bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Justice Tempered with Civility
Authors: Feldmann Doug , Ditka Mike
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses how Bob Thomas was elected to the high court. On December 11, 1998, Illinois Supreme Court Justice John Nickels announced he was retiring from the bench, with plans to return to his family farm outside of St. Charles in Kane County. Nickels stated that his departure would be immediate, thus leaving him two years short of completing his ordinary ten-year term. With the election to fill his position not scheduled to take place until November of 2000, an appointment was necessary to fill the vacancy in the interim. Thomas wished to be considered and also had an eye on the election two years down the road. On September 13, 1999, Bob Thomas announced from the steps of the DuPage County Courthouse that he was entering the race for the Republican primary in March 2000. Now, more than ever before, Thomas would be relentlessly hitting the campaign trail nearly every night, requiring the understanding and cooperation of those closest to him. On November 7, 2000, Thomas was overwhelmingly elected to the high court.
Drivers of Stasis and Change
Authors: Weiss Meredith L.
Published: January 2021

This chapter revises the usual understanding of regimes and regime transitions, including what a genuine transition might entail. It recommends a mix of structural, political-cultural, ideological, and praxis-oriented angles to understand and assess regimes and political change. Over time the workings of politics under electoral authoritarianism may shift the contest from one of policy or ideology toward less differentiable issues of mundane management and microlevel accessibility and acquisition. The chapter focuses on structural innovation at the local level. By supplementing national-level electoral tactics, electoral authoritarian regimes discipline the public and opposition parties that gradually permeates political culture and everyday political praxis. It also points out the implications of patterns that shape politician–voter linkages, premises for accountability and assessing alternatives, and the range of players with stakes in the system-that-is.
Introduction
Authors: Riegg Stephen Badalyan
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores Russia's political encounter with Armenians from its expansion into the South Caucasus in 1801 to its fateful entrance into the First World War in 1914. It argues that Russia tried to harness the stateless and dispersed Armenian diaspora to build its empire in the Caucasus and beyond. The chapter also talks about how the tsars relied on the stature of the two most influential institutions of the Armenian diaspora, the merchantry and the clergy, to accomplish several goals. It provides a background of Russia's project of diplomatic power from Constantinople to the Caspian Sea, economic benefits of Russia, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire from the Armenian merchant's transimperial trade networks, and political advantage taken from the Armenian Church's extensive authority within far-flung Armenian communities. The period discussed in this book follows the evolution of “Russian” perceptions of “Armenians” alongside the dual processes of tsarist empire-building and Armenian nation-building.
Armenians in the Russian Political Imagination, 1814–1829
Authors: Riegg Stephen Badalyan
Published: January 2021

This chapter traces the political and economic factors that rendered Armenians key to tsarist imperialism. It focuses particularly on Russia's conquest of Eastern Armenia during the Second Russo-Persian War, on the Lazarev family of entrepreneurs, and on the inconsistent economic policies that governed the commerce of Armenians in several southern Russian regions. The chapter also explores the contingent objectives of an imperial project aimed toward distinct communities of the Armenian diaspora. It illustrates impoverished immigrants from the Ottoman and Persian empires, established merchants in southern Russia, and elite families aspiring for social and political prominence in St. Petersburg and Moscow. It also analyzes how the autocracy both recruited and distrusted Armenians from abroad and promoted and restrained the commerce of Armenians already settled in southern Russian cities.
The Shining of the Sabers
Authors: Riegg Stephen Badalyan
Published: January 2021

This chapter highlights the rise of a diverse Armenian nationalist sentiment in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It describes the manifestations that Russian officials lumped under the label “Armenian nationalism,” which took on multiple forms and were not always distinct to Romanov imperial agents that struggled to discern and disarm the various Armenian political agendas. It also demonstrates, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Russo-Armenian symbiosis that faltered in the tempest of Russian reactionism and Armenian nationalism. The chapter analyzes the tsarist responses to Armenian nationalism under the rule of Tsar Alexander III. In order to grasp the bases of St. Petersburg's unprecedented measures toward Armenians in the 1880s and 1890s, the chapter provides an overview of the new tsar's political ideology.
Nadir and Normalization, 1896–1914
Authors: Riegg Stephen Badalyan
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the nadir in modern Russo-Armenian ties and the temporary abrogation of Armenian ecclesiastical independence in 1903. It details the subsequent restoration of the familiar political mutualism on the eve of the conflagration of World War I. With a brief comparative glance, the chapter points out the unique and representative aspects of the Armenian experience amid the evolution of Russian nationalities policies. It analyzes the disaster and the subsequent recovery of the more familiar imperial dynamic between the state and Armenians. It also discusses the meticulously constructed partnership of the nineteenth century that was sunk in the storm of Russification, nationalism, revolution, and imperial turmoil. The chapter provides a background of the bureaucratic meddling in Armenian life, especially its ecclesiastical dimension that was aggravated by the often-tyrannical agendas of individual tsarist agents and triggered the greatest crisis of Russo-Armenian ties in the modern era.
Marrying Up, Down, or Off in Dongyang
Authors: Yamaura Chigusa
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on a major bride-sending community, Dongyang, to investigate the ambivalent feelings participating Chinese women held toward their cross-border marriages with Japanese men. Many women simultaneously expressed a mixture of willingness for and hesitation toward their marriages with Japanese men because cross-border marriages with Japanese men were considered to be both a source of shame and privilege. They were sources of shame because they indicated that the women involved could only find marriage partners by crossing national borders; such marriages signaled that they were not “desirable” marriageable persons in their local community. Yet such marriages were simultaneously a mark of privilege as they meant that these women had been chosen by someone who might possibly provide them with a secure life. What is more, by marrying the women also were able to exit the social category of “those whom no one wants.”
Banishing Remains
Authors: Nadkarni Maya
Published: January 2021

This chapter narrates the early years of postsocialist transformation as Hungarians sought to make remake themselves as new national subjects amid the remains of multiple discredited pasts and failed historical trajectories. It explores how politicians, activists, and public officials initially conceptualized the problem of socialist remains in terms of physical remainders perceived to be emblematic of the former regime. Politicians, activists, and public officials battled to “spring clean” remains of the communist past in order to restore Hungary to the “authentic” course of national history. The chapter also focuses on the debates that resulted in the removal of Budapest's socialist-era statues to a Statue Park Museum on the outskirts of the city. Supporters justified the creation of the park as a democratic solution to the outrage that communist monuments inspired. Yet the removal of these statues was not a response to a crisis of defacements and public dissatisfaction, but an attempt to cover up the fact that little such crisis existed.
Secrets, Inheritance, and a Generation’s Remains
Authors: Nadkarni Maya
Published: January 2021

This chapter demonstrates how the rhetoric of communist terror and the danger of its return would soon extend past party politics to encompass intimate friendships and family relationships. It discusses the problem of the communist regime's informers that inspired public debate in the second decade of postsocialism. The chapter also analyzes the call to accountability as a matter of generational inheritance, in which Hungary's cultural “children” reconceptualized the problem of socialism's remains as not only the challenge of banishing the past, but the fear of reproducing it in the future. It looks at one of the crucial ways the conflicts took shape through the charged idiom of family and generational conflict and whether that entailed betrayal by cultural elders or actual parent. The works of celebrated filmmaker István Szabó and novelist Péter Esterházy are also mentioned in the chapter.
A Past Returned, A Future Deferred
Authors: Nadkarni Maya
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines how the experience of the crises fueled renewed complaints that remains of socialism prevented Hungarians from attaining a “normal” life of political civility and economic prosperity. It talks about Hungary's twentieth anniversary of 1989, in which the memory of the transition now only inspired the lament that “communism never ended.” With the anniversary of the events in 1989, new political and economic crises appeared to threaten the success of Hungary's postsocialist transformation. The chapter also narrates events on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 revolution in 2006 when the right-wing demonstrators protested the socialist-led government and had admitted to lying to win the election. It also discusses the global financial crisis in 2008 that hit Hungary with disproportionate force that lead to the first-ever International Monetary Fund bailout of an EU country.
Doing Things with Ethnicity
Authors: Gilbert Andrew C.
Published: January 2021

This chapter describes how ideas about ethnic identity functioned as an important heuristic, helping foreigners to navigate a social and political field most knew nothing about. Such ideas also served to legitimize a role for the international community in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina as a civilizing missionary and as a neutral mediator between antagonistic ethnic groups. The chapter shows how they were socialized into the performative requirements of fulfilling those roles, particularly the requirement that they be neutral. It then analyzes the creative ways returnees sought to engage foreign officials, and how foreigners responded to those attempts while navigating a tension created by fulfilling two roles. The chapter demonstrates how everyday intervention encounters in the context of refugee return reproduced the political and social salience of ethnicity and ethnic difference, and also how foreign officials were able to disavow any part in this process.
From Humanitarianism to Humanitarianization
Authors: Gilbert Andrew C.
Published: January 2021

This chapter explains that much of contemporary international intervention takes places under the sign of humanitarianism. One of the most significant undertakings in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina was the massive housing reconstruction projects run by international aid organizations as part of a highly politicized effort to move refugees back to their prewar homes. Alongside the usual technical tasks of such projects, aid workers spent considerable time and effort in their encounters with refugees creating the social and cultural conditions conducive to humanitarian action—a process which can be called humanitarianization. The chapter analyzes these efforts and demonstrates that the humanitarian status of such aid projects was never more than provisionally settled. It argues that this unstable, provisional nature of humanitarian action forms an underexplored dynamic shaping and limiting aid interventions in Bosnia and beyond.
Conclusion
Authors: Gilbert Andrew C.
Published: January 2021

This concluding chapter highlights some of the major arguments and observations of the book and demonstrates the comparative opportunities and broader relevance of a focus on encounters for the study of international intervention. Addressing the question of legitimacy in intervention encounters was a useful method for identifying and accounting for the stakes, instabilities, and effects of international intervention. This is, in part, because questions about legitimacy were an everyday part of intervention encounters. Analysis of intervention encounters revealed not only these contestations of legitimacy, but also how these encounters were where the grounds and criteria for evaluating that legitimacy were created, improvised, tested, and rejected. Intervention encounters are not only where one learns about the power or instabilities of international intervention; they are also generative sites of invention and creativity. The chapter then looks at the three processes that should be useful in exploring and analyzing intervention encounters beyond Bosnia and Herzegovina: humanitarianization, entextualization, and recontextualization.
Beyond Exception
Authors: Kanna Ahmed , Le Renard Amélie , Vora Neha
Published: January 2021

Over nearly two decades during which they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, the authors have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for the book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a “field” that is marked by such representations. The book's focus is on deconstructing the exceptionalist representations that circulate about the Arabian Peninsula. It analyzes what exceptionalism does, how it is used by various people, and how it helps shape power relations in the societies studied. The book proposes ways that this analysis of exceptionalism provides tools for rethinking the concepts that have become commonplace, structuring narratives and analytical frameworks within fieldwork in and on the Arabian Peninsula. It asks: What would not only Middle East studies, but studies of postcolonial societies and global capitalism in other parts of the world look like if the Arabian Peninsula was central, rather than peripheral or exceptional, to ongoing sociohistorical processes and representational practices? The book explores how the exceptionalizing discourses that permeate Arabian Peninsula studies spring from colonialist discourses still operative in anthropology and sociology more generally, and suggest that de-exceptionalizing the region within their disciplines can offer opportunities for decolonized knowledge production.
Conclusion
Authors: Kanna Ahmed , Le Renard Amélie , Vora Neha
Published: January 2021

This concluding chapter explores the question of what decolonized ethnography and academia can look like. It argues that de-exceptionalizing the Arabian Peninsula as a field site requires deconstructing an idealized vision of Western academia as a presumed site of democracy and liberalism. The projects of anthropology and sociology, as they have been invested in anticolonial and antiracist justice and breaking down binary understandings between East and West, self and other, civilized and savage, are implicated in the continuing use of the exceptional and spectacular as tropes in ethnographic writing, revealing just how much work is yet to be done within their disciplines. Within these disciplines, some have questioned the various hierarchies that are realized through the production of knowledge, not only between the social scientists and their “objects” or “fields,” but also among social scientists themselves, particularly the ways in which power relations in terms of status, racialized identification, class, and gender shape perceptions of their expertise or lack thereof. The chapter then assesses how centering not only the Arabian Peninsula but gender, sexuality, race, household, and other topics that have until now been seen as marginal might provide better information about the societies social scientists study as well as transnational processes, globalization, and the contemporary world.
Fajde, Pyramid Firms, or Ponzi Schemes?
Authors: Musaraj Smoki
Published: January 2021

This chapter maps out local discourses of finance and entrepreneurship at the time of the Albanian firms' boom and then bust. The discourse in the chapter is fraught with gendered and ethnicized undertones, such as the highly masculine discourse of entrepreneurship that characterized press coverage and kreditorë's recollections of the firms at the time of their boom and the feminized discourse that centered on the owner of Sude Kadëna that delegitimized the firms as fictive fraudulent entities that was attributed to occult practices and gender stereotypes. It also mentions the discourse that served to legitimize the firms as virile entrepreneurs at the forefront of Albanian capitalism. The chapter explores the changing notions of legitimate or illegitimate finance and entrepreneurship at a time of dramatic free-market reform. It constructs a genealogy of finance in postsocialist Albania in conversation with broader genealogies of finance in the global history of capitalism.
“Working the Money”
Authors: Musaraj Smoki
Published: January 2021

This chapter looks at the intertwining of financial practices at firms with different forms of social ties. It concentrates on the role of mediators, such as “sekserë” and “të njohur” and the broader mobilization of migrant networks to attract deposits for the firms. The firms deliberately mobilized such social ties by offering incentives for sekserë and “menaxherë” to recruit their family members, neighbors, and friends. The chapter also talks about the transactional pathways of circulation of migrant remittances through the firms that were mediated by social ties of kinship and friendship. It investigates how social ties enabled the ongoing financial activities of the firms and how, in turn, transactions with the firms strengthened or weakened social ties.
The Rhetoric of Market Efficiency
Authors: Polillo Simone
Published: January 2021

This chapter presents an empirical characterization of affect-laden networks in the context of financial economics. It points out how other disciplines will generate different affective dispositions and how its analysis on financial economics provide a set of sensitizing concepts with which to identify these dispositions. The chapter also focuses on two debates from an early stage of financial economics and uses this comparison to highlight how stylistic changes and the emergence of a standard of reasonability helped settle conflicts within the discipline and turn data analysis into the apex of what became the data–method–theory triad. Financial economists developed this mode of constructing credible arguments where data analysis played a new role by the late 1970s. It explains how data analysis should be reasonable rather than exact or objective and how these methods should be simple and easily derived from the existing analytical toolkit of statistics.
Collaborations and Market Efficiency
Authors: Polillo Simone
Published: January 2021

This chapter shows quantitative data on the development of collaboration in financial economics and its relationship with success in the field, thereby reconstructing the structure of the network that reasonableness and simplicity helped bring together. It emphasizes that financial economists tended to collaborate with the same people, repeatedly. They worked in small groups and, as a result, participated in an economy of affect in order to repurpose a term from Lorraine Daston that privileged the communicability and interdependence of their findings rather than their precision or accuracy as the centrality of data to what they did might suggest. The network of financial economics came to value communicability and interdependence along with reasonableness. The chapter uses a dataset of study papers, as well as bibliometric and network data to present systematic, quantitative evidence about the kind of social structure that sustained the affective dispositions.
Conclusion
Authors: Polillo Simone
Published: January 2021

This chapter provides a conclusion by extracting main theoretical lessons and developing a typology of creative social knowledge that emerges from the intersection of different ways of combining theory, methods, and data in social scientific scholarship and beyond. After further expanding on the concept of the theory–method–data triad, it presents a broader framework that can better grasp variation in the micro- and meso-level processes of knowledge production in the human sciences. The chapter argues that scholarly networks emerge at the intersection of theory, data, and methods. It also talks about a typology of networks and concrete examples that specify how and when theory, data, or methods take the lead that changes the network's understanding of what constitutes creative work. Different combinations of theory, methods, and data lead to different kinds of conflicts and different kinds of alliances. For instance, fields that grow by incorporating and standardizing data tend to fight with outsiders; questioning the data from within is destructive to the field as a whole.
International Marriage in Japan’s Periphery
Authors: Forgash Rebecca
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores military international intimacy in Okinawa in relation to military fencelines and changing community norms, especially regarding marriage, family, and community membership. It mentions Okinawan families and communities that have undergone tremendous change due to modernization and assimilation programs initiated by Japan's imperial government, displacement due to war and U.S. military land expropriations, and recent integration into global economic and communications networks since the nineteenth century. Opportunities for intimacy, notions of appropriate romantic partners, residence and household membership, and responsibilities for childcare and eldercare have shifted accordingly. The chapter situates military international marriage with other types of “marrying out” in Okinawa, as well as international marriage in mainland Japan. It investigates community perceptions of military international marriage in relation to symbolic fencelines that shape changing distinctions among insiders and outsiders and notions of appropriate marriage partners.
Race, Memory, and Military Men’s Sexuality
Authors: Forgash Rebecca
Published: January 2021

This chapter analyzes Okinawan discourses on race and military men's sexuality, with a focus on how Japanese and American racial discourses have shaped local understandings of difference. It discusses how the imperial rhetoric positioned Okinawans and other Asians alongside the Japanese in unified opposition to Europeans and Americans. During the postwar occupation, the U.S. military and its personnel were introduced into the Okinawa discourses on U.S. imperialism in Asia, Jim Crow segregation, and the 1960s civil rights and black power movements. The chapter also features the personal narratives of individuals who self-consciously viewed their relationships as transgressing established racial boundaries. It narrates stories that illustrate the struggle of military international couples in order to understand and rework racial ideologies and expectations in Okinawa's postwar society.
Creating Family and Community across Military Fencelines
Authors: Forgash Rebecca
Published: January 2021

This chapter looks into strategies that military-Okinawan couples employ to navigate life across the fencelines and achieve acceptance for themselves and their children. It describes active-duty couples living in central Okinawa, especially young Okinawan women, who make use of military family services and successfully integrate into the U.S. military community. The stories in the chapter illustrate how couples struggle to balance commitments to the military, extended family, and local community that conform to American and Okinawan cultural expectations and contend with challenges to their relationship from both sides of the fences. It talks about factors that affect long-term chances for intimate relationships and popular attitudes toward military dating and marriage, biracial children, and broader formulations of Okinawan and U.S. military community. It also investigates several stories that demonstrate people engaging in intimate relationships across military fencelines that have the capacity to influence U.S. military–host community relationships and politics in even the most contentious locales.
Conclusion
Authors: Forgash Rebecca
Published: January 2021

This chapter summarizes arguments concerning the shifting and negotiated nature of military fencelines in Okinawa. It explains that due to the ongoing antibase movement, intimate everyday effects of the U.S. military presence, including military international sex, marriage, and family, attract popular scrutiny and become subject to military and community surveillance and regulation. The adeptness with which military couples circumvent official definitions and control by crossing military fencelines reveals the limits of state institutional power and U.S. military empire. The chapter also traces the historical emergence and transformation of popular imagery and stereotypes of U.S. military men, Okinawan women, and military international sex and marriage from the early years of the U.S. occupation through the postreversion era. It analyzes how racialized and sexualized stereotypes of U.S. military men exist in connection with family opposition to military marriages in the present time.
Narrating Conflict and Violence
Authors: Manekin Devorah S.
Published: January 2021

This chapter reviews the perspectives of former combatants that raise a number of methodological questions in addition to the general methodological and ethical issues inherent in any field-based study of armed conflict. It looks into the accounts of soldiers involved in fighting in order to bring to light a unique and hard-to-capture perspective. It also explains why the reliance on soldier narratives raises specific methodological and ethical issues that are inherent in any study of war. The chapter discusses the shifting meanings of violence across different contexts, concealment and censorship. It examines the discursive reframing of violence narratives, the data-loyalty transaction, and the role of emotion in combatant accounts.
IDF Counterinsurgency in the Second Intifada
Authors: Manekin Devorah S.
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses counterinsurgency during the evolution of Israel's five-decade occupation of the Palestinian Territories based on the perspectives of ordinary combatants and supplemented by media and non-governmental organisation (NGO) reports. It provides a brief overview of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) approach to counterinsurgency and gives detailed analysis of specific practices implemented in the Second Intifada. The chapter describes the role of civilians in the Israeli approach to counterinsurgency and its importance in revealing a conflict between the principles of international humanitarian law and operational approach to counterinsurgency. It also examines the basic contradiction between the legal requirement to protect civilians and the operational notion of targeting them. It highlights the IDF's counterinsurgency tactics in the Second Intifada that responded to changes in the nature and intensity of the insurgency, domestic politics, and international factors.
The Production and Control of Opportunistic Violence
Authors: Manekin Devorah S.
Published: January 2021

This chapter shifts the focus of analysis from violence committed professionally to violence that soldiers commit opportunistically. It defines “opportunistic violence” as intentional harm inflicted by combatants that is not planned, ordered, or authorized by military superiors. It also explains how opportunistic violence is carried out by combatants for their own benefit rather than for the benefit of the military organization. The chapter outlines the functions of opportunistic violence that are diverse and include violence for instrumental purposes such as personal enrichment. It describes violence committed for social posturing or due to peer pressure and violence with no apparent purpose that stems from emotional impulses or arbitrary drives. It draws initial parallels between the Israeli case and other contemporaneous cases of counterinsurgency that can illustrate how insights from Israel can improve the understanding of political violence elsewhere.
Introduction
Authors: Rios Jodi
Published: January 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the racialized policing and governing practices in North St. Louis County, Missouri. In the suburbs of North St. Louis County, city governments discipline and police Black residents as a source of steady revenue. To put it in the way many residents do, municipalities view poor Black residents as “ATM machines,” to which they return time and again through multiple forms of predatory policing, juridical practices, and legalized violence. As part of this system and to hold on to the coveted yet hollow prize of local autonomy, Black leaders invest mightily in the white spatial imaginary of the suburbs by adopting a rhetoric of producing good citizens, promoting safety, protecting private property, and upholding norms of respectability. Narrated through questions of rights and suburban citizenship, the double bind of living as Black in North St. Louis County means that Black residents both suffer from, and pay for, the loss of economic and political viability that occurs when they simply occupy space. The systems that create and profit from this double bind rely on tropes of Black deviance, honed over the course of centuries; the illegibility of Black suffering; and questions concerning Black personhood.
Politics and Policing in Pagedale
Authors: Rios Jodi
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on the City of Pagedale, which represents an extreme example of how discourses of race and space are deployed in North St. Louis County. City officials in Pagedale pass and enforce ordinances that promote “suburban aesthetics” and white cultural norms, as well as targeting circumstances of poverty and Black culture. They do so using a consistent rhetoric of public safety and property rights, which began soon after the first developments began to appear in this area. Whereas traffic violations make up the vast majority of policing-for-revenue practices in North St. Louis County, Pagedale has historically policed space and property. Pagedale, which made history as the first municipality in the United States to elect an all-Black, all-woman leadership in 1982, troubles many of the popular explanations for the “Ferguson uprisings” and complicates the idea that predatory policing by Black leadership is simply a result of power, greed, or corruption. As the chapter details, the Black women leaders who came into power in the 1980s used visibility to push back against the limits placed on their bodies—as Black and female—yet worked within the terms that had been set by previous administrations and the historical structures of racism and sexism that construct blackness-as-risk.
Queering Protest
Authors: Rios Jodi
Published: January 2021

This chapter uses a framework of queer theory to argue that the particular aesthetic and affect of resistance in North St. Louis County made visible the extreme violence of the state in addition to exposing the inherent contradictions within masculine and heteronormative spaces of Black struggle. This is a critical component of queer of color critique. Similar to an Afro-pessimistic perspective of blackness, which locates Black life as a site of ontological death, the chapter argues that “the problem posed by blackness” is an antagonism rooted in the historically naturalized logics of society, including physical space, and is not a conflict that can be rectified through legal means. Through a more optimistic lens, it also highlights the various ways Black women and gender nonconforming individuals practiced a choreopolitics—of bodies in space—that demanded the terms of visibility be set by those “in view.” This particular practice of visibility and an insistence on simply living as an act of protest illustrate the capacity and power that Black lives and life hold in revealing the truth and thus reconfiguring the metrics of living as fully human.
Mixed Messages
Authors: Graber Kathryn E.
Published: January 2021

Focusing on language and media in Asian Russia, particularly in Buryat territories, this book engages debates about the role of minority media in society, alternative visions of modernity, and the impact of media on everyday language use. The book demonstrates that language and the production, circulation, and consumption of media are practices by which residents of the region perform and negotiate competing possible identities. What languages should be used in newspapers, magazines, or radio and television broadcasts? Who should produce them? What kinds of publics are and are not possible through media? How exactly do discourses move into, out of, and through the media to affect everyday social practices? The book addresses these questions through a rich ethnography of the Russian Federation's Buryat territories, a multilingual and multiethnic region on the Mongolian border with a complex relationship to both Europe and Asia. The book shows that belonging in Asian Russia is a dynamic process that one cannot capture analytically by using straightforward categories of ethnolinguistic identity.
Rupture and Reclamation
Authors: Graber Kathryn E.
Published: January 2021

This chapter looks into the legacies of the twentieth century's massive modernization efforts through the terms rupture and loss, in which contemporary Buryats predominantly understand the history of their culture, language, and land. It analyzes a series of temporal and spatiocultural disjunctures that informs of feelings during language shift. It also reviews the four-century shift from Buryat to Russian as an especially salient instance of cultural change. The chapter assesses the examples of Russification that affects everyday life and to which people refer to as a more thoroughgoing rupture. It covers the discussions of language that stand in for debates over the past and ideal future of Buryat belonging. It also highlights disagreement over what counts as speaking “real Buryat” over what it means to be a “real Buryat.”.
Conclusion
Authors: Graber Kathryn E.
Published: January 2021

This chapter reviews the effects of “mixed messages” produced and circulated in the region of Asian Russia. It analyzes how minority-language media are always “mixed” to some degree and media producers as well as consumers are orienting toward an idealized standard. It also talks about minority media institutions that are supposed to be indigenous but take forms that are assimilatory and hyperinstitutional. The chapter navigates the tensions and challenges for Buryats in Asian Russia and other ethnic minorities that grapple with the trappings of twentieth-century modernity and reorientation to new global publics in the twenty-first century. It also mentions Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who declared that Buryats, as a discrete ethnicity, did not exist.
Re-Designing Energy-Efficient and Intensively Managed Cereal Based Cropping Systems for Reducing the Environmental Footprints of Production in North-West India: A Review
Authors: Chandra M. Sharath , Naresh R. K. , Dhaliwal S. S. , Rajput Pradeep , Harish Jana , Yadav Shipra , Kumar Rahul
Published: January 2021

Agriculture is a major contributor to India's environmental footprint, particularly through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Sustainable agricultural systems are needed to produce high-quality and affordable food in sufficient quantity to meet the growing population need for food, feed, and fuel, and at the same time, farming systems must have a low impact on the environment. Achieving sustainability of the cereal system in the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) of North West India under progressive climate change and variability necessitates adoption of practices and technologies that increase food production, adaptation and mitigation the environmental footprints of production in a sustainable way. But production is becoming unsustainable due to depletion or degradation of soil and water resources, rising production costs, decreasing input use efficiency, and increasing environmental pollution. In contrast, cereal production systems in the IGP are largely traditional, with low yields and farm income. This review paper mainly focus on the reduction of environmental footprint production in cereal systems such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through the adoption of emerging conservation agricultural practices i.e., re-designing energy-efficient, economically sustainable and intensively managed options for cereal systems. Adoption of re-designing energy-efficient, economically sustainable and intensively managed cereal systems could help in reducing the environmental footprints of production (EFP) while maintaining productivity and better resource utilization. In India could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by almost 18 percent through the adoption of mitigation measures. Several studies revealed that conservation agriculture (CA) practices and technologies implemented in the cereal systems of the IGP have positive impacts on crop yields, returns from crop cultivation, input use efficiency (water, nutrient and energy), adaptation to heat stress and reduction of GHGs emissions. Improved conservation technologies or packages of practices from intensive agriculture that reduce environmental impacts, such as laser-aided land leveling, reduced or zero tillage, conservation tillage operation, precise nutrient and water management, crop residues management, crop diversification improves resource use efficiency by decreasing losses of inputs to the surrounding environment. It indicates that the adoption of better soil, water, nutrient management practices, and technologies has enormous potential to reduce environmental foot print, such as GHG emissions from agriculture cereal systems, thereby contributing to the mitigation of climate change.
Performance Evaluation of Sweetcorn with Different Levels of Irrigation and Nitrogen through Drip during Post Monsoon Season at Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, India
Authors: Lakshmi Y. Siva , Sreelatha D. , Pradeep T.
Published: January 2021

The present study on Performance evaluation of Sweetcorn with different levels of Irrigation and nitrogen through drip during post monsoon season at Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, India was conducted for two years at Maize Research Centre, Agricultural Research Institute (ARI), Rajendranagar, Hyderabad to assess the influence of different levels of irrigation and nitrogen on performance of sweetcorn hybrid. Randomized block design with factorial concept was used in the study and the experiment was replicated thrice. The treatments used were two factors. Factor I was five irrigation levels viz., I1: Drip irrigation at 60% E pan, I2: Drip irrigation at 80% E pan, I3: Drip irrigation at 100% E pan, I4:Drip irrigation at 120% E pan andI5: Surface irrigation at IW/CPE- 1.0 and Factor II was four nitrogen levels in kg ha-1 viz., N1: 120, N2: 160 N3: 200 N4: 240. Pooled mean of two years revealed that, drip irrigation with 120% E pan which was on par with 100% E pan showed significantly better crop performance in terms of growth characteristics like plant height, Leaf Area Index and dry matter production and both were superior to drip irrigation of 80 and 60% E pan as well as surface irrigation method. Among the yield attributes, cob girth and 100 seed weight were not influenced either with irrigation or nitrogen and their interaction. Cob length, number of seeds row-1, green cob and fodder yield were higher with drip irrigation of 120% E pan but were on par with 100% E pan. Among the different nitrogen levels, nitrogen at the rate of 240 kg ha-1recorded significantly higher growth parameters, yield attributes, green cob and fodder yield but it was on par with 200 kg ha-1 and both were superior over 160 and 120 kg N ha-1. Drip irrigation of 100% E pan and a nitrogen level of 200 kg ha-1 resulted in higher gross and net returns and benefit cost ratio compared to other irrigation and nitrogen treatments. From the study, drip irrigation of 100% E pan with 200 kg N ha-1is recommended for getting higher yields and net income in sweetcorn hybrid grown in Southern Agro climatic zone of Telangana, India.
Evaluation of Secondary Metabolites (Antibacterial and Antioxidant Activity) of Amlok (Diospyros lotus L) Fruit Extracts of Jammu Region
Authors: Ayoub Anjum , Singh Jagmohan , Hameed Fozia , Mushtaq Muntazir
Published: January 2021

Amlok (Diospyros lotus L.) fruit is growing in the hilly areas of jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir India. It is locally known as amlok. This fruit has black color and small in size and astringent taste. Analysis of the fruit was done quantitatively and qualitatively for various secondary metabolites such as total phenols, quercitin, flavonoids, alkaloids and tannins with the help of various standard methods. It was analyzed that the fruit contains the abundant amount of the tannins as compared to the rest of the metabolites. The antibacterial activity of the fruit extract shows it has great potential to provide defense against wide spectrum infections because of many pathogenic organisms. This fruit can provide defense against many diseases and carcinogenic infections because it contains the higher amount of the antioxidants as reveled with the help of the antioxidant power assay viz, DPPH Scavenging activity.
Psychological State and Low Immunity during Corona Season in KSA
Authors: Murad Manal abdulaziz , Abousada Hoda Jehad , Harazi R. N. Nouran Mohammed , Alshaikhnasser Ruqeeya Ali , Alghorrab Hussain Hassan , Alsaeedi Nashwa Nasser , Muarrif Adnan Abdullatif , Alsaedi Kamal Bakheet , Kamal Reem Muhammadishag , Alfaraj Hakeema Abdulrazaq , Noah Matooq Hasan , AlMojeb Amani Ahmad , Gadibalban Ibrahim Zaher A , Alsubhi Rawan Awad
Published: January 2021

Background: In March 2020, WHO declared COVID-19 as pandemic with very high incidence of case-fatality, after that COVID-19 Pandemic was found in China, Europe and USA where these regions were the most affected areas. The new virus attack patients with low-immunity than healthier population causing many psychological conditions. In this study, we aimed to assess prevalence of patient have low immunity symptoms, determine general psychological state in corona season, and demographic factors affecting both variable.

Methodology: This is an analytical cross-sectional study conducted in kingdom of Saudi Arabia (General population) from 19/7/2020 till 25/10/2020. The study depended on online self-report questionnaire which assessing demographic factors including age and nationality besides disease-related information.

Results: We had received 228 responses to our questionnaire where three quarter of them were female (75.9%). 21.1% of the participants were between 19-25 years old while 19.7% were between 36-40 while most of the sample had bachelor (73.7%). It was found that the most common symptoms were having trouble sleeping, low energy, felling tired, having to change the diet and having asthma where 8.8% had at least one symptom, 8.3% had two symptoms and 14.2% had 3 or more symptoms. Considering psychological status, we had found that the most common symptoms reported by participants were concerning about future, the always need for naps and caffeine, afraid of getting sick, afraid of worsen health, and extreme mood change. It was found that gender had a significant effect on developing both low immunity and poor psychological status (P=0.029, 0.02) where female seems to have more low immunity and poorer psychological status than male. Age is another significant factor in determining low immunity and poor psychological status (P=0.026, 0.001) where younger participants reported more symptoms of low immunity and poor psychological than older participants where the most affected age interval was 19-25 years old.

Conclusion: we had found high prevalence of low immune status and poor psychological status which were more associated with females and younger populations. Moreover, there is a significant correlation between poor psychological status and low immune status.
Galectin‐1–RNA interaction map reveals potential regulatory roles in angiogenesis
Authors: Wei Jiajun , Li Daniel K. , Hu Xinyu , Cheng Chao , Zhang Yi
Published: January 2021

Hyperactive angiogenesis contributes to the immunosuppressive microenvironment important for immunotherapy. Galectin‐1, encoded by LGALS1, can trigger the vascular signaling programs and mediate the anti‐angiogenic treatment response. However, the mechanism through which galectin‐1 regulates angiogenesis is poorly understood. It has been suggested that galectin‐1 may associate with mRNAs in cells. This study applied the iRIP‐seq methodology to study the potential role of galectin‐1 as an RNA‐binding protein. We found that galectin‐1 interacts with a large number of mRNAs, with a preference for binding near stop codons and a preference for UGCA/UGGA and GAGCAG as binding motifs. Galectin‐1 binds to the mRNAs of angiogenesis‐associated genes including VEGFA, EGR1, and LAMA5, suggesting that galectin‐1 may regulate angiogenesis via its mRNA‐binding activity. We further show that shLGALS1 inhibits capillary tube formation in an in vitro angiogenesis assay and alters the expression levels of several galectin‐1‐bound angiogenesis‐associated mRNAs. These results uncover a previously unrecognized mRNA‐binding activity of galectin‐1.
Impact of Oxygen Non‐Stoichiometry on Near‐Ambient Temperature Ionic Mobility in Polaronic Mixed‐Ionic‐Electronic Conducting Thin Films
Authors: Defferriere Thomas , Kalaev Dmitri , Rupp Jennifer L. M. , Tuller Harry L.
Published: January 2021

Enhanced ionic mobility in mixed ionic and electronic conducting solids contributes to improved performance of memristive memory, energy storage and conversion, and catalytic devices. Ionic mobility can be significantly depressed at reduced temperatures, for example, due to defect association and therefore needs to be monitored. Measurements of ionic transport in mixed conductors, however, proves to be difficult due to dominant electronic conductivity. This study examines the impact of different levels of quenched‐in oxygen deficiency on the oxygen vacancy mobility near room temperature. A praseodymium doped ceria (Pr0.1Ce0.9O2–δ ) film is grown by pulsed laser deposition and annealed in various oxygen partial pressures to modify its oxygen vacancy concentration. Changes in film non‐stoichiometry are monitored by tracking the optical absorption related to the oxidation state of Pr ions. A 13‐fold increase in ionic mobility at 60 °C for increases in oxygen non‐stoichiometry from 0.032 to 0.042 is detected with negligible changes in migration enthalpy and large changes in pre‐factor. Several factors potentially contributing to the large pre‐factor changes are examined and discussed. Insights into how ionic defect concentration can markedly impact ionic mobility should help in elucidating the origins of variations seen in nanoionic devices.