bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Antiblackness and the Adultification of Black Children in a U.S. Prison Nation
Authors: Gilmore Amir A. , Bettis Pamela J.
Published: March 2021

Discourses in the early 21st century surrounding the presumption of childhood innocence were undergirded by antiblackness. The theorization of antiblackness within the context of race, gender, and education has been beneficial to understanding how the mistreatment of Black children and the illegitimacy of Black childhoods within the white American racial imaginary is seemingly justified. Foundational to the United States, antiblackness is a race-based paradigm of racial othering and subjugation through a litany of organized structural violence against Black people. Structured outside the realms of humanity and civil society, Black life, through this paradigm, is regarded as other than human. Arguably, antiblackness shapes all racialized, gendered, sexualized conditions and experiences of all Black people, including the age compression of Black children. Antiblackness scholarship posits that there is an institutional unwillingness to see Black youth as children. Discourses on what it means to be a child, who can occupy that position, and when a particular stage of a child’s development is reached, are all structured against Black youth. Pathologized as deviant, adult-like problems, Black children occupy life in a liminal space, where they are denied childhood status but carry adult-like culpability. As adultified Black youth, they lack autonomy and are not granted leniency to learn from their mistakes like their white peers. With their actions and intentions perceived as deviant, ill-willed, or hypersexual, Black children are susceptible a wide range of violence from school punishment, the criminal justice system, sexual abuse and exploitation, and excessive police force.
LGBTQ Education Policy
Authors: Payne Elizabethe , Smith Melissa
Published: March 2021

LGBTQ education policy includes federal, state, district, or school policies that specifically name lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer students and families, or those that include gender identity and sexual orientation among enumerated protected categories. Significant areas of LGBTQ education policy include antibullying, antidiscrimination, school discipline, sex education, teacher education, parental notification, gender-aligned facility access, and inclusive curricula. Policies explicitly addressing LGBTQ student experiences are most often written and enacted to address bullying, gender-based targeting, and other safety threats that may lead to school drop-out, self-harm, or other risk outcomes. An ongoing and pressing concern is the dangers and limitations of relying on deficit and risk discourses to create policies that are intended to ease LGBTQ youth paths to educational success.
Malay Philosophies of Education
Authors: Hashim Rosnani
Published: March 2021

Malay philosophies of education refer to the educational thoughts of Malay philosophers from the period of the Islamization of the Malay world in the 13th century up to the present. Malay refers to an ethnic group with the Malay language as the major language of communication. The Malay world refers to the region in Southeast Asia comprising Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, southern Thailand, pockets of Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), and the southern Philippines. Prior to the introduction of Islam to the region in the 13th century, the Malay people were influenced by Hinduism, and some remnants of Hindu practices such as the conduct of the wedding ceremony and yellow being the color of royalty are still visible today. Islamization revolutionized the Malay worldview with a new ontology, cosmology, and monotheism. Moreover, the Malay language was elevated as a scientific and literary language and became a lingua franca that was widely used for communication, while Jawi script (Arabic) was used in writing, such that the region became known as the Malay world. Malay philosophies of education are very intricately related to Islamic philosophy or the Islamic worldview. Hamka, a 20th century Indonesian scholar, states that his Malayness is totally integrated with Islamic elements. Thus, the Malays’ understanding of Islam determines the goals of education. Historically, the goals of Malay education developed from the focus on the hereafter and sufism due to the nature of Islam received by the Malays at this particular time. Al-Ghazali, al-Shafie, and al-Ash’ari were among the scholars who exerted great influence on Malay scholarship. The philosophy of Malay education changed as a result of colonization by Western powers that established schools offering a liberal, secular education. However, contact with Muslim reformers in Egypt, specifically Muhammad Abduh, led to the reform of Islamic traditional schools. Hence, there was a shift in focus to reason, philosophy, and science with a closer reading of the Qur’an and Sunnah, and the goals of education emphasized the study of the acquired sciences and the use of reason. As a consequence, there were many efforts to change the existing educational institutions in terms of their curriculum. Finally, after independence, attempts were made to integrate the dualistic educational system—liberal, secular public school and traditional, religious schools—through an educational philosophy and curriculum that is holistic, integrated, and balanced, but that is also faith-based. It is not adequate to have both the acquired and revealed sciences merely coexisting but compartmentalized in the curriculum, for their values may still be conflicting. Thus, the concept of the Islamization of contemporary knowledge was deliberated and subsequently attempted. This is the climax of the unity of knowledge that is enshrined in the Islamic worldview. The educational landscape in the Malay world has been shaped by the thought patterns of Muslim scholars and the Islamic worldview.
Curriculum Proposals
Authors: Short Edmund C.
Published: March 2021

Curriculum proposals are sets of visionary statements intended to project what some person or group believes schools or school systems should adopt and utilize in formulating their actual curriculum policies and programs. Curriculum proposals are presented when there is a perceived need for change from curriculum that is currently in place. The specific changes stated in a curriculum proposal can be either quite limited or very comprehensive. If a totally restructured curriculum is recommended, particular prescriptions are necessarily based on some overall conception of what curriculum is by definition and what its constituent elements are, and therefore what topics are to be addressed in a curriculum proposal. Attempts have been made to conceptualize curriculum holistically, as an entity clearly distinguished from all other phenomena, but no agreed upon conception has emerged.

To provide a new theoretical and practically useful framework for how curriculum may be conceived, a 10-component conceptualization of curriculum has been stipulated, elucidated, and illustrated for use in designing curriculum policy, programmatic curriculum plans, or formal curriculum proposals. In this conceptualization, curriculum is defined as having the following interrelated components: (a) focal idea and intended purpose(s), (b) unique objective(s), (c) underlying assumptions and value commitments, (d) program organization, (e) substantive features, (f) the character of the student’s educational situation/activity/process, (g) unique approaches/methods for use by the teacher/educator, (h) program evaluation, (i) supportive arrangements, and (j) justifications/rationale for the whole curriculum. Any proposal for total curriculum change should make prescriptions related to all these components.

Discussion of other aspects related to curriculum proposals include how to locate existing curriculum proposals, how to analyze them in relation to this new conceptualization of curriculum, how to choose suitable ones among them for possible adoption, and how to translate a curriculum proposal into actual curriculum policies or plans.
Bringing a Humanistic Approach to Special Education Curriculum
Authors: Parker-Katz Michelle , Passi Joseph
Published: March 2021

Special education curriculum is often viewed as an effort to provide ways for students with disabilities to meet specific academic and socio-/behavioral goals and is also heavily influenced by compliance with multiple legislative policies. Critical paths forward are needed to reshape a special education curriculum by using a humanizing approach in which students’ lived experiences and relatedness to self and others is at the core of study. Intentional study of how students and their families draw upon, develop, and help shape local supports and services that are provided through schools, along with community and governmental agencies and organizations, would become a major part of the new curricular narrative.

However, the field of special education has been in large part derived from an epistemology rooted in science, positivism, and the medical model. The dominance of these coalescing epistemologies in educational systems has produced a myriad of structures and processes that implicitly dictate the ways special educators instruct, gather data, and practice. Core among those is a view that disability is synonymous with deficit and abnormality. What emerges is an entrenched and often implicit view that the person with disabilities must be fixed. In adopting a humanistic approach in which we value relationships, the funds of knowledge families have helped develop in their children and the identities individuals shape, and the linkages of persons with multiple community networks, the groundwork could be laid for a new curricular narrative to form. In so doing, the field could get closer to the grounding principle of helping all students with disabilities to thrive. For it is in communities that people can thrive and choose to participate in numerous life opportunities. In such a way curriculum is integral to lived experience, to the fullness and richness of lived experiences—lived experiences that include the study of academic subject matter along with the development of social and emotional learning.
Modern Iraq
Authors: Robertson John F.
Published: March 2021

The roots of the history of modern Iraq extend into the late Ottoman period, when the central government in Istanbul embarked upon administrative and educational reform in an attempt both to modernize and to reassert and centralize its authority there. The history of modern Iraq is also closely linked to ethnic (principally Arab and Kurd) and sectarian (principally Sunni and Shi’ite, but also Jewish and Christian) components of Iraqi society, and their interrelations and tensions. This history is also marked by distinct episodes of foreign intervention (specifically, by Great Britain and the United States), by internal political struggle often resolved by political violence, and by sectarian tensions exacerbated by the domination of political governance by a Sunni minority (1921–2003) and subsequently, beginning in 2004, by the Shi’i majority.
Health, Development, and HIV in India
Authors: Gupta Indrani , Barman Kanksha
Published: March 2021

The first HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) case in India was detected in 1986 among female sex workers. The rapid spread in HIV infections subsequently due mainly to high-risk behavior among vulnerable population groups required a sensitive, multisectoral, multipronged response that had to influence risk behavior and alleviate the socioeconomic impact of the epidemic. The journey has been a unique one in many ways in the history of public health in India. The challenges emanated from the economic, social, legal, and cultural contexts in which risk-taking behavior took place, and to be effective, the response required a framework that had to be vastly different from the usual public health approaches adopted in the country. The fairly successful national response was made possible due to the presence and subsequent co-option of a vibrant civil society, which shaped discussions and discourses around sex, sexuality, and gender and could reach out to marginalized and stigmatized groups with messages and interventions. During the course of the thirty years of response to the epidemic, shifts in positions of individuals in the three organs of the government—executive, legislative, and judiciary—on key sensitive issues around sexual behavior and preferences could be discerned to some extent, which was unprecedented and helped strengthen the response.

New infections have come down significantly over the years and treatment has scaled up massively. However, the momentum in national HIV programs has slowed down globally and in India, with lower finances and a shift to other national priorities. The sociocultural and economic contexts have yet to change for most of the groups vulnerable to HIV, and they will continue to determine risk behavior, requiring interventions to continue at a fairly high level of intensity.
Manchu Language
Authors: Söderblom Saarela Mårten
Published: March 2021

The Manchu language was the language of state in the Qing empire, which ruled China and large parts of Inner Asia from 1644 to 1911. For much of its history, it was used by communities in which Chinese was also spoken and written, but Manchu is a Tungusic language that is unrelated to Chinese. Its implementation in China and maintenance as the administrative language of core elements of the Qing imperial bureaucracy prompted the development of a Manchu education system and a tradition of bilingual Manchu-Chinese language pedagogy.

Long before upwardly mobile individuals in China from the late 19th century onward committed to the study of the languages of the industrialized West and Japan, numerous Chinese-speaking servants of the Qing throne applied themselves to the study of Manchu. Over time, not only a voluminous government archive accrued in Manchu but also a literature in several genres that consisted largely of translations from Chinese.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Manchu ceased to be a vernacular language in many areas where it had been previously spoken. It remained in use longest on parts of the imperial periphery, even beyond the fall of the Qing empire itself. Both as an administrative language and as a vernacular, Manchu survived into the tumultuous new century. Over time, however, it was supplanted by Chinese in most places. Yet dialects of Manchu remain spoken by small communities as of the early 21st century.
Land Resettlement and Restitution in Zimbabwe
Authors: Mujere Joseph
Published: March 2021

Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Program has attracted a lot of scholarly attention. While some scholars have argued that the process through which landless peasants reclaimed land was chaotic and violent, others have praised it for having been one of the most radical redistributive land reform programs in Africa. While these debates have dominated scholarship on land reform program in Zimbabwe since 2000, what has been lacking has been a historical analysis of the entanglement between land resettlement and struggles over restitution. Land restitution has been at the center of the land redistribution in Zimbabwe. In spite of the successes that the government has made in redistributing land, land restitution is the last frontier in the struggle over land. Ruins, ancestral graves, and sacred sites are important landscape features whose emotive presence and materiality enable communities to make land claims and counterclaims.

Land restitution processes have been initiated in a variety of regional and country contexts. In former settler societies such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Canada, and Australia, indigenous populations have laid claims over land dispossessed under colonial rule. In post-conflict societies internally displaced people have also attempted to lay claims over land that they had to leave behind fleeing from violence. Further, where large-scale land deals have been unsuccessful or revoked through resistance land reclamation has also been instigated. Land restitution is concerned with restoring landed property to former owners. As compared to land redistribution, restitution is not concerned with ironing out of inequitable distribution of land to create a just future but with reestablishment of former rights based on principles of justice rather than equality. Restitution is therefore based on returning land to former owners who can prove claims. Land restitution is an elastic concept covering a range of processes designed to appease what are perceived as historical injustices around loss of land rights.
The History of Sierra Leone
Authors: Cole Gibril R.
Published: March 2021

The geographical boundaries of contemporary Sierra Leone resulted from the intense quest for imperial domains by European powers, specifically by Britain and France, during the 19th-century scramble for colonies. However, the country’s history runs deep into the past. While the peoples of the present-day republic did not have a history of large polities, there were, nonetheless, organized states with social, political, and economic structures, some of them based on conventional understandings of relations between the rulers and their peoples. Agricultural production, local, regional, and long-distance commerce facilitated not just economic exchanges, but also cross-cultural encounters between peoples from near and far. This engendered an integrative process that allowed for population growth and state expansion prior to the arrival of Europeans in the region of West Africa in the 15th century and the subsequent rise of the Atlantic slave trade. While the transatlantic system disrupted the existing political, economic, and social systems, the remarkable resilience of the peoples enabled them to rebound, only to be later subjugated to British colonial rule from 1808 to 1961. British colonialism encountered resistance in one form or another from its initial establishment until 1896, when a civil uprising devolved into a war of attrition between the people of the interior of Sierra Leone and the British colonial state. British rule and control of the colonial economy continued until the post-World War II period, when educated Africans across the continent sought to attain their independence. Sierra Leone’s educated elite organized, albeit along ethno-regional lines, to demand independence, which was granted in 1961. The post-independence experiment in democracy was subverted by political megalomania, the entrenchment of ethno-regionalism, corruption, and frequent military interventions in the state. The use of subaltern youth in the politics of the country by the state ultimately had the effect of producing a group of youths who sought to transform themselves from foot soldiers of the political groups to a military junta through violence, which engulfed the country in a decade-long civil war from 1991 to 2002.
The Archaeology of Nyanga, Eastern Zimbabwe
Authors: Shenjere-Nyabezi Plan
Published: March 2021

The Nyanga district of eastern Zimbabwe shows a cultural history that is similar to the rest of Zimbabwe and the southern African region. Although largely undated, the Stone Age—from the Early Stone Age, the Middle Stone Age, through to the Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers—is represented at a number of open sites and rock shelters. Later Stone Age rock art, some of which exhibits rather unique artistic attributes and characteristics such as the stripped images, has been recorded in this area. The advent of settled iron-using farming communities is also evident, as elsewhere in southern Africa dating from the 2nd to the 3rd century ce. The well-known Early Farming Communities Ziwa ceramic tradition of southern Africa is in fact named after the type site in this district. The Nyanga district is however particularly famous for its stone constructions that come in a variety of forms, consisting of stone terraced hillsides, which extend for almost sixty-five miles from north to south and cover some twenty-three hundred square miles, as well as stone-lined pit structures, hilltop forts, stone-walled enclosures, and trackways. Dating from the 14th to the early 19th century, the culture is one of the Later Farming Community cultures of Zimbabwe. The stone architecture and several other cultural aspects differ from those of the more famous Zimbabwe Culture, such that, although the two entities partly overlapped chronologically, Nyanga represents a separate cultural development in Zimbabwe’s history. The purpose of the stone structures has been a subject of archaeological debate for some time. The majority of scholars generally agree that the terracing and pit structures were constructed for agricultural and animal herding practices. However, since the early 2010s, some scholars have somewhat unconvincingly argued that gold-mining and processing were the primary motivation for the Nyanga architectural remains. The traditional view of the communities associated with the Nyanga stone architecture has largely seen them as representing basic peasant agricultural people lacking complex sociopolitical organization. However, examination of the scale and extent of the architecture, including consideration of the size of the enclosures and their spatial distribution, strongly suggests that the Nyanga people were organized as fairly complex sociopolitical formations that are archaeologically consistent with the chiefdom level, at the very least.
Asante Queen Mothers in Ghana
Authors: Stoeltje Beverly J.
Published: March 2021

The queen mothers of Asante are linked together with chiefs in a dual-gender system of leadership. The symbol of authority and leadership in Asante is a stool (like a throne in England). Throughout the polities of Asante, each queen mother occupies her own stool, and each chief occupies his own stool, representing the authority of chieftaincy in a town or a paramountcy. This political model shapes Asante like a pyramid: queen mothers and chiefs of towns and villages at the base, paramount queen mothers and chiefs at the next level with authority over those of towns and villages, and the king of Asante, the Asantehene, and the queen mother of Asante, the Asantehemaa, at the top ruling over all of Asante. The king of Asante occupies the Golden Stool, the symbol of the Asante nation, which holds the souls of the Asante people according to popular belief. Although the position of queen mother has survived challenges, the relative salience of specific features of her authority has varied. Colonialism ignored queen mothers, and yet Yaa Asantewaa led a war and became a symbol of Asante identity. When the global women’s movement provided inspiration, queen mothers joined together to reclaim their authority.
Corporate Takeovers and Non-Financial Stakeholders
Authors: Greene Daniel , Kini Omesh , Shen Mo , Shenoy Jaideep
Published: March 2021

A large body of work has examined the impact of corporate takeovers on the financial stakeholders (shareholders and bondholders) of the merging firms. Since the late 2000s, empirical research has increasingly highlighted the crucial role played by the non-financial stakeholders (labor, suppliers, customers, government, and communities) in these transactions. It is, therefore, important to understand the interplay between corporate takeovers and the non-financial stakeholders of the firm.

Financial economists have long viewed the firm as a nexus of contracts between various stakeholders connected to the firm. Corporate takeovers not only play an important role in redefining the broad boundaries of the firm but also result in major changes to corporate ownership and structure. In the process, takeovers can significantly alter the contractual relationships with non-financial stakeholders. Because the firm’s relationships with these stakeholders are governed by implicit and explicit contracts, circumstances can arise that allow acquiring firms to fully or partially abrogate these contracts and extract rents from non-financial stakeholders after deal completion. In contrast, non-financial stakeholders can also potentially benefit from a takeover if they get to share in any efficiency gains that are generated in the deal.

Given this framework, the ex-ante importance of these contractual relationships can have a bearing on the efficacy of takeovers. The ability to alter contractual relationships ex post can affect the propensity of a takeover and merging firms’ shareholders and, in turn, impact non-financial stakeholders. Non-financial stakeholders will be more vested in post-takeover success if they can trust the acquiring firm to not take actions that are detrimental to them. The big picture that emerges from the surveyed literature is that non-financial stakeholder considerations affect takeover decisions and post-takeover outcomes. Moreover, takeovers also have an impact on non-financial stakeholders. The directions of all these effects, however, depend on the economic environment in which the merging firms operate.
Wastewater Tariffs in Spain
Authors: García-Valiñas Marián , Arbués Fernando
Published: March 2021

Urban water cycle services culminate in wastewater services; that is, with the collection, transport, and treatment of wastewater. Wastewater management in Spain is not a straightforward issue. In fact, the European Commission has initiated infringement procedures against Spain for not fully complying with the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive. Yet, appropriate collection and treatment would require a large monetary investment that is increasingly difficult to carve out of existing government revenues. In this context, wastewater pricing emerges as a significant tool for achieving cost recovery and environmental protection aims.

In Spain, local governments are responsible for providing wastewater services in urban areas and for setting the prices for those services. Spanish regional governments are in charge of specific pollution taxes on wastewater, which are included in the individual users’ water bills. Moreover, in most Spanish cities, the urban water tariffs for wastewater services (like water supply tariffs) are different for different users, representing the most common distinction between residential and nonresidential users. Additionally, specific tariffs are frequently imposed for different customer groups within both categories. In this respect, it is common to include pollution charges for industrial users, increasing their water prices according to the environmental impact of their wastewater discharges. The result is a very complex map of water-pricing and taxing in Spain.
Infectious Diseases Among Migrant Populations
Authors: Declich Silvia , Dente Maria Grazia , Greenaway Christina , Castelli Francesco
Published: March 2021

Increasing human mobility, of which migration is a component, is a key driver of microorganism circulation. Migration is a minor component of all human mobility, with most movement due to international tourism, travel for work, business, or study, and military operations abroad. Migration flows from southern low-income countries to the industrialized north have steadily increased as a consequences of a complex array of distal and proximal factors such as economic inequality, climate change, political turbulence, war and persecution, and family reunification. This has raised concerns about the potential transmission and reintroduction of microorganisms and infectious diseases into high-income host countries from migrants with asymptomatic infections such as tuberculosis, HIV, viral hepatitis, malaria, Chagas disease, and arboviral infections. These factors contribute to the mounting hostile attitude sometimes observed in receiving countries and deserve careful scientific assessment to inform policies and interventions.

The available evidence does not support the hypothesis that migrants constitute a relevant infectious public health risk for the local population, although careful epidemiological surveillance is mandatory, especially where competent vectors for specific infection are present in the destination area, where certain diseases may potentially be introduced or reintroduced.

The greatest risk of infectious diseases is to the migrants themselves due to increased risk of exposure within their own communities and from the burden of undetected and untreated infections caused by marginalization and poor living conditions. The health conditions vary at the different stages of settlement and interventions need to be tailored accordingly. In the early arrival phase the main health concerns are psychological, traumatic, and chronic conditions. Crowded unhygienic living conditions often experienced by migrants in reception camps coupled with low vaccination rate may facilitate the transmission of respiratory or gastrointestinal infections or vaccine-preventable diseases. After resettlement, undetected infections and the lack of access to health care due to social marginalization may lead to the reactivation or progression of infections such as tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, HIV, and chronic helminthiasis. These outcomes could be prevented through screening and treatment and would benefit both migrants and the host populations. Pretravel interventions that increase the awareness of the possible infectious risks in their countries of origin are critical to decrease travel-related infection among visiting friends and relatives, especially those traveling with children. Migrant-friendly health systems that ensure prompt access to diagnosis and treatment, regardless of legal status, are the best interventions to limit the burden and transmission of infections in this population.
Composition of Earth
Authors: Palme H.
Published: March 2021

Early models of the composition of the Earth relied heavily on meteorites. In all these models Earth had different layers, each layer corresponded to a different type of meteorite or meteorite component. Later, more realistic models based on analyses of samples from Earth began with Ringwood’s pyrolite composition in the 1960s. Further improvement came with the analyses of rare MgO rich peridotites from a variety of occurrences all over the Earth, as xenoliths enclosed in melts from the upper mantle or as ultramafic massifs, tectonically emplaced on the Earth’s surface. Chemical systematics of these rocks allow the determination of the major element composition of the primitive upper mantle (PUM), the upper mantle after core formation and before extraction of basalts ultimately leading to the formation of the crust. Trace element analyses of upper mantle rocks confirmed their primitive nature. Geochemical and geophysical evidence argue for a bulk Earth mantle of uniform composition, identical to the PUM, also designated as “bulk silicate Earth” (BSE). The formation of a metal core was accompanied by the removal of siderophile and chalcophile elements into the core. Detailed modeling suggests that core formation was an ongoing process parallel to the accretion of Earth. The composition of the core is model dependent and thus uncertain and makes reliable estimates for siderophile and chalcophile element concentrations of bulk Earth difficult.

Improved stable isotope analyses show isotopic similarities with noncarbonaceous chondrites (NCC), while the chemical composition of the mantle of the Earth indicates similarities with carbonaceous chondrites (CC). In detail, however, it can be shown that no single known meteorite group, nor any mixture of meteorite groups can match the chemical and isotopic composition of Earth. This conclusion is extremely important for any formation model of the Earth.
Diversionary Theories of Conflict: The Promises and Challenges of an Opportunities Approach
Authors: Butcher Charity
Published: March 2021

Since the early 1990s, a significant amount of research has been dedicated to refining the causal mechanisms that lead to the diversionary use of force and the various conditions under which such diversionary actions are most likely. This article focuses specifically on the latter—highlighting the research on the various conditions that create opportunities for states to utilize diversionary tactics—while also emphasizing how these opportunities are connected to specific causal processes for diversionary conflict. While significant attention has been paid to the domestic factors that provide additional opportunities for or constraints on actors to utilize diversionary force, less research has considered the international and dyadic opportunities for diversionary force and the interaction and interplay of these domestic and international, or dyadic, factors. These international and dyadic factors specifically focus on those related to the potential target of diversionary conflict and are an important part of fully understanding the decision-making process of leaders contemplating diversionary tactics. Both the domestic and international opportunities for diversionary force identified in the literature will be considered, specifically those focusing on advancements made in understanding the international and dyadic dimensions of these opportunities and the characteristics of potential target states.

While the movement toward identifying various opportunities for diversionary behavior, both domestic and international, or dyadic, is an important pathway in diversionary research, this approach comes with some significant challenges. First, diversionary motivations are extremely hard to “prove” since leaders have incentives to hide these motives. This problem is compounded as more opportunities for diversionary force are added to the mix—as these opportunities may, in themselves, provide motives for war. For example, rivalry and territorial disputes are shown as international opportunities for diversionary force, yet these factors are also known to be two of the most prominent causes of war between states. Thus, parsing out diversionary motives from other fundamental national security motives becomes increasingly difficult.

While quantitative studies can help uncover broad patterns of potential diversionary behavior, they are less equipped to fully explain the ways that various domestic and international opportunities might interact. Nor can these studies demonstrate whether diversion was actual present within specific cases. Case studies can help fill these gaps by allowing more in-depth analysis of these potential diversionary opportunities. Overall, quantitative studies that help uncover patterns and qualitative studies that investigate diversionary tactics in a single case or set of cases are both important parts of the puzzle. To best understand diversionary conflict, researchers need to rely increasingly on both approaches.
Material Culture in the 18th Century
Authors: Van Horn Jennifer
Published: March 2021

Material culture refers to human-manufactured, human-altered, or human-used physical things of all sizes and materials, from houses to domestic artifacts to tools to landscapes. Material culture also refers to the study of artifacts and scholars’ use of objects as a form of evidence to ask and answer questions about the 18th century. Material culture studies is not limited to physical examination of artifacts. It also involves consideration of an array of documentary, literary, and visual sources that provide information about material life. In 18th-century colonial America, the meanings and uses of material goods changed radically. Anglo-American colonists obtained greater numbers and novel types of objects through transatlantic and global trade networks. The British manufactures that flooded the colonies fulfilled colonists’ desire to assert social status and to participate in social rituals that demonstrated refinement. Scholars have labeled these changes the “Consumer Revolution” and the system of “gentility.” Artifacts also built communities and buttressed political beliefs, particularly through non-importation or boycotts of British goods during the imperial crisis. Ideas of gender shaped how women’s growing activity of shopping was understood and critiqued, as well as the association of fashion with women. The importation of Asian and Indian goods, primarily textiles and porcelain, fulfilled fantasies of the exotic while enabling American consumers to demonstrate their worldliness and status. Material goods facilitated cultural exchange and trade between those of different races and ethnicities. At the same time, oppression and political and economic disenfranchisement shaped American material culture. Indigenous peoples expressed consumer preferences for manufactured goods during negotiations within the fur trade. They incorporated British manufactures into preexisting material practices. Enslaved African Americans entered the market as both commodities and consumers. Through their purchases and creative use of refined artifacts, bond people expressed individual identity despite their legal status as property.
Buddhist Philosophy as Philosophy
Authors: Siderits Mark
Published: March 2021

Is Buddhist philosophy properly thought of as philosophy? The work of Buddhist thinkers such as Vasubandhu, Nāgārjuna, and Dharmakīrti is widely recognized as deploying the same sorts of tools to investigate the same sorts of topics as what one finds in the practices of academic philosophers in the early 21st century. Still there is resistance to incorporating Buddhist philosophical texts into the philosophy canon, and this both from “mainstream” academic philosophers and from Buddhologists (scholars of the Buddhist tradition). Current resistance can be traced to concerns over the soteriological context of Buddhist philosophizing. Those who wish to maintain the present Eurocentric focus of the philosophy canon suspect that the soteriological ends to which philosophical inquiry is put by Buddhists must compromise philosophy’s commitment to rationality and Buddhism’s commitment to its goal of salvation. Resistance from both sides thus presupposes that a spiritual practice necessarily involves commitments that are not rationally assessable. And this presupposition may be incompatible with the core Buddhist teaching of non-self. If this clears the way to including the Buddhist philosophical tradition in the canon, one must ask how this may affect the two parties to the project of fusion. A brief look at some recent missteps reveals that only if there is greater teamwork between philologically trained Buddhologists and scholars trained in (what currently counts as) “mainstream” academic philosophy can there be real progress. But the potential benefits—for both sides—may well justify the effort.
Amoghavajra
Authors: Goble Geoffrey
Published: March 2021

Amoghavajra (Bukongjin’gang不空金剛; 704/5-774) was a historically significant Buddhist monk who operated in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907). He was a prolific translator and is widely regarded as the founder of an Esoteric or Tantric Buddhist tradition in East Asia. Arriving in China at a young age, Amoghavajra became a monk and practiced under Vajrabodhi (Jin’gangzhi金剛智; 671–741). Following his master’s death, Amoghavajra undertook an ocean voyage to Sri Lanka and southern India. He returned to Tang China in 746/747 with a collection of newly acquired Buddhist texts and training in ritual practices. He was the recipient of patronage and support from members of the ruling elite in Tang China, including a succession of three emperors—Xuanzong 玄宗 (r. 713–756), Suzong 肅宗 (r. 756–762), and Daizong 代宗 (r. 762–779). Amoghavajra served the Tang government with his ritual services and was appointed a minister in the central government bureau charged with overseeing official ritual services for the Tang state. With this support and influence, Amoghavajra translated a vast collection of Buddhist scriptures and authored numerous commentaries, ritual manuals, and compendia, and he effectively established a teaching of Buddhism in China that is generally referred to as “Esoteric Buddhism.” This teaching of Buddhism was subsequently transmitted by Kūkai 空海 (774–835) to Japan, where it became established as the Japanese Shingon school. In Chinese and Japanese Buddhist histories, Amoghavajra is regarded as a patriarch of Tang dynasty Esoteric Buddhism and Japanese Shingon.
The Legacies of British Slave Ownership
Authors: Hall Catherine
Published: March 2021

In 1834, the British Parliament’s act to abolish slavery in the Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Cape included compensation for the slave owners to the tune of 20 million pounds. This was equivalent to about 16 billion pounds in today’s money. The compensation was for the owners’ loss of human property, enslaved people. More than 660,000 men and women in the Caribbean were assigned a monetary value for the last time on the basis of which compensation was calculated. Nearly 50 percent of this money was paid to more than four thousand men and women in Britain: these were the so-called absentees, who lived off the proceeds of the labor of the enslaved on plantations and in towns. The rest went to resident slave owners who were for the most part much less wealthy than the Britons. Historians of the nation, such as the great Whig, Thomas Babington Macaulay, have erased Britain’s history of involvement in the slavery business. They chose, as did politicians, to focus on abolition as symbolic of Britain’s love of liberty and to ignore direct British involvement in both the slave trade and the wider business of slavery. Issues of race, slavery, and empire have not been seen as integral to Britain’s history and continue to be marginalized. Compensation has provided a starting point for investigations of British slave owners: the wealth they transmitted to the United Kingdom, their investments in capitalist developments, their acquisition of cultural artifacts and refurbishment of country houses, their political interventions, and their ideas about racial difference. Research on slave-owning families over generations has enriched scholars’ understanding of the daily practices of racialization. All this gives access to forgotten histories.
Language Shift
Authors: Grenoble Lenore A.
Published: March 2021

Language shift occurs when a community of users replaces one language by another, or “shifts” to that other language. Although language shift can and does occur at the level of the individual speaker, it is shift at the level of an entire community that is associated with widespread language replacement and loss. Shift is a particular kind of language loss, and differs from language attrition, which involves the loss of a language over an individual’s lifetime, often the result of aging or of language replacement (as in shift). Both language shift and attrition are in contrast to language maintenance, the continuing use of a language. Language maintenance and revitalization programs are responses to language shift, and are undertaken by communites who perceive that their language is threatened by a decrease in usage and under threat of loss.

Language shift is widespread and can be found with majority- or minority-language populations. It is often associated with immigrant groups who take up the majority language of their new territory, leaving behind the language of their homeland. For minority-language speaker communities, language shift is generally the result of a combination of factors, in particular colonization. A nexus of factors—historical, political, social, and economic—often provides the impetus for a community to ceasing speaking their ancestral language, replacing it with the language of the majority, and usually politically dominant, group. Language shift is thus a social issue, and often coupled with other indicators of social distress.

Language endangerment is the result of language shift, and in fact shift is its most widespread cause.Since the 1960s there has been ever-increasing interest across speaker communities and linguists to work to provide opportunities to learn and use minority languages to offset shift, and to document speakers in communities under the threat of shift.
Economic Causes and Consequences of Desertification
Authors: Salvati Luca
Published: March 2021

Land degradation and desertification are composite processes that reflect how components of land capital have worsened over time, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Land degradation is intended as a truly socioeconomic issue because the idea and practice of use (and misuse) of land are socially constructed. In this perspective, soil productivity and land capacity, water consumption and landscape fragmentation, agriculture and sustainable development all reflect the vast ensemble of human-nature interactions. The intrinsic heterogeneity of land degradation processes at the global scale limits the development of mitigation actions. Comprehension of the socioeconomic processes underlying land degradation can benefit from a multidisciplinary approach that considers the intricate feedback between biophysical and economic dimensions. The mutual relationship between economic growth, social inequality, political action, and land degradation provides examples of the interplay among proximate causes and factors underlying desertification.
Jones, Norma Gray “Cindy”
Authors: Logan Sadye L. M.
Published: March 2021

Norma Gray “Cindy” Jones (1951–2017) was a Navy Commander and a social work professor. She served for 21 years as a Navy Commander and her work altered Navy social practices and policies. Her efforts included establishing new programs for entry-level Navy social workers and implementing Family Advocacy treatment programs worldwide.
Data-Driven Model Building for Life-Course Epidemiology
Authors: Petersen Anne H , Osler Merete , Ekstrøm Claus T
Published: March 2021

Life-course epidemiology is useful for describing and analyzing complex etiological mechanisms for disease development, but existing statistical methods are essentially confirmatory, because they rely on a priori model specification. This limits the scope of causal inquiries that can be made, because these methods are suited mostly to examine well-known hypotheses that do not question our established view of health, which could lead to confirmation bias. We propose an exploratory alternative. Instead of specifying a life-course model prior to data analysis, our method infers the life-course model directly from the data. Our proposed method extends the well-known Peter-Clark (PC) algorithm (named after its authors) for causal discovery, and it facilitates including temporal information for inferring a model from observational data. The extended algorithm is called temporal PC. The obtained life-course model can afterward be perused for interesting causal hypotheses. Our method complements classical confirmatory methods and guides researchers in expanding their models in new directions. We showcase the method using a data set encompassing almost 3,000 Danish men followed from birth until age 65 years. Using this data set, we inferred life-course models for the role of socioeconomic and health-related factors on development of depression.