Traumatic brain injury research state-of-the-art conference

Joel Kupersmith, MD; Alex K. Ommaya, ScD; Michael E. Selzer, MD, PhD, FRCP; Robert L. Ruff, MD, PhD; Henry L. Lew, MD, PhD The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), treating more than 5.5 million veterans annually [1], manages the largest integrated healthcare system in the nation and is committed to providing veterans with the highest quality healthcare. Conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan (Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom [OIF/OEF]) have resulted in an influx of new veterans to the VA health system. From 2002 to 2008, 945,423 OIF/OEF veterans left active duty, with 42 percent (400,304) obtaining VA healthcare [2]. The challenge that this trend presents to the maintenance of the VA’s high standard of care is compounded by the fact that many are returning home with complex injuries, such as traumatic brain injury (TBI), frequently referred to as the signature injury of modern warfare. Many knowledge gaps exist regarding TBI. Accordingly, in late April 2008, the VA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) sponsored a state-of-theart (SOTA) conference to advance the knowledge base in TBI. This SOTA conference identified what we know and what we need to know about TBI, from the basic science to diagnosis, evidence-based treatment, acute management, and long-term rehabilitation for TBI. The goal was to recommend for all stakeholders further research on the development of clinical practice guidelines, policies, or processes that would improve quality and outcomes of TBI care. ORD assembled a prestigious planning committee. The planning committee developed the objectives for the SOTA conference and commissioned background articles to stimulate discussions among the 100 invited experts at the conference. Subject matter experts wrote the background articles and submitted them for peer review. Of those articles, 17 passed the rigorous review process and are published here in this special issue of Journal Rehabilitation Research and Development (JRRD). The articles cover various aspects of TBI and its comorbidities. Topics include— 1. Acute clinical care for TBI: Continuation of care from the battlefield to the Department of Defense (DOD) and the VA. 2. Pathology of blast-related brain injury. 3. Infectious complications in OIF/OEF veterans with TBI. 4. Posttraumatic epilepsy. 5. Prevalence of chronic pain, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and persistent postconcussive symptoms in OIF/OEF veterans: The polytrauma clinical triad. 6. Treating veterans with comorbid mild TBI (mTBI) and PTSD. 7. Advances in neuroimaging of TBI and PTSD. 8. Approaches to war-related mild to moderate TBI.

Modern research and the forgotten prosthetic history of the Vietnam war

The Comparative Analysis of Illustration Materials on the 2nd World War in History Textbooks

Telling the Story of Islam in Asia: Reflections on Teleologies and Timelessness

The importance of Islam in Asia Any of us who teaches about Muslims in Asia is likely to feel the need to insist on the importance of the subject and its neglect by people who reduce Islam and its adherents to the Middle East or conflate Muslim and Arab. 1 The chart of population figures listed in the appendix shows why, in terms of the sheer numbers involved, one might want to assert Asia’s importance as the four largest Muslim populations in the world: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh are in Asia. The largest concentration of Muslims anywhere is in the area we demarcate “South Asia,” the old British India with close to half a billion population of Muslims. Approximately one in three of the world’s Muslims lives in the first set of countries listed in the appendix. The population statistics within countries that automatically click “Islam” in people’s minds just don’t compare. Saudi Arabia may have a population of twenty-eight million, all Muslim, but Uttar Pradesh, the state I primarily study in the Republic of India, with only an eighteen percent Muslim population, has about six million more, some thirty-four million. Numbers aside, sadly many of these areas have in fact come into popular purview in recent years because of war, violence, and strategic considerations. Afghanistan and Pakistan are widely considered as among the most dangerous places geopolitically in the world, and American troops are deeply

The Dialectics of Islamophobia and Radicalism in Indonesia

The world economic crises in 1998 and the subsequent political terrorism on September 11, 2001 vastly impacted the social, political, and cultural landscapes of Islam in Indonesia. The earlier political changes from the authoritarian New Order to the reformation era in 1998 had sparked not only democracy, but also the arrival of Islam as a political power that promised an instant solution to social, cultural, political, and economic decadence. Islamist movements, however, gained momentum after 9/11. Islamists interpreted “war on terror” and the use of terms like “Islamofascism” as a threat against Islam and Muslims. In response, they mobilized what the United State perceived as anti-Americanism. This anti-Americanism is, of course, concretely fueled by the Islamist views of US foreign policy and Western domination. But the Islamist perception of American Islamophobia plays a role as well.

Klanica pet – Slaughterhouse Five

On 22nd April 1999, during the notorious war between NATO and Serbia, the Serbian city of Užice suffered the loss of its main post office. The building designed to connect people and help them communicate from afar disappeared in almost an instant. No other building in the neighbourhood was knocked down, nobody was hurt or died, nothing else changed -- only the post miraculously vanished, as in a fairy tale. Instead of the post office, the citizens of Užice beheld the appearance of an empty space. In his legendary book The Empty Space, Peter Brook claims that for theater to take place it is enough to have 'a man [who] walks across [the] empty space whilst someone else is watching him'. I would go further and argue that in this empty space, the drama of human existence is revealed and that the search for space is an essential activity of the theatre maker. Likewise, in our second quest to reveal the great theatrical potential of the public spaces of the town of Užice, Amsterdam Cyber Theatre have decided to explore its most famous empty space where layers of meanings, riddles, and prophecies wait to be discovered and examined in order to serve the well-being of the community of the future. Sadly, the empty space of Užice's post office is not the only empty space created in recent wars in the former Yugoslavia. Many other buildings disappeared, and many homes perished, leaving only the memories of the times when these empty spaces were anything but empty. With this project we wished to pay tribute to all these empty spaces and raise awareness of their existence, not only in the sense of physical emptiness in the wounded cities and villages in the Balkans but more importantly about the emptiness in the souls of their former inhabitants. Fahrudin Nuno Salihbegovic, Amsterdam Cyber Theatre

George Augustus Sala and the English Middle-Class View of America

Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others

This article uses autobiographical material to explore how 'race' has operated as structuring principle in Britain since the end of the Second World War. It stages an encounter between lived experience (as revealed through memory) and psychoanalytic and sociological texts. The article attempts to show how 'life' is both captured by these traditions of thought and how it exceeds them. The focus is on the material and emotional registers of intersubjectivity across the divisions of black and white. The article is punctuated by brief moments of musical interruption which illustrate the pervasive presence of gendered, raced and sexed in artefacts of popular culture.

Changes of Atlantic Alliance between EU and US through the Afghanistan War and Iraqi War

The “Crisis” of Masculinity: Duchamp, War, and Nationalism