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Devotional Fanscapes: Bollywood Star Deities, Devotee-Fans, and Cultural Politics in India and Beyond (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) examines how fans worship film stars as deities. Focusing on temples dedicated to Bollywood (Hindi cinema) stars and the artifacts produced by Hindi and Tamil cinema fans, Shalini Kakar illustrates how the fan constructs their identity as a devotee and that of the star as a deity. Extending her research from India to the US, Kakar highlights the transnational dimensions of this phenomenon to demonstrate the degree to which devotional fan practices (fan-bhakti) and fan artifacts can help us rethink art, religion, and politics. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book addresses how fan-bhakti is performed in the global landscape, in the process augmenting new religious models and identities based on the idea of the “cinematic sacred.”
For more information, go here.
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Today’s book is: Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States (U California Press, 2024), a which explores how each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California, Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by resource-impoverished relatives who are unable to support them, exploitative jobs that are no match for the high cost of living, and individualistic social norms that render them independent and alone. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles illuminates how unaccompanied teens who grow up as undocumented low-wage workers navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful during the transition to adulthood in the United States.
Our guest is: Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales, who is a researcher, author, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. She specializes in the study of international migration and immigrant integration, with particular interest in the experiences of Latin American migrants in the United States. Throughout her research and writing, Stephanie explores the role of immigration policy in shaping the everyday lives of migrant children and their families, how immigrants and the communities they arrive to (re)make one another mutually, and the meanings immigrants make of success and wellbeing within an increasingly unequal US society. She is the author of Sin Padres, Ni Papeles.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Playlist for listeners:
We Are Not Dreamers
Immigration Realities
The Ungrateful Refugee
Who Gets Believed
Reunited
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.
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What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms and libraries reify-or subvert-dominant social structures like caste and gender?
These are the questions that Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala (Routledge, 2023) explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using archival material, discourse analysis, participant observation and personal interviews, this book traces the transformation of public spaces through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume focuses on how 'modernity' has also been a struggle for access to public spaces, and non-institutional spaces like teashops, markets, public roads, temple grounds, reading-rooms and libraries have all been crucial to how political culture was shaped, and how dominant hegemonies-caste, class or capital-have been challenged. It suggests that the secular public sphere that emerged in the last century in Kerala was a result of the constant negotiations between conflicting ideas which were put to test in these social spaces.
At a time when digital spaces are fast replacing physical ones, this book is a timely reminder of the struggles that led to the emergence of secular public spaces in Kerala. It contributes to similar studies on public space that have emerged from other parts of the world over the last decades. A major contribution to understanding modern India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of social history, political science, political sociology, gender studies, linguistics, and South Asian studies.
DISCOUNT CODES: Routledge has offered two discount codes that you can use to purchase this book on their website. The discount codes are ESA03 (UK) and SMA24 (USA).
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Cosplay, born from the fusion of ‘costume’ and ‘play’, transcends mere dress-up by transforming enthusiasts of TV shows, movies, books or video games into living embodiments of their cherished characters. Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Vivian Asimos is a close exploration of the vibrant world of cosplay, showing what makes it so captivating for so many.
The book frames cosplay as an enactment and embodiment of mythology, revealing its inherent complexity, and providing valuable insight into cosplayers’ experiences. Exploring cosplay performances, the skills involved and its community, the book shows how cosplayers build a strong connection to the characters and stories they treasure, and ultimately how they are constructing their own identities.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Around the world, millions are forcibly displaced by conflict, climate change, and persecution. Some cross international borders, while others are displaced within their own countries. In We Wait for a Miracle: Health Care and the Forcibly Displaced (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Muhammad H. Zaman shares poignant stories across continents to highlight the health care experiences of refugees and forced migrants. For many of these people, health risks unfortunately become part of the fabric of everyday life as they navigate new countries that treat them with varying degrees of care and indifference.
Across widely varied local systems, countries of origin, health concerns, and other contexts, Zaman finds that barriers to health care share these key factors: trust, social network, efficiency of the health system, and the regulatory framework of the host environment. A combination of these factors explains difficulties in accessing health care across the geographic and geopolitical spectrum and challenges the existing global public health framework, which is based entirely on local context. In moving stories that span seven countries—Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Colombia, and Venezuela—Zaman shares the everyday struggles of refugees, the internally displaced, and the stateless in accessing the health care they need.
This unique look at an urgent global challenge addresses the issue of access for populations that are currently in distress due to civil war, economic collapse, or a conflict driven by external state actors. Organic social networks and trust, rather than top-down policies, are often what save the lives of migrants, refugees, and the stateless. Focusing on that trust—and its deficit—in camps, urban slums, hospitals, and clinics, Zaman combines personal and journalistic accounts of refugees with broad systemic analysis on global health care access to compare problems and solutions in different regions and provide holistic policy and practice recommendations for refugees, internally displaced persons, and stateless populations.
In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Muhammad Zaman about the healthcare experiences of refugees, and the power of storytelling.
Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.
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How do street-level bureaucrats in Austria’s public service deal with linguistic diversity? In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Dr Clara Holzinger (University of Vienna) about her PhD research investigating how employment officers deal with the day-to-day communication challenges arising when clients have low levels of German language proficiency.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.
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What good is a good sense of humour especially when the humour may be ethically questionable? Although humour seems a valuable part of a good conversation and indeed a good life, jokes have never seemed more morally problematic than they do now. How can we then evaluate quips, gibes, pranks, teasing, light mockery, sarcasm when they can all too often be mean, deceitful, disrespectful, humiliating, cruel? And how is a moral philosopher to evaluate such dilemmas without taking himself and morality too seriously or too lightly?
In Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2024), David W. Shoemaker considers the interplay between humor and morality. With wit and evident joy, Shoemaker considers how "wisecracks" between family and friends are of ethical value despite how morally suspect they may appear. In arguing for the moral status of a wisecrack or a joke as partly resting on the wisecracker's intentions and motives, Shoemaker goes on to show just how complicated and sometimes unwarranted the moral complaints against humor are, despite what many may think. Wisecracks may remain, at the book's end, far from benign or an unalloyed good, but unlike in Plato's ideal republic, Shoemaker is convinced we need to keep them coming.
Damian Maher is a fellow by examination at All Souls College, University of Oxford.
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Tribe-state relations are a foundational element of authoritarian bargains in the Middle East, and in particular in the Gulf States. However, the structures of governance built upon that foundation exhibit wide differences. What explains this variation in the salience of kinship authority?
Through a case comparison of Kuwait, Qatar and Oman, in Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) Dr. Scott Weiner shows that variation in tribal access to limited resources before state building can account for these differences. Its conclusions are based on seven months of archival research and interviews in Arabic and English, and reveal new details about state formation on the Arabian Peninsula.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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The Burning Forest: India's War Against the Maoists (Verso, 2019) by Nandini Sundar is an empathetic, moving account of what drives indigenous peasants to support armed struggle despite severe state repression, including lives lost, homes and communities destroyed.
Over the past decade, the heavily forested,mineral-rich region of Bastar in central India has emerged as one of the most militarized sites in the country. The government calls the Maoist insurgency the “biggest security threat” to India. In 2005, a state-sponsored vigilante movement, the Salwa Judum, burnt hundreds of villages, driving their inhabitants into state-controlled camps, drawing on counterinsurgency techniques developed in Malaysia, Vietnam and elsewhere. Apart from rapes and killings, hundreds of ‘surrendered’ Maoist sympathisers were conscripted as auxiliaries. The conflict continues to this day, taking a toll on the lives of civilians, security forces and Maoist cadres.
In 2007, Sundar and others took the Indian government to the Supreme Court over the human rights violations arising out ofthe conflict. In a landmark judgment, the Court in 2011 banned state supportfor vigilantism.
The Burning Forest describes this brutal war in the heart of India, and what it tells us about the courts, media and politics of the country. The result is a granular and critical ethnography of Indian democracy over a decade.
Nandini Sundar is a Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, and has been visiting Bastar for over 25 years. Her first book, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar (1854-1996) is an authoritative account of Bastar's colonial and post-colonial past.
Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford.
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In the latest edition of Ethnographic Marginalia, we talk with Roxani Krystalli about her new book Good Victims: The Political as a Feminist Question (Oxford UP, 2024). Roxani describes the dilemmas she faced in her research on encounters between those recognized as victims of the Colombian conflict and the state agencies that attend them. She also explains what makes this a feminist book—not because of a focus on gender, but a feminist sensibility that questions categories like politics and victimhood and how they influence each other. Finally, she ends by describing the books that inspired her and telling us about her new project focused on love.
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An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Manuscript of Peru's lower Andean regions. The rebellious tone of both epics illuminates a heretofore overlooked aspect in Latin American Indigenous colonial writing: the sense of political injustice and spiritual sedition directed equally at European-imposed religious practice and at aspects of Indigenous belief. The link between spirituality and political upheaval in Native colonial writing has not been sufficiently explored until this work.
Sharonah Esther Fredrick applies a multidisciplinary approach that utilizes history, literature, archaeology, and anthropology in equal measure to situate the Mayan and Andean narratives within the paradigms of their developing civilizations. An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods decolonizes readers' perspective by setting Mayan and Andean authorship center stage and illustrates the schisms and shifts in Native civilizations and literatures of Latin America in a way that other literary studies, which relegate Native literature as a prelude to Spanish-language literature, have not yet done. By demonstrating the power of Native American philosophy within the context of the conquest of Latin America, Fredrick illuminates the profound spiritual dissension and radically conflicting ideologies of the Mesoamerican and Andean worlds before and after the Spanish Conquest.
Books mentioned:
Breaking the Maya Code by Michael Coe
The Huarochiri Manuscript translated by Frank Salomon
Popol Vuh translated by Dennis Tedlock
Sharonah Esther Fredrick teaches in the College of Charleston's Department of Hispanic Studies. She is the Colonial Americas editor for Routledge Resources Online--The Renaissance World.
Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.
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Each of us is endowed with an inheritance--a set of evolved biases and cultural tools that shape every facet of our behavior. For countless generations, this inheritance has taken us to ever greater heights: driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organized religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it's failing us. We find ourselves hurtling toward a future of unprecedented political polarization, deadlier war, and irreparable environmental destruction.
In Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2024), renowned anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse offers a sweeping account of how our biases have shaped humanity's past and imperil its future. He argues that three biases--conformism, religiosity, and tribalism--drive human behavior everywhere. Forged by natural selection and harnessed by thousands of years of cultural evolution, these biases catalyzed the greatest transformations in human history, from the birth of agriculture and the arrival of the first kings to the rise and fall of human sacrifice and the creation of multiethnic empires. Taking us deep into modern-day tribes, including terrorist cells and predatory ad agencies, Whitehouse shows how, as we lose the cultural scaffolding that allowed us to manage our biases, the world we've built is spiraling out of control.
By uncovering how human nature has shaped our collective history, Inheritance unveils a surprising new path to solving our most urgent modern problems. The result is a powerful reappraisal of the human journey, one that transforms our understanding of who we are, and who we could be.
Harvey Whitehouse is Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford.
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In 1966 Benedict Anderson published 'The Languages of Indonesian Politics', a seminal paper exploring the development of Indonesian as a new language for talking about national politics. In that paper Anderson underlined the contrast between the formal/official style of Indonesian news reports and the colloquial, playful speech style of ordinary Jakartans as depicted through comics. Nearly six decades on, how do we understand the 'languages' of Indonesian politics? How are figures of politics constituted through language?
Associate Professor in Indonesian Studies at The University of Sydney, Dwi Noverini Djenar, expands on these issues. She has worked on the stylistics of adolescent literature, focusing on the production and circulation of styles and their relationship to sociolinguistic change. Her current research focuses on language and relations among social actors in public spheres, particularly in broadcast settings. Novi is co-author of Style and Intersubjectivity in Youth Interaction (2018) and co-editor of Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Communities (NUS Press, 2023).
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Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care (U Illinois Press, 2023) challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures.
Dr. Tungohan is the Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy, Impacts and Activism, and Associate Professor of Politics at York University. She has also been appointed as a Broadbent Institute Fellow. Previously, she was the Grant Notley Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta’s Department of Political Science. She received her doctoral degree in Political Science and Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto. Her research looks at migrant labor, specifically assessing migrant activism. Dr. Tungohan specializes in socially engaged research and is actively involved in grassroots migrant organizations such as Gabriela-Ontario and Migrante-Canada.
Dr. Tungohan’s hosting a podcast channel, Academic Aunties. You can find her previous conversation with NBN host Dr. Christina Gessler here.
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Carceral Recovery: Prisons, Drug Markets, and the New Pharmaceutical Self (Lexington Books, 2023) explores the interrelation between carceral conditions and substance use by considering the intersections between drug markets, sidewalks, households, and prisons in Baltimore. Sanaullah Khan argues that while housing, medicalization, and incarceration fundamentally create the conditions for substance use, individuals are increasingly experiencing the paradoxes of care and punishment by being propelled into a new regime of recovery which creates new pharmaceuticalized identities. By shedding light on how addiction and the impetus for healing moves through families and institutions of the state, Khan provides an account of the different competing forces that shape substance use, recovery, and relapse. Through a combination of archival research and ethnography, the book makes a case for disentangling punishment from recovery.
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What happens when the elitist space of 'Western' classical music seeks to diversify itself? And what are the social effects worked through diversity discourses in classical music institutions? The Sound of Difference: Race, Class and the Politics of 'Diversity' in Classical Music (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Kristina Kolbe addresses these concerns by critically examining how diversity work takes shape in a cultural sector so deeply implicated in hierarchies of class, structures of whiteness, and legacies of imperialism.
The book draws from ethnographic and interview data to analyse how diversity discourses become constructed in the organisational and creative processes of music production. From rehearsal and performance practices to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the sector's commitment to change, Dr. Kolbe reveals the institutional constraints and precarious labour relations that form around diversity work in classical music and skillfully considers what these processes can tell us about the remaking of class, race, and racism today.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Queer men's cultures of intimacy have long been sites of fierce contestation. Indeed, debates have raged for decades over issues such as monogamy, safer sex, sexual racism and gay marriage. The introduction of the smartphone in 2008 only intensified these debates whilst also raising a further set of questions which are explored in this open access book.
Through interviews with a diverse group of 43 queer men about their smartphone mediated intimacies, Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphones in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2024) reveals that queer men use their smartphones, not simply to arrange intimate encounters, but more specifically to gain a sense of control over the parts of their intimate lives that make them feel most vulnerable. For instance, some use messaging apps to gain a sense of control over intimate conversations that they feel too vulnerable to have in person. Others use the 'block' function on dating apps to feel in control of the racism and transphobia they are vulnerable to on these apps.
Digital Intimacies therefore illuminates not only hitherto underexplored aspects of queer men's cultures of intimacy but crucially also brings into view previously obscured cultural dynamics, gaining insight into the historical moments in which they occur.
Jamie Hakim is Lecturer at King's College London, UK.
James Cummings is Lecturer at the University of York, UK.
Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.
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Today’s book is: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton University Press, 2024), by Dr. Allison Pugh, which explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other is valuable and worth preserving. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions—from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers—Dr. Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Dr. Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works. Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world.
Our guest is: Dr. Allison Pugh, who is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and the 2024-25 Vice President of the American Sociological Association. She writes about how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at work and at home. She is the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity and Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. Her writing has appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New Republic.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Playlist for listeners:
Talking To Strangers
Making A Meaningful Life
How to Human
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
More Than A Glitch
Meditation and the Academic Life
Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.
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Dr Laura Smith-Khan speaks with Dr Anthea Vogl about her new book, Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination (Cambridge UP, 2024). The conversation introduces listeners to the procedures involved in seeking asylum in the global north and how language is implicated throughout these processes. Discussing Dr Vogl’s new book and research, the podcast explores the difficult narrative demands these processes place on those seeking asylum, and the sociopolitical context underlying them. It reflects on the contributions scholars across disciplines have made and can make to law and policy reform, informing best practice, and advocating for more just systems.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.
Follow Laura Smith-Khan on Bluesky and Twitter.
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Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital masquerade” to theorize the co-constitutive role of digital technology as assemblage and entanglement in the articulation of feminism, queerness, and rights.
Drawing from interviews with various feminist and queer media practitioners, participant observation at community events, and detailed analyses of a variety of media forms such as social media, electronic journals, digital filmmaking, film festivals, and dating app videos, Jia Tan captures the feminist, queer, and rights articulations that are simultaneously disruptive of and conditioned by state censorship, technological affordances, and dominant social norms.
Jia Tan is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.
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