bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The comparison of k-modes clustering and ROCK clustering to the poverty indicator in Samadua Subdistrict, South Aceh
Authors: Sofyan H , Iqbal M , Marzuki M , Muhammad M
Published: February 2021

The cluster methods including k-modes clustering and ROCK clustering are rarely used for analyzing categorical data. Much of the research data, however, are categorical, such as the poverty indicator dataset. Many studies have examined each of these two methods, but there is still limited study for comparing them. This study compared between k-modes clustering and ROCK clustering on a dataset of poverty indicators at a category scale. There were 1449 households with the lowest 40% income in Samadua Sub-district, South Aceh Regency were used as data in this study. The result of this research was that the optimal number of clusters for k-modes clustering was 2. Similarly, the optimal number of clusters for ROCK clustering was 2 with a threshold value (θ) of 0.29. The SW/SB and R-Squared values for the k-modes clustering were 0.0149 and 0.7558, respectively, compared to 0.0682 and 0.5732 for ROCK clustering. From these two values, it can be concluded that the k-modes clustering is better than ROCK clustering. The significant difference between the two clusters based on deciles of households with the lowest 40% income of the k-modes clustering is ownership of defecation facilities, ownership of television and motorbikes.
Epic
Authors: Tucker Herbert
Published: February 2021

An enumeration of generic qualities will define epic less helpfully than will an assessment of its behaviors. Among major literary kinds, epic offers the most long-standing and globally distributed evidence of the human habit of thinking by means of narrative. What it cherishes is the common good; what it ponders are the behaviors and values that forward or threaten collective welfare. What it reckons are the stakes of heroic risk that any living culture must hazard in order to prosper, by negotiating core identities with margins and adjusting settled customs to emergent opportunities; and it roots all these in the transmission of a tale that commands perennial attention on their account. Such dialectics underlie epic’s favorite narrative templates, the master plots of strife, quest, and foundation; and they find expression in such conventions as the in medias res opening and suspended closure; the epic invocation, ancestral underworld, superhuman machinery, and encyclopedic simile; the genre’s formal gravitation towards verse artifice and the lexical and syntactic mingling of old with new language. The genre steadfastly highlights the human condition and prospect, defining these along a scale of higher and lower being, along a timeline correlating history with prophecy, and along cultural coordinates where the familiar and the exotic take each other’s measure.
Heteroglossia
Authors: Hirschkop Ken
Published: February 2021

The concept of “heteroglossia” was coined by Mikhail Bakhtin in an essay from the 1930s. Heteroglossia was the name he gave for the “inner stratification of a single national language into social dialects, group mannerisms, professional jargons, generic languages, the languages of generations and age-groups,” and so on, but it was not simply another term for the linguistic variation studied in sociolinguistics and dialectology. It differed in three respects. First, in heteroglossia differences of linguistic form coincided with differences in social significance and ideology: heteroglossia was stratification into “socio-ideological languages,” which were “specific points of view on the world, forms for its verbal interpretation.” Second, heteroglossia embodied the force of what Bakhtin called “historical becoming.” In embodying a point of view or “social horizon,” language acquired an orientation to the future, an unsettled historical intentionality, it otherwise lacked. Third, heteroglossia was a subaltern practice, concentrated in a number of cultural forms, all of which took a parodic, ironizing stance in relation to the official literary language that dominated them. Throughout his discussion, however, Bakhtin wavers between claiming this heteroglossia exists as such in the social world, from which the novel picks it up, and arguing that heteroglossia is something created and institutionalized by novels, which take the raw material of variation and rework it into “images of a language.” Interestingly, from roughly 2000 on work in sociolinguistics has suggested that ordinary speakers do the kind of stylizing and imaging work Bakhtin assigned to the novel alone. One could argue, however, that heteroglossia only acquires its full significance and force when it is freed from any social function and allowed to flourish in novels. According to Bakhtin, that means that heteroglossia is only possible in modernity, because it is in modernity that society becomes truly historical, and languages only acquire their orientation to the future in those circumstances.
Speech Acts and Performative Utterances
Authors: Allington Daniel
Published: February 2021

Speech Act Theory is the application to spoken and written language of the philosophy of action developed by John L. Austin. Austin was particularly interested in conventionalized actions, which have a special significance thanks to their social or institutional context. Although he emphasized that such actions could also be carried out through non-verbal means, Austin is mostly remembered for his analysis of the ways in which they can be carried out through the utterance of words—hence the term “Speech Act Theory,” and the title under which his lecture series on the topic was posthumously published (i.e., How to Do Things with Words). He described utterances that perform such actions as “performative utterances.” But he also effectively argued that all utterances are performative—or rather, that all utterances have a performative or “illocutionary” aspect.

Austin’s analysis of speech as action provides scholars with a way of looking at verbal behavior that relates spoken and written utterances to the circumstances of their production and deployment without reducing their meanings to authorial intentions conceived as mental states. As such, it has intrinsic appeal to scholars of literature, who have since the 1970s often distanced themselves both from psychological and from purely formal conceptions of literature. However, engagements with Speech Act Theory by literary and cultural theorists have often been superficial (for example, in the commonplace but spurious association of Austin’s account of performative utterances with the unrelated idea that gender is performative). Indeed, the fundamental concepts of Speech Act Theory have usually been misunderstood and misrepresented within literary studies because its core concerns are quite alien to that discipline’s central preoccupation: that is, the critical interpretation of literary texts.
Corporate Entrepreneurship: A Research Perspective
Authors: Kuratko Donald F. , Covin Jeffrey G.
Published: February 2021

The theoretical and empirical knowledge on corporate entrepreneurship (ce) has evolved in the research domain over the last 50 years, beginning very slowly and growing in importance in that time. Because of this evolution and expansion in CE research, the theoretical and empirical knowledge about CE and the entrepreneurial behavior on which it is based has progressed to a point where a greater understanding of the concept can be presented.

Many of the elements essential to constructing a theoretically grounded understanding of the domains of CE have been identified. An examination of the field reveals that there are three research domains that have developed over the years: corporate venturing (either internal or external), strategic entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial orientation.

In examining the evolution of CE research across five decades, the focus of CE research has varied over the years. The very early research published in the 1970s focused more on how teams could establish entrepreneurial activities inside established organizations; however, this early research was sparse because CE was not widely acknowledged nor sought in existing organizations. The 1980s saw some research into entrepreneurial behavior inside established organizations that explained how such activity could simply not exist in the structure and operations of existing corporations. Opposed to that thinking, many more researchers demonstrated that the idea of corporate entrepreneurial activity could be conceived as a process of organizational renewal. In the 1990s, researchers began to develop more comprehensive examinations of CE that focused on re-energizing companies and therefore increasing its abilities to develop innovations. The first and second decades of the 21st century witnessed a more sophisticated refinement of research topics in CE.

In addition to research specific to the development of the three main domains of CE (corporate venturing, entrepreneurial orientation, and strategic entrepreneurship), there has been research on more specific areas of interest in CE including the implementation of CE, management levels, the individual corporate entrepreneur, models and metrics of CE, a deeper examination of internal corporate ventures, the international domain, firm size, family firms, ethics, and corporate venture capital. These areas illustrate the developmental expansion of interest in CE across different domains.

Even with the continued expansion in the research on CE, there is so much that is still not understood nor researched well enough to fully advance the theoretical and empirical knowledge on CE. With the growing climate of disruption through external antecedents such as COVID-19, the entrepreneurial behavior of individuals within organizations becomes paramount and warrants a deeper understanding. Newer research questions on CE are emerging and further theoretical exploration should be the work of ongoing scholarly efforts.
Consumer Policy and European Union Politics
Authors: Micklitz Hans-W.
Published: February 2021

The rise of consumer policy is inextricably linked to the emergence of the consumer society after the Second World War. From the mid-1970s the EU became engaged in the issue. It used first and foremost legal means, directives, and regulations. The actors were no longer nation-states, governments, national parliaments, national courts, and national consumer organizations; they became the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, the European Court of Justice, European organizations, research institutions, and consultancy firms, which interact in a multilevel economy and society.
Patronage and Public Administration
Authors: Panizza Francisco , Peters B. Guy , Ramos Larraburu Conrado
Published: February 2021

The concept of patronage refers to the power of political actors to appoint trusted individuals by discretion to nonelective positions in the public sector. This proposed new definition avoids an exclusive association with less developed countries and recognizes the presence of patronage in modern democracies, drawing a distinction with broader terms such as clientelism and politicization. Patronage differs from clientelism because the reasons for providing patronage include a list of other motives beyond the classic particularistic allocation of public resources. At the same time, patronage is not strictly equal to politicization, as this definition reduces the influence that politicians exert on the administrative machinery to a distribution of posts. In specifying what patronage is in narrower terms, this definition merges two different literatures, one associated with institutions and political parties, and another with bureaucracies, public policy, and governance issues. Even though the meritocratic civil service is a hallmark of modern democracies, the presence of political appointees in these societies is universal. Patronage provides some benefits for governance, and any normative assessment of this type of appointment should consider the costs and benefits of this practice within each particular political and cultural context.
Ethics, Corruption, and Integrity of Governance: What It Is and What Helps
Authors: Huberts Leo , van Montfort André
Published: February 2021

Ethics, corruption, and integrity do matter for society and are relevant topics to take into account in the research (and practice) of public administration and governance. The many views, perspectives, and interpretations that are available with respect to these issues can be integrated in a challenging framework. This framework takes the concept of integrity of governance as a starting point, with a focus on relevant moral values and norms for political and administrative behavior and a discussion of various forms of integrity violations in the public sector. Based on a large amount of research on “what helps to protect integrity and prevent integrity violations,” it specially pays attention to integrity management and integrity systems. The framework concerning ethics, corruption, and integrity of governance offers starting points for formulating an agenda for the future. This agenda should express the desirability of both an “integrity turn” in public administration and political science and an “empirical turn” in integrity research.
Institutionalizing Public Action: Multiple Alignments of Goods, Services, Roles, and Tasks
Authors: Thynne Ian
Published: February 2021

Public action through the organizational use of power and rules in government and governance is multidimensional in form, scope, and reach. Approaches to action, embodying differing interactions of the state, market, and civil society, include statism, state–market dualism, state–civil society dualism, and state–market–civil society synergism. The approaches are distinctive while interrelated. They concern goods and services as focuses of action involving availability, accessibility, consumption, and use. This requires the performance of roles and tasks as modes of action. The roles are owner, producer, provider, regulator, facilitator, buyer, seller, consumer, and user, with each entailing tasks of making, implementing, and reviewing decisions. The result is a complex institutionalization of action, with multiple alignments of goods, services, roles, and tasks in the public interest.
Process Tracing in Crisis Decision Making
Authors: Beach Derek
Published: February 2021

Process tracing is an in-depth case study method that can be used to study how causal processes play out within cases. Given its focus on processes and temporality, process tracing is a useful method for analyzing crisis and crisis decision making in the fields of foreign policy analysis and public policy. As can be seen from its name, process tracing involves theorizing a causal process that is then traced by investigating the observable manifestations of the operation of the process as a whole in the more minimalist variant, or for each of its parts in the more maximalist variant. Minimalist process tracing is typically used early in a research program as a form of plausibility probe to understand what types of processes might be linking a crisis event with particular outcomes like policy change. Maximalist process tracing can then be used once there is preliminary knowledge about processes, and where the goals become gaining a better theoretical understanding of how they operate, and making stronger causal inferences using more direct evidence of their operation.
The Ontology of International Crisis
Authors: Welch David A.
Published: February 2021

For the study of international crisis to yield insights of value to both scholars and policymakers, it is imperative to understand what the term “international crisis” means in the abstract and what qualifies as an international crisis in the real world. It is also important to establish criteria for distinguishing species of the genus. These tasks require clearing up conceptual ambiguities, articulating and justifying a working definition of “international crisis,” demonstrating the utility of that definition for both scholarly analysis and practical policymaking, and exploring potentially fruitful ways in which international crises can be categorized. The working definition proposed is as follows: An international crisis is a decisive encounter between two or more states involving a plausibly elevated danger of imminent war. International crisis so conceived is inherently a decision-making problem and cannot be understood in purely systemic terms, divorced from policymakers’ perceptions of (a) the challenges they face, (b) the stakes involved, (c) the time constraints under which they operate, or (d) the severity of their predicament. While international crisis is not always entirely in the eye of the beholder, it is sufficient to establish that an international crisis is in play if decision makers believe that it is, whether or not their beliefs are well-founded. Without prejudging empirical analysis, it is plausible to suggest that both the analysis and the management of international crises may differ depending upon their genesis, the nature of the stakes involved, their severity, their payoff structure, and whether or not the protagonists have nuclear weapons.
Coup-Proofing in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Region
Authors: Lutterbeck Derek
Published: February 2021

Coup-proofing—that is, measures aimed at preventing military coups and ensuring military loyalty—has been a key feature of civil–military relations in Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) states. Just as the MENA region has been one of the most coup-prone regions in the world, coup-proofing has been an essential instrument of regime survival in Arab countries. The most commonly found coup-proofing strategies in the region include (a) so-called “communal coup-proofing,” involving the appointment of individuals to key positions within the military based on family, ethnic, or religious ties; (b) providing the military with corporate and/or private benefits in order to ensure its loyalty; (c) creating parallel military forces in addition to the regular military, so as to “counter-balance” the latter; (d) monitoring of the military through a vast internal security and intelligence apparatus; and (e) promoting professionalism, and thus political neutrality, within the military. The experiences of the “Arab Spring,” however, have shown that not all of these strategies are equally effective in ensuring military loyalty during times of popular upheavals and regime crises. A common finding in this context has been that communal coup-proofing (or militaries based on “patrimonialism”) creates the strongest bonds been the armed forces and their regimes, as evidenced by the forceful suppression of the popular uprising by the military in countries such as Syria, or by parts of the military in Libya and Yemen. By contrast, where coup-proofing has been based on the provision of material benefits to the military or on counterbalancing, as in Tunisia or Egypt, the armed forces have refrained from suppressing the popular uprising, ultimately leading to the downfall of these countries’ long-standing leaders. A further lesson that can be drawn from the Arab Spring in terms of coup-proofing is that students of both military coups and coup-proofing should dedicate (much) more attention to the increasingly important role played by the internal security apparatus in MENA countries.
Costa Rica: Demilitarization and Democratization
Authors: Booth John A.
Published: February 2021

An isolated Spanish frontier settlement with little or no significant mineral wealth, exportable crops, or exploitable indigenous population, colonial Costa Rica had only a rudimentary military. After independence in 1825, the population expanded and diversified as coffee cultivation generated growing wealth. Competing factions of the emergent coffee bourgeoisie fought to control the emerging state using elite-linked military officers to seize ruling power. Modernization and an external threat from Nicaragua and U.S. freebooters at mid-19th century led nation-building leaders to invest heavily in the army. Victorious in the 1856–1857 National War in Nicaragua, the military attained maximum size and power from 1870 to 1920 while oligarchic factions disputed ruling authority via fraudulent elections and coups d’état. Integration into the world economy deepened with banana production after 1890. Subsequent recessions and wars generated domestic economic inequality and a growing labor movement demanding reform. Civilian rule in the early 20th century was interrupted by the military regime of Federico Tinoco (1917–1919), whose atrocities led his civilian successors to almost dismantle the army. When a civil war erupted in 1948 against the divided, Communist-allied reformist government of the 1940s, the rebels defeated the army. The victorious National Liberation junta and new constitution abolished the army in 1949. Costa Rica committed to a police-based security model, nonaggression toward neighbors, and reliance on international alliances. Meanwhile, elites, spared the menace of military disruption, developed a successful electoral democratic regime. This has contributed to seven decades of political stability and allowed Costa Rica to invest successfully in economic development and its citizens’ welfare.
The Czech Republic: The Military and Politics
Authors: Kříž Zdeněk , Krpec Oldřich
Published: February 2021

The states that existed historically in what is now the Czech Republic were characterized by frequent changes of political regime, and these changes were substantially reflected in the military. Every political regime successfully avoided a military putsch despite that regime changes and international crises opened several windows of opportunity for considering open military interference (including military coups) in politics. All of the political regimes ruling in the Czech lands sought to make the military a mirror of the civilian state and society, applying what Samuel Huntington calls subjective civilian control. Military institutions were adapted to the ruling political regime as much as possible with the aim of securing their political loyalty. Values typical of each regime were implemented in the military. In the period of 1918–1938, for example, soldiers were expected to be politically conscious citizens of a democratic state. After 1948, the communist regime devoted considerable effort to transforming soldiers into obedient members of the socialist society, faithful to Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet Union. Later on, after 1989, the civic concept of the military was again emphasized, with the identification of soldiers with democratic and patriotic values considered an ideal. All the political regimes operating on the territory of today’s Czech Republic were successful in that the military as an institution has not interfered in politics and has been consistently loyal.
Political Obligation
Authors: Renzo Massimo
Published: February 2021

Political obligation refers to the idea that there is a duty to obey the law as well as to support one’s state in a number of other ways—for example, by promoting its interests, by defending it when attacked, by voting, and, more generally, by being an active citizen. These duties can be very demanding and seriously interfere with one’s capacity to autonomously choose how to lead one’s life. As such, their existence deserves close scrutiny.

The main attempts to justify the existence of political obligation appeal to the ideas of consent, fair play, gratitude, natural duties of justice, and associative obligations. Each of these theories is shown to struggle either with underinclusiveness or with overinclusiveness. It is normally thought that all and only the citizens of a given state have a duty to obey its laws and support its political institutions, but none of the classic theories seem to be able to justify a duty of this kind. In light of this, two responses are available: one is to give up the idea that there is political obligation, thereby becoming a “philosophical anarchist”; the other is to revise the traditional understanding of political obligation.
Pavlovian and Instrumental Conditioning
Authors: Sanabria Federico
Published: February 2021

Conditioning is the change in the response to a stimulus either because of the relation of that stimulus to other stimuli (Pavlovian conditioning), or because of the relation between the response and other stimuli (instrumental conditioning). These relations are formulated in terms of differences in conditional probability known as contingencies. Pavlovian contingencies refer to the difference in the conditional probability of one stimulus (the outcome, or O) given the presence vs. the absence of another stimulus (the conditioned stimulus, or CS). A conditioned response (CR) may be strengthened by a positive Pavlovian contingency (excitatory conditioning) or it may be weakened by a negative Pavlovian contingency (inhibitory conditioning). CRs are anticipatory or modified responses to the O, so their topography depends on the nature of the O (appetitive vs. aversive); the proximity between and congruency of O and CS; prior experience with the CS, O, and their contingency; the magnitude of their contingency; and the characteristics of other stimuli in the environment. Instrumental contingencies refer to the relation between one stimulus (the discriminative stimulus, or SD), a response (or operant, R), and the outcome of that response (O). The nature of the O and of its contingency with the R determines whether the O strengthens or weakens the R: Os that introduce an appetitive stimulus (positive reinforcement) or remove an aversive stimulus (negative reinforcement) strengthen the R. Positive reinforcement is typically arranged on a subset of one or more Rs following a set of rules known as a schedule of reinforcement. The probability that an R is reinforced may depend on the number of Rs (ratio schedules) or the amount of time (interval schedules) since the last reinforcer. The topography and strength of instrumental Rs depend on variables that are analogous to those that affect Pavlovian CRs: the amount and nature of prior experience with the O; the proximity, congruency, and contingency of R and O; and characteristics of other stimuli in past and present environments. Contemporary quantitative models of Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning recognize the importance of contextual stimuli that compete for cognitive and behavioral resources, constraining and shaping the expression of target responses. These models have guided the bulk of recent empirical research and conceptual developments, leading to a progressively unified view of learning and motivation processes. Along the way, Pavlovian and instrumental research have demonstrated their utility in addressing a broad range of consequential societal problems.
Common Factors in Psychotherapy
Authors: Browne Julia , Cather Corinne , Mueser Kim T.
Published: February 2021

Common factors, or characteristics that are present across psychotherapies, have long been considered important to fostering positive psychotherapy outcomes. The contextual model offers an overarching theoretical framework for how common factors facilitate therapeutic change. Specifically, this model posits that improvements occur through three primary pathways: (a) the real relationship, (b) expectations, and (c) specific ingredients. The most-well-studied common factors, which also are described within the contextual model, include the therapeutic alliance, therapist empathy, positive regard, genuineness, and client expectations. Empirical studies have demonstrated that a strong therapeutic alliance, higher ratings of therapist empathy, positive regard, genuineness, and more favorable outcome expectations are related to improved treatment outcomes. Yet, the long-standing debate continues regarding whether psychotherapy outcomes are most heavily determined by these common factors or by factors specific to the type of therapy used. There have been calls for an integration of the two perspectives and a shift toward evaluating mechanisms as a way to move the field forward. Nonetheless, the common factors are valuable in treatment delivery and should be a focus in delivering psychotherapy.
Play
Authors: Pellis Sergio M. , Pellis Vivien C.
Published: February 2021

Play behavior is relatively rare in the animal kingdom, but is widespread, and in some lineages is very common not only in childhood but also in adulthood. It can take many forms, as playful actions can be directed to a social partner (social play), to an inanimate object (object play), or self-directed, as the animal, jumps, runs, and turns (locomotor-rotational play). Considerable progress has been made in understanding the neural, emotional, and cognitive mechanisms mammals use in regulating social play, but whether comparable mechanisms are used to regulate other forms of play, or apply to non-mammalian animals, remains to be resolved. Similarly, social play in some mammals has been demonstrated to benefit the development of sociocognitive skills and emotional resilience, while locomotor-rotational play can benefit the development of motor skills. The factors that allow some species to gain these benefits also remain to be resolved. Statistical approaches that take the relatedness of species into account are increasingly being applied to analyze a growing comparative database that includes species from many different lineages. In addition, mathematical and computational models are being used to test the explanatory power of various factors to account for the evolution of play. Coupled with new methods in neuroscience that provide a deeper understanding of the brain during play, these approaches will enable extraordinary progress in understanding play over the next few decades.
Molecular Biology of Vertebrate Olfactory Receptors and Circuits
Authors: Tucker Richard P. , Gong Qizhi
Published: February 2021

Animals use their olfactory system for the procurement of food, the detection of danger, and the identification of potential mates. In vertebrates, the olfactory sensory neuron has a single apical dendrite that is exposed to the environment and a single basal axon that projects to the central nervous system (i.e., the olfactory bulb). The first odorant receptors to be discovered belong to an enormous gene family encoding G protein-coupled seven transmembrane domain proteins. Odorant binding to these classical odorant receptors initiates a GTP-dependent signaling cascade that uses cAMP as a second messenger. Subsequently, additional types of odorant receptors using different signaling pathways have been identified. While most olfactory sensory neurons are found in the olfactory sensory neuroepithelium, others are found in specialized olfactory subsystems. In rodents, the vomeronasal organ contains neurons that recognize pheromones, the septal organ recognizes odorant and mechanical stimuli, and the neurons of the Grüneberg ganglion are sensitive to cool temperatures and certain volatile alarm signals. Within the olfactory sensory neuroepithelium, each sensory neuron expresses a single odorant receptor gene out of the large gene family; the axons of sensory neurons expressing the same odorant receptor typically converge onto a pair of glomeruli at the periphery of the olfactory bulb. This results in the transformation of olfactory information into a spatially organized odortopic map in the olfactory bulb. The axons originating from the vomeronasal organ project to the accessory olfactory bulb, whereas the axons from neurons in the Grüneberg ganglion project to 10 specific glomeruli found in the caudal part of the olfactory bulb. Within a glomerulus, the axons originating from olfactory sensory neurons synapse on the dendrites of olfactory bulb neurons, including mitral and tufted cells. Mitral cells and tufted cells in turn project directly to higher brain centers (e.g., the piriform cortex and olfactory tubercle). The integration of olfactory information in the olfactory cortices and elsewhere in the central nervous system informs and directs animal behavior.
The Curricular Insights of Ivan Illich
Authors: Stuchul Dana L. , Prakash Madhu Suri
Published: February 2021

Ivan Illich’s curriculum vitae provides the frame through which to elaborate three insights—neither curricular, ideologic, utopian, nor messianic, yet penetrating contemporary givens: the institutionalization of values, the “ritualization of progress,” and the perversion of persons under the regime of scarcity. The former priest—whose challenges to the Church as it extended to similar corporate entities of the State rendered him a pariah—was arguably least understood at the moment he was most known. Yet, reviewing the entirety of his corpus, the judgment of Agamben resonates: “Now is the hour of Illich’s legibility.” This “legibility” reveals Illich’s project: his commitment to the struggle for both justice and freedom in the form of cultural, technological, and institutional inversion. His three insights—interculturality, the hidden curriculum of schooling, and a politics of limits—sought to contribute to a redirection of societies away from ecological, cultural, and social demise. His contributions address the following questions: What are the limits—ecological, technological, economic, political—within which pluralistic societies can exist? What do a society’s chosen “tools” say about what it means to be human? What are the terms—justice and freedom—within which the contemporary crises of global pandemic, of climate collapse, and of widespread immiseration and dispossession can be addressed?
Testimonio in Education
Authors: Rodriguez-Campo Marcela
Published: February 2021

Testimonio involves bearing witness to the collective experiences of historically marginalized communities, particularly as it relates to their oppression, resistance, and resilience. As an approach, it is an inherently decolonial process since it decenters Eurocentric knowledge and challenges power. Unlike oral history, memoir, or autoethnography, testimonio positions itself as an urgent and political voicing that rejects notions of objectivity and neutrality. Instead, it posits that there exist multiple truths of which each contributes to producing our understanding of a collective reality. Similar to these different practices, testimonio does not have a predictable or set structure as it can take the form of a poem, speech, interview, letter, and so on. Each of these, however, involves a public accounting of human experiences that have the ability to build solidarity.

Testimonio finds its formal roots in Latin America; however, as a practice it could be argued that it predates most traditional approaches as it has long existed within indigenous cultures that observe oral traditions and storytelling. Testimonio has been used primarily for movement building and resistance as marginalized groups globally named the oppressive practices of their governments and institutions. Since the late 1990s, testimonio has found a home in education, where scholars have deployed it as a strategy for visibilizing the experiences of people of color and women, especially Chicanas and Latinas. Additionally, testimonio has been adapted as a pedagogical tool, research method, and methodology. In the classroom, testimonio can help reveal the varying experiences and knowledge that students bring into the classroom. As a research method and methodology, testimonio compels researchers to reenvision their role in the research process and their relationship to their participants.
Disability Studies, Crip Theory, and Education
Authors: Hanebutt Rachel , Mueller Carlyn
Published: February 2021

Disability studies and crip theory emerged out of a need to reimagine, and directly challenge, dominant deficit perspectives of disability in many different contexts. Instead of framing disability as a problem of individual bodies, where the solution to difference is found in often deeply harmful rehabilitation and intervention, disability studies and crip theory allow for a more critical and expansive look at disability as an aspect of identity and culture that holds inherent value. While disability studies and crip theory have been used in academic and activist spaces, the impacts of a more critical and expansive framing of disability have incredibly important impacts on, and reciprocal relationships with, the theory and practice of education. Disability studies and crip theory both work to simultaneously critique and change dominant perspectives of disability in school settings, as it does in academic theory spaces; it challenges teachers, schools, and curriculum to ask questions of the benefits of using deficit perspectives, and what is lost when disability is seen only as a problem to be fixed. In this way, these two fields of inquiry and practice continue to shape, challenge, and push each other toward a more just sense of disability for all.
Curriculum Studies, Critical Geography, and Critical Spatial Theory
Authors: Helfenbein Robert , Huddleston Gabriel
Published: February 2021

During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, spatial terms have emerged and proliferated in academic circles, finding application in several disciplines extending beyond formal geography. Critical geography, a theoretical addition to the home discipline of geography as opposed to being a new discipline in itself, has seen application in many other disciplines, mostly represented by what is collectively called social theory (i.e., sociology, cultural studies, political science, and literature). The application of critical spatial theory to educational theory in general, and curriculum theorizing in particular, points to new trajectories for both critical geographers and curriculum theorists. The growth of these two formations have coincided with the changes in the curriculum studies field, especially as it relates to the Reconceptualization of that field during the 1970s. In terms of critical spatial theory especially, the exploration of how we conceptualize place and space differently has allowed curriculum studies scholars to think more expansively about education, schools, pedagogy, and curriculum. More specifically, it has allowed a more fluid understanding of how curriculum is formed and shaped over time by framing the spatial as something beyond a “taken-for-granted” fact of our lives. The combination of spatial theory and curriculum studies has produced a myriad of explorations to see how oppression works in everyday spaces. The hope inherent in this work is that if we can understand how space is (re)produced with inherent inequities, we can produce spaces, especially educative ones, that are more just and equitable.
Love of Wisdom
Authors: North B. B.
Published: February 2021

Philosophy as the love of wisdom is informative and can be inspiring and generative to students; it opens up possibilities for philosophical thinking to be more relevant for everyday life. Highlighting philosophy as the love of wisdom emphasizes the ancient and deep-rooted value of philosophy and does not restrict philosophy to the use of specific methodologies or to a specific subject matter, but rather expands it to encompassing a way of life. In this way, philosophy is meant to help promote valuable human lives and the public good at large. Philosophy as the love of wisdom is a call to remember that philosophy is not only a discipline to be studied in academia. Plato’s Socrates can be interpreted as a paragon of philosophy as a way of life and as exemplifying a love of wisdom. Contrary to philosophy as the love of wisdom, the popular conception of philosophy—as the paramount use of logic and argumentation—can be alienating. The scholastic or instrumental view of education promotes this popular conception and conceptually segregates the different academic disciplines. When this occurs, education is not seen as continuous with life. To move beyond the narrow and popular conception of philosophy, it is helpful to look at how John Dewey explicitly connects philosophy and education: when considering the many different types of education, one should not forget the ethical value of the given intellectual pursuits. This opens up space for the peripheries of philosophy to be more centralized. Emotion, art, and practical considerations of everyday life are illuminated as the material of philosophic thinking. Philosophy is the lived love of wisdom.
Teaching Literature in Schools for Democratic Citizenship
Authors: Heilbronn Ruth
Published: February 2021

Education is a human right and benefits both the individual and the whole society. Education that encourages debate and discussion and acknowledges complexity and ambiguity is essential for people to develop a respect for others and for democracy—that is, to participate as citizens. This concept is encapsulated in the United Nations Charter of Human Rights. The humanities and the creative arts are important curriculum areas that can encompass diversity and complexity and support the development of a necessary critical disposition. Study in these areas helps to create people who are at home in a culture in which openness to others and criticality in receiving ideas are paramount. Literature plays a key role in attaining these curriculum aims.
Public Memory and Education in Recent Colombian History
Authors: Herrera Martha Cecilia , Pertuz Bedoya Carol
Published: February 2021

Since the first decade of the 21st century, efforts have intensified in Colombia to position the discourses and practices addressing the recent history of political violence and armed conflict as part of national public memory. In this context, the victims and their memories occupy a central role in efforts to make sense of the country’s recent past. During this same decade, a specific policy of memory was implemented and has challenged how the field of education educates citizens in order to strengthen democratic processes and foster a culture of peace.

The interpellations of public policy to the educational field also concern the teaching of the recent past and are based on a social pedagogy of memory. This element, which finds an important foundation from the perspective of the historicization of the present time, constitutes an ethical and political imperative of education at the same time that it represents significant challenges; above all, if it starts from recognizing that thinking of the recent past from education, intending to build peace, involves looking toward the future that must be built from the present of new generations.
Indigenous Notions of Interconnection and Formation by the World
Authors: Mika Carl
Published: February 2021

In various ways, the notion of interconnection between all things takes on importance for all aspects of Indigenous life, and therefore, writers in the field of Indigenous education often allude to the priority of interconnection for teaching and learning. The theoretical lens on interconnection, in Indigenous writing, tends to fall into two camps: one, that the world is comprised of distinct entities that are nevertheless connected; and, the other, that one thing is constituted by the entire world.

In both cases, Indigenous theories of interconnection can be contrasted with, and even galvanized by, Western rationality, which overwhelmingly tends to fragment things in the world from each other. Education itself for the Indigenous participant may then be more a reflection of the fact of all things—its constitution of the self and all other things—than simply a transmission of knowledge. In this sense, the problem of “education” for Indigenous peoples may not lie only in the fact that education is separated out from other disciplines in dominant Western practice, but also that its attitude towards the world, with its focus on the mind, and with the clarity that fragmented things bring, does not reflect interconnection.

It is unlikely that dominant Western modes of education can fully incorporate the values and ethics of Indigenous interconnection. In both pre-tertiary and tertiary education, however, some advances towards holistic and interconnected approaches are possible. In pre-tertiary, a focus on the development of the rational mind (which, from an Indigenous perspective, sits unspoken at the base of Western education) can be moderated somewhat by looking to the human self as a culmination of the world (and vice versa); and, in tertiary education, participants may revise notions of ethics and proper writing to incorporate those things that exist beyond human knowledge.
Curriculum in a Third Space
Authors: Wang Hongyu , Flory Jo
Published: February 2021

Curriculum in a third space has become an important theory in the field of curriculum studies in the postcolonial and postmodern context, in which new approaches to social and cultural differences in education have been developed. Curriculum and education in the early 21st century face the challenging tasks of responding in a time of uncertainty, complexity, paradoxes, and crisis: How do educators navigate the central relationship between the knower and the known while both are destabilized in a postmodern condition? What are curricular responses to the issue of identity, difference, and power relationships at schools in order to carve out alternative pathways beyond dualistic either/or thinking? How can differences and tensions be transformed into productive sites for curriculum and pedagogical creativity? The notion of the third space characterized by the alterity of psychical and social difference, the necessity for cultural translation, and the creativity of dynamic hybridity, addresses such critical questions. Curriculum in a third space embraces creative tensionality, decentering and estrangement, and making passages in the midst of hybridity. Translating between the planned curriculum and experienced curriculum mobilizes the highly contested site of identity, difference, and community into an ongoing process of attending to the language of the (maternal) other, building connections between the human subject and the academic subject, and nurturing a curriculum community that welcomes the stranger. As the notion of a third space is often formulated in intercultural, transnational, and global situations, internationalizing curriculum studies becomes a movement of differentiating and passaging within, between, and among the individual, the local, the national, and the global in a third space. Aligned with such a vision of curriculum, a pedagogy of a third space is also set in motion by hybrid resistance, openness to displacement, and fluid interdisciplinary collaboration. Pedagogies in specific subject areas open up third possibilities through building dynamic relationships between school knowledge and home experiences, transforming pedagogical relationships, and navigating blended classrooms of face-to-face and digital interactions.