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Wrapped in Good Intentions: The Animal Gift Economy of Heifer International

Heifer International’s ‘gift catalogue’ is filled with images of smiling, healthy children, thriving animals, and self-sufficient women, all set against green fields and lush forests. The program’s appeal to donors lies in its simplicity: the goats, heifers, and flocks of chicks are tangible evidence of how much the Global North

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A week of tears

I believe in expressing your feelings, showing emotions, and being transparent. It is, I believe, what makes us humans disconcerting, touching and interesting. Men can not be “humans”. They are the pillars of our society. The world rests on their shoulders and they elevate us with their rationality. They can

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Studying The “Split”: An Inductive Primary Source Analysis on The Value of the Humanities at McGill

In the context of McGill University, the Faculty of Science—with programs in the physical, natural, and other sciences—fits within Snow’s culture of scientists. It is this Faculty’s traditional scientific education which is regarded by modern policymakers as of “crucial importance for the future [economic] health of their nations” (Nussbaum 7).

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One Jump Ahead of the Market

Given the confusion about the birth of the story of Aladdin, I can’t help but wonder what this uncertainty reveals about the story’s function as a cultural mirror. In his article “Monstrous Births of Aladdin,” Cooperson suggests that the story’s unstable origins make it endlessly adaptable, reflecting the cultural and

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Perspectives on Hydro-Quebec and Indigenous Communities in Quebec

Journeault et al. (2021) present a reframed understanding of Hydro-Quebec’s (HQ) sustainability reporting through the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The GRI – an institutionally developed technocratic system, predicated on the Western ontology of naturalism that privileges quantitive indicators in HQ’s reports – misrepresents HQ’s sustainability performance. Accordingly, HQ’s reports not

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The Female Body as a Spectacle

In Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s, Diva Futura, female bodies occupy the center of the frame, but the film complicates a simple reading of the “male gaze”. On one hand, it reproduces aspects of what Maina and Zecca describe as pornography’s “principle of maximum visibility” (133): women are often shown nude, staged

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Creating Space for Psilocybin in Islam

Some anthropologists are starting to question if the anthropology of modern-day Islam renders Muslim worlds as “too sober.”1 The anthropology of Islam has largely neglected studying Muslims who step outside of normative-legal Islam by, for example, drinking wine or consuming psychedelics. This approach often reduces Islam to piety, and depicts

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Ovid and Attar’s Warfare of Love

Militia amoris is a trope in Roman erotic elegy wherein love affairs are characterized through imperial language. Ovid’s Amores delineates the trope in “1.9” through extended comparison between behaviors supposedly consistent between lovers and soldiers. “1.9” consequently epitomizes how militia amoris undermined Roman mores in arguing that love affairs—associated with

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