Why has there been such an explosion of discussion about sex in the West since the seventeenth century? Here, one of France’s greatest intellectuals explores the evolving social, economic, and political forces that have shaped our attitudes toward sex. In a book that is at once controversial and seductive, Michel Foucault describes how we are in the process of making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure.
Foucault, Michel. “We ‘Other Victorians’” pp1-13, “Objective” pp. 81-91 and “Method” pp. 92-102 In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1990.
READING NOTES
Other Victorians
“the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality,” “serious function of reproduction,” “utilitarian and fertile,” “Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection,”
“coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.”
“If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression.”
mutually reinforcing
“Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostenta tiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?”
“We must not be surprised, then, if the effects of liberation vis-a-vis this repressive power are so slow to manifest themselves; the effort to speak freely about sex and accept it in its reality is so alien to a historical sequence that has gone unbroken for a thousand years now, and so inimical to the intrinsic mechanisms of power, that it is bound to make little headway for a long time before succeeding in its mission”
“Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact? […] Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of re pression? […] Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had ope rated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it “repression”?”
“Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said? What are the links between these discourses, these effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by them? What knowledge (savoir) was formed as a result of this linkage?”
“disengage my analysis from the privileges generally accorded the economy of scarcity and the principles of rarefaction, to search instead for instances of discursive production (which also administer silences, to be sure), of the production of power (which sometimes have the function of prohibiting), of the propagation of knowledge (which often cause mistaken beliefs or systematic misconceptions to circulate);”
Objective
“By constantly referring to positive technologies of power, you are playing a double game where you hope to win on all counts; you confuse your adversaries by appearing to take the weaker position, and, discussing repression alone, you would have us believe, wrongly, that you have rid yourself of the problem of law; and yet you keep the essential practical consequence of the principle of power-as-law, namely the fact that there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present, constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.”
The negative relation, the insistence of the rule (binary system, sex is to be deciphered on the basis of its relation to the law), the cycle of prohibition (do not appear if you do not want to disappear), the logic of censorship (affirming that such a thing is not permitted, preventing it from being said, denying that it exists), the uniformity of the apparatus (power over sex is exercised in the same way at all levels)
general theme that power represses sex and the idea that the law constitutes desire, “anti-energy”
“this critique of law [criticisms of lineage from monarchic institutions] is still carried out on the assumption that, ideally and by nature, power must be exer cised in accordance with a fundamental lawfulness.”
“if it is true that the juridical system was useful for representing, albeit in a nonexhaustive way, a power that was centered primarily around deduction (prelevement) and death, it is utterly incongruous with the new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus.”
“We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.”
“does this example—which can only be considered a privileged one, since power seemed in this instance, more than anywhere else, to function as prohibition —not compel one to discover principles for analyzing power which do not derive from the system of right and the form- of law? Hence it is a question of forming a different grid of historical decipherment by starting from a different theory of Copied under power; and, at the same time, of advancing little by little toward a different conception of power through a closer examination of an entire historical material. We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power with out the king.”
notes from module
critical lense on western practices
object of study comprised of instinct to know in v specific ways
how is knowledge concieved and how does it to expand in multiple feilds?
how do institutions become sites of knowledge to construct subjects in order to govern ex. discipline and punish, prisons reflect other spaces.
power shifting, disappearing, reappearing, Productive not value/moral judgement ie good/beneficial but that it multiplies from many points.
power as social configurations that enable complex+dynamic forces that enable power+resistance (loop)
fouclaut + deleuze + guattari, thinking+writing at moment where frued+marx dominated critical thinking, f+d+g forged alternative to f+m.
power is everywhere not just in law. how is power formed in relations? how to analyse such relations at micro level?
p 83, you are always already trapped
sexualit is way to demonstrate how power operates in contested domains which are dominated by false notion of repression. Power is tied to heteropatriarchy + regulation of disobedient racialized bodies… familiar discourse.
Diguise power and sex as negative relation, blocking and masking. Limitation of undrstanding power – rules as laws. In religious context, prohitiory laws. Identifying what isn’t permitted, imposing ways to prevent = silence. Uniformity of apparatus of power/ law, power from top, legistation vs obedience. This is reduction of power, does not take into account of waht is not spoken. Stems from western histories of monarchy, law replaces king. Contemporary example – Government/settler/otherwise, sustains power, toppling systems would undo dynamics of power, this is top down understanding of power that does not take into account that power does not always come from above.
p 89, dominant understanding of power is localized in law + rely on codes that are observerable. p 90 – “We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.”
power has not governed sexuality to laws
“power must be understood as multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate, and which constitute their own organization”
struggles, confrontations, transformations, belong to a chain or a system
visualize power as a rhizome, unclear where power emerges
power is excerised “from innumerable points,” not static, part of mobile relations, power is temporal, it grows in relation. not outside relation (deleuze, immanance). Binary between rulers+ruled, blurry, does not encompass hower power is constant changing. Revolts+refusals are not final, they reemerge. Plurality of resistances, each special case. Can only exist in strategic filed of power relations (p 96).
web of relations that become common (disicipline child’s body through repetition ie family, doctor, school), national body politic (Manning) = dispersions of power (Foucault)
(video clip) power is a relation, to govern “one’s behaviour can be determined according to strategies by using a number of tatics,” govermentality hasn’t ceased
Hjorth, Larissa and Kristen Sharp. “The art of ethnography: the aesthetics or ethics of participation?” Visual Studies. Vol. 29, No. 2, 2014, p. 128-135.
White, John Howell and Charles R. Garoian, and Elizabeth Garber. “Speaking in Tongues: The Uncommon Ground of Arts-Based Research” Studies in Art Education, Winter 2010.
Cole, Ardra L. and J. Gary Knowles. “Arts-Informed Research.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples and Issues. Sage Publications. 2007. p. 55-70.
Creswell, JW. “Mixed Methods Procedures.” Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage Publications. 2014. p. 215‐240.
Guest: Artist Allison Rowe, https://allisonroweart.com/
The Art of Ethnography: The Aesthetics or Ethics of Participation
When Hal Foster noted an ethnographic turn in the art world in the 1990s, he was eluding to broader ‘impulses’ that had haunted avant-garde movements throughout most of modernism, such as surrealism. However, the ethnographic turn did not just have an impact in the visual arts – areas such as cultural studies felt a shift from the textual towards the ethnographic. Two and half decades on, the pervasive nature of ethnography can be felt across the disciplines as ethnographic approaches evolve, migrate and transform, especially through the growing ubiquity of the digital. In this context, various entanglements need to be defined – especially the drawing upon ethnographic aesthetics and ethics in art practice. But is this ethnographic compulsion just a stylistic trend or does it speak of deeper concerns in the arts about engaging with social and cultural practices and reflexive participation? Drawing on case studies in contemporary art, this article focuses upon the haunting of the ethnographic turn in art through numerous guises from relational aesthetics onwards.
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Hjorth, Larissa and Kristen Sharp. “The art of ethnography: the aesthetics or ethics of participation?” Visual Studies. Vol. 29, No. 2, 2014, p. 128-135.
QUESTIONS
What is geo-ethnographies? How is ethnography used as a method in arts, how does “procedural documentation (eg. photographs)” fall short? How does a project ensure it is “critically and reflexively engaged?” What did Foster say about ethnography in arts?
READING NOTES
concepts central to ethnographic practice
reflexive negotiation of self, power, labour and participation
Bourriaud (Relational Aesthetics)
relational aesthetics – “human and social relations as context and content for art production and consumption.”
contemp art must move beyond 1960’s philosophies and toward internet, co-creation, DIY, etc. Audience is community to collaborate with.
Clare Bishop
relational aesthetics = MO of curator/gallery = “imbalances of power relations that in turn lead to various uneven forms of participation.”
“Has ethnography moved beyond and aesthetic gesture towards and ethical practice in art?”
ethnographic art
not documenting but method and criticality
not co-location but co-presence (Beaulieu)
ethno – centres people (Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities)
“moving from period of networked visual events to emplaced images,” multisensoriality, place-as-event, post-relational aesthetics (Pink)
“reflexive hospitality” (Papastergiadis), artist speedy collaborate/engage w/ community fashions ‘other’ in artistic guise. questions of power, labour, subjectivity.
“cultures… [do] not hold still for their portraits” (Clifford and Marcus)
“negotiate the politics of everyday as dynamic and yet prosaic”
Kester – collaborative methods – needs new documentation/critique that moves away from completed work and takes into account different forms of identification and agency of artist and participant and relations/operations of power (prioritizing ethics over aesthetics)
Bishop – critical of “good intentions,” prefer disrupt and provoke
“[in art] how to respond and adapt to the reconfiguring of identities and practices”
Underground Streams – “emphasis is not on art as a centralised fixed object but rather as a structure through which dialogue is encouraged”
art as “living process” (aucklandtriennial.com)
Place (Geo)
online/offline relationships, symbolic ideas of place
identity politics – geography and ethnicity
multiple forms of presence
digital overlays, “stories-so-far”
“co, net, tele, absent, ambient”
digital/mobile media = shift from co-location to co-presence
mediated by memory, language, gesture
lived, imagined, geographic, conceptual
“evokes cartographies of the imaginary, emotional, mnemonic and psychological” (Massey)
shaped by movement / meshwork of moving things (Ingold)
“[how might art] reimagine the identity and place as something contested, dynamic and contingent?”
“artist does not simply dwell in a place but collaborates with place” (Papastergiadis)
(artist)researcher – in collaborating, active practice of observing, documenting, reflecting, and presenting social nature of knowledge production
danger in using social-practice-art as “lab” w/o power analysis, becomes closed-loop, one ended discussion
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
Beaulieu, A. 2010. “Research Note: From Co-location to Copresence: Shifts in the Use of Ethnography for the Study of Knowledge.” Social Studies of Science 40 (3): 453–470. doi:10.1177/0306312709359219.
Bishop, C. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110: 51–79. doi:10.1162/0162287042379810.
Bishop, C. 2006a. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents.” Artforum Feb.: 179–185.
Bishop, C. 2006b. “Reply.” Artforum May: 22–23.
Bourriaud, N. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. First published in French 1998.
Foster, H. 1995. “The Artist as Ethnographer?” In Traffic in Culture, edited by G. Marcus and F. Myer, 302–309. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Foster, H. 1996. “The Artist as Ethnographer.” In The Return of the Real, 171–204. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kester, G. 2004. “Collaborative Practices in Environmental Art.” Accessed February 7. www.greenmuseum.org/ generic_content.php?ct_id=208
Kester, G. 2006. “Reply.” Artforum May: 22–23.
Kester, G. 2011. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London: Sage.
Papastergiadis, N. 2011. Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
Papastergiadis, N. 2012. Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pink, S. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage.
POST-READ
In this text Hjorth and Sharp provide an overview of ethnographic research as applied in arts-practice, and use Kester’s “The One and the Many” (2011) to analysis the balance of ethics and aesthetics in two case studies of collaborative, ethnographic social-practice art. A primary concern in this text is geo-ethnographies in relation to identity, place, and power. “Identity” is connected to geography and ethnicity (grid?), “place” is envisioned as symbolic and changing, and power is an ever present haunting of anthropology’s “othering.” This text argues for the necessity of focus and rigour to maintain and demonstrate critical reflection in arts-based ethnography and collaborative practices. It also emphasizes the need to move away from prioritizing static art resolutions/outcomes towards dynamic experiences of engagement, a move away from judgement and aesthetics to rigorous criticality and ethics.
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Speaking in Tongues: The Uncommon Ground of Arts-Based Research
In this article, we explore whether or not arts-based research engages different ideas and processes—different nouns and verbs—when the art form is understood as design, craft, or “fine” art. We propose that the fine, craft, and design arts each provide opportunities for conducting research, that their identities are built upon mutual support and willful self-separation—”I am a crafts artist not a designer;” that the distinctions mark the boundaries of our research but aren’t fixed; and, that they provide a framework for a comprehensive art education program in which the disjunctions among the three disciplines provide opportunities for critical discourse. The disorder, the complexity, and the contradiction that the three disciplines of craft, design, and fine arts bring to one another is further complicated by art educators’ and their students’ knowledge, primarily the memories and cultural histories that they bring to their craft, design, and fine art making practices and research. In doing so, the discourse about craft, design, and fine artmaking is forever unfinished in the classroom. This article is the authors’ attempt at introducing a writing style that best exemplifies the ambiguities and incompleteness of arts-based research. We have chosen aphoristic writing to provide art educators opportunities to enter the fray, to intervene in the openings between our writing by reading between the aphorisms that follow.
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White, John Howell and Charles R. Garoian, and Elizabeth Garber. “Speaking in Tongues: The Uncommon Ground of Arts-Based Research” Studies in Art Education, Winter 2010.
QUESTIONS
What is the difference between artist, designer, craftsperson and why do they separate themselves? What opportunities and barriers are there in having different identities and vocabularies for similar research practices? What do memory and cultural histories have to do with it?
READING NOTES
crafts/design/fine arts – identities formed+held through “networks of people, actions, objects, histories, and economies.” (William James + Ludwig Wittgenstein).
aphoristic methodology – challenges chronological and analytical approach to history (Walter Benjamin)
aphorism used to avoid hierarchical order
transitivity, indeterminancy – correspondences w/ relational aesthetics – “forever unfinished discursiveness, a never recaptured desire for dissemination” (Bourriaud)
aphorism + collage – perpetually unfinished, “the dictum says Something. The aphorism shows Something else… the dictum must be complete or it is nothing… an aphorism is pertpetually unfinished, always reaching beyond itself” (Gary Saul Morson, lit theory).
misreading, aphorism does not conclude but opens opportunities, liminality, ambiguity that are being applied to arts language in this text
disquieting objects – juxtaposition between prayer meditation bowl and porcelain cup – cannot wear ring because blood diamonds, cannot put up flower house numbers because of presentation – ghost of prophecy, materiality, order, tradition – control for fear of falling into abyss – craft verb/craft noun – “the encounter w/ materials as the point where personal history is problematized”
Disquieting actions – “make-it” phenomenon – mechanics of crafting+play – action in crafting, enjoyment of watching to seek techniques and skill to express experiences, ideas, emotions – The Pencil story, logic and rationality suspended, “walking stick of research” – returning/rememberance/research/resonance, the past is not the presence, traction (methods and results) and slippage (novelty and variety)
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
aphorism: a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment : ADAGE (MW)
transitivity (transitive): characterized by having or containing a direct object(grammar); being or relating to a relation with the property that if the relation holds between a first element and a second and between the second element and a third, it holds between the first and third elements; relating to, or characterized by transition
POST-READ
i made a nice egg and cheese and veg scramble. craft/design/fine art objects create tension the same way, craft/desgin/fine art mechanical movements are acted on the same way.??
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Arts-Informed Research
Contemporary American artist Martha Rosler (cited in Gever, 1981) states, “[If you want to] bring conscious, concrete knowledge to your work . . . you had better locate yourself pretty concretely in it” (p. 11). We are life history researchers with deep roots in meaning making systems that honor the many and diverse ways of knowing—personal, narrative, embodied, artistic, aesthetic—that stand outside sanctioned intellectual frameworks. To begin this chapter we surface these roots.
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Cole, Ardra L. and J. Gary Knowles. “Arts-Informed Research.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples and Issues. Sage Publications. 2007. p. 55-70.
READING NOTES
dissatisfaction and disillusionment
academy – use vocab to explain phenomena experiences processes context systems, although it feels false
transforms rich life stories and emotions into something dry
using integrity, relevance, accessibility, engagement to reach audience outside academy
enter the arts
arts-informed research
defining elements and form
ways and means for finding form
qualities of good arts inormed research
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
logical positisim
technical-rationality
POST-READ
vagueness and ambiguity are big themes ive been readng
Mixed Methods Procedures
Creswell, JW. “Mixed Methods Procedures.” Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage Publications. 2014. p. 215‐240.
READING NOTES
mixing 2 data types makes better understanding of problem/question
qualitative – open ended
quantitative – close ended
1) intent + def of design of mixed methods 2) reasons, value 3) choose mixed methods design 4) discuss data collection, analysis, interpretation, validation 5) discuss anticipated ethical issues
“Trying to talk to climate change scientists about the future and their feelings,” 2018 was the most interesting to me because of the way the narrative got shorter and more succinct as the interviews go on. The lack of visual / audio exhibit materials is fitting for a project where the participants unanimously did not feel it appropriate to respond. It also illuminates how the artist came to develop a later project, “Emotional Labor Specialist, Climate Change Hotline” 2019, wherein the specialist is often absent. I wonder how the work she has done at Artscape Gibraltar Point connects to the research and theory we have been reading.
Allison Rowe Green Skies- Exterior View, Installation, 2017
This research-creation project has two principal outcomes. One is a theoretical framework that presents online sex in material terms. The other, a series of art experiments that have been exhibited recently and are documented in a website. The relation between these two different expressions is by no means tautological. Rather, it should be understood as an ongoing conversation, perhaps a digression, certainly a permanent back and forth.
The Moldy Strategy, Antonia Hernandez
Villains, Ghosts, and Roses, or, How to Speak with the Dead
Huber, Sandra. “Villains, Ghosts, and Roses, or, How to Speak with the Dead”. Open Cultural Studies 3.1 (2019): 15-25. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0002 Web.
Disability as a Method of Creative Practice
Dokumaci, Arseli (2018). Supplementary Video Resources for “Disability as Method: Interventions in the Habitus of Ableism through Media-Creation.” Disability Studies Quarterly, 38(3), https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v38i3.6491
In this article, I share and reflect on a research-creation video that introduces what I call ‘disability as method’ to critical disability and media studies. The video draws on a year-long visual ethnography, during which I collaborated with a blind and a physically disabled participant to explore the specificities of their mobility experiences in the city of Montreal. In making this video, I use the affordances of filming and editing in creative ways both to explore what access could mean to differently disabled people in the space of the city and to reimagine new possibilities of media-making informed by blindness gain. To this end, I introduce a new audio description (AD) technique by using stop-time as crip-time, and deploying AD not only as an accessibility feature but also as a blind intervention in the creative process of filmmaking itself.
Dokumaci, A. (2019) “A Theory of Micro-activist Affordances: Disability, Improvisation and Disorienting Affordances,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 118 (3): 491-519.
This article proposes a new theory of affordances that is developed through a critical disability and performance lens. Through parallels to be drawn between the creative space of aesthetic performance and the performance of everyday life lived with disability, this new theory situates affordances in the improvisatory space of performance, and introduces the notion of “micro-activist affordances” as a way to understand mundane acts of world-building that could emerge from encounters with a world of “disorienting affordances.” Experiencing disability is inherently disorienting. The environment, as years of disability activism have shown us, is built with a very limited conception of the human being in mind. But the environment can also be disorienting when experiencing bodily pain and chronic disease. I argue that disability, in all of its various manifestations, is experienced as the shrinking of the environment, and its readily available affordances. But, as I shall also argue, precisely at such moments of shrinking, something else happens. When the environment is narrowed down in its offerings, I propose that it is the creative space of performance (on or offstage) that opens up to make it afford otherwise. This very potential to invent affordances is precisely how I conceptualize everyday lives lived with disability as being analogous to the reimagined space of aesthetic performance and its reorientations.
Dokumaci, A. (In press) “People as affordances”: Building disability worlds through care intimacy,” Cultural Anthropology.
Dokumaci, A. (2018) “Disability as Method: Interventions in the Habitus of Ableism through Media-Creation,” Disability Studies Quarterly, 38:3.
Dokumaci, A. (2017) “Performing Pain and Inflammation: Rendering the Invisible Visible”, AMA Journal of Ethics, Special section: Images of Healing and Learning, 19(8): 834-838.
Dokumaci, A. (2017) “Performing Pain and Inflammation: Rendering the Invisible Visible”, AMA Journal of Ethics, Special section: Images of Healing and Learning, 19(8): 834-838.
LETS GET YOU PREGNANT
Heidi Barkun
The first “test-tube baby” came into the world over 40 years ago. Since then, over seven million children have been born through in vitro fertilization. Popular culture leads us to believe that every attempt of this biotechnology is successful. In Quebec, stars such as Céline Dion and Julie Snyder have become models of its triumph. However the global success rate is just 27%. LET’S GET YOU PREGNANT! reveals the experience of failure of in vitro fertilization within the same social, political and medical systems that place motherhood at the forefront of women’s lives. An audio and museum installation creates a virtual conversation between 28 participants, including the artist, who have undergone failed in vitro fertilization cycles and have not become mothers.
(walltext)
link, includes walkthrough of exhibition w/ audio+subtitles: https://www.heidibarkun.com/projects/let-s-get-you-pregnant-
‘Tis but a flesh wound II / 2008 / Oil paint and thread on Terraskin paper, mounted on canvaswhite with red square / 2003 / Beeswax, oil paint, cement on plywood; poplar frame
Cartwright, Lisa. “Affect.” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams et al., NYU Press, 2015, pp. 30–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmhws.11. Accessed 5 Oct. 2020.
Lewis, Victoria Ann. “Crip.” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams et al., NYU Press, 2015, pp. 46–48. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmhws.17. Accessed 5 Oct. 2020.
Davidson, Michael. “Aesthetics.” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams et al., NYU Press, 2015, pp. 26–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmhws.10. Accessed 5 Oct. 2020.
Wilkerson, Abby. “Embodiment.” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams et al., NYU Press, 2015, pp. 67–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmhws.24. Accessed 5 Oct. 2020.
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