bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
United Nations Peacekeeping and Civil Conflict
Authors: Passmore Timothy J. A.
Published: June 2020

UN peacekeeping serves as the foremost international tool for conflict intervention and peace management. Since the Cold War, these efforts have almost exclusively targeted conflicts within, rather than between, states. Where traditional peacekeeping missions sought to separate combatants and monitor peace processes across state borders, modern peacekeeping in civil wars involves a range of tasks from intervening directly in active conflicts to rebuilding political institutions and societies after the fighting ends. To accommodate this substantial change, peacekeeping operations have grown in number, size, and scope of mandate.

The increasing presence and changing nature of peacekeeping has sparked great interest in understanding when and how peacekeeping is used and how effective it is in delivering and sustaining peace. Significant advances in peacekeeping data collection have allowed for a more rigorous investigation of the phenomenon, including differentiation in the objectives, tasks, and structure of a mission as well as disaggregation of the activities and impact of peacekeepers’ presence across time and space. Researchers are particularly interested in understanding the adaption of peacekeeping to the unique challenges of the civil war setting, such as intervention in active conflicts, the greater involvement and victimization of civilians, the reintegration of rebel fighters into society, and the establishment of durable political, economic, and social institutions after the fighting ends. Additional inquiries consider why the UN deploys peacekeeping to some wars and not others, how and why operations differ from one another, and how the presence of and variation across missions impacts conflict countries before and after the fighting has stopped.
Spatiality and World Politics
Authors: Weaver Duncan
Published: June 2020

Space has always animated world politics, but three spatial orientations are striking. First, the Westphalian orientation deems space a sovereign power container. Second, the scalar takes recourse to the local, regional, national, and global spaces in which world politics is played out. Third, the relational deems space a (re)produced, sociohistorically contingent phenomenon that changes according to the humans occupying it and the thought, power, and resources flowing through it. Under this latter orientation, space is lived, lived in and lived through. Whilst relationality, to a degree, calls into question the received wisdoms of International Relations (IR), the fixity of sovereignty and territory remain. The orientations coexist concomitantly, reflecting the “many worlds” humankind occupies.
Surrogacy as Labor
Authors: Majumdar Anindita
Published: June 2020

Surrogacy as labor is an important theoretical idea within anthropology. Emerging from ethnographic and feminist engagement, surrogacy or the practice of a woman gestating an artificially or naturally conceived fetus in her uterus for an infertile or childless couple, with the promise of compensation or a gesture of “gift-giving,” has been controversial. The idea of motherhood as a form of labor is especially under scrutiny within the practice of surrogacy as it becomes technologically supported through in-vitro fertilization and other forms of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and begins to be global. Against the universally socially exalted positioning of motherhood, the problematic practice of surrogacy defies social conventions. Thus, surrogacy as labor is a difficult proposition socially and morally, bringing forth questions regarding “body work” and intimate labor—all of which are represented within the practice of surrogacy.

As a field of enquiry, surrogacy as labor includes theoretical and ethnographic engagements regarding the rise of transnational surrogacy and the “hiring” of women from the Global South by couples from the Global North, and what this has meant for pregnancy, birthing, and ART. Most importantly, labor and motherhood are enmeshed in this complicated narrative of family-making that involves the intermixture of race, culture, and commerce in an uneasy relationship. In thinking through the understanding of surrogacy as labor, it is important to trace its linkages with kinship, family, commerce, and medicine. Thus, surrogacy as labor is analyzed within the following themes: as linked to other forms of precarious labor that are also enmeshed in the “hostile worlds” of money and intimacy (such as sex work and domestic labor); as a process of kin-making; and as the most legislated form of work, globally.
Global Healthcare Worker Migration
Authors: Bludau Heidi
Published: June 2020

The global migration of healthcare workers is one of the most widely studied issues in healthcare worldwide. Fueled by a global shortage of healthcare workers, this movement is considered a crisis in health sector human resources. Over the past half century, the need for skilled healthcare workers has increased in wealthy countries, which have not been able to keep up training and retaining a sufficient labor force to fill their demands and, thus, have increasingly relied on foreign-trained healthcare workers. Migrants are motivated by push factors in their home countries and pull factors in receiving countries. While some countries are capitalizing on the global market demand to facilitate export of their workers, some poor countries who lose their skilled workers to more developed countries are concerned about “brain drain.” Private, for-profit recruitment firms are increasingly entering this market and shaping migration patterns. The general consensus of research in this field is that more work needs to be done globally to build the capacity for training healthcare workers, increase recruitment and retention of healthcare workers in their local regions, and manage the global movement of healthcare workers of their own accord.
Digital Garbology
Authors: Singer Gideon
Published: June 2020

What is electronic waste? E-waste is both a by-product of manufacturing processes and the disposal of end-point devices in our digital infrastructure—the mountains of televisions, microwaves, video game consoles and handhelds, Christmas lights, and so on which are often visualized in news reports and popular media. However, digital garbology reveals an alarming assemblage of additional externalities resulting from the hyper consumption of electronic devices and even digital services requiring significant amounts of physical and social resources to operate (such as Facebook, Netflix, and bitcoin). Consequently, digital worlds are neither more nor less material than the worlds that preceded them. And yet, digital media is often perceived as immaterial because of a growing disconnect between people and the wires, power sources, and data centers that enable them to access digital worlds. Anthropologists practicing digital garbology have a critical role to play in helping to counteract the socioecological consequences of the world’s fastest growing waste stream empathetically and strategically.

Waste is a quintessential anthropological topic because it crosscuts the subfields of archaeology, linguistic anthropology, biological or physical anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology. The digital is also becoming an essential topic for 21st-century anthropologists looking to interpret and design the interactions people have with social media, surveillance technology, geographic information systems (GIS), and Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART). Anthropological archaeologists have increasingly integrated archaeological and ethnographic methods to make contributions to policy, public perceptions, and behavioral interventions concerning consumption, discard, recycling, and reuse. However, it is only in the last decade, from 2010 on, that anthropology and closely related disciplines have begun paying attention to electronic waste.

Digital garbology, a synthesis of digital anthropology and garbology, is a novel and essential framework for practicing anthropology in the 21st century. Digital garbology helps to identify and recommend strategies for confronting uneven, and often unjust, distributions of e-waste onto marginalized communities. Furthermore, digital garbology encourages anthropologists to support community-based actions such as organizing repair cafés, participating in local government, banding with activists to challenge multinational corporations, and drawing attention to the blind spots in environmental, economic, and social discourse concerning waste produced by digital technologies.
The Swahili Civilization in Eastern Africa
Authors: Ichumbaki Elgidius B. , Pollard Edward
Published: June 2020

The urbanization and globalization being experienced in Africa in this early 21st century have deep foundations in the continent’s history. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, theories on the origin of urbanization have developed through the 20th century from an external origin emphasis. There was little recognition of the greater part played by the local people. The producers of these cultures engaged in activities shaped by the environment and sociocultural, political, and economic connections. For instance, in Eastern Africa, Iron Age people became united by language and religion, and exploited the coast and sea during the medieval period (from the end of the early Iron Age c. 500 ce to the arrival of the Portuguese at the end of the 15th and to the early 16th century). Iron Age people traded with inland Africa, East and Southern Asia, and Europe, producing what has become popularly known as the “Swahili civilization.” This civilization along the coast of Eastern Africa is marked by material culture of iron working, cloth production, pottery, beads, and glass as well as monumental constructions that range from stone-built mosques, tombs, and palaces. A maritime trade assisted by seasonally reversing monsoon winds exported gold, slaves, animal skins, ivory, and mangrove poles from Eastern Africa and imported beads, porcelain, and silks. The evidence that marks the Swahili civilization is spread over an area that extends along the coast of Eastern Africa about 3,000 km from Mogadishu (Somalia) in the north to Inhambane (Mozambique) in the south. The Swahili civilization locale also includes the islands of Unguja (Zanzibar), Pemba, Mafia, Comoros, and northern Madagascar. Some remnants marking the Swahili civilization include UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Lamu Old Town, Zanzibar Stone Town, Ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara, and Ilha de Mozambique. The civilization continues in this early 21st century with its oral traditions and maritime technology that are testimony of coastal Swahili culture continuing through Eastern Africa’s social and economic challenges.
History, Anthropology, and Rethinking Modern Disciplines
Authors: Dube Saurabh
Published: June 2020

Pervasive presumptions in the human sciences project anthropology and history as taken-for-granted divisions of knowledge, whose relationship is then tracked as being vexed but constructive. At the same time, it is more useful today to rethink history and anthropology as disciplines of modernity – in their formation, elaboration, and transformation. To begin with, going back to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, historical and anthropological knowledge each appeared as mutually if variously shaped by overarching distinctions between the “primitive/native” and the “civilized/modern.” It followed that the wide-ranging dynamic of empire and nation, race and reason, and analytical and hermeneutical orientations underlay the emergence of anthropology and history as institutionalized enquiries in the second half of the nineteenth century. Further, across much of the twentieth century and through its wider upheavals, it was by attempting uneasily to break with these genealogies yet never fully even escaping their impress that history and anthropology staked their claims as modern disciplines. This entailed especially their discrete expressions of time and space, culture and change, tradition and modernity. Finally, the mutual makeovers of history and anthropology since the 1970s have thought through the formidable conceits of both these disciplines while reconsidering questions of theory and method, object and subject, and the archive and the field. Based upon salient intersections with a range of critical understandings – for instance, postfoundational and postcolonial perspectives, considerations of gender and sexuality, and subaltern and decolonial frames – the newer emphases have imaginatively articulated issues of historical consciousness and marginal communities, colony and nation, empire and modernity, race and slavery, alterity and identity, indigeneity and heritage, and the state and the secular. At the same time, considering that such disciplinary changes are themselves embedded within wider shifts in social worlds, the haunting terms of the antinomies between the “savage/native” and the “civilized/modern” unsurprisingly find newer expressions within ever emergent hierarchies of otherness.
Communities and Archaeology in Africa
Authors: Manetsi Thabo
Published: June 2020

This article traces ongoing debates and discourse on the evolving and dynamic relation between communities and archaeology in Africa. As a departure point, the article traces the complex relationship between communities and archaeology from colonial times in Africa, and illustrates that the field of archaeology was instrumental in the making of history and heritage, enabling colonial laws and institutions that served the interests of the colonial powers. Furthermore, the imposition of the authoritarian nature of archaeology (exclusive expert-scientific field) and the state is accentuated through the glaring binary opposition of “White domination” and “Black subjugation,” as an integral part of the colonial project in Africa. The perpetuation of the legacy of outdated colonial and European heritage practices and laws are still common fixtures of the contemporary cultural landscape in postcolonial Africa. The popularity of the decolonization project in Africa has ushered in new dimensions to traditional archaeological practices such as “community archaeology” and “public archaeology,” which serve as progressive attempts to restore and increase public participation and access by ordinary members of society to archaeology and heritage management. Heritage futures illustrate ongoing configurations in heritage management, where “local community” claims, rights to access, and use of heritage are critical to environmental sustainability and the developmental agenda of most postcolonial African states. However, this is yet to be fully realized.
Women, Gender, and Red Scares in the Modern United States
Authors: Ryan Erica J.
Published: June 2020

The first Red Scare, after World War I, and the Red Scare that followed World War II, both impacted American women in remarkably similar ways. Many women found their lives hemmed in by antifeminism and the conservative gender ideology that underwrote anticommunist national identity in 1919, and then again in the late 1940s. This cultural nationalism tied traditional gender norms to the defense of American values and ideals, positioning the family as a bulwark against communism while making women’s performance of gender roles symbolic of national health or sickness. Within this gendered nationalism, the first Red Scare offered opportunities for conservative women to join the antiradical cause as protectors of the home. These same antiradicals maligned radical and progressive women for their feminism and their social activism. The second Red Scare played out in similar fashion. Anticommunism provided a safe platform for conservative women to engage in political activism in defense of the family, and in turn, they participated in broader efforts that attacked and weakened civil rights claims and the social justice efforts of women on the left. In each Red Scare the symbols and rhetoric of anticommunism prioritized women’s relationship to the family, positioning them either as bastions of American virtue or as fundamental threats to the social and political order. Gender proved critical to the construction of patriotism and national identity.
Indigenous Nations and US Foreign Relations
Authors: Parmenter Jon
Published: June 2020

The United States has engaged with Indigenous nations on a government-to-government basis via federal treaties representing substantial international commitments since the origins of the republic. The first treaties sent to the Senate for ratification under the Constitution of 1789 were treaties with Indigenous nations. Treaties with Indigenous nations provided the means by which approximately one billion acres of land entered the national domain of the United States prior to 1900, at an average price of seventy-five cents per acre – the United States confiscated or claimed another billion acres of Indigenous land without compensation. Despite subsequent efforts of American federal authorities to alter these arrangements, the weight of evidence indicates that the relationship remains primarily one of a nation-to-nation association. Integration of the history of federal relations with Indigenous nations with American foreign relations history sheds important new light on the fundamental linkages between these seemingly distinct state practices from the beginnings of the American republic.
Spanglish
Authors: Stavans Ilan
Published: June 2020

Spanglish (also referred to as Espanglish, Espaninglish, and Casteinglés, among other appellations) is the hybrid language that results from the cross-fertilization between Spanish and English and, more broadly, between traits in Anglo and Hispanic civilizations. A byproduct of mestizaje with distinct linguistic varieties (Tex-Mex, Chicano, Nuyorrican, Cubonics, Dominicanish, etc.), it is used by millions in the United States, where Latinas/os are the largest and fastest-growing minority, as well as throughout Latin America, Spain, and other parts of the world. Spanglish, like any other language, has acquired its present characteristics through a slow development, in this case one lasting almost 200 years. Seen traditionally as a way for immigrants to communicate, it is actually used by all social classes; on radio, TV, theater, movies, Broadway musicals, the Internet, and social media; in political speeches and religious sermons; in sports and marketing; in the banking and food industries; and in literature, including young adult and children’s books. There are also full or partial translations of literary classics like Don Quixote of La Mancha, Hamlet, Alice in Wonderland, and The Little Prince.
The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654
Authors: Miranda Bruno
Published: June 2020

Between 1624 and 1654, the Dutch West India Company occupied part of the northeast of Brazil. A private company, in 1621 it obtained from the Republic of the United Provinces of the Netherlands a monopoly on trade and the authorization to conquer land and operate in waters on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It was created as a weapon against the Habsburg Monarchy, contrary to whom the Republic waged a long conflict: the Eighty Years War (1568–1648). The primary objective of the Company was to undermine the foundations of the Iberian overseas economy, which was of vital importance to the Spanish empire, and open the ports of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies to the Republic’s merchant vessels.

Interest in Brazil was principally related to the possibly of making profits from sugar, tobacco, and wood for dyes, products already distributed in the Republic through direct negotiations of the Dutch in Brazilian ports and indirectly through a trade route that connected Dutch cities and Portuguese ports. Incorporated in the Spanish crown as a result of the 1580 Portuguese dynastic crisis, Brazil became the target of a military assault when trade between Brazil and the Netherlands was affected by the various embargos imposed by the Habsburg Crown. The first great attack of the Company against Brazil resulted in the capture of Salvador, seat of the general government of Brazil in 1624, but their control of the city only lasted one year, resulting in a loss for the Company. After an incredible financial recuperation due to capture of the Spanish silver fleet in 1628, the Company devised a new plan. Pernambuco was the new target. A long conflict continued until January 1654, when the government of the Company of Brazil capitulated to the Portuguese.
Cairo geniza
Authors: Schiffman Lawrence H.
Published: June 2020

The Cairo geniza was a storeroom for no longer usable holy books in the synagogue of Fustat, Old Cairo, where for centuries, old Jewish manuscripts, mostly in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo- Arabic, including also secular documents and communal records, were deposited. In the 19th century, European scholars became aware of this collection and manuscripts were removed to a variety of libraries in Europe and the United States. This material provides those studying the ancient world and ancient Jewish texts in particular with an amazing treasure of documents, throwing light on the history of the biblical text and its interpretation, the Hebrew language, Greek and Syriac versions of the Bible, Second Temple and Rabbinic literature, Jewish liturgy and the later history—political, economic, and religious—of the Jews in the Mediterranean basin. This material has totally reshaped our understanding of these fields. In the area of Bible, these texts illustrate the manner in which the vocalization and cantillation symbols were developed. Hebrew versions of some important Second Temple literature, later found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, had earlier been discovered in the geniza. Many previously unknown Midrashim and rabbinic exegetical materials have become known only from this collection. This material has provided an entirely new corpus of liturgical poetry.
Morphology and Tone
Authors: Monich Irina
Published: June 2020

Tone is indispensable for understanding many morphological systems of the world. Tonal phenomena may serve the morphological needs of a language in a variety of ways: segmental affixes may be specified for tone just like roots are; affixes may have purely tonal exponents that associate to segmental material provided by other morphemes; affixes may consist of tonal melodies, or “templates”; and tonal processes may apply in a way that is sensitive to morphosyntactic boundaries, delineating word-internal structure.

Two behaviors set tonal morphemes apart from other kinds of affixes: their mobility and their ability to apply phrasally (i.e., beyond the limits of the word). Both floating tones and tonal templates can apply to words that are either phonologically grouped with the word containing the tonal morpheme or syntactically dependent on it.

Problems generally associated with featural morphology are even more acute in regard to tonal morphology because of the vast diversity of tonal phenomena and the versatility with which the human language faculty puts pitch to use. The ambiguity associated with assigning a proper role to tone in a given morphological system necessitates placing further constraints on our theory of grammar. Perhaps more than any other morphological phenomena, grammatical tone exposes an inadequacy in our understanding both of the relationship between phonological and morphological modules of grammar and of the way that phonology may reference morphological information.
Person in Morphology
Authors: Daniel Michael
Published: June 2020

The category of person is a linguistic expression of reference to a role in a speech act, including the speaker, the addressee, or a combination thereof. The values of the person category commonly, if not universally, include the opposition of first person (reference to the speaker) versus second person (reference to the addressee). Reference to neither the speaker nor the addressee is commonly—though not always—considered to be the third value of the category, third person. This article is an overview of person indexation on the verb and in possessive constructions, interaction of the category of person with other categories such as number and moods, the issue of person hierarchies as reflected in the categories of clusivity and direct-inverse systems, and some topics in the pragmatics of person. The discussion includes some topics disregarded or less touched upon in other surveys of the category of person, such as a discussion of the person relationship to commands (imperative paradigms) or logophoricity. The main focus is on the morphology of person, and other aspects of personal reference are discussed with respect to how they are expressed or differentiated by morphological material. On the other hand, personal reference in grammar and lexicon show strong affinity, making it both difficult and unnecessary to separate independent personal pronouns from person affixes in a typological perspective. In this sense, person-related lexicon and inflectional morphology are treated together.
Morphology in Indo-European Languages
Authors: Milizia Paolo
Published: June 2020

Indo-European languages of the most archaic type, such as Old Indic and Ancient Greek, have rich fusional morphologies with predominant use of suffixation and ablaut as formal devices. The presence of cumulative inflectional morphs in final position is also a general IE feature.

A noteworthy property of the archaic IE morphological system is its root-based organization. This is well observable in Old Indo-Aryan, where the mental lexicon is largely made up of roots unspecified for word-class membership.

In the historical development of the different IE branches, recurrent phenomena are observed that lead to an increase in configurationality and a decrease in the degree of synthesis (use of adpositions at the expense of case forms, rise of auxiliaries and increasing employment of periphrastic morphology, creation of determiners). However, not all the documented developments can be subsumed under the rubric ‘morphological decay’: new synthetic verbal forms, which often coexist with the inherited ones, are often created via resynthesization of periphrases; new nominal case forms are sometimes created through univerbation of adpositional phrases; instances of prefixation recurrently arise from former compound structures consisting of adverb (‘preverb’) + verb.

The formation of inflectional paradigms with several mutually unpredictable subsections and of relatively complex systems of inflectional classes is also observed in various IE languages. The same holds for the rising of new patterns of morphophonological alternations, which often allow the preservation of several morphological oppositions even after the loss of inflectional endings. As a consequence, modern IE languages may exhibit higher degrees of fusionality, at least in specific morphological subsystems, than their diachronic foregoers.

In the various branches, the system of inflectional morphology could undergo several reshapings at the level of both the structure of grammatical categories and the formal organization of paradigms, sometimes with noteworthy typological changes. English poor morphology, Ossetic and New Armenian agglutinative nominal inflections, lack of verbal inflection of number, and presence of numeral classifiers in Eastern New Indo-Aryan varieties are among the examples of extreme departure from the ancient IE morphological type. A common development concerning word formation is the decline of the root-based organization of morphology.
Environmental Regulations in India
Authors: Turaga Rama Mohana R , Sugathan Anish
Published: June 2020

Pollution is one of the greatest causes of premature deaths and morbidity in the world, and this burden of pollution is disproportionately borne by the lower and middle income countries such as India—home to more than one-sixth of humanity. In India, due to the compound effect of its large population and high levels of environmental pollution, the human cost of pollution is among the highest in the world. The environmental degradation is partly a consequence of the development model pursued after independence in 1947 based on large-scale industrialization and exploitative resource utilization, with scant consideration for sustainability. Moreover, it is also due to the failure of the environmental administration, governance, and regulatory infrastructure to keep pace with the magnitude and pace of economic growth in India since economic liberalization in 1991.

Ironically, India was also one of the early pioneers of integrating environmental considerations into its legislative and policy-making process beginning in the early 1970s. The federal and state environmental regulation and policy framing institutions set up during this era, along with environmental legislation such as the Environment (Protection) Act 1986, are comparable in design, stringency, and comprehensiveness to other contemporary command-and-control environmental regulatory regimes in many industrially developed economies. However, the widening gap between de jure expectations of environmental compliance and the de facto state of affairs has been a great concern for environmental governance in the country.

The ongoing debates discuss several mechanisms to address the regulatory failures. The first is a greater emphasis on strengthening institutions and mechanisms that foster transparency and public disclosure by pollution sources with the intent to increase access to and credibility of information on pollution. Proponents argue this will help mobilize groups such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the general public to pressure the industry and government to improve regulatory enforcement. Second, there have been calls for wider adoption of market-based instruments that are more efficient than the traditional command-and-control approaches on which India relies. Again, information is a prerequisite for the functioning of such market-based regulatory mechanisms. Third, the legal infrastructure to facilitate expedited hearing of environmental litigation is being created. With the establishment of the National Green Tribunal in 2010, India is one of only three other countries in the world to have an exclusive judicial body to hear environmental cases. This is potentially a significant step in providing greater access to environmental justice. An emerging view, however, argues that the prevailing economic development model is incompatible with ensuring sustainable development and requires a radical rethink.
Racial Profiling and Policing Black Communities
Authors: Kirven Joshua
Published: June 2020

Strained police-community relations are not new to distressed and black communities. However, recent decades of modern-day policing have become a challenging, stressful job for officers in terms of safety and social order, job performance, and being recorded (often on cell phones) and quickly judged by the public. This article looks at racial profiling, implicit bias, and how the heavy hand of order-maintenance policing is used to the detriment of black communities, especially black males. The relevance of contact theory will be discussed in terms of its relevance for reaching mutual ground between black males and police officers. This article offers practical strategies for (a) social workers (community practitioners), (b) black males and citizens of color , and ( c) police officers themselves. For officers specifically, this potential awareness can lead to healthier, neutral experiences with black males leading to positive policing of black communities.
Community-Based Aging Services
Authors: Ivery Jan
Published: June 2020

As individuals age, their physical community continues to be a primary entry point of intervention because of their attachment to place, social connections, and limited mobility to travel as far and as often as they would like or desire. The environment provides a context for understanding an older adult’s social interactions and the availability of and access to supportive services that reduce isolation and increased risk for reduced health status. When individuals age in place, social workers need to understand how community-based services can work with older adults in their community where they have lived for some time and have developed social networks. This knowledge will better assist social workers in their ability to effectively connect clients with appropriate resources. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for an older adult’s environment to not reflect or adapt to their changing health status and physical mobility. Healthy aging (also referred to as age-friendly) and NORC (naturally occurring retirement communities) initiatives have emerged as examples of how to provide supportive, community-based services that will enable older adults to remain engaged in their community as they experience changes in their health status, mobility, and financial security. These community-level interventions emphasize the adaptability to an older adult’s changing lifestyle factors that influence how they navigate their community. These initiatives engage older adults in planning and implementing strategies to connect older adults with services and activities that promote aging in place. Social workers play a very important role in the provision of community-based aging services because they can serve as a bridge between older adults and the local, state, and federal level programs that may be available to them.
Cultural Formulation Interview
Authors: Gilbert Dorie , Olcoń Katarzyna
Published: June 2020

Research indicates that practitioners’ cultural biases are a barrier to effective cross-cultural assessment; thus, social work practitioners must demonstrate the ability to appraise a client’s cultural context in assessing and treating mental health concerns. The Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) provides practitioners with a standardized cultural assessment method for use in mental health practice. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the CFI with a focus on its four domains: (a) cultural definition of the problem; (b) cultural perception of cause, context, and support; (c) cultural factors affecting self-coping and past help-seeking; and (d) cultural factors affecting current help-seeking. Conceptualizations of mental health and mental illness vary across cultural subgroups, and the nation’s changing demographics underscore the need to give particular attention to how the CFI can be useful for improving cross-cultural assessment with historically excluded or marginalized racial and ethnic groups. The CFI is an important step towards culturally grounded assessments; however, it has several conceptualization and implementation limitations, including its narrow focus on individual-level cultural explanations of distress while the effects of social inequities remain masked. The article concludes with additional considerations for cross-cultural assessment and implications for social work education and practice.
Hamer, Fannie Lou
Authors: Logan Sadye L. M.
Published: June 2020

Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights activist working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She dedicated her life to community organizing and the fight for human and civil rights. Hamer was also the co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Baker, Ella Josephine
Authors: Logan Sadye L. M.
Published: June 2020

Ella Josephine Baker (1903–1986) was a consummate organizer and activist who played an active role in shaping the civil and human rights movements in the United States of America from 1930 through the 1980s.
Racial Disparities in the Education System
Authors: Teasley Martell , Homer Bonita
Published: June 2020

Despite years of education reform, the United States continues to have disparities in academic outcomes among racial and ethnic groups in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education. High school graduation rates have increased for racial and ethnic minorities, but gross disparities in high school graduation and college attendance still exist. In this article, the authors first examine the literature on racial and ethnic group disparities in education within public K–12 education, followed by a brief review of recent research literature on racial and ethnic disparities within higher education. In each section, there is some examination of race, ethnicity, and critical factors that lead to disparities within the education system. Information on socioeconomic status, school readiness, special education, school discipline, culture, and teacher bias are discussed. The authors conclude that while family income and socioeconomic status help to explain disparities in education outcomes among racial and ethnic groups, cultural factors are a salient part of the conversation.
Hardcastle, David
Authors: Logan Sadye L. M.
Published: June 2020

David Hardcastle (1939–2019) was a highly respected scholar, author, educator, and administrator. His last book, Community Practice (3rd ed.), is still viewed as seminal in the field of community-organizing theory and practice. Hardcastle was also compassionate about social-justice issues. He was committed to creating equitable program and policy changes in society with a view toward a better future.
Marriage and Healthy Relationship Intervention
Authors: Nichols Fairfax Colita
Published: June 2020

Marriage remains a central institution among all races and ethnic groups. Legalized marriages have become an important aspect of family life among LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning, or intersex, asexual or allied) community. Given the cultural significance that marriages underscore in all communities, applied social scientists should have access to the most appropriate and affirming interventions. By having knowledge about and access to a wealth of marital interventions, social workers, family therapists, community developers, counselors will be empowered to attend to the needs of couples who desire to experience purposeful marriages. This in turn will strengthen family and community life for all who value intimacy. This article explores a brief history of marriage in America, specifics with regards to cultural groups, and a variety of interventions that may be reproduced in best practice approaches from a conflict theory lens.
Concordance of Embedded Performance and Symptom Validity Tests and Associations with Mild Traumatic Brain Injury and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder among Post-9/11 Veterans
Authors: Aase Darrin M , Soble Jason R , Shepard Paula , Akagi Kouri , Schroth Christopher , Greenstein Justin E , Proescher Eric , Phan K Luan
Published: June 2020

Objective

The present study explored both embedded symptom (SVT) and performance (PVT) validity test scores within a post-9/11 veteran sample to elucidate the degree to which there is concordance between validity indicators, as well as how frequently one SVT and four PVT indicators were failed in screened mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and diagnosed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Method

A total of 114 post-9/11 veterans were evaluated utilizing the Neurobehavioral Symptom Inventory (NSI) Validity-10, four embedded PVTs, mTBI screening, and a diagnostic interview for PTSD.

Results

While we found concordance between embedded PVTs and the NSI Validity-10 at select cutoffs (i.e., ≥13, ≥19), symptom and performance validity indicators were clinically dissociable in that only SVT significantly predicted diagnosed PTSD and screened mTBI.

Conclusions

Dissociation between symptom and performance validity may be clinically useful when interpreting neuropsychological evaluation findings in post-9/11 veterans with a history of mTBI or PTSD.
Current development of integrated web servers for preclinical safety and pharmacokinetics assessments in drug development
Authors: Hsiao Yi , Su Bo-Han , Tseng Yufeng J
Published: June 2020

In drug development, preclinical safety and pharmacokinetics assessments of candidate drugs to ensure the safety profile are a must. While in vivo and in vitro tests are traditionally used, experimental determinations have disadvantages, as they are usually time-consuming and costly. In silico predictions of these preclinical endpoints have each been developed in the past decades. However, only a few web-based tools have integrated different models to provide a simple one-step platform to help researchers thoroughly evaluate potential drug candidates. To efficiently achieve this approach, a platform for preclinical evaluation must not only predict key ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity) properties but also provide some guidance on structural modifications to improve the undesired properties. In this review, we organized and compared several existing integrated web servers that can be adopted in preclinical drug development projects to evaluate the subject of interest. We also introduced our new web server, Virtual Rat, as an alternative choice to profile the properties of drug candidates. In Virtual Rat, we provide not only predictions of important ADMET properties but also possible reasons as to why the model made those structural predictions. Multiple models were implemented into Virtual Rat, including models for predicting human ether-a-go-go-related gene (hERG) inhibition, cytochrome P450 (CYP) inhibition, mutagenicity (Ames test), blood–brain barrier penetration, cytotoxicity and Caco-2 permeability. Virtual Rat is free and has been made publicly available at https://virtualrat.cmdm.tw/.
The Minimum Information about a Molecular Interaction CAusal STatement (MI2CAST)
Authors: Touré Vasundra , Vercruysse Steven , Acencio Marcio Luis , Lovering Ruth C , Orchard Sandra , Bradley Glyn , Casals-Casas Cristina , Chaouiya Claudine , del-Toro Noemi , Flobak Åsmund , Gaudet Pascale , Hermjakob Henning , Hoyt Charles Tapley , Licata Luana , Lægreid Astrid , Mungall Christopher J , Niknejad Anne , Panni Simona , Perfetto Livia , Porras Pablo , Pratt Dexter , Saez-Rodriguez Julio , Thieffry Denis , Thomas Paul D , Türei Dénes , Kuiper Martin
Published: June 2020

Motivation

A large variety of molecular interactions occurs between biomolecular components in cells. When a molecular interaction results in a regulatory effect, exerted by one component onto a downstream component, a so-called ‘causal interaction’ takes place. Causal interactions constitute the building blocks in our understanding of larger regulatory networks in cells. These causal interactions and the biological processes they enable (e.g. gene regulation) need to be described with a careful appreciation of the underlying molecular reactions. A proper description of this information enables archiving, sharing and reuse by humans and for automated computational processing. Various representations of causal relationships between biological components are currently used in a variety of resources.

Results

Here, we propose a checklist that accommodates current representations, called the Minimum Information about a Molecular Interaction CAusal STatement (MI2CAST). This checklist defines both the required core information, as well as a comprehensive set of other contextual details valuable to the end user and relevant for reusing and reproducing causal molecular interaction information. The MI2CAST checklist can be used as reporting guidelines when annotating and curating causal statements, while fostering uniformity and interoperability of the data across resources.

Availability and implementation

The checklist together with examples is accessible at https://github.com/MI2CAST/MI2CAST

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Short-term resilience of Great Gray Owls to a megafire in California, USA
Authors: Siegel Rodney B , Eyes Stephanie A , Tingley Morgan W , Wu Joanna X , Stock Sarah L , Medley Joseph R , Kalinowski Ryan S , Casas Angeles , Lima-Baumbach Marcie , Rich Adam C
Published: June 2020

Throughout western North America, longer, hotter fire seasons and dense fuels are yielding more frequent, larger, and higher-severity wildfires, including uncharacteristically large “megafires.” Wildlife species associated with late-seral forest characteristics may be particularly vulnerable to habitat loss stemming from changing fire regimes. The Great Gray Owl (Strix nebulosa) is a state-listed endangered species in California that typically nests in large snags in well-shaded forests adjacent to montane meadows. The 2013 Rim Fire burned 104,000 ha in Yosemite National Park and Stanislaus National Forest, making it the largest recorded fire in California’s Sierra Nevada. The fire perimeter contained 23 meadows known to be occupied by Great Gray Owls during the decade prior to the fire, representing nearly a quarter of all known or suspected territories in California at the time. We analyzed 13 yr (2004–2016) of Great Gray Owl detection/non-detection data from 144 meadows in the central Sierra Nevada, including meadows inside and outside the Rim Fire perimeter in Yosemite National Park and on Stanislaus National Forest. During 3 yr of surveys after the fire, Great Gray Owls were detected at 21 of 22 meadows surveyed within the fire perimeter that were occupied during the decade prior to the fire. Bayesian hierarchical modeling revealed that, rather than decreasing after the fire, persistence of owls at meadows actually increased on both National Park Service (NPS) and non-NPS lands, while colonization rates exhibited no significant change. Within the burned area, these dynamics were unrelated to forest structure variables describing post-fire stands around individual meadows. Notably, post-fire increases in owl persistence occurred both inside and outside the fire perimeter, suggesting factors other than the fire were likely favorable to Great Gray Owls during the post-fire years. Great Gray Owls appear to have been largely resilient to effects of the Rim Fire during the 3 yr after it burned.
Rapid development of visualization dashboards to enhance situation awareness of COVID-19 telehealth initiatives at a multihospital healthcare system
Authors: Dixit Ram A , Hurst Stephen , Adams Katharine T , Boxley Christian , Lysen-Hendershot Kristi , Bennett Sonita S , Booker Ethan , Ratwani Raj M
Published: June 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the rapid expansion of telehealth services as healthcare organizations aim to mitigate community transmission while providing safe patient care. As technology adoption rapidly increases, operational telehealth teams must maintain awareness of critical information, such as patient volumes and wait times, patient and provider experience, and telehealth platform performance. Using a model of situation awareness as a conceptual foundation and a user-centered design approach we describe our process for rapidly developing and disseminating dashboard visualizations to support telehealth operations. We used a 5-step process to gain domain knowledge, identify user needs, identify data sources, design and develop visualizations, and iteratively refine these visualizations. Through this process we identified 3 distinct stakeholder groups and designed and developed visualization dashboards to meet their needs. Feedback from users demonstrated the dashboard’s support situation awareness and informed important operational decisions. Lessons learned are shared to provide other organizations with insights from our process.