Youth Life Writing, Networked Media, Climate Change: The Challenge of Testimony to the Future

This article examines some of Greta Thunberg’s life writing as an example of the creativity and ingenuity with which some young people engage with the identity category of ‘youth’ in their life writing. It argues that Thunberg’s activism uses personal testimony in order to amplify expertise testimony as an epistemic source that demands action on climate change. This strategic use of life writing produces a paradoxical, but seemingly effective, form of life writing in which Thunberg provides personal testimony to the future. The article analyses how this paradoxical form of testimony is produced by situating Thunberg’s life writing in the context of the social and political investment in youth as an identity genre central to understanding of the human life course, and to how political responsibility is figured in contemporary western democracies. Drawing on theories of new media as an affective site in which life unfolds, rather than being represented, the paper concludes by reflecting on how Wendy Chun’s argument that networks involve the twinning of habituation and crisis mirrors Thunberg’s argument that action on climate change demands that habitual ways of living and acting must be rethought in response to the climate crisis.

Trump claims of executive privilege expected to fail

Significance Efforts to investigate the former president’s tax returns, together with a separate congressional investigation into the events of January 6, are raising questions over the extent to which documentation and personal testimony can be withheld from Congress under the principle of executive privilege. Impacts Congress will seek testimony from Trump administration officials about alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election result. State prosecutors are seeking access to Trump’s tax records as they examine possible conflicts of interest while in office. A Biden refusal to endorse Trump claims of executive privilege risks further partisan division over the January 6 investigation.

Psychedelic Drugs and Atheism: Debunking the Myths

Two recent surveys of people who took psychedelic drugs and reported “God experience encounters”, along with successful clinical trials using psychedelic therapy for depression, have given rise to public misconceptions about psychedelics and atheism. Specifically, three inferences have been drawn: (1) that the psychedelic experience tends to dissolve atheist convictions; (2) that atheist convictions, once dissolved, are replaced with traditional monotheist beliefs; and (3) that atheism and depression somehow correlate as afflictions for which psychedelic drugs offer relief. This paper argues, based on analysis of the studies and trials along with relevant supplemental evidence, that each of these popular inferences is substantially misleading. Survey data do not indicate that most psychedelic atheists have cleanly cut ties with their former convictions, and there is strong evidence that they have not traded atheism for traditional monotheism. Both personal testimony and the effectiveness of microdose clinical trials serve to complicate any notion that a psychedelic drug alleviates symptoms of depression by “curing” atheism. The paper then extends its focus to argue that the broader field of neurotheology includes elements that contribute to these popular misconceptions.

Uyghurs in China: Personal Testimony of a Uyghur Surgeon

Dr Enver Tohti Bughda is a qualified medical surgeon and a passionate advocate for Uyghur rights. Having been ordered to remove organs from an executed prisoner, Enver has since taken up a major role in the campaign against forced organ harvesting and is determined to bring China’s darkest secret to light. In this personal testimony, Enver shares his experience working as a surgeon in Xinjiang and reflects more broadly on the situation of Uyghurs in China, explaining that unless Uyghurs earn the sympathy and support of China’s Han majority, unless it is understood that all Chinese people are the victims of the same authoritarian regime, ethnic animosity will continue to serve the political purposes of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The Poet as Witness: Abraham Sutzkever in Vilna and at Nuremberg

This article juxtaposes Abraham Sutzkever’s Yiddish poems written in the Vilna Ghetto between 1941–1943 with the testimony he gave at the Nuremberg Trials on 27 February 1946. A witness, participant, and survivor of the annihilation, Sutzkever became an appropriate representative and unique spokesperson for the murdered Jewish victims. As evidence of a personal and collective tragedy, providing a double record of the destruction of a once-vibrant community through his poetry and his witness statement, Sutzkever imparts the reality of the Holocaust on the first occasion that leaders of a country were indicted before an international court for crimes against humanity. Hence, this article contributes to the understanding of the emotional trauma and fate of Jewish victims during the Holocaust. Emphasising how artistic expression may assist human beings to endure unimaginable hardship, it highlights the continuing importance of personal testimony to endorse memory and warn against recurrence.

Care to value. Preservation strategies in the Art Market’s context

In the art market, it is a real possibility that the conduct to be adopted in the preservation of contemporary art cannot be put into practice without secession with the conservation and restoration guidelines. The aim of this study is to analyse if the most prominent professional guidelines fit into the market framework, or if it is possible to find divergences or reasons to lay aside in commercial practice. The work compared the fundamental guidelines with the practical objectives of the art market, qualitatively analyzing the results with the personal testimony collected from the agents of the national market on the issue raised. From this analysis, it was possible to identify the need for diagnostic models balanced with the safeguard of the commercial circumstance of the assets, seeking to develop a line of diagnostic guidelines that offer analytical usefulness to the conservator, in actions in the context of the contemporary art market in Portugal.

Confessing on the Move

Even though Viaje del Parnaso (1614) has been relegated to the status of a minor work within Cervantine literature, in its day it must have had a strong personal significance, and it was well received. The fact that he devoted time and energy towards the end of his life to complete Viaje meant that Cervantes wanted to leave us with a personal testimony of his experience as a writer and a record of his artistic and aesthetic values. However, it undeservedly finds itself at the margins of Cervantine studies, possibly due to the widespread belief held by many that he was a bad poet. This chapter explores the literary value of Viaje and the ‘Adjunta’ in prose and why it has been studied so little.

The Filmī-ʿIlmī Formula: Shama Magazine and the Urdu Cosmopolis

This article traces the history and significance of Shama (Shamʿ) magazine in the context of Urdu popular culture in the twentieth century. Published monthly from 1939 to 1999, Shama developed a successful filmī-ʿilmī (film and belles-lettres) formula that made it the most widely circulated Urdu monthly in India for half a century. I analyze Shama’s components and publishing strategies, drawing on archival evidence, interviews, and personal testimony. Building on work by Jennifer Dubrow, Francesca Orsini, and others, I argue that Shama played an important role in defining the post-Independence Urdu public. While Shama purported to cater to male readership, visual and textual evidence suggests that the Shama community also included a “secret” readership of women. I further argue that Shama’s cover paintings, and the juxtaposition of text and image within, embody some of the contradictions of the mid-twentieth-century Urdu cosmopolis.

(Re)Mediating Holocaust Survivor Testimony

As the number of Holocaust survivors declines, their live eyewitness testimony will be preserved and communicated via other media. This transformation prompts a key question. What value can personal testimony have when disembodied and presented in a medium more manipulable by the audience? The response addresses three types of mediated testimony: the first televised broadcast of a Holocaust survivor’s story, on the 1953 U.S. television series This Is Your Life; archival video testimonies; and “unsettled testimony” consisting of less structured, first-person testimonies gathered by the author that reveal the challenges of discursive representation. Each type of testimony offers distinct advantages and limitations in reducing prejudice and fostering understanding.