bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Political Parties and Democratization
Authors: Ishiyama John
Published: September 2021

Parties are indispensable to the building and maintenance of democracy. This is because parties are purported to promote representation, conflict management, integration, and accountability in new democracies. Second, the failures of parties in helping to build democracy in systems in transition are because they have not performed these functions very well. Third, there are three emerging research agendas to be explored that address the relationship between parties and democratic consolidation: (a) the promotion of institutional innovations that help build institutionalized party systems; (b) the role of ethnic parties in democratization and democratic consolidation; and (c) the role of rebel parties in building peace and democracy after civil wars. Although not entirely exhaustive, these three agendas represent promising avenues of research into the role political parties play in democratization.
Multiculturalism and Cultural Assimilation
Authors: Hong Ying-yi , Schmidt Christa
Published: September 2021

Multicultural individuals need to navigate different cultural grounds and identities, and in turn fields like acculturative and cultural psychology have employed theories, frameworks, and research to capture and understand such experiences. Early articulations of such processes utilized unidimensional and bidimensional models to conceptualize experiences of being a part of more than one cultural group. However, such models have received numerous criticisms, ranging from contested definitions to inconclusive empirical evidence. These early models have been especially criticized for their inability to capture the dynamic and complex nature of cultural experiences. To address these problems, newer frameworks have been put forth that utilize multifaceted approaches to capture the inherently dynamic nature of cultural negotiating processes.
Dissonance and Attitude Change
Authors: Stone Jeff , Taylor John J.
Published: September 2021

Cognitive dissonance theory (CDT) was first introduced by Leon Festinger. Cognitive dissonance is the process by which people detect an inconsistency between cognitions, such as attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. When individuals become aware of an inconsistency between cognitions, they experience a state of psychological discomfort that motivates them to restore consistency. Factors such as the importance of the cognitions and the magnitude of the discomfort play a role in determining how people restore consistency. Festinger described three primary ways people can reduce dissonance: change a cognition; add new cognitions; or change the importance of the inconsistent cognitions. Many early studies showed that when people are unable to change their behavior, they will change their attitudes to be more in line with the inconsistent behavior.

Over the years, CDT has undergone many challenges and revisions. Some revisions focus on the importance of cognitions about the self in the processes by which dissonance motivates attitude change. Others focused on the consequences of the behavior and various cognitive mechanisms that underlie the experience of dissonance. In the early 21st century, research has examined the underlying motivation for dissonance-induced attitude and behavior change, and how people prefer to reduce dissonance once it is present. And, as with the entire field of social psychology, dissonance researchers are also raising concerns about the replicability of classic dissonance effects and focusing their attention on the need to improve the methods the field uses to test predictions going forward.
Gender-Equitable Schooling in Brazil
Authors: Belchior Rodrigues Ellen
Published: September 2021

Brazil has done much to overcome gender inequalities rooted in settler colonialism. The implementation of social justice policies has tremendously promoted access to education, most recently to Black Brazilians, Indigenous peoples, and sexual minorities. The country offers free public education from kindergarten to college; college quotas for low-income transgender students; a monthly stipend for each underprivileged child a family maintains enrolled in school; and a national high school curriculum that includes sociology, philosophy, African history, history of Indigenous peoples, and human rights. These would not have been achieved without the efforts of the women’s rights movement and Black women’s rights movement. Brazilian women reversed the gender gap in education and paved the way for employment and political participation throughout the 20th century, attaining higher rates of retention, graduation, and schooling. Despite achievements for cisgender women, transgender students and other sexual minorities still don’t feel included in school environments. Schools can be one of the most difficult spaces for LGBTQIA+ youth in Brazil, who may be daily targets of verbal, psychological, and physical violence. These behaviors are rooted in an education system that, since its creation in the 1600s, predominantly focused on the education of Portuguese settlers’ children, namely, White boys. Two hundred years later, White girls were allowed in the classrooms, only to experience another layer of the patriarchy: Schools were scarce because the girls could only be taught by female teachers, a rarity during the colonial period, and the academic curriculum was limited and often focused on the skills of housewifery. Aimed at creating subservient wives and mothers, the Brazilian schooling system failed entire generations of women by denying them access to math, sciences, or most other subjects available to men. During the entire 1800s, White women lagged behind in access to higher education, employment, and political participation. In the meantime, Black, brown, and Indigenous people in Brazil suffered under slavery for nearly 400 years. Slavery legally ended in 1888, but cruelty and discrimination remained pervasive in society, further silencing claims for racial justice and widening the social and economic gaps in the country. Thus, the understanding of gender-equitable schooling in Brazil is only possible through the historical lenses of how its society perceives gender, race, and sexuality. This historical perspective explains how Brazil developed its teaching curriculum based on social justice principles. The history of Brazil’s educational system cannot be described without acknowledging the traumas inflicted by colonialism and slavery. However, history also explains how the country uniquely stands out as a model for thinking about the connections among education, racial and social justice, and gender inclusivity.
Afro-Pessimism and Curriculum Studies
Authors: Baugh Michael
Published: September 2021

Afro-pessimism is a lens that meditates heavily on the endless consequences the Black body experiences via its position as a nonbeing and slave—a position opposite of Humanity. The marker of Human is reserved for non-Blacks. Modernity is that which has birthed this hierarchy, this structure of the world, and this division of bodies. The slave and the Black are synonymous ontological markers that leave the Black body as an ever-vulnerable creature experiencing endless violence. The slave is a socially dead nonbeing. This reality creates conundrums for enacting methods of redress. And the violence that saturates the realm in which the slave resides is not that which is analogous to the oppression narratives impacting non-Black people of color.

Many of the scholars of U.S. curriculum, and generations of scholars within and around the field of curriculum studies, have long sought to utilize U.S. curriculum to address social ills and to thwart any regimes aimed at hindering the nation’s imaginary thrust toward democratic ideals. From the onset, curriculum has been a battleground atop which ideological interests have guided its direction and shaped its composition. Curriculum has long been a social and cultural arcade of democratic deliberation and a site in which one meditates on Humanism’s ideals.

In the 1970s, the field of curriculum studies was specifically marked by a reconceptualization that would institute a method for addressing the psychic and social ills plaguing U.S. society (with confident applicability abroad). The method, called currere, was engineered to awaken and deepen one’s engagement with oneself and to reinforce one’s connectivity with the inhabitants of one’s society and world. This includes a rescuing of the individual psyche from depersonalization and derealization—with the end being: An integrated self. This integrated self is then recast into the world with an awakened agency and an enlarged empathic register laced with moral and ethical commitments. This integrated self would be charged with engaging in transformative action within the larger society—aimed at salvaging the tears in the nation’s social fabric by building toward the tenets of democratic idealism. This method is believed to be universally applicable as it is designed to aid and transform the experiences of those who exist at all rungs of the social hierarchy. This method, and its evolved forms, is ultimately designed to challenge hegemonic interests.

Afro-pessimism asserts that curriculum’s very composition simultaneously forgets and exploits the Black. Afro-pessimism asserts that curriculum’s antihegemonic weaponry and psychoanalytic instruments cannot spoil the plight of those who are beyond and outside of hegemony’s Human intervals and whose psyches are endlessly disrupted by an invasive Whiteness. Afro-pessimism asserts that the liberative mission of curriculum/currere/the field of curriculum studies is a Humanism that is designed for all who are not Black and perpetuates anti-Black violence.
Taking a Well-Being-Centric Approach to School Reform
Authors: Cahill Helen , Dadvand Babak , Gowing Annie
Published: September 2021

The well-being challenges of the 21st century are deeply ethical in nature and require activation of collective as well as individual responsibility for the ways in which others are treated. For this reason, school reform initiatives need to equip young people with a wide range of capacities to engage with the challenges of advancing both the wellness of humanity and that of the planet. There is a robust body of theory and research available to inform school reform efforts that aim to accomplish improved individual and collective well-being. This knowledge base emanates from different paradigms and disciplinary traditions. Brought together, these knowledge sources highlight the importance of ensuring that schools invest efforts toward developing ethical, critical, personal, social, and creative capabilities that enable young people to enact care for self, others, society, and the planet. A transdisciplinary approach that expounds on research and theory from diverse disciplines, including well-being education, critical, feminist, and postmodern traditions, and scholarship on youth voice and participation can help efforts toward well-being-centric school reform. Evidence suggests that research-informed well-being education programs can have positive impacts in terms of improved mental, social, and relational health, contributions to learning, and fostering critical thinking skills. These are the skills that are needed by young people to navigate and respond to ethnical challenges with care, compassion, and a sense of responsibility as a relational ethos. Taken together, these advances in thinking and knowledge, derived from different traditions of scholarship, can be harnessed to inform a “well-being-centric” approach to schooling reform that is responsive to the past, present, and future lives of persons, peoples, and the planet. A well-being-centric approach to school reform should harness developments in education knowledge and thinking generated across diverse disciplines within the past 50 years, since the 1970s. This, in turn, requires disrupting the ways in which the disciplinary structures and assessment regimes of secondary schools work as impediments to the transformative change needed to advance student well-being and learning in these changed and challenging times.
The Contents and Discontents of Madrasa Reform in India
Authors: Alam Arshad
Published: September 2021

Madrasa reform in India is a deeply contested issue. While the state has from time to time attempted to introduce various policies for madrasa reforms, its attempts have been, at best, half-hearted. Moreover, the state and the pro-reform voices have been uninformed about the deeper complexities within the madrasa system. For example, in treating madrasas as a homogenous entity, the reform policy has singularly failed to target the most deserving. There does exist a case for madrasa reforms, however, given that there are clear correlations between Muslim educational lags and contemporary madrasa education. A passionate defense of madrasas as being cultural institutions might therefore be counterproductive to the educational futures of children studying in these institutions. A certain a-historicity associated with the madrasa reform project has meant that the political economy that sustains this kind of education has largely escaped the attention of policymakers in India. It is equally true that the Muslim community has not been supportive of any such state policy. Owing to a number of factors, Muslims, led by the ulema, have been deeply suspicious of the state intruding into their religious space. Following a modernist logic, they argue that matters of religion, including the question of madrasa reform, should be left to them. This, however, is not to say that they blindly oppose any madrasa reform whatsoever, but they have their own notions about what constitutes “proper” madrasa reforms.
Using Proven Programs to Improve Educational Outcomes
Authors: Slavin Robert E.
Published: September 2021

One of the most important problems in improving educational practice and outcomes is the very limited role that evidence plays in decisions about adopting books, software, professional development, and other materials and services. Instead, these are sold using relationship marketing in which sales reps work to build friendships with key decision makers. Word of mouth among educators with similar jobs also has a powerful influence.

Why should evidence of effectiveness be a major criterion in the selection of educational products and services? The most important answer is that programs with a strong evidence base that are implemented as they were in the validating research are likely to produce better outcomes for children. Further, making evidence a basis for program adoption would put education into a virtuous cycle of innovation, evaluation, and progressive improvement like that which has transformed fields such as medicine, agriculture, and technology.
Climate Change in Eastern Africa
Authors: Marchant Rob
Published: September 2021

The climatology of East Africa results from the complex interaction between major global convergence zones with more localized regional feedbacks to the climate system; these in turn are moderated by a diverse land surface characterized by coastal to land transitions, high mountains, and large lakes. The main climatic character of East Africa, and how this varies across the region, takes the form of seasonal variations in rainfall that can fall as one, two, or three rainy seasons, the times and duration of which will be determined by the interplay between major convergence zones with more localized regional feedbacks. One of the key characteristics of East Africa are climatic variations with altitude as climates change along an altitudinal gradient that can extend from hot, dry, “tropical” conditions to cool, wet, temperate conditions and on the highest mountains “polar” climates with permanent ice caps. With this complex and variable climate landscape of the present, as scientists move through time to explore past climatic variability, it is apparent there have been a series of relatively rapid and high-magnitude environmental shifts throughout East Africa, particularly characterized by changing hydrological budgets. How climate change has impacted on ecosystems, and how those ecosystems have responded and interacted with human populations, can be unearthed by drawing on evidence from the sedimentary and archaeological record of the past six thousand years. As East African economies, and the livelihoods of millions of people in the region, have been clearly heavily affected by climate variability in the past, so it is expected that future climate variability will impact on ecosystem functioning and the preparedness of communities for future climate change.
Women in Gabon
Authors: Griffiths Claire H.
Published: September 2021

Gabon, a small oil-rich country straddling the equator on the west coast of Africa, is the wealthiest of France’s former colonies. An early period of colonization in the 19th century resulted in disease, famine, and economic failure. The creation of French Equatorial Africa in 1910 marked the beginning of the sustained lucrative exploitation of Gabon’s natural resources. Gabon began off-shore oil production while still a colony of France. Uranium was also discovered in the last decade of the French Equatorial African empire. Coupled with rich reserves in tropical woods, Gabon has achieved, since independence in 1960, a higher level of export revenue per capita of population than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa in the postcolonial era.

However, significant inequality has characterized access to wealth through paid employment throughout the recorded history of monetized labor. While fortunes have been amassed by a minute proportion of the female population of Gabon associated with the ruling regime, and a professional female middle-class has emerged, inequalities of opportunity and reward continue to mark women’s experience of life in this little-known country of West Central Africa.

The key challenge facing scholars researching the history of women in Gabon remains the relative lack of historical resources. While significant strides have been made over the past decade, research on women’s history in Francophone Africa published in English or French remains embryonic. French research on African women began to make a mark in the last decade of colonization, notably with the work of Denise Paulme, but then remained a neglected area for decades. The publication in 1994 of Les Africaines by French historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch was hailed at the time as a pioneering work in French historiography. But even this new research contained no analysis of and only a passing reference to women in Gabon.
Socialist Regimes and Economic Planning
Authors: Ibhawoh Bonny
Published: September 2021

Between 1950 and the mid-1980s, several African countries adopted socialist systems of government. In the first decades of independence, socialism appealed to some African leaders both as a political ideology and as an economic system. Socialism represented the promise of a new anti-imperial, revolutionary, and independent path to national and continental development. The socialist policies adopted in African countries included centralized state control of the economy, collectivization of land and agriculture, the nationalization of key sectors of the economy, and public sector–led social development. From Ghana to Algeria, and from Tanzania to Egypt, these socialist policies brought significant economic and social changes with mixed results. The end of the Cold War in the 1990s, and the wave of pro-democracy movements that followed, signaled the end of socialist experimentation in Africa. However, the legacies of socialist economic planning persist across the continent.
Health Inequities in Aging Adults from a Public Health Perspective
Authors: Wallace Steven
Published: September 2021

Inequities in the United States have gained renewed attention as a result of social movements such as Black Lives Matter (racism), Me Too (sexual abuse and gender), and immigrant rights. Yet despite the growing awareness of inequality across major social categories, there has been little or no public attention paid to the persistent inequities facing older adults. The news media in the 2020 presidential elections uncritically reported charges that one, or both, candidates were “too old” for the job or had some other liability tied primarily to their age. There is a whole field of “anti-aging” medicine that claims to slow the biological process of senescence (distinct from fighting specific diseases), even as the greatest challenges of growing older are rooted in social and political processes. This reflects the ageism in society that results in undervaluing older adults’ lives and often marginalizes them. In addition, there are serious inequities within the older population based on class, race, gender, and citizenship status.

Health inequities involve conditions that are avoidable, are not the result of informed choice (e.g., injuries among extreme sports participants), and which differ by membership in groups that hold different levels of power and resources. As such, inequities also include an element of “unfairness” such that the disadvantage is in groups with less power and resources than others.
Space Law Education and Capacity-Building
Authors: Chen David Kuan-Wei
Published: September 2021

Space activities can bring tremendous benefits to global development and humanity. For the safety, security, and long-term sustainability of outer space, activities and developments in the exploration and use of outer space must therefore be guided by the effective formulation, implementation, and enforcement of law and governance. Concerted and quality space law education and capacity-building efforts are necessary for the cultivation of competent professionals, scholars, and next-generation experts who are cognizant of the emerging issues and challenges posed by the proliferation of space activities and actors in the global commons of outer space.

In order to fully grasp space law, it is important to possess a basic understanding of space technology, space applications, and the space environment in which the exploration and use of outer space take place. Not only should space law professionals and scholars be trained in law and have a deep understanding of especially public international law, but the approach to space law education and capacity-building must also be uniquely holistic and interdisciplinary. Hence, education and capacity-building can stimulate international development and cooperation in space activities and contribute to building expertise and capacity in countries with emerging space capabilities.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Debates, Impacts, and Trends
Authors: Li Xiang , Shao Mengqi , Tan-Mullins May
Published: September 2021

President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI一带一路) in 2013. The BRI, which will pass through over 60 countries in Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, aims at improving and creating new trading routes and investment opportunities. It consists of the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) and the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI), and is a continuation of China’s “opening up” policy. It comprises six overland and one maritime economic cooperation corridors, supporting the expansion of Chinese enterprises abroad to facilitate industrial upgrading at home, paving the way for Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) and trade abroad, and advancing the internationalization of the Chinese currency. In addition, the project is welcomed by recipient countries due to their need for infrastructure investment. China remains the biggest player in the initiation and implementation of BRI projects. As such, the impact of Chinese projects on the economic, political, cultural, and environmental fabric of host countries will likely be dramatic, especially since many BRI projects are large-scale infrastructure projects that cut across different regions and states. The COVID-19 pandemic further implicated the progress of BRI projects in these areas.
Indigenous Peoples and Euro-American Frontiers, Borderlands, and Borders in North America
Authors: Rensink Brenden W.
Published: September 2021

On July 27, 1882, a group of at least seventy-five “Turtle Mountain Indians from Canada” crossed the US–Canada border near Pembina, Dakota Territory, ordered white settlers off the land, and refused to pay customs duties assessed against them. “We recognize no boundary line, and shall pass as we please,” proclaimed their leader, Chief Little Shell. Native to the Red River region long before the Treaty of 1818 between the United States and Great Britain drew imaginary cartographies across the region or the 1872 International Boundary Survey left physical markers along the 49th parallel, Little Shell’s Chippewas and Métis navigated expansive homelands bounded by the natural environment and surrounding Native peoples, not arbitrary latitudinal coordinates. Over a century later, Indigenous leaders from the United States, Canada, and Mexico formed the Tribal Border Alliance and hosted a “Tribal Border Summit” in 2019 to assert that “Tribes divided by international borders” had natural inherent and treaty-bound rights to cross for various purposes. These Indigenous sentiments, expressed over centuries, reveal historic and ongoing conflicts born from the inherent incongruity between Native sovereignty and imposed non-Native boundaries and restrictions.

Issues of land provide a figurative bedrock to nearly all discussion of interactions between and boundary making by non-Native and Native peoples in North America. Indigenous lands and competing relations to it, natural resources and contest over their control, geography and territoriality: these issues underpin all North American history. Adjacent to these more familiar topics are complex stories of boundaries and borders that were imposed, challenged, ignored, violated, or co-opted. Native histories and experiences at the geographic edges of European empires and nation-states uncover rough and untidy processes of empire-building and settler colonial aspirations. As non-Natives drew lines across maps, laying claim to distant Indigenous lands, they also divided the same in arbitrary manners. They rarely gave serious consideration to Native sovereignty or rights to traditional or evolving relationships to homelands and resources. It is a wonder, therefore, that centuries of non-Natives have been surprised when Indigenous peoples refused to recognize the authority of imposed borders or co-opted their jurisdictional “power” for their own uses.

Surveying examples of Indigenous peoples and their histories across imposed boundaries in North America forces historians to ask new questions about intercultural exchange, geopolitical philosophies, and the histories of nations, regions, and peoples. This is a worthy, but complex, pursuit that promises to greatly enrich all intersecting topics and fields.
The Black Press
Authors: Gallon Kim
Published: September 2021

The term “Black Press” is an umbrella term that includes a diverse set of publications that include a small number of religious and mostly secular magazines and newspapers published by Black people in the United States from 1827 to the present. While religious newspapers are an integral part of the Black Press cultural tradition, of particular interest is how papers outside of formal Black religious dominations and institutions negotiated their self-defined racial uplift mission with their desire to attract readers to purchase and read newspapers. This focus does not deny the tremendous significance of Black religious print culture and the role it played in conveying African American cultural expression. Nineteenth-century religious papers like the Christian Recorder (1852–) were instrumental to the publication of early Black literature. Focusing on a small number of religious publications, then, provides a window into how they worked in conjunction with secular newspapers to define Black life in the United States. A newspaper is defined as “Black” if the publisher and principal editor or editors characterized themselves as such. Immigrant and foreign-language Black newspapers published in the United States were closer to the immigrant press.

The history of the Black Press in the United States is simultaneously rooted in uplift and protest against racial injustice. Two Black abolitionists—Presbyterian minister Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm, one of the nation’s first African American college graduates—created the first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in 1827 to promote self-help and respond to anti-Black attacks in white papers. The first issue of Freedom’s Journal famously related the sentiments of its founders: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations in things which concern us dearly.” Indeed, Cornish and Russwurm’s statements define close to 200 years of Black journalism that created the necessary political and social space for African Americans to recover their humanity.

Despite the significant role the Black Press has and continues to play, to some degree, the cultural history of the Black Press is underexamined relative to the emphasis that historians place on the race advocacy and protest mission of African American newspapers. Close examination reveals that the Black Press’s power lay not only in its capacity to assert the rights and humanity of Black people through agitation but also in the ways it reinforced and amplified the unique and lively culture of African Americans. To this end, the Black Press created a countercultural public of Black peoples’ image and identity that was equally instrumental in refuting the discrimination they faced in American society.
The African American Denominational Tradition: The Rise of Black Denominations
Authors: Dickerson Dennis C.
Published: September 2021

From the formation of the first independent African American Protestant denomination in the 1810s and 1820s to the opening decades of the 21st century, independent African American denominations have stood at the center of black religious life in the United States. Their longevity and influence have made them central to the preservation of black beliefs, practices, and rituals; have provided venues to promote movements for black freedom; and have incubated African American leadership in both the church and civic spheres. They have intertwined with every aspect of American and African American life, whether cultural, political, or economic, and they engaged the international involvement of American society and the diasporic interests of black people.

Parallel assemblies composed of black ministers pastoring black congregations that remained within white denominations also emerged within the traditional white denominations, including the white Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational Protestant groups, plus the Catholic Church. Although they eschewed withdrawing from the white denominations, their extramural bodies functioned as a virtual black ecclesia, or institutional bodies, even though they remained smaller than the growing independent black denominations. Together, the black preachers and parishioners in independent black denominations and inside traditional white denominations maintained churches characterized by proud histories and long records of frontline involvements in black freedom pursuits.
Visual Arts: Postmodernism
Authors: Munson Meredith
Published: September 2021

Postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define in any concise manner. Its start dates (and end dates, for that matter) exist in a state of flux, often varying by decades in the historiographies of major disciplines. In an attempt to begin to understand postmodernism, many theorists, art historians, and philosophers choose to take a rather apophatic approach by describing that which it is not, namely starting by understanding modernism. After all, that is embedded into the term postmodernism itself; at its core, postmodernism is connected to modernism. Essentially, modernism as a movement was predicated upon an avant-gardism that envisioned modern art as the cure-all for the broken world, working toward a utopian ideal. In understanding art’s engagement with religion in the postmodern era, it is also necessary to consider the shifting social landscape of institutional religion and politics at this time. The culture wars of the end of the 20th century both shaped and were shaped by postmodern art, with famous clashes between artists and the emerging religious right and/or prominent political figures dominating the headlines. Largely because of these events, many critical narratives have promoted the idea that art and religion had little to do with each other in this period. While secularization theories are gradually unraveling in the field at large, these ideas still figure prominently in many discussions of modernism and postmodernism. Regardless, artists have continued to engage with religious subject matter throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The appearance of secularization is imperative to note, particularly as a number of postmodern artists (indeed, some of the most recognizable names in the art world) have engaged with religion in their work. This is not to say that postmodern artworks with religious themes all celebrate religion uncritically, nor do they all examine religion from outside the realm of belief in a strictly anthropological manner. One of the main difficulties in interpreting postmodernism’s rather vexed relationship with institutional religion is the multivalence of many of the artworks. Multiplicity of meaning in both artistic intent (if such a thing is granted) and reception is common in postmodernism, which should caution critics from attempting to make concrete assertions about any presence of pure religiosity or pure secularism. Trends in postmodern artistic practices, such as the mixing of high and low art forms and media, the use of appropriation, pastiche, institutional critique, and more, along with the increasing diversification of artists and contexts, have resulted in the examination of religious subjects in ways that are particularly postmodern.
Visual Arts: Abstraction
Authors: Wisotzki Paula
Published: September 2021

For avant-garde European and American artists at the turn of the 20th century, a nexus of developments encouraged the rejection of naturalism, which had driven most of Western art for more than four centuries. Despite the increasing secularization of Western society throughout the 19th century, religious beliefs and practices were one important source for artists’ experimentation with abstracting forms from nature. Christianity and other world religions aided artists who sought to shift the focus of their art from description to expression. Around 1910, certain European and American artists pressed forward to make art that they considered to be fully nonrepresentational. Still, the bridge between abstraction and nonrepresentation was a challenging one to cross and artists frequently invoked religious beliefs to justify leaving the natural world behind.

The evolution of abstraction in Western visual arts was intimately linked to the modern era. As important as religious concepts may have been to individual artists around 1900, artists had gradually moved to the periphery of society in the 19th century, leaving behind the institutions, including churches, that had been their primary means of support. These changing relationships gave individual artists the freedom to explore new ideas but eliminated stable sources of income previously available to them. On the other side of the patronage divide, mainstream religions were already threatened by the radical modernization of Western society, so even though religious dogma was replete with abstract concepts, churches were reluctant to embrace abstraction in the visual arts. At the same time, while artists were committed to expressions of spiritual truth in their abstract art, their objects were rarely produced with a conventional church setting in mind. Emerging in the 19th century, the complex relationship among modern society, abstract art, and religious practices persisted well into the 20th century.
Spanish Amazonia, 1532–1825
Authors: Jones Cameron
Published: September 2021

Stretching from modern-day southern Venezuela to northern Bolivia, Spanish-controlled Amazonia represented the ultimate frontier to colonial officials. Home to hundreds of native cultures, Crown authorities consistently struggled to extend hegemony to most of the region. Barriers to entry were both physical and motivational. In the shadow of the Andes, the thick vegetation, constant rains, and lack of navigable rivers from Spanish-controlled regions meant that only the most motivated could reach its most valuable natural resources. As a result, only the most intrepid, and perhaps delusional, adventurers tried. For the most part, it was religious devotion that brought Spanish subjects to the region. Therefore, Spanish colonization in Amazonia was represented largely by the mission church than any other organ of the empire. These religious enterprises fluoresced in some places, but in most others they floundered. While the difficulties of colonization meant fewer colonizers than in other parts of the Americas, the native population suffered under colonial impositions that forced changes in their traditional lifestyle, imposed coercive labor regimes, and brought disease. The native population did not accept this passively, resulting in some of the most successful uprisings in the colonial period, including the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion.
The United States and the Portuguese Atlantic
Authors: Reeder Tyson
Published: September 2021

Due to treaties between the British and Portuguese empires, Portugal and its Atlantic islands had served as some of the most important trade destinations of British Americans prior to the American Revolution. After US independence, however, Portugal restricted North American access to Portuguese markets. As a result, North Americans anticipated a day when they could trade with independent, republican Brazilians. For their part, however, Brazilians followed a different trajectory toward independence. The Portuguese monarchy liberalized trade in the 1790s to avoid uncomfortable associations of free trade and republican revolution. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Portuguese court relocated from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro to save the empire, opening Brazil to foreign commerce in the process. As a result of such reforms, Brazilians rarely equated republicanism with free trade. After the court returned to Lisbon in 1821 and Brazilians declared independence in 1822, Brazil adopted a monarchy rather than a republic. Brazil disrupted North Americans’ tidy narrative of the Americas as a hemisphere of republics contrasted with European monarchies.
The Lienzo de Tlaxcala and the Indian Conquistadors
Authors: Navarrete Linares Federico , Cossich Vielman Margarita , Jaramillo Arango Antonio
Published: September 2021

The conquest of Mexico can be better understood if one leaves aside the myths of European superiority and acknowledge the key role played by the Indigenous conquistadors in the defeat of the Mexica and later the formation of the realm of New Spain. Dozens of Mesoamerican polities, large and small, joined the victorious Indo-Spanish armies, and hundreds of thousands of Mesoamerican women, warriors, and assistants, participated in the twenty years of “Mesoamerican wars” that started with the war against México-Tenochtitlan, 1519–1521, and continued all across what is now Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua until the 1540s.

The victorious Indigenous conquistadors produced legal testimonies and historical accounts of their feats of war to obtain rewards and privileges, often granted by the Spanish crown. The most spectacular were the lienzos, visual histories of the conquest painted on large cloths. There are many of these Indigenous accounts, but the best known and perhaps the most influential one is the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. It is the most complete account of the Mesoamerican wars, produced by the most important ally of the Spaniards, and it is also the foremost example of the historical and ritual discourses produced by the Indigenous conquistadors, as the ultimate proof of their leading role in this process. This spectacular artwork easily assimilated European pictorial conventions to the much more complex Amerindian pictographic and ritual narrative genres. As such, it was the anchor for complex ritual performances that re-enacted the feats of those wars and also allowed for the constitution of the Amerindian “complex beings” of Malinche and Santiago, the keystones of Tlaxcalan cultural memory of the conquest. Its communicative success can be proved by the fact that the Tlaxcalan embassies that presented the Lienzo de Tlaxcala and other historical books and precious gifts obtained the privileges they sought and asserted the autonomy of Tlaxcala.
Rhythm in the Romance Languages
Authors: Bertinetto Pier Marco
Published: September 2021

Speech rhythm is a popular research topic but a still poorly understood phenomenon. A critical assessment of the algorithmic tools developed in the last two decades to analyze rhythm in natural languages shows that they can at best lead to a topological arrangement of the languages to be compared, with no ambition to actually offer objective and absolute measures. Besides, all available tools are heavily influenced by any source of variability, in particular: speech rate, speech style (most notably, spontaneous vs. read), and even speaker identity. Although this shows their high sensitivity to the input details, it raises severe doubts as for the actual relevance of the comparative results obtained in the study of different languages. Future research will have to learn to overcome these weaknesses.

Most importantly, readers should be alerted to the false idol of a common Romance rhythmic footprint. Close inspection of the prosodic characteristics of the main Romance languages indicates that the differences are indeed remarkable and likely to feed diverging rhythmical behaviors. Besides, one should take into account the vast intrafamily variability, up to the tiniest local vernaculars, which often diverge in extraordinary ways from the ‘roof’ language supposed to constitute a sort of common denominator.
Ethics for Macro Social Work
Authors: Aguayo Cecilia , Calderón-Orellana Magdalena
Published: September 2021

The concept of ethics in social work is the practical knowledge based on professional experience. To understand ethics in macro social work, first, ethics and morals will be described broadly as well their relevance to social work identity. Then, codes of ethics, standards, and ethics committees are presented as components of integrity systems. In the same way, professional principles and values together with their relation to macro–social work definitions are reviewed. These account for procedures that display autonomy, reciprocity, reflexivity, and conflict acceptance to arrive at prudent and fair decisions. As an applied ethics, social work ethics is concerned with the systematic analysis of ethical issues in practical contexts. In this sense, the work is focused on decision-making in macro social work, bringing out the challenges that professionals face and how they address these challenges. This analysis will be done considering the moral dilemmas that might arise for social workers in practice with/in communities, organizations, and the public policy arena. Finally, to argue decisions and actions in professional practice, some philosophical approaches are presented, which are selected according to their relevance to macro social work. Summarizing, communicative ethics, the ethics of conflict, the ethics of recognition and moral offense, and intercultural ethics are reviewed in order to avoid all kinds of fundamentalism and relativity in professional action.
Infliximab for Paradoxical Reactions in Pediatric Central Nervous System Tuberculosis
Authors: Abo Yara-Natalie , Curtis Nigel , Osowicki Joshua , Haeusler Gabrielle , Purcell Rachael , Kadambari Seilesh , De Wachter Matthias , Vanden Driessche Koen , Dekeyzer Sven , Coleman Lee , Crawford Nigel , Graham Steve , Marais Ben , Gwee Amanda
Published: September 2021

Paradoxical reactions in central nervous system tuberculosis (CNS-TB) are associated with significant morbidity and mortality. We describe 4 HIV-uninfected children treated for CNS-TB with severe paradoxical reactions unresponsive to corticosteroids. All made recovery after treatment with infliximab, highlighting the safety and effectiveness of infliximab for this complication, and need for prospective trials.
Using a decision tool to evaluate for osteomyelitis in children
Authors: Good Jason J. , Rabener Michael J. , Fisher Geoffrey W.
Published: September 2021

Osteomyelitis is a common occurrence in children and typically has a prolonged treatment course involving multiple specialties. Historically, the long bones are most commonly affected and Staphylococcus aureus is the primary causative organism.

This case shows the value of using the Kocher criteria and acute phase reactant C-reactive protein as diagnostic tools that can be used to advocate MRI to rule out this potentially devastating process.
Fecundity in transgender men
Authors: Salzer Elizabeth A.J.
Published: September 2021

Premenopausal transgender men who retain internal female reproductive organs, who use exogenous testosterone, and who are sexually active with cisgender men are often capable of conception. This article discusses the potential for fecundity in transgender men, as well as appropriate reproductive care depending on whether the patient prefers to avoid conception or to become pregnant.
Outcomes After Operative Fixation of Vancouver B2 and B3 Type Periprosthetic Fractures
Authors: Barghi Ameen , Hanna Philip , Merchan Nelson , Lechtig Aron , Haggerty Christopher , Weaver Michael J. , von Keudell Arvind , Wixted John , Appleton Paul , Rodriguez Edward
Published: September 2021

Objectives:

The incidence of periprosthetic femur fracture in the setting of total hip arthroplasty is steadily increasing. Although the traditional dogma is that loose femoral components must be revised, we propose that in a frail geriatric population, anatomic reduction and fixation of Vancouver B2 and B3 periprosthetic fracture variants can restore stem stability and provide similar outcomes as revision arthroplasty.

Design:

Retrospective cohort study.

Setting:

Level 1 trauma center, tertiary academic medical center.

Patients/Participants:

We identified 94 patients over 65 years of age with Vancouver B2 and B3 fractures sustained between 2005 and 2019.

Intervention:

Patients were treated by either open reduction and internal fixation (ORIF) or revision arthroplasty (RA) with or without fixation.

Main Outcome Measurements:

Outcomes were mortality, time to full weight-bearing after surgery, intraoperative estimated blood loss, perioperative complications, reoperation, subsidence rate, and Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System pain and physical function scores.

Results:

A total of 75 (79.8%) ORIF and 19 (20.2%) RA patients were reviewed. One-year mortality for our cohort was 26.3%, and there was no significant difference between groups. Mean time to weight bear and surgical complication rates were similar between groups. The ORIF group had a significantly shorter time to surgery than the RA group. The RA group had greater incidence and amount of subsidence as well as estimated blood loss than the ORIF group.

Conclusions:

In geriatric patients with Vancouver B2 and B3 type periprosthetic fractures with known loose stems, ORIF may offer a similarly safe method of treatment than revision arthroplasty.

Level of Evidence:

Therapeutic Level III. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.