The contributors to Affective Trajectories examine the mutual and highly complex entwinements between religion and affect in urban Africa in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic ...research throughout the continent and in African diasporic communities abroad, they trace the myriad ways religious ideas, practices, and materialities interact with affect to configure life in urban spaces. Whether examining the affective force of the built urban environment or how religious practices contribute to new forms of attachment, identification, and place-making, they illustrate the force of affect as it is shaped by temporality and spatiality in the religious lives of individuals and communities. Among other topics, they explore Masowe Apostolic Christianity in relation to experiences of displacement in Harare, Zimbabwe; Muslim identity, belonging, and the global ummah in Ghana; crime, emotions, and conversion to neo-Pentecostalism in Cape Town; and spiritual cleansing in a Congolese branch of a Japanese religious movement. In so doing, the contributors demonstrate how the social and material living conditions of African cities generate diverse affective forms of religious experiences in ways that foster both localized and transnational paths of emotional knowledge.
Contributors. Astrid Bochow, Marian Burchardt, Rafael Cazarin, Hansjörg Dilger, Alessandro Gusman, Murtala Ibrahim, Peter Lambertz, Isabelle L. Lange, Isabel Mukonyora, Benedikt Pontzen, Hanspeter Reihling, Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon
Abstract Background The accuracy of the 2013 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) Pooled Cohort Risk Equation for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) events ...in contemporary and ethnically diverse populations is not well understood. Objectives The goal of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of the 2013 ACC/AHA Pooled Cohort Risk Equation within a large, multiethnic population in clinical care. Methods The target population for consideration of cholesterol-lowering therapy in a large, integrated health care delivery system population was identified in 2008 and followed up through 2013. The main analyses excluded those with known ASCVD, diabetes mellitus, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels <70 or ≥190 mg/dl, prior lipid-lowering therapy use, or incomplete 5-year follow-up. Patient characteristics were obtained from electronic medical records, and ASCVD events were ascertained by using validated algorithms for hospitalization databases and death certificates. We compared predicted versus observed 5-year ASCVD risk, overall and according to sex and race/ethnicity. We additionally examined predicted versus observed risk in patients with diabetes mellitus. Results Among 307,591 eligible adults without diabetes between 40 and 75 years of age, 22,283 were black, 52,917 were Asian/Pacific Islander, and 18,745 were Hispanic. We observed 2,061 ASCVD events during 1,515,142 person-years. In each 5-year predicted ASCVD risk category, observed 5-year ASCVD risk was substantially lower: 0.20% for predicted risk <2.50%; 0.65% for predicted risk 2.50% to <3.75%; 0.90% for predicted risk 3.75% to <5.00%; and 1.85% for predicted risk ≥5.00% (C statistic: 0.74). Similar ASCVD risk overestimation and poor calibration with moderate discrimination (C statistic: 0.68 to 0.74) were observed in sex, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic status subgroups, and in sensitivity analyses among patients receiving statins for primary prevention. Calibration among 4,242 eligible adults with diabetes was improved, but discrimination was worse (C statistic: 0.64). Conclusions In a large, contemporary “real-world” population, the ACC/AHA Pooled Cohort Risk Equation substantially overestimated actual 5-year risk in adults without diabetes, overall and across sociodemographic subgroups.
Before he became the father of cinematic special effects, George Méliès (1861-1938) was a maker of deluxe French footwear, an illusionist, and a caricaturist. Proceeding from these beginnings, Méliès ...Boots traces how the full trajectory of Georges Méliès’ career during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, along with the larger cultural and historical contexts in which Méliès operated, shaped his cinematic oeuvre. Solomon examines Méliès’ unpublished drawings and published caricatures, the role of laughter in his magic theater productions, and the constituent elements of what Méliès called "the new profession of the cinéaste." The book also reveals Méliès' connections to the Incohérents, a group of ephemeral artists from the 1880s, demonstrating the group’s relevance for Méliès, early cinema, and modernity. By positioning Méliès in relation to the material culture of his time, Solomon demonstrates that Méliès’ work was expressive of a distinctly modern, and modernist, sensibility that appeared in France during the 1880s in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution.
ABSTRACT
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Johannesburg between 2011 and 2019 in inner‐city unlawful occupations and temporary emergency accommodation sites. These are often ...referred to as “hijacked buildings,” “bad buildings,” or “dark buildings.” However, they are also spaces of refuge, intimacy, and sociality for tens of thousands of South Africans and foreign nationals excluded from formal rental markets and often displaced by the drive for urban regeneration. This essay mobilizes two concepts to characterize these spaces. The first is the notion of the “city otherwise,” engaging Elizabeth Povinelli's concept of “spaces of otherwise.” The residents of these occupations endure in spaces of emergence and potentiality. Furthermore, I argue that they exist in a juridical condition that I characterize as “the deferred emergency.” This condition entails the indefinite deferral of an emergency, framed around both the juridical and the infrastructural form of “temporary emergency accommodation” for the evicted.
In the beginning of 2020, the novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, became a public health emergency in the U.S. and rapidly escalated into a global pandemic. Because ...the SARS-CoV-2 virus is highly contagious, physical distancing was enforced and indoor public spaces, including schools and educational institutions, were abruptly closed and evacuated to ensure civilian safety. Accordingly, educational institutions rapidly transitioned to remote learning. We investigated the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on domestic U.S. college students, ages 18-24 years.
Through Pollfish®'s survey research platform, we collected data from 200 domestic U.S. college students in this age range (N = 200) regarding the physical, emotional, and social impacts of COVID-19 as well as key background information (e.g. whether or not they are first-generation or if they identify with the LGBTQIA+ community).
Our results indicate that students closer to graduating faced increases in anxiety (60.8%), feeling of loneliness (54.1%), and depression (59.8%). Many reported worries for the health of loved ones most impacted their mental health status (20.0%), and the need to take care of family most affected current and future plans (31.8%). Almost one-half of students took to exercising and physical activity to take care of their mental health (46.7%). While a third did not have strained familial relationships (36.5%), almost one half did (45.7%). A majority found it harder to complete the semester at home (60.9%), especially among those who had strained relationships with family (34.1%). Seventy percent spent time during the pandemic watching television shows or movies. Significantly more men, first-generation, and low-income students gained beneficial opportunities in light of the pandemic, whereas their counterparts reported no impact. First-generation students were more likely to take a gap year or time off from school.
Although students found ways to take care of themselves and spent more time at home, the clear negative mental health impacts call for schools and federal regulations to accommodate, support, and make mental health care accessible to all students.
In January 2012 the residents of an inner‐city tenement building in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, were evicted on a court order. The building was situated in a post‐industrial neighbourhood in which ...thousands of South Africans and foreign nationals, many blind or disabled, live in unlawfully occupied buildings without access to water, basic sanitation, electricity and waste management services. Such buildings are known in policy discourse as ‘bad buildings’, and informally as ‘dark buildings’, invoking both a sense of developmental failure and spiritual insecurity. In this paper I analyse how urban renewal policies created social divisions and alliances not only among the residents of Chambers, which were channelled along nationalist lines, but also between the able‐bodied and disabled, and produced new social alliances. In particular, I document how a group of blind Zimbabweans experienced threats of violence and accusations of betrayal, as they were offered alternate accommodation by the evicting company because of their disability. I argue here that the pressures of private‐sector housing developments intersected with the insecurities and divisions of inner‐city social spaces and also fostered new alliances. Following the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I invoke the concept of ‘decoding dispossession’, proposing that ongoing evictions and dispossessions are characterized by simultaneous movements of ‘decoding and deterritorialization’ and ‘overcoding‐reterritorialization’.
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