Academic literature on the topic 'Christian teenage girls'

AbstractThe paper examines the changes that occurred over time between Christians and Muslim in rural settlements. The study collected data from focus group discussions (FGDs) with married literate adolescent girls and unmarried non-literate adolescent girls. Christian and Muslim faith leaders as well as a government official were interviewed. The study revealed the rising rate of early marriage among Christians who were hitherto known to the delayed marriage of girl-child above 18 years. These changes have been attributed to the rising rate of poverty. This is because most of the rural families in the areas surveyed regardless of their faith; are polygamous because of the nature of their occupation––subsistence farming which relied on manual labour from the family. Cultural beliefs are still adhered to in rural settlements, most parents viewed girl-child as a problem which if left unmarried, may bring shame to the family: teenage pregnancy out of wedlock which is regarded as a taboo. The paper concludes that there is a need for the cultural reorientation and awareness on how rural dwellers view girl-child. Also, it is pertinent to introduce poverty reduction projects in rural areas and the establishment of schools closer to the people as well as imparting sex education

Since theRoev.WadeSupreme Court ruling in 1973 made abortion legal in the United States, it has consistently been subject to attempts to limit its reach, to make abortions harder to access, and thus to restrict their availability or frequency. In recent years, both pro-life and pro-choice groups have been reenergized, through calls to defund Planned Parenthood in Congress in 2015, and the 2016 Supreme Court ruling which prohibited a Texas “clinic-shutdown” law, for obstructing women's legal access to abortion underRoe. An era where this law was particularly contested, however, was the 1980s, which saw the Christian right crystallize and rally together to support the election of Ronald Reagan as President, in the hopes that he would promote their goals. Though extra-governmental pro-life groups and antiabortion individuals within the federal government were not ultimately able to do away withRoe, and would eventually become disappointed with Reagan's efforts in securing this, a series of measures over the course of the administration saw abortion access limited for one group of women in particular: teenage girls. This essay follows these legislative moves over the course of the 1980s, which include the first federal abstinence-only education bill, the Adolescent Family Life Act, a series of laws that allowed states to enact parental notification or consent clauses for minors’ abortions, and a “squeal rule” for doctors who treated sexually active teenagers. It analyses the discourse of and around each of these measures in order to understand how young women's sexual conduct mobilized abortion policy in this era. In doing so, it offers new perspectives on the significance of adolescent female sexuality to Reagan, to the Christian right, and to progressives involved in the heated debates over abortion and related battles of the 1980s culture wars.

The Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS 2014) revealed changing patterns in the contraceptive use of young women aged 15–24, shifting from injectable methods to implants. Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) is user friendly, long-term, and more effective than other modern methods. It could be a game-changer in dealing with unintended pregnancies and herald a new chapter in the reproductive health and rights of young women. This study determined the factors associated with LARC use among adolescent girls and young women to expand the evidence of its potential as the most effective method of reducing unwanted pregnancies among the cohort. This study analysed secondary data from KDHS 2014 using binary logistic regression. The findings showed a rise in LARC use (18%), with identified predictors of reduced odds being aged 15–19 [OR = 0.735, 95% CI = 0.549–0.984], residence (rural) [OR = 0.674, CI = 0.525–0.865], religion (Protestant/other Christian) [OR = 0.377, CI = 0.168–0.842], married, [OR = 0.746, CI = 0.592–0.940], and region (high contraception) [OR = 0.773, CI = 0.626–0.955], while the number of living children showed increased odds for 1–2 children [OR = 17.624, CI = 9.482–32.756] and 3+ children [OR = 23.531, CI = 11.751–47.119]. This study established the rising popularity of LARC and identified factors that can be addressed to promote it. Its increased uptake could help Kenya achieve the International Conference on Population and Development 25’s first and second commitments on teenage pregnancies and maternal and new-born health, thus promoting the health, wellbeing, educational goals, and rights of this critical cohort. This study can guide the accelerated efforts needed in Kenya’s march towards the five zeros of unmet need for contraception, teenage pregnancies, unsafe abortions, preventable maternal deaths, and preventable neonatal/infant deaths.

Background and Objectives: Without mandatory school-based education, Romania is a leading European country in teen pregnancy. This survey aimed at assessing the level of knowledge and the opinions about sexual education and sexual-related issues among mothers of female teenagers aged 13–18 years old. Material and Methods: The survey was conducted between 2015 and 2017 and had four parts, collecting data about sociodemographic variables, the level of knowledge about sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, and contraception. The respondents were mothers of female teenagers hospitalized in a tertiary pediatric clinic. Data were analyzed using IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Statistics for Windows, version 25 (Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Results: One hundred and thirty-five mothers (42.46 ± 6.81 years old) were included in the research. Most of them were from rural areas, had graduated secondary school, were Christian-orthodox, married, and with a stable job. More than half of the mothers (61.42%) declared that they personally knew adolescents that were already mothers. In great proportion, mothers proved good knowledge about sexual education, contraception, and STDs. They considered that the minimum age for becoming married, in general, is about M = 18.62 ± 2.09 years old but in the case of their daughters, mothers appreciated that the best age would be 23.56 ± 9.37. Mothers considered that they had good communication with their daughters (M = 4.28 ± 0.99) and two-thirds sustained that they had discussed with them about sexual activity, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and contraception. In case of unwanted pregnancy of their daughters, one-third of the mothers (38.50%) would advise their girls to continue the pregnancy and 7.40% mentioned the termination of pregnancy. Two-thirds of them (74.10%) agreed to school-based sexual education. In the order of preferred sources for sexual education, mothers mentioned parents (85.90%), teachers (33.30%), and family doctors (24.40%). Comparative results regarding their own sex life and that of their daughters are presented. Conclusions: School-based programs should meet parental beliefs about sexuality and sexual education. School, as a creator of values and models, should find the golden ratio to better shape the personal, familial, and social needs for the healthy sexual behavior of the new generation.

A teenage Catholic girl lies immobilized in her bed in Worcester, Massachusetts, her dark hair gathered in pink satin ribbons, her lacy nightgown spread neatly around her. The pleasing effect of a damsel in a pre-Raphaelite painting is broken by the sight of a tracheotomy tube in her neck attached to a ventilator, and a feeding tube in her stomach. For the last six years the American media has provided glimpses into the curious vegetative existence of Audrey Santo (1984–), who has lain in a coma-like state since a swimming pool accident at the age of three. Despite the girl's lack of consciousness and brain function, she has been credited as the conduit for extraordinary events in her home which have included bleeding hosts, stigmata, weeping statues, exuding walls, and physical healings. Audrey's popularity is largely a media creation, stemming from a 1996 televised documentary film about her on EWTN, a Christian broadcasting network in Alabama, which spawned a deluge of requests to the Santo family from people wanting to make a pilgrimage to see their daughter.

The image appeared on the cover of a Sunday bulletin, produced and distributed by one of Guatemala City's most conservative neo-Pentecostal mega-churches. The picture presented the face of a young teenage girl, her eyes closed, lips wet, and skin kissed by a soft, transcendent light; the young woman's head was even tilted to the side in what Jacques Lacan would call jouissance (1998). Across her pink lips read Psalm 4:6: “In peace, I lay myself down.” This image, stitched together by the church's media relations department, makes a sly reference to Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture, St. Teresa in Ecstasy (1652). The statue in Rome presents one of Teresa of Ávila's (1515–1582) mystical experiences of God, which the sixteenth-century Spanish saint narrates with unblinkingly erotic imagery. In her autobiography, St. Teresa writes how “the great love of God” often left her “utterly consumed,” “penetrated to [her] entrails,” and made her “utter several moans” for both the “intense pain” and its “sweetness” (Peers 1927: 197). With St. Teresa in mind, my own reaction to the church bulletin parroted Jacques Lacan's response to Bernini's statue. “She's coming,” Lacan commented, “There's no doubt about it” (1998: 76).

Abstract.DIFFERENCES BY CULTURE IN AN INITIAL VALIDATION OF AN INSTRUMENT IN CONSTRUCTION TO EVALUATE EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IN A SAMPLE OF PRIMARY STUDENTSCulture differences over initial a validation of a test under construction to asses Emotional Intelligence in Primary degree students. The objective of this paper is to develop a questionnaire to assess Emotional Intelligence (EI), following the model which sees it as a set of skills, using as reference the MSCEIT (Mayer et al., 2009) aimed at a sample of students from Primary Education. To prevent the validity be adversely affected, we applied analysis to both customs/religion separately. We focused on 404 participants from 6 to 12 years old, from 4 different schools; 42.2% are boys and 57.8% girls; 58.9% are Muslims and 41.1% Christians. The techniques used in this survey are a test developed to assess EI in teenagers and a similar adaptation of EHS (Gismero, 2000). The results show high levels of reliability for both customs/religion groups. The dimensions are different (4 Christians and 5 Muslims) for both groups. There are positive correlations between totals and the dimensions that make them. We found no significant correlations between the two scales. Therefore this questionnaire is an appropriate tool to evaluate these capabilities after making some modifications in future works. It is more appropriate to apply the analysis separately.Keywords: Emotions, Emotional Intelligence, emotional education, assessment tool, pluricultural context.Resumen.Este trabajo tiene como objetivo elaborar un cuestionario para evaluar la Inteligencia Emocional (IE), siguiendo el modelo que la considera como un conjunto de habilidades, utilizando como referencia el MSCEIT (Mayer Salovey y Caruso, 2009) y destinado a una muestra infantil. Para evitar que la validez del instrumento se pueda ver negativamente afectada se aplicó en análisis a ambos grupos culturales por separado. Para esto se contó con una muestra de 404 participantes, procedentes de 4 centros distintos, de los cuales, el 47.8% son niños y el 52.2% niñas y el 68.8% de cultura/religión musulmana y el 31.2% cristiana, con edades comprendidas entre los 6 y los 12 años. Como instrumentos de evaluación se emplearon un test elaborado para la evaluación de la IE, junto con una adaptación propia de la EHS (Gismero, 2000). Los resultados obtenidos reflejan niveles de fiabilidad aceptables para ambos grupos culturales. Las dimensiones esperadas fueron diferentes (4 cristianos y 5 musulmanes), apareciendo intercorrelaciones positivas entre los totales y las dimensiones que lo conforman. No fue así para las Habilidades Sociales, medidas a través de este cuestionario. Este cuestionario se muestra como instrumento adecuado para evaluar estas capacidades en la población infantil, tras realizar algunas modificaciones en trabajos futuros, siendo más indicado aplicar el análisis por separado.Palabras Clave: Emociones, Inteligencia Emocional, educación emocional, instrumento de evaluación,contexto pluricultural.

Abstract: Obesity is a multifactorial disease, which is caused by excessive accumulation of fat tissue. So that it can be detrimental to health. Children who had obesity tend to have obesity during their adulthood. The school age of children have risks to get obesity. Ignoring breakfast and tend to consume fast food, tend to make teenagers at risk of suffering obesity.The research aim to identify the obese prevalence of adolescent at Tumou Tou Christian Senior High School Bitung City. The method of research used cross sectional descriptive approach. Samples were taken of 137 people aged 13-18 years by using simple random sampling. Based on the results of waist circumference there were 17 students obtained obese category. However, by using IMT examination there were only 5 students found obese category. Therefore, it can be concluded that the prevalence of obesity in adolescent is equal to 12.40% of the sample, and consists of 2.91% boys and 9.5% among girls. Keyword: Obesity, Adolescent, Tumou Tou Christian Senior High School Bitung City. Abstrak: Obesitas merupakan suatu penyakit multifaktorial, yang terjadi akibat akumulasi jaringan lemak berlebihan, sehingga dapat mengganggu kesehatan. Obesitas pada anak adalah faktor penentu yang sangat penting terhadap obesitas pada usia dewasa. Salah satu kelompok umur yang berisiko terjadinya obesitas adalah kelompok umur usiasekolah. Gaya hidup remaja saat ini yang sering melewatkan sarapan dan lebih suka mengkonsumsi fast food serta cenderung sedentary life style, membuat remaja berisiko untuk menderita obesitas. Tujuan dari penelitian untuk mengetahui prevalensi obesitas pada remaja di SMA Kristen Tumou Tou Kota Bitung. Jenis penelitian yang digunakan bersifat cross sectional dengan pendekatan deskriptif.Sampel yang diambil sebanyak 137 orang dengan usia 13-18 tahun di SMA Kristen Tumou Tou Kota Bitung secara simple random sampling. Berdasarkan hasil pemeriksaan lingkar pinggang pada 137 populasi didapatkan 17 siswa termasuk dalam kategori obesitas, namun dengan menggunakan pemeriksaan IMT ditemukan 5 orang siswa yang mengalami obesitas, sehingga dapat disimpulkan prevalensi obesitas pada remaja adalah sebesar 12,40% yang terdiri dari 2,91% remaja laki-laki dan 9,5% remaja perempuan. Kata kunci: Obesitas, Remaja, SMA Kristen Tumou Tou Kota Bitung.

Herbstein, Manu. Brave Music of a Distant Drum. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer Press. 2012. Print. A young African-American man, Zachariah Wiliams, comes to visit his mother, who has been enslaved all her adult life. He, too, is a slave, but views his Brazilian owners as benevolent Christians, who have taught him how to read and write, gave him some pay for his bookkeeping work, and have promised to set him free in the coming years. He is reticent to meet with his mother who has never converted to Christianity, and with whom he is not close; she calls him by the name Kwame Zumbi, and she is uninterested in his successes working for his owners. She has asked him to smuggle some paper from his office, for she is going to tell a story she wishes him to write down for his own daughter to read when she is older.Ama's story is brutal in a way that is familiar to many readers, but not predictable. She tells of a failed rebellion on the slave ship, the beatings and sexual assaults that were a part of her everyday life, and of her love for Tomba, Zacharias' father. She writes of her intimacy with the daughter of her owners, emphasizing the strangeness of a girl who attempts to treat Ama well as a slave, but who does not truly want Ama to have her freedom. Although Ama has some momentary victories against people involved in the slave trade, she is never ultimately free. The novel does not attempt to fulfill a reader's hope for Ama's emancipation, and in this way, is more realistic than some fictional narratives of slavery in the Americas; it also avoids 'containing' the issue of slavery by ending with an individual's escape. This makes for a difficult, but strong novel.This young adult novel is based on author Herbstein's earlier historical novel for adults, Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Herbstein has made an unusual move here, revising the original novel for a younger audience, and has made thoughtful choices in doing so. He has shortened the story significantly, skimming over much of Ama's experiences that take place between her kidnapping in her village, and her forced placement on a slave ship headed for Brazil. (He skillfully explains this change as the limited amount of paper that Zachariah been able to procure; Ama wishes to retain only the details of her brutal enslavement in Brazil.) Herbstein's use of shifting first-person perspective, alternating between Ama and Zacharias, efficiently conveys Ama's blunt telling with her son's change from disbelief to anger at the injustice she has endured—an injustice that implicates his Brazilian owners. Brave Music of a Distant Drum is a brutal, thoughtful, well-written book that would be excellent for teenage readers.Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Allison SivakAllison Sivak is the Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Library and Information Studies and Elementary Education, focusing on how the aesthetics of information design influence young people’s trust in the credibility of information content.

Approaching the third millennium of the Christian calendar (a fact which in spite of its ethnocentrism is a culturally significant means of making temporal sense of the world), more people in the industrialised world than ever before are stamped with the imprimatur granted by formal education. To draw on the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the world is loaded with people in possession of cultural capital. However, while Bourdieu wrote in a milieu concerned with the capacity to distinguish between the 'Well-Tempered Clavier' and 'Blue Danube' as a pivotal mark of distinction, in the postmodern times in which we apparently live, these distinctions are no longer quite so distinguishable nor distinguished. This is no more true than at the ground zero of popular culture where a small army of mostly young people sit in lounge rooms, cinemas, and cafés armed with media and/or cultural studies training of one form or another, reading their world as texts. The net effect: advertisements become 'clever' and cinemagraphic; irony has become an empty signifier; intertextuality eats itself; and the weekly late night broadcast of Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) has -- at least here in Brisbane -- become a flashpoint for the local universities' public relations wars. Go girl! In this short article it is my intention to explore -- in a none too systematic manner -- some of the ways in which the traditional determinants of class are being redefined in the light of the so-called postmodern capitalist informational economy which arguably defines this moment. From this, I will then segue into a discussion of contemporary cultural distinctions -- the consumer practices inflecting style and fashion -- that draw upon an informed and educated subject as both their inspiration and market. Cultural Capital and Bricolage Those with cultural capital are in this socio-political moment the 'haves' (as distinct from the 'have nots') of an age where much certainty is being challenged. In both consumer choices and in the wider spheres of employment and kinship structures, bricolage -- the piecing together of value and/or meaning from the assortment of possibilities that can be wrenched from what's 'out there' -- is the modus operandi of those with the educational chutzpah to venture to try. Of course, the starting points are still far from equal; some hit the ground running due to privileges of birth, skin, class, gender, nationality, normative sexualities and biologies, others have often sought out education as the first step in an attempt to endow themselves with capital in any form. But the fact remains that the hurdle has been raised and formal -- preferably post-secondary -- education is now something of a pre-requisite for social mobility. Zygmunt Bauman equates this endowed subjectivity with that of the tourist: the mobile bourgeois consumer par excellence. As bricoleur our (I use the term 'our' to refer to those people similarly 'marked by our non-markedness' as myself: white, educated citizens of an industrialised nation, even if that is Australia) highly portable knowledge confers upon us a privileged status within global racial and economic structures of power. Cultural knowledge can operate literally as both right of passage and funding; hence cultural capital. As those in the best position from which to maximise the possibilities of the postmodern world, Bauman argues that the 'tourist' never actually arrives per se, rather the achievement is the journey -- the capacity to move on when the need arises or the whim strikes (90). That sort of mobility presumes agency. 'Tourists' choose to be mobile and transient and so can arrive somewhere bigger and better if they wish; they are not forcibly dislocated to what may well be a worse option. In Bauman's words, 'tourists' possess 'situational control': "the ability to choose where and with what parts of the world to 'interface' and when to switch off the connection" (91). By definition such a system also requires a larger grouping of people who are excluded from Nirvana; Bauman names this status that of the 'vagabond', those who are forcibly moved on from any space which may present as a possible home and who are allowed to settle precisely nowhere. They too are on the move, but unlike the movement of the 'tourist' this is not a chosen path; for the 'vagabond' freedom means the freedom "not to have to wander around" (92). The 'vagabonds' freedom is on par with that of the person forced by institutional status to live on the streets of industrialised societies wanting nothing more than a vaguely secure place to have a kip. The road may be mythic and romantic -- a site of freedom -- if you can choose to be there (and to return 'home'), but, and this can be said of many situations, something is not romantic nor desirable if you have no choice but to be there or to do it, even if the case were that if such a choice were possible you would indeed choose such a course of action. 'Slumming it' is fun if you know a hot bath and warm bed awaits you at the end of the day. Needless to say, it's also incredibly insulting to those who don't have this choice. Therefore, returning to Bauman, the point is that the greater "freedom of choice one has, the higher one's rank in the postmodern social hierarchy" (93). This embodied characterisation of the material significance of cultural capital in an age where information is king, should serve as a warning signal to those for whom the hype of a technologically mediated informational economy of global proportions equals rings somehow true. New horizons are being opened up and will soon be visited by independent travellers in search of a more 'authentic' and 'exotic' experience, who will subsequently open up the space for the more overtly imperialist agents who inevitably follow. Goa is no longer where it's happening, grab the Rough Guide to cyberspace and hang on. Nerd Chic At this point however, it's time to relate this all back to my putative title for this piece and to come clean on some moments of interpellation, which, as always, got me thinking on my own place within global systems of power (and desire). And I have to 'fess up that all my cultural capital came at a price, as it did for many of us: I was a teenage nerd (and arguably still am). What brings me joy however, is that long after the guys had their nerd chic moment in the sun -- Jarvis Cocker, glasses, lots of corduroy, (indeed, all those British non-laddish lads and their iconography) -- it's finally also the nerd chicks' time in the warm glow of funkiness. I'm afraid I'm not referring here to the popularity of the Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace section of the Powerhouse Museum's "Universal Machine" Exhibition currently running in Sydney which included a piece of the original analytical engine itself as well as details regarding Ava and her status as the world's first computer programmer. The clunkiness of the world's first computer -- in all its tarnished metal and mechanistic glory -- couldn't compete in the eyes of the punters with the free Internet access provided by the spiffy new colourful Apple I-Macs. No, the current moment of female nerd chic, as I see it, is one much more firmly anchored in fashion, consumption and image. It is on a direct continuum from the emergence of nerd chic which is only now providing a space for women on vaguely equal terms [and by way of example, I refer you to the not necessarily unattractive, but still problematically infantilising, trend that hit the industrialised world in recent years which drew upon a cutesy schoolgirl aesthetic: I'm thinking of hair clips and 'baby doll' dresses in 'sweet' prints here]. Too Many Pockets As the new millennium beckons, in the industrialised world, technology saturates our lives; we are increasingly -- both literally and figuratively -- becoming cyborg beings. Cyborg subjectivity is a frequently cited concept which is used to describe, in broad terms, the manner in which human beings are already located as agents and vehicles within technological networks. Overt examples of cyborg beings are provided by science fiction, but this serves as a distraction from the fact that cyborgs already walk amongst us. Indeed probably are us. Maybe not in a strictly technical sense, but certainly as beings for whom the negotiation of cyborg identities is a taken for granted feature of everyday life. A cyborg being is one which is fitted with any manner of medical accoutrements (pacemaker, artificial limb, etc.), or which has been inoculated, wears glasses, sits at a computer, works in the electronics manufacturing industry, rides a bike, takes vitamin supplements, and on the list goes. The cyborg is a hard concept to pin down but it is precisely this slippery property which renders it a useful vehicle for exploring a world of overwhelming diversity and multiple subjectivities. This is also why it can be conceptually seized upon as a fashion concept, stripped of its political ramifications as posited by feminists (in particular Donna Haraway and her now legendary piece "A Manifesto For Cyborgs" in which she seeks to map out the possibilities for a technologically-able, contingently adept socialist feminism), but remain associated with women as a strong and powerful image of empowered -- and significantly embodied -- female identity. Hence, we have a series of interpellating fashion trends that borrow heavily from dance party/rave culture -- itself a space loaded with technological and cyborg possibilities -- and are manifest in a fashion which emphasises utility with an androgynous and sharp edge: combat trousers; record/porterage bags or bags which sit around the hip and look like fabric gun holsters (both of which supposedly sit on the body in such a way as to minimise their presence, while maximising one's cultural capital); puffer jackets with lots of zipped pockets so that your gear doesn't fall out while you dance all night; body adornment in the form of mehindi (henna tattoos); tattoos, bindi, glitter, piercing, body hugging jewellery; and, of course, trainers for mobility. This nerd-girl moment, the particular meeting of contemporary dance music and the fashionability of the savvy smart cyborg woman is discursively marked by the (unedited) video clip for the Chemical Brothers' 'Hey Boy, Hey Girl'. It features a young book-reading, museum visiting girl, hassled by boys, who (through a nice graphic match involving her image in a mirror) transforms into a cool, nightclub groover. A unifying motif is provided throughout by the girl/woman's fascination with an exploration of the role of the skeletal system as it holds us up and allows us to function, hence the book, the museum and some interesting renderings of sex in a nightclub toilet. The organic body as finely tuned skeletal machine, and Chemical Brothers video -- go girl? References Bauman, Zygmunt. "Tourists and Vagabonds: the Heroes and Victims of Postmodernity." Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity P, 1997. 83-94. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 1994 (1979). Harraway, Donna. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's." Socialist Review 80 15.2 (1985): 64-107. [This article was also subsequently reprinted in Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.] Citation reference for this article MLA style: Susan Luckman. "XX @ MM: Cyborg Subjectivity as Millennial Fashion Statement." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/xxmm.php>. Chicago style: Susan Luckman, "XX @ MM: Cyborg Subjectivity as Millennial Fashion Statement," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/xxmm.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Susan Luckman. (1999) XX @ MM: cyborg subjectivity as millennial fashion statement. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/xxmm.php> ([your date of access]).

Contemporary Christian/secular/social trends and beliefs about religion, the rights of women, and the privacy of their bodies have been used to challenge the Dangme people of Ghana's continued adherence to the Dipo puberty rite. Without judging the Dipo rite but focusing on its intended value systems, this research argues that contemporary societal problems can harness the beneficial qualities of various traditional rituals to help solve specific societal issues. This chapter sets out to explore how the value systems of a contested puberty rite like the Dangme people's Dipo can help address sexual health issues prevalent in the Dangme communities. This chapter discusses how repurposing of Dipo's existing educational platform and value systems can contribute to the eradication or reduction of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) such as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) epidemic among members of the Dangme tribes.

Dring’s musical education took place at the Royal College of Music, beginning in the Junior Department at the same time as her formal education in Roman Catholic grade schools. Her mentors included Percy Buck and Angela Bull, who together directed the Department. Dring also benefited from the encouragement of the directors of the RCM, Hugh Allen and George Dyson. Principal teachers included Betty Barne and Freda Dinn for violin, Jewel Evans and Lilian Gaskell for piano, and Stanley Wolff and Leslie Fly for composition. Important first performances of her music took place on the BBC radio broadcast of the “Children’s Hour” and at a concert at Lambeth County Hall. As an actor, Dring’s participation in the yearly Christmas play is documented, and as an example of her musical style, her Fantasy Sonata (In one movement) is examined in detail. The effect of the beginning of World War II is considered from Dring’s point of view, specifically in the way it affected a teenage girl at the Royal College of Music.