bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Forms of Realism in Dostoevsky and Céline
Authors: Lawton Max
Published: April 2022

Many critics, Michael André Bernstein prominent among them, have noted similarities between the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and the 20th-century French modernist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. These critics often compare the underground man and similar characters in Dostoevsky’s work to Céline’s singular, auto-fictional narrator. Two novels, Crime and Punishment and Death on Credit, grounded in a common literary-historical narrative—that of French Realism and Romantic Realism—show that Céline has a distinct philosophical vision, which is the opposite of Dostoevsky’s.

At first glance, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Céline’s Death on Credit seem to be entirely different in terms of their aesthetics, engagement with national traditions, and thematic preoccupations. The former is a novel with a religious message and a traditionally teleological narrative, while the latter reflects a deeply nihilistic vision of human existence and deconstructs narrative structure and style. Examining the two novels in another light, however, draws attention to Dostoevsky’s treatment of squalid, modern situations and puts Céline into a different, nonnational lineage of authors, while also highlighting the unity of his philosophical vision. For both authors, desperately poor people and acts of extreme violence create the impression of a godless world. The two novels’ focus on poverty and crime seem to have their origin in the two epic cycles written by the most famous practitioners of French Realism and Romantic Realism, Balzac and Zola. In Balzac’s La Comédie humaine and Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, the two authors’ most consistent focus is the way systems of economic power force people to commit crimes and the consequences that ensue. This might be said to be so of Realism and Romantic Realism in general: all of the intensive worldbuilding it entails is performed to offer verisimilitude to the desperate crimes by impoverished people it dissects. At the very least, this is what Dostoevsky and Céline both took from the genre.
Folk and Blues Methods in American Literature and Criticism
Authors: Black Taylor
Published: April 2022

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in the fall of 2016. News of this drew predictable reactions from fans and naysayers who, each in their own way, either praised or lamented the judgment of the Nobel Committee’s decision to honor a songwriter and performer for a prize traditionally reserved for novelists, poets, and playwrights. Despite arguments about whether or not Dylan’s work is or is not sufficiently literary, his award confirmed something that, at least for Americans, has always been true: that popular music is as important a part of American literature as anything written in between the covers of a book.

The folk and blues traditions from which Dylan emerges as a musical artist are also major sources of mythopoetic cultural production operating at the heart of American culture. These are first and foremost oral traditions, offered up in the form of songs and tales (and everything in between) and passed down from person to person, across regions, and through time. A folk and blues approach to American literature is one that understands there are no originary, primary folk and blues texts. It is also one that necessarily envisions a tradition as belonging to the future rather than the past. The American folk and blues method is, in other words, one of invention and adaptation, and its embedded notion of a tradition is something that is always shifting according to practice. Instead of only searching out primary textual examples of form, a folk and blues–influenced literary critical approach is drawn to figures—like Robert Johnson, Nina Simone, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan—who are practitioners of folk and blues traditions. These performers are also experts in and vectors of folk and blues cultures. A prescriptive notion of an artistic tradition is determined based on what it was. In folk and blues, a tradition is what it does.

There are also conventionally literary figures who seem to benefit from and understand the musical roots of American literature. Authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, and Toni Morrison incorporate musical elements into their plays, novels, stories, and poems in such a way as to make these otherwise written forms sound American. Folk and blues idioms and aesthetics encircle these authors’ literary works and enhance their meanings. A critical approach to such artists is in search of these meanings. This involves listening and developing a feeling for folk and blues traces in song and prose. The historical echoes of the many folk and blues myths, figures, and refrains that float around the nation’s culture are resurrected, from generation to generation, in its art. In the end, a folk and blues method seeks out these originators and reproducers of folk and blues traditions, insisting on an interpretive practice that is closer to hearing than reading.
White Supremacy in Business Practices
Authors: Liu Helena
Published: April 2022

Contrary to its popular use to refer to racially violent extremism, white supremacy in the tradition of critical race studies describes the normalized ideologies, structures, and conventions through which whiteness is constructed as biologically, intellectually, culturally, and morally superior. This socially constituted racial hierarchy was developed through European colonialism to justify the acts of genocide and slavery that extracted resources from “non-white” lands and bodies to enrich “white” elites. Despite prevailing myths that colonialism and racism are artifacts of the past, the cultural hegemony of white power and privilege remain enduring pillars of contemporary business and society.

White supremacy inextricably shapes business practices. Indeed, our current practices of business administration and management are themselves modeled on slavery—the possession, extraction, and control of human “resources.” White supremacist ideologies and structures can also be found in the highly romanticized discourses of leadership that continue to rely on imperialist myths that white people are more fit to govern. They likewise surface in entrepreneurship and innovation where white people are overwhelmingly cast in the glorified roles of geniuses and pioneers. Even diversity management, which purports to nurture inclusive organizations, ironically reinforces white supremacy, treating workers of color as commodities to exploit. Within liberal logics of multicultural tolerance, workers of color are often tokenistically hired, expected to assimilate to white structures and cultures, and used as alibis against racism.

White supremacy is an integral (and often invisible) dimension of work, organizations, society, and everyday life. Challenging white supremacy requires that we engage in frank, honest conversations about race and racism, and the brutal legacy of European colonialism that maintains these constructs and practices. The path ahead requires the relinquishment of beliefs that race is an immutable, primordial essence and recognize it instead as a socially constructed and politically contested identification that has been used for white gain. Two ways that white supremacy may be dismantled in our cultures include redoing whiteness and abolishing whiteness. Redoing whiteness requires collectively understanding the mundane cultural practices of whiteness and choosing to do otherwise. Abolishing whiteness calls for a more absolute rejection of whiteness and what it has come to represent in various cultures. Antiracist resistance demands people of all racial identifications to commit to thinking, doing, and being beyond the existing racial hierarchy.
Banking Regulation in and for Crisis
Authors: Cabane Lydie , Lodge Martin
Published: April 2022

This chapter deals with a case of radical regulatory innovation as a result of the financial crisis of 2007–2009. Since the financial crisis of 2007–2009, the question of how to manage banking crises has risen in prominence. The considerable financial, social, and political consequences of various governments’ rescue packages established demands for creating more orderly ways of dealing with bank failure, reducing the exposure of states and the taxpayer. Consequently, considerable institutional innovation over the 2010s has led to new banking crisis management mechanisms, including new organizations, new legal regimes, and a new profession, in particular in the European Union context. The emergence of an explicit European banking crisis management has to be understood within the context of different modes of transboundary crisis management and in relation to the various rationales and accounts of bank crisis management experiences. Before the financial crisis, the emerging European regime was characterized by an absence of formal crisis prevention and management powers. Since then, banking crisis management has witnessed the rise of new institutions that illustrate broader trends in crisis management, namely the growing importance of planning and preparation rather than actual firefighting. Besides, the banking crisis management regime is shaped by deep underlying tensions that are shared by multilevel crisis management regimes more generally. To explore these issues, this chapter sets out the rationale for regulating for “orderly failure,” provides for a brief account of the emergence of the EU’s Single Resolution Mechanism, before turning to unresolved, and arguably irresolvable tensions that exist in multi-level crisis management in the case of banking.
Advice, Decision Making, and Leadership in Security Crises
Authors: Drumhiller Nicole K.
Published: April 2022

A growing body of the scholarship within security studies looks at the influence that crisis has on decision making. Critical areas of focus provide insight into the political leader as a key decision maker, groups as decision-making bodies, and the impact of organizational culture and bureaucratic politics. With crises becoming more complex, the security of states can be impacted in a variety of ways. Under extreme stress, a leader can succumb to flawed decision making as a result of information-processing errors and cognitive biases which skew the way that information is assessed. These decisions can lead to policies and responses to security situations that may impact one or more political entities. When a looming threat is no longer imminent, attention turns inward and investigations into threat preparedness and decision-making processes are carried out. While the stress from the threat itself subsides, leaders can still feel the effects of extreme stress as inquiries into decision making can lead to questions of accountability and blame placement.

A look at crisis decision making also requires a foundational understanding for how someone’s leadership style will impact the way that information is sought and how advisory member guidance will be utilized. As leaders surround themselves with supporting advisory groups, it is important to consider the overall impact that advisory groups play during times of crisis, as well as the functionality of advisory group decision making. Broadening this out to the organizational level, when assessing the impact that crisis has on decision making, it is essential to also consider how organizational dynamics and culture might come to be impacted by crises as well.
Amicus Curiae Briefs in the Supreme Court
Authors: Pacelle, Jr. Richard L.
Published: April 2022

The decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court are the law of the land and create precedents that bind lower courts and the justices. The impact of any Supreme Court decision is seldom confined to the two parties in the case. This presents two dilemmas. First, how can the Court accurately gauge the effects of its decision beyond the two parties? Second, for groups anxiously awaiting a decision that is going to impact their future, how do they convey their views to the justices? Perhaps the best solution to both is the amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief.

Groups file such briefs to provide the Court with expertise, to expand or contract the issue in the case, and to provide an informal tally of public opinion. The amicus briefs serve the purposes of the justices as well. For their part, justices have a tremendous amount of work and a limited staff of clerks to help them. They are cognitive misers who cannot process all the relevant information they need and thus rely on cues and heuristics to help them make reasonably informed decisions. The existing scholarship provides a window into the growth of the use of amicus briefs and their impact on decisions.

The use of the amicus brief also has important implications for representation and political participation. It can provide an entry to the system for groups that otherwise might lack access. The dramatic rise in the use of amicus briefs in the Supreme Court has altered the dynamics of decision making and provides the research agenda for the next round of studies.
History of Social Psychology
Authors: Ward Andrew
Published: April 2022

Social psychology represents a scientific approach that fosters advances in both theory and practical application designed to understand and enhance interactions among individuals and groups.
Globalization and Intercultural Relations
Authors: Chiu Chi Yue , Benegal Anand , Hays Gries Peter
Published: April 2022

Globalization refers to the growing economic, political, social, and cultural interdependence of countries ensued from cross-border trade, technology, investment flow, information and knowledge diffusion, and migration. It is an ongoing historical and multidimensional process characterized by increasing integration and interaction between people, companies, and governments of different nations worldwide. Globalization presents abundant opportunities for intercultural contacts, increases diversity of cultures within geopolitical entities, and has created cultural hybridities. The psychological study of globalization aims to investigate the psychosocial ramifications of globalization and intercultural relationships on the level of the individual. Several avenues of exploration have revealed insights into how individuals react to different culture-mixing phenomena, and how individuals hailing from different cultural backgrounds and holding different cultural ideologies respond differently or similarly to different situational cues and culture-mixed circumstances. First, globalization has sparked debates on the nature of and how people should respond to the characteristic cultural traits of a group: Should people be blind to the distinctiveness of these traits, treat these differences as the group’s defining essences, or view them as malleable qualities ensued from intercultural learning? These different perspectives have had important policy implications for intercultural relations. Second, lay people generally believe that although globalization fosters economic growth, it often leads to disintegration of traditional communities. Third, exposures to multiple cultures in the same space at the same time tend to accentuate perceived cultural differences and polarize positive or negative responses to foreign cultural inflow. Fourth, culture mixing experiences may evoke an exclusionary reactions (exclusionary responses) to foreign cultural inflow or heighten the motivation to learn from foreign cultures (integrative responses). Exclusionary responses are likely when (a) local cultural identities are salient, (b) foreign cultural influence is perceived to be intrusive, and (c) existential or epistemic anxiety is heightened. Integrative responses are likely when people (a) have strong learning motivation, (b) contemplate upon cultural complexity, and (c) are open to experience. New topics of psychological research of globalization that have emerged include (a) the ramifications of globalization for the conceptualization of cultural competence, (b) construction of multicultural identities, (c) consumer responses to international marketing, and (d) health and well-being in global contexts.
Reimagining Student Leadership Development in Urban Schools
Authors: Scott Lawrence , Druery Donna , Pingue Ashland
Published: April 2022

Urban Teen Summit (UTS) is a program that gives high school students the opportunity to amplify the voices of young leaders in search of viable solutions for their school and community progression. These student leaders illustrate efficacy and agency by identifying areas of improvement for their community and proactively develop and implement a community-wide, student-led conversation with stakeholders. Since the advent of UTS in 2016, more than 300 student leaders of color have been trained, and more than 2,000 students, parents, and community leaders have participated. The focus of UTS is to recruit students aged 15–18 years from high-poverty and underserved communities and give them the opportunity to acquire leadership skills that will benefit their communities in real time.
Indigenous Knowledges and Methodologies in Higher Education
Authors: Leonard Beth
Published: April 2022

Indigenous knowledges (IK) are complex, intact, resilient, and adaptable systems generated by and through diverse Indigenous peoples with long-term ties to place and land. Key challenges include ongoing perceptions of IK as primitive, isolated, and/or static knowledge, in spite of research that confirms Indigenous knowledges as [w]holistic, dynamic, and scientific. Enduring methodological questions include how to effectively Indigenize or shape Indigenous spaces in higher education for the benefit of Indigenous students. As surface descriptions of IK and Indigenous methodologies are insufficient for an authentic understanding, specific examples are included that illustrate how Alaska Native knowledges and methodologies are presented in higher education. Concluding sections include a brief case study of the University of Alaska system’s engagement of Indigenous knowledges and content; this section also considers issues of control and constraints of authentic integration of Alaska Native knowledges in a Western higher education system.
India’s Merchant Communities
Authors: Kudaisya Medha
Published: April 2022

Merchant communities have dominated the Indian commercial landscape for centuries. These groups span different religions and regions across the country, and even beyond. They include the Marwaris, Banias, and Khatris in the north, the Chettiars and Komatis in south India; the Jains, Sindhis, Parsis, and the Bohras, Memons, and Khojas in the western parts of the subcontinent. While business activity was not restricted to these groups, they dominated it until at least the mid-20th century.

These mercantile communities underwent a constant process of evolution in response to changing political and economic developments. They were not homogenous groups either and were divided internally by subcaste, region, religious affiliation, and language. Yet, they found it advantageous to function collectively and formed community organizations, which facilitated their economic interests. These communities played an important role in the 16th century in integrating India in the new trading networks, thereby helping in the making of a world economy. By the mid-19th century, many among them made the transition to industrial activity. These communities dominated commerce and industry till the late 1960s and 1970s, when new groups began to emerge.
Song China: The First Modern Economy?
Authors: So Billy , So Sufumi
Published: April 2022

Often considered one of the most prosperous dynasties in China’s two-thousand-year imperial history, the Song dynasty lasted for about three hundred years (960–1276 ce). The dynasty is sometimes credited with having developed the world’s first modern economy. While the Song economy lacked such essential characteristics of modern economic growth as science-based ways of improving industrial output and law-based capital markets, there was an undeniable presence of market forces that depended on a combination of product specialization, industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, monetization, and the widespread use of credit instruments. Such are the modern tendencies that many scholars have seen in Song China. The Song’s commercial growth predated the development of trade and commerce in late medieval Europe that began in the 11th century. None of the European cities of this period could compare in population size or trade volume to those in Song China. Neither the use of paper currency nor the burgeoning growth in agricultural production and commercialization existed in Europe’s commercializing economy. From this angle, Song China deserves to be recognized as the world’s first modern economy.
Namibia since Independence
Authors: Melber Henning
Published: April 2022

The Republic of Namibia was a latecomer in the decolonization of Africa. Its trajectory has also been exceptional in other ways. The first three decades after independence in 1990 were characterized by the political hegemony of a former liberation movement as government in a multiparty constitutional democracy under the rule of law. In contrast to other anticolonial movements, the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO of Namibia) consolidated and further entrenched its power in successive national, and regional and local, elections until 2014 and 2015, respectively. But the presidential and National Assembly election results in November 2019 and those of the Regional and Local Authorities in November 2020 marked a rupture. The shifting grounds indicate a gradual erosion of the party’s credibility. Contributing factors were the lack of delivery in governance and, in particular, the effects of growing socioeconomic constraints. An initial period of economic growth based on resource extraction mainly benefited the old and new elites in collusion with international companies. The policies of those in government and control over the state displayed the limits to socioeconomic transformation for the majority of people, who had expected more material benefits from self-determination. As a result, there has been a growing lack of trust in governance, and new contestants have entered the political sphere. It remains to be seen how this new political landscape will shape the country’s social contract and democratic contestation.
Forced Labor in Portuguese Africa
Authors: Kagan Guthrie Zachary
Published: April 2022

Forced labor was central to the modern history of the Portuguese empire. It was widely imposed across Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé, and Guinea after the imposition of Portuguese colonial rule in the late 19th century and persisted within the Portuguese empire for decades after it had been abolished by other European powers. The brutal violence and far-reaching social disruption created by forced labor had a profound impact on colonized communities. It was one of the most important ways that individual subjects interacted with the Portuguese colonial state. Forced labor was also fundamental in structuring the economic, political, social, and ideological contours of the Portuguese empire: the colonial economy was deeply dependent on the exploitation facilitated by forced labor, and both the operations of the Portuguese colonial administration and the justification for its existence were closely intertwined with conscripting forced workers. Finally, the prevalence of forced labor in the Portuguese empire precipitated recurring international scandals, which did a great deal to define Portuguese colonialism in the eyes of the world. Studying forced labor has therefore become an important methodology for understanding the depredations of Portuguese colonial rule, its impact on the lives of the people it governed, and the economic and political organization of the Portuguese empire.
Enslaved Africans in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia
Authors: Armenteros-Martinez Ivan
Published: April 2022

In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, slavery was a widespread institution in the Christian-western Mediterranean. Its development was closely related to the systemic changes that took place in the region: the arrival of Islam in the 8th century, the Latin expansion of the 12th and 13th centuries, and the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade (c. 1450).

After the arrival of Islam on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and then the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century, a type of slavery concentrated mainly in the cities began to take shape in western Europe. During the Latin economic and commercial expansion of the 12th and 13th centuries, European merchants expanded their networks to the Black Sea, the Balkans, and the coast of Libya around Barqa, an area that concentrated part of the trans-Saharan slave trade routes. These three regions became the main centers for the exportation of enslaved men and women for the Christian-western Mediterranean. Finally, after the Ottoman expansion in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea (c. 1370–1480), and the onset of the Atlantic slave trade (c. 1450–1480), Black African slaves became more numerous than those from anywhere else.

Medieval Mediterranean societies made intensive and extensive use of slave labor. The slaves’ living conditions were related to the type of jobs they were forced to do, whether exploited directly by their owners or hired by others.

After the exponential increase of sub-Saharan slaves, the first Black brotherhoods in the northern Mediterranean appeared, a testimony to the importance that Black slavery had attained by the end of the 15th century.
Red Sea Slave Trade
Authors: Miran Jonathan
Published: April 2022

Together with the Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades, the Red Sea slave trade is one of the arenas that comprise what is still referred to as the “Islamic,” “Oriental,” or “Arab” slave trades that involved the transfer of enslaved people from sub-Saharan Africa to different parts of the Muslim world. It arguably represents one of the oldest, most enduring, and complex multidirectional patterns of human flow. It animated a series of routes and networks that moved African enslaved people mainly to Arabia, the eastern Mediterranean, the Gulf, Iran, and India. The Red Sea and Gulf of Aden slave trade also constituted part of a broader commercial system that comprised, in varying degrees, the greater Nile Valley trade system through which enslaved people from the northeast African interior were moved via overland routes to Egypt and beyond.

Unlike the Atlantic slave trade system, where slave cargoes were commonplace, enslaved people were most often shipped across the Red Sea on regular sailing boats carrying a variety of other commodities. At the peak of the trade during the nineteenth century, a large majority of enslaved people exported through the Red Sea were in their teens. The sex ratio heavily favored females. Enslaved individuals from northeast Africa were exploited in a host of occupations that varied from “luxury” slaves (eunuchs and concubines) to domestic servants to labor-intensive enterprises such as pearl divers, masons, laborers in ports, and workers on agricultural plantations. Others were employed in urban economies in transportation, artisanship, and trade.

Estimates based on a notoriously weak evidentiary base (for most periods) put Red Sea slave exports for the entire period between 800 ce and around 1900 ce at a total of just under 2,500,000, though this figure may be higher or lower. The heyday of the Red Sea trade was in the 19th century with estimates of around 500,000 enslaved people exported during the period. The abolition and suppression of the slave trade proper in the Red Sea region took a century to accomplish. It is infamously known as one of the most enduring slave trades in the world and it was only in the mid-20th century, when slavery was legally abolished in Yemen and in Saudi Arabia (both in 1962), that illicit slave smuggling across the sea was choked off. But legal abolition has not ended various forms and practices of human trafficking, smuggling, forced labor, debt bondage, commercial sex trafficking, and in some cases enslavement. These persist in the third decade of the 21st century in most of the modern countries bordering the Red Sea and, as in the past, with a reach that extends far and wide, beyond the region proper.
Slavery in Luanda and Benguela
Authors: Candido Mariana P. , Oliveira Vanessa
Published: April 2022

The institution of slavery existed in West Central Africa before the arrival of Europeans as a form of labor exploitation. While in local states political elites targeted outsiders and criminals as potential captives, slavery in the colonial settlements of Luanda and Benguela was similar to bondage in other Atlantic ports such as Rio de Janeiro, Havana, or Cartagena, and even in other colonial towns on the African coast including Cape Town and Lagos. Captives of war or people born into bondage performed most of the domestic and public labor. Their productive and reproductive capacities were appropriated for the benefit of their owners. Slaves could be bought and sold, were considered property, and did not enjoy rights, including to their own sexuality. Despite owners’ control, enslaved men and women resisted oppression and sought to ameliorate their condition and status through different strategies such as flight or paying for their own manumission. Slavery remained an important element of colonial societies in Luanda and Benguela until it was officially abolished in 1869, and new forms of compulsory labor were introduced.
International Trade With Heterogeneous Firms: Theory and Evidence
Authors: Bonfiglioli Alessandra , Crinò Rosario , Gancia Gino
Published: April 2022

International trade is dominated by a small number of very large firms. Models of trade with heterogeneous firms have been developed to study the causes and consequences of this observation. The canonical model of trade with heterogeneous firms shows that trade leads to between-firm reallocations and selection: It shifts employment toward firms with the best attributes and forces marginal firms to exit. The model also illustrates the role of heterogeneity, and its various sources, in explaining the volume of trade and the firm-level margins of adjustment. Consistent with the model, the empirical literature has documented that exporting is a rare activity, that exporting firms are larger and more productive than other firms, and that trade liberalization reallocates market shares toward the best-performing firms in various countries. Studies using transaction-level data have unveiled additional salient features of trade flows. First, sales by foreign firms are very heterogeneous and highly concentrated. Second, both the extensive margin (number of exporting firms) and the intensive margin (average export per firm) are important in explaining the level of exports and its changes over time. More heterogeneity in sales across firms is associated with a higher volume of trade along both margins. Third, increased foreign competition reallocates market shares toward top firms and hence can increase concentration from any country of origin. Numerous extensions of the benchmark model have been proposed to study other important aspects, such as the relevance of multi-product and multinational firms, the import behavior of firms, and the extent to which heterogeneity is endogenous to firms’ choices, but some open challenges still remain.
Public Sector Participation in the Water Sector: Opportunities and Pitfalls
Authors: Galiani Sebastian
Published: April 2022

Water is one the most indispensable human needs. Although pumped wells, bottled water, or public faucets are used in many parts of the world as means to obtain this crucial good, piped water services are considered the gold standard to ensure wide, regular, and secure access. At first glance, piped water services have all the characteristics of a natural monopoly in which the government is better positioned for provision than the private sector: high sunk costs and economies of scale are present, and the quality of the service is costly to supervise. However, in that first intuition, there is one missing block: government behavior. In countries with low state capacity and accountability, weak checks and balances, and institutional dysfunction, public companies are frequently used to fulfill political goals instead of their stated objectives. In those cases, privatization coupled with the creation of an independent regulatory agency can limit the predatory capacity of the government, displace the service to the sphere of private incentives, and provide the opportunity to extend coverage and improve quality.

There is, nonetheless, a fragile side to this solution. If the same institutional vulnerabilities that create poor public companies’ management persist, incentives for predatory government behavior remain latent and can emerge when circumstances facilitate it. This whole parable was observed with the privatization of Obras Sanitarias de la Nación in Argentina. First, a paralyzed and overstaffed public company was replaced by a dynamic private company. During this period, more than 2 million people gained access to the water service and 1.2 million people gained access to the sewage networks, which substantially improved health outcomes for the newly incorporated groups. Then a big economic crisis hit the contractual relationship between the government and the company, and renationalization took place. This change was paired with a return of previously observed predatory practices such as unsustainable pricing policy and non-meritocratic appointments.
Health Workforce: Situations and Challenges in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Brazil
Authors: Machado Maria Helena , Santos Renato Penha de Oliveira , dos Santos Neto Pedro Miguel , Santana Vanessa Gabrielle Diniz , Campos Francisco Eduardo de
Published: April 2022

The greatest challenge in the development of universal health systems worldwide is to increase organization, training, and regulation of the health workforce (HWF). To accomplish this, the World Health Organization (WHO) has pointed out several strategies utilized since the beginning of the 2000s.

One of the world regions with the greatest internal HWF disparities is the Americas, more specifically Latin America and the Caribbean. Brazil is another of the countries in this region that presents great inequities in its HWF distribution, although its Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde, or SUS), created after 1988, is one of the largest universal health systems in the world. It is worth noting that Latin America, the Caribbean, and Brazil historically have high levels of social inequality and have recently become regions severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite some advances in the formation and distribution of HWF in Latin America and the Caribbean in the last 10 years, structural problems persist in the health systems of several countries in this region, such as Brazil. The COVID-19 pandemic aggravated some problems such as the distribution of specialized health workers in intensive care units and the precarious working conditions in several public health services that were organized to face the pandemic.
Public Perceptions of International Terrorism
Authors: Avdan Nazli
Published: April 2022

Terrorist violence appeals to and pivots on the creation and dissemination of fear. In that respect, it hinges on public perceptions and threat manufacturing to have policy impact. Scholars have long recognized that terrorist actors appeal to multiple audiences, including the public audience. By sowing fear, actors hope that the public will put pressure on the target regime to enact policy concessions to militants or that policymakers, fearing the erosion of public support, will bend to the terrorists’ demands. Recognizing this, it behooves scholars to delineate the mechanisms that shape perceptions and parse the different types of emotional and cognitive responses that terrorist violence arouses. Violence inculcates a range of public responses, most notably, anxiety, fear, anger, and perceptions of threat. These responses may vary with individual demographics, such as gender and age, but are also guided by the political environment in which individuals are embedded. Variegated emotive responses have important policy consequences as distinct emotions are associated with different policy demands. On the whole, psychological reactions to terrorism underlie the effectiveness of terrorism and have downstream social, political, and cultural ramifications.
Côte d’Ivoire Shell Middens: Specificity and Evolution
Authors: Kouassi Siméon , Loba Léon Fabrice , Etienne Ettien N'Doua
Published: April 2022

The shell middens of Côte d’Ivoire span almost the entirety of the southern coastal zone of the country. Unearthed in the second half of the 1930s, they are sites of almost unparalleled preservation, providing a wealth of information about the lives of the area’s ancient inhabitants. While they are very often prey to pillaging, archaeological studies of these middens have enabled the exhumation of lithics, ceramics, metals, and burial remains that offer insight into the ideologies, social organizations, and health of the people that made them. Data recorded in geological reports, scientific publications, site explorations, ethnoarchaeological studies, surveys, and field excavations have highlighted the major characteristics of these shell middens. While invaluable as archaeological resources, their location and material value make them sensitive to encroaching urbanization and economic exploitation.
Global Theravada Buddhism: Asian Foundations
Authors: Fenn Mavis L.
Published: April 2022

The establishment and development of Theravada in South and Southeast Asia was driven by relationships between the king, the sangha (community of monks and nuns), and the laity. It is an imaginaire through which precolonial history is seen as a time when ideal kings and an ideal sangha mutually supported each other and worked for the benefit of the people through the teaching and the performance of rituals that allowed lay people to make religious merit (punna) toward future lives. The king protected the realm from attack, protected it internally through ensuring stability, and supported the sangha. The king was the largest financial supporter of the sangha and had oversight over it. Kings periodically reformed the sangha administratively and “purified” it of unacceptable behavior and belief. These reforms generally saw an increase in the king’s power vis-a-vis that of the sangha. The ideal king was the cakkavattin, “righteous ruler” and world conqueror. The historical instantiation of this ideal was King Ashoka. These relationships were often tense and fractious but with colonization, especially by the British in the 19th- to mid-20th century, this ideal provided the basis for postcolonial visions of the emerging nation states.

Three common themes arose as Buddhists grappled with colonization. The first was that there had been both an institutional and personal decline in the dhamma that contributed to the loss of independence. The second was that the dhamma needed to be protected from further decline and this required the reform of the sangha and expansion of lay practice—in particular with regards to the laity’s involvement with and public support for the sangha. The third was an idealization of the past. These themes played an important role in the creation of anticolonial independence movements that led to the emergence of modern states, Buddhist nationalism, and Buddhist modernism.

The bhikkhuni sangha, established by the Buddha in India, died out around the 11th to 13th century where it existed. In its absence, alternative forms of practice and orders of religious women arose. A movement in the late 1980s and 1990s worked to revive the bhikkhuni order. While there are bhikkhuni both within and outside of Asia, those in South and Southeast Asia are not considered authentic by monastic authorities and government, and the revival of the bhikkhuni sangha remains controversial among monks, laity, and women in alternative orders.
Buddhism and Medicine in Premodern Japan
Authors: Macomber Andrew
Published: April 2022

Beliefs and practices surrounding the body, disease, and healing have defined Buddhist traditions around the world since the inception of the religion in northern India roughly two-and-a-half millennia ago. Buddhism’s therapeutic dimensions left a discernible impact on the history of premodern Japan, where Buddhism arrived in the 6th century of the common era. Because Buddhist healers practiced medicine on all levels of society on the archipelago, the Buddhist imagination of disease found wide and enduring acceptance throughout the ancient and medieval periods. This included the notion of “karmic illness,” which provided a compelling etiological explanation for disease, disability, and injury by reference to the “physiomoral” causality expressed in the Buddhist doctrine of karma. Another Buddhist etiology that saw pervasive acceptance in Japan, especially with the rise of esoteric Buddhism throughout the Heian period (794–1185), was the attribution of illness to demons, malicious instigators of pestilence who had much in common with the plague deities thought responsible for epidemics since the Nara period (710–794) and earlier.

Buddhist healers in Japan engaged with disease through a staggering variety of ritual, devotional, and medical practices. In the Nara period, the state relied on large-scale sūtra recitation assemblies and repentance rituals, many of which were aimed at securing the safety of the realm at large by healing the body of the emperor. In the Heian period, political power became increasingly diffused over multiple political agents, a rising class of warriors, and powerful Buddhist monasteries; personal salvation became an urgent priority in what was considered the “age of the Final Dharma”; and private sponsorship of esoteric Buddhist rituals for therapeutic purposes became an everyday affair. These rituals, many of which were highly innovative, typically incorporated the use and ritual consumption of diverse medical substances. Some of these substances were acquired via trade with the continent, and others were found or cultivated locally on the archipelago. One consequence of the nearly ubiquitous use of physical therapeutic substances in rituals was that Buddhists in Japan came to possess extensive knowledge about materia medica.

New research on Buddhism and medicine in premodern Japan elucidates the historical and social contexts of Buddhist medicine. This research highlights the dynamic interactions between Buddhist healers, therapists of non-Buddhist medical traditions, and their patients.
Comic Book Depictions of the Mexico City Earthquake of 1985
Authors: Buitrón Vera Gabriela
Published: April 2022

On the morning of September 19, 1985, an 8.1 magnitude earthquake shocked Mexico City. Approximately 10,000–15,000 people died and hundreds of buildings collapsed. Many representations of this event emerged in the aftermath. Newspapers, chronicles, testimonials, and photographs were some of the mediums that reported this tragic event, and the most immediate comic book response to the catastrophe was Terremoto 85: Historias reales del dramático suceso (1986). This graphic narrative draws from a long line of Mexican comic books that had promoted conservative cultural values for decades. By portraying the nuclear family as an allegory of the nation, its characters are represented as ignoring—rather than participating in—the sociopolitical upheaval taking place around them. The comic suggests that it is only by embracing normativity and gender norms, as well as by contributing to the procreation and production of the nation, that readers can become exemplary citizens. Furthermore, this graphic narrative shows that only characters depicted as “exemplary” get to have “happy endings.” By articulating disaster in this manner, Terremoto 85 obscures the real civil disobedience and direct action that surged after Mexico City’s earthquake of 1985. In so doing, the comic book participates in the erasure of well-recorded civil responses to the earthquake. It also demonstrates how national narratives often glorify exemplary citizens and contribute to the exclusion of vulnerable and precarious populations. A careful read of this graphic text can help one examine 20th- and 21st-century national emergencies in Mexico, Latin America, and beyond.
Negation and Polarity in the Romance Languages
Authors: Moscati Vincenzo
Published: April 2022

Negation in Romance offers a wide array of cross-linguistic variation. For what concerns sentential negation, three main strategies are employed depending on the position of the negative marker with respect to the finite verb: some varieties (e.g., Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese) adopt a preverbal particle, others (e.g., Gallo-Italic varieties) a postverbal one, and some others (e.g., French) a combination of both. Negation can also surface in the left-most clausal positions, generally carrying an additional meaning expressed by emphatic polarity particles. The diverse options available in contemporary varieties stemmed from their common ancestor, Latin, through a sequence of (potentially) cyclical grammatical changes captured by the Jespersen’s cycle. A further dimension of variation concerns negative indefinites (N-words) and their interpretation when combined with negation, resulting in strict and nonstrict negative concord depending on the availability of double negation readings in both pre- and postverbal positions or only postverbally. In addition, the evolution of indefinites from Latin to modern Romance languages constitutes its own quantifier’s cycle. This cycle classifies the continuous diachronic changes that have occurred through the centuries into a sequence of discrete steps, imposing constraints on the transition of indefinites from one stage to the next. Despite the great variability in the ways negation is expressed, its interpretive properties are not fully constrained by superficial variations. Logical scope in particular is not bound to the syntactic position where negation surfaces and inverse scope readings are generally possible.
Coordination in Syntax in the Romance Languages
Authors: Abeillé Anne
Published: April 2022

Coordination exhibits unusual syntactic properties: the conjuncts need not be identical but they must obey some parallelism constraints, and their number is not limited.

Romance languages have conjunctive (‘and’), disjunctive (‘or’), adversative (‘but’), and negative (‘nor’) conjunctions, some of which have a correlative use, such as (French) soit . . . soit, (Italian, Spanish) o . . . o, (Portuguese) quer . . . quer, (Romanian) sau . . . sau (‘either . . . or’). They allow coordination of clauses and phrases but also of words (French: le ou la secrétaire ‘the.m.sg or the.f.sg secretary’) and even some word parts (Italian: pre- o post-moderno ‘pre- or post-modern’).

Romance languages show intricate agreement patterns in case of coordination. For number agreement, disjunctive coordination allows for total or partial agreement (Paul ou Marie viendra/viendront. ‘Paul or Mary come.fut.sg/pl’). For gender agreement, conjunctive coordination obeys gender resolution (French: un garçon et une fille gentils ‘a boy.m.sg and a girl.f.sg nice. m.pl’) or closest conjunct agreement (Spanish: El idioma y literatura rusa ‘the language.m.sg and litterature.f.sg Russian.f.sg’).

Coordination may also involve nonconstituents (Italian: Darò un libro a Giovanni e un disco a Maria. ‘I’ll give a book to Giovanni and a record to Maria’) and ellipsis, such as gapping (French: Paul arrive demain et Marie aujourd’hui. ‘Paul arrives tomorrow and Mary today’), with possible mismatches between the elided material and its overt antecedent.