bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Banning of Ethnic Studies in the United States
Authors: Cantú Norma E.
Published: February 2020

During the first decade of the 21st century, a political movement based in Arizona sought, through legislation, to ban the use of certain books and the teaching of certain authors and concepts in high school classrooms in the Tucson Unified School District. HB 2281 was signed into law in May 2010 on the heels of one of the strictest anti-immigrant legislative acts, SB 1070. These two bills would become intertwined in the imagination of the country and would elicit protests and generate actions by activists, writers, and teachers as they wound through the legal battles that ensued. This article explores the consequences of the law and the impact both locally and nationally of such actions by focusing on two key events: The Poets Against SB 1070 and the Librotraficante project led by Houston activist Tony Díaz. Moreover, it contextualizes such a historic event within the larger history of educational disenfranchisement of Latinx in the United States.
Marxism, Economic Theory, and Asian American Literary Studies
Authors: Chiang Mark
Published: February 2020

As migrants who were drawn to North America to serve as cheap labor, questions of money, economy, and class have been central to Asian American experiences from the mid-19th century, and Marx’s critique of capitalism has circulated almost as long among Asian Americans and anticolonial, nationalist movements in Asia. However, the long history in the communist movement of the subordination of racial and gender inequality to a narrowly defined class struggle alienated many in US racialized communities. Subsequent interventions in Marxist theory leading to non-economically determinist accounts of social transformation have resulted in a post-Marxist Asian American literary and cultural studies. This is a theory, though, that is largely devoid of specifically economic inquiry, and this has led to the marginalization of questions of class, labor, and whiteness that might complicate questions about resistance to domination and capitalist hegemony. These elisions are only exacerbated in the turn to global and transnational frames of analysis, since the complexities of local racial dynamics are often lost in more abstract narratives and conceptual paradigms. The history of Japanese internment provides a case study that exemplifies some of the difficulties of evaluating the multiple forces motivating racial discrimination.
Asian Americans in Hip-Hop
Authors: McTaggart Ninochka , Wang Oliver
Published: February 2020

This entry surveys the history of Asian Pacific Islander Americans participation and involvement in expressive forms of hip-hop culture. While acknowledging that hip-hop has its roots in Afro-diasporic traditions, the entry highlights the various ways in which Asian Pacific Islander Americans have been both key participants and innovators within that culture. Particular attention is paid to specific forms of hip-hop: graffiti writing, dancing, rapping/MCing and DJing/turntablis. Each of these include succinct historical summaries of their development. The participation of Asian Pacific Islander Americans are then discussed, ending with annotated lists of select, key figures within each form.
Contemporary Asian American Dance
Authors: Wong Yutian
Published: February 2020

Contemporary Asian American dance includes a wide range of choreographic approaches, movement vocabularies, aesthetic traditions, and philosophies toward the body. Referencing either time or genre, the “contemporary” in contemporary Asian American dance can refer to work that includes high-art concert productions that utilize modern and postmodern movement vocabularies, reworkings of traditional Asian movement practices, or popular dance practices. Contemporary Asian American dance also encompasses work that is created by Asian American choreographers, choreography that addresses Asian American experiences or history, or work that is performed by Asian American dancers.

As a field of study, Asian American dance studies is concerned with an analysis of how the critical reception of choreography by Asian American choreographers is entangled with the history of Orientalism in both American modern dance history and the racialization of Asian Americans in US history. Beginning in the early 20th century, choreographer Michio Ito (1892–1961) navigated his training in German expressionist dance with public expectations of performing recognizable Japaneseness in the face of growing anti-Japanese sentiments on the West Coast of the United States in the years before the United States officially entered World War II. In the later half of the 20th century, Mel Wong (1938–2003) faced similar issues after leaving the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to pursue his own choreography. While Merce Cunningham’s adoption of the Chinese text the I-Ching was considered a choreographic breakthrough in the development of chance procedure that would revolutionize the definition of what is considered dance, Mel Wong faced critics and funding organizations who found Wong’s own use of ritual and Asian philosophy to be incomprehensible or inauthentic.

The question of authenticity in relationship to the use of traditional Asian vocabularies runs the gamut from the performance of depoliticized folk dance forms such as those performed by the San Francisco Chinese Folkdance Association to the purposeful invention of Japanese American taiko repertory by organizations such as San Jose Taiko during the 1960s Asian American movement. In contrast, choreographers such as Eiko (1952–present), Koma (1948–present), and Shen Wei (1968–present) are not concerned with the question of Asian American authenticity and have been creating work that stakes a claim in universal themes of humanity and the environment or the relationship between movement and visual art. Understanding the work of choreographers such as Eiko & Koma and Shen Wei as contemporary Asian American dance is enabled by the transnational turn in Asian American studies to include work by choreographers whose work does not directly represent traditional understandings of the Asian American experience rooted in themes such as the trauma of immigration, intergenerational conflict, or national belonging.
Latin American American Literature
Authors: Phillips Rose
Published: February 2020

Latin American literature is a broad and heterogeneous category composed of voices from many countries spanning two continents. In the United States, more attention has been given to Cuban, Chicano/a, and Central American literatures than to writers from other South American countries. This article tries to remedy this disparity by focusing on the presence and influence of literature from South American countries, among them Colombia, Peru, and Argentina.

The Latin American Boom was one of the most important literary movements that introduced Latin American literature into the United States and the broader international scene. After the revolution of 1959, Cuba began to offer opportunities for writers and artists from all over Latin America who wanted to pursue their intellectual or artistic interests. One of the reasons the United States government established the Alliance for Progress was to counter Cuba’s influence on Latin American intellectuals. The insidious program Alliance for Progress had a darker side that supported repressive military regimes across Latin America that were responsible for the death, torture and disappearance of thousands of South American citizens. At the same time, it did facilitate the translation and publication of Latin American novels; making them available to the American public. As a result, the works of Colombian, Peruvian, Argentine and Chilean writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Jose Donoso, Manuel Puig, and Mario Vargas Llosa were published and widely read in the United States.

South American literatures have developed a strong presence in the United States such as Andean literature and literature of exile. Since the 1980s, indigenous populations of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador have migrated legally or extra-legally to the United States, whether in search of better opportunities or to escape the violence of their home countries. These vibrant Andean populations have contributed to expanding the Andean Archipelago of literature. Similarly, high numbers of Argentines went into exile during the military dictatorship of 1976 to escape government violence and repression. Scholars such as Yossi Shain affirm that exiles expand the borders of the country by creating a diaspora that continues to interact with their compatriots in their home country and with those spread throughout the world. One example is Luisa Valenzuela, an Argentine writer, who continued to be committed to resisting the dictatorship while in exile. Her work is engaged with the process of writing, and how the exile experience influenced her work and her identity.
Contemporary Voices in Asian American Lyric Poetry
Authors: Chang Jennifer
Published: February 2020

Asian American poetry flourished in the first two decades of the 21st century. In 2004, the Asian American literary organization Kundiman hosted their inaugural workshop-based retreat at the University of Virginia, connecting poets from the United States and North America across generations. (The retreat continues to be held annually at Fordham University and has included fiction writers, as fellows and faculty, since 2017.) The first year of Kundiman’s retreat coincided with the publication of Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, edited by Victoria Chang, which introduced emerging poets Kazim Ali, Cathy Park Hong, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Srikanth Reddy, and Paisley Rekdal, among others, to a broader audience of readers and critics and, at the same time, urged a reassessment of the contemporary poetry field. Both events signaled an emergent generation’s desire to find community and acknowledgment for their work. Not only were these goals accomplished, but the collectivization of young Asian American poets and critical attention from universities and other cultural institutions also evinced how powerfully the impact of a previous generation of Asian American poets had been felt. That generation arguably began with the publication of Cathy Song’s Yale Younger Poets Prize–winning book Picture Bride in 1982 and grew to include Marilyn Chin, Li-Young Lee, Garrett Hongo, and Agha Shahid Ali, whose work can be found in Norton anthologies of poetry and various other canon-defining projects. The critical and cultural acceptance these poets enjoyed at the end of the 20th century blazed a trail for Asian American poets of the 21st century, who increasingly balance the lyric conventions of emotional expressiveness and imagistic language with audacious political subjectivity. In doing so, Asian American poets of the 21st century have opened up conceptions of lyric, particularly regarding voice, to incorporate questions of identity, immigration and migration, and American cultural experience. Contemporary Asian American poets frequently reimagine the lyric tradition through a distinctly Asian American political imagination.
Humanitarian Aid and the European Union
Authors: Pusterla Francesca , Pusterla Elia
Published: February 2020

The European Union Humanitarian Aid Policy (EUHAP) operates through the European Commission’s Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations Department (DG ECHO) in international humanitarian crises to help victims of man-made atrocities and natural catastrophes worldwide. EUHAP is a subject of vibrant debates given its sensitive scope of intervention and institutional uniqueness. This results, first, in discussions of the reason and legitimacy of humanitarian aid as well as the goals and impact on domestic politics of both donors and recipients. Second, EUHAP is institutionally provided with parallel competences that allow simultaneous and autonomous interventions of the European Union and Member States in humanitarian crises. This means that the EU and Member States can formally carry out independent humanitarian aid without obligation to coordinate. This makes EUHAP particularly relevant regarding the role of the EU as a humanitarian aid provider, the relations between the EU and Member States, the policy governance, and the policy implementation principles.

First, coordination and cooperation between the EU and Member States are de facto essential, given the collective nature and global effects of humanitarian crises. Shared competence regulation through EUHAP may enhance the effectiveness of joint operations, overcome inefficient division of labor, and avoid divergence between intervention expected outcome and real performance.

Second, parallel competences give to the EU the formal competence to carry out humanitarian actions and conduct a common policy, while Member States’ autonomous actions are not prevented. Indeed, despite the undeniable benefits of multilateral intervention, Member States may opt for bilateralism due to concerns for domestic autonomy and sovereignty breaches. Such collective action problems risk affecting policy coherence and effectiveness.

Third, policy governance can make the difference in an effective and coherent EUHAP. This depends on the successful coordination of involved actors to avoid overlapping interventions, dispersion of resources, and particular political, economic, and bureaucratic interests to prevail. In so doing, Member States access the benefits of centralized coordination, monitoring, and division of labor and also avoid autonomy and sovereignty breaches.

Fourth, the application of a costs/benefits rationale to common humanitarian interventions is not per se sufficient to ground and overcome the drawbacks of collective action and explain EUHAP. As per its Treaties, or in line with international humanitarian law, the EU adopts and pursues a humanitarian aid policy based on shared principles of solidarity, humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality.
Coming Out, Intergroup Relations, and Attitudes Toward LGBT Rights
Authors: Hoffarth Mark R. , Hodson Gordon
Published: February 2020

Intergroup relations and contact between groups has historically been considered a mechanism to promote support for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights. However, LGBT identities are often concealable, and stigma discourages members of the LGBT community from disclosing that they are LGBT, which may prevent contact. Some subsets of the LGBT population make up a small percentage of the overall population, which may also decrease the quantity of contact. As such, the process of coming out to friends, relatives, and coworkers has been a common strategy of the modern LGBT movement. The strategy could be effective because the intergroup contact literature has found support for intergroup contact decreasing prejudice in meta-analyses. At the same time, researchers have challenged the assertion that intergroup contact promotes social change because intergroup contact is sometimes negative, or may be impractical or avoided, positive attitudes can coincide with acceptance of inequality, and intergroup contact may have unintended negative side effects.

Research has generally found support for the notion that intergroup relations are more positive when there is greater contact. For LGBT people greater contact has been associated with decreasing anti-LGBT prejudice and increasing support for LGBT rights. However, similar to other domains of contact, the influence of LGBT contact is contextually sensitive, and a combination of psychological and structural barriers can decrease or prevent the positive effects of intergroup contact. There are strategies which may overcome these limitations, through policies (e.g., protection against discrimination), promoting types of contact that promote social change as opposed to merely positive attitudes, secondary transfer of contact effects, imagined contact, indirect forms of contact, and positive media representations of LGBT people. Gaps in the literature include a relative lack of research on contact with members of the LGBT community other than gays and lesbians (particularly non-cisgender people), intergroup contact between members of different subsets of the LGBT community, and a need for experimental and/or intervention-based research.
Distributive Justice for LGBTQ People
Authors: Adler Libby
Published: February 2020

Leading advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) advancement in the United States debate the central objectives of the movement as well as its proper reformist scope. On the libertarian right, gay rights proponents articulate a narrow vision, devoid of race or class consciousness and focused on obtaining formal equality through spare legal reforms—mainly access to marriage and military inclusion. On the left, advocates envision a larger cultural transformation, one that intersects with racial and economic justice and challenges the norms of powerful institutions such as family, capitalism, and the military.

A review of empirical research demonstrates that the needs in the LGBTQ community are diverse and, in many cases, urgent. The most privileged, along axes of race and class, may have few concerns apart from protection against discrimination and formal exclusion from major social institutions. Once the full spectrum of LGBTQ demographics and experience are considered, however, such a constricted range of reform objectives reveals itself to be insufficient to address such obstacles as hunger, homelessness, and unemployment.

A fresh approach to evaluating LGBTQ legal needs yields an equally fresh set of alternatives to the mainstream legal reform agenda. An intersectionally and distributively cognizant shift in the movement’s direction could advance the needs of the most disadvantaged members of the community, including homeless youth, transgender sex workers, and low-income parents.
Hurricane Katrina: Analyzing a Mega-Disaster
Authors: Boin Arjen , Brown Christer , Richardson James A.
Published: February 2020

The response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has been widely described as a disaster in itself. Politicians, media, academics, survivors, and the public at large have slammed the federal, state, and local response to this mega disaster. According to the critics, the response was late, ineffective, politically charged, and even influenced by racist motives. But is this criticism true? Was the response really that poor? This article offers a framework for the analysis and assessment of a large-scale response to a mega disaster, which is then applied to the Katrina response (with an emphasis on New Orleans). The article identifies some failings (where the response could and should have been better) but also points to successes that somehow got lost in the politicized aftermath of this disaster. The article demonstrates the importance of a proper framework based on insights from crisis management studies.
Electoral Systems and System Reforms in Latin America
Authors: Crisp Brian F. , Silva Patrick Cunha
Published: February 2020

Electoral systems impose incentives for relationships between parties and relationships within parties. In interparty terms, weak systems encourage many parties to enter and voters to vote sincerely for their most preferred options. Strong systems discourage many parties from entering and encourage voters to think strategically about viability (the likelihood a preferred option will win seats). In intraparty terms, centralized systems empower party leaders and put an emphasis on the party’s shared reputation. Individualistic systems empower individual candidates and members of congress and put an emphasis on their personal reputations. The individual rules examined when defining system incentives include ballot type (can voters choose among copartisans), the level to which votes are pooled before seats are awarded, the number and level at which votes are cast, district magnitude (the number of seats to be decided in a district in a given election), and legal thresholds (predefined vote total barriers to being awarded seats). The electoral systems used to elect lower houses, upper houses (where they exist) and presidents in Latin America are located in a two-dimensional space based on these incentives. In interparty terms, weak systems outnumber strong ones in the region. In intraparty terms, there is a great deal of diversity with centralized systems slightly outnumbering individualistic ones. Instances of electoral reform are captured as changes in incentives or movements in this space. Reforms are frequent but no clear pattern emerges in terms of countries across the region converging toward imposing similar electoral incentives.
A Constructivist Approach to Online Political Information Processing
Authors: Cassino Dan
Published: February 2020

Online processing, and the models arising from it, starts with an optimistic view of the American voter, in which it is supposed that the seeming ignorance of voters does not prevent them from expressing rational attitudes about the very political objects they do not know much about. This means that the seeming ignorance of voters is not necessarily a threat to electoral democracy, but the cognitive structures needed for this sort of rationality also lead to necessary, and sometimes extreme, biases in political information processing. Since information stored in long-term memory is linked, both semantically and affectively (that is, based on the perceived positive or negative valence of the information), affect—understood here as a simple positive or negative valence—colors all steps of information processing. For instance, individuals are likely to avoid, or counter-argue, or simply reject information that is at odds with their existing views. As a result, individuals of different political persuasions may have difficulty coming to agreement on the correct interpretation of relevant facts, or even the facts themselves. Alternative memory-based models, which propose that evaluations are constructed on the spot when a question is asked, may help to explain response instability, but fail to serve as complete replacements for the online processing approach. The bias caused by affect-infused cognition seems to present challenges for electoral democracy just as much as the seeming ignorance it accounts for, but it is argued that such biases are mostly limited to individuals who already hold fairly strong existing attitudes, a group which is unlikely to include most voters. Moreover, some degree of intransigence is likely a good thing, as the alternative is views that shift rapidly with new information.
Discussion Networks in Political Decision Making
Authors: Shapiro Ian , Richardson Steven , McClurg Scott , Sokhey Anand
Published: February 2020

Decades of work have illuminated the influence interpersonal networks exert on voting behavior, political participation, the acquisition of political knowledge, tolerance, ambivalence, and attitude polarization. These central findings have largely been grounded in examinations of political discussion and have remained robust to measurement differences of key concepts like disagreement, various data collection methods, and multiple research designs ranging from the cross-sectional to large-scale field experiments. By comparison, scholars understand considerably less about individuals’ motivation to approach their social contacts when it comes to politics, and about why networks produce the outcomes that they do; this calls researchers to reflect on and revisit previous research, but also to consider new paths of research. Although there is a growing body of promising work focused on “whole,” or complete, networks, much can also be gained by better integrating social psychology into the study of egocentric, or “core,” political networks.

Answering these (and other) questions will help connect current findings, emerging methods, and nascent theory. Such connections should advance dialogues between research on group influence, discussion networks, and individual political behavior.
Arrow’s Theorem
Authors: Duddy Conal , Piggins Ashley
Published: February 2020

Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility” theorem is rightly considered to be a landmark result in economic theory. It is a far-reaching result with implications not just for economics but for political science, philosophy, and many other fields. It has inspired an enormous literature, “social choice theory,” which lies on the interface of economics, politics, and philosophy. Arrow first proved the impossibility theorem in his doctoral dissertation—Social Choice and Individual Values—published in 1951. It is a remarkable result, and had Arrow not proved it, it is unlikely that the theorem would be known today.

A social choice is simply a choice made by, or on behalf of, a group of people. Arrow’s theorem is concerned more specifically with the following problem. Suppose that we have a given set of options to choose from and that each member of a group of individuals has his or her own preference over these options. By what method should we construct a single ranking of the options for the group as a whole? Any such method may be represented mathematically by a “social welfare function.” This is a function that receives as its input the preference ordering of each individual and then generates as its output a social preference ordering.

Arrow defined some properties that would seem to be essential to any reasonable social welfare function. These properties are called “unrestricted domain,” “weak Pareto,” “independence of irrelevant alternatives,” and “non-dictatorship.” Each of these properties, when taken alone, does appear to be very necessary indeed. Yet, Arrow proved that these properties are in fact mutually incompatible. This troubling fact has been central to the study of social choice ever since.
The Concept of Crisis in the History of Western Psychology
Authors: Wieser Martin
Published: February 2020

With roots that range from medicine to politics, to jurisdiction and historiography in ancient Greece, the concept of “crisis” played an eminent role in the founding years of Western academic psychology and continued to be relevant during its development in the 19th and 20th century. “Crisis” conveys the idea of an imminent danger of disintegration and breakdown, as well as a pivotal turning point with the chance of a new beginning. To this day, both levels of meaning are present in psychological discourses. Early diagnoses of a state of “crisis” of psychology date back to the end of the 19th century and focused on the question of the correct metaphysical foundation of psychology. During the interwar period, warnings of a disintegration of the discipline reached their first climax in German academia, when many eminent psychologists expressed their worries about the increasing fragmentation of the discipline. The rise of totalitarian systems in the 1930s brought an end to these debates, silencing the theoretical polyphony with physical violence. The 1960s saw a resurgence of “crisis literature” and the emergence of a more positive connotation of the concept in U.S.-American experimental psychology, when it was connected with Thomas Kuhn’s ideas of scientific “revolutions” and “paradigm shifts.” Since that time, psychological crisis literature has revolved around the question of unity, disunity, and the scientific status of the discipline. Although psychological crisis literature showed little success in solving the fundamental problems it addressed, it still provides one of the most theoretically rich and thought-provoking bodies of knowledge for theoretical and historical analyses of the discipline.
Psychological Humanities, Sciences, and the Arts in Russia
Authors: Vassilieva Julia
Published: February 2020

The interdisciplinary connections between psychology, the humanities, and the arts in Russia played a powerful role in delineating the unique character of the psychological field in the country. During the 19th and early 20th centuries an approach in Russian psychology that drew on the work of philosophers and theologists, art and literature critics, poets and writers represented a powerful current in the Russian quest for self-understanding. The interdisciplinary exchanges between psychology, sciences, and the arts intensified after the October Revolution of 1917. The revolution’s imperative of reshaping the world in a socialist mold ushered in a period of bold experimentation in the arts and the formulation of similarly ambitious research agendas in the sciences. The first 15 years following the revolution saw intense traffic between scientific laboratories, research institutes, and teaching institutions, on the one hand, and theaters, art studios, and the cinema industry, on the other, reconfiguring what had traditionally been understood as the distinct domains of science and art. The ideal of synthetic knowledge and the imperative of integration, especially in the domain of psychology, was also the main driving force behind the emergence of the cultural-historical paradigm proposed by Lev Vygotsky. Moreover, many of Vygotsky’s key concepts—including sign, mediation, and “perejivanie” (emotional work)—are indebted to his early encounters with literature, theater, and art criticism. A non-classical paradigm, the most recent and original development in Russian psychology, continues to draw important insights from aesthetic theories and philosophy. Overall, the Russian tradition in psychological humanities provides a powerful example of epistemological practice that brings art, humanistic inquiry, and scientific research well and truly together, generating a remarkable synthesis of knowledge.
Marxist Influences in Psychology
Authors: Laine-Frigren Tuomas
Published: February 2020

Marxist ideas influenced and inspired psychological thinking and practice in the 20th century in a range of ways. In different parts of the world, unique versions of Marxist psychology emerged as answers to questions and problems raised by specific historical contexts. As shown in the early 21st century scholarly interventions in Lev Vygotsky studies, the Soviet psychologist’s work was deeply embedded in the sociopolitical, cultural, and ideological context of early Soviet Russia. In countries such as Brazil and Italy, Marxism had a more indirect influence as an emancipatory discourse. In the wider framework of Latin American liberatory ideas and struggles, the educational philosopher Paulo Freire and psychologists Ignacio Martín-Baró and Maritza Montero wanted to increase the autonomy of those in poverty with their radical ideas and practices. In Italy, mental health reformers Franco Basaglia and Franca Ongaro Basaglia wanted to end the social alienation of psychiatric patients by allying with contemporary Italian Marxists and members of other social movements to change institutions from within. In the communist countries of Eastern Europe, psychology and Marxism had a complex relationship. Marxist psychology could be used rhetorically to make psychology somehow safe for socialism, but there were also psychologists who were truly inspired by Marx and used his work to further their wider social and educational agendas. These cases all highlight the importance of the interplay between local, regional, and global aspects in the history of Marxist psychology. Taken together, they show how Marxism has been a discourse utilized for various social, cultural, and scientific ends within psychology. Rather than existing in a purely political form, Marxist ideology and thinking has often manifested in the field as (re)interpretations, traveling ideas, and conceptual hybrids. The history of Marxist psychology can be regarded as a continuous effort to reinterpret and reprocess Marx’s ideas about the human condition. The history of Marxism and psychology also reveals an inner contradiction between control and emancipation, between the ideological aim of molding “collective men” and encouraging individual autonomy.
Educational Leadership as Practice
Authors: Wilkinson Jane
Published: February 2020

In the first part of the 21st century there has been a turn to practice in the social sciences including organizational studies, critical management sociology, philosophy, and some domains of education inquiry. Despite a rich tradition of epistemological and ontological debates, educational leadership scholarship has been slow to recognize the productive nature of the practice turn. This is partly due to its historical location in North American pragmatic traditions and a concomitant privileging of more instrumentalist, positivist, and functionalist accounts of how we come to know, be, and learn to go on in the social world that constitutes educational organizations.

Educational leadership scholarship has had two dominant tendencies when it comes to explaining the phenomenon of organizational change. The first relies on individualist and frequently decontextualized accounts that privilege individuals, for example, the hero leader who turns around a “failing” educational organization. The second draws on dominant societist accounts that foreground systems, for example, principals as role incumbents in schools. In so doing, the latter privileges the system above the lifeworld of educational organizations.

In contrast, a practice account of leadership or leading draws our attention to the materiality and “happeningness” of leading practices as social phenomena, unfolding in the ontological specificity of particular sites at particular times, rather than as a set of espoused ideals. It foregrounds the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements or practice architectures that hold in place particular educational practices, and that in turn create the kinds of enabling or constraining conditions for educational transformation to occur. By understanding the practices and arrangements that hold particular kinds of educational practices in place, we are better able to understand possibilities for educational change and transformation.
Questioning Nature and Environmental Ethics in Schools
Authors: Moreira Jorge , Alves Fátima , Mendonça Ana
Published: February 2020

Contemporary sciences and societies are facing several problems when analyzing the relationship between the natural and social dimensions of the world as reflected in the field of education. A serious effort must be urgently made to identify and tackle environmental problems in order to understand the world in which we live, in ways that are beneficial to present and future life on Earth. In this context, it is fundamental to create a new social order in a way that thinking “out of the box” can emerge with other orders closer to the diversity of life that coexist on the planet. Consequently, the awareness of the complexity and multidimensionality of our world requires the building of new forms of reflexivity and the development of critical thinking, reversing the still predominant characteristics of modern societies such as compartmentalization of knowledge, unhealthy competition, profit-seeking motivations, the exploitation of nature, and excessive individualist and anthropocentric approaches. In this regard, educational institutions play a relevant role in shaping future human actions to be more ethically harmonic (both environmentally and socially) as they are sites of knowledge production and sharing.

Hence, it is crucial to rethink the entire educational paradigm and learning system (objectives, curricula, pedagogical strategies, instruments, competencies, school management framework, and even school buildings), because schools often function as “islands,” isolating students from nature, the community, and the “real world,” not preparing them to be well-informed and conscious citizens nor for the challenges that lie ahead. Some theoretical and practical alternatives are needed since schools actually embody the paradoxes and dilemmas of the current societal malaise but have not yet been able to deal with them or to provide adequate effective responses.
Environmental Change and Chinese Empire
Authors: Bello David A.
Published: February 2020

Agriculture—especially grain cultivation—informed the primary environmental ground of imperial China (221 to 1912 ce) and was ideally intended to produce human habitat from state-supervised environmental change. The consequent political and socioeconomic development of the empire and its constituent dynasties was conditioned within larger global ecological contexts that can be abbreviated as two major climate shifts, the Medieval Warm Period (MWP, c. 1000–1300 ce) and the Little Ice Age (LIA, c. 1400–1900 ce). Before 1000 ce, China likely experienced a number of less prolonged alternations of cold and warm climate, such as the Sui-Tang Warm Period (650–700 ce).

Chinese empire’s adaptations in response were rooted in agriculture, augmented by agro-pastoral and pastoral measures mainly concentrated along and above north China’s steppe ecotone. Critical inputs for the sustainability of environmental relations were maintained throughout the imperial period and came from domestic and foreign sources—most critically including the fertile eroded silt of the north China Loess Plateau, the water resources of the Yellow and Yangzi river basins, a high-yield crop suite of both dryland and wet rice varieties, south China fast-growth tree species, and New World silver and highland crops. Ongoing development and exploitation of these resources across the succession of seven major—and over a dozen more localized—dynasties over two millennia allowed China’s population to expand at globally unprecedented rates, numbering from tens of millions around the year 0 ce to hundreds of millions during the 18th century. In the process, biodiversity—especially that of wild growth forest habitats—was steadily reduced from north to south, successively. The empire’s main resource base and population centers correspondingly relocated south of the Yangzi around the watershed Song (960–1279 ce) period, with the Grand Canal tapping both of China’s major rivers to deliver southern abundance as far north as Beijing by the Yuan (1279–1368 ce). Inner and Southeast Asian peripheries came under comparable agro-commercial developmental pressure only during the Ming–Qing period (1368–1912 ce). With the onset of the 19th century, however, destabilizing environmental pressures emerged across the empire, many of them paradoxically driven by once-effective adaptations.
The Dutch East India Company and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago Worlds, 1602–1795
Authors: van Rossum Matthias
Published: February 2020

Slavery and slave trade were widespread throughout the empire of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Asia. The VOC was not only a “merchant” company but also functioned as military power, government, and even agricultural producer. In these roles, the VOC was involved in the forced relocation (and forced mobilization) of people in direct and indirect ways. This entailed commodified slavery and especially slave trade, in which persons were considered property and sellable, but also a wider landscape of forced relocations (deportation, non-commodified transfers) and coerced labor regimes (corvée, debt, and caste slavery). Much more research into the histories of slavery, slave trade, and wider coercive labor and social regimes is needed to shed light on the dynamics and connections of local and global systems.
Maps of the World in Early Modern Japan
Authors: Leca Radu
Published: February 2020

Since the world in its entirety cannot be grasped through direct experience, world maps are mental constructs that serve as a radiography of a given culture’s attitudes towards its environment. Early modern Japan offers an intriguing study case for the assimilation of a variety of world map typologies in terms of pre-existing traditions of thought. Rather than topography, these maps stress topological connections between “myriad countries” and therefore embody the various mental maps of cultural agents in Japan. The maps’ materiality and embeddedness in social networks reveal connections to other areas of visual and intellectual culture of the period.
Women in West African History
Authors: Cooper Barbara
Published: February 2020

Across West Africa up to the 19th century, titled positions for women ensured that women’s interests could be voiced and their disputes regulated. Women often had major roles as brokers and intermediaries in trade centers along the Saharan and Atlantic littorals, contributing to the emergence of powerful Euro-African families. Nevertheless, women were particularly vulnerable to the depredations of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades. Because female labor was so highly valued, female slaves were more expensive than male slaves. The history of women in West Africa has been characterized by marked differences by ecological zone. Those differences have been deepened by Islamic influences in the North and by different experiences under French, British, and Portuguese rule. With the decline in the Atlantic trade and the growing emphasis upon commodity production, the demand for female labor in agriculture and in processing rose. Under colonial rule, the loss of slave labor was partially offset by increasing demands upon the labor of wives. Women mediated demands upon their labor through colonial courts, with some success in the early decades of the 20th century. Later courts and administrators supported patriarchal controls upon women in the interests of order and a smoothly running economy. Women’s control over their traditional means of accumulating wealth through farming, cloth production, and specialized crafts was typically undermined as economies shifted to emphasize cash crop production and tree crops in particular. Women nevertheless could flourish in market trade and could sometimes gain control over new niches in the economy. The growth of colonial infrastructure had contradictory implications. Women’s traditionally important roles as queens, priestesses, and ritual specialists declined in importance. At the same time, schooling gave some women access to new means of gaining income and prestige as teachers and medical practitioners.
An Environmental History of Southern Africa
Authors: Knight Jasper
Published: February 2020

Southern Africa has experienced significant environmental changes since the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent, starting around 180 million years ago. These environmental changes broadly reflect the interplay between tectonic and global-scale climatic drivers, which in combination result in changes to the properties and dynamics of land surface physical and ecological processes. The preserved record of such processes can be used as proxy indicators to reconstruct past environments and climates.

In southern Africa, different types of proxy indicators have formed and are preserved in different geographical areas, broadly corresponding to their individual climatic and geomorphic contexts. Three significant time intervals over which landscape evolution have taken place are the Phanerozoic, the late Quaternary, and the last 200 years.

A critical outcome of this analysis is that the record of environmental change in southern Africa is highly variable and only partly preserved, and that there are spatial and temporal gaps which mean that it is difficult to construct a continuous or unambiguous environmental history either for all areas of the region or for all time intervals. Changing physical drivers and environmental controls over time, including land surface feedbacks, are now being supplanted by a stronger imprint of human activity in the Anthropocene.
Ngoyi, Lilian
Authors: Berger Iris
Published: February 2020

Lilian Masediba Matabane Ngoyi was a passionate anti-apartheid and women’s rights advocate and one of the most prominent woman leaders during the 1950s. Born in Pretoria in 1911, she attended primary school through Standard 6 and trained as a nurse for three years before becoming a seamstress. Her marriage to John Ngoyi ended with his death in an automobile accident. In 1945 Ngoyi began working in a garment factory and joined the Garment Workers’ Union of the Transvaal. Her union activism led her to take part in the Defiance Campaign against apartheid laws. Ngoyi’s arrest in 1952 for standing in the whites-only line at the post office in Pretoria changed the course of her life.

From this time onward, while still struggling to support her family, she devoted herself to anti-apartheid activism. A passionate speaker, she was elected to the top positions in the Federation of South African Women and the African National Congress Women’s League and became the first woman elected to the ANC Executive Committee. In 1954, as a delegate to the World Congress of Mothers, she traveled widely in Europe, China, and the Soviet Union. Upon returning to South Africa, Ngoyi was a key leader of the historic demonstrations against passes for women in 1955 and 1956. But her political prominence also made her a target of state repression. First arrested in the Treason Trial in 1956, she was among the anti-apartheid leaders detained after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960. Between trial appearances and imprisonment, she continued her political activities. In the last two decades of her life, she suffered from a series of banning orders that restricted her to her Soweto home. She died on March 13, 1980.