By Patrick Meyer
New Orleans Jazz Funerals Celebrate the End of the Struggle
Unlike most port cities in the American South, New Orleans is very Catholic. And with Catholicism come the longstanding and elaborate Old World rituals. And unlike anywhere else in the world, New Orleans has its very own jazz funeral, a communal celebration where grief is danced out of the body and cast off into the air with soaring jazz cadenzas, carnival-worthy costumes, and respect for a time-honored ritual that allows the deceased to be shepherded to their final resting place with great fanfare and joy. A loud and triumphant alternative to Western expectations when it comes to rituals of grief and loss, the jazz funerals genealogical roots are wholly African, using joy and music instead of sadness and silence, to recogn
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By: Laura Ellen Joyce
When the initial furore over the Juarez-inspired Fall/Winter 2010 collection designed by Rodarte in collaboration with MAC cosmetics hit the fashion blogs, I had only recently become aware of the femicides on the Mexican-US borders. Though the situation has been ongoing for more than twenty years, and during that period thousands of women have gone missing, and hundreds more found murdered, there has been scant media attention in the mainstream (UK) media. My first awareness of the situation came from watching Missing Young Woman (Señorita Extraviada), a documentary directed by Lourdes Portillo, which was shown at the Transnational Feminisms conference 2009 at the University of Manchester. What strikes me is that I had to find this information out, in a context which was academic, nic
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By: Elke Weesjes, Ph.D and Lori Peek, Ph.D
In 1987, Irwin Redlener, and singer/songwriter, Paul Simon, founded Children's Health Fund (CHF) with the goal of providing comprehensive health care to homeless and medically underserved children. Today, under the leadership of Dr. Redlener, Mr. Simon, and Executive Director, Karen Redlener, CHF sustains a national network of 25 programs serving some of Americas most impoverished communities.
This post, the first of a two-part series on CHF, features Alan Shapiro, MD. He is Senior Medical Director of the New York Childrens Health Project and of the South Bronx Health Center and Center for Child Health and Resiliency, both affiliated with CHF and Montefiore Medical Center. Recently, Dr. Shapiro talked to us about the history of Children's Health Fund, his wo
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This article about hurricane Sandy and the problems of evacuation, was first published in the January issue of the United Academics Magazine. Parts of this publication's content have now been made available for those who don't have an Ipad and/or UA magazine subscription. I hope that by republishing this story on my blog, people are reminded of the horrendous events of October 2012. For many of us, life has gone back to normal, but in the areas hit hardest, like the Rockaways, life is a struggle. Many displaced Sandy survivors are still living in hotel rooms. Their future is uncertain and they and many other victims still need your help.
SURVIVING SANDY: STAYING PUT IN FAR ROCKAWAY| By Elke Weesjes PhD and Lori Peek PhD
Hurricane Sandy churned across the Caribbean and up the eastern seaboard of the U.S
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We are all familiar with photographs of death. From Margaret Bourke-White's coverage of Nazi concentration camps and Eddie Adam's world famous image of General Loan shooting a Viet Cong soldier in the head, to the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year, depicting the bodies of two children carried by their uncles to a mosque for their funeral in Gaza City. Photography immortalizes places, people and events. It celebrates life and commemorates death.
Recording death is nothing new. Death and photography have been historically intertwined from as early as the mid-19th century when the daguerreotype process was invented by the French artist and physicist Louis Daguerre (1787-1851). In this process, images fixed themselves not to paper but to silver-coated copper and the copper was then covered by glass. Onl
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