bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of adhesive-free focused high-frequency PVDF copolymer transducers fabricated on spherical cavities
Authors: Habib A , Wagle S , Decharat A , Melandsø F
Published: February 2020

A layer-by-layer deposition method for fabricating a focused ultrasonic transducer from piezoelectric copolymers has been developed. The fabrication process involves engraving a spherical cavity of 2 mm diameter on polyethyleneimines (PEI) polymer substrate. Surface roughness of the engraved spherical cavity is measured and compared with simulated line scan. Then, the transducer response was investigated by observing the acoustic pulse reflection from the glass plate used as reflector in a focal point. The average central frequency responses were measured to be 48.5 MHz, with a lower and upper −6 dB frequencies of approximately 25 and 76.5 MHz, yielding a bandwidth of 94.2%. A scanning hydrophone system has been employed to determine the focal zone of the transducer and compared with simulation using COMSOL Multiphysics. Two-dimensional surface scanning was performed on the test sample to provide the ultrasonic imaging of the transducer prototype and compare the image with commercial PVDF transducer with a center frequency of (48.5 ± 1) MHz.
Multi-parameter estimation with multi-mode Ramsey interferometry
Authors: Li Xinwei , Cao Jia-Hao , Liu Qi , Tey Meng Khoon , You Li
Published: February 2020

Estimating multiple parameters simultaneously is of great importance to measurement science and application. For a single parameter, atomic Ramsey interferometry (or equivalently optical Mach–Zehnder interferometry) is capable of providing the precision at the standard quantum limit (SQL) using unentangled probe states as input. In such an interferometer, the first beam splitter represented by unitary transformation U generates a quantum phase sensing superposition state, while the second beam splitter U
−1 recombines the phase encoded paths to realize interferometric sensing in terms of population measurements. We prove that such an interferometric scheme can be directly generalized to estimation of multiple parameters (associated with commuting generators) to the SQL precision using multi-mode unentangled states, if (but not iff) U is orthogonal, i.e. a unitary transformation with only real matrix elements. We show that such a U can always be constructed experimentally in a simple and scalable manner. The effects of particle number fluctuation and detection noise on such multi-mode interferometry are considered. Our findings offer a simple solution for estimating multiple parameters corresponding to mutually commuting generators.
Novel spectral unmixing approach for electron energy-loss spectroscopy
Authors: Cai Ren-Fong , Chang Mu-Tung , Lo Shen-Chuan , Chen Chien-Chun
Published: February 2020

Electron energy-loss spectroscopy is a well-established technique for characterizing low-Z elements in materials. Typically, a measured spectrum image is contributed from several materials when the composition of the specimen is sophisticated. Therefore, decomposing the distribution of each endmember is crucial to material scientists. In this article, we combined multiple linear least-squares fitting and k-means clustering to resolve the aforementioned issue. In addition, our method can nearly extract the true endmembers in materials unsupervisedly. Simulated and experimental data were employed to evaluate the performance and feasibility of our method.
Demonstration of lateral resolution enhancement by focusing amplitude modulated radially polarized light in a confocal imaging system
Authors: Meng Peiwen , Pham Hong-Liên , Pereira Silvania F , Urbach H Paul
Published: February 2020

Lateral resolution enhancement is demonstrated in a confocal imaging system with amplitude-modulated radially polarized (RP) light at the wavelength

λ
=
632

nm
.

Annular pupil fields and optimized amplitude distribution functions can be realized with a spatial light modulator. By comparing images obtained with full and amplitude modulated apertures of RP illuminations using a high numerical aperture (NA = 0.9), spatial resolution of

d
=
0.358
λ

has been achieved experimentally. This result agrees very well with theoretical simulation results and will be helpful in improving performance of the non-fluorescent imaging systems.
Salinas, Raúl
Authors: Mendoza Louis G.
Published: February 2020

The poetry, memoirs, essays, letters, prison journalism, and other forms of writing by Raúl Salinas (1934–2008) were grounded in his commitments to social justice and human rights. He was an early pioneer of contemporary Chicano pinto (prisoner) poetry whose work was characterized by a vernacular, bilingual, free verse aesthetics. Alongside other notables like Ricardo Sánchez, Luis Talamentez, Judy Lucero, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, Salinas helped make Chicana and Chicano prisoner rights an integral part of the agenda of the Chicana/o Movement through his writing and activism while incarcerated (1959–1972) and following his release. He was also a prolific prose writer in prison, and much of his journalism, reflective life writing, essays, and letters from his archives were published following his release. As important as his literary and political production in prisons was for establishing his literary recognition, it is important to note that the scope of his writing expands well beyond his prison experience. Though his literary and political interventions were important to a still emergent Chicana and Chicano literary, cultural, and political aesthetic, he was influenced by, but was not limited to, American and Latin American literary traditions. Given the scope of his life’s work, his indigenous and internationalist commitments, Salinas’ literary output make him a Xicanindio (indigenous identified Chicano) poet, a Latino internationalist, as well as a spoken word jazz and hip-hop artist whose work engaged, adapted and transformed elements of the American literary canon.
Racialized Sexuality: From Colonial Product to Creative Practice
Authors: Hernández Jillian
Published: February 2020

Racialized sexuality is a term that describes the linking of racial attributes to sexual comportment. Racialized sexualities have been produced through colonial conquest in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. European discourses framed colonized subjects as racial and thus sexual others—as different kinds of human beings with deviant erotic practices. The colonial and racist underpinnings of religion, law, and science have produced pervasive tropes of, for example, the sexual excess of Native and African peoples and the sexual submissiveness of Asian peoples. These stereotypes have had an enduring impact on the representations of racialized people’s sexual subjectivities in art and media, in addition to academic knowledge production. Representations of the insatiable lust and spitfire of Black and Latina women, the sexual submissiveness of Asian women, the lack of Asian men and the predatory sexualities of Black men, stem from centuries of discursive circulation in fields ranging from biology to anthropology, which in turned shaped how such tropes have been taken up and reproduced in cultural production.

With the understanding that racialized sexuality is a colonial product, scholars invested in anti-racism and queer politics have problematized the scientific racisms that have upheld dominant discourses of racialized sexualities by exposing their deficient methodologies, ethical violations, and often eugenicist agendas. Racialized sexualities have been lived by colonized subjects through a wide range of violences via chattel slavery, and in the early 21st century, through eroticized violence such as that inflicted on the Arab detainees of Abu Gharib prison by the United States military following 9/11. While acknowledging how racialized sexuality is intimately wedded to experiences of violation and injury, contemporary artists and scholars of sexuality have also worked to show how the very tropes that dehumanize people of color are also marked by ambivalence. These representations often present the possibilities of both pleasure and pain for racialized subjects and thus are in turns claimed, disavowed, and altered through art and scholarship in order to highlight the complexities of how racialized sexualities are experienced. Queer and trans artists of color are at the forefront of demonstrating the potential of transforming racialized sexualities from a colonial product to a creative practice.
de Burton, María Amparo Ruiz
Authors: Pita Beatrice
Published: February 2020

The novels The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), written by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832–1895), are the first novels written in English from the pen and perspective of a Mexican American woman. The author, born in Mexican Baja California, came to Northern California after the 1846–1848 Mexican American War, marrying US Army Captain Henry S. Burton. An extraordinarily talented woman, Ruiz de Burton addresses crucial issues of ethnicity, power, gender, class, and race in dialogue with a number of contemporary 19th-century discourses—political, juridical, economic, commercial, and literary—all to voice the bitter resentment of the Californios faced with despoliation and the onslaught of Anglo-American domination in the aftermath of annexation to the United States. Hers is a strong, distinctive—and notably—female voice with a critical Mexican American perspective; her novels have served to shift the benchmarks of US literature and 19th-century literary scholarship, moving it further away from an Anglo-centered, East Coast, and mostly male-centered canon. Her writings have been productive sites against which to reread both canonical and newly emerged texts. By addressing US government policies, and in that regard, racial, ethnic, and class formations, as well as foregrounding gender issues, Ruiz de Burton’s works have problematized and enriched the US literary and cultural landscape. Her rediscovered novels were republished (in 1992 and 1995, respectively) by Sánchez and Pita and have become key elements in better understanding US 19th-century literary history.
Paredes, Américo
Authors: Pérez Héctor
Published: February 2020

The remarkably multi-faceted Américo Paredes Manzano attained the status of renowned scholar, teacher, author, and poet over his tumultuous and illustrious lifespan. Born in 1915 in Brownsville, at the southeastern-most corner of the state of Texas bordering Mexico, Américo Paredes passed away in Austin in 1999. His life and professional career spanned much territory, touched many lives, and affected areas of study and pedagogy as few individuals can claim. His impressive body of work is encyclopedic in range and awe-inspiring in its originality. Certainly, Paredes’s life circumstances must be read in their historical context. He was born at a time when the scent of revolution was strong in the air, declared in Mexico in 1910, and with the nascent organizing of the revolt to liberate south Texas from the rest of the state in 1915. Tensions among competing groups in the formation of Texas since the treaty of 1848 had not yet been resolved and the state of a negotiated pluralistic existence was still precarious at best. For generations, university students have first encountered the work of Paredes through his major work of scholarship on the border corrido (ballad), namely the fully contextualized and historicized analysis of “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez”/ “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.” However, those who look further into his work realize that Paredes had already started to make his mark in the area of ethnomusicology, a branch of anthropology. His contributions are not insignificant as a number of his students went on to carry and extend Paredes’s teachings to other institutions of higher learning. One might see the logical relationship between this scholar’s interest in and knowledge of the Texas-Mexico border corrido and the more global ethnomusicologist’s perspective. In the same manner, Paredes trained and inspired numerous cadres of scholars in cultural and literary studies. By extension, his mentees have likewise now trained generations of scholars who have applied variants of the critical model pioneered by Paredes, rooted in his observations and study of the clash of cultures. Not unlike the history of other major intellectuals, the history of Paredes’s influence is marked by scholars who emulate, extend, revise, and also critique earlier views and critical approaches in a variety of areas such as language and linguistics, gender, class, race and ethnicity, and regionalism.
Baca, Jimmy Santiago
Authors: Terrell Clint J.
Published: February 2020

Jimmy Santiago Baca is a poet, memoirist, novelist, essayist, filmmaker, and activist who began his literary career in Florence State Prison, Arizona, where he was incarcerated from 1974 to 1979. Baca spent most of his adolescent years between orphanages, stints of homelessness, and time in juvenile detention facilities. He credits learning to read and write in prison as the galvanization of his journey from illiteracy to worldly poet, and his endorsement of literacy as an avenue for individual and community empowerment echoes the black nationalist political thought of Malcolm X. In addition to an overarching theme of literacy, he also maintains a critical awareness to the politics of land ownership. He is of Chicano and Apache descent and often draws on his Indigenous heritage, as well as his prison experience, to critique the colonial settler ideology that associates private property with personal liberty. He is among the gallery of canonized Chicano pinto (prisoner) poets like Ricardo Sánchez and Raúl Salinas who discovered their talents while incarcerated. His poetry and prose are in harmony with prisoner discourse that indicts the state for economic injustices and contextualizes crimes as economic necessity instead of demonizing the individual. Similar to Sánchez and Salinas, Baca’s poetic voice can be both figural and visceral in the same breath. But distinct from these pinto poets, Baca’s poetic introduces a proliferation of personas that go back and forth between a poet who wants to love and make peace and a pugnacious identity that was nurtured by the violence of life in various state institutions, particularly prison. He has published eighteen books that include poetry, memoir, fiction, creative non-fiction, essay collections, and chapbooks. He is an active writer and frequently has additional publications in various stages of production, showing us that the negotiation of his traumatic past is never fully complete. Indeed, he continues to push his boundaries as a writer and challenges any preconceived notions about the literary limits of a prison cultivated intellectual.
North Korea in Asian American Literature and Culture
Authors: Hong Christine
Published: February 2020

To the extent North Korea features within Asian American literature and culture, it primarily does so in a body of Korean American cultural production—memoirs, biographies, documentary films, oral histories, fiction, and multi-media political advocacy—that is distinctively post-9/11 but not-yet post-Korean War. The irresolution of the Korean War, a war that has yet to be ended by a peace treaty, serves as defining extraliterary context for representations of North Korea. Not reducible to historical setting, much less an event safely concluded in the past, the Korean War, as a contemporaneous structure of enmity between the United States and North Korea, conditions the significance of this cultural archive—its urgency, politics, and reception. Often markedly instrumental in nature, indeed defined by the antithetical political ends it wishes to foster, Asian (mainly Korean) American cultural production on North Korea falls into two broad camps: on the one hand, “axis of evil” accounts that advocate, at times explicitly, for US intervention against North Korea, and on the other, more emergent cultural expressions that seek to expose the human costs of unending US war with North Korea.
Sino Caribbean Performance and Music
Authors: Prater Tzarina T.
Published: February 2020

Studying Sino Caribbean participation in the two cultural juggernauts of Caribbean cultural production, music and Carnival, reveals the vexed position of these modes of performance in relation to conventional historical narratives of colonialism, as well as struggles related to multiple and resilient essentialist discourses of nationalism and identity formation. The complex diasporic histories of music and Carnival are tied to violent exploitive labor formations at the core of colonial capitalism. Sino Caribbean experiences are marked by marginalization, conflict, and rebellion as well as acclimation, inclusion, and challenge to diasporic theories and critical praxis. This labor history is frequently ignored by cultural chauvinists whose critical lenses do not engage beyond the Anglo-American academic bastions. Outside of music aficionados and Caribbean communities, very few are familiar with the integral role of Sino Caribbean peoples in the production and dissemination of reggae, jazz, and by extension, hip-hop music. This historical and critical lacuna can be addressed by shifting away from Atlantic- and Pacific Rim–bound ideological articulations of diaspora that ignore the contiguities of African, Caribbean, and Asian experiences in the Caribbean, and by focusing on this history as integral to a greater understanding of colonial and neocolonial political and economic formations.
Missing Data in Research
Authors: Richardson Hettie A. , Simmering Marcia J.
Published: February 2020

Nonresponse and the missing data that it produces are ubiquitous in survey research, but they are also present in archival and other forms of research. Nonresponse and missing data can be especially problematic in organizational contexts where the risks of providing personal or organizational data might be perceived as (or actually) greater than in public opinion contexts. Moreover, nonresponse and missing data are presenting new challenges with the advent of online and mobile survey technology. When observational units (e.g., individuals, teams, organizations) do not provide some or all of the information sought by a researcher and the reasons for nonresponse are systematically related to the survey topic, nonresponse bias can result and the research community may draw faulty conclusions. Due to concerns about nonresponse bias, scholars have spent several decades seeking to understand why participants choose not to respond to certain items and entire surveys, and how best to avoid nonresponse through actions such as improved study design, the use of incentives, and follow-up initiatives. At the same time, researchers recognize that it is virtually impossible to avoid nonresponse and missing data altogether, and as such, in any given study there will likely be a need to diagnose patterns of missingness and their potential for bias. There will likewise be a need to statistically deal with missing data by employing post hoc mechanisms that maximize the sample available for hypothesis testing and minimize the extent to which missing data obscures the underlying true characteristics of the dataset. In this connection, a large body of programmatic research supports maximum likelihood (ML) and multiple imputation (MI) as useful data replacement procedures; although in some situations, it might be reasonable to use simpler procedures instead. Despite strong support for these statistical techniques, organizational scholars have yet to embrace them. Instead they tend to rely on approaches such as listwise deletion that do not preserve underlying data characteristics, reduce the sample available for statistical analysis, and in some cases, actually exacerbate the potential problems associated with missing data. Although there are certainly remaining questions that can be addressed about missing data techniques, these techniques are also well understood and validated. There remains, however, a strong need for exploration into the nature, causes, and extent of nonresponse in various organizational contexts, such when using online and mobile surveys. Such research could play a useful role in helping researchers avoid nonresponse in organizational settings, as well as extend insight about how best and when to apply validated missing data techniques.
Stereotypes at Work
Authors: Sawyer Katina , Clair Judith A.
Published: February 2020

Stereotypes are a central concern in society and in the workplace. Stereotypes are cognitions that drive what individuals know, believe, and expect from others as a result of their social identities. Stereotypes predict how individuals view and treat one another at work, often resulting in inaccurate generalizations about individuals based on their group membership. As such, it’s important to break down and combat the use of stereotypes in decision-making at work. If stereotypes can be overcome in the workplace, fairness and equity in organizations becomes more likely.
Is There a Female Leadership Advantage?
Authors: Offermann Lynn R. , Foley Kira
Published: February 2020

Women have historically been underrepresented in leadership positions across private and public organizations around the globe. Gender inequality and gender discrimination remain very real challenges for women workers in general, and especially so for women striving for leadership positions. Yet organizational research suggests that female leaders may bring a unique constellation of leadership-related traits, attributes, and behaviors to the workplace that may provide advantages to their organizations. Specific cultural and organizational work contexts may facilitate or inhibit a female leadership advantage. Reaping the benefits of female leadership relies on an organization’s ability to combat the numerous barriers female leaders face that male leaders often do not, including gender-based discrimination, implicit bias, and unfair performance evaluations. Despite these challenges, the literature suggests that a reasoned consideration of the positive aspects of women’s leadership is not only warranted but is instructive for organizations hoping to reap the benefits of a diverse workforce.
Framing and Journalism
Authors: von Sikorski Christian , Matthes Jörg
Published: February 2020

As one of the most popular concepts in current research on journalism and mass communication, framing refers to the idea that actors like strategic communicators, journalists, but also audience members select some aspects of a particular issue and make them salient while other aspects are ignored. Frames refer to a specific presentation of issues or events and therefore construct reality in a meaningful but selective way. They do so by suggesting a problem definition, causal interpretation, treatment recommendation, and/or moral evaluation on a given issue, favoring a specific political leaning and course of action. More specifically, strategic communicators suggest frames that compete for public and media attention, and journalists adopt and alter these frames, which ultimately affects audience members’ individual level frames. Framing as a concept thus explains the power to construct and alter meaning.

As a unifying concept, framing has the potential to bridge several areas of communication research and explain the competition of strategic positions on the side of communicators, journalists, and audience members. However, the concept is also plagued by conceptual and operational fuzziness, resulting in arbitrary and incompatible uses of the term. This limits the relevance of the framing concept to theory-driven journalism studies.
Governance by and of Algorithms on the Internet: Impact and Consequences
Authors: Latzer Michael , Just Natascha
Published: February 2020

Internet-based services that build on automated algorithmic selection processes, for example search engines, computational advertising, and recommender systems, are booming and platform companies that provide such services are among the most valuable corporations worldwide. Algorithms on and beyond the Internet are increasingly influencing, aiding, or replacing human decision-making in many life domains. Their far-reaching, multifaceted economic and social impact, which results from the governance by algorithms, is widely acknowledged. However, suitable policy reactions, that is, the governance of algorithms, are the subject of controversy in academia, politics, industry, and civil society. This governance by and of algorithms is to be understood in the wider context of current technical and societal change, and in connection with other emerging trends. In particular, expanding algorithmizing of life domains is closely interrelated with and dependent on growing datafication and big data on the one hand, and rising automation and artificial intelligence in modern, digitized societies on the other. Consequently, the assessments and debates of these central developmental trends in digitized societies overlap extensively.

Research on the governance by and of algorithms is highly interdisciplinary. Communication studies contributes to the formation of so-called “critical algorithms studies” with its wide set of sub-fields and approaches and by applying qualitative and quantitative methods. Its contributions focus both on the impact of algorithmic systems on traditional media, journalism, and the public sphere, and also cover effect analyses and risk assessments of algorithmic-selection applications in many domains of everyday life. The latter includes the whole range of public and private governance options to counter or reduce these risks or to safeguard ethical standards and human rights, including communication rights in a digital age.
Land–Atmosphere Interaction in Tropical Africa
Authors: Hohenegger Cathy
Published: February 2020

Even though many features of the vegetation and of the soil moisture distribution over Africa reflect its climatic zones, the land surface has the potential to feed back on the atmosphere and on the climate of Africa. The land surface and the atmosphere communicate via the surface energy budget. A particularly important control of the land surface, besides its control on albedo, is on the partitioning between sensible and latent heat flux. In a soil moisture-limited regime, for instance, an increase in soil moisture leads to an increase in latent heat flux at the expanse of the sensible heat flux. The result is a cooling and a moistening of the planetary boundary layer. On the one hand, this thermodynamically affects the atmosphere by altering the stability and the moisture content of the vertical column. Depending on the initial atmospheric profile, convection may be enhanced or suppressed. On the other hand, a confined perturbation of the surface state also has a dynamical imprint on the atmospheric flow by generating horizontal gradients in temperature and pressure. Such gradients spin up shallow circulations that affect the development of convection. Whereas the importance of such circulations for the triggering of convection over the Sahel region is well accepted and well understood, the effect of such circulations on precipitation amounts as well as on mature convective systems remains unclear. Likewise, the magnitude of the impact of large-scale perturbations of the land surface state on the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere, such as the West African monsoon, has long been debated. One key issue is that such interactions have been mainly investigated in general circulation models where the key involved processes have to rely on uncertain parameterizations, making a definite assessment difficult.
Luxembourg and the European Union
Authors: Harmsen Robert , Högenauer Anna-Lena
Published: February 2020

A founding member state of the European Union (EU) and a major European institutional center, Luxembourg has been a consistently strong supporter of the further development of European integration, often acting to facilitate compromises at critical moments. Its European policy rests on a broad political consensus and enjoys strong support in national public opinion. However, the country has also defended key national priorities on occasion, such as the interests of the steel sector in the early phases of European integration or its taxation policy in the early 21st century.

Historically, this openness toward cooperation can be explained by reference to Luxembourg’s long experience of cooperation with neighbouring countries. Luxembourg was a member of the Zollverein (German Customs Union) in the 19th century and formed an economic union with Belgium after the First World War.

European policymaking in Luxembourg is characterized by a pragmatic and informal policy style. The comparatively limited size of the national bureaucracy allows for an ease of internal communication and coordination. The typically long tenures and broad remits of national officials coupled with their multilingualism facilitate their integration into European policy arenas, where they often play pivotal roles.

Luxembourgish society is further highly “Europeanized.” As the country became one of the largest producers of steel in the world, it attracted high levels of immigration from other European countries. The economic transformation of the country from the 1980s onward—moving from an industrial economy to a service-based economy centered on the financial sector—would not have been conceivable without the parallel development and deepening of European integration. In 2018, foreigners made up 48% of the resident population of the country, with citizens of the other 27 EU member states accounting for around 85% of that foreign community. The country’s labor force is further heavily dependent on cross-border workers from the three surrounding countries. This unique national situation poses a range of distinctive policy challenges regarding both the national political system and the wider governance of an exceptionally dense network of cross-border relationships.
Euroskepticism, a Multifaceted Phenomenon
Authors: Bijsmans Patrick
Published: February 2020

In an age of Brexit, Euroskepticism has become a central element in debates about Europe. It is generally believed that there has been an increase in criticism on and opposition toward the European Union (EU) and its policies since the 1991 Maastricht Treaty. Yet, criticism was already present at the start of the integration process, also among mainstream parties in the six founding members. With the EU’s recent crises, Euroskepticism has become embedded in contestation in most member states, affecting politics at the national and European level. Consequently, it is important to understand Euroskepticism in contemporary Europe and to gather a broad overview of its development, its meaning, and its wider consequences.

Euroskepticism is a diverse, multifaceted phenomenon that varies across time, member states, and policies. Exploring the history of Euroskepticism helps to contextualize contemporary developments and to understand some of the main debates and issues in the field, including conceptual challenges, but also debates about the reasons for Euroskepticism and what kind of impact it might have. One of the key questions in this respect is whether Euroskepticism should be seen as a problematic phenomenon or as an essential element of a democratic Europe. While conventional negative connotations associated with Euroskepticism suggest the former, research finds a broader variety of criticism and opposition to the EU and its policies that may be conducive to a more democratic EU debate.
Turkey and the European Union
Authors: Yeşilada Birol A.
Published: February 2020

The partnership between the European Union (EU) and Turkey has been unlike any other accession process. Turkey has had a close relationship with Western Europe since it joined the National Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952 and became an associate member of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1963. During the Cold War, there was hardly any serious doubt about this country eventually becoming a member of the Western European Economic Community. However, developments since the end of the Cold War have raised considerable misgivings over Turkey’s membership in the EU, first among several political leaders of member states and their respective citizens, and lately among Turkish leaders and the general Turkish public. Debates over Turkey’s membership fall into two distinct categories. First, those who oppose Turkey’s membership in the EU point at this country’s economic problems, deterioration of democracy, and the Islamic culture of its society. These states either outright object to Turkey’s membership or favor changing the negotiation process to end with nothing more than a preferential partnership between the EU and Turkey. Second, supporters of Turkey’s membership emphasize this country’s economic and strategic importance for the EU, as well as the Union’s treaty obligations to complete the accession negotiation. Moreover, Turkey’s supporters argue that the EU cannot afford to cut off its ties to this country at a time when President Erdogan is looking for excuses to realign his country with anti-NATO countries.

When one looks at the potential for Turkey’s membership in the EU, accession seems further away, if not impossible. The challenges for Turkey include a roller-coaster performance along democratic (political) acquis, the economic cost of enlargement, the Europeanness of Turkey, and the acquis communautaire. Once a promising potential member, Turkey has become a policy nightmare for the EU. Although the Copenhagen criteria represent the primary framework for accession, regional, and systemic developments further complicate such decision-making. For the political acquis, Turkish democracy has deteriorated to such an extent that it no longer meets the minimum requirements for membership. On the economic front, Turkey remains one of the EU’s most important trade and investment partners. However, the Turkish economy is showing severe signs of overheating coupled with the falling value of the Turkish lira. Furthermore, the Turkish public is increasingly moving away from the Europeans in terms of social values that dominate the general population. Instead of the convergence of societal benefits, there is a growing gap between Turks and other Europeans. Furthermore, there is a growing sentiment among Turks that the EU leaders are not interested in having Turkey join the Union. Finally, Turkey and the EU need to find a permanent solution to such problems as the refugee crisis, EU–NATO partnership, Cyprus, and bilateral disputes between Greece and Turkey.
Japan and the European Union
Authors: Suzuki Hitoshi , Suzuki Yu , Igawa Yoshimi
Published: February 2020

Japan and the European Union have historically developed relations, from trade conflicts to mutual cooperation between global actors. Japan’s prewar attitude and postwar rapid reconstruction caused misunderstandings and frictions, but these were gradually overcome thanks to the efforts made by Japan, the European Commission and member state governments. After the Cold War ended, policy fields of cooperation expanded from “mutual” market liberalization to foreign direct investments, aid, security, and environment. Japan and the EU jointly aided the newly liberalized countries in Central Eastern Europe, while the EU sought to strengthen its relations with countries in the Asia-Pacific. The Japan–EU Economic Partnership Agreement and the Strategic Partnership Agreement of 2018 were signed on the 50th anniversary of the customs union. The Agreements are jointly aimed by both parties to foster global free trade and shared values. For the first time in postwar history, Japan and the EU had reached an agreement before achieving one with the United States. Japan–EU relations are the strongest they have been since 1959 when the Japanese Mission to the European Communities and the European Commission Delegation to Japan were established. But the security threats in the Pacific indicate that bilateral relations between Japan and member states—the United Kingdom and France at the forefront—are still in play. The impact of Brexit, estimated to be felt more on the Japanese side, is also an issue requiring close study.
Transgender Law and Policy in the United States
Authors: Gilreath Shannon
Published: February 2020

Transgender people have a complicated history in U.S. law and policy. Once thought of as a symptom of homosexuality, gender nonconformity has long been the subject of social disapprobation and legal sanction, including criminalization. Beginning in the 1950s, an emergent interest by the medical community in individuals suffering from “gender dysphoria” precipitated an identity politics primarily organized around a goal of access to competent medical care and treatment for transsexual individuals. In ways both significant and ironic, this medicalization both promoted a binary ideology of gender, most obvious in concepts like male-to-female or female-to-male transsexualism, and created space for more transformative concepts of gender fluidity and transgender identity to emerge. Long conceptualized as a kind of subsidiary of the gay and lesbian rights movement in the United States, a status that entailed considerable turmoil, the transgender movement, especially since the 1990s, has emerged as a vocal and relatively effective rights lobby in its own right. The advent of the Trump administration presents a pivotal moment that will likely test not only the durability of recent policy gains but also whether those gains can be expanded in any significant measure.
Flood Damage Assessments: Theory and Evidence From the United States
Authors: Bakkensen Laura , Blair Logan
Published: February 2020

Flooding remains one of the globe’s most devastating natural hazards and a leading driver of natural disaster losses across many countries, including the United States. As such, a rich and growing literature aims to better understand, model, and assess flood losses. Several major theoretical and empirical themes emerge from the literature. Fundamental to the flood damage assessment literature are definitions of flood damage, including a typology of flood damage, such as direct and indirect losses. In addition, the literature theoretically and empirically assesses major determinants of flood damage including hydrological factors, measurement of the physical features in harm’s way, as well as understanding and modeling protective activities, such as flood risk mitigation and adaptation, that all co-determine the overall flood losses. From there, common methods to quantify flood damage take these factors as inputs, modeling hydrological risk, exposure, and vulnerability into quantifiable flood loss estimates through a flood damage function, and include both ex ante expected loss assessments and ex post event-specific analyses. To do so, high-quality data are key across all model steps and can be found across a variety of sources. Early 21st-century advancements in spatial data and remote sensing push the literature forward. While topics and themes apply more generally to flood damage across the globe, examples from the United States illustrate key topics. Understanding main themes and insights in this important research area is critical for researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners to better understand, utilize, and extend existing flood damage assessment literatures in order to lessen or even prevent future tragedy.
Mestizaje, Racial Discrimination, and Inequality in Latin America
Authors: Paixão Marcelo , Rossetto Irene
Published: February 2020

Latin America ranks highest in the world in markers of social and economic inequality, as well as in the negative effects of inequality on other realms of social life, such as access to basic services, political power, and, in many countries, unfair treatment by police and the justice system. Yet in Latin America it is not possible to talk about racism, ethnic-racial discrimination, and inequality without taking into consideration the hegemonic narratives of mestizaje and racial democracy that shape the way many Latin American nations think about themselves today. Can a region characterized by extreme levels of social inequality also be ethnically and racially democratic? The pattern of ethnic and racial relations in Latin America is marked by discrimination, but at the same time, it creates mechanisms that prevent individuals from recognizing the existence of discrimination against themselves. This reality carries several complications for census-taking and other forms of statistical data collection intended to measure ethnic-racial inequality. Because the main paradigms of analysis of social inequality prioritize economics and class, they have directly or indirectly strengthened the discourse that in Latin America, there is no racism. Certainly, the future of research on race relations and inequality in Latin America will benefit from new demographic data and public opinion surveys, carried out since the turn of the century, which include the identification of indigenous and Afro-descendant people. This trend may advance the production of studies grounded in more robust empirical evidence of ethnic-racial asymmetry.
Racial Politics in Haiti
Authors: Simeon-Jones Kersuze
Published: February 2020

The fusion of race with political and economic agendas was materialized in the 15th century, with the enslavement and transportation of Africans to the Americas. Thenceforth, race, politics, and economic growth have been inextricably linked and established as a lasting structure. The birth of the black republic, République D’Haïti, in 1804, unveiled, to a flagrant degree, the significant impact of institutionalized racial politics. As racist ideologies served to justify and reinforce the economic enterprises of enslavers and imperialists, the new black republic endured rapacious politico-economic policies from the 19th century onward. Ratified decrees, proclamations, and constitutions lay bare perennial institutionalized methods of race disenfranchisement in Saint-Domingue, subsequently Haiti.

The imposition of France’s indemnity against the Republic of Haiti—for daring to reclaim its humanity by breaking the yoke of enslavement—discloses, unequivocally, the precarious position of an emerging black nation within a world of systemic and fiendish chattel enslavement of Africans and their descendants. Within the context of imperial power and economic enterprises, it remains vital to probe the extent to which the categorical refusal of that lucrative system of human commerce affected the economic and political position of the Republic of Haiti. Nominally free, the leaders of the new black republic increasingly lost—from the 1820s onward—autonomy of self-governance, at different junctures of the nation’s political history. Within the temporal framework of the 19th and 20th centuries one could question the extent to which ideologies of contempt and disregard were translated into economic and political policies. To what degree did long-standing racialized politics and policies, in tandem with acute uninterrupted corruption within the nation’s state, contribute to the material destitution of the republic? Can the Republic of Haiti recover from the quotidian concrete outcomes of its political and economic history?
The Electoral Representation of Evangelicals in Latin America
Authors: Boas Taylor C.
Published: February 2020

Evangelical Christians have drawn attention for electoral victories throughout Latin America, yet their engagement and success with electoral politics also varies significantly across countries and over time. Scholars’ explanations for this cross-national variation generally fall into one of several categories. Sociological or demographic explanations argue that evangelicals should be better represented in countries where they are a larger share of either the population or the socioeconomic elite. A second set of explanations focuses on factors that might politicize evangelical identity and provide the motivation for contesting elections. Among these are the postmillennial and prosperity theology associated with neo-Pentecostalism; the influence of co-religionists from abroad, particularly the United States; historical struggles for religious freedom and legal equality with the Catholic Church; and the rise of values issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. A third set of arguments focuses on the degree to which electoral and party systems are open to new entrants, thus facilitating the electoral ambitions of a mobilized faith community. Finally, arguments focused on voting behavior examine how a candidate’s religion affects electoral support, especially among fellow believers, and whether this tendency varies across countries. Explanations for cross-national variation in evangelical political representation also help us understand their electoral surge in the early 21st century, as issues such as same-sex marriage have arrived on the political agenda in a roughly contemporaneous fashion in much of the region, providing a common motivation for electoral contestation.
Religious Traditions in Politics: Latter-day Saints
Authors: Phillips Rick , Cragun Ryan
Published: February 2020

From its inception Mormonism was an overtly political movement that sought to dismantle the barriers between religion and government. The church’s founding prophet, Joseph Smith, was both a theological and political leader, serving as mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois, and even running for president of the United States. After Smith’s assassination, the Mormons left the United States for the valley of the Great Salt Lake in an attempt to escape the persecution the fledgling religion had faced from its inception. Isolated from the American mainstream, the Mormons established a separatist, quasi-nation in what would become the state of Utah. Church and state were substantially conflated in the Utah Territory. Political conflict with state and federal governments is a common theme running throughout Mormon history through the mid-19th century. In Utah, the fiercest battles were over federal authorities’ attempts to eradicate Mormon polygamy. The passage of draconian anti-polygamy laws eventually forced the Mormons to abandon their distinctive marriage system and begin the process of assimilating into the larger society. Mormon assimilation has proceeded in fits and starts, and charges that church and state remain conflated in Utah are still common. The Mormon Church has been involved in several high-profile political battles on “culture war” issues. While the church has generally been neutral in electoral politics since the end of World War II, Mitt Romney’s quest for the presidency has thrust some of the esoteric doctrines of Mormonism into the spotlight.