bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Institutional Turn
Authors: Rosen Jeremy
Published: July 2019

Since around the turn of the millennium, Anglo-American literary scholarship has been marked by a remarkable shift in its attention to and its attitude toward institutions. Within this shift or “institutional turn,” two interrelated movements can be detected: 1) a departure from thinking about literature as a social institution, toward a sociological approach that examines the many and varied organizations and institutions in and through which literature and its value are produced, distributed, and consumed; and 2) a tendency to revise earlier critiques of institutions, which were often indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, and which emphasized their regulating and disciplinary power, in favor of a more balanced view of institutions as enabling as well as constraining, and in some cases, an outright advocacy for their value and the need to conserve them. Both of these movements stem from scholars’ recognition of the heterogeneity of actual institutions. Rather than understanding literature as something constituted by monolithic, homogenizing forces, early 21st-century literary scholars tend to emphasize the way it is generated and sustained by a wide range of practices occurring in an equally disparate set of institutional locations. Since the early 2000s, scholars have undertaken to analyze the workings of these institutions as the more immediate context in which literary production occurs and is disseminated—a middle range of actors and organizations situated between broader social and historical currents and literary texts. The more charitable attitude toward institutions also recognizes the crucial roles institutions play in the teaching and study of literature. Scholars have thus begun defending the work of institutions, in response to early 21st-century conditions of neoliberalism, under which governments have withdrawn state support for public institutions, including institutions of higher education. A neoliberal ideology that reduces all value to market value presents a threat to institutions that are not primarily dedicated to the generation of economic profit. Thus both of the movements toward institutional study are necessarily bound up with a tradition of scholars who have produced “institutional histories” of literature departments and of the discipline of literary studies. Under neoliberal conditions, such histories have gained urgency, giving rise to a renewed call to account for the value of literary study and of educational institutions in terms that do not reduce this value to service to the economy.
Afterlife
Authors: Bennett Alice
Published: July 2019

From classical antiquity onwards, writing about life after death has consistently served as a situation for questions of literary theory. The locations of the afterlife are hypotheticals and counterfactuals; they are the site of theory itself. Questions about authorship, for instance, have been articulated through the myth of Orpheus (in the forms recorded by Virgil and Ovid). The story of Orpheus tells of a poet who must go into the underworld to find the material for a tale of survivorship and loss, raising questions about the sources of creative inspiration, the art of trauma, and the suffering of the authentic artist. Dante’s imagined structures of an afterlife, in which punishments fit crimes with an apt poetic justice, have similarly been enlisted into one of the most important theoretical debates of the 20th century between formalists and historicists. The afterlife as a supplement to life’s time has also been used as a way of thinking about temporality and the implications for narrative as a literary mode that works with and through the philosophy of time. One of the most influential aspects of the literature of the afterlife to resonate in literary theory has been the ghost story. In its greatest manifestations, from Hamlet to The Turn of the Screw to Beloved, the ghost story forces its readers to acknowledge those elements of the past that refuse to be laid to rest, and it has therefore served as a vehicle for psychoanalytic questions about how processes of individual or collective memory are depicted in literary texts. In poststructuralist theory, the notion of the hauntological has also built its concepts in dialogue with earlier literary ghosts and become a way of thinking about language and its uncanny slippage between presence and absence. Subsequent critical work continued to develop hauntology into a way of understanding temporality and cultural history. Finally, the notion of prosopopoeia, or the voicing of the dead through writing, is perhaps the most far-reaching way of understanding the prevalence of dead voices as a literary trope, which reflects something of the processes of reading and writing themselves. The afterlife has therefore been a crucial source of generative metaphors for literary theory, as well as a topic and setting with an important literary history.
Revisiting Asian American Poetics
Authors: Chang Juliana
Published: July 2019

The most discussed and cited works of Asian American writing in literary studies include mainly novels, memoirs, short fiction, essays, and plays. To use Sau-ling Wong’s terms Necessity and Extravagance, the study of prose narrative has become a Necessity in the establishment of an Asian American literary canon, while poetry appears to occupy the status of the Extravagant—not excluded, but not as important or basic as prose. However, considering Asian American studies through the framework of not just poetry as a genre but also the poetic as a mode leads to some fresh understandings of canonical narratives, as well as criticism and theory. The power of poetry and the poetic do lie in their alignment with Extravagance, especially in their play with rules and expectations of language, convention, and form. Poems by Asian American writers point to the underside of play, the ways in which play can threaten minority subjects. At the same time the poems enact their own forms of play, through literary allusion and figurative language, for example. Asian American poetry and the Asian American poetic harness the energies of recreation and enjoyment to build and repurpose literary and discursive forms that articulate racial, ethnic, and gendered perils and promises.
Queer South Asian Diasporas
Authors: Khubchandani Kareem
Published: July 2019

Queer South Asian Diasporas can refer to the individuals and communities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people who trace their ancestry to the South Asian subcontinent, but have lived beyond its borders. These communities and individuals generate vibrant forms of cultural production: writing, activism, filmmaking, performance art, and creative manipulations of everyday practice. Additionally, queer diaspora can refer to a particular way of analyzing South Asian public cultures and discourse through a transnational lens with an eye toward the ways that normative genders and sexualities are managed and manipulated to secure and undo nationalist projects. Given the dislocation rendered by pushes and pulls from multiple nations and communities, a common theme in the theorization of queer diaspora and the representation of LGBTQ South Asian life is the struggle over and production of “home” as physical space, affective landscape, and shared embodiment. Theories of queer diaspora help scholars understand how some practices that are not particularly associated with mainstream queer identities can be interpreted as queer, especially when read in the context of South Asian histories. The homosociality of South Asian domestic life, filmic conventions, and ritual practices lend themselves to queer interpretations. While these intimacies do not read as queer to everyone, LGBTQ South Asians precisely apprehend these queer possibilities as alternatives to white and Western gay habitus. Also, queer diaspora explains that migrant, postcolonial subjects are often perceived as having non-normative genders and sexualities given the ways that imperial projects have managed those aspects of human life. This framework is reflected in the narratives of LGBTQ South Asians who name how their (un)desirability is based on race, including the hair on their body, their ethnic heritage, and the stereotypes they are associated with.
Translation and Translation as a Weapon
Authors: Sapiro Gisèle
Published: July 2019

Translation is a social activity that fulfills other functions than mere communication: political, economic and cultural. Thus translation can be used as a political weapon to export or import texts conveying an ideological message, such as socialist realism. As evidenced by the promotion of world bestsellers, translation may in other cases serve economic interests. Literary translations also serve cultural purposes, such as the building of collective (national, social, gendered) identities, the representations of other cultures, or the subversion of the dominant norms in a literary field (as defined by Pierre Bourdieu), which can be illustrated by the reception and uses of William Faulkner’s novels in France in the 1930s (namely by Jean-Paul Sartre).

The study of translation has become a research field called “Translation Studies,” which underwent a “sociological turn” at the beginning of the 21st century, and was also renewed at the same time by the rise of “world literature” studies in comparative literature. While translation studies are interested in norms of translation (as defined by Gideon Toury), which may vary across cultures, especially between domesticating and foreignizing strategies, the sociology of translation and of (world) literature asks how literary texts circulate across cultures: who are the mediators? Why do they select certain texts and not others? What obstacles stand in the way of the transfer process? How are translations used as weapons in cultural struggles?

The circulation of texts in translation can be studied through a quantitative analysis of flows of translation (across languages, countries, publishing houses) and through qualitative methods: interviews with specialized intermediaries and cultural mediators (publishers, translators, state representatives, literary critics), ethnographic observation (of book fairs, literature festivals), documentary sources (critical reception), archives (of publishers), and text analysis. However, internal (text analysis) and external (sociological) approaches still wait to be fully connected.
Russian Meteorological Investigations in China in the 19th Century
Authors: Feklova Tatiana
Published: July 2019

The history of the Russian Magneto-Meteorological Observatory (RMMO) in Beijing has not been extensively researched. Sources for this information are Russian (the Russian State Historical Archive, Saint Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Academy of Sciences, Russian National Library) and Chinese (the First Historical Archive of Beijing, the Library of the Shanghai Zikavey Observatory) archives. These archival materials can be scientifically and methodologically analyzed. At the beginning of the 18th century, the Russian Orthodox Mission (ROM) was founded in the territory of Beijing. Existing until 1955, the ROM performed an important role in the development of Russian–Chinese relations. Russian scientists could only work in Beijing through the ROM due to China’s policy of fierce self-isolation. The ROM became the center of Chinese academic studies and the first training school for Russian sinologists. From its very beginning, it was considered not only a church or diplomatic mission but a research center in close cooperation with the Russian Academy of Sciences. In this context, the RMMO made important weather investigations in China and the Far East in the 19th century. The RMMO, as well as its branch stations in China and Mongolia, part of a scientific network, represented an important link between Europe and Asia and was probably the largest geographical scientific network in the world at that time.
Stereotyping and Political Decision Making
Authors: Spencer Bettina
Published: July 2019

Stereotypes are overgeneralized, often inaccurate, characterizations of a group and its members. Because stereotypes rely on heuristics, they can occur unconsciously and shape behavior in multiple ways. People may stereotype in order to quickly characterize a person or a group of people, or they may be motivated to deliberately stereotype in order to maintain their own self-esteem and sense of self-worth. Stereotypes can undermine many facets of our behavior and beliefs, including how we make political decisions. For example, people who stereotype women as being nurturing and in need of protection may be less inclined to vote for a women running for a leadership position. Because stereotypes are so pervasive and learned early, they can be particularly difficult to reduce or eliminate, and people will often look for evidence to support their attitudes rather than actively challenging the stereotype. However, stereotype reduction is possible and can be done both consciously and unconsciously.
Hindsight Bias in Political Decision Making
Authors: Pohl Rüdiger F. , Erdfelder Edgar
Published: July 2019

Hindsight bias describes the tendency of persons—after the outcome of an event is known—to overestimate their foresight. For example, following a political election, persons tend to retrospectively adjust their predictions to the actual outcome. These judgment distortions are very robust and have been observed in a variety of domains and tasks. About 50 years of research on hindsight bias have meanwhile brought a wealth of findings and insights. Core research questions are (1) how to explain hindsight bias in terms of underlying processes, (2) whether there are individual differences in susceptibility, (3) how the bias possibly impedes decision-making in applied contexts, such as political decision-making, and (4) how possibly to overcome it. Theoretical approaches suggest that there are distinct components of hindsight bias, and that several, mainly cognitive, mechanisms are responsible for them. Using stochastic models of hindsight bias allows us to estimate the relative proportions of these mechanisms. Depending on the task, motivational factors may also exert their influence. In addition, the strength of hindsight bias appears to be related to some personality traits and also to age. For example, some authors found that hindsight bias tends to increase with the tendency toward favorable self-presentation and to decrease with intelligence. Moreover, lifespan studies have shown that children and older adults show larger hindsight bias than young adults. Hindsight bias has been found in political decision-making (as well as in other applied domains). Surprisingly, attempts to overcome hindsight bias have mainly failed, whereas only a few debiasing techniques show promising results. In sum, one important conclusion is to be continuously aware of the potentially distorting influence of outcome knowledge on the evaluation of our own (or other’s) prior knowledge state.
The United Nations and the European Union
Authors: Monteleone Carla
Published: July 2019

The European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) are expressions of a rules-based global order. The EU has enshrined support to the UN in its security strategies, and its priorities indicate an engagement in a wide range of UN programs and activities to maintain the rules-based order and adapt it to face internal and external challenges. The EU and its member states are the largest contributors to the UN budget. Following the adoption of the Lisbon treaty, the EU has increased its representation at the UN, gaining enhanced observer status in the General Assembly. However, because of the intergovernmental nature of the forum, only its member states have the right to vote. This has led scholars to investigate the actorness of the EU at the UN through the analysis of the voting cohesion of EU member states in the General Assembly. Less attention has been paid to the behavior of EU member states in the Security Council.

Existing scholarship has tended to analyze how the EU acts within the UN more than inter-organizational cooperation. However, the contribution of the EU and its member states to UN activities in the area of peace and security maintenance is particularly relevant and is a reminder that inter-organizational cooperation deserve greater attention than the one it has received so far.
East Africa: Regional Politics and Dynamics
Authors: Oyugi Walter O. , Ochieng Jimmy
Published: July 2019

The East African region historically has comprised Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. The politics of these countries have been shaped by the colonial heritage bequeathed at independence and its impact continues to reverberate on politics and administration of the region five decades after independence. While the three countries inherited similar systems of governance that sought to decentralize power, they all reverted to the centralized governance systems that predated independence, to not serve the leaders’ own power interests but to also secure effective control of the localities. According to the said system, all governance institutions at the subterritorial level operated in line with centrally determined guidelines. This centralization of power has impacted on the evolution, character, and nature of the state in the region as well as on the governance of the individual states. Even with constitutional and legislative changes to check on the excess powers of the executive—which in all three cases means the president and his key allies— it continues to seek means of controlling the processes of democratization and decentralization in a manner that defeats the logic of introducing checks and balances. While Tanzania and Kenya have experimented with democratization since the 1990s and Uganda since the 2000s, consolidation remains a challenge due to the reluctance of those in charge of central government to let go of power and its attendant benefits. In addition, the various experiences with decentralization have suffered from the desire of the center to use them not as platforms for participatory governance but rather as tools for control and domination. At the regional level, the issues of national interest and mistrust have continued to constrain endeavors toward deeper integration.
Secularization, Secularity, and Secularism in the New Millennium: Macro-theories and Research
Authors: Stolz Jörg , Tanner Pascal
Published: July 2019

In the second half of the 20th century, theories on secularization and secularism have been dominated by three approaches: secularization theory, individualization theory, and market theory. In the new millennium, approaches that both built on and revised these neoclassical approaches emerged: deprivation and insecurity theory, the theory of secular transition and intergenerational decline, theories of religious–secular competition, and theories focusing on the tipping point of the 1960s. These four new approaches have deepened our understanding of secularization, secularity, and secularism; however, they each have their own theoretical and empirical problems that need to be addressed by future research.

It has become customary in sociology and the political sciences to distinguish three large types of macro-theory on secularization, secularity, and secularism, namely secularization theory, individualization theory, and market theory. Each of these types includes a large number of approaches, ideas, and research endeavors. These neoclassical theories were formulated in the last millennium and have been described, discussed, and criticized many times since. A brief overview of the three neoclassical theories is provided, but then four theoretical approaches are focused on that have been developed in the new millennium: deprivation and insecurity theory, the theory of secular transition and intergenerational decline, theories of religious–secular competition, and theories focusing on the tipping point of the 1960s. These approaches are in the process of being discussed and tested thoroughly.
War and Religion: The Iran−Iraq War
Authors: Asadzade Peyman
Published: July 2019

Religion has historically played a central role in motivating rulers to start and individuals to participate in war. However, the decline of religion in international politics following the Peace of Westphalia and the inception of the modern nation-state system, which built and highlighted a sense of national identity, undermined the contribution of religion to politics and consequently, conflict. The case of the Iran−Iraq War, however, shows a different pattern in which religion did play a crucial role in motivating individuals to participate in war. Although the evidence suggests that religious motivations by no means contributed to Saddam’s decision to launch the war, an overview of the Iranian leaders’ speeches and martyrs’ statements reveals that religion significantly motivated people to take part in the war. While Iraqi leaders tried to mobilize the population by highlighting the allegedly Persian-Arab historical antagonism and propagating an Iraqi-centered form of Arab nationalism, Iranian leaders exploited religious symbols and emotions to encourage war participation, garner public support, alleviate the suffering of the people, and build military morale. The Iranian leadership painted the war as a battle between believers and unbelievers, Muslims and infidels, and the true and the false. This strategy turned out to be an effective tool of mobilization during wartime.
Thirst and Water Balance
Authors: Daniels Derek
Published: July 2019

Maintaining water balance is critical for survival, but our bodies are constantly losing more water than we produce. Consuming water, therefore, is needed to restore what is lost by sweating, bleeding, vomiting, urinating, even breathing. Because the fluid in the body is divided into intracellular and extracellular compartments, and because depletion can happen in one compartment without affecting the other, separate detection mechanisms for losses in each are required. Moreover, the relatively high concentration of sodium in the extracellular space means that sodium loss accompanies extracellular dehydration. Accordingly, the behavioral response to loss of fluid from the extracellular space needs to include sodium intake. Activity of osmoreceptors (in the case of intracellular loss), or baroreceptors and the renin-angiotensin system (in the case of extracellular loss), underlies the responses to perturbations of fluid balance, and promotes the appropriate behaviors needed to restore balance to the system. The peptide angiotensin II (AngII) is a key component of these responses. Studies of AngII in drinking have been critical in our understanding of how a peripherally derived peptide can act in the brain without transport across the blood–brain barrier, and AngII-induced drinking has served as an important model for the study of intracellular signaling pathways that affect behavior. Although much has been discovered about these systems and how they respond to fluid deficits, the precise means by which the systems generate a behavioral response and the mechanism that mediates satiety remains poorly understood. Nevertheless, ongoing experiments on these open questions have already started to provide a new perspective on the negative reinforcement that is provided by drinking under conditions of thirst.
Learner Engagement in Teacher Education
Authors: Seo Kay K. , Gibbons Scott
Published: July 2019

In teacher education, learner engagement is an important instructional consideration. When students are physically, cognitively, and socially involved in the learning process, they can achieve high levels of productivity and develop a meaningful learning experience. In addition, learner engagement is closely associated with student retention and degree completion. To engage education students more meaningfully in the learning process, it is important to teach them in student-centered, technology-enriched environments. Education students should also become more engaged with the community and with other educators in order to build upon their pedagogy. Furthermore, it is important to offer them professional experiences, including student teaching practicum and teacher preparation programs, so that they can transform those experiences into their own teaching practices.
Preparing Teachers for Collaborative Classrooms
Authors: Duran David , Miquel Ester
Published: July 2019

Many educational reforms highlight the need for collaboration, understood not only as a competence to be learned but also as a way of learning and teaching. Two types of collaboration can be found in classrooms: peer collaboration and teacher collaboration. The first focuses on how the teacher restructures interactions between pupils organized in pairs or groups. This permits cooperative learning practices, either by peer tutoring or through systems of cooperative learning. By implementing peer collaboration, the teacher is able to develop a new and transformative role which facilitates functions such as continuous assessment or immediate personalized attention, which are more difficult to carry out in environments where a traditional teaching approach is used. However, both the organization of the classroom for peer collaboration and this new teaching role require teacher training. Experiential learning is a key aspect of the training.

Different levels of teacher collaboration exist, but the most complete is co-teaching: two teachers planning, implementing, and assessing the same lesson for a group of students. Co–teaching allows teachers to attend to the individual needs of their students; that is why it is such an important tool in inclusive education. Furthermore, it is a learning tool for teachers. Co-teachers can foster mutual observation, reflection, and planning of innovative practices, making working together a form of professional development. However, to ensure that pupils receive better attention and that teachers learn from each other, there has to be teacher training, and again, it must be addressed from an experimental perspective.
The Economics of Long-Term Care
Authors: Bannenberg Norman , Karlsson Martin , Schmitz Hendrik
Published: July 2019

Long-term care (LTC) is arguably the sector of the economy that is most sensitive to population aging: its recipients are typically older than 80 years whereas most care providers are of working age. Thus, a number of ongoing societal trends interact in the determination of market outcomes in the LTC sector: trends in longevity and healthy life expectancy interact with changing family structures and norms in shaping the need for services. The supply side is additionally affected by changes in employment patterns, in particular regarding the transition into retirement, as well as by cross-regional imbalances in demographic and economic conditions. The economic literature on long-term care considers many of these issues, aims at understanding this steadily growing sector, and at guiding policy. Key economic studies on long-term care address determinants of the demand for long-term care, like disability and socio-economic status; the two most important providers: informal family caregivers and nursing homes; and the financing and funding of LTC.
Health Insurance Plan Choice and Switching
Authors: Winter Joachim , Wuppermann Amelie
Published: July 2019

Choice of health insurance plans has become a key element of many healthcare systems around the world along with a general expansion of patient choice under the label of “Consumer-Directed Healthcare.” Allowing consumers to choose their insurance plan was commonly associated with the aim of enhancing competition between insurers and thus to contribute to the efficient delivery of healthcare. However, the evidence is accruing that consumers have difficulties in making health insurance decisions in their best interest. For example, many consumers choose plans with which they spend more in terms of premiums and out-of-pocket costs than in other available options. This has consequences for the individual consumer’s budget as well as for the functioning of the insurance market.

The literature puts forward several possible reasons for consumers’ difficulties in making health insurance choices in their best interest. First, consumers may not have a sufficient level of knowledge of insurance products; for example, they might not understand insurance terminology. Second, the environment or architecture in which consumers make their decision may be too complicated. Health insurance products vary in a large number of features that consumers have to evaluate when comparing options, introducing search or hassle costs. Third, consumers may be prone to psychological biases and employ decision-making heuristics that impede good choices. For example, they might choose the plan with the cheapest premium, ignoring other important plan features that determine total cost, such as copayments. There is also evidence that consumer education programs, simplification of the choice environment, or introducing nudges such as setting smart defaults facilitate consumer decision making.

Despite recent progress in our understanding of consumer choices in health insurance markets, important challenges remain. Evidence-based healthcare policy should be based on an evaluation of whether different interventions aimed at facilitating consumer choices result in welfare improvements. Ultimately, this requires measuring consumer utility, an issue that is vividly debated in the literature. Furthermore, welfare calculations necessitate an understanding of how interventions will affect the supply of health insurance, including supply reactions to changes in demand. This depends on the specific regulatory setting and characteristics of the specific market.
Anthropology of Education
Authors: Henze Rosemary
Published: July 2019

The anthropology of education (also known as educational anthropology, pedagogical anthropology, ethnography of education, and educational ethnography) is a broad area of interest with roots and continuing connections in several major disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, as well as the field of education. It emerged as a named subdiscipline in the 1950s primarily in the United States through the work of George and Louise Spindler, Margaret Mead, and others. However, work of a related nature was also taking place around the same time in Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and Britain. While research in the anthropology of education is extremely diverse, a few central aims can be articulated. One is to build our understanding of how people teach and learn and what they teach and learn across different community, cultural, national, and regional contexts. Through comparisons of educative processes, scholars often draw insights about how culture shapes educational processes, how culture is acquired by individuals and groups through such processes, as well as how people create changes in and through their educational environments. A basic premise is that formal schooling is implicated in a paradoxical relationship with social inequality. While formal education can lead to greater social justice, it can also contribute to the creation and widening of social inequality. Thus, another key aim is to describe, uncover, and expose educational processes that undermine as well as enhance greater social equality. Formal education is not the only focus; studies of informal learning in families and communities provide rich descriptions of everyday contexts in which young people develop the skills and knowledge to be productive members of their community. Often such descriptions stand in stark contrast to the formal educational system where the same learners may be perceived as deficient.

Since the 1990s, the anthropology of education has witnessed a number of shifts, including a movement toward research that takes an activist and engaged stance (e.g., research that includes a goal of changing oppressive conditions by collaborating directly with stakeholders such as youth and parents). This movement entails accompanying changes in methodologies, expanding beyond primarily descriptive ethnography to include methods such as participatory action research, teacher research, policy research, and critical ethnography. A more international and less US-centric perspective is also emerging as scholars around the world recognize the importance of studying both formal and informal education through ethnographic and other qualitative methods. The field is enriched as scholars around the world contribute new perspectives forged in regions with different historical and political environments. One of the key questions asked in early 21st-century educational anthropology is, under what circumstances can formal education be a force for change to create more egalitarian and inclusive societies?
Fishing
Authors: McCormack Fiona , Forde Jacinta
Published: July 2019

The anthropology of fisheries is a core focus of maritime anthropology. Scholarship in this field is multifaceted, exploring fishing ways of life, fishing knowledge, marine tenures and economies, the gendered nature of fishing, how people cope with danger and risk, and the specificities of how this particular watery nature is manifested in social, political, and cultural systems. Fishing can be defined as a productive activity that takes place in a multidimensional space, depending more on natural or wild processes than manufactured processes. The idea of fishing being closer to nature is an analytical thread, giving the anthropology of fisheries a particular edge on the multispecies and more than human ethnographic turn in contemporary anthropology. Research in fisheries anthropology has long held the connections between fisher and fish to be of central concern. Significant too, however, is the thesis that the construction of commodity fisheries as a natural domain, of which fishers are atomistic extractors to be managed, is a highly politicized process involving the bioeconomic creation of fish stock and broader political economies. Anthropological research on fisheries engages critically with neoliberalizations, the extension of privatizations, and the proliferation of industrial aquaculture, thus challenging Blue Economy attempts to reconfigure nature–culture relationships and reposition the marine environment as a locus for the enactment and perpetuation of inequality.
The Persian Gulf War
Authors: Bakich Spencer D.
Published: July 2019

The Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991 was something of a paradox. From the American perspective, the war had the hallmarks of a resounding victory. Responding to a flagrant case of interstate aggression by Iraq against Kuwait, the George H. W. Bush administration assembled a substantial international coalition to deter further Iraqi attacks against its neighbors in the Gulf and to compel Saddam Hussein into quitting Kuwait, to avoid war. When the latter proved infeasible, the United States led that coalition in forcibly ousting Iraq’s military from Kuwait, substantially degrading Iraqi combat power in the process. The war’s outcome resulted from an auspiciously altered geopolitical landscape at the end of the Cold War, the overwhelming superiority of American power vis-à-vis Iraq, and a US decision-making process that tightly knitted military and diplomatic objectives into a coherent—and coherently executed—wartime strategy. However, America’s historically lopsided victory in the Persian Gulf War proved fleeting. Iraq’s surviving military forces retained the capacity to crush domestic challenges to the Ba’athist regime and to threaten its Gulf neighbors. President Bush’s vision of a post-war new world order notwithstanding, Gulf security depended heavily on continuing military missions years after the Persian Gulf War ended. Despite wartime tactical and strategic successes, grand strategic success eluded the United States in the years after the war.
Public Opinion and US Foreign Relations
Authors: Cull Nicholas J.
Published: July 2019

Public opinion has been part of US foreign relations in two key ways. As one would expect in a democracy, the American public has shaped the foreign policy of its government. No less significantly, the United States has sought to influence foreign public opinion as a tool of its diplomacy, now known as public diplomacy. The US public has also been a target of foreign attempts at influence with varying degrees of success. While analysis across the span of US history reveals a continuity of issues and approaches, issues of public opinion gained unprecedented salience in the second decade of the 21st century. This salience was not matched by scholarship.
International Terrorism and the United States
Authors: Barton Mary S. , Wight David M.
Published: July 2019

The US government’s perception of and response to international terrorism has undergone momentous shifts since first focusing on the issue in the early 20th century. The global rise of anarchist and communist violence provided the impetus for the first major US government programs aimed at combating international terrorism: restrictive immigration policies targeting perceived radicals. By the 1920s, the State Department emerged as the primary government agency crafting US responses to international terrorism, generally combating communist terrorism through diplomacy and information-sharing partnerships with foreign governments. The 1979 Iranian hostage crisis marked the beginning of two key shifts in US antiterrorism policy: a heightened focus on combating Islamist terrorism and a willingness to deploy military force to this end. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, led US officials to conceptualize international terrorism as a high-level national security problem, leading to US military invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, a broader use of special forces, and unprecedented intelligence-gathering operations.
Cartography and European Expansion and Consolidation in Colonial Spanish America, 1500–1700
Authors: Lois Carla
Published: July 2019

During the period of European expansion and consolidation (1500–1700) Mapping the world during the European expansion and consolidation (1500–1700) was a challenging intellectual activity which included the development of new ways of making knowledge, the invention of new instruments, the creation of unprecedented scientific-political institutions, a wider circulation of knowledge thanks to the improvements in printing, and the emergence of radical questions about the nature of the world.

In order to record the information provided by travelers, new cartographic genres and languages began to be created in Spanish institutions. On the one hand, they made use of and readapted well-established traditions, like Mediterranean portolans; on the other, they introduced more and more systematic methodological protocols, that would become solid cartographical traditions by the end of the 17th century, specifically sea charts, world maps, and atlases, among others. This new accuracy and updated geographical information elevated the ideal of scientific mapping and cartographical activities.

The expansion of the book market and particularly, within that market, the rapidly expanding demand for atlases in the Low Countries in the 17th century, contributed to the dissemination of cartographical images of a changing world (constantly being modified as a result of ongoing expeditions and explorations) to the educated public. The buyers of these images were not only scientists but also wealthy and curious people who could afford the high prices charged for the luxurious atlases produced by some of the most renowned publishers. From this time onward, maps were no longer exclusively scientific instruments but also commodities that helped “common people” to imagine how the world looked; in effect, they helped to create a shared modern geographical imagination.
Derivation of Time-Activity Data Using Wearable Cameras and Measures of Personal Inhalation Exposure among Workers at an Informal Electronic-Waste Recovery Site in Ghana
Authors: Laskaris Zoey , Milando Chad , Batterman Stuart , Mukherjee Bhramar , Basu Niladri , O’neill Marie S , Robins Thomas G , Fobil Julius N
Published: July 2019

Objectives

Approximately 2 billion workers globally are employed in informal settings, which are characterized by substantial risk from hazardous exposures and varying job tasks and schedules. Existing methods for identifying occupational hazards must be adapted for unregulated and challenging work environments. We designed and applied a method for objectively deriving time-activity patterns from wearable camera data and matched images with continuous measurements of personal inhalation exposure to size-specific particulate matter (PM) among workers at an informal electronic-waste (e-waste) recovery site.

Methods

One hundred and forty-two workers at the Agbogbloshie e-waste site in Accra, Ghana, wore sampling backpacks equipped with wearable cameras and real-time particle monitors during a total of 171 shifts. Self-reported recall of time-activity (30-min resolution) was collected during the end of shift interviews. Images (N = 35,588) and simultaneously measured PM2.5 were collected each minute and processed to identify activities established through worker interviews, observation, and existing literature. Descriptive statistics were generated for activity types, frequencies, and associated PM2.5 exposures. A kappa statistic measured agreement between self-reported and image-based time-activity data.

Results

Based on image-based time-activity patterns, workers primarily dismantled, sorted/loaded, burned, and transported e-waste materials for metal recovery with high variability in activity duration. Image-based and self-reported time-activity data had poor agreement (kappa = 0.17). Most measured exposures (90%) exceeded the World Health Organization (WHO) 24-h ambient PM2.5 target of 25 µg m−3. The average on-site PM2.5 was 81 µg m−3 (SD: 94). PM2.5 levels were highest during burning, sorting/loading and dismantling (203, 89, 83 µg m−3, respectively). PM2.5 exposure during long periods of non-work-related activities also exceeded the WHO standard in 88% of measured data.

Conclusions

In complex, informal work environments, wearable cameras can improve occupational exposure assessments and, in conjunction with monitoring equipment, identify activities associated with high exposures to workplace hazards by providing high-resolution time-activity data.
Ethical and policy issues raised by uterus transplants
Authors: O’Donovan Laura , Williams Nicola Jane , Wilkinson Stephen
Published: July 2019

Introduction

In 2014, Brännström and colleagues reported the first human live birth following uterine transplantation (UTx). Research into this treatment for absolute uterine factor infertility has since grown with clinical trials currently taking place across centers in at least thirteen countries worldwide.

Sources of data

This review summarizes and critiques the academic literature on ethical and policy issues raised by UTx.

Areas of agreement

There is general agreement on the importance of risk reduction and, in principle, to the sharing and maintenance of patient data on an international registry.

Areas of controversy

There are numerous areas of controversy ranging from whether it is ethically justified to carry out uterus transplants at all (considering the associated health risks) to how deceased donor organs for transplant should be allocated. This review focuses on three key issues: the choice between deceased and living donors, ensuring valid consent to the procedure and access to treatment.

Growing points

UTx is presently a novel and rare procedure but is likely to become more commonplace in the foreseeable future, given the large number of surgical teams working on it worldwide.

Areas timely for developing research

Uterus transplantation requires us to re-examine fundamental questions about the ethical and social value of gestation. If eventually extended to transgender women or even to men, it may also require us to reconceptualize what it is to be a ‘father’ or to be a ‘mother’, and the definition of these terms in law.
Coming off cannabis: a cognitive and magnetic resonance imaging study in patients with multiple sclerosis
Authors: Feinstein Anthony , Meza Cecilia , Stefan Cristiana , Staines Richard W.
Published: July 2019

Cognitive dysfunction affects 40–80% of patients with multiple sclerosis. Smoking cannabis may add to these deficits. It is unclear whether coming off cannabis results in cognitive improvement. To address this question, 40 patients with multiple sclerosis who started using cannabis after the onset of multiple sclerosis and who used it for at least 4 days a week over many years were divided by odd-even number selection into two groups: cannabis continuation and cannabis withdrawal. Assessments took place at baseline and after 28 days and included serial versions of the Brief Repeatable Neuropsychological Battery for multiple sclerosis containing tests of verbal and visual memory, processing speed and executive function; structural and functional MRI, the latter entailing a compatible version of the Symbol Digit Modalities Test; urine for cannabinoid metabolites to detect compliance with abstinence. Only those participants deemed globally impaired at baseline (failure on at least two cognitive domains) were enrolled. The results revealed that the two groups were well matched demographically and neurologically. One subject was removed from the withdrawal group because of failed abstinence. Urine analysis revealed the cannabinoid consumed was predominantly tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). There were no baseline between group cognitive differences, but by Day 28 the withdrawal group performed significantly better on every cognitive index (P < 0.0001 for all). Significant within group differences were present for every test over time, but only in the abstinent group (P < 0.0001 for all tests). There were no between group baseline or Day 28 differences in structural MRI indices (global atrophy, total T1 and T2 lesion volume). At index assessment the two groups had a similar performance on the functional MRI-compatible Symbol Digit Modalities Test and there were no group differences in brain activation. However, by Day 28, the withdrawal group completed more trials correctly (P < 0.012) and had a faster reaction time (P < 0.002), associated with significantly increased activation in brain regions known to be associated with performance of the test (bilateral inferior frontal gyri, caudate and declive/cerebellum, P < 0.001 for all regions). These results reveal that patients with multiple sclerosis who are frequent, long-term cannabis users can show significant improvements in memory, processing speed and executive function after 28 days of drug abstinence. The absence of similar improvements in a matched multiple sclerosis group that remained on cannabis shows that beneficial cognitive change after stopping cannabis is not solely attributable to the effects of practice.