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The current chapter outlines the process through which New Religious Movement (NRM) membership is conceptualized as facilitating the development of increased reflexivity, in particular the development of an increased ability to connect to others. Based on the narratives of a subsample of 11 former members of NRMs for whom membership signified a desire for an increased ability to emotionally connect to others, a number of factors that are understood as having facilitated or inhibited this type of change were identified and are discussed. The findings extend previous theorizing of NRM as facilitating changes in the behaviors and beliefs of their members, and conceptualizes NRMs as possible avenues through which self-change at an emotional level can occur.

The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2015) is the story of a group of teenage friends that, during the screening of a Friday the 13th-like 1980s slasher horror, happen to be sucked into the film. Trapped in the gruesome narrative, they have to survive the deranged killer that haunts the premises of the campsite by applying their knowledge of the rules and cliches of the slasher genre. The film is of interest not only because it mixes horror and comedy and exaggerates the horror genre’s conventions – as Scream and other neo-slashers already did. By employing the device of the screen rupture, the film constructs a complex network of self-reflexive moments and intertextual references. The metalinguistic play involves in particular the notoriously sexophobic and gender-led dynamics of the 1980s slashers – those more emancipated girls who have sex are killed; the most prudish girl is the one that eventually manages to defeat the monster, the ‘Final Girl’. In this sense, the film is almost like a video essay that reprises and illustrates one of the most seminal study of the slasher genre, Carol Clover’s 1992 Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. The chapter presents the defining elements of the slasher subgenre as theorized by Clover and then focusses on the analysis of the metalinguistic elements of The Final Girls vis-à-vis Clover’s classic text.

This chapter examines the acts of burial and exhumation in three contemporary British history plays. For the purposes of this argument, a ‘history play’ may be defined as a piece of writing for the theatre that engages with historical events or settings. Such plays inevitably, at the moment of their staging or revival, take on particular meanings for audiences, since theatre as a live, durational art form encourages spectators to compare the historical events depicted with their present historical moment. The chapter argues that acts of burial and exhumation in contemporary British theatre are intimately tied to notions of land, soil and belonging. These became increasingly pertinent ideas in the UK’s political climate in the years following the 2016 Referendum on membership of the European Union. Of the three case studies, Victoria by David Greig (2000) dates from more than a decade before this vote, whilst Common by D. C. Moore (2017), and Eyam by Matt Hartley (2018) were written and staged in the interim between the Referendum result and the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. All three, however, feature corpses on stage as a means to consider time, temporality, place and history. Each play offers a different interpretation of what it means to play dead and to stay dead.

Research in psychology and accounting suggest that affect (client likeability) toward a person can impact human judgment, resulting in more favorable treatment for likeable than dislikeable individuals. This study investigates whether two debiasing mechanisms, justification and self-review, mitigate the impact of affect (client likeability) on fraud risk assessments. Consistent with prior research on nonfraud audit judgments, this study finds that in absence of any debiasing mechanism, inexperienced auditors are susceptible to affect biases in fraud judgments. Extending prior research, we find justification is not sufficient to mitigate likeability, but self-review is an effective mechanism to mitigate the effect of client likeability in a fraud judgment task. Supplemental findings indicate that general accounting experience, in itself, does not mitigate client likeability; however, the effectiveness of the self-review mechanism extends to these participants.

In this chapter, we explore two intersecting plotlines of teacher knowledge and content knowledge through an experience in which we engaged our teacher candidates during our mathematics methods course. Teacher candidates were tasked with the challenge of creating hands-on, interactive activities for small groups of fifth-grade students based on a selected Common Core State Standard for Mathematics (CCSS-M) related to the area of fractions. Responsible for both planning and preparing their activities, the teacher candidates were the curriculum designers. What we designed as the practice teaching activity involved a morning of planning and implementing a fraction activity with small groups of fifth-graders in short sessions, making adjustments, prompting and cueing students, extending learning, managing behaviors and distractibility – experiencing the early challenges and rewards of their first experiences in teaching – gaining practice and feedback. Forming the core of this chapter is a narrative construction of Michelle’s personal experience working with teacher candidates and fifth-grade students in practice teaching spaces for the first time, discovering moments along with our students, when they bridged the expansive gap from living as education students to feeling like beginning teachers. Teacher candidates’ responses to the experience and reflections on their challenges and successes are shared.

The study assesses public health programs to shed light on the experiences of low-income and minority women with children seeking health services. Thirteen focus groups were conducted with 111 pregnant women or women with children. Women consumers of public health services experience difficulties accessing health services due to a lack of insurance, information and language barriers about programs and eligibility, a shortage of Medicaid providers and specialist services, long waits, bureaucratic barriers, and dismissive treatment. Accessibility and information barriers were more prominent in rural regions whereas bureaucratic barriers were more pronounced in urban areas. Lower satisfaction with services was reported among ethnic minority women compared to whites.