bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Changing Strategies in Marketing Kenya's Tourist Art: From Ethnic Brands to Fair Trade Labels
Authors: Mahoney Dillon
Published: April 2012

This article explores recent changes in Kenya's curio or handicrafts industry. In addition to a crisis in access to raw materials and a diversifying tourist market, the rise in the use of cell phones and the Internet during the early 2000s present unique challenges. Nonetheless, innovative Kenyan entrepreneurs are using these challenges to market and brand products in new ways—by representing modern global interconnectedness as “fair trade” or creatively promoting the authenticity of their products in other ways. Kenya's artisans and traders have also adapted to diverse and complex tastes beyond the desire for an invented tradition of ethnic and “tribal” art.
Introduction: Decolonization in the Congo (DRC)—Fifty Years Later
Authors: Kapanga Kasongo M.
Published: April 2012

Fifty years after the occurrence of a major event, a golden jubilee, is often an opportunity for celebration and reminiscing over fond memories. Conventional wisdom would project such an event as a landmark likely to serve as a stepping stone toward greater achievements.

As in most African countries on Independence Day, there were formalities in Kinshasa on June 30, 2010. But while the political establishment— flanked with foreign dignitaries, including King Albert II and Queen Paola of Belgium—watched a military parade to showcase the existence of political institutions, unusually large numbers of ordinary people went about their normal daily business. The general mood in both the capital city and elsewhere was one of indifference, reflecting the hardships of daily life and the challenges of mere survival: over the course of fifty years, the per capita income had been halved. The whole atmosphere had an eerie feeling, suggesting a tamed anxiety and a simmering anger from unfulfilled promises. The euphoria of the 1960s has withered into the obvious gloom made visible in the tattered infrastructure of the capital city. InJune 2010, the mood was more somber than celebratory.
Gender, Justice, and the Environment: Connecting the Dots
Authors: Byfield Judith A.
Published: April 2012

In this paper I attempt to connect several dots, specifically my research on African women's activism, environmental justice, and climate change. The book on which I am currently working is tentatively entided “‘The Great Upheaval’: Women, Taxes and Nationalist Politics in Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1945–1951.” The study examines the struggles of Nigerian women to shape the nationalist agenda and their setbacks as the country moved decisively toward independence. At its core lies an analysis of a tax revolt launched by women in Abeokuta in 1947. The Abeokuta Women's Union (AWU), under the leadership of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (the mother of the late musician Fela Kuti), began a protracted protest against a tax increase. This revolt is well known in Nigerian popular history, and many people outside of Nigeria were introduced to it in Wole Soyinka's memoir,Ake: The Years of Childhood(1981:164–218).
The Congo's Independence Struggle Viewed Fifty Years Later
Authors: Weiss Herbert
Published: April 2012

In the cacophony of what has been referred to in broad terms as “The Congo Crisis,” some misrepresentations have been repeated again and again. This commentary therefore will not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the Congo's struggle and achievement of independence; instead it will focus on aspects that can be given a new or revised interpretation. Itwill consider five themes where misrepresentation has had significant effects: (1) Belgian policy on the education of elites; (2) the supposed “violence” associated with the nationalist drive to independence; (3) Belgium's decision to accept a dramatically condensed decolonization process; (4) Belgian miscalculations in this process; and (5) the price of haste.
ASR Focus: The Political Economy of Democratic Reform in Kenya
Authors: Harbeson John W.
Published: April 2012

Kenya's long quest for democratic reform since the first multiparty elections in 1991 has been inextricably enmeshed in a parallel struggle for fundamental socioeconomic reform. The essays in this special ASR Focus originated with a roundtable at the 2009 annual meetings of the African Studies Association in New Orleans that centered on the problems of and prospects for reform in Kenya-specifically, the efforts to forestall a repetition of the violence that took place in the aftermath of the 2007 elections and posed the most serious threat to the county's stability since independence in 1963. The speakers at the roundtable, whose presentations appear here in slighdy edited form, joined other students of Kenya politics to contemplate the underlying issues and challenges confronting the country in its effort to achieve that goal before the next national elections scheduled for late 2012 or early 2013.
The Structural Roots of the DRC's Current Disasters: Deep Dilemmas
Authors: Schatzberg Michael G.
Published: April 2012

The staggering dilemmas facing the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) today have their structural roots in both the near and distant past. The purpose of this brief reflection is to consider the nature of these disasters and to deflect discussion away from those hardy perennials that somehow, usually incorrectly, pass as explanations of the Congo's problems. Ethnic tensions, corruption, and the absence of democracy all contribute in harmful ways to the current situation, but they do not tap into the deeper structural roots of the disasters besetting the DRC More specifically, by “structural roots” I mean those features of the Congolese political landscape that seem to recur, albeit in slightly different form, across time and therefore across different political regimes as well.
Land and the Quest for a Democratic State in Kenya: Bringing Citizens Back In
Authors: Harbeson John W.
Published: April 2012

Kenya's current constitutional moment has included both the first pop ularly ratified constitution and its first postindependence comprehensive land reform policy. The roughly temporally parallel processes that brought about these two signal achievements have inserted the interests of ordinary Kenyans into this constitutional moment in a way that elections and constitutional ratification alone would not have, reflecting more than two decades of civil society pressure. The new democratized land tenure policy removes land allocation decisions from pervasive executive branch abuse and vests them in a democratically elected Parliament. In this fundamental respect, the Kenya constitutional implementation process appears to privilege procedural and deliberative democracy as the source of substantive democratic land tenure outcomes, and by extension, the terms on which Kenyans relate to each other and their leaders. Upon the outcomes of these deliberations may well hinge the future stability as well as the democratic quality of the Kenyan state.
A “Crutch to Assist in Gaining an Honest Living”: Dispensary Shopkeeping by Scottish General Practitioners and the Responses of the British Medical Elite, ca. 1852–1911
Authors: Jenkinson Jacqueline
Published: April 2012

This article examines the practice among general practitioners in Scotland of keeping shops for dispensary and retail purposes in the late nineteenth century. It demonstrates that while doctors kept such open shops in these areas in order to subsidize their income in a crowded medical market, they argued that shopkeeping allowed them to provide medical care in communities where the population was otherwise too poor to pay for such care. The article compares shopkeeping to medical “covering” and assesses the medical hierarchy’s reactions to shopkeeping doctors via disciplinary actions taken against some of these doctors by the General Medical Council (GMC). These actions provoked an organized protest among hundreds of doctors (some of it channeled through the British Medical Association), which challenged the methods of the GMC in determining acceptable professional medical standards.
Sauvons les Bébés : Child Health and U.S. Humanitarian Aid in the First World War Era
Authors: Irwin Julia F.
Published: April 2012

From 1917 to 1923, the American Red Cross organized an array of long-term child health projects in Europe as part of its larger wartime and post-war humanitarian efforts. Across the continent, the organization established child health clinics, better baby shows, playgrounds, fresh air camps, and courses for women on infant and child hygiene. Hundreds of U.S. doctors, nurses, and other child welfare professionals traveled to Europe to administer these programs. These activities call attention to American efforts to reform the health of European youth and, in so doing, to reshape European medicine and European society more broadly. Moreover, they suggest the importance of child-centered medical relief—and the history of medicine more broadly—to the history of U.S. foreign relations.
“A Startling New Chemotherapeutic Agent”: Pediatric Infectious Disease and the Introduction of Sulfonamides at Baltimore’s Sydenham Hospital
Authors: Connolly Cynthia , Golden Janet , Schneider Benjamin
Published: April 2012

Using pediatric patient records from Baltimore’s Sydenham Hospital, this article explores the adoption of sulfa drugs in pediatrics. It discusses how clinicians dealt with questions of dosing and side effects and the impact of the sulfonamides on two diagnoses in children: meningococcal meningitis and pneumonia. The care of infants and children with infectious diseases made demands on physicians and nurses that differed from those facing clinicians treating adult patients. The article demonstrates the need to distinguish between pediatric and adult medical history. It suggests that the new therapeutics demanded more intense bedside care and enhanced laboratory facilities, and as a result paved the way for the adoption of penicillin. Finally, it argues that patient records and the published medical literature must be examined together in order to gain a full understanding of how transformations in medical practice and therapeutics occur.
Methods and Management: NIH Administrators, Federal Oversight, and the Framingham Heart Study
Authors: Patel Sejal S.
Published: April 2012

This article explores the 1965 controversy over the Framingham Heart Study in the midst of growing oversight into the management of science at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It describes how, beginning in the early 1960s, federal overseers demanded that NIH administrators adopt particular management styles in administering programs and how these growing pressures led administrators to favor investigative pursuits that allowed for easy prospective accounting of program payoffs, especially those based on experimental methods designed to examine discrete interventions or outcomes of interest. In light of this changing managerial culture within the NIH, the Framingham study and other population laboratories—with their bases in observation and in open-ended study designs—became harder for NIH administrators to justify and defend.
Hobbes, Descartes, and Ideas: A Secret Debate
Authors: Mori Gianluca
Published: April 2012

The author proposes that the anonymous letter dated May 19, 1641, which Mersenne delivered to Descartes, should be attributed to Thomas Hobbes. Although the text is known, it is usually considered not so much in itself as for Descartes’s two replies, which contain important clarifications on the proof of God’s existence. Hobbes’ hand is revealed by various thematic, conceptual, and lexical analogies and, above all, by the presence of two doctrines characteristic of his thought: 1) the denial of the existence of intellectual ideas; 2) the assertion that the nature of God can only be described by the proposition “God exists”. Attribution to Hobbes of the May 19 th 1641 letter throws new light on the debate that followed Descartes’s Meditations as well as on Mersenne’s role.
Pufendorf on Morality, Sociability, and Moral Powers
Authors: Darwall Stephen
Published: April 2012

Only in the last twenty-five years have scholars begun to appreciate Samuel Pufendorf’s importance for the history of ethics. The signal element of Pufendorf’s ethics for recent commentators is his idea that morality arises when God imposes his superior will on a world that can contain no moral value of or on its own. But how, exactly, is “imposition” accomplished? According to Pufendorf, human beings do not simply defer to God in the way elephant seals do to a dominant male. Rather, imposition is realized through recognition of God’s authority to direct and hold us answerable. This brings a whole battery of concepts into play—recognition, accountability, imputation, and authority—along with the capacities to operate with them in practical thought. What is brilliantly original in Pufendorf is his appreciation of these conceptual connections and his awareness of their implications for moral psychology. Authority is a kind of “moral power,” as Pufendorf calls it, which agents can exercise only within a social, moral space that is constituted by their respective obligations to and rights against one another, and whose exercise directly affects those rights and obligations. Only “sociable” beings with the capacity for mutual recognition are thus capable of moral obligation.

Recent commentary has generally missed these important aspects and so, in my view, what is most fascinating and original in Pufendorf’s thought. Pufendorf was far from the first thinker to hold some version of a divine command theory of morality. But he may have been the first to attempt to work out what such a view must look like if it is to take seriously the conceptual links between authority, recognition, and accountability, as well as the psychology necessary for these to be realized in the moral life. In the end, however, this introduces an instability into Pufendorf.s view. I argue that whereas Pufendorf seeks to derive human moral powers, equal dignity, and sociability from God’s superior moral power, the very idea of moral powers, including God’s, seems already to presuppose a more basic moral power or dignity that is shared by any being who is capable of sociable relations.
Rousseau’s Virtue Epistemology
Authors: Hanley Ryan Patrick
Published: April 2012

Rousseau’s moral and political philosophy is grounded in a largely overlooked virtue epistemology. This essay reconstructs this epistemology with a particular focus on Rousseau’s conception of how our capacity for sensation might be cultivated to develop the judgment and wisdom that distinguish the developed virtuous agent. It proceeds in three sections. The first section focuses on Rousseau’s conception of the first stage of development, and especially his sensationist claim that all knowledge originates in sensory impressions. The second section examines the maturing agent’s transition from mere sensation to the cultivation of the capacity for judgment, particularly focusing on Rousseau’s account of the agent’s shift from the passive reception of sensory impressions of discrete objects to the active and synthetic processes of comparison and association that give rise to complex ideas and to moral conceptions. The third section turns to Rousseau’s conception of the developed mind, focusing on his claim that the intellectual virtues not only require cultivation but are indispensible to the proper exercise of freedom that distinguishes the fully moral human being.
Nietzsche’s Questions Concerning the Will to Truth
Authors: Jenkins Scott
Published: April 2012

By a will to truth Nietzsche understands an overriding commitment, unlimited in scope, to believing in accordance with evidence and argument. I show that the critique of this commitment found in Nietzsche’s later works uncovers the psychological grounds of our modern will to truth and establishes its affinity with distinctively moral commitments. I argue that Nietzsche’s critique nevertheless provides no answer to his question concerning the value of a will to truth in general. Nietzsche’s examination of the will to truth aims instead to establish that we presently lack any standard for determining its value.
A Likely Account of Necessity: Plato’s Receptacle as a Physical and Metaphysical Foundation for Space
Authors: Sattler Barbara
Published: April 2012

This paper aims to show that—and how—Plato’s notion of the receptacle in the Timaeus provides the conditions for developing a mathematical as well as a physical space without itself being space. In response to the debate whether Plato’s conception of the receptacle is a conception of space or of matter, which presupposes some vague notion of space, I suggest employing criteria from topology and the theory of metric spaces as the most basic ones available. I show that the main task of the receptacle consists in allowing the elements qua images of the Forms to exist as sensible things, since the receptacle is that in which the elements appear, change and move. The receptacle guarantees this possibility by virtue of being pure continuity, while all further qualifications of this continuity required for a full notion of space are derived solely from the content of the receptacle.
What Era’s O’ering?: The Precession of the Equinoxes in Finnegans Wake
Authors: Benjamin Roy
Published: April 2012

The precession of the equinoxes and the myths that it has produced have been studied by George de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill and Thomas D. Worthen in The Myth of Replacement . In this study, I examine its role in Finnegans Wake . The great year that corresponds to the precessional cycle and the myth of replacement that arises from the replacement of one pole star with another are, in the context of the Wake , another way of telling the story of generational conflict and cyclical return. I also analyze the appearance in the Wake of such authors as Plato, Cicero, Giordano Bruno, Madame H. P. Blavatsky, and W. B. Yeats whose representations of cyclical change drew on the mythology of the precession. Finally, I show how such heroes of the precession as Noah, Manu, and Arthur who survive the flood of chaos—the chaotic period between pole stars and between eras—become, in the Wake , avatars of HCE in his struggle to rear his kingdom on the ruins of time.
“The Dead” Just Won’t Stay Dead
Authors: LeBlanc Jim
Published: April 2012

Although allusions to death, dying, and the deceased pervade the final tale in Dubliners , the most compelling and haunting element in “The Dead” is undoubtedly Gretta’s poignant memory of her teenage love, Michael Furey, and the effect that her tearful sharing of this recollection with her husband, Gabriel, has on the couple. Like most of Joyce’s stories, “The Dead” concludes with its protagonist feeling trapped in a situation seemingly beyond his control. Moreover, Gabriel’s sense of self has been severely shaken by the events of the evening and the climactic, disquieting, revenant otherness of his wife’s past love. In my essay, I examine the existential psychological nature of this haunting and the possibility (or impossibility) of mastering or transcending the situation in which Gretta and Gabriel find themselves at the tale’s end.
Advertising Agency: Print Culture and Female Sexuality in “Nausicaa”
Authors: Pelt April
Published: April 2012

Did Gerty MacDowell have an abortion? “Advertising Agency: Print Culture and Female Sexuality in ‘Nausicaa’” uncovers historical material long overlooked by Joyce scholars to indicate that she very well may have: Widow Welch’s Female Pills, a patent medication to which Gerty explicitly refers, was widely believed to have abortifacient properties during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This essay draws upon Joyce’s familiarity with the discourses of birth-control movements and turn-of-the-century advertising to argue that critics have too easily dismissed Gerty as an unthinking and passive consumer of the fashion, fiction, and fantasy offered by ladies’ magazines. Instead, this essay contends, Gerty, like her creator, employs the deliberately ambiguous rhetoric of advertising, seizing control of her body and reproductive health from a legal system that seeks to circumscribe her.
Joyce’s Utopian Machine: The Anti-Tyrannical Mechanics of Ulysses
Authors: Meadowsong Zena
Published: April 2012

This essay argues that James Joyce’s Ulysses is preoccupied with the problem of mechanization. The electrical and steam-driven machines of the early twentieth century appear in the novel as instruments of tyrannical power—man-made monsters of social and political domination. Ulysses , however, resists the forms of mastery it depicts in its machines. Recognizing its implication in the processes of industrial modernity, it turns itself, formally, into a machine for the disruption of its own technological monsters. It becomes a utopian machine: a self-subverting, self-deconstructing machine built to resist the forces of instrumental domination.
“A Rank Outsider”: Gambling and Economic Rivalry in Ulysses
Authors: Shea Daniel
Published: April 2012

The 1904 Ascot Gold Cup Race presents an opportunity to contrast two competing economic experiences inherent within a capitalist system: the gambler’s trust in luck and the investor’s trust in time. Using Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the effect of capitalistic industrialization on experience, this study examines the competition between Leopold Bloom and Blazes Boylan as a contrast of economic strategies and the location of human value within them. Thus, Joyce’s reading of experience within a capitalistic world leads to a simultaneous critique of the modern urban world and an affirmation of the human response to it.
Verbivocovisuals: James Joyce and the Problem of Babel
Authors: Schotter Jesse
Published: April 2012

This article situates Joyce’s work within a larger discourse about the problem of Babel or about how, in a newly globalized world, different cultures and language groups might best communicate with one another. The journal transition —in which Joyce’s work was serialized and whose editor, Eugene Jolas, he knew well—served as a clear-inghouse for ideas about how a new universalism might be forged: either through Joyce’s Wake se and other avant-garde experiments or through the philosopher C. K. Ogden’s Basic English. Fascinated by these theories of universal language and drawn to the anti-imperialist politics underlying them, Joyce, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake , turns to visual and gestural languages—film, hieroglyphics, and illuminated manuscripts—in an effort to subvert theories of an “Aryan” language and to imagine a more inclusive origin for all the world’s cultures in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ideas of linguistic or media “purity” are allied in Joyce with the danger of Nazi claims for racial purity. His emphasis on the commonality of writing and new media becomes a political gesture: a way of insisting on the unity of all races, cultures, and languages in a mythic past.
Southeast Asia: Strong-state Democratization in Malaysia and Singapore
Authors: Slater Dan
Published: April 2012

Abstract: Enduring authoritarian stability in Malaysia and Singapore has been a product of these countries' extraordinarily powerful state apparatuses. Strong states emerged well before both countries' authoritarian turns in the 1960s, and would continue to help stabilize national politics if Malaysia and Singapore were to undergo the sort of "strong-state democratization" that has been witnessed in South Korea and Taiwan. Yet the same state strength that facilitates stable transitions to democracy also empowers authoritarian rulers to forestall democratization altogether. The main reason democratization should go smoothly in Malaysia or Singapore is also the main reason it might not transpire at all.
Ballots, Bullets, and the Bottom Billion
Authors: Goldsmith Arthur A.
Published: April 2012

Competitive, but imperfectly democratic elections have become the predominant mode for selecting political leaders around the globe, even in very poor countries. Such elections are often projected to spark struggles for power by unsanctioned means, yet there has not been a corresponding rise in coups, assassinations, or the onset of civil wars for central control. Using updated datasets on various aspects of political competition over the past 50 years, this article looks carefully at the historical record. Contested elections in low-income nations are associated with the timing of irregular, violent efforts to seize or influence political leadership, but do not correlate with a greater number of such events.
Southeast Asia: Elites vs. Reform in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam
Authors: Gainsborough Martin
Published: April 2012

Abstract: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos share a number of similarities: All three countries are former colonies of France located next to one another on the Southeast Asian mainland; all three witnessed the rise of communist parties to nationwide power in the mid-1970s; and all three have also seen fast-rising economic growth and falling poverty since the 1990s, and are viewed as undergoing a process of "reform" involving a shift from central planning to a market economy. Yet Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia remain bastions of illiberalism and one-party rule despite rapid economic growth and falling poverty. What will it take to reform their elitist political cultures and curtail the use of public office for private ends?
How Poland Promotes Democracy
Authors: Petrova Tsveta
Published: April 2012

This article examines the democracy promotion efforts of a new Eastern EU democracy and a regional leader in the post-communist world—Poland. Polish democracy promotion has its origin in the international solidarity tradition of the anticommunist opposition movement in the country. However, Poland has made concerted, if at times inconsistent, efforts to support the democratization of its eastern neighbors, primarily because such support is understood to be a central element of a geopolitical security strategy to deter a resurgent Russia. And while Poland has already made some difference by helping secure some democratization gains in Ukraine, Poland's efforts in autocratic Belarus have been rather unsuccessful.
Southeast Asia: Thailand's Uneasy Passage
Authors: Pongsudhirak Thitinan
Published: April 2012

Abstract: In 2011, Thais reelected a party backed by deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Although Thaksin himself was banned from actually appearing on the ballot, he emerged as the big winner when a new electoral vehicle known as the Pheu Thai Party (PTP, or "For Thais") gained a decisive victory with his younger sister Yingluck at its head. As of early 2012, however, no other reformist groups or individuals had appeared on the scene possessing anything like what it will take to reconcile monarchy and democracy in Thailand. All the same, however, it appears that Thailand cannot escape the challenge of reaching a new consensus that will root the monarchy more squarely within the constitution of an emerging democracy, but in a way that reconciles conservative royalists.
Argentina: The Persistence of Peronism
Authors: Calvo Ernesto , Murillo M. Victoria
Published: April 2012

Despite a rocky first term, Peronist President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner saw her popularity rebound, leading to a huge reelection victory in 2011. The election served as a reminder of the remarkable durability and ideologically flexible appeal of the Peronist "brand" in Argentine politics. It also showed the ability of what we might call the Kirchnerist center-left sub-brand of Peronism to dominate at the polls given a divided set of rivals, a national economy buoyed by a commodities boom, and a wave of personal sympathy for a recently widowed incumbent.
Southeast Asia: Minding the Gap Between Democracy and Governance
Authors: Emmerson Donald K.
Published: April 2012

Abstract: The eleven countries of Southeast Asia vary widely by type of regime and quality of governance. Those that are the most democratic are not always the best governed, and the reverse is also true. Based on evidence from these countries, this essay explores two propositions—one normative, the other empirical. The normative argument is this: Good things ought to go together. Because democracy is more humane than dictatorship, democracy in Southeast Asia should also do a better job delivering security, welfare, and other public goods. The empirical argument, whose validity would bolster the normative one, is this: Good things do go together. Democracy and governance, however, do not co-vary in Southeast Asia. These two good things do not go together. Gaps exist, and they are worth minding, in theory and in practice.
The Year of the Arab Uprisings
Authors: Puddington Arch
Published: April 2012

The political uprisings that swept across the Arab world over the past year represent the most significant challenge to authoritarian rule since the collapse of Soviet communism. In a region that had seemed immune to democratic change, coalitions of activist reformers and ordinary citizens succeeded in removing dictators who had spent decades in power. Yet the continued pattern of global democratic backsliding—especially in such critical areas as press freedom, the rule of law, and the rights of civil society—is a sobering reminder that the institutions that anchor democratic governance cannot be achieved by protests alone.
Tunisia's Transition and the Twin Tolerations
Authors: Stepan Alfred
Published: April 2012

In 2011, Tunisia achieved a successful democratic transition, albeit not yet a consolidation of democracy. It did so while adhering to a relationship between religion and politics that follows the pattern of what I have called the "twin tolerations." The first toleration is that of religious citizens toward the state. It requires that they accord democratically elected officials the freedom to legislate and govern without having to confront denials of their authority based on religious claims—such as the claim that "Only God, not man, can make laws." The second toleration requires that laws and officials must permit religious citizens, as a matter of right, to freely express their views and values within civil society, and to freely take part in politics, as long as religious activists and organizations respect other citizens' constitutional rights and the law.
The Languages of the Arab Revolutions
Authors: Filali-Ansary Abdou
Published: April 2012

The upheavals that have been shaking the Arab-Muslim world are revolutions in discourse as well as in the streets. Arabs are using not only traditional and religious vocabularies, but also a new set of expressions that are modern and represent popular aspirations. We now seem to be at a moment when large strata in Arab societies (and in developing countries more broadly) have reached a state of real disenchantment with utopias, and seem to be ready for other forms of political participation. The conviction that there are alternatives to the kinds of regimes that have for so long imposed themselves on Arab societies—that life under this or that brand of dictatorship and unaccountable rule emphatically does not have to be the Arabs' fate—seems to have taken hold of the collective imagination.
Fathers, Daughters, Crossdressing, and Names: L’Anconitana and Angelo Beolco/Ruzante’s Contribution to Commedia Erudita
Authors: Coller Alexandra
Published: April 2012

The essay examines Angelo Beolco/Ruzante’s place in the scripted comedy tradition by looking at one of his comedies, L’Anconitana , alongside post- Anconitana commedie erudite . My aim is twofold: first, to take stock of the Paduan playwright’s rich contribution by analyzing the protofeminist aspects of this early and highly original yet neglected play; second, to bring to light less well known but equally fascinating dramatic texts which seem to take their impetus, at least in part, from the Ruzantian model. My purpose, ultimately, is to reclaim Ruzante’s Anconitana as another ‘classic’ alongside the canonical Gl’ingannati . By the same token, I seek to highlight reasons more sophisticated than the traditional innamoramento for women’s crossdressing on the Renaissance stage, namely, the quest for an education and/or the acquisition of an inheritance.
Weaving the Crusades: Bodies of Interlace in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata
Authors: Combs-Schilling Jonathan
Published: April 2012

This essay attempts to complicate our understanding of Tasso’s Ariostan inheritance by advocating that interlace (the privileged structuring principle of romance, which reaches its apogee in Orlando furioso ) informs Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata . Through an examination of Erminia and her appropriation of the narrator’s power in cantos 6 and 7, I contend that, while the Liberata ’s narrator dissociates himself from the Ariostan poet-figure, this figure is recuperated by the bodies and thoughts of the Liberata ’s characters. Thus Tasso both embraces and radically transforms Ariosto’s model by representing interlace as an immanent textual force, as his characters are tasked with interlacing themselves.
La terra trema as Palimpsest: Tracing Intertextualities between Literature, Theater, and Film in Pirandello and Visconti
Authors: Giannini Stefano
Published: April 2012

At an advanced stage of the preparation of La terra trema (1948), Luchino Visconti incorporated elements of Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia into his film to change the original documentary nature of his masterpiece. But Verga’s novel was not the only stimulus of Visconti’s grandiose imagination. In fact, the social utopia that feeds Visconti’s dream is an element that cannot be inferred from I Malavoglia , a work that intentionally avoids conveying any message of social change. Instead, Visconti’s film can be read as a product of literary mediations that establish a hermeneutical process which examines the incessant bidirectional dialogue between literature and film. This process brings into play Luigi Pirandello’s La nuova colonia , born as an incomplete filmic subject. In my reading of it, Visconti’s La terra trema embodies the ideal completion of this unfinished filmic project.
Tasso’s Homeric Counterfactuals
Authors: Van der Laan Sarah
Published: April 2012

The Homeric counterfactual—“and now x would have happened, had not y intervened”—is instantly recognizable as one of the most distinctive narrative techniques of the Iliad and Odyssey . Reading Tasso’s counterfactuals against those of the Iliad reveals that Tasso adapts this technique to argue for a greatly reduced divine presence in human affairs; even where the outlines of those affairs are divinely willed, human activity plays a decisive role in shaping history. In the space they make for human agency within a triumphant divine providence, they play a role in Tasso’s Counter-Reformation argument for the necessity of free will.
Imagining Narrative in Tasso: Revisiting Erminia
Authors: Tylus Jane
Published: April 2012

Simile plays a far more fundamental role in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata than has generally been acknowledged, exemplary of what Tasso would refer to in his Discorsi del poema eroico 　 as the "parola pellegrina." "Imagining Narrative in Tasso" brings together one of the key similes of the poem – the comparison of the fleeing Erminia to a hunted deer at the end of Canto 6 - to the role of Erminia as a pellegrina . Like figurative language itself, Erminia mediates between the "real" world of the poem’s Crusade narrative and the allusive world of the poetic imagination, giving rise to the experience of maraviglia 　among the poem’s characters and readers alike. In this she is not unlike the narrator, who also defines himself as a peregrino errante in the Liberata ’s exordium.
A Good Place for a Tale: Reading the Decameron in 1358–1363
Authors: Clarke K. P.
Published: April 2012

This article presents a reading of Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Magliabechiano II, II, 8, the oldest surviving witness to Boccaccio’s Decameron , comprising the conclusions to Days I–IX, the ballate , Dioneo’s story in Dec. IX.10, as well as an opening compiler’s prologue. It argues that the manuscript represents a significant and valuable early “reading” of the Decameron , guiding the reader’s response in a series of rubricated headings, and responding to key features of compilatio that blur the boundaries between author, compiler and the figure of Dioneo.
The Invention of Personality in Valla’s De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione
Authors: Pfeiffer Douglas
Published: April 2012

The philological segment of Valla’s De falso that is the basis for most claims about the text’s innovative and distinctly modern character is only one part of the larger oration, which includes three invented speeches – mere fiction by modern historiographical standards. But by reading these speeches in light of the text’s other anthropocentric inventions – including “Palea” the forger and the author’s own first person ethos – we can better understand Valla’s reliance on the non-logical or indirect means of persuasion and in doing so, see both the formal coherence of Valla’s decision to link fabricated speeches with applied philology and the personality-informed model of textual interpretation that results.
Dead Souls: Leon Battista Alberti’s Anatomy of Humanism
Authors: Kircher Timothy
Published: April 2012

This article examines the meaning of death in a number of Alberti’s writings, in particular the Defunctus ( The Deceased ). While Eugenio Garin has discussed this theme in Alberti’s work, this article presents a different interpretation. The dead souls of the Defunctus , in their afterlife, provide Alberti with a means to critique the humanist revival of the ancients. Despite their immortality and erudition, these souls remain prone to self-deception. Alberti’s portrayals suggest that the contemporary studia humanitatis often impeded self-awareness and tranquility of mind. As such his thought offers a significant contribution to quattrocento humanism.
Fair Use: Articulating the Liberal Approach
Authors: Davis Anthony
Published: April 2012

Within the context of Cambridge University Press et al. v. Patton et al. , this article provides the rationale for the academic distribution of scholarly articles without requesting copyright permission or paying the corresponding fees. The fair use of scholarly articles is examined legally, historically, and in an economic context. This article builds upon the market failure model of fair use and fundamental models from economic anthropology to illuminate the underlying conflict between market and reciprocal economies. Fair use is presented as a limiter to market economy when, for socially sanctioned purposes, reciprocal economies yield greater utility to society.
Commercial Social Media and the Erosion of the Commons: Implications for Academic Libraries
Authors: Lilburn Jeff
Published: April 2012

Recent scholarship challenges the celebratory discourse surrounding Web 2.0. This paper engages with this scholarship to examine critically the implications of academic libraries’ presence within commercially owned social media spaces. It considers the apparent contradiction between work to promote the principles of open access and the idea of the commons, and engagement with commercial social media that may be contributing to the enclosure of the commons. It also examines whether the form of participation permitted within commercial social media sites may be limited and subordinating. The paper concludes with possible directions for further research and analysis.
What Liaisons Say about Themselves and What Faculty Say about Their Liaisons, a U.S. Survey
Authors: Arendt Julie , Lotts Megan
Published: April 2012

Liaison librarians and faculty in chemistry, English, and psychology departments at colleges and universities in the United States were surveyed. They answered questions about services provided by the liaison and satisfaction. Liaisons’ satisfaction with their performance was associated with active liaison service, such as recent contact with the department and more time spent on liaison work. Faculty satisfaction with liaisons was associated with contact with their liaisons. We did not find associations between liaisons’ descriptions of their work and faculty satisfaction with their liaisons for the pairs of faculty and their liaisons we were able to match.
New Academic Librarians and Their Perceptions of the Profession
Authors: Sare Laura , Bales Stephen , Neville Bruce
Published: April 2012

This study identifies developments relevant to new academic librarians’ perceptions of librarianship. Through use of the long interview and document analysis, the researchers developed a grounded theory consisting of six categories that weigh upon novice librarians’ perceptions of the profession: (1) deciding upon a career, (2) experiencing graduate school, (3) continuing education, (4) defining the work, (5) evaluating the work, and (6) (re)imagining the future. The categories are analyzed to theorize how perceptions shift from the decision to pursue a new career through the first few years of professional work, and these processes’ educational implications are considered.
McGill Library Makes E-books Portable: E-reader Loan Service in a Canadian Academic Library
Authors: Savova Maria , Garsia Matthew
Published: April 2012

E-readers are increasingly popular personal devices, but can they be effectively used for the needs of academic libraries’ clients? This paper employs an evidence-based approach that examines the role and efficacy of implementing an E-reader Loan Service at McGill University Library. Suggestions are offered as to what lending model and device features best meet client needs. Observations are made based on the lessons learned from active use. The paper also examines relevant issues, such as electronic formats, Digital Rights Management, and the role of e-readers as library technology that facilitates the ideals of mobile learning.
Consumer Preferences for Eco, Health and Fair Trade Labels. An Application to Seafood Product in France
Authors: Brécard Dorothée , Lucas Sterenn , Pichot Nathalie , Salladarré Frédéric
Published: April 2012

How are consumer attitudes towards eco-labeled products affected by a profusion of labels? This article provides both theoretical and empirical insight into this issue. Assuming that consumers perceive a label both as a sign of quality and of a particular characteristic of a product, we deduce theoretical determinants for preferences for three types of label: a health label, an eco-label and a fair trade label. We enrich this analysis by synthesizing most empirical determinants of eco-labeling demand mentioned in the literature. Using a French survey on seafood products, the estimation of a rank-ordered multinomial logit with random intercepts shows a certain proximity between the profiles of pro-eco-label and pro-fair trade label consumers, whereas pro-health label individuals have a more distinct profile: The two former are more likely to be young men mainly concerned with fishing conditions, whereas the latter are older married women with children who pay attention to the product form. We relate preferences for labels to degree of altruism, environmental consciousness and other socio-economic features.
Enhancement of DME Production in an Optimized Membrane Isothermal Fixed-Bed Reactor
Authors: Farsi Mohammad , Jahanmiri Abdolhossein
Published: April 2012

Dimethyl ether is a colorless gas at the ambient condition that is easily liquefied under light pressure. Currently, DME as a green fuel has been suggested as one of the most promising candidates for substitution of LPG and diesel fuel. In this paper, a water cooled membrane fixed bed reactor is proposed and modeled heterogeneously for large scale production of DME from methanol dehydration. The proposed reactor is modeled one-dimensionally based on mass and energy conservation laws at steady state condition. Also, the efficacy of the proposed membrane reactor is investigated and the results of the proposed reactor are compared with an isothermal and commercial adiabatic reactor. The simulation results of the proposed membrane reactor indicate that the methanol conversion is improved about 6.2 percent compared to the conventional industrial reactor. Also, water vapor removal from reaction zone in the membrane reactor yields lower water concentration over the catalyst pellets and higher quality of outlet product. These can lead to higher catalyst lifetime and lower cost in purification stage.
Mass Transport Properties of a Flow-Through Electrolytic Reactor Using Zinc Reduction System
Authors: Sulaymon Abbas H. , Zablouk Mumtaz A. , Sabri Anaam A. , Abbar Ali H.
Published: April 2012

An electrolytic process for the removal of Zn(II) from aqueous solution using a parallel amalgamated copper screens cathode operated in the flow through mode is proposed. The current-potential curves recorded at a rotating amalgamated copper disc electrode were used to determine diffusion coefficient of Zn(II). The performance of electrolytic reactor was investigated by using different flow rates at initial zinc ion concentration(48 mg/L). Taking into account the residential Zn(II) concentration, the best results were obtained for cathode potential of (-1.35 V vs. SCE) at flow rate (320 L/h). Zinc ion concentration was found to decrease from 48 mg/L to 1 mg/L during 120 min. of electrolysis. The experimental data are well correlated in term of Sherwood and Reynolds numbers based on the wire diameter of woven screen for characteristic length .Empirical correlation characterized the mass transport properties of the reactor is: Sh = 8.077 Re0.363.
Fe Containing ZSM-5 Zeolite as Catalyst for Wet Peroxide Oxidation of Orange II
Authors: Bolova Emre , Gunduz Gonul , Dukkanci Meral , Yilmaz Selahattin , Yaman Yadigar Ceyda
Published: April 2012

This study presents the catalytic performances of iron containing ZSM-5 zeolites, prepared by ion exchange or hydrothermal synthesis, in catalytic Fenton-like oxidation of Orange II in aqueous solution. The catalyst, ZSM-5 zeolite with Si/Al ratio of 42 loaded with iron by ion exchange, showed the highest activity. The decolorization of 99.7 percent, degradation of 87.0 percent and COD removal of 81.2 percent were achieved over this catalyst at an initial pH of 3.5. Incorporation of iron into ZSM-5 structure increased its catalytic activity. The hydrothermally prepared FeZSM-5 catalyst was more stable against leaching at low pH value due to the iron being in the framework.
Study on Pyrolysis Characteristics of Corn Straw
Authors: Li Zhengqi , Chen Zhichao , Liu Chunlong , Hu Zhiyong , Zhao Wei , Zhao Guangbo
Published: April 2012

Pyrolysis characteristics of corn straw samples (corn stalks skins, corn stalks cores, corn bracts and corn leaves) was performed using thermogravimetric analysis Three heating rates (20, 50 and 100 k min-1) were applied with a final temperature of 900°C. The maximum pyrolysis rates increased with the heating rate increasing and the temperature at the peak pyrolysis rate also increased. The activation energy and the temperature interval of pyrolysis for these samples had only slightly increasing at different heating rates. The one-step model was used to obtain the pre-exponential and the activation energy. Through calculating, we obtain the mass loss ratio curve. The three models have similar results. The one-step model is simpler and suitable for the simulation of the mass loss ratio curve.