnea. The portal hypertension may be a result of cirrhosis or non-cirrhotic causes such as nodular regenerative hyperplasia of the liver that is associated with drug therapy. Progressive hypoxemia often occurs despite stable liver function. Ado-trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1; KADCYLA) is an antibody-drug conjugate comprised of a humanized monoclonal antibody trastuzumab covalently linked to the cytotoxic agent maytansine. T-DM1 is prescribed in the postneoadjuvant setting in persons with residual invasive HER2-positive (HER2+) breast cancer (BC) as well as in persons with metastatic HER2+ BC who were previously treated with trastuzumab and a taxane. Liver toxicities including an asymptomatic, transient increase in transaminases and nodular regenerative hyperplasia that results in portal hypertension have been described; however, HPS secondary to noncirrhotic portal hypertension occurring with long-term exposure to T-DM1 has not been reported. We have identified patients (pts) with this infrequent, yet serious complication, and we aim to better characterize their clinical course to guide earlier detection and hopefully prevent irreversible hypoxic respiratory failure. Methods: Institutional search tools were utilized to identify pts at Mayo Clinic with HER2+ BC treated with T-DM1 in either the postneoadjuvant or metastatic setting. Electronic health records were manually reviewed for HPS criteria including 1) hypoxemia 2) portal hypertension and 3) intrapulmonary shunt/vasodilation confirmed by contrast echocardiogram or macroaggregated albumin lung perfusion scan. For pts meeting criteria for HPS, imaging was independently reviewed by a hepatologist to determine whether there was preexisting liver disease or if changes occurred after initiation of T-DM1. Results: We identified 259 pts with HER2+ BC treated with T-DM1 in the postneoadjuvant (n=70) or metastatic setting (n=185). Four pts met criteria for HPS (1.5%) while receiving T-DM1 for metastatic disease (Table 1; listed in chronological order of onset of HPS). Median age was 43 (range 35 - 53 years), median prior lines of treatment was 1.5 (range 0 - 7), and the median number of cycles of T-DM1 prior to discontinuation was 68.5 (range 51 - 90). All pts had evidence of left atrial enlargement on echocardiogram, and evidence of portal hypertension as determined by the presence of varices, and splenomegaly. Three pts had documented telangiectasias as well as Grade 1-2 elevations in serum transaminases and bilirubin. Elevations in hemoglobin were noted in 2 pts during treatment with T-DM1. All pts had a confirmed intrapulmonary shunt via contrast echocardiogram and a lung perfusion scan. Three pts discontinued T-DM1 after diagnosis of HPS and experienced some clinical improvement in hypoxia. One pt died two months after stopping T-DM1 due to progression of BC. Conclusion: HPS may occur in the setting of prolonged exposure to T-DM1 and can be associated with severe hypoxic respiratory failure. Further data are required to characterize the spectrum of liver injury that occurs with long-term use of T-DM1 to provide further guidance to clinicians as regards monitoring for these adverse effects. Patients who developed hepatopulmonary syndrome while on T-DM1Age, yrsSites of metastases# lines of prior txCycles of T-DM1Presenting sign or symptomsNon-contrast ECHO findingsSupplemental oxygenTransaminitis; hyperbilirubinemiaEvidence of portal hypertensionTelangiectasiasHgb prior to T-DM1Hgb end of txLung perfusion studyContrast ECHOPt 153LN, bone090DOE, hypoxemia, clubbingleft atrial enlargement (62 mg/m2)YesNovarices, splenomegalyNot documented12.9 g/dL10.7 g/dL13.5%Yes, small shuntPt 235LN, bone, liver751DOEleft atrial enlargement (54 mg/m2)YesGrade 1; Grade 2varices, splenomegaly; thrombocytopeniaYes, face and handsn/a11.9 g/dL24%Yes, large shuntPt 338LN, bone251Hyperbilirubinemiaborderline left atrial enlargementYesGrade 1; Grade 2varices, splenomegalyYes, trunk, extremities, face11.7 g/dL16.2 g/dL17.8%Yes, moderate shuntPt 448LN, liver186DOEleft atrial enlargement (49 mg/m2)NoGrade 1; Grade 2varices, splenomegalyYes, trunk12.5 g/dL16.1 g/dL7.9%Yes, large shunt Citation Format: Ally Higgins, Adham K Alkurashi, Patrick S Kamath, Vivek N Iyer, Ciara O'Sullivan, Tufia C Haddad. Hepatopulmonary syndrome with long term use of ado-trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1) [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 P5-18-03.

Abstract Breast cancer is a serious disease that affects millions of women worldwide, and 700,000 people succumb to the disease annually. Breast cancers are divided into several functional subgroups based on molecular characteristics and growth pattern: Luminal A and B, HER2 positive (HER2+) and triple negative. The subgroups are important from a clinical perspective as they partially guide treatment strategies. In this study we wanted to investigate the difference in target engagement with four drugs indicated for treatment of different types of breast cancer: Alpelisib, Neratinib, Vinorelbine, and Docetaxel. Five different human breast cancer cell lines were included, representing Luminal A (MCF-7, T-47D), HER2+ (SK-BR-3, BT-474), and triple negative (BT-20). We used CETSA® (CEllular Thermal Shift Assay) coupled to mass spectrometry detection to assess proteome wide changes in protein thermal stability in intact breast cancer cell lines. CETSA is unique as a target engagement detection modality as it allows for target engagement assessment in intact cells with unaltered drug molecules. Also, as biology is intact in live cells it is possible to follow compound induced downstream signaling or phenotypic events that result in changed thermal stability of proteins. In addition to assessing protein thermal stability with CETSA, which is a short treatment of 1 h, we also subjected cells in culture to prolonged drug exposures, ≤72 h, in order to measure viability. This was done to correlate early changes in protein thermal stability to the viability phenotype that manifested later. In general, responses both in protein thermal stability and cell viability was heterogenous among the cell lines. The most homogenous response in viability was observed for the Phosphatidyl Inositol 3’ kinase inhibitor Alpelisib, which reduced viability to 20 - 40% in all cell lines. In contrast, partial resistance was shown to the other drugs by at least one of the cell lines. For Alpelisib, the amount and type of proteins that were thermally shifted correlated with the effect on viability. The covalent HER2 inhibitor Neratinib was most effective in inhibiting viability in HER2+ cells and proteins of the HER2 pathway were thermally shifted in these cells, which was not observed for the other cell lines. Viability of the other cell lines were also affected by Neratinib, but only at higher concentrations. Both microtubule inhibitors induced thermal stabilization of tubulins, but that did not always translate into efficacy in the viability assay. However, sensitive cell lines showed thermal shifts of tubulins at lower concentrations of compound. In oncology drug development it is important that effects on viability are driven by on-target efficacy and not by off-target effects. Here we show the benefit of connecting knowledge of target engagement and phenotypic readouts; what targets are engaged, at which concentrations, and what is the corresponding phenotype. Citation Format: Tomas Friman, Tuomas Tolvanen, Merve Kacal, Victoria Brehmer, Stina Lundgren, Laurence Arnold, Daniel Martinez Molina. Target engagement sheds light on difference in drug efficacy in breast cancer cell lines [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 4723.

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful ACADEMIC INTEGRITY It is easier to describe academic integrity in terms of what it is not. Plagiarism is often associated with a lack of academic integrity. Lack of academic integrity is also manifested in the use of inaccurate data, misrepresentation of data, and misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for paraphrasing in academic writing. In an article on ‘Research Ethics: Decoding Plagiarism and Attribution’, iThenticate describes ten forms of plagiarism and attribution issues as rated by several hundred scientific researchers according to their perceived degree of occurrence and seriousness. Failure to provide accurate citations and not citing a reference when paraphrasing were not the only types of common plagiarism mistakes. Many authors do not realise that reusing work from their own previously published articles without attribution is a case of self-plagiarism. Also, submitting a manuscript to multiple publications, resulting in the same article being published more than once, is a serious violation of research ethics and academic integrity. The latter was ranked second among the most common forms of plagiarism by the iThenticate report. The forms of plagiarism perceived as being most serious include: taking the work of another author and publishing it under one’s own name; verbatim copy-and-paste without proper attribution; providing inaccurate authorship; listing authors who made no contribution to the research; and denying credit to contributing authors. While it is the responsibility of authors to uphold the highest values associated with academic integrity, such as honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility, publishers and journal editors are equally responsible to ensure that submitted manuscripts do not breach academic conduct standards. Plagiarism detection software such as iThenticate or Turnitin is often used to detect the similarity index of the content with other sources, thus helping editors to determine if the content draws significantly from other publications or has been previously published elsewhere, either partly or in a substantially similar form, by the same authors. Submitted articles often have to be passed through such software multiple times and adjusted accordingly to ensure a consistently low similarity level at the different stages of the publication process. Based on the editor’s experience at ISRA International Journal of Islamic Finance (IJIF), it has even been discovered, just as an article is about to be published, that an article of similar content was recently published elsewhere. Therefore, authors have the moral responsibility to explicitly declare if their submission draws from an unpublished conference paper or dissertation work and confirm the originality of their manuscripts. Following best practices in publishing, IJIF now requests authors to declare each author’s contribution in the work submitted, make a conflict of interest statement, acknowledge any research funding or grant received or any other forms of contribution, and make available a summary of their data which will be provided to readers upon request. This information is now published at the end of each article to meet the standards of publishing ethics. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ACADEMIC WRITING While technological advances have significantly facilitated the dissemination of research and made accessible a wealth of knowledge to writers, the advent of AI has posed additional challenges to academic integrity principles. Without the facility provided by AI tools, researchers used to make personal efforts and, at best, made use of synonyms to paraphrase others’ work and avoid literal copy-and-paste of texts. AI-powered tools such as plagiarism changers and word/text spinners can now paraphrase texts and even whole manuscripts while retaining the original ideas and meanings, maintaining coherence and improving language presentation. If ideas are not attributed to the original source through citations, this is still called paraphrasing plagiarism, irrespective of whether the intention was deliberate or unintentional. Plagiarism software detectors like Turnitin now provide details on the percentage of AI-written content within the similarity report issued for a new submission. In our opinion, a high AI similarity index, say beyond 30 per cent, would mean that it is highly unlikely that the authors have produced an original work. IJIF requests authors to explain a high similarity index for both plagiarism checks and AI-written content. IJIF Volume 15 Number 4 December 2023 This issue publishes seven articles on various areas of Islamic finance. As the Islamic finance industry is expanding in different jurisdictions, most of these articles cover aspects of Islamic finance development in leading countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as countries trying to advance Islamic finance such as Uzbekistan and Thailand. The key objectives of these articles are as follows: ‘An Exploratory Study of Manfaʿah (Usufruct) in Ijārah Accounting from the Sharīʿah Perspective’ by Rahmat Ullah, Irum Saba and Riaz Ahmad. This article addresses the Sharīʿah perspectives of treating manfaʿah (usufruct) in the ijārah (lease) contract as māl (asset) according to the new standards on leasing issued by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and on ijārah issued by AAOIFI. It particularly examines the legal status of ownership of usufruct following its treatment as māl in ijārah financing. ‘Viability of Cash Waqf-Linked Ṣukūk in Malaysia’ by Sherin Kunhibava, Aishath Muneeza, Zakariya Mustapha, Maryam Khalid and Thong Ming Sen. In view of the successful introduction of cash waqf-linked ṣukūk (CWLS) in Indonesia, this article examines the potential for implementing CWLS by Islamic financial institutions in Malaysia and discusses its viability under the relevant legal and regulatory frameworks of waqf and ṣukūk in the Malaysian context. ‘Legal Challenges in Establishing the Islamic Capital Market in Uzbekistan’ by Alam Asadov, Ikhtiyorjon Turaboev ‎and Mohd Zakhiri Md. Nor. The Islamic capital market is yet to be developed in Uzbekistan. This study discusses the possibility of its introduction and investigates the legal barriers impeding the process. ‘The Moderator Effects of Owner-Manager Knowledge on the Intention to Adopt Islamic Financing Facilities in Malaysia’ by Hazalina Mat Soha, Mohd Zukime Mat Junoh, Tunku Salha Tunku Ahmad and Md. Aminul Islam. This article assesses the role of owner-manager knowledge as a moderating factor in the relationship between innovation, organisational and environmental characteristics, and the intention to adopt Islamic financing facilities in the context of Malaysia. ‘Investigating Equity-Based Financing and Debt-Based Financing in Islamic Banks in Indonesia’ by Hasan Mukhibad and Doddy Setiawan. Using data over the period 2009–2019, this article investigates whether equity-based financing as practised by Islamic banks in Indonesia generates fixed income similar to debt-based financing. Factors Influencing Thai Muslims’ Willingness to Donate Cash Waqf to Religious Projects by Aris Hassama and Nor Asmat Ismail. This study looks into the motivational and economic factors that positively impact the willingness of cash waqf donors in the southernmost provinces of Thailand to donate to religious projects. ‘Exploration of a New Zakat Management System Empowered by Blockchain Technology in Malaysia’ by Amelia Nur Natasha Nazeri, Shifa Mohd Nor, Aisyah Abdul-Rahman, Mariani Abdul-Majid and Siti Ngayesah Ab. Hamid. This article seeks to examine how the proposed implementation of blockchain technology in the current zakat management system in Malaysia would work and how it would help improve efficiency in the zakat collection and distribution process. We congratulate the authors for the successful publication of their articles and wish our readers a pleasant read. Allah (SWT) is the Bestower of success, and He knows best. Beebee Salma SairallyISRA Research Management Centre, INCEIF University, Malaysia

This paper considers the engagement of Christian communities in the healing process of the victims after cases of sexual abuse. Over the last fifty years, restorative justice has emerged to respond to the harm inflicted on individuals by abusive behaviors. However, restorative justice alone, focusing on restoring the relationship between the victim and the aggressor, leaves many social and institutional mechanisms unchallenged. Drawing on Johann B. Metz’s political theology, I claim that three aspects must be taken into account by Christian communities to show solidarity with the victims and facilitate their spiritual healing: the necessity of structural change through serious consideration of social sin in the Church; the importance of parrhesia (open and honest speech) through peaceful public protests where survivors and their allies manifest their discontent and ask for accountability; listening to the marginalized as a priority that re-educates the Church to pay attention to those who suffer.

Abstract Background Following the authorization by the regulatory authorities of vaccination against COVID for children aged between 5 and 11, in Emilia-Romagna Region, Italy, the pediatricians of the Italian Society of Pediatrics (SIP), the Italian Society of Neonatology (SIN), the Cultural Association of Pediatrics, the Italian Federation of Pediatricians (FIMP) and the Italian Union of Family Pediatricians (SIMPeF), who work in the hospital and in the territorial setting, have made a univocal and convinced appeal in favor of vaccination also in this age group. Main findings In order to contribute to a conscious choice, on the part of parents, based on exhaustive and correct information, a 24-point manifesto was developed. The manifesto showed that vaccines against COVID are the most effective and safest tool we have to counter the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and vaccination against COVID is a right of children just as it is for adults. Children between 5 and 11 years are not protected from the virus and a large part of the newly infected is this age. Although SARS-CoV-2 infection is certainly more benign in children, in some cases it can cause a serious pathology and long COVID. The stress caused by the pandemic, the prolonged closure of schools and the interruption of sports and recreational activities have had a devastating effect on the mental health of children and on the development of their personality. Vaccinating children against COVID serves to protect them from severe forms of disease and long COVID, allowing them to attend school face-to-face and lead a normal social life. The safety of vaccinatin is very high and vaccines against COVID have no influence on fertility nor can they cause developmental or growth side effects. Conclusions The manifesto highlighted that the vaccine against COVID for children aged between 5 and 11 is effective and safe and represents an extraordinary gift for safeguarding health of the younger ones. The invitation, therefore, to parents is to have their children vaccinated against COVID as early as possible.

AbstractHeavy rain is one of the extreme weather events which pose a variety of serious risks on transportation infrastructures. Porous asphalt pavement can be used as a sustainable solution to mitigate the effects of such heavy rains. The objective of this study was to study the potential of using fiber elastomer modifier (FEM) to produce porous asphalt mixtures of high quality and enhanced performance. This was done through an experimental program composed of three different phases. The first phase was the development and the rheological, chemical, and microstructural characterization of the FEM modified asphalt. The second phase focused on using FEM to produce porous asphalt mixtures using different techniques. The third phase was the characterization of the porous asphalt mixtures to study their anticipated performance. The FEM asphalt performance grade, PG (76-22), proved enhanced rheological properties in terms of better rutting resistance indicated by higher G*/sin δ over a wide range of temperatures and lower Jnr3.2 value of about 19% compared to the virgin asphalt and an enhanced fatigue cracking resistance manifested by the significant reduction in the fatigue cracking indicator G* sin δ with about 94%. Finally, porous asphalt mixtures were produced of an enhanced performance based on the dynamic modulus. Higher E* values at higher temperatures/lower frequencies and lower E* values at lower temperatures/higher frequencies were reported for the FEM porous asphalt mixture in reference to the, control dense-graded HMA mixture, promising an enhanced both rutting and fatigue resistances of the produced porous asphalt mixtures.

On 12 January 2020, the Department of Science and Technology’s Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) raised Alert Level from 1 to 4 (out of 5) after increasing activity of Taal Volcano in Batangas. The eruption has resulted in development challenges and problems such as increased poverty, limited livelihood opportunities faced by farmers which manifest the serious impact of the eruption on the ways of living and the livelihood activities. Thus, this project formulated in which a series of workshop and training skills where conducted to assess, develop and implement an action plan for rehabilitating the farm of the affected residents of Batangas, primarily at the municipality of Talisay, Balete, San Nicolas, Laurel, Agoncillo, and Ibaan. The participants were chosen by the Local Government Unit and composed mostly of members of 4P’s and farmers. The beneficiaries were already in a difficult situation not only because of the recent eruption of Taal Volcano that rendered some of them homeless and unemployed but also because of the COVID-19 which aggravated the situation. Based on the initial assessment, it was found out that agricultural livelihood and property were heavily damaged by the eruption. Moreover, the said assessment led the project team to identify initial livelihood training’s that can be introduced to the affected communities. These trainings’ included household opportunities through vegetable production, processing and organic concoction production to rehabilitate the soil from acidity due to sulfur deposition during volcanic eruption. Rehabilitation and recovery plan were also considered to capacitate the farmers.

Aims: Our study addresses underlying mechanisms of disruption of the circadian timing system by low-intensity artificial light at night (ALAN), which is a growing global problem, associated with serious health consequences. Methods: Rats were exposed to low-intensity (~2 lx) ALAN for 2 weeks. Using in situ hybridization, we assessed 24-h profiles of clock and clock-controlled genes in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) and other hypothalamic regions, which receive input from the master clock. Moreover, we measured daily rhythms of hormones within the main neuroendocrine axes as well as the detailed daily pattern of feeding and drinking behavior in metabolic cages. Results: ALAN strongly suppressed the molecular clockwork in the SCN, as indicated by the suppressed rhythmicity in the clock (Per1, Per2 and Nr1d1) and clock output (arginine vasopressin) genes. ALAN disturbed rhythmic Per1 expression in the paraventricular and dorsomedial hypothalamic nuclei, which convey the circadian signals from the master clock to endocrine and behavioral rhythms. Disruption of hormonal output pathways was manifested by the suppressed and phase-advanced corticosterone rhythm and lost daily variations in plasma melatonin, testosterone, and vasopressin. Importantly, ALAN altered the daily profile in food and water intake and eliminated the clock-controlled surge of drinking two hours prior to the onset of the rest period, indicating disturbed circadian control of anticipatory thirst and fluid balance during sleep. Conclusion: Our findings highlight compromised time-keeping function of the central clock and multiple circadian outputs, through which ALAN disturbs the temporal organization of physiology and behavior.

Abstract Disclosure: A.M. San Hernandez: None. R. Alshantti: None. G. Espinoza Mercado: None. J.L. San Hernandez: None. Introduction: Adrenal Insufficiency is caused by the failure of the adrenal cortex to produce glucocorticoids +/- mineralocorticoids. This can be due to a defect in the adrenal cortex, or in the hypothalamic pituitary axis. The clinical manifestations are usually non-specific, ranging from mild vague symptoms to life threatening crisis. Therefore, diagnosis requires a high level of suspicion by providers. Unusual presentations of primary adrenal insufficiency (PAI) with hypertension and hypokalemia have been rarely described in the literature. We present a rare case of PAI with hypertension and hypokalemia. Case Presentation: A 68 years old female with a medical history of rheumatoid arthritis, hypothyroidism on Levothyroxine, chronic transaminitis, and bicytopenia presented to the hospital with a 6 weeks history of generalized weakness, loss of appetite, weight loss, and dizziness. Patient denied any diuretic or steroid use within the last 2 years. On arrival, she was afebrile, hypertensive (168/84mmHg), with normal oxygenation and pulse. Physical examination was unremarkable with normal volume status. Initial laboratory results showed low sodium 116 mEq/L, low serum osmolality 247 MEQ/kg, normal potassium 3.6 mEq/L, Creatinine 0.3 mg/dL & BUN 9 mg/dL. She was initially started on IVF normal saline. Further workup revealed normal TSH & FT4 levels. Urine study showed urine osmolality (477 MOSM/KG), & urine sodium (127 mEq/L). Given these findings, SIADH was suspected and fluid restriction was started. Sodium level continued to be low with minimal improvement to 120 mEq/L, potassium levels also dropped (3.3-3.2 mEq/L), requiring daily replacement. BP remained elevated ranging from 150s to 160s systolic and 80s to 90s diastolic. Hypertension was controlled with her home medication Amlodipine. Although atypical presentation with hypertension & hypokalemia, the diagnosis of adrenal insufficiency was considered. Laboratory evaluation showed low morning cortisol 5.2 ug/dL, with album level 3.5 g/dL. Cosyntropin stimulation test showed 1.3 ug/dL (at baseline), 9.9 (30 min post administration), and 14.4 (1 hour post administration); results confirming PAI. ACTH, Renin, Aldosterone, & DHEAS levels were normal. CT adrenal was normal. Patient was started on hydrocortisone; some of her symptoms & Na level improved. Further investigation of the etiology of PAI and possible hyperaldosteronism is pending outpatient follow up. Conclusion: Adrenal insufficiency is a life threatening condition with serious consequences if diagnosis is missed. It manifests by a wide spectrum of symptoms and signs, some can be masked by the presence of other comorbid conditions leading to atypical presentations. Our case highlights the importance of maintaining a high level of suspicion of adrenal insufficiency in patients with atypical presentation, including those with hypertension & hypokalemia. Presentation: 6/3/2024

<p>ResumenEl Proyecto del Código Nacional de Policía y Convivencia ha sido radicado porel Gobierno Nacional en el Congreso, y se prevé su primer debate en el año 2013.Se considera insuficiente el esbozo y delineamiento, en el proyecto, de la medidapolicial para la protección de las personas en debilidad manifiesta y la prevención deconductas delictuales de personas en alto grado de agresividad. Tiene las carenciase imperfecciones que, según la honorable Corte Constitucional, posee la medidadiseñada en el Decreto-Ley 1355 de 1970. Obvio que en ese tiempo se justificaba, pues no se contaba con la decantación que el tema ahora tiene. Se recuerda queesta medida, en el mencionado decreto, se plasmó en cuatro artículos: el 186, numeral8; el 192 (declarado inexequible); el 207 (parcialmente exequible), y el 219.Además, se produjeron dos sentencias: la C-199 de 1998, que declaró conformea la Constitución la medida, y la C-720 de 2007 que, con serias incoherencias enlos fundamentos de la decisión, solo declaró inconstitucional el artículo 192. Unpormenorizado análisis jurídico de estas dos sentencias y su confrontación con otrasnormas jurídicas y sentencias, especialmente la C-879 de 2011, infiere, sin lugar adudas, que dicha medida policial hoy está plenamente vigente. Para el futuro, frutode un examen pormenorizado, se propondrá un título sobre tal medida, dentro delProyecto del Código Nacional de Policía y Convivencia.</p><p>Palabras clave: Proyecto Código Nacional de Policía, medida policial para protecciónde personas, debilidad manifiesta, prevención de conductas delictuales.</p><p>Criteria to implement protective measures andprevention in the “new” National Police Code</p><p>Abstract: The National Police and Coexistence Code bill has been introduced by the nationalGovernment to Congress, and is scheduled for first reading in 2013. The outlineand delineation in the bill is considered insufficient as regards to the police measureto protect people under evident weakness and prevention of criminal behavior byhighly aggressive people. It has the shortcomings and imperfections that, accordingto honorable Constitutional Court, has the measure designed in Decree-Law 1355of 1970. Obviously at that time it was justified, since, the issue was not settledas it is today. It is recalled that this measure, in the aforementioned decree, wascontained in four articles: the 186 (numeral 8), 192 (declared unconstitutional),the 207 (partially enforceable) and 219. In addition, two rulings were issued: theC-199 of 1998, which declared the measure in accordance to the Constitution,and the C-720 of 2007 which, with serious inconsistencies in the conclusions oflaw of the decision, only declared unconstitutional the article 192. A detailed legalanalysis of these two decisions and their confrontation with other legal rules andcourt decisions, especially the C-879, 2011, infer, without a doubt, that such police measure is in full force today. In the future, as a result of a detailed examination,a title on such measure will be proposed within the bill of the national police andcoexistence code.</p><p>Keywords: National Police Code bill, police measure for protection of people,evident weakness, prevention of criminal behavior.</p><p>Critérios para executar a medida de proteção eprevenção no “novo” Código Nacional de Polícia</p><p>Resumo: O projeto do Código Nacional de Polícia e Convivência foi apresentado peloGoverno Nacional no Congresso, e prevê-se seu primeiro debatimento em 2013.Considera-se insuficiente o esquema e o delineamento no projeto, da medidapolicial para a proteção das pessoas com debilidade manifesta e a prevenção decomportamento criminoso de pessoas com alto grau de agressividade. Ele tem ascarências e imperfeições que, segundo a honrosa Corte Constitucional, possui amedida desenhada no Decreto-Lei 1.355 de 1970. Obviamente naquela época erajustificado, pois, não contavam com a decantação que o tema tem agora. Lembreseque esta medida, no decreto mencionado, está contida em quatro artigos: o186 (seção 8), o 192 (declarado inexequível), o 207 (parcialmente exequível) e o219. Além disso, houve duas sentencias: a C-199 de 1998, que declarou a medidaconforme à Constituição, e a C-720 de 2007 que, com inconsistências graves nosfundamentos da decisão, apenas declarou inconstitucional o artigo 192. Uma análisejurídica detalhada destas duas sentenças e seu confronto com outras normas jurídicase sentenças, especialmente a C-879, 2011, infere, sem dúvida nenhuma, que essamedida policial ainda hoje está em total vigor. No futuro, como resultado de umexame detalhado, será proposto um título sobre essa medida dentro do projeto docódigo nacional de polícia e de convivência.</p><p>Palavras chave: projeto Código Nacional de Policia, medida policial para proteçãode pessoas, debilidade manifesta, prevenção de condutas criminosas.</p><p> </p>

White Chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum morifolium), a perennial herb of the Compositae family, is used for traditional medicine. The planting area of white chrysanthemum in Macheng city, Hubei Province is about 3333 ha and the annual output can reach more than 5000 tons. In 2019, leaf spot disease appeared on almost all middle and lower leaves of white chrysanthemum in most fields of Fengshumiao county, Macheng city (N31°29′57″, E115°05′49″). This county has 33 acres white chrysanthemum planting area, and most of the plants in the county were infected with the leaf spot disease. The average incidence of leaf spot disease was 65%, and incidence in some areas was 100%. In our observations, leaf spot disease can occur throughout the whole growth period of white chrysanthemum, and it will become more serious under the high temperature and humidity condition. Usually, the diseased leaves account for 30 to 80% of the total leaves on the plant. Leaf spot initially manifests as necrotic lesions on the edge and tip of the leaf, and then the lesions coalesce and gradually expand to form irregular light-brown to brown-black spots, eventually leading to necrosis and curling of the entire leaf. This disease seriously affects the growth and development of plants, resulting in the decline of yield and quality of white chrysanthemum. Ten symptomatic leaf samples were collected, the surfaces were disinfected with 0.1% mercuric chloride (HgCl2) for 3 min, and washed with sterile distilled water three times. Ten tissue samples at the junction of diseased and healthy areas (0.5 × 0.5 cm2) were cut and placed on potato dextrose agar (PDA) medium containing 100 µg/ml cefotaxime sodium and incubated in a dark chamber at 28°C. After 2 days, the hyphal tips from the edges of growing colonies were transferred to fresh PDA plates for further purification. Finally, eight isolates were obtained and these isolates were similar in morphology. The color of purified isolates was initially white to pale yellow. After six days of incubation, colonies had a diameter of 8 cm and the cultures were pale gray and starting to secrete scarlet pigment. After 15 days incubation, the colonies were grayish brown, while the backside was reddish-brown. Gray to tan chlamydospores were observed, nearly spherical, with a wart-like surface. Unicellular chlamydospores were 7.91 to 32.23 × 12.03 to 38.42 µm (n=30) and multicellular chlamydospores were 6.32 to 25.10 × 21.75 to 100.05 µm (n=30). The morphological characteristics were similar to Epicoccum sorghinum (Kang et al. 2019). The isolate FDY-5 was chosen for molecular identification. The sequence of rDNA-ITS, TUB, and LSU of the FDY-5 were amplified (GenBank MT800929, MT799852, and MT800935, respectively) (White et al. 1990; Carbone and Kohn 1999; Lumbsch et al. 2000). BLAST results showed that the rDNA-ITS sequences, the TUB gene sequences, and LSU gene sequences of strain FDY-5 shared 99% identity with the sequences of E. sorghinum (syn. Phoma sorghina) in GenBank (MN555348.1, MF987525.1, MK516207.1, respectively). Moreover, a phylogenetic tree of the LSU gene sequence of FDY-5 was constructed based on the Neighbor-Joining (NJ) method in MEGA6 software (Tamura et al. 2013) and revealed that strain FDY-5 was closest to E. sorghinum. Based on morphological and molecular characteristics, the fungus was identified as E. sorghinum. Pathogenicity tests were conducted on two-month-old white chrysanthemum plants. The upper three leaves of three plants were randomly selected for stab treatment and were inoculated with 5 × 5 mm mycelial discs produced from a fifteen-day-old colony on PDA. The inoculated and control (treated with sterile PDA disks) plants were incubated in a moist chamber (25 ± 2 °C, RH 85%). The first lesions appeared 1 day after inoculation on leaves, and the necrotic lesion area expanded outward and showed typical symptoms 3 days later. To fulfill Koch's postulates, the pathogen was reisolated from nine inoculated leaves by repeating the above isolating operation, and confirmed as E. sorghinum by morphology. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of E. sorghinum causing leaf spot on white chrysanthemum in China. E. sorghinum has a wide host range worldwide and often causes crop yield reduction. This report will facilitate the diagnosis of white chrysanthemum leaf spot of white chrysanthemum allowing control measures to be adopted to manage this disease in a timely manner. References Carbone, I., and Kohn, L. M. 1999. Mycologia 91:553. Kang, Y., et al. 2019. Plant Dis. 103 (7):1787. Lumbsch, H., et al. 2000. Plant Biol. 2:525. Tamura, K., et al. 2013. Mol. Biol. Evol. 30:2725-2729. White, T. J., et al. 1990. Page 315 in:PCR protocols:a guide to methods and applications. Academic Press, San Diego, CA. Funding Funding was supported by Major Increase and Decrease Projects at the Central Level of China (2060302) and the National Key Research and Development Program (2017FYC1700704).

What creative techniques of resistance are available to a female filmmaker when she is the victim of a violent event and filmed at her most vulnerable? This article uses an autoethnographic lens to discuss my experience of a serious car crash my family and I were inadvertently involved in due to police negligence and a criminal act. Employing Creative Analytical Practice (CAP) ethnography, a reflexive form of research which recognises that the creative process, producer and product are “deeply intertwined” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 930), I investigate how the crash’s violent affects crippled my agency, manifested in my creative praxis and catalysed my identification of latent forms of institutionalised violence in film culture, its discourse and pedagogy that also contributed to my inertia. The article maps my process of writing a feature length screenplay during the aftermath of the crash as I set out to articulate my story of survival and resistance. Using this narrative inquiry, in which we can “investigate how we construct the world, ourselves, and others, and how standard objectifying practices...unnecessarily limit us” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 924), I outline how I attempted to disrupt the entrenched power structures that exist in dominant narratives of violence in film and challenge my subjugated positioning as a woman within this canon. I describe my engagement with the deconstructionist practices of writing the body and militant feminist cinema, which suggest subversive opportunities for women’s self-determination by encouraging us to embrace our exiled positioning in dominant discourse through creative experimentation, and identify some of the possibilities and limitations of this for female agency. Drawing on CAP ethnography, existentialism, film feminism, and narrative reframing, I assert that these reconstructive practices are more effective for the creative enfranchisement of women by not relegating us to the periphery of social systems and cultural forms. Instead, they enable us to speak back to violent structures in a language that has greater social access, context and impact.My strong desire to tell screen stories lies in my belief that storytelling is a crucial evolutionary mechanism of resilience. Narratives do not simply represent the social world but also have the ability to change it by enabling us to “try to figure out how to live our lives meaningfully” (Ellis 760). This conviction has been directly influenced by my personal story of trauma and survival when myself, my siblings, and our respective life partners became involved in a major car crash. Two police officers attending to a drunken brawl in an inner city park had, in their haste, left the keys in the ignition of their vehicle. We were travelling across a major intersection when the police car, which had subsequently been stolen by a man involved in the brawl – a man who was wanted on parole, had a blood alcohol level three times over the legal limit, and was driving at speeds exceeding 110kms per hour - ran a red light and crossed our path, causing us to crash into his vehicle. From the impact, the small four-wheel drive we were travelling in was catapulted metres into the air, rolling numerous times before smashing head on into oncoming traffic. My heavily pregnant sister was driving our vehicle.The incident attracted national media attention and our story became a sensationalist spectacle. Each news station reported erroneous and conflicting information, one stating that my sister had lost her unborn daughter, another even going so far as to claim my sister had died in the crash. This tabloidised, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, culture of journalism, along with new digital technologies, encourages and facilitates the normalisation of violent acts, often inflicted on women. Moreover, in their pursuit of high-rating stories, news bodies motivate dehumanising acts of citizen journalism that see witnesses often inspired to film, rather than assist, victims involved in a violent event. Through a connection with someone working for a major news station, we discovered that leading news broadcasters had bought a tape shot by a group of men who call themselves the ‘Paparazzi of Perth’. These men were some of the first on the scene and began filming us from only a few metres away while we were still trapped upside down and unconscious in our vehicle. In the recording, the men are heard laughing and celebrating our tragedy as they realise the lucrative possibilities of the shocking imagery they are capturing as witnesses pull us out of the back of the car, and my pregnant sister incredibly frees herself from the wreckage by kicking out the window.As a female filmmaker, I saw the bitter irony of this event as the camera was now turned on me and my loved ones at our most vulnerable. In her discussion of the male gaze, a culturally sanctioned form of narrational violence against women that is ubiquitous in most mainstream media, Mulvey proposes that women are generally the passive image, trapped by the physical limits of the frame in a permanent state of powerlessness as our identity is reduced to her “to-be-looked-at-ness” (40). For a long period of time, the experience of performing the role of this commodified woman of a weaponised male gaze, along with the threat of annihilation associated with our near-death experience, immobilised my spirit. I felt I belonged “more to the dead than to the living” (Herman 34). When I eventually returned to my creative praxis, I decided to use scriptwriting as both my “mode of reasoning and a mode of representation” (Richardson, Writing Strategies 21), test whether I could work through my feelings of alienation and violation and reclaim my agency. This was a complex and harrowing task because my memories “lack[ed] verbal narrative and context” (Herman 38) and were deeply rooted in my body. Cixous confirms that for women, “writing and voice...are woven together” and “spring from the deepest layers of her psyche” (Moi 112). For many months, I struggled to write. I attempted to block out this violent ordeal and censor my self. I soon learnt, however, that my body could not be silenced and was slow to forget. As I tried to write around this experience, the trauma worked itself deeper inside of me, and my physical symptoms worsened, as did the quality of my writing.In the early version of the screenplay I found myself writing a female-centred film about violence, identity and death, using the fictional narrative to express the numbness I experienced. I wrote the female protagonist with detachment as though she were an object devoid of agency. Sartre claims that we make objects of others and of ourselves in an attempt to control the uncertainty of life and the ever-changing nature of humanity (242). Making something into an object is to deprive it of life (and death); it is our attempt to keep ourselves ‘safe’. While I recognise that the car crash’s reminder of my mortality was no doubt part of the reason why I rendered myself, and the script’s female protagonist, lifeless as agentic beings, I sensed that there were subtler operations of power and control behind my self-objectification and self-censorship, which deeply concerned me. What had influenced this dea(r)th of female agency in my creative imaginings? Why did I write my female character with such a red pen? Why did I seem so compelled to ‘kill’ her? I wanted to investigate my gender construction, the complex relationship between my scriptwriting praxis, and the context within which it is produced to discover whether I could write a different future for myself, and my female characters. Kiesinger supports “contextualizing our stories within the framework of a larger picture” (108), so as to remain open to the possibility that there might not be anything ‘wrong’ with us, per se, “but rather something very wrong with the dynamics that dominate the communicative system” (109) within which we operate: in the case of my creative praxis, the oppressive structures present in the culture of film and its pedagogy.Pulling FocusWomen are supposed to be the view and when the view talks back, it is uncomfortable.— Jane Campion (Filming Desire)It is a terrible thing to see that no one has ever taught us how to develop our vision as women neither in the history of arts nor in film schools.— Marie Mandy (Filming Desire)The democratisation of today’s media landscape through new technologies, the recent rise in female-run production companies (Zemler) in Hollywood, along with the ground-breaking #MeToo and Time’s Up movements has elevated the global consciousness of gender-based violence, and has seen the screen industry seek to redress its history of gender imbalance. While it is too early to assess the impact these developments may have on women’s standing in film, today the ‘celluloid ceiling’ still operates on multiple levels of indoctrination and control through a systemic pattern of exclusion for women that upholds the “nearly seamless dialogue among men in cinema” (Lauzen, Thumbs Down 2). Female filmmakers occupy a tenuous position of influence in the mainstream industry and things are not any better on the other side of the camera (Lauzen, The Celluloid Ceiling). For the most part, Hollywood’s male gaze and penchant for sexualising and (physically or figuratively) killing female characters, which normalises violence against women and is “almost inversely proportional to the liberation of women in society” (Mandy), continues to limit women to performing as the image rather than the agent on screen.Film funding bodies and censorship boards, mostly comprised of men, remain exceptionally averse to independent female filmmakers who go against the odds to tell their stories, which often violate taboos about femininity and radically redefine female agency through the construction of the female gaze: a narrational technique of resistance that enables reel woman to govern the point of view, imagery and action of the film (Smelik 51-52). This generally sees their films unjustly ghettoised through incongruent classification or censorship, and forced into independent or underground distribution (Sexton-Finck 165-182). Not only does censorship propose the idea that female agency is abject and dangerous and needs to be restrained, it prevents access to this important cinema by women that aims to counter the male gaze and “shield us from this type of violence” (Gillain 210). This form of ideological and institutional gatekeeping is not only enforced in the film industry, it is also insidiously (re)constituted in the epistemological construction of film discourse and pedagogy, which in their design, are still largely intrinsically gendered institutions, encoded with phallocentric signification that rejects a woman’s specificity and approach to knowledge. Drawing on my mutually informative roles as a former film student and experienced screen educator, I assert that most screen curricula in Australia still uphold entrenched androcentric norms that assume the male gaze and advocate popular cinema’s didactic three-act structure, which conditions our value systems to favour masculinity and men’s worldview. This restorative storytelling approach is argued to be fatally limiting to reel women (Smith 136; Dancyger and Rush 25) as it propagates the Enlightenment notion of a universal subjectivity, based on free will and reason, which neutralises the power structures of society (and film) and repudiates the influence of social positioning on our opportunity for agency. Moreover, through its omniscient consciousness, which seeks to efface the presence of a specific narrator, the three-act method disavows this policing of female agency and absolves any specific individual of responsibility for its structural violence (Dyer 98).By pulling focus on some of these problematic mechanisms in the hostile climate of the film industry and its spaces of learning for women, I became acutely aware of the more latent forms of violence that had conditioned my scriptwriting praxis, the ambivalence I felt towards my female identity, and my consequent gagging of the female character in the screenplay.Changing Lenses How do the specific circumstances in which we write affect what we write? How does what we write affect who we become?— Laurel Richardson (Fields of Play 1)In the beginning, there is an end. Don’t be afraid: it’s your death that is dying. Then: all the beginnings.— Helene Cixous (Cixous and Jensen 41)The discoveries I made during my process of CAP ethnography saw a strong feeling of dissidence arrive inside me. I vehemently wanted to write my way out of my subjugated state and release some of the anguish that my traumatised body was carrying around. I was drawn to militant feminist cinema and the French poststructuralist approach of ‘writing the body’ (l’ecriture feminine) given these deconstructive practices “create images and ideas that have the power to inspire to revolt against oppression and exploitation” (Moi 120). Feminist cinema’s visual treatise of writing the body through its departure from androcentric codes - its unformulaic approach to structure, plot, character and narration (De Lauretis 106) - revealed to me ways in which I could use the scriptwriting process to validate my debilitating experience of physical and psychic violence, decensor my self and move towards rejoining the living. Cixous affirms that, “by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into…the ailing or dead figure” (Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa 880). It became clear to me that the persistent themes of death that manifested in the first draft of the script were not, as I first suspected, me ‘rehearsing to die’, or wanting to kill off the woman inside me. I was in fact “not driven towards death but by death” (Homer 89), the close proximity to my mortality, acting as a limit, was calling for a strengthening of my life force, a rebirth of my agency (Bettelheim 36). Mansfield acknowledges that death “offers us a freedom outside of the repression and logic that dominate our daily practices of keeping ourselves in order, within the lines” (87).I challenged myself to write the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, the unexplored and to allow myself to go to places in me that I had never before let speak by investigating my agency from a much more layered and critical perspective. This was both incredibly terrifying and liberating and enabled me to discard the agentic ‘corset’ I had previously worn in my creative praxis. Dancyger and Rush confirm that “one of the things that happens when we break out of the restorative three-act form is that the effaced narrator becomes increasingly visible and overt” (38). I experienced an invigorating feeling of empowerment through my appropriation of the female gaze in the screenplay which initially appeased some of the post-crash turmoil and general sense of injustice I was experiencing. However, I soon, found something toxic rising inside of me. Like the acrimonious feminist cinema I was immersed in – Raw (Ducournau), A Girl Walks Home at Night (Amirpour), Romance (Breillat), Trouble Every Day (Denis), Baise-Moi (Despentes and Thi), In My Skin (Van), Anatomy of Hell (Breillat) – the screenplay I had produced involved a female character turning the tables on men and using acts of revenge to satisfy her needs. Not only was I creating a highly dystopian world filled with explicit themes of suffering in the screenplay, I too existed in a displaced state of rage and ‘psychic nausea’ in my daily life (Baldick and Sartre). I became haunted by vivid flashbacks of the car crash as abject images, sounds and sensations played over and over in my mind and body like a horror movie on loop. I struggled to find the necessary clarity and counterbalance of stability required to successfully handle this type of experimentation.I do not wish to undermine the creative potential of deconstructive practices, such as writing the body and militant cinema, for female filmmakers. However, I believe my post-trauma sensitivity to visceral entrapment and spiritual violence magnifies some of the psychological and physiological risks involved. Deconstructive experimentation “happens much more easily in the realm of “texts” than in the world of human interaction” (hooks 22) and presents agentic limitations for women since it offers a “utopian vision of female creativity” (Moi 119) that is “devoid of reality...except in a poetic sense” (Moi 122). In jettisoning the restorative qualities of narrative film, new boundaries for women are inadvertently created through restricting us to “intellectual pleasure but rarely emotional pleasure” (Citron 51). Moreover, by reducing women’s agency to retaliation we are denied the opportunity for catharsis and transformation; something I desperately longed to experience in my injured state. Kaplan acknowledges this problem, arguing that female filmmakers need to move theoretically beyond deconstruction to reconstruction, “to manipulate the recognized, dominating discourses so as to begin to free ourselves through rather than beyond them (for what is there ‘beyond’?)” (Women and Film 141).A potent desire to regain a sense of connectedness and control pushed itself out from deep inside me. I yearned for a tonic to move myself and my female character to an active position, rather than a reactive one that merely repeats the victimising dynamic of mainstream film by appropriating a reversed (female) gaze and now makes women the violent victors (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 130). We have arrived at a point where we must destabilise the dominance-submission structure and “think about ways of transcending a polarity that has only brought us all pain” (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 135). I became determined to write a screen narrative that, while dealing with some of the harsh realities of humanity I had become exposed to, involved an existentialist movement towards catharsis and activity.ReframingWhen our stories break down or no longer serve us well, it is imperative that we examine the quality of the stories we are telling and actively reinvent our accounts in ways that permit us to live more fulfilling lives.— Christine Kiesinger (107)I’m frightened by life’s randomness, so I want to deal with it, make some sense of it by telling a film story. But it’s not without hope. I don’t believe in telling stories without some hope.— Susanne Bier (Thomas)Narrative reframing is underlined by the existentialist belief that our spiritual freedom is an artistic process of self-creation, dependent on our free will to organise the elements of our lives, many determined out of our control, into the subjective frame that is to be our experience of our selves and the world around us (107). As a filmmaker, I recognise the power of selective editing and composition. Narrative reframing’s demand for a rational assessment of “the degree to which we live our stories versus the degree to which our stories live us” (Kiesinger 109), helped me to understand how I could use these filmmaking skills to take a step back from my trauma so as to look at it objectively “as a text for study” (Ellis 108) and to exercise power over the creative-destructive forces it, and the deconstructive writing methods I had employed, produced. Richardson confirms the benefits of this practice, since narrative “is the universal way in which humans accommodate to finitude” (Writing Strategies 65).In the script’s development, I found my resilience lay in my capacity to imagine more positive alternatives for female agency. I focussed on writing a narrative that did not avoid life’s hardships and injustices, or require them to be “attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified” (Nietzsche and Hollingdale 68), yet still involved a life-affirming sentiment. With this in mind, I reintroduced the three-act structure in the revised script as its affectivity and therapeutic denouement enabled me to experience a sense of agentic catharsis that turned “nauseous thoughts into imaginations with which it is possible to live” (Nietzsche 52). Nevertheless, I remained vigilant not to lapse into didacticism; to allow my female character to be free to transgress social conventions surrounding women’s agency. Indebted to Kaplan’s writing on the cinematic gaze, I chose to take up what she identifies as a ‘mutual gaze’; an ethical framework that enabled me to privilege the female character’s perspective and autonomy with a neutral subject-subject gaze rather than the “subject-object kind that reduces one of the parties to the place of submission” (Feminism and Film 135). I incorporated the filmic technique of the point of view (POV) shot for key narrative moments as it allows an audience to literally view the world through a character’s eyes, as well as direct address, which involves the character looking back down the lens at the viewer (us); establishing the highest level of identification between the spectator and the subject on screen.The most pertinent illustration of these significant scriptwriting changes through my engagement with narrative reframing and feminist film theory, is in the reworking of my family’s car crash which became a pivotal turning point in the final draft. In the scene, I use POV and direct address to turn the weaponised gaze back around onto the ‘paparazzi’ who are filming the spectacle. When the central (pregnant) character frees herself from the wreckage, she notices these men filming her and we see the moment from her point of view as she looks at these men laughing and revelling in the commercial potential of their mediatised act. Switching between POV and direct address, the men soon notice they have been exposed as the woman looks back down the lens at them (us) with disbelief, reproaching them (us) for daring to film her in this traumatic moment. She holds her determined gaze while they glance awkwardly back at her, until their laughter dissipates, they stop recording and appear to recognise the culpability of their actions. With these techniques of mutual gazing, I set out to humanise and empower the female victim and neutralise the power dynamic: the woman is now also a viewing agent, and the men equally perform the role of the viewed. In this creative reframing, I hope to provide an antidote to filmic violence against and/or by women as this female character reclaims her (my) experience of survival without adhering to the culture of female passivity or ressentiment.This article has examined how a serious car crash, being filmed against my will in its aftermath and the attendant damages that prevailed from this experience, catalysed a critical change of direction in my scriptwriting. The victimising event helped me recognise the manifest and latent forms of violence against women that are normalised through everyday ideological and institutional systems in film and prevent us from performing as active agents in our creative praxis. There is a critical need for more inclusive modes of practice – across the film industry, discourse and pedagogy – that are cognisant and respectful of women’s specificity and our difference to the androcentric landscape of mainstream film. We need to continue to exert pressure on changing violent mechanisms that marginalise us and ghettoise our stories. As this article has demonstrated, working outside dominant forms can enable important emancipatory opportunities for women, however, this type or deconstruction also presents risks that generally leave us powerless in everyday spaces. While I advocate that female filmmakers should look to techniques of feminist cinema for an alternative lens, we must also work within popular film to critique and subvert it, and not deny women the pleasures and political advantages of its restorative structure. By enabling female filmmakers to (re)humanise woman though encouraging empathy and compassion, this affective storytelling form has the potential to counter violence against women and mobilise female agency. Equally, CAP ethnography and narrative reframing are critical discourses for the retrieval and actualisation of female filmmakers’ agency as they allow us to contextualise our stories of resistance and survival within the framework of a larger picture of violence to gain perspective on our subjective experiences and render them as significant, informative and useful to the lives of others. This enables us to move from the isolated margins of subcultural film and discourse to reclaim our stories at the centre.ReferencesA Girl Walks Home at Night. Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour. Say Ahh Productions, 2014.Anatomy of Hell. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Tartan Films, 2004. Baise-Moi. Dirs. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. FilmFixx, 2000.Baldick, Robert, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965.Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.Citron, Michelle. Women’s Film Production: Going Mainstream in Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. Ed. E. Deidre Pribram. London: Verso, 1988.Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1.4 (1976): 875-893.Cixous, Helene, and Deborah Jenson. "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.Dancyger, Ken, and Jeff Rush. Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully Breaking the Rules. Boston, MA: Focal Press, 2002.De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.Dyer, Richard. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. California: AltaMira, 2004.Filming Desire: A Journey through Women's Cinema. Dir. Marie Mandy. Women Make Movies, 2000.Gillain, Anne. “Profile of a Filmmaker: Catherine Breillat.” Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1981-2001. Eds. Roger Célestin, Eliane Françoise DalMolin, and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 206.Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. London: Pandora, 1994.Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. London: Routledge, 2005.hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990.In My Skin. Dir. Marina de Van. Wellspring Media, 2002. Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Routledge, 1988.———. Feminism and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Kiesinger, Christine E. “My Father's Shoes: The Therapeutic Value of Narrative Reframing.” Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature, and Aesthetics. Eds. Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002. 107-111.Lauzen, Martha M. “Thumbs Down - Representation of Women Film Critics in the Top 100 U.S. Daily Newspapers - A Study by Dr. Martha Lauzen.” Alliance of Women Film Journalists, 25 July 2012. 4-5.———. The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 100, 250, and 500 Films of 2018. Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film San Diego State University 2019. <https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/2018_Celluloid_Ceiling_Report.pdf>.Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000.Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 2002.Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. 34-47.Nietzsche, Friedrich W. The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Francis Golffing. New York: Doubleday, 1956.Nietzsche, Friedrich W., and Richard Hollingdale. Beyond Good and Evil. London: Penguin Books, 1990.Raw. Dir. Julia Ducournau. Petit Film, 2016.Richardson, Laurel. Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, 1990.———. Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997.———. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000.Romance. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Trimark Pictures Inc., 2000.Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Routledge, 1969.Sexton-Finck, Larissa. Be(com)ing Reel Independent Woman: An Autoethnographic Journey through Female Subjectivity and Agency in Contemporary Cinema with Particular Reference to Independent Scriptwriting Practice. 2009. <https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/1688/2/02Whole.pdf>.Smelik, Anneke. And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.Smith, Hazel. The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Thomas, Michelle. “10 Years of Dogme: An Interview with Susanne Bier.” Future Movies, 5 Aug. 2005. <http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/filmmaking.asp?ID=119>.Trouble Every Day. Dir. Claire Denis. Wild Bunch, 2001. Zemler, Mily. “17 Actresses Who Started Their Own Production Companies.” Elle, 11 Jan. 2018. <https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/g14927338/17-actresses-with-production-companies/>.

In March 2020, co-authors burrough and Starnaman with Technical Director Dale MacDonald had just finished collaborating on a work of computational art, A Kitchen of One’s Own, for The Photographers’ Gallery in London. In this essay we discuss the genealogy of our Zoom performance, Epic Handwashing for Synchronous Participation, which was an extension of two earlier projects—one that was derailed due to COVID-19, and the other that resulted from our pivot towards reflecting on the pandemic experience. Our performance was a response to, and offered a collaborative moment of reflection on, the uncertain moment in time of living in a global pandemic and understanding our experience through participatory art. A Kitchen of One’s Own was commissioned for “Data/Set/Match”—a year-long program dedicated to analysing, interpreting, and visualising image datasets (burrough, Starnaman, and MacDonald). The image dataset we interpreted is Epic Kitchens’ 2018 collection. Epic Kitchens is a dataset of videos collected by a group of researchers whose participants create non-scripted recordings of daily activities in kitchens. It is the largest known dataset produced using first-person vision. Researchers assign each recorded action with a verb like “wash”, “peel”, “toast”, or “rub” to describe and categorise the event. Our project juxtaposed the videos from Epic Kitchens with quotes from a dataset created by Starnaman with research assistant Alyssa Yates. This work was scheduled for installation on the approximately nine by nine-foot media wall, viewable to the public inside the gallery and to passersby on the street in London’s SoHo neighborhood. However, the work was not sent until May because of the COVID-19 lockdowns in London and Dallas. Thus, feeling trapped and frustrated in our respective homes, totally separated by quarantine, but close in distance, we responded to our historical moment with art. Figure 1: xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman with technical direction by Dale MacDonald, A Kitchen of One’s Own, single frame on the media wall seen from Ramilles Street. The Photographers’ Gallery, London, October 2020. A Kitchen of One’s Own explored personal and domestic kitchen spaces as mundane, politically-charged, and inspirational (fig. 1). The familiar, comforting space of the home kitchen became charged with domestic tropes of the pandemic: hand washing, sanitising, and cooking. We explained, A Kitchen of One’s Own is a speculative remix that confronts Epic Kitchens, a dataset of first-person cooking videos, with quotes from articles and social media posts on sexual harassment in professional and domestic kitchens, podcasts about the kitchen as a political space, and reflective texts by women authors about food and cooking. (burrough, Starnaman, and MacDonald, “Kitchen”) Taking inspiration from our Kitchen project, we pivoted for audiences online with a browser-based project, Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives. This project (fig. 2) showcases 68 videos found in Epic Kitchens’ 2018 dataset that had been tagged by researchers with the keywords “wash” or “hand”, which burrough and MacDonald optimised for the web browser and republished in a showcase on Vimeo (burrough, Starnaman, and MacDonald, “Epic”). Starnaman and burrough developed a new dataset of complementary quotes for this iteration including selections from literature written during or about pandemics such as the bubonic plague and the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19. Figure 2: Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives. Browser-based project for The Photographers’ Gallery and Unthinking Photography. March 2020 (https://unthinking.photography/projects/epichandwashing/). We developed Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation (fig. 3) as a Zoom performance of our browser-based project for a virtual engagement session at the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) conference in the summer of 2020 (burrough and Starnaman, “Epic”). In this article, we illustrate these projects as a series of interrelated investigations, and centre on the Zoom performance, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation. We then reflect on the way these works engage a range of public audiences and participants. Figure 3: xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation. Virtual engagement session and participatory performance hosted on Zoom for the ELO conference. This still frame shows a final group performance of hand washing at 21:56 (the complete session was 27:32). July 2020. Blurring Boundaries: Audiences, Participants, Maintenance, and Labour Our past projects demonstrate our commitment to participatory creative practices in which the boundary between audience members, performers, and participants is blurred in the generation of the work of art. Our earliest collaboration, The Laboring Self, was an installation of cardboard cut to the shape of virtual workers’ hands. We collected tracings of hands from workers on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk work platform and laser-cut them from recycled Amazon boxes. In the gallery we invited participants to inscribe or embroider the hands with statements about work before adding them to The Laboring Self installation. Audience members shared their stories, sentiments, anxieties, and hopes about the labour they perform in their everyday lives on hands that crowded a wall space during the span of the exhibition (fig. 4). This work was inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles's 1970s feminist performances in maintenance art, which elevated care-taking and everyday “maintenance” activities to the platform of fine art. In Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, Ukeles confronts the boundary between her everyday performance as a mother, woman, and artist. In particular, with regard to maintenance, Ukeles proposes to “simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art” (qtd. in Burnham). So too, we exhibited the hands of hidden workers to bring visibility to the invisible and asked audience members to become participants by putting on view their own reflections on the various forms of labour they embody. Figure 4: xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman, The Laboring Self, installation view approximately 8 by 10 feet. The Dallas Museum of Art Center for Creative Connections. October 2017-January 2018. For our more recent Zoom-based performance, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation, we again focus on the hands of our audience members-turned participatory performers. As Ukeles used her hands to wash the steps of an urban museum, turning often invisible labour visible through performance, we sought to make the private act of hand washing—an act of personal protection and civic duty—a public performance in the digital town square. The individual hand, which has been central to our work in the past, synecdochally represents the worker, or in this case the person-turned-public-health-citizen. In a world of ubiquitous Zoom calls, the focus is almost always on our faces, our bodies cut off around the shoulders or mid-torso. Hands are but a fleeting on-screen guest. Yet, for this performance, our hands were at the centre of the screen, standing in for our physical effort and existential fear. Directions for Participants Before our performance, we shared this set of directions with participants: Prepare to wash your hands on Zoom in real time by setting up a camera to live stream or recruit a person to film you near your sink. Log into the Zoom link provided. Wash your hands on camera for 20 seconds while we read along with your performance. Notes from the Live Event On 18 July 2020, about 24 people participated in our event as solo participants, as couples, and as families on one Zoom call. The invitation to this project included the instruction to be camera-ready for hand washing at any household sink, so our participatory public entered the call from their kitchens and bathrooms. Before our formal introduction, a couple of tech-savvy kids drew on the Zoom screen (fig. 5), initiating a spirit of playfulness that the adults on the call stepped right into. While we had anticipated this event would elicit a sense of communal action, we were not prepared for just how community- and play-starved we all were. Figure 5: Opening Title Slide, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation. ELO Virtual Engagement Session. 18 July 2020. We set the stage for the performance by introducing Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives, our spring 2020 browser-based project, and gave participants a moment to click through it and to read the texts we had culled for our database of “pandemic quotes” (burrough and Starnaman, “Epic Hand Washing Text Dataset”). Then we explained that our facilitator and Zoom host, John Murray, would be calling on the participants one at a time to wash their hands, while we took turns reading quotes from our archive. The first participant quietly washed their hands, and the pairing of our first quote created a serious tone: “so, at the bidding of the queen, they washed their hands, and all took their places…” (Boccaccio 26). However, the rhythm of the call and response, and the joy of witnessing each other in our various households across the globe, lightened the experience. We, along with participants, reveled in the intimate hygienic dance of hand washing at kitchen sinks and bathroom vanities; one after another we shifted our presence to another person’s living quarters and joined them at the sink. This was a truly mixed, global group. Scholars and artists for whom ELO is a disciplinary home rubbed virtual shoulders with our friends and their own friends who would not have attended ELO otherwise. This event replicated the same kind of shared experience across time and space that the archive of pandemic and hand washing texts elicited. These texts bring humanity together through the calamity of plague and disease, allowing for a sense of larger community, and that is exactly what we saw on the screen: human experience mediated by the screen in conversation with writers across time and connected by the word. Moreover, this event took place in July 2020, a time of “early pandemic”, a time when the complete unknown of the epidemic had given way to the acceptance of quarantining, but before the exhaustion and cynicism of The Long Confinement and Zoom fatigue had fully set in. Thus, we saw an enthusiasm to connect and play with the medium in a way that might have been impossible eight months later. Synchronous Participation as a Performance While the complete performance is archived on the ELO website, we have excerpted a clip from the performance for analysis (burrough and Starnaman, “Excerpt”). It is a 2:15 clip from the middle of the performance, during which we took turns reading quotes from our database while participants washed their hands on camera, one at a time. We showcase this selection of the performance to highlight the repetition embedded in the script. Our directions for participants and our moderator, John Murray, became repetitive mantras throughout the performance, while the reading of the quotes gave participants space to wash their hands. We read four quotes for each participant, which we measured to leave approximately thirty seconds of time for hand washing. We wanted participants to wash their hands for at least 20 seconds, following the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) guidelines, and we predicted that there would be moments when we would begin reading but participants would not yet be washing their hands. Since their performances were out of our control, we decided to read for slightly more than twenty seconds for each participant. From 0 to 22 seconds, Sabrina and our moderator, John Murray, enact the transitional directions between participants. At the start of the clip, Sabrina thanks the participants who have just finished washing their hands—our friends’ twin children, Cora and Henry, who fill the screen in Zoom’s Spotlight mode until eight seconds. The twins are at a double-vanity, washing their hands in coordinated outfits, and moving towards separate towels at the left and right sides of the screen at six seconds. At eight seconds Sabrina is spotlighted. She directs our moderator with the same “set-up phrase” that we repeat throughout the performance: “please mute everyone but us and the next selected hand washer, and don’t forget to change the spotlight to them. When you’re ready, announce who will begin washing their hands.” From 12 to 22 seconds participants are visible in Gallery View while John announces that Tina Escaga will wash their hands next (fig. 6). From 0:22 to 1:07 Tina appears in Spotlight mode. The screen is filled with Tina in the bathroom washing their hands with a white bar of soap. The next set of four quotes are read by xtine, as we watch Tina perform hand washing: "Can we not contrive that he somehow wash himself a little, that he stink not so shrewdly?” (Boccaccio 149). “We are now close to a well, which is never without the pulley and a large bucket; ’tis but a step thither, and we will wash him out of hand” (Boccaccio 149). “Among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is the poverty of the language” (Woolf 33). “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache” (Woolf 34). Figure 6: Tina washes their hands at the sink with a white bar of soap. From 1:01 to 1:29 xtine thanks Tina, repeats the set-up phrase to John, and John announces that Renee Carmichael is the next performer. The spotlight shifts from Tina to xtine to Gallery View to Renee. From 1:29 to 2:00 Renee appears at their kitchen sink and washes their hands in Spotlight mode as Sabrina can be heard reading the following four quotes: “We’ve not seen anything of the sort before...” (Camus 6). “The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits” (Camus 1). “It becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature” (Woolf 32). “They determined to attach him to the rope, and lower him into the well, there to wash himself...” (Boccaccio 149). From 2:00 to 2:15 Sabrina thanks Renee, repeats the set-up phrase, and John announces “OK, next up, Leo”. From 2:00 to 2:07 we see Sabrina in Spotlight mode, at 2:07 to 2:15 participants are visible in Gallery View, and though this clip ends at 2:15, in the full-length documentation of the performance, Leo is next seen in the Spotlight. In this short clip, it is evident that the repetition of the performance directions sets the stage for our audience / guests / performers, who voluntarily came to this ELO virtual engagement without prior rehearsal. Cora and Henry, Tina, and Renee are prepared with the camera near their sinks and wash their hands for the complete duration of our reading. Tina and Renee (and all of our adult participants) are seen in the video wearing headphones or earbuds for their performance. Our directions did not advise this, but we were encouraged to see that the participants thought ahead about their technical engagement. We also did not advise participants to turn off the water while they were scrubbing their hands. If we were to restage the event, we would include this for water sustainability purposes. It should not be so surprising to us, but we are still amazed at how thoroughly all of our participants washed their hands. Clearly, our performers had watched the directions provided by the CDC for washing viral matter from our bodies. Conclusion Our original project A Kitchen of One’s Own had viewers peering into the recorded kitchen scenes of anonymous participants in person at The Photographers’ Gallery or through the gallery window on Ramillies Street in SoHo, London. Viewers watched the private actions of strangers in their kitchens while being presented with various texts. Some offered descriptions of sexual harassment in often famous professional kitchens and others, the meditations of women about the significance of creation in their home kitchen. This developed an exploration of the significance of women’s experience in place. While fewer people were able to visit the gallery installation, A Kitchen of One’s Own, in London due to the pandemic, many people viewed Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narrative online. Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation put the audience in the domestic space while sharing the historic, traumatic experience of a pandemic, dislocated across time. It invited an entirely online audience to experience a live performance of hand washing at the sinks of strangers and friends, fully mediated through screens on both sides. Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation did exactly what we named it to do—engage people in a live, synchronous elevation of a mundane human action in a personal, yet ubiquitous space to a work of art, while experiencing the asynchronous voices of people who had already lived through global pandemics. This iteration offered us the embodied experience we had originally envisioned for A Kitchen of One’s Own. As a result of the pandemic, people in technologically connected communities are intimately familiar with the online interactive public that was once the realm of digitally savvy producers and users. This reality thus broadens the audience for our online projects. Our previous browser-based art and archive project An Archive of Unnamed Women was largely visited at workshops and conference presentations that we hosted. In previous projects like The Laboring Self, which was installed at the DMA and in the lobby of the California State University, San Marcos library, we transformed library patrons into a participatory-art public. In a moment of transformation, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation reinvented the pedestrian action of hand washing, like turning an ordinary visit to the library into an encounter with art. Similarly, it reinvented the ubiquitous act of hand washing into a live-for-Zoom performance. We are intrigued by transformation, and this shows in the way we accompany a project though many different forms before moving on to something completely different; our work is iterative by nature. A Kitchen of One’s Own germinated from our project An Archive of Unnamed Women, which pairs images of unnamed women from the New York Public Library with textual selections from fiction by women about women (“Archive of Unnamed Women”). That project engaged the archive and sought to reclaim these women from the obscurity of history. A Kitchen of One's Own took us into the kitchen, exploring what it means for women to labour and create in kitchens, both in ease and amid the duress of sexism and sexual harassment, through videos paired with text. With the pandemic arising in the U.S. and Europe in Spring 2020, we were swept up into the shared confusion, and like so many, we sought to make sense of a moment so catastrophic. We turned to writers of the past who had endured plagues and epidemics to help us gain clarity, creating a video and text synthesis that again allows for speculative meaning-making through fortuitous pairings. Presently, we are evolving this project from pandemic to enlightenment, with an iteration that takes up as inspiration the Instructions for the Zen Cook by thirteenth century Zen Master Eihei Dōgen Zenji. Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation is an iterative work arising from the tensions of a time in transformative upheaval. It was one way we sought to make sense and bring people together in a playful experience that was beyond easy understanding. References Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Filippo and Bernardo Giunti: 1370-71. Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf Edition. <http://flc.ahnu.edu.cn/__local/7/E7/75/6AB8DEBA692DD0CF6790CA70701_26DE4EC2_17EED4.pdf?e=.pdf>. Burnham, Jack. “Problems of Criticism IX: Art and Technology.” ArtForum (Jan. 1971). <http://www.artforum.com/print/197101/problems-of-criticism-ix-art-and-technology-38921>. burrough, xtine, and Sabrina Starnaman. “Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation.” Electronic Literature Organization Virtual Engagement Session. July 2020. <http://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2020/live/events/12>. ———. “Excerpt of ELO Virtual Engagement, ‘Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation’ (2:15).” Vimeo, 19 May 2021. <http://vimeo.com/xtineburrough/elo-zoom>. ———. The Laboring Self. Dallas Museum of Art Center for Creative Connections. Oct. 2017 to Jan. 2018. <http://dma.org/visit-center-creative-connections-community-projects/laboring-self>. ———. Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives: Text Dataset. Mar. 2020. <http://drive.google.com/file/d/1hSV-9l_ETTOruBpI-NCOChjuPtprlZue/view>. ———. An Archive of Unnamed Women. Browser-based project. Oct. 2019. <http://visiblewomen.net/unnamed-women/index.html>. burrough, xtine, and Sabrina Starnaman, with Technical Direction from Dale MacDonald. “A Kitchen of One’s Own.” The Photographers’ Gallery, 1-28 Oct. 2020. <http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/akitchenofonesown>. ———. “Epic Hand Washing.” Vimeo. <https://vimeo.com/showcase/4611141>. Camus, Albert. The Plague. Gallimard, 1947. <http://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/the-plague.pdf>. Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill.” The Criterion, 1926. <http://thenewcriterion1926.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/woolf-on-being-ill.pdf>.

Introduction This paper explores some specific conjunctions that tie together two nations, Japan and the Philippines. Over the past 30 years both have become entwined as a transfer of people, cultures and societies have connected and formed some interesting developments. Relations between both countries have been highly influenced through the deployment of State intervention (historically colonial and post-colonial), as well as through actors’ initiatives, leading to the development of a complex network that links both countries. It is in these relations that I would like to locate a transition between two stages in Japan-Philippine relations. I argue, this is a transition, where marriages of one kind (international marriages), the bonding of social actors from two distinct cultural spheres, gives way to another form of marriage. This transition locates the term marriage as part of an ongoing process and a discursive realm in a larger ‘affective complex’ that has developed. In this paper, I focus on this term ‘affective complex’ as it offers some interesting avenues in order to understand the continuing development of relations between Japan and the Philippines. By ‘affective complex’ I refer to the ‘cultural responses’ that people use in reaction to situations in which they find themselves which are not mediated by language. I suggest that this complex is a product of a specific encounter that exists between two nations as understood and mediated by Japanese actors’ positionings vis-à-vis foreign resident Filipinos. In tracing a moment between Japan and the Philippines, I delineate emerging properties that currently allude to a transition in relations between both countries. I would like to show that the properties of this transition are creating an emergent phenomena, a complex? This is developing through interactions between human actors whose trajectories as transnational migrants and permanent foreign residents are coming under the scrutiny of Japanese State forces in a heavily contested discursive field. This paper focuses upon the nature of the complex that entwines both countries and examines Japan’s particular restructuring of parts of its workforce in an attempt to include foreign migrants. To do this I first offer an outline of my fieldwork and then delineate the complex that ties both countries within present theoretical boundaries. This paper is based on fieldwork which deals with the theme of International Marriages between Japanese and Filipino couples. In the field I have observed the different ways in which Filipinos or Japanese with a connection to the Philippines orientate themselves within Japanese society vis-à-vis the Philippines. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus exclusively on a particular moment in my field: a care-giver course run privately with approval and recognition from local government. This course was offered exclusively for Filipino nationals with permanent residency and a high level of Japanese. As part of a larger field, a number of overlapping themes and patterns were present within the attitudes of those participating in the course. These were cultural responses that social actors carry with them which constitute part of an ‘affective complex’, its gradual emergence and unfolding. To further locate this fieldwork and its theoretical boundaries, I also position this research within current understandings of complexity. Chesters and Welsh have referred to a complex system as being a non-linear, non-deterministic system. However, from my perspective, these parameters are insufficient if institutions, organisations and human actors exhibit linear and deterministic properties (properties that discursively capture, locate and define elements in a system). In my research, I am dealing with actors, in this case Filipinos who are seen first as recipients and then as providers of welfare services. Japanese actors act as suppliers of a service both to long-term residents and to the State. In this case the following question arises: whose ‘complexes’ may be defined by a mixture of both these parameters and how can it be possible to take into account relationships whose existence cuts across them? Could a complex not be any number of these terrains which have emerged through encounters between two countries? Marriage could be a starting point for complexes that can come under scrutiny at a higher level, that of the State forces. In addition, a study of complexity in the Social Sciences focuses on how structures form rather than by focusing on any prior structured existence. Any focus on a complex system is to analyze holistic multiple elements in order to descriptively locate structures, what they penetrate, and what they are penetrated by. Human actors’ actions, strategies and expectations merge under the influence of these structures, while simultaneously influencing them. As elements interact, emergent phenomena (properties that emerge at a higher level) show a system that is process dependent, organic, and always evolving (Arthur 109). Locating Affect Deleuze and Guattari refined the discursive realm to emphasise how spaces of creation, dialogue and the casting of influence are affective, institutional and State-influenced. Within these spaces I locate the existence of ‘affective complexes’ which are discursively constructed and deployed by local actors. I will to argue that international marriages have laid a groundwork in which ‘affect’ itself has become a catalyst, re-orientating perceptions of and toward Filipinos. Following Deleuze, we can understand ‘affect’ as an intensity which, to repeat, is an expression of human relationships not mediated directly through language (Rodriguez). However, I want to suggest ‘affect’ also comes under the scrutiny of, and is discursively appealed to by, State forces as ‘affective capital’. When I refer to ‘affective capital’ I mean the potential labour discursively constructed. This construction is then “projected and tapped” in response to the changing nature of Japan’s labour market – in particular, the shortage of care-givers. This construction itself exists as an ongoing management strategy that deals with certain foreign nationals in Japan. Here, in response to the transformations of service work, ‘affective capital’ is the commoditised value of care inherent the discourse. It is the kernel of ‘affective labour’. This was very clear in my fieldwork, wherein Filipinos were targeted exclusively as the recipients of training in the health-care sector based on an understanding of the form of ‘affect’ that they possess. In this context, ‘affect’ adds intensity to meaning and is used in a wide range of cultural contexts, yet its very essence eludes description, especially when that essence as used by ‘active agents’ may be misconstrued in its deployment or discursively captured. Returning to the Deleuzian interpretation of ‘affect’, it could be interpreted as the outcome of encounters between actors and as such, a ‘mode’ in which becoming can initiate possibilities. I refer to ‘affect’, the deployment of shared, performed, communicated non-verbal ‘content’, as a powerful tool and an essential component in everyday habituated practice. In other areas of my field (not included in this discussion), ‘affect’ deployed by both actors, husband and wife, within and beyond the family, manifests itself as a mode of being. This at times adds to the location of actors’ intentions, be they spoken or performative. In this sense, locating the ‘affect’ in my research has meant observing the way in which Filipinos negotiate the availability of life strategies and opportunities available to them. At the same time, ‘affect’ is also produced by Japanese actors realigning themselves vis-à-vis both foreign actors and social change, as well as by effectuating strategies to emergent situations in Japan such as care management. ‘Affective capital’ is an inherent long-term strategy which has its roots in the cultural resources at the disposal of non-Japanese partners who, over the years, in the short and long term put to use discursively produced ‘affect’. ‘Affect’, produced in reactions to situations, encounters and events, can work in favour of long-term residents who do not have access to the same conditions Japanese may find in the labour sector. From encounters in my fieldwork, the location of ‘affect’ is an asset not just within immediate relationships, but as a possible expression of strategies that have arisen in response to the recognition of reactionary elements in Japanese society. By reactionary elements I refer to the way in which a complex may realign itself when ‘interfered’ with at another level, that of the State. The Japanese State is facing labour shortages in certain sectors due to social change, therefore they must secure other potential sources of labour. Appropriation of human resources locally available has become one Japanese State solution for this labour shortage. As such, ‘affect’ is brought into the capitalist fold in response to labor shortages in the Health Sector. Background The Philippines is a prime example of a nomad nation, where an estimated eight million of the population currently work or live overseas while remitting home (Phillippines Overseas Employment Agency). Post-colonial global conditions in the Asia Pacific region have seen the Philippines cater to external national situations in order to participate in the global labour market. These have been in the form of flows of labour and capital outsourced to those economies which are entangled with the Philippines. In this context, marriage between both countries has come to be made up almost exclusively of Japanese men with Filipina women (Suzuki). These marriages have created nascent partnerships that have formed links within homes in both countries and supported the creation of a complex system tying together both nations. Yet, in the entanglement of what seems to be two economies of desire, some interesting observations can be drawn from what I consider to be the by-products of these marriages. Yet what does this have to do with a marriage? First, I would like to put forward that certain international marriages may have developed within the above discursive framework and, in the case of the Philippines and Japan, defined certain characteristics that I will explain in more detail. Over the past 20 years, Filipinos who came to Japan on entertainment visas or through encounters with Japanese partners in the Philippines have deployed discursively constructed ‘affective capital’ in strategies to secure relationships and a position in both societies. These strategies may be interpreted as being knowledgeable, creative and possessive of the language necessary for negotiating long-term dialogues, not only with partners and surrounding family, but also with Japanese society. These deployments also function as an attempt to secure additional long term benefits which include strengthening ties to the Philippines through increasing a Japanese spouse’s involvement and interest in the Philippines. It is here that Filipinos’ ‘affect’ may be traced back to a previous deployment of categories that influences local Japanese actors’ decisions in offering a course exclusively for Filipino residents. This offers the first hint as to why only Filipinos were targeted. In Japan, secure permanent work for resident Filipinos can be, at times, difficult even when married to a partner with a stable income. The reality of remitting home to support family members and raising a family in Japan is a double burden which cannot be met solely by the spouse’s salary. This is an issue which means actors (in this case, partners) recourse to their ‘affective capital’ in order to secure means towards a livelihood. In this context, marriages have acted as a primary medium entangling both countries. Yet changes in Japan are re-locating ‘possible’ resources that are rationalised as a surplus from these primary encounters. Shifts in Japan’s social landscape have over the past 10 years led to an increasing awareness of the high stakes involved in care for the ageing and invalid in Japanese society. With over 21% of the population now over 65, the care industry has seen a surge in demand for labour, of which there is currently a shortfall (Statistics Bureau Japan). With the Philippines having strategically relocated its economy to accommodate demands for the outsourcing of health care workers and nurses overseas, Japan, realigning its economy to domestic change, has shown a new type of interest (albeit reluctant) in the Philippines. In 2005, changes and reforms to Japan’s Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act successfully curtailed the flow of Filipinos applying to Japan to work as entertainers. This was in part due to pressure from the interventionary power of the U.S: in 2006 the U.S. State department published the Trafficking in Persons Report, which stipulated that Japan had yet to comply in improving the situation of persons trafficked to Japan (U.S. State Department). This watershed reform has become a precursor to the Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement ratified by Japan and the Philippines to promote the ‘trans-border flow of goods, person, services and capital between Japan and the Philippines (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and has now temporarily realigned both economies into a new relationship. Under the terms ‘movement of natural persons’, Filipino candidates for qualified nurses and certified care workers would be allowed a stay of up to three years as nurses, or four for certified care workers (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Nonetheless, this lip service in showing openness to admit a new category of Filipino is the continuation of a mode of ‘servicing’ within the Japanese nation, albeit under the guise of ‘care work’, and rests upon the capitalist rationalisation of hired workers for Japan’s tertiary sectors. The Philippines, a nation which is positively export-orientated in terms of its human resources in response to care inequalities that exist between nations at a global level (Parreñas 12-30), is now responding to the problematic issue of care that has become a serious concern in Japan. Fieldwork To place these issues in context I want to locate the above issues within a part of my present fieldwork. In 2006, I participated in a privately funded non-profit venture set up for Filipino residents with the aim of training them to be care-givers. The course was validated and acknowledged by the local prefectural government and primarily limited to a group of 20 participants who paid approximately sixty thousand yen ($485) for the three month course including training and text books. One Filipina acquaintance enthusiastically introduced me to the retired bank manager who had set up a fund for the three month care-giver course for Filipina residents. Through interviews with the course providers, one underlying theme in the planning of the course was clear: the core idea that Filipinos have a predisposition to care for the elderly, reflecting Filipino social values no longer existent in Japan. In particular, two Japanese words employed to reflect these views – ‘omoiyari’ (思いやり), meaning “compassion” or “considerateness” and ‘yasashisa’ (優しさ) meaning “kindness toward others” – were reiterated throughout the course as a requisite for dealing with the elderly or those in need of care. One core presupposition underlining the course was that the Philippines still cherishes values which are on the decline in Japan, offering a care ethos based on Christian values ready for deployment in such work. I believe this marks a transition point in how both countries’ relations are moving away from ‘entertainment-based’ care to ‘care within an institutional setting’, such as private nursing homes or hospitals. In both cases, ‘care’ (as it is ironically known in both industries, the deployment of hospitality and attendance), operates as a dynamic of desire within a social field which orientates how residents (i.e. foreign female residents with permanent residency) are used. Yet, why would the Philippines be such an attractor? It is not difficult to see how ‘affect’ is discursively rationalised and deployed and projected onto Philippine society. This ‘affect’ acts as an attractor and belongs to an ‘imagined’ cultural repertoire that Japan has created in response to its turbulent marriage to the Philippines. In this sense, the care course promoted this ‘caring affective side’ of Filipinas here in Japan, and provided a dynamic engagement for potential negotiation, persuasion and tension between ‘local actors’ (course providers and participants) who come under the direct remit of the Japanese State (care institutions, hospitals and nursing homes). I say “tension”, as to date only a handful (three women out of a total of sixty) of those who participated in the course have taken up employment in the care industry. As one participant, a divorcee, commented, the reluctance to seek work as a qualified care worker resided in an economic framework, she says: this is a useful investment, but I don’t know if I can do this work full time to live off and support my families…but it is another arrow in my bow if the situation changes. Yet, for another woman, care work was an extension of something that they were familiar with. She jokingly added with a sigh of resignation: Oh well, this is something we are used to, after all we did nothing but care for our papa-san (husband)! When I discussed these comments with an N.G.O. worker connected to the course she pessimistically summed up what she thought by saying: The problem of care in Japan was until very recently an issue of unpaid work that women have had to bear. In a sense, looking after the aged living at home has been a traditional way to treat people with respect. Yet, here in Japan we have experienced an excessively long period whereby it was de facto that when a woman married into someone’s family, she would care for the husband and his family. Now, this isn’t an individual problem anymore, it’s a societal one. Care is now becoming an institutional practice which is increasing paid work, yet the State works on the assumption that this is low paid work for people who have finished raising their children; hard labour for low wages. All the women have graduated and are licensed to work, yet at 1000 yen (U.S. $8) an hour for psychologically demanding hard labour they will not work, or start and finish realising the demands. Travelling between locations also is also unpaid, so at the most in one day they will work 2-3 hours. It is the worst situation possible for those who choose to work. The above opinion highlights the ambiguities that exist in the constant re-alignment of offering work to foreign residents in the effort to help integrate people into Japan’s tertiary ‘care sector’ in response to the crisis of a lack of manpower. To date most women who trained on this course have not pursued positions within the health sector. This indicates a resistance to the social beliefs that continue to categorise female foreign residents for gendered care work. Through three successive batches of students (sixty women in total) the president, staff and companies who participated in this pilot scheme have been introduced to Filipino residents in Japanese society. In one respect, this has been an opportunity for the course providers to face those who have worked, or continue to work at night. Yet, even this exposure does not reduce the hyper-feminisation of care; rather, it emphasises positions. One male coordinator brazenly mentioned the phrase ashi wo aratte hoshii, meaning ‘we want to give them a clean break’. This expression is pregnant with the connotation that these women have been involved in night work have done or still participate in. These categorisations still do not shake themselves free from previous classifications of female others located in Japanese society; the ongoing legacy that locates Filipinos in a feminised discursive space. As Butler has elucidated, ‘cultural inscriptions’ and ‘political forces with strategic interests’ work to keep the ‘body bounded and constituted’ (Butler 175). It is possible to see that this care course resides within a continuously produced genealogy that tries to constitute bodies. This resides under the rubric of a dominant fantasy that locates the Philippines in Japan as a source of caring and hospitality. Now, those here are relocated under a restructuring industry outsourcing work to those located in the lower tiers of the labour sector. Why other nationals have not been allowed to participate in the course is, I stress, a testimony to this powerful discourse. Major national and international media coverage of both the course and company and those women who found employment has also raised interest in the curious complex that has arisen from this dynamic, including a series of specials aired on Japanese television by NHK (NHK Kaigo no Jinzai ga Nigete iku). This is very reminiscent of a ‘citationary’ network where writings, news items and articles enter into a perpetuating relationship that foments and bolsters the building up of a body of work (Said) to portray Japan’s changing circumstances. As seen from a traced genealogy, initial entanglements between two nations, in conjunction with societal change in Japan, have created a specific moment in both countries’ trajectories. Here, we can see an emergent phenomena and the relocation of a discursive structure. An affective complex can be located that marks a shift in how foreign residents are perceived and on what terms they can participate or contribute to Japanese society. Within this structure, ‘care’ is relocated – or, rather, trapped – and extracted as labour surplus that resides in an antagonistic relationship of domination highlighting how a specific moment existing between two countries can be ‘structured’ by needs in the ‘engaging’ country, in this case Japan. Non-linear elements in a complex system that contest how discursive practices in Japanese society locate foreign residents, within the rubric of an ‘imagined’ ethos of compassion and kindness that emanates from outside of Japan, seem to display ‘affective’ qualities. Yet, are these not projected categories deployed to continue to locate migrant labour (be they permanent or temporary residents) within an ongoing matrix that defines what resources can be discursively produced? However, these categories do not take into account the diverse structures of experience that both Japanese nationals and Filipino nationals experience in Japan (Suzuki). Conclusion In this paper I have briefly delineated a moment which rests between specific trajectories that tie two nations. A complex of marriages brought about within a specific historic post-colonial encounter has contributed to feminising the Philippines: firstly, for women in marriages, and now secondly for ‘potential resources’ available to tackle societal problems in Japan. As I have argued a discursively produced ‘affective complex’ is an authorising source of otherness and could be part of a precursor complex which is now discursively relocating human resources within one country (Japan) as a ‘reluctant source’ of labour, while entering into a new discursive mode of production that shapes attitudes toward others. I also suggest that there is a very specific complex at work here which follows an as of yet faint trajectory that points to the re-organisation of a relationship between Japan and the Philippines. Yet, there are linear elements (macro-level forces rooted in the Japanese State’s approach to care vis-à-vis the Philippines) operating at the fundamental core of this care-giver course that are being constantly challenged and cut across by non-linear elements, that is, human actors and their ambivalence as the beneficiaries/practitioners of such practices. This is the continued feminisation of a highly gendered dynamic that locates labour as and when it sees fit, but through the willing coercion of local agents, with an interest in mediating services through and for the State, for the welfare of the Nation. The desiring-machine that brings together Japan and the Philippines is also one that continues to locate the potential in foreign actors located within Japan’s institutional interpellation for its care market. Within these newly emergent relationships, available political and social capital is being reshaped and imagined in reaction to social change in Japan. By exploring two entangled nations situated within global capitalist production in the twenty-first century, my research points towards new ways of looking at emerged complexes (international marriages) that precludes the reconfigurations of ongoing emerging complexes that discursively locate residents as caregivers, who fall under the jurisdiction and glare of political powers, government subjects and State forces. References Artur, W. Brian. “Complexity and the Economy.” Science 284.2 (1999): 107-109. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Chester, Graeme, and Ian Welsh. “Complexity and Social Movement(s): Process and Emergence in Planetary Action Systems.” Theory, Culture & Society 22.5 (2005): 187-211. Deleuze, Giles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Japan). Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement Press Statement. 29 Nov. 2004. 29 Mar. 2007 http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/philippine/joint0411.html>. NHK Kaigo no Jinzai ga Nigete iku. 介護の人材が逃げて行く (“Care Workers Are Fleeing.”) Televised 11 Mar. 2007. 29 Mar. 2007 http://www.nhk.or.jp/special/onair/070311.html>. Parreñas, Rachel Salazar. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. Philippines Overseas Employment Agency. “Stock Estimates of Filipinos Overseas.” 2 May 2007 http://www.poea.gov.ph/html/statistics.html>. Rodriguez, Encarnación Gutiérrez. “Reading Affect – On the Heterotopian Spaces of Care and Domestic Work in Private Households.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 8 (2007). 2 May 2007 http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-07/07-2-11-e.pdf>. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1995. Statistics Bureau and Statistical Research and Training Institute. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (Philippines). 2005. 2 May 2007 http://www.poea.gov.ph/docs/STOCK%20ESTIMATE%202004.xls>. Suzuki, Nobue. “Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 33.4 (2004): 481-506. “Trafficking in Persons Report.” U.S. State Department. 2006. 29 Apr. 2007. http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/66086.pdf>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lopez, Mario. "From Bride to Care Worker?: On Complexes, Japan and the Philippines." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/04-lopez.php>. APA Style Lopez, M. (Jun. 2007) "From Bride to Care Worker?: On Complexes, Japan and the Philippines," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/04-lopez.php>.