Reactive Strength as a Metric for Informing Return-to-Sport Decisions: A Case-Control Study

Objective: Current return-to-sport decisions are primarily based on elapsed time since surgery or injury and strength measures. Given data that show rates of successful return to competitive sport at around 55%, there is strong rationale for adopting tools that will better inform return to sport decisions. The authors’ objective was to assess reactive strength as a metric for informing return-to-sport decisions. Design: Case-control design. Methods: Fifteen elite athletes from national sports teams (23 [6.0] y) in the final phase of their return-to-sport protocol following a unilateral knee injury and 16 age-matched control athletes (22 [4.6] y) performed a unilateral isometric strength test and 24-cm drop jump test. Pairwise comparisons were used to determine differences between legs within groups and differences in interleg asymmetry between groups. Results: Strength measures did not distinguish the control from the rehabilitation group; however, clear differences in the degree of asymmetry were apparent between the control and rehabilitation groups for contact time (Cohen d = 0.56; −0.14 to 1.27; 8.2%; P = .113), flight time (d = 1.10; 0.44 to 1.76; 16.0%; P = .002), and reactive strength index (d = 1.27; 0.50 to 2.04; 22.4%; P = .002). Conclusion: Reactive strength data provide insight into functional deficits that persist into the final phase of a return-to-sport protocol. The authors’ findings support the use of dynamic assessment tools to inform return-to-sport decisions to limit potential for reinjury.

Screenic fashion: horizontality, minimal materiality and manual operation

Focusing on a one-minute ‘fashion film’ by the Dutch fashion designer Alexander van Slobbe for the retrospective exhibition on his work in Utrecht’s Centraal Museum in 2010, this article investigates the interconnectedness of film and fashion through their mutual concern with the processes of crafting and dressing. A close reading of Van Slobbe’s film highlights a current return to a minimal design aesthetic in both fashion and film that shows fashion as a process or as a ‘manual’ operation. This film goes beyond the portrait of a fashion designer, becoming a meditation on the material practice of designing, crafting and viewing. That practice involves an intimacy with materiality constituting the fashion garment as a material, crafted and dynamic sartorial object that requires an axial positionality stemming from horizontal closeness. Ultimately, this article presents horizontality as being part of the experience of both moving images and fashion as a material object. The aim is thus to reflect on what is termed ubiquitous ‘screenic fashion’ (as a peculiar affinity between fashion and screen) by considering an alignment of horizontality and materiality as related to a current and vivid concern in the field of fashion and clothes-making.

Northward shifts of Canadian late deglacial drainage routes caused a stronger and warmer Canaries Current that enabled Holocene monsoons and a savanna on the western Sahara

This paper proposes an explanation for the well-watered savanna on the presently barren western Sahara Desert during the mid-Holocene and near the ends of other earlier Canadian deglaciations. Between 7,500 and 4,000 years before present, a humidity index indicates moist conditions and a savanna in the western Sahara. During this interval, a stronger and warmer Canaries Current return flow of the Gulf Stream nullified the effect of cold water that upwells off the northwest African coast due to the westward movement of surface water by trade winds. The return flow was stronger than today because less eastward Gulf Stream flow was lost to the northward flow of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current. The Canaries Current was warmer than today because cold southern Canadian meltwater no longer entered the Gulf Stream, and the high latitude climate was warmer then. Similar conditions probably prevailed at the ends of many other deglaciations, which were separated by 20,000 to 70,000 years due to orbital factors and variable glaciation. The savanna connections across the Sahara would have allowed each Hominin population to evolve in the isolated Moroccan-Algerian coastal zone to extend its range into the larger Africa. The intermittent savannas could therefore have played a significant role in the evolution of the many Hominin species found in the African fossil record over the last three million years.

‘Art’s in pop culture in me’: Posthuman performance and authorship in Lady Gaga’s Artpop (2013)

Ten years after her eccentric entrance into the pop scene with ‘Just Dance’, Gaga’s image is now markedly less edgy, in part due to her current focus on her film and TV acting career which requires a different image. In her musical work, Gaga is known for referencing artists that came before her in her music and music videos, and she has previously pushed the assumed boundaries between pop and art. This bricolage of influences often gives rise to claims of inauthenticity where rapidly changing and subversive image has left critics questioning who the ‘real’ Lady Gaga is. Moving beyond limited and value-laden discourses of authenticity, we instead suggest that her performances exemplify a posthuman approach to art and/as subjectivity. In the posthuman view, one’s ‘self’ is not a singular, static, autonomous individual, but a subjectivity that is emergent; an entanglement between entities, both human and non-human. Posthuman theory consequently troubles dualistic binaries, such as those between male/female, self/other, subject/object and human/machine/animal. This allows for a critique of anthropocentric hierarchies, instead arguing for a rhizomatic acknowledgement of the different entities in the subjectivities that emerge. We suggest that Lady Gaga’s work on her 2013 album Artpop exemplifies this approach, as Gaga fashions her body to resemble artworks and wears visual references to (female) artists that came before her. She incorporates different objects, machines, animals and others into her performances, thereby embodying a posthuman subjectivity. This work therefore signifies a reconsideration of what it means to be an audio-visual-artist and challenges not only the sanctity of self, but also the Romantic model of the male artist and singer-songwriter which persists in much popular music media criticism. However, problematically anthropocentric approaches remain throughout via Gaga’s foregrounding of self, and her current return to more muted performance styles might be seen as indicative of the difficulties of living a posthuman life in a humanistic society and marketplace.

The Return of Forgotten Critique: Some Remarks on the Intellectual Sources of the Polish Populist Revolution

The Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or PiS), which has been ruling in Poland since 2015, has developed a specific narrative about the law and judiciary, which constitutes the ideological background of its stance in the conflict concerning the rule of law in the country. The main tenets of the legal ideology of Law and Justice include the views that judicial decisions are not determined by legal texts (the indeterminacy thesis), and that judges are part of an elite who are detached from society at large and are attempting to impose the liberal world-view upon a conservative society. The aim of the paper is to deconstruct those ideological constructs in a search for their possible sources in certain critical currents in the legal theory of the Polish People’s Republic, represented by Stanisław Ehrlich, Leszek Nowak and Jarosław Ładosz. The paper notes interesting parallels between the legal ideas developed by those three legal theorists and the current narrative put forward by Law and Justice. Whilst stopping short of claiming a direct and conscious inspiration, the paper nonetheless hypothesises possible avenues of influence, including the academic mentorship of Ehrlich over Jarosław Kaczyński in the early 1970s and Nowak’s involvement in the ‘Solidarity’ movement in the 1980s following his anti-Marxist intellectual and political turn. The paper concludes that legal critique in Poland, after a period of being repressed in the 1990s, is now returning; however, whilst its first appearance (in the socialist period) was a ‘tragedy’ (due to its inability to subject socialist law to any form of critique), its current return is a ‘farce’, since critical tools are used not for their original purpose (emancipation), but in order to further a populist-conservative project.