bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Disney Chorus
Authors: Camp Gregory
Published: May 2024

Throughout its history, the Walt Disney Company has foregrounded community singing as part of its construction of American cultural identity across its film, television, and theme park texts, while at the same time acting as an important disseminator of music for community consumption. The studio’s 1950s films and television shows, such as Davy Crockett, The Mickey Mouse Club, and The Light in the Forest, present community singing, often of simulated folksongs (or “fakesongs”), as an important part of American life in both the idealized present and the constructed past. The Mickey Mouse Club even encouraged children to sing along from their own homes. From the founding of Disneyland in 1955 to the present international expansion of the theme parks, Disney’s attractions, shows, and parades have asked park-goers to join with each other and with professional performers, real and audio-animatronic, in singing traditional American songs as well as newly composed music. By enabling and encouraging community singing based on its own musical products, Disney has since the 1950s cemented its centrality in American cultural life. The company has long given its consumers a literal voice in their use of its products as it taps into their desire for nostalgia, tradition, and shared identity.
Border Transgressions
Authors: Amrein Emilie , de Quadros André
Published: May 2024

Eurocentric choral practice represents a small slice of the 70,000-year-old phenomenon of communal singing, yet it dominates in the imagination of singing communities. This narrow paradigm of group singing persists within a series of interlocking ideologies—settler colonialism, racialized capitalism, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy—that continue to cause harm to individuals and communities around the world. This chapter argues, therefore, that choral music’s white racial frame impoverishes the power and potential of choral musicking in the Western world. In this chapter, the authors present exemplars and experiences of community singing that depart from typical choral activity, arguing that when the performative is displaced in favor of the participatory, and the stage is replaced by communal spaces, the possibilities for expressive and empowering practice can be greater. They detail narrative work behind walls and borders, real and metaphoric, disciplinary and interdisciplinary, and geographic/demographic. Their narratives traverse communal practice in Islam, in prisons and detention centers, and with forced migrants on the Mexico–US border.
March for the Beloved
Authors: Ha Jarryn
Published: May 2024

“Imŭl Wihan Haengjingok” (March for the Beloved) is a South Korean protest song that has defined the soundscape of demonstrations since the early 1980s. The song’s lyrics speak in the voice of martyred activists of the past that now “awake and … roar” as they urge the living to follow their lead in a shared political cause, even toward possible martyrdom. The song establishes a connection between activists of the past and those of today, building upon the kut tradition, or community-centered shamanistic rituals to appease ancestors and other spirits. By singing this and other anthems that date back to the 1980s peak of the democratic movement against authoritarianism, today’s South Korean protesters not only claim heirship to a political tradition, but also partake in a mass experience that connects them to their fallen comrades and predecessors. The communal singing of this and other songs serves both as a tribute to the dead and as a community-building, legitimizing experience for the living.
“Cielito Lindo” or “Son de la Negra”?
Authors: Flores Cameo
Published: May 2024

During the Trump presidency (2016–2020), immigration enforcement and policies focused on immigrants coming through the US–Mexico border. President Donald Trump focused his rhetoric on Mexican immigrants, and many US citizens followed suit, describing all immigrants as Mexican. While anti-Trump protestors took to the streets to stand up to his new anti-immigrant policies, the Latinx community sang “Cielito Lindo” and “Son de la Negra” to reclaim mariachi as cultural identity in the face of anti-immigrant sentiment. Utilizing singing as an expression of collective Latin American identity confirmation and solidarity, “Cielito Lindo” and “Son de la Negra” became aural signifiers of latinidad. This chapter outlines how mariachi became a cultural symbol of mexicanidad and subsequently latinidad, discusses the homogenization of immigrant culture under “latinidad” as a result of Trump administration rhetoric, and situates “Cielito Lindo” and “Son de la Negra” as songs in which a collective community expresses latinidad solidarity through singing in the face of anti-immigration policies.
Community Singing, the Church of England, and Spirituality
Authors: Boyce-Tillman June
Published: May 2024

The theoretical background of this chapter is cross-disciplinary, drawing on musicology, music well-being, community arts, spirituality, philosophy, theology, and sociology. The focus of the research is to explore aspects of the congregational singing tradition in the Church of England since the Reformation and how those practices are related to spirituality and eudaimonia/well-being in its aspiration for people to live a godly, righteous, and sober life. This chapter includes a review of the history and the literature, identifying themes that are found in the literature on well-being and congregational singing. The author examines the nature of the liminal/spiritual experience in congregational singing and its transformative properties in the church and everyday life, and interrogates this using a eudaimonic frame in a phenomenography of the musical experience that includes materials (relationship with the body), expression (relationship with the feeling world), construction (relationship with the mind), and values (relationship with the social), within the larger domain of the spiritual/liminal (the cosmic). The author looks at the nature of exclusivity and inclusivity in congregational singing and examines who was/is allowed to sing, the nature of the songs, and the singing style that has developed. Finally, the author considers the ways contemporary liturgical developments have challenged the sacred site of communal singing in church, especially the role of the development of technology in this process. It will also raise questions around congregational singing post-pandemic.
Virtual Choirs and Issues of Community Choral Practice
Authors: Bendall Cole
Published: May 2024

Technological developments in recent years have enabled a wider public access to the tools required to create, edit, collaborate on, and distribute audio-visual media—a phase documented in the rise of online video and social media platforms. In light of the coronavirus pandemic, many vocal ensembles took to producing online content as a replacement for their typical series of meetings, rehearsals, and concerts. The phenomenon of the virtual choir is by no means new, with similar projects taking place since the early 2010s. Singers, vocal groups, and choirs are participating in these projects with greater frequency—and, for some, urgency.

This chapter proposes that virtual choirs present new modes of musical practice and group identity in online communities that differ from pre-existing modes of synchronous choral practice. A short history of the virtual choir is theorized as a progression from the development of multi-tracking to the modern ubiquitous presence of technology. The author reflects on his practice as a choral director using virtual choirs and offer suggestions on the ways in which the use of the virtual choir may prove an effective pedagogical tool. Finally, varied examples of virtual choirs are presented that illustrate the potential for mass participation and collaboration beyond typical physical boundaries.
Land Politics and Human Mobilities
Authors: Otsuki Kei , Zoomers Annelies
Published: May 2024

Debates on land politics and migration conventionally focus on fixing people to a particular space by regularizing land tenure, containing migrants within a territory, and enforcing boundaries against outsiders. Little attention has been paid to how land politics shapes migration and how mobilities influence land use and access to land. This chapter establishes the land-mobility nexus as an analytical lens to fill the gaps. Land politics and investments induce displacement, resettlement, and urbanization, further generating mobilities. Migration politics induces land acquisitions for refugee and labor camps and influences the ways that migrants invest in rebuilding livelihoods in new places or in their homelands. Drawing from literature and empirical examples, the chapter advocates a translocal approach to engage with the land-mobility nexus and a perspective that migrants and nonmigrants are agents of development as investors and placemakers. A people-as-agents perspective is increasingly pertinent as climate change and its politics affect the land-mobility nexus, forcing people to move and to make new land investments, often in multiple locations. The chapter argues that land, migration, and climate politics should jointly support people’s ongoing place-making practices.
Heterogeneity of Agrarian Transformation in Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia
Authors: Herzfeld Thomas
Published: May 2024

This chapter reviews the progress of the agrarian transformation in Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia. It highlights similarities and differences by describing the performance of the agricultural sector in these economies with respect to output and productivity development and discussing land and other reforms. The agrarian transformation across the thirty countries in these regions reveals increasing heterogeneity. Decollectivization and land reform resulted in a sharp reduction of agricultural employment in some countries. In contrast, subsistence agriculture and increased engagement in agriculture served as a livelihood strategy in several others. In most of the countries that joined the European Union since the early 2000s, agriculture is currently a small sector, characterized by highly productive commercial farms. In stark contrast stand the agricultural sectors of Belarus, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, where state involvement is still high. Either state-led price formation or the restructuring of farms are signs of this involvement. Any outlook on further agrarian transformation depends on the direction of future political and economic reforms. The agricultural producers and markets in the group of countries that are aiming at EU accession face enormous challenges. Farmers and enterprises will most likely be pressured to further increase productivity, resulting in an accelerated structural change.
Performing Piety
Authors: Hart Kimberly
Published: May 2024

This chapter introduces Sunni piety in rural life in western Turkey. Based on ethnographic research in villages in the mountainous region north of Manisa, this chapter explores dimensions of piety, including how the state construction of Sunni Islam through the Diyanet is experienced in villages. The people in these places have diverse relationships to formal and informal practices, led by men and women. Formal practices are contained in the mosque and also include Islamic education for children. Less clarified by the government and therefore more informal practices include good deeds, the veneration of holy men, and celebrations for religious holidays. The chapter finishes with how empathy and compassion are defined in rural places and taken to urban ones through animal-human relationships. Rural life has undergone rapid transformation in the last ten years, as the villagers described here have shifted their lives and religious practice towards the city. Therefore, accounts in this chapter are historic remnants of rural Islam.
Machine Learning and Large-scale Data for Understanding Urban Inequality
Authors: Candipan Jennifer , Tollefson Jonathan
Published: May 2024

Advances in machine learning and the proliferation of big data are shifting how sociologists understand urban inequality and governance. This chapter outlines how scholars in recent years have paired increasingly advanced predictive analytic tools with new sources of urban data to expand a sociological understanding of cities. The chapter focuses on four thematic areas in the sociological study of cities: (a) urban mobility, (b) neighborhood inequality and change, (c) urban form and function, and (d) predictive modeling for urban governance. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ethics and potential pitfalls of machine learning and big data applications in an urban context. Taking a mindful approach to computational urban scholarship, this chapter argues that despite the noted challenges that ML raises, the recent innovations in machine learning in tandem with growing availability of novel real-time data have the potential to push forward the field of urban scholarship in fruitful ways. This opens the door for new multidisciplinary and multi-method collaborations that expand sociological understandings of the city.
Quality Control for Quality Computational Concepts
Authors: Yung Vincent , Colyvas Jeannette A. , Hwang Hokyu
Published: May 2024

Sociologists encounter digitized data in all aspects of social life, albeit data of indefinite quality. This chapter asks, “How might scholars use the process of inspecting and cleaning such data as an occasion to advance social theory?” It draws on Art Stinchcombe’s theory of formality to demonstrate how the craft of data wrangling can be used to assess and improve the quality of concepts. Drawing on examples from contemporary computational social science, it shows how the cognitive adequacy, communicability, and improvability of conceptual abstractions can be developed and refined in the data wrangling process. Using Stinchcombe to highlight the link between theorizing and the organizational and institutional systems in which such theorizing is embedded, the chapter argues that the systems that affect the quality of data simultaneously affect the quality of concepts. Inspired by AI oversight research, the chapter provides a roadmap for evaluating the systems involved in computational abstractions.
Complex Adaptive Supply Chain Management
Authors: Massari Giovanni F. , Giannoccaro Ilaria
Published: May 2024

Supply chain conceptualizations have been oversimplified through linear systems made up of sequential dyadic relationships between vertically specialized firms. This view fails to capture the complex patterns of interdependencies that instead characterize modern supply chains, preventing managers from properly understanding the underlying structure of their supply chains and the design of the most effective coordination mechanisms. We investigate this issue through the theoretical lens of complex adaptive systems. The supply chain is conceptualized as a complex adaptive ecosystem where autonomous firms belonging to value chains originally separated coevolve over time by changing their individual behaviours while carrying out interdependent activities and interacting with each other, fostered by common goals. The archetypes of linear chains, networks, intertwined networks, closed-loop chains, and circular chains are conceptualized by means of different patterns of interdependencies, defined by the number and distribution of interdependent activities within the system. The presence of interdependencies limits the decision-making autonomy of the single firms and requires them working together through collaborative relationships. The latter in fact permit the mutual exchange of information for common benefits. A simple, yet insightful, agent-based model is then developed to investigate the effectiveness of three information-sharing mechanisms: those developing through vertical, horizontal, and lateral collaborative relationships, across the different supply chain structures. The generalized NKC fitness framework is adopted to model the complex patterns of interdependencies. The results of simulations permit us to draw theoretical and practical contributions.
Africa’s Geoeconomics and Economic Statecraft
Authors: Heto Paa-Kwesi
Published: May 2024

Africa is deeply integrated into the international system. Yet many metrics show that it plays only a minimal role within the system. Consequently, many Africanists conclude that African states lack the wherewithal to influence the international system. This chapter challenges this view, showing how African actors use economic tools to shape the international system and advance geopolitical goals within and beyond their continent. It starts by reviewing the political and economic debates on the continent, goes on to elaborate on Africa’s geoeconomics at the international, continental, and sub-regional levels, then focus on economic statecraft at the national level. Finally, it discusses Africa’s relationship with China, the European Union, Russia, and the United States. The last section argues that the US and Russia view their engagement with Africa through a geopolitical lens. However, Western Europe and China adopt a geoeconomics approach when dealing with Africans.
Judicial Independence
Authors: Schwartz Alex , Lee H.P.
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the constitutional protection of judicial independence throughout Asia with a particular focus on how judicial independence can be undermined despite relevant constitutional safeguards. The chapter presents several examples from the region to illustrate two important themes. The first theme is that a seemingly strong package of constitutional protections for judicial independence can be defeated through a single vulnerability. Important vulnerabilities in judicial independence range from executive influence on judicial appointments to the political deployment of impeachment mechanisms. The second theme is that weaknesses of this kind may only become apparent under certain political conditions. As the examples canvassed here demonstrate, judicial independence often fails not because it lacks formal constitutional protections but rather because those protections are easily circumvented in practice. The chapter then turns to an empirical evaluation of the varying levels of constitutional protection for judicial independence across Asia, showing that nearly every constitution within the scope of this Handbook displays at least one obvious vulnerability.
Music
Authors: Moore Jane
Published: May 2024

‘Music’, writes Thomas De Quincey, ‘is an intellectual or a sensual pleasure, according to the temperament of him who hears it.’ This chapter attends to writing about music in the Romantic period, from the growing print subculture of journalism and reviewing, notably of classical music and the opera, to sociable music-making such as musician Vincent Novello’s ‘exquisite evenings of Mozartian … music’ attended by such notables as John Keats, Leigh Hunt, the Lambs, and the Shelleys, through to the manner in which Romantic writers such as De Quincey, William Hazlitt, and Felicia Hemans engaged imaginatively and intellectually with music, virtuosity, and performance. It demonstrates how Hunt straddles reviewing culture with theorizing, seeing for instance, a ‘union’ of ‘passion and feeling’ with ‘science’ as ‘consti[tuting] the style of Mozart and the other great German composers’. Music, in this interpretation, is, in Charles Lamb’s phrase, an ‘alembic strain’, a spark to fire the imagination.
Natural Science
Authors: Heringman Noah
Published: May 2024

This chapter shows how science writing originated as a part of scientific practice, pursued self-consciously by scientists in many disciplines as a way of integrating their new specializations into a long and distinguished history. The chapter argues that historical narrative, especially of the heroic kind, is crucial to science writing in the Romantic period because it legitimates the disciplinary changes occurring during the ‘second scientific revolution’, codified in the transformation of ‘naturalists’ and ‘philosophers’ into ‘scientists’ at the end of the period. Evidence is drawn from the experimental practice, historical and theoretical writing, reception, and institutional affiliations of Erasmus Darwin, Mary Somerville, Humphry Davy, Charles Lyell, and William Whewell, with historiographic considerations also based on the writings of Whewell as well as those of Thomas Carlyle.
Philosophy
Authors: Warren Andrew
Published: May 2024

No canon of English literature is more deeply invested in philosophy than Romanticism. And yet so many of its most vital writers—looking abroad, or to the past, or into their own systems—considered Romantic-era Britain more like a philosophical desert, what William Drummond called ‘a mercantile nation’ with a ‘general distaste … for all speculative and metaphysical reasoning’. What then, beyond the specific work of a few key figures (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, &c.) was British philosophy ‘doing’ in the Romantic era? This chapter proposes a quiet thesis: that central to the age’s philosophy, perhaps like never before, was a problematizing of relations. The age is one of spreading, entangling, shifting relations—a lived experience reflected, theorized, contested, and sublimated in the times’ philosophies. Perhaps what is most remarkable about British Romantic philosophy is not any particular revolution, advance, or creation, but the broad-scale shifts and tremors operating beneath it that opened it up to novel crossdisciplinarity and future thought.
Voyaging in the Pacific
Authors: Coleman Deirdre
Published: May 2024

Voyage literature enjoyed immense popularity in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, second only to fiction in selling power. This chapter examines three voyages to the Pacific published in London by John Hawkesworth (1773), George Keate (1788), and John Martin (1817). These were not authors but professional literary men who edited, rearranged, compiled, and often embellished the journals, logbooks, and charts of the original travellers. My aim is to see how each of these editors produced the experience of voyaging textually for metropolitan audiences. Generically, many problems and questions surrounded these works. Were they merely fictions composed of lying, impersonating, and ventriloquizing, or were they superior works precisely because they were not novels? Did these editors prompt their readers to consider the impact of Europeans on the local cultures and identities of Pacific nations? Finally, how far was Britishness the norm by which Pacific cultures were measured?
Regionalism
Authors: Lawrenson Sonja
Published: May 2024

Ireland entered the Romantic period in the whirl of a paper war that would soon escalate into a brutal military conflict with profound consequences. Indeed, the failed rebellion of 1798 and the subsequent Act of Union transformed Ireland’s political and economic landscape. Not only forced to confront the political fallout of the previous turbulent decade, Irish print culture also suffered a significant decline with the extension of British copyright law to Ireland. Nevertheless, the early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the development of alternative networks of publishers, authors, and audiences across Ireland and beyond. Whether publishing in an established London press or in an eclectic Irish periodical, Irish prose writers explored Ireland’s new constitutional position from a range of perspectives and in a variety of modes. This chapter charts the various means by which Irish Romantic prose sought to reconceptualize Ireland’s cultural cartography, both in historical and geo-political terms.
Rhetoric
Authors: Solomonescu Yasmin
Published: May 2024

This chapter revises master narratives of the demise, adaptation, or transformation of rhetoric during the Romantic period to show how the range of present-day definitions—from language used for purposes of persuasion to the endlessly ramifying character of modern discourse—have important antecedents in Romantic prose. In essays and treatises by, among others, Joseph Priestley, George Campbell, John Thelwall, Thomas De Quincey, and William Hazlitt, and especially in conflicting opinions about the prose of Edmund Burke, we see how debates about the concept of rhetoric became as much a defining feature of the period’s writing as a diversified recourse to rhetoric itself. We also see how, amid a widespread emphasis on rationality and perspicuity, Hazlitt stands out. In his theory and practice of perspective-shifting, rhetoric becomes bound up with antifoundational ideas about truth and language well before the modernist advent of ‘rhetoricality’ with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Slavery
Authors: Bohls Elizabeth
Published: May 2024

The national debate over slavery and the slave trade spanned the Romantic era, fought in nonfiction genres: pamphlets, periodical essays, autobiographical narratives, travel writing, and colonial history. Antislavery polemics projected an imaginary geography, contrasting a pastoral Africa with depraved sugar colonies; some presented first-hand colonial experience. Slavery’s defenders, conversely, painted Africa as a hellhole and the slave trade as ‘rescue’. Planter-historian Bryan Edwards interviewed captives on his plantation, seeking evidence of African savagery, and narrated the Haitian Revolution as a cautionary tale. Politicized travel writing supported each side, though some, like Mungo Park’s African travels, took no overt stance. Black autobiographers supported antislavery activism, offering first-hand experience of the Middle Passage and enslaved life. The push to abolish the slave trade succeeded in 1807; a second wave of activism, starting in 1823, generated more prose polemics and helped to achieve British emancipation in 1833.
Autobiography
Authors: Balfour Ian
Published: May 2024

Autobiography is a precarious genre as it consists in principle of works by and about an individual and yet an autobiography could only be ‘generic’ if the life and the text shared numerous experiences and dynamics with those of others. Many autobiographies entail a complicated dialectic of individual and general, including the possibility of readers identifying with the authors and their lives. This chapter addresses prominent (even some bestselling) autobiographies by Romantic writers at a time when the genre or mode flourished: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oladuah Equiano, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Harriette Wilson. Attention is paid to the discursive shaping of lives that risk having no particular shape, focusing on conversion and moments forcing self-reflection (such as theft in the era of childhood). The projects of these autobiographies are fraught with difficulties of articulation, given the vagaries of memory, the force of narcissism, and the uncertainties of self-reflection.
The Levant
Authors: Minta Stephen
Published: May 2024

The chapter takes, as its geographical heart, the shores of the Mediterranean. The term ‘Romantic Levant’ has been applied to countries as far east as Syria, Persia, the Holy Land, and Afghanistan, but the idea of the Levant as constituted by the Eastern Mediterranean is well established in critical writing of the twenty-first century, as it was in earlier times: ‘the Word [Levant] is generally restrain’d to the Mediterranean Sea’ (Chambers Cyclopaedia, 1728). In the Romantic tradition, the Levant held a promise of diversity that would allow the traveller to escape what Philip Mansel calls ‘the prisons of nationality and religion’. The chapter looks at a variety of travellers, with a variety of motives, commercial, military, or simply personal. The list of travellers includes Lord Byron, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Hester Stanhope, Edward Daniel Clarke, Elizabeth Lady Craven, John Galt, and Thomas Hope.
Fine Arts
Authors: Bailey Quentin
Published: May 2024

This chapter argues that the Fine Arts served, in the Romantic period, as a proxy for conversations about class and politics. Whether the subject was the taste of the King and Prince Regent, government expenditure on military statues, or daytrips to Hampton Court by members of the newly emergent middle classes, essayists and pamphleteers regularly discussed the relationship between the arts, the ruling classes, and national values. The tensions that emerged in these debates—between those who sought to link the fine arts to monarchical or aristocratic culture and those who championed republican or democratic ideals—shaped much of the art criticism in the period, from the patriotic appeals of Benjamin Robert Haydon to the searing invectives of William Hazlitt, who found in the purchase of the Parthenon Marbles from Lord Elgin an instance of the hypocrisy and corruption of the elites that the French Revolution had promised to eradicate.
Confessions
Authors: Milligan Barry
Published: May 2024

More than autobiography and memoir, confessions focus upon questionable behaviour. In the nineteenth century, the genre bends away from religious confessions and towards sensational revelations from public figures, including Death-Bed Confessions of the Late Countess of Guernsey (1806) and Confessions of an Oxonian (1826). Closely related are criminals’ self-disclosures, such as The Life and Confessions of Peter Dixon, the Celebrated Body Snatcher, and Confessions of an Unexecuted Femicide (both 1827). A third thread follows Jean-Jacques Rousseau in adopting Augustine’s emphasis upon conventionally immoral acts, a tactic that might suggest the narrator is disclosing everything but that is in fact a controlled focusing of the reader’s attention. This subcategory includes Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). A fourth category consists of hybrids such as The Memoirs and Confessions of Captain Ashe (1815), and overtly fictional accounts such as James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).
Poetic Justice, Prosaic Crime
Authors: Black Joel
Published: May 2024

The assumption of a tradition of sensational tales and songs of sinful behaviour giving way in the late eighteenth century to more rationalist, ‘realist’ crime narratives and a more prosaic discourse of crime calls for re-examination in light of a key strain of crime literature at this time. A century after Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding found fertile literary material in prison calendars’ demonized depictions of the notorious thief Jonathan Wild, William Godwin’s protagonist’s pursuit of justice in Caleb Williams turns him into a pursued outlaw, while James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner presents the antinomian premise that the elect are not subject to moral law. By 1832, the ‘hero-criminal’ of Edward Lytton Bulwer’s Newgate novel, Eugene Aram, justifies his murderous crime of passion as the rational expression of a superior intellect. But it is Thomas De Quincey’s essays on ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Murder’ that transpose fictional and nonfictional murderers alike into artist-criminals in what Michel Foucault would call ‘the whole aesthetic rewriting of crime’.
LGBTI Populations and the Right to Health
Authors: Ryan Fergus
Published: May 2024

LGBTI populations—particularly gay and bisexual men, transgender and intersex people—face particular LGBTI-specific challenges in relation to physical and mental health and access to medical treatment and support. International Law emphasizes the equal right of all to enjoy the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health as well the importance of effective health promotion and preventative measures. In the case of LGBTI populations, however, these aims are often frustrated and undermined by discrimination and stigma that disproportionately affects members of sexual and gender minorities. This chapter examines how the rights to health (along with the allied right to life) and freedom from discrimination have often proven to be useful rights-based tools in asserting access to positive and supportive health outcomes for LGBTI people. While legal and rights-based strategies are not necessarily a universal panacea, law reform at both the international and national level can help secure better outcomes for LGBTI people in the sphere of health and well-being.
Queering the Law of Armed Conflict
Authors: Winkler Matteo M.
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the queer dimensions of the laws of armed conflict (LOAC). Using queer theories, it looks at how these laws treat the individuals belonging to the so-called LGBTI Community and at the same time questions the dominance of certain actors like the male military and the Occupying Power. The objective is to find new spaces of resistance at the margin that challenge traditional scholarship and scout currently unexplored legal landscapes, or blind spots, within the LOAC. This chapter first reviews the existing queer scholarship on international law to assess its (in)capability to comprehend modern war technologies. Second, it delves into two specific examples, the queer military bans and international occupation law, to show how the LOAC concretely impacts queer bodies. Overall, this chapter makes the case for a more holistic approach to the LOAC under queer lenses that unveils previously unmapped political and academic trajectories.
Poland
Authors: Czapliński Władysław
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the role of Polish international legal practice and Polish writing in the history of the law of nations. It concentrates on four issues: important personalities in the Polish law of nations (including Polish judges with the World Court); application of international law in the Polish legal order; Polish practice of international law; and Polish cases at the European Court of Human Rights. We have presented the most important factors of the Polish practice, focusing on relations of Poland with neighbouring States. On the other hand, these factors influenced to a large extent Polish position with respect to general international law. We have tried to avoid references to political issues, and our analysis is aimed at legal elements. Polish practice concerning international organizations including relations with the UN and EU including disarmament initiatives were also omitted.
Description of the characteristics of the nailfold capillary structure in healthy children: a multi-centric study
Authors: Dundar Hatice Adıgüzel , Adrovic Amra , Demir Selcan , Demir Ferhat , Cakmak Figen , Ayaz Nuray Aktay , Sözeri Betul , Bilginer Yelda , Kasapçopur Ozgur , Unsal Erbil
Published: May 2024

Background

Nailfold videocapillaroscopy (NVC) is the primary diagnostic tool for the assessment of microcirculation in the pediatric population.

Objective

To define and standardize age-specific normal NVC patterns in healthy children and adolescents.

Methods

A cross-sectional observational multicentric study was conducted in 564 participants aged 5–17 years. Dino-Lite CapillaryScope 200 Pro Model MEDL4N Pro was performed at 200× magnification. Quantitative and qualitative NVC parameters were analysed separately for each age group and divided into four groups based on age categories.

Results

Of the 564 healthy participants, 54.9% were female. A total of 1184 images and 3384 capillaries were analysed. Positive correlations were observed between age and capillary density (P < 0.001, R = 0.450, CI95% 0.398–0.503). There was also a positive correlation between age and arterial/venous, loop diameter and capillary length, whereas there was a weak negative correlation between intercapillary distance. However, no correlation was found between age and capillary width. In addition, capillary density was significantly lower in the 5–7 age group compared with the other patient groups. Arterial limb diameter was lower in the 5–7 age group, while venous limb diameter was significantly wider in the 15–17 age group compared with the other patient groups. Dilated capillaries (8.7%), capillary tortuosity (14.4%), crossed capillaries (43.1%), micro-haemorrhages (2.7%) and avascular area (4.8%) were present in all age groups. Excellent intra- and interobserver ICC values were obtained for all parameters.

Conclusion

These findings hold potential significance for future studies, aiding in the analysis and differentiation of children suspected of rheumatological diseases with potential microangiopathy.
Broken promises? Trust and pension savings in turbulent times
Authors: Mangan Madi , Mastrogiacomo Mauro , Hochguertel Stefan , Goedkoop Floor
Published: May 2024

Using survey data on household savings and trust, we investigate the determinants of trust in one’s pension fund and its effect on the decision to build up additional retirement savings. Key in our approach is the realization that trust in itself may respond to the usage of additional savings instruments, through learning, experience, and information acquisition, for instance. We therefore use an instrumental variables approach, based on exogenous shocks arising from pension cuts and indexation. We also account for the potential spurious relation between funds’ equity and trust, that could arise in a period of financial crisis. We do so using information on fund size, as this is an important proxy for funds’ economies of scale. These instruments allow identifying the unbiased effect of trust in pension funds on participation in voluntary pension saving plans. We disentangle the effects of age, birth cohort, and time in the determination of trust, and counter previous findings of a positive age gradient with trust. This implies that in the future the level of trust in pension funds will decline. Our main result is to find a positive effect of trust on additional pension savings.
Adapting the World Health Organization’s Surgical Safety Checklist to High-Income Settings: A Hybrid Effectiveness-Implementation Trial Protocol
Authors: Turley Nathan , Kogut Karolina , Burian Barbara , Moyal-Smith Rachel , Etheridge James , Sonnay Yves , Berry William , Merry Alan , Hannenberg Alexander , Haynes Alex B. , Dias Roger D. , Hagen Kathryn , Molina George , Spruce Lisa , Williams Carla , Brindle Mary E.
Published: May 2024

Objectives:

The proposed study aims to assess users’ perceptions of a surgical safety checklist (SSC) reimplementation toolkit and its impact on SSC attitudes and operating room (OR) culture, meaningful checklist use, measures of surgical safety, and OR efficiency at 3 different hospital sites.

Background:

The High-Performance Checklist toolkit (toolkit) assists surgical teams in modifying and implementing or reimplementing the World Health Organization’s SSC. Through the explore, prepare, implement, and sustain implementation framework, the toolkit provides a process and set of tools to facilitate surgical teams’ modification, implementation, training on, and evaluation of the SSC.

Methods:

A pre–post intervention design will be used to assess the impact of the modified SSC on surgical processes, team culture, patient experience, and safety. This mixed-methods study includes quantitative and qualitative data derived from surveys, semi-structured interviews, patient focus groups, and SSC performance observations. Additionally, patient outcome and OR efficiency data will be collected from the study sites’ health surveillance systems.

Data analysis:

Statistical data will be analyzed using Statistical Product and Service Solutions, while qualitative data will be analyzed thematically using NVivo. Furthermore, interview data will be analyzed using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research and reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, maintenance implementation frameworks.

Setting:

The toolkit will be introduced at 3 diverse surgical sites in Alberta, Canada: an urban hospital, university hospital, and small regional hospital.

Anticipated impact:

We anticipate the results of this study will optimize SSC usage at the participating surgical sites, help shape and refine the toolkit, and improve its usability and application at future sites.
Does Local Aqueous Tobramycin Injection Reduce Open Fracture-Related Infection Rates?
Authors: Southall Wyatt G. S. , Griffin Jarod T. , Foster Jeffrey A. , Wharton Matthew G. , Muhammad Maaz , Sierra-Arce Carlos R. , Mounce Samuel D. , Moghadamian Eric S. , Wright Raymond D. , Matuszewski Paul E. , Zuelzer David A. , Primm Daniel D. , Landy David C. , Hawk Gregory S. , Aneja Arun
Published: May 2024

OBJECTIVES:

To examine the effect of local aqueous tobramycin injection adjunct to perioperative intravenous (IV) antibiotic prophylaxis in reducing fracture-related infections (FRIs) following reduction and internal fixation of open fractures.

METHODS:

Design:

Retrospective cohort study.

Setting:

Single academic Level I trauma center.

Patients Selection Criteria:

Patients with open extremity fractures treated with reduction and internal fixation with (intervention group) or without (control group) 80 mg of local aqueous (2 mg/mL) tobramycin injected during closure at the time of definitive fixation were identified from December 2018 to August 2021 based on population-matched demographic and injury characteristics.

Outcome Measures and Comparisons:

The primary outcome was FRI within 6 months of definitive fixation. Secondary outcomes consisted of fracture nonunion and bacterial speciation. Differences in outcomes between the 2 groups were assessed and logistic regression models were created to assess the difference in infection rates between groups, with and without controlling for potential confounding variables, such as sex, fracture location, and Gustilo–Anderson classification.

RESULTS:

An analysis of 157 patients was performed with 78 patients in the intervention group and 79 patients in the control group. In the intervention group, 30 (38.5%) patients were women with a mean age of 47.1 years. In the control group, 42 (53.2%) patients were women with a mean age of 46.4 years. The FRI rate was 11.5% in the intervention group compared with 25.3% in the control group (P = 0.026). After controlling for sex, Gustilo–Anderson classification, and fracture location, the difference in FRI rates between groups remained significantly different (P = 0.014).

CONCLUSIONS:

Local aqueous tobramycin injection at the time of definitive internal fixation of open extremity fractures was associated with a significant reduction in FRI rates when administered as an adjunct to intravenous antibiotics, even after controlling for potential confounding variables.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE:

Therapeutic Level III. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.
EN FACE OPTICAL COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHY MORPHOLOGY OF MACULAR PUCKER CORRELATES WITH METAMORPHOPSIA
Authors: Govetto Andrea , Lucchini Sara , Sebag JERRY , Gianfrate Fiammetta , Ranno Stefano , Carini Elisa , Virgili Gianni , Romano Mario R. , Sarraf David , Radice Paolo
Published: May 2024

Purpose:

To describe macular pucker contraction patterns with en face optical coherence tomography (OCT), to provide a correlation with metamorphopsia scores, and to discuss the protective role of the Henle fiber layer (HFL) against tangential traction.

Methods:

Retrospective, institutional, observational, and consecutive case series. Clinical charts, M-charts scores, and structural and en face OCT imaging of patients diagnosed with macular pucker were reviewed.

Results:

A 120 eyes of 114 consecutive patients diagnosed with macular pucker were included. En face OCT patterns of macular pucker contraction were foveal in 51 of 120 eyes (42.5%) and extrafoveal in 69 of 120 eyes (57.5%). Foveal macular puckers had regular, a concentric, circle morphology in the HFL (46/51 eyes, 90.2%), whereas extrafoveal membranes had irregular, distorted, circular HFL morphology (62/69 eyes, 89.8%; P < 0.001). Foveal contraction morphology and regular HFL pattern, as well as extrafoveal contraction morphology and an irregular HFL pattern, highly correlated one with another (P < 0.001 in both cases). Foveal macular puckers with regular HFL patterns had significantly less vertical and horizontal M-charts scores as compared with extrafoveal membranes with irregular HFL (P < 0.001 in both cases). Ellipsoid zone and external limiting membrane defects were rare in the parafoveal region (5/120 eyes, 4.2%). Visual acuity did not correlate with metamorphopsia scores (P = 0.903).

Conclusion:

En face OCT imaging identifies macular pucker contraction patterns that correlate with metamorphopsia scores and that can be used alongside the current structural OCT staging system to guide clinicians in the surgical decision-making process.
SILICONE FINE-NEEDLE ASPIRATION RETINAL BIOPSY
Authors: Globočnik Petrovič Mojca , Vrabič Nika , Prevodnik Kloboves Veronika , Miceska Simona , Pajtler Rošar Ana , Vidovič Valentinčič Nataša
Published: May 2024

Purpose:

To describe a 41-gauge silicone fine-needle aspiration biopsy (S-FNAB) technique and assess its value in diagnosing primary vitreoretinal lymphoma (PVRL).

Methods:

Retrospective review of seven consecutive patients who underwent vitreous biopsy (VB) and 41-gauge S-FNAB of retinal/subretinal lesions in a single tertiary center between January 2012 and March 2023.

Results:

Of seven patients, S-FNAB confirmed the diagnosis of PVRL in six patients. In five of those patients, both VB and retinal/subretinal S-FNAB (performed at the same procedure) yielded positive results, with the retinal thickness at the biopsy site as small as 231 µm. Four of these five patients had one or more previous negative VB. In one patient, S-FNAB yielded positive results despite a negative VB. Silicone fine-needle aspiration biopsy failed to confirm positive VB for PVRL in the remaining patient. The time from symptom onset to diagnosis of PVRL ranged from 18 days to 26 months. There were no severe complications associated with the procedure.

Conclusion:

Silicone fine-needle aspiration biopsy might be a valuable method for obtaining a sufficient sample of viable cells to diagnose PVRL. It can be performed as a primary procedure along with VB. Further studies are warranted to determine where this technique could be most advantageous.
PROSPECTIVE TRIAL OF HOME OPTICAL COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHY–GUIDED MANAGEMENT OF TREATMENT EXPERIENCED NEOVASCULAR AGE-RELATED MACULAR DEGENERATION PATIENTS
Authors: Holekamp Nancy M. , de Beus Anthony M. , Clark W. Lloyd , Heier Jeffrey S.
Published: May 2024

Purpose:

To evaluate the impact of home optical coherence tomography (OCT)–guided patient management on treatment burden and visual outcomes.

Methods:

An interventional trial was conducted to compare frequency of treatment and visual acuity for the neovascular age-related macular degeneration patients before and during use of home optical coherence tomography over a period of 6 months. Patient adherence to regular scanning was measured by the number of scans performed per week. The characteristics of episodes of fluid recurrence and classification of typical fluid volume trajectories were performed.

Results:

Twenty-seven eyes (21 with diagnosis of neovascular age-related macular degeneration and one converted during the study), of 15 patients were monitored for 6 months, scanning at 6.2 times/week per eye and yielding 4,435 scans of which 91.2% were eligible for artificial intelligence–based fluid volume quantification. Total number of monitoring weeks before and during the study were 1,555 and 509. The mean (SD) number of weeks per injection before and during home OCT management were 8.0 (4.7) and 15.3 (8.5) (P = 0.004), respectively. The mean (SD) visual acuity change before and during home OCT-based management was 3.5 (12.0) letters and 0.0 (9.5) letters (P = 0.45), respectively, showing no significant impact on visual acuity.

Conclusion:

For the first time, remote patient monitoring with a home OCT allowed personalized management of neovascular age-related macular degeneration. This study showed significant reduction in treatment burden while maintaining stable visual acuity.