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1

Tompkins, Cynthia, and Enrique Jaramillo Levi. "When New Flowers Bloomed: Short Stories by Women Writers from Costa Rica and Panama." World Literature Today 67, no. 1 (1993): 164. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/40148914.

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2

Santacruz, Thanya, and Enrique Jaramillo Levi. "When New Flowers Bloomed: Short Stories by Women Writers from Costa Rica and Panama." Chasqui 32, no. 1 (2003): 135. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/29741783.

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3

González, Ann. "Costa Rican Identity and the Stories of Carmen Lyra." Latin Americanist 52, no. 1 (March 2008): 73–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1557-203x.2008.00007.x.

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4

Artalejo, Lucrecia, and Diana Vélez. "Reclaiming Medusa: Short Stories of Contemporary Puerto Rican Women." World Literature Today 73, no. 3 (1999): 503. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/40154899.

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5

Araya Ríos, Jacqueline. "El tratamiento de la metáfora en la traducción de Historias de Tata Mundo." LETRAS, no. 56 (July 26, 2014): 35–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.15359/rl.2-56.2.

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Fabián Dobles plantea mediante hechos característicos y regionalismos una imagen del campesino nacional de mediados de siglo xx en su obra Historias de Tata Mundo. Joan Henry lo traduce al inglés en 1998 y lo titula The Stories of Tata Mundo, transportando al campesino costarricense a la escena de habla inglesa. Se analizan las decisiones de la traductora sobre el tratamiento de las metáforas, teniendo en cuenta el lenguaje figurado como una herramienta empleada por el autor para caracterizar la vida rural del campesinado costarricense. Using traditional activities and regionalisms, Fabián Dobles reconstructed the image of the Costa Rican country folk of the mid-twentieth century in his literary work Historias de Tata Mundo. Joan Henry translated it in 1998, with the title The Stories of Tata Mundo, transporting the local peasant to the English-speaking scenario. The translator’s decisions are analyzed here regarding the translation of metaphors, taking into account figurative speech as a tool used by the author to characterize and depict the rural life of Costa Rican country folk.
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6

Ballestero S., Andrea. "Transparency Short-Circuited: Laughter and Numbers in Costa Rican Water Politics." PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 35, no. 2 (November 2012): 223–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1555-2934.2012.01200.x.

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7

Conejo Jend, Francisco J., Wilson Rojas Herrera, Ana Lucy Zamora Munguía, and Clifford E. Young. "Development of a Short Scale to Measure Sustainable Product Involvement." Revista Nacional de Administración 12, no. 1 (September 9, 2021): e3503. http://dx.doi.org/10.22458/rna.v12i1.3503.

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This study develops a short, general scale to measure sustainable product involvement. This is done in a Costa Rican context, via a relatively large sample, demographically similar to the national population. The study also evaluates the viability of the C-OAR-SE scaling technique for this purpose. A five-item instrument is developed, its reliability and validity psychometrically confirmed. The scale addresses the levels and types of involvement that consumers might have. It suits not only academic researchers, but also practitioners in different areas. We conclude that C-OAR-SE is a viable technique. It complements traditional psychometric methods well so as to be considered by researchers in the different fields of business.
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8

Monge-Nájera, Julian. "The power of short lectures to improve support for biodiversity conservation of unpopular organisms: an experiment with worms." UNED Research Journal 9, no. 1 (March 14, 2017): 145–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.22458/urj.v9i1.1690.

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Public opinion is important in obtaining support for the conservation of biodiversity, and invertebrates have a "public relations problem" because -for reasons that are both cultural and biological- they are poorly known and often unpopular. In this article I present the results of an experiment on the power of a short lecture to improve attitude towards invertebrates, using the case of velvet worms. Velvet worms are "living fossils" that have inspired a wide range of cultural expressions, probably because of the adhesive net they use to capture prey. For the experiment, a group of 141 Costa Ricans, aged 10 to 58 years old, rated their reaction to a color photograph of Epiperipatus biolleyi, a Costa Rican species of velvet worm, before and after a five-minute lecture about the natural history of the worm. Even before the treatment, most of the respondents had a correct idea of the animal's anatomy (84%); supported the use of public funds to conserve it (71%); and more than half perceived the worm in a positive way (58%). They stated that they were willing to donate a mean of US$7,00 from their own pocket for the worm's protection (six times more if they had university education); and were less likely to reject the worm if they kept pets at home. Gender, age and education did not have any effect on most variables of attitude and knowledge. Compared with the control group, the group that received the lecture had a 17% improvement in attitude. The Costa Rican educational system, focused on nature and its conservation, can explain the generally good attitude and knowledge of invertebrates found in this study; and a five-minute natural history lecture can produce a significant improvement in perception of an animal that is generally unattractive: a worm.
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9

Arquín, Margarita, and Carla Guerrón-Montero. "Costa Rican Social Anthropology in the Central American Context at the End of the Twentieth Century." Practicing Anthropology 24, no. 4 (September 1, 2002): 17–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.17730/praa.24.4.yu20r31583757427.

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This article is the synthesis of a series of short essays given to the students of the course I taught in conjunction with Dr. María Eugenia Bozzoli. It was entitled Theory and Praxis of Central American Sociocultural Anthropology, offered in the graduate program in anthropology at the University of Costa Rica, during the second semester of the year 2001.
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10

Sánchez, María Jesús, and Elisa Pérez-García. "Relationship between code-switching and emotional identity in Junot Diaz’s short stories." Literatura y Lingüística, no. 42 (October 29, 2020): 91–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.29344/0717621x.42.2587.

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The purpose was to check whether Yunior, character/narrator in three short stories by Junot Díaz (2012), reduces the use of codeswitching (Cs) to Spanish (his first language, L1) from the first chronological story to the third one: “Invierno”, “Nilda”, and “The Pura Principle”, respectively. We hypothesize a reduction in the number of words used in his mother tongue and a decrease in emotional words, implying a change in his emotional identity. (Costa et al., 2017; Dewaele, 2010; Ferré et al., 2010; Pavlenko, 2008). From the latter, we qualitative and quantitatively analyzed Yunior’s Cs to L1. A change in Yunior’s emotional identity could not be found probably due to the small size of the vocabulary corpus and the lack of emotional ratings for many of these words. Yunior keeps using Cs to his L1 for family and intimate matters in the three stories and English when seeking detachment.
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11

Wood, Tana E., and Deborah Lawrence. "No short-term change in soil properties following four-fold litter addition in a Costa Rican rain forest." Plant and Soil 307, no. 1-2 (April 19, 2008): 113–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11104-008-9588-2.

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12

Marin, D. H., S. M. Blankenship, T. B. Sutton, and W. H. Swallow. "Physiological and Chemical Changes during Ripening of Costa Rican Bananas Harvested at Four Different Seasons." HortScience 30, no. 4 (July 1995): 805A—805. http://dx.doi.org/10.21273/hortsci.30.4.805a.

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Mature-green `Grande Naine' bananas (Musa AAA) were harvested 13 weeks after flowering, in June and Sept. 1993, and Feb. and Mar. 1994. Fruit were 1) held in storage for 36 days at 14C and 80% to 90% RH, or 2) after 8 days of storage, fruit were treated with ethylene, and held at 17C until color 6 of the standard color scale was observed. Although a similar grade and age, the length of the preclimacteric phase was different among months, which reflected different physiological maturities at harvest. Rate of respiration, pulp pH, and soluble solids were the most-useful variables to characterize the fruit. Increases in respiration after ethylene treatment varied from 4- up to 14-fold the respiratory level under storage conditions. The climacteric occurred at any point during ripening, ranging from color 2 to 5, except at very early stages. Ethylene increases were short in duration and magnitude, and occurred earlier than the respiratory peak. Sometimes, internal and external ripening stages did not match. The most dramatic seasonal effects were observed in CO2 evolution, pulp-to-peel ratio, and starch conversion.
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13

Bogue, Robert R., Florian M. Schwandner, Joshua B. Fisher, Ryan Pavlick, Troy S. Magney, Caroline A. Famiglietti, Kerry Cawse-Nicholson, et al. "Plant responses to volcanically elevated CO<sub>2</sub> in two Costa Rican forests." Biogeosciences 16, no. 6 (April 1, 2019): 1343–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-1343-2019.

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Abstract. We explore the use of active volcanoes to determine the short- and long-term effects of elevated CO2 on tropical trees. Active volcanoes continuously but variably emit CO2 through diffuse emissions on their flanks, exposing the overlying ecosystems to elevated levels of atmospheric CO2. We found tight correlations (r2=0.86 and r2=0.74) between wood stable carbon isotopic composition and co-located volcanogenic CO2 emissions for two of three investigated species (Oreopanax xalapensis and Buddleja nitida), which documents the long-term photosynthetic incorporation of isotopically heavy volcanogenic carbon into wood biomass. Measurements of leaf fluorescence and chlorophyll concentration suggest that volcanic CO2 also has measurable short-term functional impacts on select species of tropical trees. Our findings indicate significant potential for future studies to utilize ecosystems located on active volcanoes as natural experiments to examine the ecological impacts of elevated atmospheric CO2 in the tropics and elsewhere. Results also point the way toward a possible future utilization of ecosystems exposed to volcanically elevated CO2 to detect changes in deep volcanic degassing by using selected species of trees as sensors.
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14

Rojas, Luis A. "La labranza mínima como práctica de producción sostenible en granos básicos." Agronomía Mesoamericana 12, no. 2 (July 1, 2006): 209. http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/am.v12i2.17236.

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In the present the agriculture and livestock field and specifically the basic grains producer, goes throught the worst crisis in the whole history of Costa Rica. The strong degradation of the natural resourses, linked to the important low yield of the crops, which also coincide with the high cost of production, have been increasing the problem. On the other hand, the lack of policies of the last Costa Rica government hastens the crisis. Right now, the basic grain crops do not produce economic profit, so it’s impossible to contonue producing with high costs, as machinery, excessive use of chemical and other inputs. We are looking for a system to approach and to assess lower cost alternative with high agricultural return. The basic grain sowing within of non-tillage system, conservation tillage o direct sowing, is a great production alternative, with high income and profit in the short, medium and long term; which includes physical, chemical and biological improvement of the soil and reduce the production cost. The Agronomy School at the Costa Rican Tecnological Institute are currently working in the project with different non- tillage activities like research, technological transfer, and non-tillage cropping system in basic grain, as sustainable alternative in the Huetar Norte region of Costa Rica and others parts of the country.
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15

Greiner, Sabine, Franz Schwarzenberger, and Christian C. Voigt. "Predictable timing of oestrus in the tropical bat Saccopteryx bilineata living in a Costa Rican rain forest." Journal of Tropical Ecology 27, no. 2 (February 1, 2011): 121–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266467410000696.

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Abstract:Many tropical mammals reproduce seasonally, although the circum-equatorial climate is more stable and less seasonal than that of temperate zones. The mechanisms underlying seasonal reproduction in the tropics remain enigmatic. Female reproduction and its relation to environmental factors were investigated in the Neotropical bat species Saccopteryx bilineata. Colonies consist of year-round stable groups of several females that are defended each by an adult male. Females give birth to a single offspring each year and it is suggested that mating is restricted to November and December. In this study, it was asked whether females of a Costa Rican colony come into oestrus around the same time each year and whether oestrus times are synchronized. Oestrogen and progesterone metabolites were monitored from faeces between October and January in four years. Oestrus was identified in 32 females. In addition, climatic factors such as rainfall and temperature were monitored at the study site. Results indicate that (1) females exhibit monoestry, (2) oestrus dates cluster around the first half of December, (3) reproduction is strongly seasonal and highly predictable and (4) oestrus times are possibly influenced by long-term cues like photoperiod and short-term cues like sudden changes in rainfall and temperature.
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16

Rico, Barbara Roche. "‘An Island Like You’: Representing the Puerto Rican diaspora in the short stories of Nicholasa Mohr and Judith Ortiz Cofer." Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1, no. 2 (April 27, 2012): 201–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/fict.1.2.201_1.

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17

León, Christina A. "Exorbitant Dust." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 27, no. 3 (June 1, 2021): 357–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8994084.

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Abstract This article traces the figure of polvo (dust) across the writing career of Puerto Rican and New York writer Manuel Ramos Otero. Polvo heralds the macabre sensuality of his early short stories, long before his diagnosis with HIV, and persists and morphs through his later essays and poetry up until his eventual death in 1990 from AIDS complications. Writing defiantly as a queer, a feminist, a Puerto Rican, and a sidoso, he produced work that invites death and desire to commingle through a figuration of dust, as a scattered substance that covers skin, coats translation, and dirties conventional genres. Polvo illuminates the dimensions and risks of relation as a particulate matter that exposes our porosity—clinging and hovering in the space between bodies, between the past and the future, between life and death. As the dust settles in the wake of Hurricane María, so too can polvo be read as prescient for how coloniality lingers as enduring conditions of debility and precarity. Ramos Otero's affinity for finitude, figured through polvo, counterintuitively conjures a relational desire that privileges the porous, the marginal, and the always precarious possibility of survival. Polvo moves across the different genres and phases of Ramos Otero's work as a matter that refuses to disentangle the material realities of queerness and coloniality.
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18

Marx, Andrew, and Donald McFarlane. "Combining Unmanned Aerial Systems and Satellite Data to Monitor Phenological Changes in Tropical Forests: A Case Study from Costa Rica." Case Studies in the Environment 3, no. 1 (December 31, 2019): 1–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/cse.2018.001842.

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The migration of vegetation under the influence of climate change is of great interest to ecologists, but can be difficult to quantify—especially in less accessible landscapes. Monitoring land cover change through remote sensing has become the best solution, especially with the use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs; drones) as low-cost remote sensing platforms are able to collect data at high spatial and spectral resolutions. Unfortunately, in the context of climate change studies, the lack of comparative UAS data sets over decadal timescales has been limiting. Here, we describe a technique for the integration of historical, low spatial resolution satellite-based Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data with short-term high-resolution multispectral UAS data to track the vegetation changes in a Costa Rican rainforest over a 33-year time frame. The study reveals the transition of a mixed forest from strongly deciduous to weakly deciduous phenology in the Hacienda Barú National Wildlife Refuge (HBNWR), southwestern Costa Rica. This case study presents an approach for researchers and forest managers to study and track vegetation changes over time in locations that lack detailed historical vegetation data. Vegetation migration due to climate change is not well documented and difficult to monitor, especially in remote or inaccessible locations. This case study presents researchers, students, and forest managers an approach for leveraging freely available satellite imagery and UASs to track these changes over time.
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Chevallier, Tiphaine, Kenji Fujisaki, Olivier Roupsard, Florian Guidat, Rintaro Kinoshita, Elias de Melo Viginio Filho, Peter Lehner, and Alain Albrecht. "Short-range-order minerals as powerful factors explaining deep soil organic carbon stock distribution: the case of a coffee agroforestry plantation on Andosols in Costa Rica." SOIL 5, no. 2 (November 15, 2019): 315–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/soil-5-315-2019.

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Abstract. Soil organic carbon (SOC) constitutes the largest terrestrial C stock, particularly in the Andosols of volcanic areas. Quantitative information on distribution of SOC stocks is needed to construct a baseline for studying temporal changes in SOC. The spatial variation of soil short-range-order minerals such as allophane usually explains the variability of topsoil SOC contents, but SOC data for deeper soil layers are needed. We found that within a 1 km2 Costa Rican basin covered by coffee agroforestry, SOC stocks in the upper 200 cm of soil were highly variable (24 to 72 kg C m−2). Topsoil SOC stocks were not correlated with SOC stocks present in deeper layers. Diffuse-reflectance mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy made possible the analysis of a large number of samples (69 soil profiles, i.e. 598 soil samples) for ammonium-oxalate and sodium-pyrophosphate-extractable forms of Al, Fe, and Si, as well as SOC content and bulk density. Using the MIR spectra, we identified two different soil materials, which were identified as allophanic and halloysitic soil material. Allophanic soil occurred on top of the halloysitic soil. The thickness of the allophanic soil material, rich in SRO minerals and related to a young andic A horizon, explained the variability of SOC. This study illustrates that knowledge of topography and pedogenesis is needed to understand and extrapolate the distribution of SOC stocks at landscape scales.
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20

Vázquez, David J. "Mapping Decolonial Environmental Imaginaries in Latinx Culture." American Literary History 33, no. 3 (August 3, 2021): 657–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab054.

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Abstract Mapping Decolonial Environmental Imaginaries in Latinx Culture addresses a growing dialogue between antiracist environmental humanities and Latinx studies scholars that emphasizes how Latinx creativity expresses decolonial environmental values. Even as we face a racial crisis in the US, there is a looming, similarly daunting challenge in environmental change. Locating forms of progressive environmental ideas that think simultaneously about race and racialization is crucial if we are to meet these twin challenges. This essay introduces a mode of comparative analysis that places multiple genres and forms (novels, films, visual art, and short stories) created by authors from multiple Latinx communities (Chicanx, Puerto Rican, Peruvian, and Central American) into conversation. This comparative approach provides a more nuanced account of how Latinxs from multiple racial, class, gender, sexual, and other identity positions think about and represent environmental ideas. As the legatees of colonialism and racism, Latinx artists have much to say about combatting, circumventing, and, at times, proposing remedies for oppression and environmental harm as complex, interrelated phenomena. These authors and artists comprehend racial capitalism as directly causing environmental crises that perform in concert with racism and colonialism.
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21

Green, Mary. "The Representation of Puerto Rican Women in Two Short Stories by Ana Lydia Vega: "Letra para salsa y tres soneos por encargo" (1979) and "Pollito Chicken" (1977)." Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 8, no. 2 (December 2002): 127–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1470184022000035157.

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22

Alfaro, Eric J., and Hugo G. Hidalgo. "Climate of an oceanic island in the Eastern Pacific: Isla del Coco, Costa Rica, Central America." Revista de Biología Tropical 64, no. 1 (March 2, 2016): 59. http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/rbt.v64i1.23411.

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<p>Studies of atmosphere-ocean interaction in the Pacific of Costa Rican are scarce. To identify oceanographic systems that may be influencing climate near Cocos Island (Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape) we conducted six scientific expeditions between 2007 and 2012. Two automated weather stations were set near Chatham and Wafer bays during the expeditions. Data included records from National Meteorological Institute, Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) and Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST). The climate is typical of the Eastern Tropical Pacific. Its seasonality is driven by precipitation variability associated with meridional migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. The seasonal cycle has two peaks, in May and July, a relative minimum between them in June, and the absolute minimum in February. Most of the precipitation is recorded from April to November. Most rain events have short duration and low intensity. An SST trend was observed from January 1854 to December 2013, coherent with regional warming temperature observations. From 1998 to 2013 there were changes in distributions of almost all meteorological parameters. The combination of these factors resulted in higher evapotranspiration values through the daily cycle, especially during the night time. Precipitation (P) positive anomalies tended to be associated with positive air surface temperature (AST) and SST anomalies and negative global radiation (GR) anomalies. Negative P anomalies tended to be associated with negative AST, SST and positive GR anomalies. Relative humidity (RH) negative anomalies tend to be associated with positive wind speed (WS) anomalies, and the WS effect is opposite for positive RH anomalies. During the cold Niño 3 condition of October 2007, negative P, AST, SST and RH anomalies were observed in concordance with positive WS and GR anomalies, in agreement with the conceptual model of climate system response at Isla del Coco to cold ENSO conditions. Rev. Biol. Trop. 64 (Suppl. 1): S59-S74. Epub 2016 February 01.</p><div> </div>
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23

Grassi, Evelin. "Memorie Sadriddin Ajnī (Italian translation by Evelin Grassi)." Oriente Moderno 93, no. 1 (2013): 212–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340010.

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Abstract This is the first Italian translation of some selections from the Ëddoštho* “Reminiscences” of Sadriddin Ajnī (Bukhara 1878—Dushanbe 1954), the author commonly regarded as the leading representative of modern Tajik literature. Ajnī’s Reminiscences, divided into four parts and published between 1948 and 1954, are a collection of lively short-stories where the author described his childhood spent in two villages near Bukhara, as well as his youth and schooldays at the madrasa in the last two decades of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Parts I and II were more often translated into many languages, both in the Republics of the former Soviet Union and in other countries. Translations in Russian (parts I-IV), German and French (parts I-II) have appeared in the 1950s. In English, separate chapters from the work have been published in academic journals from the 1950s onward; the most recent English translation (part I) is The sands of Oxus. Boyhood reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini, tr. by J.R. Perry and R. Lehr (Costa Mesa, Mazda Publishers, 1998).
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Alroy, John. "A simple Bayesian method of inferring extinction." Paleobiology 40, no. 4 (2014): 584–607. http://dx.doi.org/10.1666/13074.

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Determining whether a species has gone extinct is a central problem in both paleobiology and conservation biology. Past literature has mostly employed equations that yield confidence intervals around the endpoints of temporal ranges. These frequentist methods calculate the chance of not having seen a species lately given that it is still alive (a conditional probability). However, any reasonable person would instead want to know the chance that a species is extinct given that it has not been seen (the posterior probability). Here, I present a simple Bayesian equation that estimates posteriors. It uninterestingly assumes that the sampling probability equals the frequency of sightings within the range. It interestingly sets the prior probability of going extinct during any one time interval (E) by assuming that extinction is an exponential decay process and there is a 50% chance a species has gone extinct by the end of its observed range. The range is first adjusted for undersampling by using a routine equation. Bayes' theorem is then used to compute the posterior for interval 1 (ε1), which becomes the prior for interval 2. The following posterior ε2again incorporates E because extinction might have happened instead during interval 2. The posteriors are called “creeping-shadow-of-a-doubt values” to emphasize the uniquely iterative nature of the calculation. Simulations show that the method is highly accurate and precise given moderate to high sampling probabilities and otherwise conservative, robust to random variation in sampling, and able to detect extinction pulses after a short lag. Improving the method by having it consider clustering of sightings makes it highly resilient to trends in sampling. Example calculations involving recently extinct Costa Rican frogs and Maastrichtian ammonites show that the method helps to evaluate the status of critically endangered species and identify species likely to have gone extinct below some stratigraphic horizon.
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KITLV, Redactie. "Book Reviews." New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 78, no. 1-2 (January 1, 2004): 123–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/13822373-90002521.

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-Chuck Meide, Kathleen Deagan ,Columbus's outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2002. x + 294 pp., José María Cruxent (eds)-Lee D. Baker, George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A short history. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. x + 207 pp.-Evelyn Powell Jennings, Sherry Johnson, The social transformation of eighteenth-century Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. x + 267 pp.-Michael Zeuske, J.S. Thrasher, The island of Cuba: A political essay by Alexander von Humboldt. Translated from Spanish with notes and a preliminary essay by J.S. Thrasher. Princeton NJ: Markus Wiener; Kingston: Ian Randle, 2001. vii + 280 pp.-Matt D. Childs, Virginia M. Bouvier, Whose America? The war of 1898 and the battles to define the nation. Westport CT: Praeger, 2001. xi + 241 pp.-Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Antonio Santamaría García, Sin azúcar no hay país: La industria azucarera y la economía cubana (1919-1939). Seville: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Universidad de Sevilla y Diputación de Sevilla, 2001. 624 pp.-Charles Rutheiser, Joseph L. Scarpaci ,Havana: Two faces of the Antillean Metropolis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. x + 437 pp., Roberto Segre, Mario Coyula (eds)-Thomas Neuner, Ottmar Ette ,Kuba Heute: Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Vervuert, 2001. 863 pp., Martin Franzbach (eds)-Mark B. Padilla, Emilio Bejel, Gay Cuban nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. xxiv + 257 pp.-Mark B. Padilla, Kamala Kempadoo, Sun, sex, and gold: Tourism and sex work in the Caribbean. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. viii + 356 pp.-Jane Desmond, Susanna Sloat, Caribbean dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How movement shapes identity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xx + 408 pp.-Karen Fog Olwig, Nina Glick Schiller ,Georges woke up laughing: Long-distance nationalism and the search for home. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2001. x + 324 pp., Georges Eugene Fouron (eds)-Karen Fog Olwig, Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's two great waves of immigration. Chelsea MI: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. xvi + 334 pp.-Aviva Chomsky, Lara Putnam, The company they kept: Migrants and the politics of gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xi + 303 pp.-Rebecca B. Bateman, Rosalyn Howard, Black Seminoles in the Bahamas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xvii + 150 pp.-Virginia Kerns, Carel Roessingh, The Belizean Garífuna: Organization of identity in an ethnic community in Central America. Amsterdam: Rozenberg. 2001. 264 pp.-Nicole Roberts, Susanna Regazzoni, Cuba: una literatura sin fronteras / Cuba: A literature beyond boundaries. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Vervuert, 2001. 148 pp.-Nicole Roberts, Lisa Sánchez González, Boricua literature: A literary history of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2001. viii + 216 pp.-Kathleen Gyssels, Ange-Séverin Malanda, Passages II: Histoire et pouvoir dans la littérature antillo-guyanaise. Paris: Editions du Ciref, 2002. 245 pp.-Sue N. Greene, Simone A. James Alexander, Mother imagery in the novels of Afro-Caribbean women. Columbia MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001. x + 215 pp.-Gert Oostindie, Aarón Gamaliel Ramos ,Islands at the crossroads: Politics in the non-independent Caribbean., Angel Israel Rivera (eds)-Katherine E. Browne, David A.B. Murray, Opacity: Gender, sexuality, race, and the 'problem' of identity in Martinique. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. xi + 188 pp.-James Houk, Kean Gibson, Comfa religion and Creole language in a Caribbean community. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xvii + 243 pp.-Kelvin Singh, Frank J. Korom, Hosay Trinidad: Muharram performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. viii + 305 pages.-Lise Winer, Kim Johnson, Renegades: The history of the renegades steel orchestra of Trinidad and Tobago. With photos by Jeffrey Chock. Oxford UK: Macmillan Caribbean Publishers, 2002. 170 pp.-Jerome Teelucksingh, Glenford Deroy Howe, Race, war and nationalism: A social history of West Indians in the first world war. Kingston: Ian Randle/Oxford UK: James Currey, 2002. vi + 270 pp.-Geneviève Escure, Glenn Gilbert, Pidgin and Creole linguistics in the twenty-first century. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2002. 379 pp.-George L. Huttar, Eithne B. Carlin ,Atlas of the languages of Suriname. Leiden, The Netherlands: KITLV Press/Kingston: Ian Randle, 2002. vii + 345 pp., Jacques Arends (eds)
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"When new flowers bloomed: short stories by women writers from Costa Rica and Panama." Choice Reviews Online 29, no. 10 (June 1, 1992): 29–5586. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/choice.29-5586.

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Rojas-Valverde, Daniel Francisco, María Morera-Castro, Jaqueline Montoya-Rodríguez, and Randall Gutiérrez-Vargas. "KINEMATIC DEMANDS OF TWO SMALL-SIDED GAMES OF COSTA RICAN COLLEGE SOCCER PLAYERS." Pensar en Movimiento: Revista de Ciencias del Ejercicio y la Salud 15, no. 1 (June 22, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/pensarmov.v15i1.25902.

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The purpose of this paper was to compare two small-sided games kinematics of Costa Rican college soccer players. Two SSG (2x10min, 3 min rest in between), C1 (600m2) and C2 (1200m2), were played by 14 college soccer players of Costa Rica. Global Positioning System was used to measure kinematic and physiological variables in both conditions. A mixed ANOVA was used, results suggested C1 and C2 were statistically different in speed (C1 < C2), distance (C1 < C2) and heart rate (C1 > C2). When analyzing the distance covered by speed category (low, moderate and high running actions) results suggest C2 had higher intensities compared to C1. This research confirms the findings of previous studies on the effectiveness of SSG to simulate real game conditions in short periods of time. Conclusions: C2 had higher intensities compared to C1 game with lower physiological demand. Likewise, the C2 resembles more accurately matches in official conditions of Costa Rican players.
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Caravaca-Morera, Jaime Alonso, and Maria Itayra Padilha. "Bodies in motion: spaces, emotions and representations that (de)construct realities." Revista da Escola de Enfermagem da USP 51 (2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s1980-220x2016036103203.

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Abstract OBJECTIVE To analyze the social representations of the body among Brazilian and Costa Rican transsexual people through their life stories. METHOD Qualitative and descriptive multicenter research. The study population consisted of 70 participants. Two organizations cooperated to collect the information, one in Florianópolis, SC-Brazil and one in San José, the capital of Costa Rica. Content Analysis was used to analyze the data. RESULTS Based on the results, a single social representation of corporeality was unveiled: “Modeled bodies: about the elasticity of corporeality”. This representation described two clear elementary context units (discourse matrices). The first associates the body with an inconclusive, transitory, volatile, pliable, moldable and fluid object, while the second relates the body with a separate institution, but regulated and controlled by others. CONCLUSION In conclusion, the transsexual body is a volatile, transient, transformable institution, crossed by the marks of a historicizing and historicizable time, which comes within the scope not only of what can be named by means of linguistic signs, but also of what belongs to the unnamable in terms of sociocultural perceptions and feelings.
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Hernández-Ching, Ruth Cristina. "The Relevance of Pedagogical Translation for the Development of Bilingual Education in Costa Rica." Revista Electrónica Educare 23, no. 1 (October 12, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.15359/ree.23-1.2.

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The article reflects on bilingualism in Costa Rica in recent years in light of the latest versions of the Reports on the Costa Rican Public School Systems (2011, 2013, 2015 y 2017). Successful contributions of several national and international researches, where teaching translation as effective technique for developing communication skills is proposed, are discussed. Also, the article reviews major historical landmarks of translation in second language teaching. There are programs in the Ministry of Public Education (MEP), public and private colleges, schools and universities, but there is a tendency to associate the use of translation in teaching only with the grammatical method. Later studies could be oriented to compare the progress between populations that have acquired the language as a second language and have worked for a short period of time in a call center, in tourism, or in real life activities where they have to translate or interpret in real mode, compared to those that do not.
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Jorge Mustonen, Pedro, Maren Oelbermann, and Donald C. L. Kass. "Using Tithonia diversifolia (Hemsl.) Gray in a Short Fallow System to Increase Soil Phosphorus Availability on a Costa Rican Andosol." Journal of Agricultural Science 4, no. 2 (February 1, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/jas.v4n2p91.

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Mena Araya, Aarón Elí. "Critical Thinking for Cvic Life in Elementary Education: Combining Storytelling and Thinking Tools." Revista Educación, April 24, 2020, 23–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/revedu.v44i2.39699.

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Teaching critical thinking involves developing specific thinking skills and nurturing attitudes that are necessary for adequate use these of these skills in everyday life situations. The required skills and attitudes required by students to approach problems that affect their own communities can be taught by designing and executing learning activities where students use storytelling, for example. This study focuses on designing and executing two learning units for critical thinking instruction on citizenship education in a Costa Rican elementary school. These units combine the use of story-based materials, such as animated films, digital comic strips, and thinking tools. Additionally, an assessment method is proposed which is based on analysis of the comic strips created by the students. This method analyzes the logical structure behind comic strips to help determine to what extent critical thinking skills are applied with a focus on specific thinking skills such as inference and analysis. The results of the assessment suggest that when students participate in learning units, such as the use of story-based media and thinking tools, they can express a higher level of critical thinking skill application in the stories they create.
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Gupta, Kashvi, Ana B. Baylin, and Erica Jansen. "Abstract 226: Association Between Sleep Duration and Mediterranean Diet Score in Costa Rica." Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes 13, Suppl_1 (May 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.1161/hcq.13.suppl_1.226.

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Background: Short and long sleep are risk factors for coronary artery disease. One of the mechanistic pathways is likely through diet. While many studies have examined associations between sleep and individual dietary components, few have examined diet patterns. We hypothesized that those with short sleep (< 7 hours/night) and long sleep (>9 hours/night) would have lower adherence to the Mediterranean diet. We also examined the effect of social jetlag, that is, a difference in the sleep duration between weekdays and weekends, on the Mediterranean diet. Methods: Participants in this study are population based-controls that were recruited for a case-control study on myocardial infarction and matched by sex, age and area of residence. Study participants (1600 men and 569 women) were recruited randomly using data from the National Census and Statistics Bureau of Costa Rica between 1994 and 2004 and therefore are representative of the Costa Rican population within matching strata. Sleep and napping patterns were self-reported by the participants. Social jetlag was defined as a ≥ 1-hour difference in sleep duration from weekdays to weekends. Validated food frequency questionnaires, detailed socio-demographic, medical history and physical activity questionnaires were administered. Alternative Mediterranean Diet (AMED) scores were calculated based on the consumption of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, legumes, fish, red and processed meat, alcohol and monounsaturated fat-to-saturated fat ratios. We used adjusted linear regression models stratified by sex to study the association between sleep duration, social jetlag and AMED score. Results: Men and women with short sleep tended to be younger, more educated, non-smokers, diabetic and have lower physical activity compared to those getting optimal hours (≥ 7 and ≤ 9 hours/night) of sleep. Among women, short sleep on weekdays was significantly associated with having a lower AMED score when compared to those with optimal hours of sleep. This association remained unchanged after adjusting for confounders including age, area of residence, education, napping frequency, caffeine intake, smoking status, physical activity and diagnosis of type 2 diabetes mellitus and hypertension (ß, -0.41 and CI, -0.69 to -0.13). Women with short sleep had a lower intake of vegetables, fruits, and legumes that contributed to their lower AMED score. There were about 20% of men and women with social jetlag. Social jetlag was associated with lower AMED scores, but it was not statistically significant amongst men (p=0.08) or women (p=0.15) after adjusting for confounders. Conclusions: Short sleep is associated with lower adherence to a Mediterranean diet amongst women in Costa Rica. The lack of an association amongst men might imply different biological pathways and residual confounding by lifestyle factors that drive food consumption in men as compared to women.
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Gilbert, Ellen. "Opening Doors to Literature: People & Stories / Gente y Cuentos." International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI) 3, no. 2 (April 30, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.33137/ijidi.v3i2.32595.

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People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos (P&S/GyC) is a non-profit literacy outreach organization with headquarters in the U.S. state of New Jersey (https://peopleandstories.org/). P&S/GyC is guided by a belief in the power of literature to positively impact transitioning populations, such as halfway house residents, immigrants working toward citizenship, and veterans reintegrating into civilian life. Homeless parents and senior citizens are also invited to participate in P&S/GyC’s reading programs, which include oral readings and seminar-style discussions of literary short stories. The stories chosen for P&S/GyC programs typically embody the best qualities of enduring literature: artistic richness, explorations of life complexities, wonders, and ambiguities. Participants learn to connect knowledge synthesized from their own life experiences with stories under discussion in an atmosphere of trust established by trained facilitators. P&S/GyC’s beginnings date back to 1972, when founder Sarah Hirschman invited a group of Puerto Rican women in Cambridge, Massachusetts to engage with their cultural heritage through reading literature in their first language—Spanish. English reading groups were added to P&S/GyC’s design in 1986, and today the program collaborates with social service organizations, such as the Harvard Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment Lab, and other partner sites in the states of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. In 2016, the National Endowment for the Humanities recognized the extraordinary work of P&S/GyC by funding a 30-month expansion program called “Reading Deeply in Community,” partnering with ten public library systems around the country.
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Rios, Luis Diego, and Alfredo Cascante-Marín. "High selfing capability and low pollinator visitation in the hummingbird-pollinated epiphyte Pitcairnia heterophylla (Bromeliaceae) at a Costa Rican mountain forest." Revista de Biología Tropical 65, no. 2 (March 27, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/rbt.v65i2.25948.

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Pitcairnioideae is the second most diverse subfamily of bromeliads (Bromeliaceae), a group exclusive to tropical regions of the New World. Pitcairnioid bromeliads have floral traits assumed to promote outcrossing through biotic pollination systems; however, the reproductive biology of most of the species of this group has not been documented. Pitcairnia heterophylla is an epiphytic (seldom saxicolous) bromeliad occurring from Southern Mexico, into the Northern Andes. We studied the pollination and breeding system of P. heterophylla in an epiphytic population at a mountain forest in Costa Rica from January to April 2013. We performed hand pollination experiments (agamospermy, autonomous self-pollination, hand self-pollination and hand cross-pollination) on 89 flowers from 23 individuals (3–6 flowers per individual) in 2013 flowering season. Nectar production was measured on 18 unvisited flowers of six individuals with a hand-held refractometer. Simultaneously, floral visitors were recorded on eight individuals with trail cameras for a total of 918 hours (115 ± 52 hours per individual, mean ± SE). Under natural conditions, seed set (540.4 ± 55.2) was similar to manually selfed flowers (516.3 ± 41.5) and autonomously selfed flowers (521.1 ± 29.0), but lower to manually outcrossed flowers (670.2 ± 31.3). The flowers of P. heterophylla are self-compatible, capable of autonomous pollination, and non-agamospermous. Intrafloral self-pollination is facilitated by adichogamy and lack of floral herkogamy. The scentless red flowers of P. heterophylla with tubular corollas and nectar production suggested ornithophilic pollination which was confirmed by video recording of 46 hummingbird visits. The most common floral visitor was the short-billed hummingbird Lampornis calolaemus which accounted for 78 % of the visits. However, the visitation rate during the flowering season was low (0.6 visits per day per plant). Selfing in P. heterophylla might be explained as a mechanism of reproductive assurance and to reduce interspecific pollen flow with taxonomically unrelated plants.
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Ocasio-Russe, Lizbette. "Sam." eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics 16, no. 2 (December 15, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.25120/etropic.16.2.2017.3613.

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The short story 'Sam’ is part of an original collection of short stories written as part of my MA creative thesis, Circo, which seeks to give voice to the queer community of Santurce, Puerto Rico through the integration of characters and storylines based on real queer Puerto Rican individuals and the personal experience I acquired being actively involved in Santurce’s LQBTQ community. These individuals’ queerness has led them to suffer misrepresentation and exclusion, as well as a social oppression that often denies them the freedom and opportunity to live genuinely validating lives. They inhabit what Homi K. Bhabha calls the ‘betwixt and between', that ‘in between’ space that allows individuals to elaborate strategies of selfhood that initiate new signs of identity (Mangham,p.4). Though inhabiting these spaces can allow for certain types of self-development, the largely traditional, heterosexual and conservative nature of Puerto Rico’s majority culture constantly pressures them to abide by normative gender stereotypes. Trans people thus feel the pull of the desire for ‘normalcy’ and the desire to find their ‘true’ self, which can keep them trapped in a stagnant world of ‘in-betweenness.’ Rather than play the victim, though, they embrace their limbo existence and make it into a productive space of expression and personal development.
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Casini, Marina, Carlo Casini, Rafael Santamaria D'Angelo, Joseph Meaney, Nikolas Nikas, and Antonio G. Spagnolo. "La procreazione artificiale all’attenzione della Corte interamericana dei diritti dell’uomo. Il “Caso Gretel Artabia Urilla et Al. vs. Costa Rica”." Medicina e Morale 61, no. 3 (June 30, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.4081/mem.2012.135.

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Il contributo esamina il “Caso n. 12.361 Gretel Artavia Urilla et Al. vs. Costa Rica” sul quale si attende una pronuncia della Corte interamericana dei diritti umani. La vicenda ha origine dalla sentenza della Corte costituzionale costaricana (del 15 marzo 2000 n. 2000-02306) che aveva annullato, per ragioni di forma e di sostanza, il Decreto Ejecutivo n. 24029-S1 (del 3 febbraio 1995) sulla procreazione artificiale umana. La vicenda prosegue davanti alla Commissione interamericana chiamata in causa da una “Petición” che accusa la Repubblica del Costa Rica di aver violato i diritti di alcune coppie in attesa di realizzare il loro “progetto parentale”. Il divieto di fecondazione artificiale confliggerebbe, in sintesi, con il diritto alla privacy e alla vita familiare, con il diritto di fondare una famiglia con il principio di uguaglianza contenuti nella Convenzione americana dei diritti umani (“Patto di San Josè”). Al termine di un lungo percorso e di un ampio dibattito, la Commissione ha ritenuto che tali diritti fossero stati violati e ha rimesso il caso alla Corte interamericana dei diritti dell’uomo. Con riferimento a questa nuova fase, nell’articolo si dà conto del “Escrito de Amici Curiae” presentato alla Corte dal Movimento per la vita italiano, dall’Istituto di Bioetica, dall’Asociación Crece Familia-CreceFam, dal Coordinamento di Human Life International e da Bioethics Defend Found. Nell’“Escrito” si afferma che il divieto del Costa Rica non viola la Convenzione americana sui diritti umani che afferma: “Ogni persona ha diritto al rispetto della propria vita. Tale diritto è protetto dalla legge e, in generale, è tutelato a partire dal momento del concepimento. Nessuno può essere privato arbitrariamente della vita (art. 4/1). Nel parere, inoltre, si avanzano argomenti di ordine scientifico e giuridico a sostegno del divieto di procreazione artificiale, in nome del riconoscimento della dignità umana e del conseguente diritto alla vita dell’essere umano nella fase più giovane della sua esistenza. Questo diritto, primo fra tutti, è già ampiamente accolto nella Convenzione americana sui diritti dell’uomo sottoscritta e ratificata dalla Repubblica del Costa Rica. ---------- The article deals with the “Case n. 12.361 Gretel Artavia Urilla et Al. vs. Costa Rica” which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is going to decide. This case has its roots in the Supreme Court of Costa Rica’s decision (n. 2000-02306, March 15, 2000) which annulled the Decree n. 24029-S1 (February, 3, 1995) on human artificial procreation because of both formal and substantial aspects. Indeed, the Supreme Court of the Costa Rica considered that in vitro fertilization constituted a threat against human life before birth. Afterwards, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights received a “Petición” which charged Costa Rica with a violation of the rights of some couples who wanted to achieve parenthood by medically assisted procreation. In short, according to Petitioner, the ban on in vitro fertilization violated the right to privacy and family life, the right to raise a family and equality before the law and equal protection established in the American Convention on human rights (“Pact of Saint José”). At the end of a long iter and an extended debate, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights submitted the case to the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights claiming the violation of said rights and asking the Court to rule and declare the international responsability of the Costa Rican Republic. Regarding this new stage, the article relates the “Escrito de Amici Curiae” sent to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights by the Italian Movement for the Life, the Institute of Bioethics of teh Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Asociación Crece Familia-CreceFam, Human Life International and the Bioethics Defense Fund. This “Escrito” argues that Costa Rica’s ban does not violate the American Convention on Human Rights which says that “Every person has the right to have his life respected. This right shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life” (article 4/1). Besides the “Escrito” presents scientific and legal arguments corroborating the ban on artificial human procreation in the light of modern idea of human rights, recognition of human dignity and the right to life of human beings in the youngest stages of their lives. This right, the primary or first right, is already widely recognized in the American Convention on Human Rights, signed and ratified by Costa Rica’s Republic.
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Haller, Beth. "Switched at Birth: A Game Changer for All Audiences." M/C Journal 20, no. 3 (June 21, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1266.

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The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) Family Network show Switched at Birth tells two stories—one which follows the unique plot of the show, and one about the new openness of television executives toward integrating more people with a variety of visible and invisible physical embodiments, such as hearing loss, into television content. It first aired in 2011 and in 2017 aired its fifth and final season.The show focuses on two teen girls in Kansas City who find out they were switched due to a hospital error on the day of their birth and who grew up with parents who were not biologically related to them. One, Bay Kennish (Vanessa Marano), lives with her wealthy parents—a stay-at-home mom Kathryn (Lea Thompson) and a former professional baseball player, now businessman, father John (D.W. Moffett). She has an older brother Toby (Lucas Grabeel) who is into music. In her high school science class, Bay learns about blood types and discovers her parents’ blood types could not have produced her. The family has professional genetic tests done and discovers the switch (ABC Family, “This Is Not a Pipe”).In the pilot episode, Bay’s parents find out that deaf teen, Daphne Vasquez (Katie Leclerc), is actually their daughter. She lives in a working class Hispanic neighbourhood with her hairdresser single mother Regina (Constance Marie) and grandmother Adrianna (Ivonne Coll), both of whom are of Puerto Rican ancestry. Daphne is deaf due to a case of meningitis when she was three, which the rich Kennishes feel happened because of inadequate healthcare provided by working class Regina. Daphne attends an all-deaf school, Carlton.The man who was thought to be her biological father, Angelo Sorrento (Gilles Marini), doesn’t appear in the show until episode 10 but becomes a series regular in season 2. It becomes apparent that Daphne believes her father left because of her deafness; however, as the first season progresses, the real reasons begin to emerge. From the pilot onwards, the show dives into clashes of language, culture, ethnicity, class, and even physical appearance—in one scene in the pilot, the waspy Kennishes ask Regina if she is “Mexican.” As later episodes reveal, many of these physical appearance issues are revealed to have fractured the Vasquez family early on—Daphne is a freckled, strawberry blonde, and her father (who is French and Italian) suspected infidelity.The two families merge when the Kennishes ask Daphne and her mother to move into their guest house in order get to know their daughter better. That forces the Kennishes into the world of deafness, and throughout the show this hearing family therefore becomes a surrogate for a hearing audience’s immersion into Deaf culture.Cultural Inclusivity: The Way ForwardShow creator Lizzy Weiss explained that it was actually the ABC Family network that “suggested making one of the kids disabled” (Academy of Television Arts & Sciences). Weiss was familiar with American Sign Language (ASL) because she had a “classical theatre of the Deaf” course in college. She said, “I had in the back of my head a little bit of background at least about how beautiful the language was. So I said, ‘What if one of the girls is deaf?’” The network thought it was wonderful idea, so she began researching the Deaf community, including spending time at a deaf high school in Los Angeles called Marlton, on which she modelled the Switched at Birth school, Carlton. Weiss (Academy of Television Arts & Sciences) says of the school visit experience:I learned so much that day and spoke to dozens of deaf teenagers about their lives and their experiences. And so, this is, of course, in the middle of writing the pilot, and I said to the network, you know, deaf kids wouldn’t voice orally. We would have to have those scenes only in ASL, and no sound and they said, ‘Great. Let’s do it.’ And frankly, we just kind of grew and grew from there.To accommodate the narrative structure of a television drama, Weiss said it became clear from the beginning that the show would need to use SimCom (simultaneous communication or sign supported speech) for the hearing or deaf characters who were signing so they could speak and sign at the same time. She knew this wasn’t the norm for two actual people communicating in ASL, but the production team worried about having a show that was heavily captioned as this might distance its key—overwhelmingly hearing—teen audience who would have to pay attention to the screen during captioned scenes. However, this did not appear to be the case—instead, viewers were drawn to the show because of its unique sign language-influenced television narrative structure. The show became popular very quickly and, with 3.3 million viewers, became the highest-rated premiere ever on the ABC Family network (Barney).Switched at Birth also received much praise from the media for allowing its deaf actors to communicate using sign language. The Huffington Post television critic Maureen Ryan said, “Allowing deaf characters to talk to each other directly—without a hearing person or a translator present—is a savvy strategy that allows the show to dig deeper into deaf culture and also to treat deaf characters as it would anyone else”. Importantly, it allowed the show to be unique in a way that was found nowhere else on television. “It’s practically avant-garde for television, despite the conventional teen-soap look of the show,” said Ryan.Usually a show’s success is garnered by audience numbers and media critique—by this measure Switched at Birth was a hit. However, programs that portray a disability—in any form—are often the target of criticism, particularly from the communities they attempting to represent. It should be noted that, while actress Katie Leclerc, who plays Daphne, has a condition, Meniere’s disease, which causes hearing loss and vertigo on an intermittent basis, she does not identify as a deaf actress and must use a deaf accent to portray Daphne. However, she is ASL fluent, learning it in high school (Orangejack). This meant her qualifications met the original casting call which said “actress must be deaf or hard of hearing and must speak English well, American Sign Language preferred” (Paz, 2010) Leclerc likens her role to that of any actor to who has to affect body and vocal changes for a role—she gives the example of Hugh Laurie in House, who is British with no limp, but was an American who uses a cane in that show (Bibel).As such, initially, some in the Deaf community complained about her casting though an online petition with 140 signatures (Nielson). Yet many in the Deaf community softened any criticism of the show when they saw the production’s ongoing attention to Deaf cultural details (Grushkin). Finally, any lingering criticisms from the Deaf community were quieted by the many deaf actors hired for the show who perform using ASL. This includes Sean Berdy, who plays Daphne’s best friend Emmett, his onscreen mother, played by actress Marlee Matlin, and Anthony Natale who plays his father; their characters both sign and vocalize in the show. The Emmett character only communicates in ASL and does not vocalise until he falls in love with the hearing character Bay—even then he rarely uses his voice.This seemingly all-round “acceptance” of the show gave the production team more freedom to be innovative—by season 3 the audience was deemed to be so comfortable with captions that the shows began to feature less SimCom and more all-captioned scenes. This lead to the full episode in ASL, a first on American mainstream television.For an Hour, Welcome to Our WorldSwitched at Birth writer Chad Fiveash explained that when the production team came up with the idea for a captioned all-ASL episode, they “didn’t want to do the ASL episode as a gimmick. It needed to be thematically resonant”. As a result, they decided to link the episode to the most significant event in American Deaf history, an event that solidified its status as a cultural community—the 1988 Deaf President Now (DPN) protest at Gallaudet University in Washington. This protest inspired the March 2013 episode for Switched at Birth and aired 25 years to the week that the actual DPN protest happened. This episode makes it clear the show is trying to completely embrace Deaf culture and wants its audience to better understand Deaf identity.DPN was a pivotal moment for Deaf people—it truly solidified members of a global Deaf community who felt more empowered to fight for their rights. Students demanded that Gallaudet—as the premier university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students—no longer have a hearing person as its president. The Gallaudet board of trustees, the majority of whom were hearing, tried to force students and faculty to accept a hearing president; their attitude was that they knew what was best for the deaf persons there. For eight days, deaf people across America and the world rallied around the student protestors, refusing to give in until a deaf president was appointed. Their success came in the form of I. King Jordan, a deaf man who had served as dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the time of the protest.The event was covered by media around the world, giving the American Deaf community international attention. Indeed, Gallaudet University says the DPN protest symbolized more than just the hiring of a Deaf president; it brought Deaf issues before the public and “raised the nation’s consciousness of the rights and abilities of deaf and hard of hearing people” (Gallaudet University).The activities of the students and their supporters showed dramatically that in the 1980s deaf people could be galvanized to unite around a common issue, particularly one of great symbolic meaning, such as the Gallaudet presidency. Gallaudet University represents the pinnacle of education for deaf people, not only in the United States but throughout the world. The assumption of its presidency by a person himself deaf announced to the world that deaf Americans were now a mature minority (Van Cleve and Crouch, 172).Deaf people were throwing off the oppression of the hearing world by demanding that their university have someone from their community at its helm. Jankowski (Deaf Empowerment; A Metaphorical Analysis of Conflict) studied the Gallaudet protest within the framework of a metaphor. She found a recurring theme during the DPN protest to be Gallaudet as “plantation”—which metaphorically refers to deaf persons as slaves trying to break free from the grip of the dominant mastery of the hearing world—and she parallels the civil rights movement of African Americans in the 1960s. As an example, Gallaudet was referred to as the “Selma of the Deaf” during the protest, and protest signs used the language of Martin Luther King such as “we still have a dream.” For deaf Americans, the presidency of Gallaudet became a symbol of hope for the future. As Jankowski attests:deaf people perceived themselves as possessing the ability to manage their own kind, pointing to black-managed organization, women-managed organizations, etc., struggling for that same right. They argued that it was a fight for their basic human rights, a struggle to free themselves, to release the hold their ‘masters’ held on them. (“A Metaphorical Analysis”)The creators of the Switched at Birth episode wanted to ensure of these emotions, as well as historical and cultural references, were prevalent in the modern-day, all-ASL episode, titled Uprising. That show therefore wanted to represent both the 1988 DPN protest as well as a current issue in the US—the closing of deaf schools (Anderson). The storyline focuses on the deaf students at the fictitious Carlton School for the Deaf seizing one of the school buildings to stage a protest because the school board has decided to shut down the school and mainstream the deaf students into hearing schools. When the deaf students try to come up with a list of demands, conflicts arise about what the demands should be and whether a pilot program—allowing hearing kids who sign to attend the deaf school—should remain.This show accomplished multiple things with its reach into Deaf history and identity, but it also did something technologically unique for the modern world—it made people pay attention. Because captioning translated the sign language for viewers, Lizzy Weiss, the creator of the series, said, “Every single viewer—deaf or hearing—was forced to put away their phones and iPads and anything else distracting … and focus … you had to read … you couldn’t do anything else. And that made you get into it more. It drew you in” (Stelter). The point, Weiss said, “was about revealing something new to the viewer—what does it feel like to be an outsider? What does it feel like to have to read and focus for an entire episode, like deaf viewers do all the time?” (Stelter). As one deaf reviewer of the Uprising episode said, “For an hour, welcome to our world! A world that’s inconvenient, but one most of us wouldn’t leave if offered a magic pill” (DR_Staff).This episode, more than any other, afforded hearing television viewers an experience perhaps similar to deaf viewers. The New York Times reported that “Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers commented by the thousands after the show, with many saying in effect, “Yes! That’s what it feels like” (Stelter).Continued ResonancesWhat is also unique about the episode is that in teaching the hearing viewers more about the Deaf community, it also reinforced Deaf community pride and even taught young deaf people a bit of their own history. The Deaf community and Gallaudet were very pleased with their history showing up on a television show—the university produced a 30-second commercial which aired within the episode, and held viewing parties. Gallaudet also forwarded the 35 pages of Facebook comments they’d received about the episode to ABC Family and Gallaudet President T. Alan Hurwitz said of the episode (Yahr), “Over the past 25 years, [DPN] has symbolised self-determination and empowerment for deaf and hard of hearing people around the world”. The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) also lauded the episode, describing it as “phenomenal and groundbreaking, saying the situation is very real to us” (Stelter)—NAD had been vocally against budget cuts and closings of US deaf schools.Deaf individuals all over the Internet and social media also spoke out about the episode, with overwhelmingly favourable opinions. Deaf blogger Amy Cohen Efron, who participated in 1988′s DPN movement, said that DPN was “a turning point of my life, forcing me to re-examine my own personal identity, and develop self-determinism as a Deaf person” and led to her becoming an activist.When she watched the Uprising episode, she said the symbolic and historical representations in the show resonated with her. In the episode, a huge sign is unfurled on the side of the Carlton School for the Deaf with a girl with a fist in the air under the slogan “Take Back Carlton.” During the DPN protest, the deaf student protesters unfurled a sign that said “Deaf President Now” with the US Capitol in the background; this image has become an iconic symbol of modern Deaf culture. Efron says the image in the television episode was much more militant than the actual DPN sign. However, it could be argued that society now sees the Deaf community as much more militant because of the DPN protest, and that the imagery in the Uprising episode played into that connection. Efron also acknowledged the episode’s strong nod to the Gallaudet student protestors who defied the hearing community’s expectations by practising civil disobedience. As Efron explained, “Society expected that the Deaf people are submissive and accept to whatever decision done by the majority without any of our input and/or participation in the process.”She also argues that the episode educated more than just the hearing community. In addition to DPN, Uprising was filled with other references to Deaf history. For example a glass door to the room at Carlton was covered with posters about people like Helen Keller and Jean-Ferdinand Berthier, a deaf educator in 19th century France who promoted the concept of deaf identity and culture—Efron says most people in the Deaf community have never heard of him. She also claims that the younger Deaf community may also not be aware of the 1988 DPN protest—“It was not in high school textbooks available for students. Many deaf and hard of hearing students are mainstreamed and they have not the slightest idea about the DPN movement, even about the Deaf Community’s ongoing fight against discrimination, prejudice and oppression, along with our victories”.Long before the Uprising episode aired, the Deaf community had been watching Switched at Birth carefully to make sure Deaf culture was accurately represented. Throughout season 3 David Martin created weekly videos in sign language that were an ASL/Deaf cultural analysis of Switched at Birth. He highlighted content he liked and signs that were incorrect, a kind of a Deaf culture/ASL fact checker. From the Uprising episode, he said he thought this quote from Marlee Matlin’s character said it all, “Until hearing people walk a day in our shoes they will never understand” (Martin). That succinctly states what the all-ASL episode was trying to capture—creating an awareness of Deaf people’s cultural experience and their oppression in hearing society.Even a deaf person who was an early critic of Switched at Birth because of the hiring of Katie Leclerc and the use of SimCom admitted he was impressed with the all-ASL episode (Grushkin):all too often, we see media accounts of Deaf people which play into our society’s perceptions of Deaf people: as helpless, handicapped individuals who are in need of fixes such as cochlear implants in order to “restore” us to society. Almost never do we see accounts of Deaf people as healthy, capable individuals who live ordinary, successful lives without necessarily conforming to the Hearing ‘script’ for how we should be. And important issues such as language rights or school closings are too often virtually ignored by the general media.In addition to the episode being widely discussed within the Deaf community, the mainstream news media also covered Uprising intensely, seeing it as a meaningful cultural moment, not just for the Deaf community but for popular culture in general. Lacob wrote that he realises that hearing viewers probably won’t understand what it means to be a deaf person in modern America, but he believes that the episodeposits that there are moments of understanding, commonalities, and potential bridge-building between these two communities. And the desire for understanding is the first step toward a more inclusive and broad-minded future.He continues:the significance of this moment can’t be undervalued, nor can the show’s rich embrace of deaf history, manifested here in the form of Gallaudet and the historical figures whose photographs and stories are papered on the windows of Carlton during the student protest. What we’re seeing on screen—within the confines of a teen drama, no less—is an engaged exploration of a culture and a civil rights movement brought to life with all of the color and passion it deserves. It may be 25 years since Gallaudet, but the dreams of those protesters haven’t faded. And they—and the ideals of identity and equality that they express—are most definitely being heard.Lacob’s analysis was praised by several Deaf people—by a Deaf graduate student who teaches a Disability in Popular Culture course and by a Gallaudet student who said, “From someone who is deaf, and not ashamed of it either, let me say right here and now: that was the most eloquent piece of writing by someone hearing I have ever seen” (Emma72). The power of the Uprising episode illustrated a political space where “groups actively fuse and blend their culture with the mainstream culture” (Foley 119, as cited in Chang 3). Switched at Birth—specifically the Uprising episode—has indeed fused Deaf culture and ASL into a place in mainstream television culture.ReferencesABC Family. “Switched at Birth Deaf Actor Search.” Facebook (2010). <https://www.facebook.com/SwitchedSearch>.———. “This Is Not a Pipe.” Switched at Birth. Pilot episode. 6 June 2011. <http://freeform.go.com/shows/switched-at-birth>.———. “Not Hearing Loss, Deaf Gain.” Switched at Birth. YouTube video, 11 Feb. 2013. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5W604uSkrk>.Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. “Talking Diversity: ABC Family’s Switched at Birth.” Emmys.com (Feb. 2012). <http://www.emmys.com/content/webcast-talking-diversity-abc-familys-switched-birth>.Anderson, G. “‘Switched at Birth’ Celebrates 25th Anniversary of ‘Deaf President Now’.” Pop-topia (5 Mar. 2013). <http://www.pop-topia.com/switched-at-birth-celebrates-25th-anniversary-of-deaf-president-now/>.Barney, C. “’Switched at Birth’ Another Winner for ABC Family.” Contra Costa News (29 June 2011). <http://www.mercurynews.com/tv/ci_18369762>.Bibel, S. “‘Switched at Birth’s Katie LeClerc Is Proud to Represent the Deaf Community.” Xfinity TV blog (20 June 2011). <http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/2011/06/20/switched-at-births-katie-leclerc-is-proud-to-represent-the-deaf-community/>.Chang, H. “Re-Examining the Rhetoric of the ‘Cultural Border’.” Essay presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Dec. 1988.DR_Staff. “Switched at Birth: How #TakeBackCarlton Made History.” deafReview (6 Mar. 2013). <http://deafreview.com/deafreview-news/switched-at-birth-how-takebackcarlton-made-history/>.Efron, Amy Cohen. “Switched At Birth: Uprising – Deaf Adult’s Commentary.” Deaf World as I See It (Mar. 2013). <http://www.deafeyeseeit.com/2013/03/05/sabcommentary/>.Emma72. “ABC Family’s ‘Switched at Birth’ ASL Episode Recalls Gallaudet Protest.” Comment. The Daily Beast (28 Feb. 2013). <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/28/abc-family-s-switched-at-birth-asl-episode-recalls-gallaudet-protest.html>.Fiveash, Chad. Personal interview. 17 Jan. 2014.Gallaudet University. “The Issues.” Deaf President Now (2013). <http://www.gallaudet.edu/dpn_home/issues.html>.Grushkin, D. “A Cultural Review. ASL Challenged.” Switched at Birth Facebook page. Facebook (2013). <https://www.facebook.com/SwitchedatBirth/posts/508748905835658>.Jankowski, K.A. Deaf Empowerment: Emergence, Struggle, and Rhetoric. Washington: Gallaudet UP, 1997.———. “A Metaphorical Analysis of Conflict at the Gallaudet Protest.” Unpublished seminar paper presented at the University of Maryland, 1990.Lacob, J. “ABC Family’s ‘Switched at Birth’ ASL Episode Recalls Gallaudet Protest.” The Daily Beast 28 Feb. 2013. <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/28/abc-family-s-switched-at-birth-asl-episode-recalls-gallaudet-protest.html>.Martin, D. “Switched at Birth Season 2 Episode 9 ‘Uprising’ ASL/Deaf Cultural Analysis.” David Martin YouTube channel (6 Mar. 2013). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA0vqCysoVU>.Nielson, R. “Petitioned ABC Family and the ‘Switched at Birth’ Series, Create Responsible, Accurate, and Family-Oriented TV Programming.” Change.org (2011). <http://www.change.org/p/abc-family-and-the-switched-at-birth-series-create-responsible-accurate-and-family-oriented-tv-programming>.Orangejack. “Details about Katie Leclerc’s Hearing Loss.” My ASL Journey Blog (29 June 2011). <http://asl.orangejack.com/details-about-katie-leclercs-hearing-loss>.Paz, G. “Casting Call: Open Auditions for Switched at Birth by ABC Family.” Series & TV (3 Oct. 2010). <http://seriesandtv.com/casting-call-open-auditions-for-switched-at-birth-by-abc-family/4034>.Ryan, Maureen. “‘Switched at Birth’ Season 1.5 Has More Drama and Subversive Soapiness.” The Huffington Post (31 Aug. 2012). <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-ryan/switched-at-birth-season-1_b_1844957.html>.Stelter, B. “Teaching Viewers to Hear with Their Eyes Only.” The New York Times 8 Mar. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/arts/television/teaching-viewers-to-hear-the-tv-with-eyes-only.html>.Van Cleve, J.V., and B.A. Crouch. A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America. DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989.Yahr, E. “Gallaudet University Uses All-Sign Language Episode of ‘Switched at Birth’ to Air New Commercial.” The Washington Post 3 Mar. 2013 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tv-column/post/gallaudet-university-uses-all-sign-language-episode-of-switched-at-birth-to-air-new-commercial/2013/03/04/0017a45a-8508-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394_blog.html>.
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Crosby, Alexandra, Jacquie Lorber-Kasunic, and Ilaria Vanni Accarigi. "Value the Edge: Permaculture as Counterculture in Australia." M/C Journal 17, no. 6 (October 11, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.915.

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Abstract:
Permaculture is a creative design process that is based on ethics and design principles. It guides us to mimic the patterns and relationships we can find in nature and can be applied to all aspects of human habitation, from agriculture to ecological building, from appropriate technology to education and even economics. (permacultureprinciples.com)This paper considers permaculture as an example of counterculture in Australia. Permaculture is a neologism, the result of a contraction of ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’. In accordance with David Holmgren and Richard Telford definition quoted above, we intend permaculture as a design process based on a set of ethical and design principles. Rather than describing the history of permaculture, we choose two moments as paradigmatic of its evolution in relation to counterculture.The first moment is permaculture’s beginnings steeped in the same late 1960s turbulence that saw some people pursue an alternative lifestyle in Northern NSW and a rural idyll in Tasmania (Grayson and Payne). Ideas of a return to the land circulating in this first moment coalesced around the publication in 1978 of the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, which functioned as “a disruptive technology, an idea that threatened to disrupt business as usual, to change the way we thought and did things”, as Russ Grayson writes in his contextual history of permaculture. The second moment is best exemplified by the definitions of permaculture as “a holistic system of design … most often applied to basic human needs such as water, food and shelter … also used to design more abstract systems such as community and economic structures” (Milkwood) and as “also a world wide network and movement of individuals and groups working in both rich and poor countries on all continents” (Holmgren).We argue that the shift in understanding of permaculture from the “back to the land movement” (Grayson) as a more wholesome alternative to consumer society to the contemporary conceptualisation of permaculture as an assemblage and global network of practices, is representative of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture from the 1970s to the present. While counterculture was a useful way to understand the agency of subcultures (i.e. by countering mainstream culture and society) contemporary forms of globalised capitalism demand different models and vocabularies within which the idea of “counter” as clear cut alternative becomes an awkward fit.On the contrary we see the emergence of a repertoire of practices aimed at small-scale, localised solutions connected in transnational networks (Pink 105). These practices operate contrapuntally, a concept we borrow from Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), to define how divergent practices play off each other while remaining at the edge, but still in a relation of interdependence with a dominant paradigm. In Said’s terms “contrapuntal reading” reveals what is left at the periphery of a mainstream narrative, but is at the same time instrumental to the development of events in the narrative itself. To illustrate this concept Said makes the case of novels where colonial plantations at the edge of the Empire make possible a certain lifestyle in England, but don’t appear in the narrative of that lifestyle itself (66-67).In keeping with permaculture design ecological principles, we argue that today permaculture is best understood as part of an assemblage of design objects, bacteria, economies, humans, plants, technologies, actions, theories, mushrooms, policies, affects, desires, animals, business, material and immaterial labour and politics and that it can be read as contrapuntal rather than as oppositional practice. Contrapuntal insofar as it is not directly oppositional preferring to reframe and reorientate everyday practices. The paper is structured in three parts: in the first one we frame our argument by providing a background to our understanding of counterculture and assemblage; in the second we introduce the beginning of permaculture in its historical context, and in third we propose to consider permaculture as an assemblage.Background: Counterculture and Assemblage We do not have the scope in this article to engage with contested definitions of counterculture in the Australian context, or their relation to contraculture or subculture. There is an emerging literature (Stickells, Robinson) touched on elsewhere in this issue. In this paper we view counterculture as social movements that “undermine societal hierarchies which structure urban life and create, instead a city organised on the basis of values such as action, local cultures, and decentred, participatory democracy” (Castells 19-20). Our focus on cities demonstrates the ways counterculture has shifted away from oppositional protest and towards ways of living sustainably in an increasingly urbanised world.Permaculture resonates with Castells’s definition and with other forms of protest, or what Musgrove calls “the dialectics of utopia” (16), a dynamic tension of political activism (resistance) and personal growth (aesthetics and play) that characterised ‘counterculture’ in the 1970s. McKay offers a similar view when he says such acts of counterculture are capable of “both a utopian gesture and a practical display of resistance” (27). But as a design practice, permaculture goes beyond the spectacle of protest.In this sense permaculture can be understood as an everyday act of resistance: “The design act is not a boycott, strike, protest, demonstration, or some other political act, but lends its power of resistance from being precisely a designerly way of intervening into people’s lives” (Markussen 38). We view permaculture design as a form of design activism that is embedded in everyday life. It is a process that aims to reorient a practice not by disrupting it but by becoming part of it.Guy Julier cites permaculture, along with the appropriate technology movement and community architecture, as one of many examples of radical thinking in design that emerged in the 1970s (225). This alignment of permaculture as a design practice that is connected to counterculture in an assemblage, but not entirely defined by it, is important in understanding the endurance of permaculture as a form of activism.In refuting the common and generalized narrative of failure that is used to describe the sixties (and can be extended to the seventies), Julie Stephens raises the many ways that the dominant ethos of the time was “revolutionised by the radicalism of the period, but in ways that bore little resemblance to the announced intentions of activists and participants themselves” (121). Further, she argues that the “extraordinary and paradoxical aspects of the anti-disciplinary protest of the period were that while it worked to collapse the division between opposition and complicity and problematised received understandings of the political, at the same time it reaffirmed its commitment to political involvement as an emancipatory, collective endeavour” (126).Many foresaw the political challenge of counterculture. From the belly of the beast, in 1975, Craig McGregor wrote that countercultures are “a crucial part of conventional society; and eventually they will be judged on how successful they transform it” (43). In arguing that permaculture is an assemblage and global network of practices, we contribute to a description of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture that was identified by McGregor at the time and Stephens retrospectively, and we open up possibilities for reexamining an important moment in the history of Australian protest movements.Permaculture: Historical Context Together with practical manuals and theoretical texts permaculture has produced its foundation myths, centred around two father figures, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. The pair, we read in accounts on the history of permaculture, met in the 1970s in Hobart at the University of Tasmania, where Mollison, after a polymath career, was a senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology, and Holmgren a student. Together they wrote the first article on permaculture in 1976 for the Organic Farmer and Gardener magazine (Grayson and Payne), which together with the dissemination of ideas via radio, captured the social imagination of the time. Two years later Holmgren and Mollison published the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements (Mollison and Holmgren).These texts and Mollison’s talks articulated ideas and desires and most importantly proposed solutions about living on the land, and led to the creation of the first ecovillage in Australia, Max Lindegger’s Crystal Waters in South East Queensland, the first permaculture magazine (titled Permaculture), and the beginning of the permaculture network (Grayson and Payne). In 1979 Mollison taught the first permaculture course, and published the second book. Grayson and Payne stress how permaculture media practices, such as the radio interview mentioned above and publications like Permaculture Magazine and Permaculture International Journal were key factors in the spreading of the design system and building a global network.The ideas developed around the concept of permaculture were shaped by, and in turned contributed to shape, the social climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s that captured the discontent with both capitalism and the Cold War, and that coalesced in “alternative lifestyles groups” (Metcalf). In 1973, for instance, the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin was not only a countercultural landmark, but also the site of emergence of alternative experiments in living that found their embodiment in experimental housing design (Stickells). The same interest in technological innovation mixed with rural skills animated one of permaculture’s precursors, the “back to the land movement” and its attempt “to blend rural traditionalism and technological and ideological modernity” (Grayson).This character of remix remains one of the characteristics of permaculture. Unlike movements based mostly on escape from the mainstream, permaculture offered a repertoire, and a system of adaptable solutions to live both in the country and the city. Like many aspects of the “alternative lifestyle” counterculture, permaculture was and is intensely biopolitical in the sense that it is concerned with the management of life itself “from below”: one’s own, people’s life and life on planet earth more generally. This understanding of biopolitics as power of life rather than over life is translated in permaculture into malleable design processes across a range of diversified practices. These are at the basis of the endurance of permaculture beyond the experiments in alternative lifestyles.In distinguishing it from sustainability (a contested concept among permaculture practitioners, some of whom prefer the notion of “planning for abundance”), Barry sees permaculture as:locally based and robustly contextualized implementations of sustainability, based on the notion that there is no ‘one size fits all’ model of sustainability. Permaculture, though rightly wary of more mainstream, reformist, and ‘business as usual’ accounts of sustainability can be viewed as a particular localized, and resilience-based conceptualization of sustainable living and the creation of ‘sustainable communities’. (83)The adaptability of permaculture to diverse solutions is stressed by Molly Scott-Cato, who, following David Holmgren, defines it as follows: “Permaculture is not a set of rules; it is a process of design based around principles found in the natural world, of cooperation and mutually beneficial relationships, and translating these principles into actions” (176).Permaculture Practice as Assemblage Scott Cato’s definition of permaculture helps us to understand both its conceptual framework as it is set out in permaculture manuals and textbooks, and the way it operates in practice at an individual, local, regional, national and global level, as an assemblage. Using the idea of assemblage, as defined by Jane Bennett, we are able to understand permaculture as part of an “ad hoc grouping”, a “collectivity” made up of many types of actors, humans, non humans, nature and culture, whose “coherence co-exists with energies and countercultures that exceed and confound it” (445-6). Put slightly differently, permaculture is part of “living” assemblage whose existence is not dependent on or governed by a “central power”. Nor can it be influenced by any single entity or member (445-6). Rather, permaculture is a “complex, gigantic whole” that is “made up variously, of somatic, technological, cultural, and atmospheric elements” (447).In considering permaculture as an assemblage that includes countercultural elements, we specifically adhere to John Law’s description of Actor Network Theory as an approach that relies on an empirical foundation rather than a theoretical one in order to “tell stories about ‘how’ relationships assemble or don’t” (141). The hybrid nature of permaculture design involving both human and non human stakeholders and their social and material dependencies can be understood as an “assembly” or “thing,” where everything not only plays its part relationally but where “matters of fact” are combined with “matters of concern” (Latour, "Critique"). As Barry explains, permaculture is a “holistic and systems-based approach to understanding and designing human-nature relations” (82). Permaculture principles are based on the enactment of interconnections, continuous feedback and reshuffling among plants, humans, animals, chemistry, social life, things, energy, built and natural environment, and tools.Bruno Latour calls this kind of relationality a “sphere” or a “network” that comprises of many interconnected nodes (Latour, "Actor-Network" 31). The connections between the nodes are not arbitrary, they are based on “associations” that dissolve the “micro-macro distinctions” of near and far, emphasizing the “global entity” of networks (361-381). Not everything is globalised but the global networks that structure the planet affect everything and everyone. In the context of permaculture, we argue that despite being highly connected through a network of digital and analogue platforms, the movement remains localised. In other words, permaculture is both local and global articulating global matters of concern such as food production, renewable energy sources, and ecological wellbeing in deeply localised variants.These address how the matters of concerns engendered by global networks in specific places interact with local elements. A community based permaculture practice in a desert area, for instance, will engage with storing renewable energy, or growing food crops and maintaining a stable ecology using the same twelve design principles and ethics as an educational business doing rooftop permaculture in a major urban centre. The localised applications, however, will result in a very different permaculture assemblage of animals, plants, technologies, people, affects, discourses, pedagogies, media, images, and resources.Similarly, if we consider permaculture as a network of interconnected nodes on a larger scale, such as in the case of national organisations, we can see how each node provides a counterpoint that models ecological best practices with respect to ingrained everyday ways of doing things, corporate and conventional agriculture, and so on. This adaptability and ability to effect practices has meant that permaculture’s sphere of influence has grown to include public institutions, such as city councils, public and private spaces, and schools.A short description of some of the nodes in the evolving permaculture assemblage in Sydney, where we live, is an example of the way permaculture has advanced from its alternative lifestyle beginnings to become part of the repertoire of contemporary activism. These practices, in turn, make room for accepted ways of doing things to move in new directions. In this assemblage each constellation operates within well established sites: local councils, public spaces, community groups, and businesses, while changing the conventional way these sites operate.The permaculture assemblage in Sydney includes individuals and communities in local groups coordinated in a city-wide network, Permaculture Sydney, connected to similar regional networks along the NSW seaboard; local government initiatives, such as in Randwick, Sydney, and Pittwater and policies like Sustainable City Living; community gardens like the inner city food forest at Angel Street or the hybrid public open park and educational space at the Permaculture Interpretive Garden; private permaculture gardens; experiments in grassroot urban permaculture and in urban agriculture; gardening, education and landscape business specialising in permaculture design, like Milkwood and Sydney Organic Gardens; loose groups of permaculturalists gathering around projects, such as Permablitz Sydney; media personalities and programs, as in the case of the hugely successful garden show Gardening Australia hosted by Costa Georgiadis; germane organisations dedicated to food sovereignty or seed saving, the Transition Towns movement; farmers’ markets and food coops; and multifarious private/public sustainability initiatives.Permaculture is a set of practices that, in themselves are not inherently “against” anything, yet empower people to form their own lifestyles and communities. After all, permaculture is a design system, a way to analyse space, and body of knowledge based on set principles and ethics. The identification of permaculture as a form of activism, or indeed as countercultural, is externally imposed, and therefore contingent on the ways conventional forms of housing and food production are understood as being in opposition.As we have shown elsewhere (2014) thinking through design practices as assemblages can describe hybrid forms of participation based on relationships to broader political movements, disciplines and organisations.Use Edges and Value the Marginal The eleventh permaculture design principle calls for an appreciation of the marginal and the edge: “The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system” (permacultureprinciples.com). In other words the edge is understood as the site where things come together generating new possible paths and interactions. In this paper we have taken this metaphor to think through the relations between permaculture and counterculture. We argued that permaculture emerged from the countercultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s and intersected with other fringe alternative lifestyle experiments. In its contemporary form the “counter” value needs to be understood as counterpoint rather than as a position of pure oppositionality to the mainstream.The edge in permaculture is not a boundary on the periphery of a design, but a site of interconnection, hybridity and exchange, that produces adaptable and different possibilities. Similarly permaculture shares with forms of contemporary activism “flexible action repertoires” (Mayer 203) able to interconnect and traverse diverse contexts, including mainstream institutions. Permaculture deploys an action repertoire that integrates not segregates and that is aimed at inviting a shift in everyday practices and at doing things differently: differently from the mainstream and from the way global capital operates, without claiming to be in a position outside global capital flows. In brief, the assemblages of practices, ideas, and people generated by permaculture, like the ones described in this paper, as a counterpoint bring together discordant elements on equal terms.ReferencesBarry, John. The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon Constrained World. 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The Princeton Guide to Ecology. Princeton: Princeton UP. 2009Lockyer, Joshua, and James R. Veteto, eds. Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillages. Vol. 17. Berghahn Books, 2013.Madge, Pauline. “Ecological Design: A New Critique.” Design Issues 13.2 (1997): 44-54.Mayer, Margit. “Manuel Castells’ The City and the Grassroots.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.1 (2006): 202–206.Markussen, Thomas. “The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design between Art and Politics.” Design Issues 29.1 (2013): 38-50.McGregor, Craig. “What Counter-Culture?” Meanjin Quarterly 34.1 (1975).McGregor, Craig. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Meanjin Quarterly 30.2 (1971): 176-179.McKay, G. “DiY Culture: Notes Toward an Intro.” In G. 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Molly. Environment and Economy. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.Stephens, Julie. Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1998.Stickells, Lee. “‘And Everywhere Those Strange Polygonal Igloos’: Framing a History of Australian Countercultural Architecture.” In Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 30: Open. Vol. 2. Eds. Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach. Gold Coast, Qld: SAHANZ, 2013. 555-568.
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