bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hedgehog signaling establishes precursors for germline stem cell niches by regulating cell adhesion
Authors: Lai Chun-Ming , Lin Kun-Yang , Kao Shih-Han , Chen Yi-Ning , Huang Fu , Hsu Hwei-Jan
Published: March 2017

Stem cells require different types of supporting cells, or niches, to control stem cell maintenance and differentiation. However, little is known about how those niches are formed. We report that in the development of the Drosophila melanogaster ovary, the Hedgehog (Hh) gradient sets differential cell affinity for somatic gonadal precursors to specify stromal intermingled cells, which contributes to both germline stem cell maintenance and differentiation niches in the adult. We also report that Traffic Jam (an orthologue of a large Maf transcription factor in mammals) is a novel transcriptional target of Hh signaling to control cell–cell adhesion by negative regulation of E-cadherin expression. Our results demonstrate the role of Hh signaling in niche establishment by segregating somatic cell lineages for differentiation.
Apocalyptic Fiction, 1950–2015
Authors: Hicks Heather J.
Published: March 2017

From 1950 to the 2010s, the genre known as apocalyptic fiction has grown in prominence, moving from the mass-market domain of science fiction to a more central position in the contemporary literary scene. The term “apocalyptic fiction” can be understood to encompass both depictions of cataclysms that destroy the Earth and texts that portray the aftermath of a disaster that annihilates a nation, civilization, or all but a few survivors of the human population. The term itself finds its roots in the book of Revelation, and while contemporary apocalyptic fiction tends to be largely secular in its worldview, important traces of the Christian tradition linger in these texts. Indeed, while apocalyptic fiction has evolved over the past sixty-five years in response to historical transformations in Western societies, much of it remains wedded to Revelation’s representation of women as the cause of apocalyptic destruction. The material of the 1950s reflects Cold War anxieties about nuclear war while presenting sexually liberated women as implicated in the same modernity that has created the atomic bomb. People of color are also depicted as threats that must be contained. The apocalyptic fiction of the 1960s registers a fascination with genetic, social, and literary mutation, ambivalently treating a variety of “others” as both toxic and potentially useful ambassadors to some new, postmodern condition. The 1970s see the emergence of feminist apocalypses, works that react against the sexist tendency to conflate female power and sexuality with apocalyptic menace. The 1980s introduce the “American apocalypse,” a subgenre that imagines a disaster befalling America in specifically economic terms. The 1990s, meanwhile, find combinations of the feminist and American apocalypse, while also beginning to bring environmental peril into focus. From 2000 forward, there is a renewed interest in broader, more global disasters, in part informed by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Formally, this is the era of the “metapocalypse”—apocalyptic fictions that are self-reflexive about the conventions of the genre, including those involving gender and race. Nonetheless, several of the novels in this period still unapologetically introduce figures that recall Jezebel and Babylon from Revelation. Finally, the period since 2010 has seen a revived emphasis on economic collapse precipitated by neoliberal capitalism as well as the anthropocene.
The Adaptive Organization and Fast-Slow Systems
Authors: Andersen Torben Juul , Hallin Carina Antonia
Published: March 2017

Contemporary organizations operate under turbulent business conditions and must adapt their strategies to ongoing changes. Sustainable performance can be achieved when the organization engages in interactive processes that link emerging opportunities to forward-looking analytics. But few organizations are able to practice this consistently. Fast processes performed by managers at the frontline respond to ongoing environmental stimuli and slow processes initiated by managers at the center interpret events and reasons about updated strategic actions. Current experiential insights from the fast processes can be aggregated systematically to inform the slow processes of reasoning. When the fast and slow processes interact they can form a dynamic system that adapts organizational activities to changing conditions.
Restructuring and Divestitures
Authors: Bergh Donald D.
Published: March 2017

Growth strategies have long been a priority for executive leadership. However, growth can also create problems. Leaders may need to use restructuring and divestiture actions to regain control, improve transparency, and re-establish efficiency. Given that leaders benefit from having insights into the antecedents, processes, outcomes, and decisions associated with unwinding growth most effectively, it is essential to consider the body of knowledge that exists in strategic management on restructuring and divestiture. This review seeks to describe what is currently known and not known about restructuring and divestiture and will give future researchers some suggested directions for further developing knowledge about these expensive and risky actions. The assessment is organized round five key questions that have shaped the field’s literature base: Why do firms divest? How do firms divest? Do divestitures create value? What happens to the divested units? And what are some promising directions for future knowledge development? Afterwards, three challenges for knowledge development are presented: What is value creation and for whom does it matter? What to do about incomplete information? And, is there a need for integrating different levels of strategy? Overall, it is important to identify, develop, and analyze the conceptual models of restructuring and divestiture with the purpose of guiding future research to provide knowledge that decision-makers will find useful as they engage in restructuring and divestitures.
Leadered and Leaderless Teams in the Classroom
Authors: André Rae
Published: March 2017

There are trends in the use of teams in the classroom that stimulate both theory development and pedagogical innovation in this important area. In particular, three classroom applications are (1) building group process skills, (2) developing team leaders, and (3) using teams to learn course content. Of particular interest are new possibilities for utilizing leadered rather than leaderless groups, systematizing team coaching interventions, and enriching team-based learning. In this field of study, it is clear that pedagogical innovation and theoretical development interact to enhance student learning. Continued exploration in both aspects is encouraged.
Positive Deviance: A Non-Normative Approach to Health and Risk Messaging
Authors: Singhal Arvind , Dura Lucia
Published: March 2017

The Positive Deviance (PD) approach is based on the premise that every community has individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers although everyone has access to the same resources and challenges. In contrast to traditional problem-solving approaches that begin with an expert-driven analysis of “what is not working” with people—their explicit needs, deficits, problems, and risks—followed by attempts to plug those gaps, the PD approach focuses on identifying “what is working.” PD offers a systematic framework to identify assets, indigenous knowledge, and home-grown solutions, and to amplify them for wider adoption.

The PD approach was operationalized and systematized in the early 1990s in Vietnam to address malnutrition. At the time, 65% of children under five were malnourished. Instead of looking for the causes and applying best practices, PD pioneers looked for children from very poor families who were well-nourished. Through community-led efforts, they determined the existence of positive deviants, identified their behaviors and strategies, and amplified them. The process was replicated across 14 villages—each identifying its own batch of local practices—and malnutrition decreased by 85%. These actions led to PD as we know it today in the form of the “6 Ds”: Define, Determine, Discover, Design, Discern, and Disseminate.

PD has been used widely to address a large number of intractable social problems—many of them dealing with health and risk: reducing endemic malnutrition, decreasing neonatal and maternal mortality, reducing goiter and diseases of micronutrient deficiency, boosting organ transplantation rates and cancer screenings, increasing mental well-being and psychological resilience, preventing and controlling malaria and Chagas, and reducing hospital-acquired infections in healthcare.

From 2004 to 2008, six U.S. hospitals pioneered the use of PD to address the growing incidence of infections caused by the antibiotic resistant bacteria Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). PD was used to identify and amplify evidence-based infection prevention practices. Pilot outcomes included a 73% average reduction in healthcare-associated MRSA infections units and a subsequent decrease of between 33 and 84% at the different hospitals.

The PD approach to problem-solving holds important implications for public health scholars and practitioners, risk communicators, and message designers. The cases of Vietnam and one of the pilot hospitals are used to illustrate the ways that through language- and action-based strategies PD challenges traditional risk and health messaging, proposing instead an asset-based, participatory, and sustainable framework.
Counterfactuals in Health and Risk Messaging
Authors: Iles Irina A. , Nan Xiaoli
Published: March 2017

Counterfactual thinking is the process of mentally undoing the outcome of an event by imagining alternate antecedent states. For example, one might think that if they had given up smoking earlier, their health would be better. Counterfactuals are more frequent following negative events than positive events. Counterfactuals have both aversive and beneficial consequences for the individual. On the one hand, individuals who engage in counterfactual thinking experience negative affect and are prone to biased judgment and decision making. On the other hand, counterfactuals serve a preparative function, and they help people reach their goals in the future by suggesting effective behavioral alternatives.

Counterfactual thoughts have been found to influence an array of cognitive processes. Engaging in counterfactual thinking motivates careful, in-depth information processing, increases perceptions of self-efficacy and control, influences attitudes toward social matters, with consequences for behavioral intentions and subsequent behaviors. Although it is a heavily studied matter in some domains of the social sciences (e.g., psychology, political sciences, decision making), counterfactual thinking has received less attention in the communication discipline. Findings from the few studies conducted in communication suggest that counterfactual thinking is a promising message design strategy in risk and health contexts. Still, research in this area is critically needed, and it represents an opportunity to expand our knowledge.
Grounded Theory Methodology
Authors: Ruppel Paul Sebastian , Mey Günter
Published: March 2017

Grounded theory methodology is one of the most widely used approaches to collect and analyze data within qualitative research. It can be characterized as a framework for study design, data collection, and analysis, which aims at the development of middle-range theories. The final result of such a study is called a “grounded theory,” and it consists of categories that are related to each other.

Health and risk message design researchers working with grounded theory methodology are explicitly invited to use any kind of data they consider suitable for a particular project. Grounded theory methodology studies were originally based on intense fieldwork data, but in the meantime, interviews have become the most widely used type of data. In addition, there is a growing interest in using visual data such as pictures or film. Grounded theory methodology originated from sociology, but has since been applied in many different disciplines. This widened application went along with modifications, new developments, and innovations, and led to several current variants of grounded theory methodology.

Basic features of grounded theory methodology include theoretical sampling, specific coding procedures with a comparative approach to analysis, and memo writing. The strategy of theoretical sampling requires that theoretical insights gained from the analysis of initially collected data guide subsequent data collection. Hence, during the research process data collection and analysis alternate and interact. For data analysis, different ways of coding enable the researcher to develop increasingly abstract conceptual ideas and reflections, first embodied in codes, later in categories. This analytical process allows for a step-by-step development of categories that are grounded in data. Category development entails comparisons at all stages, for example, of different cases during sampling, of different data pieces, and of different codes and categories during analysis. As a result, grounded theory methodology is also known as the constant comparative method. Throughout the research process the researcher writes memos and keeps track of the development of conceptual ideas, methodological reflections, and practical to-dos. Today, many researchers use software specifically developed to assist the process of qualitative data analysis.
Meta-Analysis in Health and Risk Messaging
Authors: Zebregs Simon , de Bruijn Gert-Jan
Published: March 2017

Meta-analyses are becoming increasingly popular in the field of health and risk communication—meta-analyses allow for more precise estimations of the magnitude of effects and the robustness of those effects across empirical studies in a particular domain. Despite its popularity, most scholars are not trained in the basic methods involved with meta-analyses. There are advantages to meta-analysis in comparison to other forms of research synthesis. An overview of the methods involved in conducting and reporting meta-analytical research is helpful.

However, the methods involved with meta-analyses are not as clear-cut as they may first appear. Numerous issues must be considered and various arbitrary decisions are required during the process. These issues and decisions relate to various topics such as inclusion criteria, the selection of sources, quality assessments for eligible studies, and publication bias. Basic knowledge of these issues and decisions is important for interpreting the outcomes of a meta-analysis correctly.
Effects of Social Media Use on Climate Change Opinion, Knowledge, and Behavior
Authors: Anderson Ashley A.
Published: March 2017

Early research on the relationship between social media use and its relationship to climate change opinion, knowledge, and behavior suggests several positive impacts. Social media encourages greater knowledge of climate change, mobilization of climate change activists, space for discussing the issue with others, and online discussions that frame climate change as a negative for society. Social media, however, does provide space for framing climate change skeptically and activating those with a skeptical perspective of climate change. Further examination of the relationship between social media use and climate change perceptions is warranted.
Energy Policy
Authors: Tosun Jale
Published: March 2017

Energy policy comprises rules concerning energy sources, energy efficiency, energy prices, energy infrastructure, and climate and environmental aspects of energy production, utilization, and transit. The main theme in this policy domain, especially in the European context, concerns the trade-offs between affordable, secure, and clean energy. Energy policy is a cross-sectoral—or boundary-spanning—policy domain, and as such, it is affected by decisions taken in other policy domains as well as affects what is decided there. The cross-sectoral character of energy policy is reflected in how it is proposed, adopted, implemented, and evaluated. The analytical perspectives on energy policy depend on the energy source of interest. Research concentrating on fossil energy sources (i.e., coal, oil, and natural gas) has traditionally adopted the analytical lens of international relations and international political economy. These lenses have also been important for the study of unconventional fossil energy sources (i.e., oil shale, oil sands, and shale gas) and nuclear power, for which, however, risk and uncertainty also play an important role. Questions concerning the supply and management of energy infrastructure have received attention from public administration scholars. The promotion of renewable energy as a central means for mitigating climate change has become one of the most intensely researched themes in the broader political science literature.
Transitional Justice During Armed Conflict
Authors: Loyle Cyanne E.
Published: March 2017

Armed conflict is ultimately about the violent confrontation between two or more groups; however, there is a range of behaviors, both violent and nonviolent, pursued by governments and rebel groups while conflict is ongoing that impacts the course and outcomes of that violence. The use of judicial or quasi-judicial institutions during armed conflict is one such behavior. While there is a well-developed body of literature that examines the conditions under which governments engage with the legacies of violence following armed conflict, we know comparatively little about these same institutions used while conflict is ongoing.

Similar to the use of transitional justice following armed conflict or post-conflict justice, during-conflict transitional justice (DCJ) refers to “a judicial or quasi-judicial process initiated during an armed conflict that attempts to address wrongdoings that have taken or are taking place as part of that conflict” (according to Loyle and Binningsbø). DCJ includes a variety of institutional forms pursued by both governments and rebel groups such as human rights trials, truth commissions or commissions of inquiry, amnesty offers, reparations, purges, or exiles.

As our current understanding of transitional justice has focused exclusively on these processes following a political transition or the termination of an armed conflict, we have a limited understanding of how and why these processes are used during conflict. Extant work has assumed, either implicitly or explicitly, that transitional justice is offered and put in place once violence has ended, but this is not the case. New data on this topic from the During-Conflict Justice dataset by Loyle and Binningsbø suggests that the use of transitional justice during conflict is a widespread and systematic policy across multiple actor groups. In 2017, Loyle and Binningsbø found that DCJ processes were used during over 60% of armed conflicts from 1946 through 2011; and of these processes 10% were put in place by rebel groups (i.e., the group challenging the government rather than the government in power).

Three main questions arise from this new finding: Under what conditions are justice processes implemented during conflict, why are these processes put in place, and what is the likely effect of their implementation on the conflict itself? Answering these questions has important implications for understanding patterns of government and rebel behavior while conflict is ongoing and the impacts of those behaviors. Furthermore, this work helps us to broaden our understanding of the use of judicial and quasi-judicial processes to those periods where no power shift has taken place.
Political Attitudes and Behavior Under Autocracy
Authors: Bratton Michael
Published: March 2017

Knowledge about mass political attitudes and behavior derives mainly from studies of established Western democracies. But do populations under autocracy engage in the political process and, if so, do they support or challenge the status quo? Much depends on the nature of political regimes. To the extent that spaces for political expression are closed under autocracy, citizens face an unpalatable choice between political acquiescence and violent protest, with all the risks that such options impose.

A key question for researchers is whether participants in authoritarian politics are active citizens or mobilized subjects. Survey evidence suggests that some people may be willing to grant legitimacy to strong leaders and to trust the institutions of a dominant state. Others nevertheless find ways to engage in conventional political behaviors such as discussing public affairs, taking collective action, and turning out to vote in elections, especially under hybrid competitive authoritarian regimes.

Under what conditions do citizens sometimes rebel against entrenched authority? Regime type again seems to matter, with popular protest more common under open than closed systems. With reference to prodemocracy social movements, like the Arab Spring of 2011, analysts debate whether people take to the streets principally for reasons of rational self-interest or propelled by emotions like anger. And scholars explore the effects of new information and communications technologies, finding mixed results for political mobilization. As emphasized in the literature on contentious politics, the displacement of autocratic regimes from below is likely only if social movements build strong and sustained political organizations.
Opportunity and Willingness: From “Ordering Concepts” to an Analytical Perspective for the Study of Politics
Authors: Starr Harvey
Published: March 2017

The opportunity/willingness framework (O/W) is presented as an agent-structure approach to the understanding of international relations (IR) and international conflict, with deep roots in the “ecological triad” of Harold and Margaret Sprout. While originally developed to organize thinking about international politics, this article describes how it has evolved into a guide for generating IR theory, developing research designs to study IR, and ways to evaluate those theories. It does this by showing how to synthesize what we know and bring together apparently disparate hypotheses and evidence to bear—crossing a variety of analytic boundaries—and by pulling together what we know across levels of analysis, academic disciplines, and the sub-disciplines of political science. O/W compels scholars to cross, link, and synthesize levels of analysis—complementing theories built around levels of analysis, while at the same time moving them forward in order to deal with the complex causation they have to confront. This complex causation derives from the logical features of O/W, which regards opportunity and willingness as jointly necessary conditions for the occurrence of any event. A discussion of the characteristics of necessity and sufficiency as causal processes leads to the conclusion that not only does this joint necessity distinguish O/W from theoretical approaches that are deterministic, monocausal, or are concerned only with either opportunity or willingness, but is the beginning of a logical story that demonstrates how this framework can deal with causal complexity. The joint necessity of opportunity and willingness, along with its two corollaries of “substitutability” and “nice laws,” forces a researcher to more fully specify the logical and substantive structure of the theoretical statements under investigation, and to ensure the research design is relevant to the theory and set of research hypotheses—such that there is a coherent relationship among the components of logic, theory, and method. At the end of the logical story developed in the article, it can be seen that O/W has moved well beyond an organizing principle and is a model of causal complexity of great potential.
Democratic Domestic Institutions and Foreign Policy
Authors: Hamilton Eric
Published: March 2017

Scholarship on the relationship between domestic institutions and foreign policy is driven by the assumption that a state’s domestic political arrangement can explain important aspects of its foreign policy behavior. Democratic domestic institutions, in particular, are thought to be significant for explaining an important set of outcomes. Research shows, for example, that democracies tend to cooperate with each other; uphold their commitments; make more effective threats; engage in fewer wars with each other (but do fight non-democracies quite frequently); perform better in the wars in which they are involved; and tend to fight wars of shorter duration.

Studying the impact of democratic domestic institutions on foreign policy has developed along two broad lines. The first and most established approach is rooted in the basic distinction between democracies and non-democracies. In this view, democratic institutions constrain leaders in a way that produces distinct democratic foreign policy patterns. This approach has yielded a tremendous amount of research and insight into democratic foreign policy, but also suffers from several important shortcomings. One is that democracy tends to be correlated with a host of other variables, making it difficult to specify what exactly it is about democracy that explains certain foreign policy outcomes. A second and related critique of this approach is that it tends to treat democracy uniformly when in fact there is often great variation in democratic domestic institutions across cases.

A second and more recent approach focuses on the differences among democracies and seeks to explain how this variation, in turn, creates variation in foreign policy behavior. Democracies differ in terms of their underlying institutional arrangements in a variety of ways, including whether they have presidential or parliamentary systems, autonomous or constrained executives, and open or closed institutions to modulate the flow of information between leaders and citizens, among others. Even within a country, there can be a different set of institutional constraints on democratic leaders depending on the given foreign policy instrument they seek to employ. Studying these variations and their impact on policy processes and outcomes provides great promise for further unpacking the relationship between domestic democratic institutions and foreign policy.
Moral Panics
Authors: Critcher Chas
Published: March 2017

The concept of moral panic was first developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s, principally by Stan Cohen, initially for the purpose of analyzing the definition of and social reaction to youth subcultures as a social problem. Cohen provided a “processual” model of how any new social problem would develop: who would promote it and why, whose support they would need for their definition to take hold, and the often-crucial role played by the mass media and institutions of social control. In the early 1990s, Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda produced an “attributional” model that placed more emphasis on strict definition than cultural processes. The two models have subsequently been applied to a range of putative social problems which now can be recognized as falling into five principal clusters: street crime, drug and alcohol consumption, immigration, child abuse (including pedophilia), and media technologies. Most studies have been conducted in Anglophone and European countries, but gradually, the concept is increasing its geographical reach. As a consequence, we now know a good deal about how and why social problems come to be constructed as moral panics in democratic societies.

This approach has nevertheless been criticized for its casual use of language, denial of agency to those promoting and supporting moral panics, and an oversimplified and outdated view of mass media, among other things. As proponents and opponents of moral panic analysis continue to debate the essentials, the theoretical context has shifted dramatically. Moral panic has an uncertain relationship to many recent developments in sociological and criminological thought. It threatens to be overwhelmed or sidelined by new insights from theories of moral regulation or risk, conceptualizations of the culture of fear, or the social psychology of collective emotion. Yet as an interdisciplinary project, it continues, despite its many flaws, to demand sustained attention from analysts of social problem construction.
Ideology in the Crime Genre
Authors: Lenz Timothy O.
Published: March 2017

The media inform the public about crime while also reflecting and shaping thinking about crime. The news media primarily provide information when they report on crime as part of the coverage of public affairs, but they also shape thinking about crime. The entertainment media, particularly television and film crime stories, primarily entertain audiences, but they also reflect and shape public opinion about the threat of crime, the causes of crime, criminal justice policies, and the criminal justice system. The media effect on the general public’s thinking about crime includes both the news media and the entertainment media because the trends toward infotainment in the news media (e.g., docudramas and true crime reality shows) and realism in the crime genre (stories that are based on or inspired by actual events) have blurred the distinction between fact and fiction.

The study of ideology in the crime genre includes the development of theories; empirical analyses of the media effect; explaining ideology, film, and television crime stories as legal texts explaining criminal procedure; and the exploration of current issues related to thinking about rights, law, violence, and justice.
Dark Tourism
Authors: Lennon John
Published: March 2017

Dark tourism has passed into the language and study of tourism since it was first designated as such in 1996 (see Lennon & Foley, 1996; Seaton, 1996). It is now established as a term to designate those sites and locations of genocide, holocaust, assassination, crime, or incarceration that have served to attract visitors. The phenomenon exists across a range of global destinations and demonstrates commonality and unifying elements across a range of societies and political regimes. The interpretation of these sites can of course be the product of ideology and dominant belief systems, and they act as the meeting place for history and visitation where questions of authenticity and fact are sometimes juxtaposed with the operation of tourism facilities. What is celebrated, interpreted, and developed is often selective, and dilemmas of commemoration of the unacceptable and acceptable are reflected clearly in the condition, nature, and content of these sites. This selective interpretation is demonstrated in destinations from Cambodia to Lithuania, from Auschwitz to Dallas, and from Moscow to London. In these locations, such tourist attractions become key physical sites of commemoration, history, and record. They provide the visitor with a narrative that may well be positioned, augmented, and structured to engage, entertain, or discourage further inquiry.

Dark tourism attractions demonstrate demand but also constitute commemoration, historical reference, narrative legacies, and populist heritage attractions. These tourism sites in some cases become one of the few remaining commemorative elements of victims and their testimonies. In such cases the content and its narrative interpretation take on critically important values in understanding a shared past.
Crime and Masculinity in Popular Culture
Authors: Tomsen Stephen , Hobbs Dick
Published: March 2017

A focus on masculinity and crime has been an ongoing feature of popular culture, ranging from early pulp fiction, cartoons, popular music, commercial film and television, and contemporary forms of gaming and online media. In sociology and cultural studies, the search for unequivocal examples of ideological repression has been thrown into doubt by accounts that seek out nuanced readings of cultural depictions and that have reworked evidence from audience research to question ideology as an uncontested absorption of ruling ideas. The creative relationship between producer and audience, with shifting meanings for consumers of culture, means a hesitation about whether cultural items can be read as holding a single inner meaning. A consideration of these cultural forms shows that simpler depictions of crime and criminal justice as a terrain of symbolic struggle between rival masculinities contrast morally repellent offenders from law enforcement heroes who enact justice and guard society. Yet cultural accounts of crime often offer more ambiguous scenarios that are difficult for viewers to judge, and opportunities for viewers to identify with acts of violence and lawbreaking that play on the wider tensions between official state-based and outlaw “protest” masculinities in the criminal justice system.
Worker Health and Safety
Authors: Tombs Steven , Whyte David
Published: March 2017

From the best estimates we have, workers die as a result of health and safety crimes at perhaps 70 times the rate of people who are murdered and perhaps 15 times the rate of people killed in car accidents. Yet health and safety crimes are not the typical subject matter for criminology simply because they are not interpersonal crimes. Yes, individuals are involved, but health and safety crime always requires us to look beyond individual actors playing out a criminal event in a self-contained crime “scene.” This chapter provides a detailed overview of how safety crimes might be regarded as crimes of violence, and explores in detail the way scholars have characterized the regulation of those crimes. It closes by providing a theoretical and empirical description of the “political economy” approach to understanding safety crimes with reference to the case of a young English worker, Simon Jones, who was killed at the hands of his employer.
Drugs and Popular Culture
Authors: Bogazianos Dimitri A.
Published: March 2017

While criminological analyses of drugs and popular culture often focus on media constructions of drug scares and epidemics, they also draw from a wide range of interrelated influences, including critical theory, cultural studies, feminism, and critical race theory, among many others. Given that current trajectories of hypermediated cultural production in a post-crack drug landscape is unlikely to change anytime soon, ever more fine-grained analyses will be needed in order to make sense of the inextricable links between drug-related representations, crime policy, and social justice. Future scholarship in this area will continue to draw from its rich heritage as well as innovate new methodological and theoretical emphases that pay closer attention to the nontextual elements of popular cultural forms.
Auditory Processing in the Aging Brain
Authors: Recanzone Gregg
Published: March 2017

Age-related hearing loss affects over half of the elderly population, yet it remains poorly understood. Natural aging can cause the input to the brain from the cochlea to be progressively compromised in most individuals, but in many cases the cochlea has relatively normal sensitivity and yet people have an increasingly difficult time processing complex auditory stimuli. The two main deficits are in sound localization and temporal processing, which lead to poor speech perception. Animal models have shown that there are multiple changes in the brainstem, midbrain, and thalamic auditory areas as a function of age, giving rise to an alteration in the excitatory/inhibitory balance of these neurons. This alteration is manifest in the cerebral cortex as higher spontaneous and driven firing rates, as well as broader spatial and temporal tuning. These alterations in cortical responses could underlie the hearing and speech processing deficits that are common in the aged population.
Transitions, Justice, and Equity in Education in Finland
Authors: Brunila Kristiina , Ikävalko Elina , Kurki Tuuli , Masoud Ameera , Mertanen Katariina , Mikkola Anna , Mäkelä Kalle
Published: March 2017

The ethos of vulnerability plays a central role in shaping cross-sectoral youth transition policies and their implementations. Despite good intentions, the ethos of vulnerability emphasizes personal accountability and stigmatization. This is the situation in Finland, where young people tend to be recognized through the prism of inherent vulnerability, with a parallel notion of the self that is damaged and fragile. This “turn inward” to the self does not necessarily help to see problems as societal but as individual, which may perpetuate systematic inequalities.
Education for Global Citizenship
Authors: Torres Carlos Alberto
Published: March 2017

The emergence of post-national citizenships questions the principles and values as well as the rights and responsibilities in which national citizenships were founded. Does this new reality reflect a crisis of classical liberalism and particularly of its neoliberal declination facing the new challenges of globalization and diversity? Multiculturalism, one of the answers to the dilemmas of citizenship and diversity shows signs of crisis. In these context concepts such as cosmopolitan democracies and global citizenship education have been invoked as solutions to the possible demise of the regulatory power of the nation-state and failed citizenship worldwide. The implementation of the Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) in 2012 by the UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon sets a new program for education where Global Citizenship Education is predicated as a resource to enhance global peace, sustainability of the planet, and the defense of global commons.
Pashtuns
Authors: Nichols Robert
Published: March 2017

With an estimated thirty million or more in Pakistan, twelve million in Afghanistan, and perhaps a million or more in a global diaspora, Pashtuns or Pukhtuns comprise a complex ethno-linguistic population with a rich cultural tradition and literature, varied political and economic contexts, and diverse national and Islamic identities. Historic and literary references to communities that have been thought to identify “Afghans” date to the 10th century and, according to the source and scholar consulted, many centuries earlier. The assumption of any uniquely “Pashtun” identity as equivalent to the diverse “Afghan” cultural, religious, and ethnic identities that evolved over centuries has obfuscated a full understanding of the emergence of distinct regional Pashtun ethno-linguistic communities and the origins of frequently studied cultural idioms. Millions of Pashtuns have lived in close and daily contact with many other ethnic groups (Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Baluch, Punjabis, etc.), and color-coded maps of ethnic homelands in Afghanistan and Pakistan are best seen as guides to often complex social geographies rather than absolute markers of ethnically pure settlement areas.

For perhaps a thousand years, Pashtuns and regional forefathers have circulated within imperial and merchant networks connected by Silk Road pathways, Persian and north Indian trade routes, and Indian Ocean sea lanes. Pashtuns sought livelihoods as horse traders, military entrepreneurs, agrarian pioneers, and regional rulers in the northern, eastern, and Deccan regions of India. An Afghan state with variable territorial claims consolidated after 1747. Leading Pashtun clans from around Kandahar and the eastern districts took positions in the dynasties that soon ruled from Kabul and core provinces.

Pashtuns between the Oxus and Indus rivers adapted to, avoided, and served 18th- and 19th-century Russian and British imperial economic and political forces. In the high European “new imperialism” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Afghan territories were framed by treaty-negotiated boundaries. Never colonized, Afghanistan became economically dependent on British–India subsidies and linkages. Into the mid-20th century, Afghanistan’s Pashtun political dynasties and Islamic and political activists on both sides of the British-Indian Durand Line offered leadership and alternative visions of the future to anticolonial and Muslim nationalists, including those in British India.

In recent decades, core Pashtun homelands and diasporic communities have fully experienced the disruptions and violence that followed the partition of British India in 1947, postcolonial “national” consolidation, conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, Cold War alliances and conflict, the rise and fall of the Taliban, and civil war. Like others, Pashtun lives were shaped by the transnational dynamics of economic globalization, urbanization, migration, and the international crises that traumatized the world after September 11, 2001.
Port Cities and Islamic Insurgency across Southeast Asia, 1850–1913
Authors: Gedacht Joshua
Published: March 2017

Port cities have long played a critical role in the circulation of peoples, commodities, and ideas within and across the maritime spaces of Southeast Asia. Although an indelible component of the islands and archipelagos of this region since at least the 15th century, the rise of global empires in the 19th century rejuvenated these communities by the sea, giving rise to thriving metropolises from Rangoon to Singapore, Bangkok to Penang. Historians recognize that these ascendant cities served as “imperial bridgeheads,” connecting the products and peoples of the Southeast Asian hinterlands to world markets. Yet, the idea of “cosmopolitanism” arguably pervades how historians understand these port cities; bustling docks, diverse populations, and lively scenes of popular culture take precedence over the imperial coercion unfolding within and beyond their shores.

Port cities and urbanization, in fact, were intimately intertwined with the violence of conquest and Islamic insurgency enveloping various corners of the Southeast Asian countryside. When armed conflicts such as the bitter Dutch-Aceh War in the Netherlands East Indies (present-day Indonesia) and the Moro Wars in the southern Philippines engulfed venerable Muslim sultanates, the maritime metropolises of the Straits Settlements emerged as critical nodes—sites for the dissemination of weapons and smugglers, spies and diplomats, contentious ideas and theologies. These circulations were facilitated not just by Muslim networks or colonial agents but by the very cosmopolitan nature of port cities. Chinese and German, Arab and Turkish, Muslim and Christian, all became drawn into the whirling vortex of “Islamic insurgencies.” By highlighting the integral position of port cities in the conduct of various armed conflicts, it becomes possible to gain new perspectives and suggest reconfigured research paradigms for understanding the connected histories of colonial conquest.
Urban Society in Colonial Sudan
Authors: Sikainga Ahmad Alawad
Published: March 2017

As in the rest of Africa, the establishment of colonial rule has accelerated the pace of urban growth in the Sudan. During the period of British colonial rule (1898–1956), a number of new administrative centers, ports, and railway stations were established and metamorphosed into full-fledged cities. Among the most important towns and administrative centers were Khartoum, the capital of the Anglo-Egyptian administration; Atbara, headquarters of the Sudan Railways; the port city of Port Sudan; and Khartoum North, the headquarters of the steamers division of the Sudan Railways. These towns grew from small administrative headquarters into major urban centers and became the home of a diverse population that included Sudanese as well as immigrants from the Middle East, Europe, and neighboring African countries. The inhabitants of these towns engaged in a wide range of economic, social, and political activities that shaped the character of these towns and developed a distinctive urban culture.
Public Sector Unionism
Authors: Hower Joseph E.
Published: March 2017

Government employees are an essential part of the early-21st-century labor movement in the United States. Teachers, firefighters, and police officers are among the most heavily unionized occupations in America, but public-sector union members also include street cleaners and nurses, janitors and librarians, zookeepers and engineers. Despite cultural stereotypes that continue to associate unions with steel or auto workers, public employees are five times more likely to be members of unions than workers in private industry. Today, nearly half of all union members work for federal, state, or local governments.

It was not always so. Despite a long, rich history of workplace and ballot box activism, government workers were marginal to the broader labor movement until the second half of the 20th century. Excluded from the legal breakthroughs that reshaped American industry in the 1930s, government workers lacked the basic organizing and bargaining rights extended to their private-sector counterparts. A complicated, and sometimes convoluted, combination of discourse and doctrine held that government employees were, as union leader Jerry Wurf later put it, a “servant to a master” rather than “a worker with a boss.” Inspired by the material success of workers in mass industry and moved by the moral clarity of the Black Freedom struggle, government workers demanded an end to their second-class status through one of the most consequential, and least recognized, social movements of late 20th century. Yet their success at improving the pay, benefits, and conditions of government work also increased the cost of government services, imposing new obligations at a time of dramatic change in the global economy. In the resulting crunch, unionized public workers came under political pressure, particularly from fiscal conservatives who charged that their bargaining rights and political power were incompatible with a new age of austerity and limits.
United States Strategy in the Asia Pacific
Authors: Anderson Michael R.
Published: March 2017

American strategy in the Asia Pacific over the past two centuries has been marked by strong and often contradictory impulses. On the one hand, the western Pacific has served as a fertile ground for Christian missionaries, an alluring destination for American commercial enterprises, and eventually a critical launchpad for U.S. global power projection. Yet on the other hand, American policymakers at times have subordinated Asian strategy to European-based interests, or have found themselves embroiled in area conflicts that have hampered efforts to extend U.S. regional hegemony. Furthermore, leading countries in the Asia-Pacific region at times have challenged U.S. economic and military objectives, and the assertion of “Asian values” in recent years has undermined efforts to expand Western political and cultural norms. The United States’s professed “pivot to Asia” has opened a new chapter in a centuries-long relationship, one that will determine the geopolitical fault lines of the 21st century.