bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Young Readers and Sexualized Fiction: A Review and Case Study of Young Women in Canada
Authors: Helkenberg Davin L.
Published: August 2022

In sexualized fiction written for young readers (ages 12–24), common narratives are meant to guide readers through their early sexual life, inform about the dangers and pleasures of sexuality, and validate the sexual lives of those deemed outside of the heterosexual norm. Young Adult (YA) novels comprise most of the canon of literature for readers of this age, but what young people read extends into other genres and formats, such as Adult fiction, graphic novels, and online amateur fiction. Literary scholars have criticized sexualized fiction for young readers for the presence of a sexually repressive ideology embedded within sexual relationships or scenarios. Most notably, didactic narratives meant to guide young persons through their early sexual life have typically associated sex with risk and not necessarily with pleasure or well-being, especially for young women. The argument, therefore, is that these texts are detrimental to the sexual well-being or liberation of young people. Contrary to this argument, sexualized fiction for young readers has also been subject to widespread censorship efforts in North America. Challenges or bans are typically based on concerns that these texts are pornographic, are unsuitable for young readers, or will inspire young people to act on their sexual impulses or engage in non-normative forms of sex. These two counterarguments parallel larger debates about what kinds of information about sexuality young people should have access to or how young people should perform—or not perform—their sexuality. The study of reading in the everyday lives of young people reveals complex relationships between text and reader, beyond those commonly cited as essentially repressive or corruptive. A case study on the reading experiences of young women in Canada shows that young readers engage with a wide variety of sexualized fiction and have nuanced relationships with these texts. This case study shows that as a literature that addresses the complexities of adolescent sexuality, sexualized fiction remains a source for transformative possibilities, where fictional narratives have the possibility to contribute to the sexual well-being of young people.
The Vernacular in American Literature
Authors: Moore J. Peter
Published: August 2022

At its most basic level the term “vernacular” denotes the nonliterary or common language of a given region. While the idea of a literature of the vernacular suggests a contradiction, this contradiction is useful in considering the study of American literature, if for no other reason than the notion of an American literature, up until the 20th century, also seemed like a contradiction. There is ample basis then for arguing not for the existence of a vernacular tradition in American writing, but that American writing itself is, if not a collection of vernacular traditions, a body of writing defined in relation to vernacularity. While the term provisionally acknowledges a range of meanings from the lowly and indigenous to the amateur and popular, all of these meanings are discursive and thus contingent upon context. The act of applying the term to a text tells us as much about the classificatory values of a moment as it does about the text itself. Abstracted then, the category of the vernacular serves two primary functions. It introduces difference, and it suggests hierarchy. This dual framework has historically allowed for the identification of neglected forms, which stand in contradiction to reigning models. The vernacular provides a means of celebrating marginalized modes of expression as well as the identity formations they index, while at the same time running the risk of pandering to stereotypes. Literary scholars of the vernacular tend to focus on questions of diction, and yet the category is not strictly linguistic; it includes a range of intuitive, improvisatory, and contextual practices. This leaves the perennial question, what is the literary vernacular—a style of language, a philosophy of form, a function of technological capture and dissemination, or a model of reception? In pursuing this question, readers are primed to see the ways in which the category opens onto several critical issues, from the representation of cultural difference to the identification of transnational bonds and contingent universals.
Connectivity and Collectivity in Contemporary Global Fiction in English
Authors: Haley Madigan
Published: August 2022

The term “global fiction” has been applied to a number of texts that have become increasingly important to the study of contemporary literature and debates about world literature. What global fiction is, however, is not entirely clear. With reference to prominent examples, global fiction can be provisionally defined as fiction that anticipates circulating widely (beyond national and regional boundaries) and that seeks to mediate global interconnection. While that definition could be applied to a number of works from at least the early 20th century, it is especially relevant to works that belong to the increasingly global environment for the writing and reading of literature that has emerged since the late 1980s under contemporary globalization. Since this environment has favored the circulation of English-language literature, due to the historical hegemony of Britain and the United States over the capitalist world-system, some scholars have viewed global fiction with understandable suspicion. Yet works of global fiction do not necessarily reflect the ideology of capitalist globalization. Many of these works can be understood, instead, as attempts to think through what global relationships entail on a shared planet, and in tension with the dominant form they have been made to take historically within global capitalism. Such works of global fiction have sought to mediate connectivity and collectivity at a global scale in four main ways. First, works have represented new material connections between people and places within the global system that emerged after the Cold War. Second, works have explored the ethical stakes of such new connections by staging scenes of encounter between self and other. Third, works have made imaginable a transnational, cosmopolitan community by weaving together far-flung narratives. Fourth, works have sought to gather together a collective agency capable of making a more equitable world.
Information Technology Project Risk as a Dynamic Phenomenon
Authors: El-Masri Mazen , Rivard Suzanne
Published: August 2022

Information systems (IS) research provides strong evidence for the effect of information technology (IT) project risk and on-project failure. However, no consensus has yet been reached on what constitutes risk and how it should be specified. Existing definitions of the risk construct are diverse leading to fragmented scientific knowledge. This article specifies IT project residual risk as an aggregate multidimensional construct comprised of four dimensions: project sources, undesirable events, risk management mechanisms, and expected outcomes. The construct accentuates the dynamic nature of IT project risk and can help reorganize the abundant risk factors found in the IS literature under its four dimensions while exposing their interactions.
Cultural Productions of Queer Asia
Authors: Eguchi Shinsuke
Published: August 2022

Queer Asia, which critiques the multidimensional flows of power (e.g., globalization, market capitalism, state capitalism, and/or Western queer formation), is a process of reimagining historically specific and culturally saturated nuances of minoritized sexualities and genders in and across Asia and Asian diasporas. This process redirects attention to cultural productions of Queer Asia as disjunctive modernities. By this means, contemporary global capitalism enables a paradoxically contested space of temporality through which new geopolitical imaginaries of minoritized sexualities and genders can emerge. Consequently, Queer Asia troubles, remixes, and remaps how the logic of Whiteness that operates as a global, colonial, imperial, and capitalist power homogenizes culturally heterogeneous paradigms of minoritized sexualities and genders through LGBTQIA+ identities, discourses, and politics. Three topics—identifications and affinities, relationalities and spatialities, and media and popular culture—represent indefinite and unlimited possibilities of Queer Asia. Accordingly, examining these topics in light of the cultural productions of Queer Asia provides possible pathways to expand the current circumferences of queer studies in communication, which is known as a very White, Western, and US-American discipline.
Chinese Pink Markets
Authors: Wong Terrie Siang-Ting
Published: August 2022

Starting from the late 20th century, domestic and multinational corporations begun actively promoting their products and services to Chinese tongzhi communities at local LGBTQ events such as the ShanghaiPRIDE, Taiwan Pride Week, and the Hong Kong Pride Parade. In recent years, consumer brands are eager to market themselves as tongzhi friendly, for example, by displaying the pride colors in advertising. In the People’s Republic of China (henceforth PRC and China), businesses are offering services that exclusively serve the needs of Chinese tongzhi, such as overseas wedding packages, travel services, surrogate services, and assisting in permanent overseas migration. In the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (henceforth Hong Kong) and the Republic of China (henceforth Taiwan), the pink market features a well-established network of gay and lesbian disco clubs, bars, and bookstores. In addition to brick-and-mortar businesses, the Chinese pink market also has a strong online presence in the form of gay and lesbian dating apps. In short, the Chinese pink market includes all activities in contemporary Chinese societies that aim to profit from the needs and desires of individuals who experience same-sex attraction.

Research on the Chinese pink markets to date has primarily focused on using a political economy perspective to investigate tongzhi subject formation, specifically focusing on queer subjects as consumers. Aspects of the Chinese pink markets that have been studied include product/service offerings, profit mechanisms, and marketing messages. In contrast to the financial institutions and business owners that promote the pink economy as progress for local tongzhi communities in the form of increased visibility and improved quality of life, there is a distinct ambivalence towards the Chinese pink market amongst the scholarly community. Literature on all three Chinese pink markets—China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—trouble the notion that tongzhi visibility in the pink economy unequivocally heralds positive social change for local tongzhi subjects. Scholars writing on all three Chinese pink markets are also united in their rejection of a global queering reading of tongzhi subjectivity and subject formation.

Despite these common research trajectories, there are also divergences in the literature on each of the Chinese pink markets. For example, research on the China pink market entails a vibrant debate on what should be the “proper relationship” between tongzhi businesses, LGBTQ NGOs, and the state; these questions are of less interest in research on the Hong Kong and Taiwan pink markets. Given the uniqueness of state regulations as well as the different economic histories and policies of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, future research should consider the Chinese pink market as a multi-location, multicultural, and multi-layered site of study with diverse developments in queer identity, consciousness, and politics.
HIV/AIDS: The Queer Communication of HIV in the LGBTQ Community
Authors: Spieldenner Andrew R. , Nieto Bolivar X.
Published: August 2022

After four decades of living, organizing, and even dying in the HIV epidemic, individuals, communities, and institutions have been disrupted. The disease that would become known as HIV was first diagnosed among gay men in Los Angeles and New York in 1983. The epidemic in the United States began in a few communities—gay and bisexual men, trans people, injection drug users, hemophiliacs, and Haitian immigrants—all communities already stigmatized in society. The lack of knowledge, scientific research, and effective treatment fueled a new kind of stigma focused on HIV as a disease and the assumption of HIV infection. Community organizing—especially in those groups first identified in HIV—would provide life-saving services, community centers, and advocacy before governments would respond. HIV became a global pandemic revealing vast differences in health infrastructures and access to medicines. The emergence of effective HIV treatment began a different narrative about the disease—from automatic death to addressing how to live and age with the disease. The institutionalization of the HIV industry, which includes community activists, health care clinics, pharmaceutical companies, and governments, has been vital to firming up health services and advocacy groups. The impact of HIV on queer communication has stretched across understandings of health, community, organizations, and policies. In addition, HIV has made more visible queer practices of the body, disability, and dying in particular contrast to middle-class, hetero, White, cisgender, and able-bodied expectations.
Refugee and Mediated Lives
Authors: Smets Kevin , Toffano Giacomo , Almenara-Niebla Silvia
Published: August 2022

The lives of refugees are highly mediated. Media and technologies affect the daily experiences and trajectories of refugees in numerous ways while on the move as well as while settling into new homelands. Mediation processes also inform broader societal and political meanings that are assigned to refugees, as the figure of “the refugee” is constantly reshaped through processes of representation. Although these processes are much older, the research on refugees and mediation has accelerated especially since 2015. The literature focuses on three key areas: (a) refugees’ media uses and (dis)connectivity; (b) the role of media technologies in refugees’ everyday lives; and (c) media representations and narratives. Across these three areas, several important critiques have been formulated. These include criticisms of essentialist understandings of “the refugee” as well as Eurocentric and technocentric tendencies in the literature. A response to these criticisms might lay in a more historicized, contextualized, and situated approach to the mediated lives of refugees.
Gay Aging and Discourses of Future
Authors: Goltz Dustin
Published: August 2022

The understandings about age—the values and assumptions placed upon age and aging persons—mark a culturally and politically constructed discourse. For LGBTQ populations, aging is mapped with a unique set of stories, scripts, and narratives that work to frame and constrain how they are trained to see, read, and assign meanings. Coupled with scripts and myths that work to define the process and experience of LGBTQ aging—what it is to be an “older,” “younger,” or “aging” queer—is the cultural scripting of the queer future (i.e., “What’s ahead?” “What do you expect from your life?” “What is to come?”). As a communicative process and a symbolic construction, no one knows what the future is or what one’s future will be. Yet, the queer future has historically been scripted in mainstream discourses (film, literature, religion, and cultural mythology) as a space of pain, loss, and tragedy—“a harder path” equated with sadness, turmoil, and punishment. Cautionary tales of the dirty old man, the sad pathetic fool, the invisible spinster, the lesbian vampire, and the queer monster are recurring themes that work to denigrate aging queer lives and shore up the story of heteronormative correctness. This cultural script works to frame how mainstream culture understands LGBTQ populations but also frames and constrains how LGBTQ populations might view themselves, understand their future and aging bodies, and shape their investment in health, self-care, and longevity. The cultural scripts perpetuated in media and discourse, however, do not so easily line up with social science research on queer populations. Examining the meaning-making dimensions of gay aging and future offers an interdisciplinary approach that brings together sociology, gerontology, performance studies, and media criticism with the field of human communication.
Climate, Coast, and Morphology
Authors: Zhang Wenyan , Arlinghaus Peter
Published: August 2022

Coastal morphology refers to the morphology and morphological development of the coast in response to a combined influence of atmospheric, oceanic and anthropogenic forcing. Coastal morphology comprises a wide variety of landforms (exposed to air) and bedforms (submerged in water) manifested in a large spectrum of spatial scales (10−2–105 m scale) and shapes ranging from mildly sloping lower shoreface to steep cliffs, from small ripples to large river deltas.

Coastal zones are cradles for life. About 40% of the global human population and 50% of marine life are living in low-lying coastal zones with elevation less than 10 m above the mean sea level. Coasts contain the highest biodiversity in the surface earth system yet are highly vulnerable to environmental stressors associated with human activities and climate change. Climate impacts coastal morphology in multiple ways, including ice cover/melting, precipitation, temperature, and wind. In response to a changing climate, adaptation of coastal morphology can be categorized into three basic states: erosional, stable, and accretionary. Each state may persist or iterate at any given part of a coast, even in the context of a persistently warming or cooling climate. Anthropogenic protection has been globally implemented to ease erosion and protect human property. However, it remains largely unknown whether the existing measures would be able to counteract the effects of climate change in the upcoming decades.
Homophobic Populism
Authors: Corrales Javier , Kiryk Jacob
Published: August 2022

Populism often emerges with a strong homo- and transphobic orientation. This is the result of an alliance between populism and conservative religion. Populist movements have incentives to reach out to religious voters and vice versa. We argue that the alliance between populism and religion is both a marriage of convenience and inconvenience. Populists can offer attacks on pluralism and liberal social policies (e.g., pro-LGBTQ laws), which conservative religious groups often welcome. In return, religious groups can deliver loyal acolytes across classes, which populists also welcome. Religion enables populist movements to expand their constituency beyond their base of economically anxious and nationalist voters. That said, this alliance works best only where the conservative religious electorate is growing (or, at least, not declining). Even then, this union can still incite internal frictions within populist coalitions. These frictions tend to be more salient within left-wing populist coalitions than right-wing ones. This explains why the populist-religion nexus is more resilient among right-wing populist movements, as cases from the Americas and Europe illustrate.
Cultures of Honor
Authors: Rodriguez Mosquera Patricia M.
Published: August 2022

Honor is complex, deeply relational, and important in many cultures and social groups. A definition of honor as multifaceted and consisting of a set of interrelated honor codes, i.e., the honor-as-multifaceted approach to honor, is presented and discussed by Rodriguez Mosquera. This definition provides researchers the conceptual boundaries of honor as a construct as well as methodological guidelines on how to operationalize honor in empirical research. Furthermore, the honor-as-multifaceted approach provides researchers with a definition of cultures of honor as those in which honor codes become culturally shared psychological concerns that individuals evaluate as important to their self-esteem and self-concept, thereby influencing their cognitions, motivations, emotions, and behaviors. The Honor Scale measures honor codes in line with this definition. A review of existing empirical research on honor in a wide variety of cultures and social groups is also presented and discussed. Some of the work reviewed is cross-cultural in nature, whereas other work focuses on how honor operates in particular cultures or social groups (e.g., British Muslims; Moroccan Dutch and Turkish Dutch youth; Southern Italian criminal organizations; the Canadian Army). The reviewed research provides empirical support for the honor-as-multifaceted approach and demonstrates the centrality of honor codes in a variety of psychological and social processes, including personality, the negotiation of gendered roles within the family, attitudes toward in-group members, emotions in response to threats to collective honor, intergroup conflict, the negotiation of power in intergroup relations, in-group identification processes, and prosocial motivations. Thus, the reviewed research shows that honor codes play an important role in processes at the different levels of analysis typically studied in the social sciences—individual, interpersonal, group, cultural—thereby making honor an important topic of inquiry for psychologists and other social scientists. Avenues for future research are also discussed.
Conscious and Unconscious Mental States
Authors: Dienes Zoltan , Seth Anil K.
Published: August 2022

The major theories of consciousness that distinguish conscious from unconscious states can be grouped into two main classes, either higher-order or integration theories. There is evidence that different types of mental states can be unconscious, though that conclusion depends on the theory of consciousness assumed. Unconscious memory (in the sense of the influence of a prior event not recollected) can shape perception and liking and control our behavior. Subliminal perception can produce semantic priming and guide attention and decision making; and optical variables that a person describes incorrectly can guide action. Implicit learning can shape judgments and choices in complex environments. Unconscious intentions can allow people to respond appropriately in goal-directed ways while the person experiences the actions as involuntary. Unconscious attitudes are no more or less plausible than any other mental state being unconscious, but it has been hard to obtain evidence for unconscious attitudes as distinct from gut reactions one does not agree with.
The Perception of Self-Orientation
Authors: Harris Laurence R.
Published: August 2022

Self-orientation perception refers to our perceived self-orientation relative to gravity. An internal representation of self-orientation is derived from sensory cues indicating either directly or indirectly the direction of gravity relative to the body. The internal representation can be measured in the laboratory or clinic using visual or haptic measures, or even the body itself. However, each measure is affected differently by the availability of cues and the observer’s actual orientation relative to gravity, suggesting multiple, simultaneous representations of gravity. Visual, vestibular, somatosensory and proprioceptive cues are combined by multisensory integration to provide the most reliable estimates. Multisensory integration provides a robust perception of self-orientation for adults but means that children have a much lower precision in judging vertical before multisensory integration mechanisms are mature. The neurophysiological basis of the perception of self-orientation is a network of brain areas reflecting the multisensory processes that underlie it. This network provides some redundancy that can be exploited for potential patient recovery. Future work will perfect models for predicting perceived self-orientation in ever more challenging situations and how we can improve performance of pilots, divers and astronauts as they explore new situations and new gravity fields, and improve how we, and especially older people, can continue to enjoy our lifelong dance with gravity.
Left Realism: “Taking Crime Seriously”
Authors: Mooney Jayne
Published: August 2022

Left realism emerged in the mid-1980s as a criminological theory of the Left. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government had been voted into power in the United Kingdom on a largely law-and-order ticket. Thatcher led an administration of the radical Right, close in politics to Ronald Reagan’s Republicanism in the United States, bound to laissez-faire economics, to incentives for work, cutting back on the welfare state, and a heavily punitive response to street crime. Yet, despite Thatcher’s law-and-order agenda, the crime rate continued to rise, and there was widespread public unease about crime and disorder, especially in inner-city areas. Riots, largely the result of political marginalization and aggressive policing, which had occurred against a background of high unemployment and deprivation, impacted several major British cities and, in particular, communities of color. Although central government was Conservative, many of the metropolitan councils (local government) were Labour Party controlled and were committed to addressing the high levels of unemployment, caused by Thatcher’s monetarist policies, together with the growing problem of crime, while, at the same time, curbing the excessive use of police powers. The latter was viewed as the major cause of the riots and as having resulted in a plethora of police malpractices. This provided the impetus and support for left realism: a perspective intent on identifying problems of crime and policing in urban areas, committed to keeping law-and-order issues high on the political agenda, and seeking to find crime-control policies that were progressive and non-authoritarian, with the understanding that ultimately change had to occur at the level of the social structure. The substantive inequalities that tarnish the social fabric had to be confronted. While left realism is concerned with state and corporate crime, it became particularly associated with tackling the problems of street crime—that is, crime which directly affected poor and working-class communities. The aim of left realism is to take the problem of crime seriously, to listen to the concerns of ordinary people, especially those living on inner-city housing estates [projects], and to reclaim the politics of crime and disorder from the Right. The founding text of left realism was John Lea and Jock Young’s What Is To Be Done About Law and Order? (a book greatly influenced by Ian Taylor’s Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism). Initially, conceived as a Left social democratic project that would work to intervene both theoretically in criminological debates and politically in the Party politics of the day, in recent years there has been a revival of interest in left realism and its development. Its aim being that of advancing what John Lea described as “a radical program for social justice” to confront the challenges of the contemporary period.
Black Male Preservice Teachers
Authors: Tafari Dawn N. Hicks , Wilson Janeva
Published: August 2022

Institutionalized racism in the American education system has resulted in a crisis plaguing young Black boys from their preschool years and continuing into their pursuits in higher education. This is manifested as various forms of racial and gendered oppression, which is causing a disparate gap in Black males’ educational success and achievement. Racism and bias on the individual and systemic level have short- and long-term implications for Black male students and Black male teachers. Negative experiences in primary and secondary education make it more difficult to recruit and retain Black male teachers. The presence of Black male teachers is not only imperative to diversify a field dominated by White women but to also enhance the educational experiences of young Black boys. The diversity of students is not reflected by those teaching them, which exacerbates issues facing Black males in primary education, Black male preservice teachers, and new teachers.

Understanding and addressing the barriers that young Black men face in education can yield efforts to support their success not only as students but as teachers. Establishing an inclusive and encouraging space where young Black boys can flourish in school can promote a more inviting place for Black male teachers to shine. Young Black boys who see educators that resemble them are positively impacted in areas of academic performance and personal growth. Young Black boys being introduced to mentors that understand and relate to them is instrumental during their formative years, as they can witness Black men succeeding in the face of adversity. An increased presence of Black male teachers in education is not the sole solution for the troubles and oppression that young Black boys face in education. However, they are a valuable asset to the education system, as well as the lives of students who benefit from their existence.
Epistemology and Learning in STEM Education
Authors: Elby Andrew
Published: August 2022

STEM students’ personal epistemologies—their views about what counts as knowledge and knowing in mathematics, science, and engineering—influence how they approach learning and problem-solving. For example, if algebra students conceptualize “knowing algebra” as knowing how to manipulate symbols and numbers to solve particular kinds of problems, they are likely to approach learning as mastering procedures, not as making sense of why those procedures work. By contrast, consider a student who conceptualizes “knowing physics” as having a qualitative understanding that makes sense to her. When studying, she might practice and reflect on the relevant problem-solving approaches, not just to master procedures but also to understand how those problem-solving approaches make sense in terms of underlying concepts.

Although mathematics, engineering, and science differ, certain dimensions or aspects of students’ epistemologies are common across the STEM disciplines. These dimensions include to what extent students: (a) view knowledge as factual and procedural versus conceptual and heuristic, (b) view learning as acquiring separate pieces of knowledge versus linking those pieces into a coherent whole, and (c) think they can make sense of what they are learning by relating it to their own informal knowledge, experiences, and ways of thinking. Crucially, the epistemological views a student exhibits in a course are not necessarily a hardened personality trait or belief. A student might exhibit different epistemological views in different contexts, based in part on how the class is taught. Indeed, common STEM classroom cultures and structures can inadvertently invite students to adopt epistemological views that support superficial learning. Furthermore, broader cultural narratives, most notably the trope that mathematics and mathematical sciences can be understood only by people with innate talent, influence students’ epistemological views, again favoring those associated with superficial learning.

Additional epistemological issues arise in integrated STEM units and lessons. In such lessons, mathematics, science, and engineering are “de-siloed,” often in the context of understanding and/or addressing a local or societal problem. However, unless STEM lessons are carefully crafted, students can experience the “problem” as little more than a motivational hook to engage them in mathematics and science business as usual. In that case, students might adopt the same epistemological views as they do in a siloed mathematics or science course. By contrast, when students frame the STEM lesson as an authentic engineering design challenge or attempt to understand an issue in which they learn and/or apply mathematics and science as needed to understand and/or address the challenge, students are more likely to view their learning as sense-making, drawing on multiple streams of both formal and informal knowledge.
Computing in Precollege Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Education
Authors: Farris Amy Voss , Tosun Gözde
Published: August 2022

Computing is essential to disciplinary practices and discourses of science, engineering, and mathematics. In each of these broad disciplinary areas, technology creates new ways of making sense of the world and designing solutions to problems. Computation and computational thinking are synergistic with ways of knowing in mathematics and in science, a relationship known as reflexivity, first proposed by Harel and Papert. In precollege educational contexts (e.g., K-12 schooling), learners’ production of computational artifacts is deeply complementary to learning and participating in science, mathematics, and engineering, rather than an isolated set of competencies.

In K-12 contexts of teaching and learning, students’ data practices, scientific modeling, and modeling with mathematics are primary forms through which computing mediates the epistemic work of science, mathematics, and engineering. Related literature in this area has contributed to scholarship concerning students’ development of computational literacies––the multiple literacies involved in the use and creation of computational tools and computer languages to support participation in particular communities. Computational thinking is a term used to describe analytic approaches to posing problems and solving them that are based on principles and practices in computer science. Computational thinking is frequently discussed as a key target for learning. However, reflexivity refocuses computational thinking on the synergistic nature between learning computing and the epistemic (knowledge-making) work of STEM disciplines. This refocusing is useful for building an understanding of computing in relation to how students generate and work with data in STEM disciplines and how they participate in scientific modeling and modeling in mathematics, and contributes to generative computational abstractions for learning and teaching in STEM domains.

A heterogeneous vision of computational literacies within STEM education is essential for the advancement of a more just and more equitable STEM education for all students. Generative computational abstractions must engage learners’ personal and phenomenological recontextualizations of the problems that they are making sense of. A democratic vision of computing in STEM education also entails that teacher education must advance a more heterogeneous vision of computing for knowledge-making aims. Teachers’ ability to facilitate authentic learning experiences in which computing is positioned as reflexive, humane, and used authentically in service of learning goals in STEM domains is of central importance to learners’ understanding of the relationship of computing with STEM fields.
Researching Conditions of Learning—Phenomenography and Variation Theory
Authors: Kullberg Angelika , Ingerman Åke
Published: August 2022

The research tradition of phenomenography and variation theory has contributed to insights on teaching and learning at all levels, from preschool to higher education. Phenomenographic studies contribute knowledge about how learners experience the same phenomenon in qualitatively different ways and thereby shed light on what learners need to discern to experience a phenomenon in more powerful ways. Variation theory, which was developed in relation to the collective empirical outcome and interpretation of decades of phenomenographic studies, is a learning theory that points to variation and invariance as primary mechanisms for learning. The theory may be used to plan teaching and to analyze teaching and learning and can therefore be used to address the relationship between teaching and learning. Learning study combines lesson study as a form for development of teaching in relation to learning with the theoretical input from variation theory, and an action research approach, using teacher experience and insights to systematically enhance teaching practice for learning (of the identified learning object). Recent developments in the field to a larger degree combine elements from phenomenographic and variation theory modes of inquiry and address the whole of teaching–learning as it unfolds in classrooms, as well as teaching and learning across larger knowledge areas and/or the stability of findings across larger sets of classrooms with teachers and students.
Power, Capital, and Classes in the Middle East since 1945
Authors: Shokr Ahmad
Published: August 2022

The history of postwar development in the Middle East began with a commitment by states to achieving national economic growth, industrialization, and the provision of social welfare. After some early experiments, state-led development began to gather pace across the region in the mid-1950s. Although conservative and revolutionary states stood on opposing sides of the Cold War, many of them pursued remarkably similar paths of agrarian reform, industrial development, and state bureaucratization. By the 1970s, republics facing political and economic pressures began to abandon their “socialist experiments,” while the oil revolution empowered Gulf states on the regional stage, hastened the adoption of neoliberal policies, and helped transform the global financial system. Since the late 1980s, war, debt and austerity, and the expansion of Gulf capital and influence again transformed the Middle East by exacerbating regional conflicts, reshaping local economies, and fostering new forms of social, economic, and geographic inequality.
The Cowrie World
Authors: Yang Bin
Published: August 2022

For a long time cowrie shells originating in the Maldive islands had been used as a form of money in various Afro-Eurasian societies The use of cowrie shells as money was first adopted in Bengal around the 4th century, and cowrie money soon expanded into the Tai world, then into Yunnan province, on China’s southwestern frontier, where it became a legal currency. Local shell money was also adopted as early as the 10th century along the great bend of the Niger River in West Africa, and cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean were also shipped there by way of the Mediterranean. From the 16th century onwards, European merchants, led by the Portuguese, initiated the cowrie slave trade and the cowrie palm oil trade by shipping Maldivian shells through Europe to West Africa, thus reshaping the cowrie monetary zone in West Africa and creating a broad network that connected two oceans (the Indian and Atlantic oceans) and two worlds (the Old and New Worlds). The cowrie trade and cowrie money enabled the acquisition of Asian and African resources by Europeans and so promoted European dominance across the world, until a glut of cowrie shells destroyed this monetary system.The case of early China is different. While cowrie shells shared the same origin of the Indian Ocean, and played a significant role amongst the Chinese elite, they did not constitute a form of money.
Nationalism and Decolonization in the Ivory Coast
Authors: Babo Alfred
Published: August 2022

The postcolonial history of Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire) is marked by a continuum of policy-making inherited from the colonial administration and which contributed to the state’s stability and relative economic success in the 1970s in West Africa. However, government policy fluctuated in accordance with economic crises, demands for democracy, and ethnic division. Although laws aimed at normative governance, ethnic-based policy-making has been expanded to post-independence because political power in Ivorian society is still determined by ethnic loyalty. Economic distress intertwined with political ethnicity has persistently led to turmoil, from coups d’état to rebellion and civil war—in sharp contrast with the country’s earlier apparent stability, for thirty years after Independence.
Luanda: An Atlantic Port City
Authors: Oliveira Vanessa
Published: August 2022

The connections of west-central Africa with the Atlantic world were first established in the 15th century, when a Portuguese expedition arrived in the kingdom of Kongo. By 1520, Portuguese traders reached the Mbundu state of Ndongo to the south, and in 1575 Paulo Dias de Novais established the coastal settlement of Luanda, marking the beginning of a lucrative trade in enslaved Africans that connected Luanda to the wider Atlantic world. The trade in captives became the main economic activity of the Portuguese based in Angola, and Luanda became the single most important Atlantic slaving port. In Luanda and its hinterland, interactions between foreign and local peoples gave origin to a Luso-African society, which adopted elements of European and Mbundu cultures. Previous exposure to this Atlantic creole culture was crucial for the integration of enslaved Africans to societies in Latin America. Besides supplying captives to the transatlantic slave trade, Luanda was also a slave society. Elite men and women had numerous captives in their households and in agricultural properties located in rural suburbs and in the interior. With the abolition of the slave trade in the Portuguese territories in Africa in 1836, Luanda experienced the development of the so called legitimate commerce in tropical commodities, shifting its Atlantic connections from Brazil to Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, the city was reconnected to São Tomé through a traffic of forced laborers to work on cocoa and coffee plantations.
Score-Driven Models: Methods and Applications
Authors: Artemova Mariia , Blasques Francisco , van Brummelen Janneke , Koopman Siem Jan
Published: August 2022

The flexibility, generality, and feasibility of score-driven models have contributed much to the impact of score-driven models in both research and policy. Score-driven models provide a unified framework for modeling the time-varying features in parametric models for time series.

The predictive likelihood function is used as the driving mechanism for updating the time-varying parameters. It leads to a flexible, general, and intuitive way of modeling the dynamic features in the time series while the estimation and inference remain relatively simple. These properties remain valid when models rely on non-Gaussian densities and nonlinear dynamic structures. The class of score-driven models has become even more appealing since the developments in theory and methodology have progressed rapidly. Furthermore, new formulations of empirical dynamic models in this class have shown their relevance in economics and finance. In the context of macroeconomic studies, the key examples are nonlinear autoregressive, dynamic factor, dynamic spatial, and Markov-switching models. In the context of finance studies, the major examples are models for integer-valued time series, multivariate scale, and dynamic copula models. In finance applications, score-driven models are especially important because they provide particular updating mechanisms for time-varying parameters that limit the effect of the influential observations and outliers that are often present in financial time series.
The Costs of Bankruptcy Restructuring
Authors: Wang Wei
Published: August 2022

Financially distressed and insolvent firms file for bankruptcy to either reorganize or liquidate under court supervision. Fundamentally, bankruptcy law is designed to resolve creditor coordination and holdout problems. It not only sets up rules and guidelines to allow firms to restructure their debt claims but also provides means for firms to reallocate their assets to other users. Although an efficient bankruptcy system can help mitigate bargaining frictions and maximize asset value and thus creditor recovery by avoiding inefficient liquidation or excess continuation, the bankruptcy process itself can be costly.

Understanding and quantifying the costs of bankruptcy restructuring are important not only to financially distressed firms but also to the capital structure decisions and the pricing of securities of healthy firms. More broadly, efficient bankruptcy mechanisms are important for economic growth, the productivity of firms in an economy, and the resiliency of the economy to adverse shocks. From the 1990s through the 2020s, the literature has flourished, with a growing number of empirical studies investigating the efficiency of the bankruptcy system and different aspects of bankruptcy costs.

Bankruptcy costs are typically classified as either direct or indirect costs. The former refers to out-of-pocket expenses associated with the retention of professionals, while the latter refers to opportunity costs incurred as a result of the adverse effect of a bankruptcy filing on business operations, human capital, and investments. Indirect costs are typically larger and more difficult to measure and quantify than direct costs, which studies show to be a small fraction of a bankrupt firm’s assets.

Because of significant economic frictions such as conflicts of interest, information asymmetry, and judicial biases presented in the system, bankruptcy can be a lengthy process. Since delay allows both direct and indirect costs to accumulate, a number of studies show that shortening the bargaining process can effectively help preserve firm value. Besides delay, bankruptcy costs can be manifested in inefficient liquidation, excess continuation, fire sales, loss of human capital, and managerial turnover, which impose real costs on bankrupt firms. How to mitigate frictions and minimize costs has been the central theme of bankruptcy research from the 1990s through the 2020s, a time that has also witnessed several notable changes to the U.S. bankruptcy system, including the rise of specialized distressed investors, the strengthening of secured creditor control rights, and the increasing intensity of asset sales. These changes have important implications for the restructuring landscape.
Child Development, Major Disruptive Events—Public Health Implications
Authors: Vaillancourt Tracy , Szatmari Peter
Published: August 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended nearly all the safeguarding systems in the lives of children and youth, such as family life, school, extracurricular activities, sports, unstructured social opportunities, health care, and church. With many of the typical promotive and protective factors disrupted all at once, and for so long, the mental health of children and youth has deteriorated in many areas, but not all, and for many children and youth, but not all. It is important to acknowledge, however, that the mental health of children and youth was in crisis before the pandemic, with 1 in 7 children and youth worldwide having a mental disorder. Given the continued decline in this area of health, children and youth may well be on the cusp of a “generational catastrophe” that could involve lasting harms if immediate action is not taken. Of particular concern are marginalized and vulnerable children and youth—they are the ones unduly enduring the brunt of this global crisis. Accordingly, child and youth mental health recovery must be prioritized, along with the reduction of inequity within and across countries. A commitment to public health strategies that never include harming children and youth as a tolerated side effect must also be made.