bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Jewish Cultural Heritage in the USSR and after Its Collapse
Authors: Levin Vladimir
Published: February 2023

The article discusses the fate of tangible Jewish heritage (synagogues, ritual objects, museums, cemeteries) in the USSR and after its collapse. It demonstrates that during the interwar period, the Soviet state addressed Jewish heritage in a manner similar to that of other ethnic and religious groups. After WWII, the approach also was ambiguous: along with enormous destruction, there were cases of state protection and even restauration. After the collapse of the USSR, those post-Soviet countries that chose the “European way” (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) began to see Jewish monuments as part of their history and culture and to invest in their restoration. The rest of post-Soviet countries perceive Jewish monuments as “theirs,” belonging to Jews, who are entitled to deal with them, and not as an integral part of local history and culture that should be preserved for the benefit of the entire population.
Becoming Jews: The Petersburg Jewish University in the 1990s
Authors: Goldin Semion
Published: February 2023

The renaissance of Jewish activity in the last years of the Soviet Union manifested itself in the energetic creation of new structures and new ideologies. The history of the Petersburg Jewish University (PJU), an independent Jewish academic body that existed from 1989 to 1998, sheds light on the emergence of a renewed Jewish identity in the epoch of the late1980s-early 1990s. Late Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish activity inevitably was a continuation under new conditions of Soviet experiences and Soviet forms of life, side by side with the utopia of creating a new Jewish civilization and the vision of renewing of Jewish scholarly activities of the pre-1917 period. The successful professional careers in Judaic studies of some two dozen scholars, and the experience of hundreds of people connected to the university who acquired content for their nominal Jewishness, indicates the importance of the PJU project.
Antisemitism in Context: Three Recent Volumes
Authors: Volkov Shulamit
Published: February 2023

This chapter reviews three collections of essays on the history of antisemitism. The 19 essays in Antisemitism: Historical Concept, Public Discourse (2020) were written as responses to David Engel’s article of 2009, “Away from a Definition of Antisemitism: An Essay in the Semantics of Historical Description.” In it, Engel recapitulates his lingering frustration with the unclear nature of the term “antisemitism.” Meanwhile, the 17 essays in Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A Global History (2021) deal with the complex links among Jews, antisemites, and liberals, not only in Italy, Spain, and Vienna, but also in the United States, Turkey, the Middle East, and even the Caribbean. In Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (2021)—an alphabetical compendium beginning with anti-Judaism and ending with Zionism—the essays discuss emancipation, the Catholic church, nationalism, gender, orientalism, and postcolonialism.
Trueing
Authors: Andersen H. K.
Published: February 2023

Even in areas of philosophy of science that don’t involve formal treatments of truth, one’s background view of truth still centrally shapes views on other issues. I offer an informal way to think about truth as trueing, like trueing a bicycle wheel. This holist approach to truth provides a way to discuss knowledge products like models in terms of how well-trued they are to their target. Trueing emphasizes: the process by which models are brought into true; how the idealizations in models are not false but rather like spokes in appropriate tension to achieve a better-trued fit to target; and that this process is not accomplished once and done forever, but instead requires upkeep and ongoing fine-tuning. I conclude by emphasizing the social importance of being a pragmatist about truth in order to accurately answer questions about science such as, “but do we really know that…”
Pragmatism and the Challenge of Scientific (Dis)unification
Authors: Danks David
Published: February 2023

Pragmatist accounts of science are often thought to necessarily imply pluralism about science. This chapter examines the common belief that a pragmatist approach must lead to the conclusion that scientific theories cannot be unified in substantive ways. I first examine the grounds for this belief, and argue that the prima facie connection between pragmatism and (dis)unification holds only if we adopt a narrow view of the conditions under which scientific theories are actually unifiable. In particular, I contend that this apparent connection presupposes that unification requires intertheoretic reduction, but there are many other intertheoretic relations. If we broaden our understanding to allow for unifications based on mutual satisfaction of intertheoretic constraints, then the connection between pragmatism and disunification no longer holds. As a result, the pragmatist about science can have all of the scientific unification that they need, even if that unification falls short of the realist’s demands.
‘Not one of us…is able to speak more than a few words of the language’
Authors: Bensimon Fabrice
Published: February 2023

This chapter concerns the cultural and religious history of the migrants in this study. When they left Britain, British workers usually spoke only English; interpreters, however, were only available for a few engineers. The rest of the workers had to manage for themselves. By examining language, this chapter gauges British workers’ level of integration into their new local communities. Regardless of whether they learned to communicate in a new language, British workers came to continental Europe with their own culture and built new institutions to bolster their British identities. English-language newspapers were set up and British games and sports were practised on the Continent, including the establishment of long-lasting clubs from the 1870s onwards. Although ‘irreligion’ and the decline in churchgoing in the new industrial towns were widely denounced in Britain, most migrant workers who settled in Europe shared a Protestant culture. English schools were opened with clergymen as well as Anglican churches and Methodist chapels. This chapter also examines national representations of workers. Many stereotypes prevailed, for instance that the British were stronger and more hard-working than local workers (partly because they ate meat), or that they drank too much.
Analysing the Consequences of Institutional Reforms Using Country Pairs
Authors: Büthe Tim , Cheng Cindy
Published: February 2023

This chapter lays out the methodological rationale for the matched-country-pairs research design used to select the case studies that constitute the core of the empirical analysis of participation and influence in the governance of global finance and health. At the outset, we selected Brazil, India, and China (the BICs) because, collectively, they account for almost half of the world’s population. Their size (and their closely related ascendant power), however, also makes their experiences potentially highly atypical. To examine to what extent their experiences might apply to developing countries more generally, we used coarsened exact matching (CEM) to match each BIC country with a much smaller country in the same region that is otherwise maximally comparable. After discussing the promise and limits of CEM for case selection research more broadly, we detail how we used CEM to select Argentina–Brazil and Vietnam–China as matched pairs, as well as alternatively Bangladesh and the Philippines as counterparts for India.
India and the Philippines in Global Health Governance
Authors: Büthe Tim , Chaturvedi Sachin , Payoyo Peter B , Srinivas Krishna Ravi
Published: February 2023

This chapter explores the consequences of institutional reforms in global health governance. Specifically, it investigates and compares changes in the voice and influence of Indian and Philippine stakeholders—and assesses whether and to what extent these changes are attributable to recent institutional reforms undertaken by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the International Council for Harmonisation (ICH), and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria. For both India and the Philippines, the reforms have resulted in increased voice opportunities in global health governance; both also have increased their actual engagement and experienced real gains in influence. Increases in voice opportunities, engagement, and influence have been remarkably similar for the two countries (and almost entirely governmental), though often for different reasons. The chapter also highlights numerous differences in the consequences of institutional reforms across the four health governance institutions. It shows that understanding improvements in—and remaining impediments to—stakeholder participation for previously marginalized stakeholders in global health governance requires the analysis of domestic institutions and the domestic politics of health governance in interaction with institutional change and persistence at the global level.
Assessing Stakeholder Participation Reforms in Global Health Governance
Authors: Berman Ayelet , Pauwelyn Joost
Published: February 2023

Based on the comparative country case studies in this volume (Brazil and Argentina, China and Vietnam, India and the Philippines), this chapter assess whether and how the institutional reforms in global health institutions have improved the participation of marginalized developing countries and non-state actors in global health governance. We find that despite an overall trend of openness across all forms of global health governance, IOs are most inclusive of developing countries, followed by multi-stakeholder partnerships, and then by standard-setting bodies. We also find that notwithstanding the institutional opportunity to participate, stakeholder characteristics or preferences such as capacity, resources, or saliency play a critical role in determining whether and the extent to which stakeholders actually take advantage of their participation rights. They also explain variations in participation between large emerging economies and smaller developing countries.
What is ankylosing spondylitis?
Authors: Khan Muhammad Asim
Published: February 2023

Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is a chronic, slowly progressive, painful inflammatory arthritis, primarily affecting the sacroiliac joints and the spine, resulting in a gradually progressive stiffness of the back. Its prevalence varies world-wide and affects approximately 0.5% of the adult population of European descent. It typically starts during adolescence and early adulthood, affecting both males and females, and it is very uncommon for the symptoms to begin after age 45. The course of AS is highly variable and can be characterized by spontaneous remissions and exacerbations, particularly in early disease. The disease activity, however, generally persists for many decades, rarely entering a long-term remission. The disease in some patients may be relatively mild or stay limited to the sacroiliac (SI) joints and the lumbar spine. Many patients may not seek medical help, which combined with the insidious nature of AS, may preclude an early diagnosis. There is no cure yet for AS but most patients can be very well managed with current more effective medications, especially when the disease is diagnosed and treated early. One or more episodes of acute eye inflammation (acute anterior uveitis) can occur in approximately 30% of patients, and 6 to 10% have psoriasis, ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease. Much more effective treatments are also now available for all of these associated diseases.
What is the underlying cause? HLA-B27 and other disease-predisposing genes
Authors: Khan Muhammad Asim
Published: February 2023

Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is a non-infectious (non-contagious) arthritis with a strong genetic predisposition, best exemplified by its association with HLA-B27, a perfectly normal gene carried by a small percentage of the general population. But only a tiny minority (<5%) of the HLA-B27-positive people get AS or related forms of SpA. Moreover, possession of the HLA-B27 gene is not a prerequisite because people lacking this gene can also suffer from these diseases. Testing for HLA-B27 can be diagnostically useful but only if used in context with clinical, laboratory, and imaging (X-rays and MRI) findings. HLA-B27 provides approximately 20% of the total genetic risk and there are ~140 additional such genes or genetic variants; they all interact with each other and possibly with non-genetic (environmental) factors that include disruption of the gut microbiome, to result in disease. Increasingly better understanding of the causes of AS and related forms of SpA has already led to an increasing number of potential new and very effective therapies.
Radiology, MRI, and CT
Authors: Khan Muhammad Asim
Published: February 2023

Evidence of involvement of sacroiliac joints (sacroiliitis) is one of the hallmarks of AS, usually detected on obtaining the conventional anterior–posterior (AP) or angled (Ferguson’s) view of the pelvis, especially in patients with long-standing disease. However, such pelvic X-ray examinations can sometimes be normal or are difficult to interpret due to various reasons. This is particularly the case in patients being seen in very early stages of their disease. In this situation, a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan appears to be the method of choice for the early detection of sacroiliitis, and is radiation-free, although much more costly and unavailable in some parts of the world. Low dose computed tomography (CT) with minimal radiation has now been increasingly available that can better detect structural bone damage. Ultrasound examination with high-frequency color and power Doppler can be helpful for evaluating peripheral arthritis, tendinitis, and enthesitis. Ultrasonography can also be helpful in placing the needle to aspirate joint fluid or for joint injection.
Other causes of chronic back pain
Authors: Khan Muhammad Asim
Published: February 2023

AS/axSpA is an important but relatively an uncommon cause of highly prevalent chronic back pain and therefore is often overlooked by the primary healthcare providers. Fibromyalgia is a common undefined condition characterized by chronic widespread pain and is a challenge to diagnose and manage, especially when present along with AS/axSpA. These patients have emotional and sensory experience of chronic pain resembling that associated with tissue damage, and their symptoms persists even when there is objective evidence of resolution or control of AS/axSpA-related inflammation. Degenerative disc disease and osteoporosis are other common causes of back pain, especially in older populations. Osteomalacia and its childhood equivalent, called rickets, can be mistaken for AS/axSpA and fibromyalgia because it causes widespread pains, including back pain, fatigue, weakness, tenderness over bones, and it even show some resemblances with the X-ray imaging findings of AS/axSpA. It is easily treatable with vitamin D therapy. The spread of cancer to the pelvis and the spine, as well as some chronic spinal infections, can also present as back pain.
Management
Authors: Khan Muhammad Asim
Published: February 2023

There is currently no preventive measure or a curative treatment for AS, but in most people the disease can be very well managed. Early diagnosis and effective therapeutic interventions markedly improve the outcome. All patients should be provided with disease-specific written information, instructions, and illustrations in the form of handouts, books, or pamphlets, or as videos, audiotapes, and information about useful websites. There are many AS self-help and support groups that enlist enthusiastic patient cooperation, provide information about the disease and advice about life and health insurance, jobs, working environment, and other useful items. Patients should be advised to carry a “medical alert” card that contains a concise information about them, including their blood type, medication, and a list of allergies.
Non-traditional (complementary or alternative) therapy
Authors: Khan Muhammad Asim
Published: February 2023

Unlike conventional medicines, nutritional supplements and herbal preparations are not regulated by agencies such as the FDA. Some practitioners providing complementary medicine do not need to have a license or other proof of their competency to prescribe such remedies or procedures. People are therefore using many of these substances without any certainty about their precise composition, strength, and dose, and without scientifically valid proof of their safety or effectiveness. Subjects discussed in this chapter include elimination diets, probiotics, prebiotics, intermittent fasting, nutritional supplements, traditional Chinese medicine, meditational relaxation exercises, acupuncture, holistic medicine, chiropractic treatment, homeopathy, transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS), medicinal marijuana, and others. The efficacy and safety of acupuncture as a treatment of AS is not supported by the published data. Proper use of the Internet to obtain medical information is also discussed.
Disease course and effect on life span
Authors: Khan Muhammad Asim
Published: February 2023

The course of the disease is highly variable, and the spine does not always fuse completely as the disease may stay limited to the SI joints and the lower lumbar spine in some patients. Spinal structural damage seems to progress most rapidly when patients are 30–39 years of age. In women the spine fusion (ankylosis) tends to progress more slowly, and neck, anterior chest wall, and limb joint involvement may be the main or prominent manifestation. There is no cure yet for AS, but most patients can be very well managed with increasingly more effective medications and life-long programs of regular physical exercises. In general, most people do well and continue to live normal and productive lives, although some may have to modify their lifestyle or their work environment. There is a need for early disease detection, more effective anti-inflammatory treatment with biologics, as well management and prevention of comorbid conditions.
Democracy versus Republic
Authors: Allen Danielle
Published: February 2023

Many commentators have made the careful distinction that the United States is a “republic,” not a “democracy.” Drawing on a longstanding and ongoing debate about these terms, this essay contextualizes the presumed opposition between “republic” and “democracy” in Revolutionary-era writings by John Adams, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and other founders (including in particular lesser-read numbers of The Federalist Papers). As this evidence reveals, the problem was not so much whether to designate the new nation as a “democracy” or a “republic,” though this remains a widely held belief. Rather, the question was—and is—how to enact a commitment to a government where sovereignty resides in the people.
Equality
Authors: Wong Edlie
Published: February 2023

Equality has long served as the guiding principle for the American experiment, yet it remains one of the most elusive and contentious political concepts. The Fourteenth Amendment established the territory of one’s birth as the basis for political membership and, equally important, expanded the federal mandate of equal protection to the states. Facing discriminatory restrictions and exclusion, Chinese immigrants brought numerous test cases, including the landmark Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) that forced the federal judiciary to declare this mandate inclusive of all persons—even noncitizens. However, jurists in the era of Black disfranchisement and Jim Crow segregation enlisted the equal protection precedent set in Yick Wo to limit and even prevent racial equality until its reinterpretation by the modern Supreme Court. The essay charts how the Yick Wo case influenced the development of equal protection jurisprudence in profound yet largely unexplored ways.
Scale
Authors: Sanders James E.
Published: February 2023

In 1876 a Colombian politician noted, “There are not gatherings, nor meetings, nor discussions in which you do not hear … the word ‘Democracy.’” However, which “America” is meant by “American democracy”? How we understand American democracy critically relies on scale—geographic scale, societal class scale, and chronological scale. In the nineteenth century, Americans south of the United States came to insist their republics were the center of democratic innovation in world history. Visions of democracy also varied tremendously by social class; popular republicans imagined democracy differently than elites. Finally, democratic cultures waxed and waned over time across the Americas, with moments of democratic fervor (the 1860s to early 1870s) countermanded by periods of resistance to democracy (the late 1870s to 1890s). If we only examine one part of the Americas, or one social class, or one time period, we can too easily mask the complexities of historical actors’ lived experiences of democratic political culture.
Citizenship
Authors: Riley Padraig
Published: February 2023

Before the Fourteenth Amendment, there was no one clear rule about how one became an American citizen. In that space of confusion, citizenship became a battleground for competing visions of the American polity: nativists sought to limit foreign immigration and naturalization; slaveholders and their allies sought to build a white nationalist republic; and antislavery white people and Black abolitionists, in different ways, fought to establish birthright citizenship in the United States and protect Black political belonging. This essay traces debates over naturalization policy and Black citizenship before the Civil War, outlining the contested path of the early national citizenship regime as it veered from ideals of consensual membership to racist practices of exclusion.
The Town Hall Meeting
Authors: Gustafson Sandra M.
Published: February 2023

The philosopher John Dewey summed up the legacy of the New England town hall meeting for American democracy in his book The Public and Its Problems (1927). Dewey’s vision built on an influential nineteenth-century tradition—one including the historian George Bancroft and the philosopher John Stuart Mill—that understood American democracy as the outgrowth of the town hall meeting, and his work continues to resonate in twentieth- and twenty-first-century efforts to recast it for modern institutions and media. Importantly supplementing Dewey is the work of Reconstruction-era author and activist Albion Tourgée, who saw the town hall meeting as a means to achieve racial justice. Following Dewey and Tourgée’s discussions, and with reference to analogous elements of the Chautauqua system, this essay concludes by asking if a twenty-first-century town hall meeting system could be sustained with universities at the center and a university-to-society pipeline created to enhance graduate involvement in civic life.
Comfort
Authors: Sizemore Michelle
Published: February 2023

“Comfort” wasn’t always a private commodity vended by home improvement channels and design vlogs. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville argues that members of democratic societies are motivated by “comfort,” or modest material rewards, as opposed to “opulence” in aristocratic societies. Commentary over the following two decades—chiefly aimed at New York’s Lower East Side and Five Points—would shift the emphasis from comfort as a measure of material success to comfort as a measure of physical ease. In their crusades, reformers insisted that suitable living conditions for everyone are fundamental to the democratic project and advanced the aesthetics of amenity for an agreeable common mood. Drawing on the history and literature of mid-nineteenth-century housing reform, this essay conceives of comfort as a shared political sensibility essential to incremental activism, a sensibility with the potential to intervene in the housing crises of the twenty-first century.
Sham
Authors: Spires Derrick R.
Published: February 2023

This essay draws on nineteenth-century Black intellectuals to develop “sham” as a framework for understanding US democracy as a cultural and political phenomenon linked to the production and maintenance of white nationhood. It takes its key term “sham” from Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852) and Frances E. W. Harper’s readings of the US Constitution. Democracy, as they understood it, requires a cultural and material infrastructure that empowers people to engage in shaping their communities. They document how sham democracy uses formally democratic institutions to undermine democratic practices and to ensure that government is legitimate only when it reinforces white supremacy. “Sham” democracy describes a national pattern of protecting whiteness and property over equality and justice, where the “popular” in “popular sovereignty” is a code—a sham—for white supremacy and anti-democratic movements.
Neighbors
Authors: Rosenblum Nancy
Published: February 2023

This essay considers the democracy of everyday life among neighbors as the deep substrate of democracy in America. Using Henry David Thoreau as its theoretical touchstone, it explores the key elements of reciprocity, equality as neighbor, and “live and let live.” The essay clarifies that the “good neighbor” is a false ideal for democratic citizenship because such a conflation disregards the inequalities, conflicting interests, and ideologies that citizens bring to public life. When politics extends “all the way down” and deranges everyday life by creating mistrust, inciting betrayal, or condoning violence, democracy is diminished in a deeper way than exclusively political standards allow us to see. Ultimately, the democracy of everyday life is both a resource and an index of political catastrophe. Treating one another with respect as neighbors is available to us when our government and we as citizens have fallen into evil or just fallen off the rails.
The Creative Sense
Authors: Sadler-Smith Eugene
Published: February 2023

The main idea of this chapter is that intuition ‘senses’ whilst insight ‘sees’. Other differences between intuition and insight are discussed and illustrated with examples such as Archimedes’ fabled ‘Eureka’ moment and various ‘light-bulb’ moments from business. Close examination of the Standard Model of creativity reveals it to have five not four stages. The pivotal point in the model, as far as sensing is concerned, is ‘intimation’ (approximating to ‘creative intuition’). The role of unconscious thought in decision-making and creative thinking is explored. The example of the Mann Gulch fire illustrates how insight and intuition work together under straightened circumstances. Whether the idea of an ‘intuitive insight’ is an oxymoron is debated. If and how ‘holistic hunches’ should be used in business as a way of ‘exploring’ (as opposed to ‘exploiting’) is discussed. The vital role of creative intuition in ‘sensing’ direction and foreseeing in art, science, technology, and business is established, and evidence from extraordinary human achievement is cited as evidence.
Sentimental Values
Authors: Justin D’Arms , Daniel Jacobson
Published: February 2023

This chapter introduces the book’s central topic: the sentimental values. These values, which include the funny, the disgusting, and the shameful, are specific ways of being good or bad. They are basic and distinctive human values whose foundations like in pancultural, natural emotions. Sentimental values deserve more philosophical attention, in light of their centrality to human concerns. But they can conflict with other values, and with morality, in ways that moral philosophy struggles to accommodate. A theory of these values, rational sentimentalism, is summarized and the argument of the book outlined.
Sentimentalism
Authors: Justin D’Arms , Daniel Jacobson
Published: February 2023

The core idea of Humean sentimentalism is that values are essentially connected to emotional responses. This chapter addresses two challenges to this idea: the instability of affect and shadow skepticism. The instability of affect problem is that values are stable, but emotional responses vary in several respects. This problem can be addressed by invoking sentiments, understood as dispositions to emotional response. A joke can be funny by your lights because your sense of humor disposes you to amusement at it, even if it no longer amuses you. Shadow skepticism argues that the values with which emotions are concerned are either response-independent or insignificant. This chapter argues against shadow skepticism using the case of fear and danger. Dangerousness is best understood as equivalent to a response-dependent value: the fearsome.
The Motivational Theory of Emotion
Authors: Justin D’Arms , Daniel Jacobson
Published: February 2023

The natural emotions, including both “affect programs” like fear and anger and complex social emotions like envy and guilt, are explained as universal psychological kinds of motivational state. They arise in bouts involving distinctive goals and action tendencies that take control precedence, and they motivate actions that are discontinuous from practical rationality and sometimes conflict with it. The underlying nature of these emotions is revealed in familiar patterns of irrationality, including acting without thinking and emotional recalcitrance. A motivational theory of emotion is defended on the basis of its explanatory power. Objections to natural emotions from neuroscience and the constructivist approach are addressed. It is argued that an episodic approach to emotion also offers the best account of when a durable state should and should not be understood as emotional. Durable emotions should be attributed by their resemblance to emotional bouts and dispositions to them, and their tendency to produce behavior that is similarly discontinuous with practical rationality.
Pluralism and Moralism
Authors: Justin D’Arms , Daniel Jacobson
Published: February 2023

Philosophers often infer that an emotion is unfitting because it would be wrong to feel. That is the moralistic fallacy, and it is argued here that this inference and related forms of moralism confound evaluative judgment in both philosophical and ordinary thought. A plausible form of pluralism about sentimental values entails that they can conflict with one another, and with moral and ethical standards. One influential source of resistance to our claims from a neo-Aristotelian thought: that the virtuous person is the standard of both ethical and fitting emotional response. This approach is explored and shown to have implausible consequences. Moreover, it does not rescue the moralistic fallacy from error.
Memory and Mathematics in Tiṇṇai Schools
Authors: Senthil Babu D.
Published: February 2023

The third chapter is on Memory and Mathematics in the elementary tiṇṇai schools. These were the elementary schools in precolonial Indian society. Despite the social exclusivity of teaching and learning, the activities of production and measurement enabled familiarity with numbers through the training offered in these schools. This chapter uses nineteenth-century colonial records to study these elementary institutions of learning, where arithmetic pedagogy was central. The elementary manuals like the Eṇcuvaṭi tables also provide a complex and detailed picture of the nature of pedagogic practices in these institutions, whose orientation was not simply to impart arithmetic ability, but to also provide functional training in the arts of recollective memory as a crucial resource to cultivate ways with numbers.
Quality Regulation in Higher Education in Asia-Pacific
Authors: Hou Angela Yung Chi , Lu I-Jung Grace , Chen Karen Hui Jung , Guo Chao Yu
Published: February 2023

Currently, quality assurance (QA) and qualification frameworks (QF) are regarded as strong policy tools by Asian governments to either achieve specific educational goals, or to ensure quality of higher education in an either direct or an indirect manner. As QA is strongly connected to the local context, some QA agencies supported by Asian governments engage in the development of a national qualification framework and its implementation. The main purpose of this chapter is to explore the impacts of national regulations by Asian governments over higher education providers. First of all, it was found that Asian governments attempted to deregulate and corporatize universities under neoliberalism, but national states continue to play an influential role for quality control and regulation in higher education governance and management. Second, QA and a national qualification framework would likely lead to an isomorphism phenomenon of Asian higher education system.
Student Loans in Practice
Authors: Ziderman Adrian
Published: February 2023

This chapter examines and compares student loans schemes where present, in some 15 countries, in the Asian region. In particular, it draws on and updates the author’s earlier studies of loans schemes with the inclusion of India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Vietnam. Commonalities and differences across loans schemes in the region are examined. First, in terms of the rationale for their introduction and loan mechanisms employed, including funding sources, loan recipient selection and targeting, interest level charged, repayment schedules, loans subsidies, and repayment regimes—whether based on annual income (income contingent loans) or pre-fixed (mortgage type) repayments. This is followed by a scrutiny of outcomes, in terms of success and shortcomings in meeting stated financing and social objectives. Attention is paid to overall financial viability of schemes, the issue of student debt, and whether there is a “best practice” loans scheme suitable for the Asian context.
India
Authors: Jayal Niraja Gopal
Published: February 2023

This chapter maps the size, scale, and diversity of higher education in India, and offers a critical reading of its architecture of regulation and governance. It provides an overview of the multiple challenges of funding, governance, and quality facing public institutions of higher education: from the declining funding for research and infrastructure to the delinking of teaching and research; from homogenizing bureaucratic controls to the overweening role of government in university leadership appointments; from the erosion of academic freedom to the offer of academic autonomy for institutions that can raise their own funds and compete to be “world class”; and from the access provided by quotas for disadvantaged groups to everyday practices of discrimination. The chapter also discusses the mismatch between education and employability, and the politicization of higher education, reflected in the involvement of politicians as educational entrepreneurs but not as leaders invested in the raising of educational standards.
Indonesia
Authors: Logli Chiara , Wahyuni Hermin Indah
Published: February 2023

This chapter examines recent developments in Indonesian higher education. It focuses on the efforts to establish and maintain equity and quality as they intersect with the dynamics of massification, internationalization, and governance. The chapter also contextualizes Indonesia within South-East Asia, with comparative attention given to middle-income ASEAN countries. Each predicament is analyzed through relevant policies and datasets from both national and international agencies. Indonesia has managed to expand tertiary education with limited governmental funding, but forgoing equity and quality. Despite its extraordinary growth, Indonesian universities remain out of reach for most youth. Internationalization, pressures for remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the overrepresentation of students from Java, urban centers, and higher social classes pose some complications in the realm of equity. In addition, students who succeed in entering college often find questionable quality in teaching and research. The Indonesian higher educational system remains financially underfunded and bureaucratically centralized.
Philippine Higher Education
Authors: Bautista Maria Cynthia Rose , Paqueo Vicente , Orbeta Aniceto
Published: February 2023

This chapter traces in broad strokes the evolution of Philippine higher education—from a colonial cocoon of three centuries of Spanish rule (1565–1898) and half a century of American rule (1901–1946) to its expansion in the post-World War II decades, all the way to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Unequal access, uneven quality of education programs and institutions; a relatively underdeveloped research and innovation system; the position of Philippine universities in world university rankings as well as the current crisis of private education are among the issues highlighted in the chapter. The chapter concludes by arguing that complementarity between public and private providers is necessary for Philippine higher education’s transition to its “next normal” in the face of a disruptive future that is already here, of pandemics, climate change, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and political economic crises.
Gender in Higher Education in the Asia-Pacific Region
Authors: King Elizabeth M.
Published: February 2023

In the Asia-Pacific region, women’s enrollment in higher education has been growing rapidly and at a faster pace than men’s enrollment in most, but not all, countries. The chapter presents evidence on time trends, cross-country variation, and within-country inequalities. It also reviews the empirical studies that have examined why young women are enrolling in, and why young men are shying away from, higher education. Young women are also expanding into study programs typically dominated by men, except in specific STEM programs such as engineering and computer science which young men choose in much larger numbers than women do. Despite the large and growing number of women with higher education degrees, however, women comprise a small proportion of high-level academic and research positions in many countries.
Liberal Arts and Sciences Education for the Twenty-First Century in Asia
Authors: Nishimura Mikiko
Published: February 2023

This chapter presents an overview of the core values of liberal arts and sciences education in Asia and the Pacific, with some examples of recent programs and innovations, and the challenges and transformations deemed necessary in the twenty-first century. Given the hyper-knowledge economy and the high-speed, cross-border mobility of ideas and services in our globalized world, liberal educational imperatives of critical thinking, creativity, and civic engagement have become part of the practical needs of the labor market in Asia and beyond. Nevertheless, there still exists some misinterpretation on its definitions and modalities. For higher education institutions (HEIs) to fully embrace the idea of liberal education or liberal arts and sciences education, they need to go beyond the technocratic, market-oriented, or political approach, and to embrace more philosophically and socially guided ideals for future generations with a vision for and rigor in what we mean by “liberal” learning.
The Ergonomics of Stone Tool Use and Production
Authors: Key Alastair , Lycett Stephen J.
Published: February 2023

The field of ergonomics studies how the human body interacts with its physical environment. Often there is a focus on hand-held tools. In the case of hominin artifacts, factors relating to ergonomics may influence their design and form, ultimately increasing effectiveness, safety, and ease of use. Although often alluded to in the literature, it is only recently that research has begun to investigate explicitly how ergonomic factors may have influenced the behavior of early humans and, in turn, the pattern of the Palaeolithic archaeological record. This chapter reviews the current understanding of how hominins (or more precisely, their anatomy) interacted with stone tools of different sizes, shapes, and types. Stone tool use and production are considered separately, because although both interact with the hominin upper limb, they invoke distinct durational and magnitudinal demands. It is demonstrated that different muscular and skeletal stresses likely influenced the design of stone tool artifacts throughout the Palaeolithic. Equally, the shape and size of stone tools can impact how the hand, and upper limb more widely, are recruited during use, and how this may have placed evolutionary demands on hominin anatomy. Accordingly, the final section of this chapter considers how over the long-term course of human evolution, lithic technology potentially interacted with both cultural evolutionary forces and biological evolutionary forces. Ultimately, the inception of stone tool technology may have played a particular role in the eventual pathway of human evolution through gene–culture co-evolution. Ergonomic issues are revealed to have likely influenced both hominin anatomy and patterns of stone tool technology through the Palaeolithic.
The Role of the “Social Investment” Concept for the Development of Family Policy
Authors: Saraceno Chiara
Published: February 2023

The chapter has its main focus on the ways in which the welfare states have used the social investment concept to reframe the family and gender arrangements that are supported and expected by family policies, and of the role of family policies within the social policies package. The analytical framework of the paper relates to the approach of Béland (2009), according to which ideas are an important component in the identification and construction of social problems that enter the policy agenda. The author concludes from the analysis that the diversity of functions and policy instruments envisaged by the social investment approach offers policy advocacy and policymakers the possibility to adapt selectively the social investment discourse. The chapter also argues that the possible tensions between the expectations concerning good mothering and those concerning the “adult worker” model are likely to be strengthened.
Cohabitation through the Life Course
Authors: Thomson Elizabeth
Published: February 2023

Since the middle of the 20th century, nonmarital cohabitation has steadily increased in many, if not most, affluent countries. This chapter traces temporal shifts and cross-national variation in cohabitation throughout the life course. It is divided into four sections: first unions (cohabitation or marriage and the transformation of cohabiting unions into marriage); the union context of first births, including mid-pregnancy cohabitation and marriage; union dissolution, including separation from cohabitation and divorce, both prior to and after a first child’s birth; and links between cohabitation and repartnering, including repeat cohabitation and the formation of stepfamilies, both during the childbearing years and in late life. The chapter focuses on cohabitation in Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries, but notes alternative forms of cohabitation and emerging trends in other societal contexts.
The Comparative Stability of Cohabitation versus Marriage
Authors: DeRose Laurie
Published: February 2023

This chapter examines the relative stability of cohabitation and marriage for both adults and children, using the 2017 World Family Map report and other research. Although cohabitations are, on average, less stable than marriages, the author highlights that a select subset of cohabitations are just as stable as marriages in some contexts. However, only a small share of cohabiting adults—and an even smaller share of children—experience the personal and societal conditions under which cohabitation has marriage-like stability. There is much variation between countries in the amount of family instability people experience, but few exceptions to the generalization that children born to marital unions have the best chance of stability across cultures, legal systems, welfare regimes, and levels of cohabitation.
Childcare by Fathers in the Context of Active Father-Oriented Policies
Authors: Eydal Guðný Björk , Rostgaard Tine
Published: February 2023

Around the world there is increasing interest in men’s contribution to parenting and caregiving, both as a way to address the lack of equitable distribution in unpaid care work and in recognition of caregiving as a natural part of men’s lives. Men as fathers have been the focus in the last decades of much academic research and of new policy initiatives, including reforms of the parental leave systems which favor a more gender-equal division of leave. This chapter investigates how the development of leaves for fathers supports the involvement of fathers in childcare. The chapter first discusses the political and cultural factors that have contributed to the increasing interest in active fatherhood, before showing how the Nordic region has been the pioneer in introducing parental leave and the father’s quota. Outcomes of fathers’ leave rights are presented on the basis of two outcome indicators: fathers’ time use and their take-up of parental leave. The authors apply data from the OECD Family Database, supplemented with data from the International Network on Leave Policy and Research. The findings show that mothers still provide the lion’s share of parental care, but there are clear signs that fathers are carving out a larger space for caring for their children. The authors argue that the individual right to parental leave, a reasonable compensation level for the leave benefits, and, in particular, the father’s quota are all effective policy instruments that contribute to active fatherhood.
Changing Families in Europe
Authors: Naldini Manuela
Published: February 2023

Tracing the transformations in European family life from historical and comparative perspectives, Manuela Naldini distinguishes the patterns of change among five groups of countries: Scandinavian, English-speaking, Continental Europe, Mediterranean, and Central-Eastern Europe. These clusters represent not only different geographical regions, but alternative gender and welfare regimes as well. Naldini’s analysis of the trends and patterns from the 1960s to the present illustrates the lines of convergence and divergence among these regions in the changing dimensions of family life. These dimensions include rates of marriage, cohabitation, divorce and out-of-wedlock births, increasing labor force participation of women, norms governing sexual relations, “new family” forms, and revised timing of basic stages (marriage, childbirth, leaving home) in the family life cycle. She finds a number of common patterns among the countries, such as low fertility rates, increasing pluralization of family life, and later transitions from the parental home. At the same time, much diversity remains in family arrangements, such as the introduction of marriage equality.
Family Policies in Long-Term Perspective
Authors: Bahle Thomas
Published: February 2023

Surveying the historical development of family policies from a cross-national perspective, Thomas Bahle distinguishes three main stages during which various measures emerged in response to family-related problems that arose in the process of modernization. Initially the main instrument of family policies involved family allowances supported by nationalist, pro-natalist movements. The second stage emerged as women entered the industrial labor force in large numbers. Measures such as childcare and family leave aimed to harmonize work and family life, as the dual-earner family model replaced the male breadwinner model. Bahle sees the third stage developing in response to the pluralization of family life and the changing patterns of the individual life course, which includes the timing of marriage, education, childbearing, and retirement. He suggests that as the third stage evolves, family policies will focus more on individuals in families than on specific types of families.