bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Widowhood
Authors: Crabb Ann
Published: March 2013

The history of widows is part of the history of women. It was also a distinctive phase of female experience in the Renaissance and Reformation periods, and the related late medieval and early modern periods. Widowhood was both the time of the greatest potential autonomy for women and a time of limits on this autonomy, of public suspicion, and often of poverty. Relevant themes include widows’ experience in particular countries, attitudes to widows and widowhood, mourning practices, remarriage, the experience of widows at different social levels, widows and religion, and widows and the arts. Suspicion of widows was universal, not needing to be divided by country, but the methods widows used to negotiate around restrictive attitudes will be dealt with by country. Some of the authors mentioned in this bibliography try to present data on widows in a neutral fashion, but most come down on one side or another: the positive side, that is, that widowhood presented opportunities for action, in spite of limitations, or the negative side, emphasizing the problems it brought,
Hinduism and Christianity
Authors: Bauman Chad , Jones Arun , Pennington Brian , Dayam Joseph Prabhakar , Roberts Michelle Voss
Published: March 2013

Christian communities have existed in India since at least the 4th century ce, the likely result of relatively well-established trade connections between India and the Near East in the early centuries of the Common Era. While Christians maintained a lively and well-documented existence in the centuries after that, particularly in southern India, the size of the Christian population, as well as its geographical spread, began to increase dramatically after the arrival of European traders and missionaries in the late 15th century. European contact with India through trade and then, later, colonization led to greater European interest in Indian cultures and religions. While for some that interest was scholarly and dispassionate, for others it grew out of the evangelical impulse, that is, the desire to promote Christianity and “convert the heathen.” That said, some of the most useful ethnographic data and analyses on Indian culture and religion in this era of Indo-European interaction comes from missionary figures, many of whom took at least a quasi-scholarly interest in the people with whom they interacted, most of whom documented religio-cultural beliefs, practices, and events that passed away, or were significantly altered, in the centuries that followed. The relationship between Christian missionaries and the study of India/Indian Christianity is therefore important to keep in mind because of the way it has complicated (and to some degree still does) academic work on the topic. In the bibliography that follows, readers will discover resources about Indian Christianity and its relationship to Indian culture and religion written both from an assumed scholarly distance and from a more committed stance (e.g., by foreign missionaries and/or Indian Christians writing self-consciously as Christians, or by Hindus writing appreciatively of or critically against Christianity). Nevertheless, while the resources listed here emerge from a range of disciplines—history, ethnography, sociology, cultural studies, missiology, and theology—one theme that pervades them all is how India’s Christians have interacted (or should interact) with Hinduism and India’s other religious and cultural traditions.
Sati
Authors: Courtright Paul B.
Published: March 2013

The word sati (Skt. Satī: spelled ‘suttee’ in nineteenth colonial sources) may refer to one of three categories. First, satī is one of the terms for a good woman, one who exemplifies the highest dharma appropriate to her position as a wife. The term may also be used as an honorific title for a goddess or heroine: Satī Sāvitrī. While the term sati may refer to an unmarried ascetic, the more general context is that of marriage. Hence, the sati is the wife who embodies through her devotion to her husband the ideal of the pativratā, the chaste wife. Second, as a proper name, Satī is a goddess in Hindu mythology, the wife of Śiva, who immolated herself in her father’s sacrificial fire in response to his rejection of her husband Śiva’s exclusion from the sacrifice. In some versions of the story, she is reborn as Parvati and marries Śiva in that life; in others, Śiva takes her smoldering body from the fire and wanders off into the mountains consumed with grief and performs his doomsday (taṇḍava) dance. Viṣṇu and the gods pursue them and cut her body into pieces. Each piece falls to the ground and Satī is established whole in each place. Śiva remains with each Satī in the form of the liṅga. These body parts of Satī are knows as the śāktapīṭhas, or “seats of power” of Śakti, the goddess. The third context for the term sati is that of the devoted wife who immolates herself on the funeral fire of her deceased husband. The sati has been and continues to be venerated as the ideal of wifely devotion in some parts of Hindu India. It has been a controversial topic both within Hindu discourses since around the sixth century ce, and it became an important focus for British debates on social policy and religion in the 1820s leading up to the abolition of the practice in British India and later across the subcontinent. During the colonial period, the Sanskrit term “satī” came to refer to the ritual of immolation as well as the wife undergoing it. In central and western India, satis have been remembered by families, villages, and communities as goddesses or mahāsatīs. Stone slabs, often located in cremation grounds, with the iconic upraised right hand and wrist are decorated with garlands of flowers as part of the practice of lineage deities. The immolation of Roop Kanwar, an eighteen-year-old Rajput wife on 4 September 1987, in the otherwise obscure small town of Deorala, Rajasthan, provoked a national and international resurfacing of the subject of sati in the Indian and international media in the context of postcolonial India, the rise of Hindu nationalism, and the foregrounding of women’s issues in Indian society. For Hindu nationalists, Roop Kanwar emerged as an icon of traditional values; for advocates of a modern secular India, she became an icon of women’s victimization by a retrograde patriarchy.
Sūrdās
Authors: Hawley John Stratton
Published: March 2013

Sūrdās (Sūradāsa, or for short, Sūr) is among the most important of India’s religious poets. He is traditionally considered to have been blind. Although his life story is widely told and highly celebrated, especially in northern parts of the Indian subcontinent, there are no biographical data about him that can be regarded as historically reliable. Judging by the moment when his poems were first anthologized in collections that have come down to us, however, it seems clear that Sūrdās flourished at some point in the sixteenth century. The language of these lyrics is Brajbhāṣā, an aspect of Hindi, and many of them are regarded as being among the finest poetry ever to have been composed in North India. So profound was their impact that many centuries after the poet’s death—right up to the present day—other poets have chosen the signature of Sūrdās as a way to locate their own compositions in the proper genre or lineage. Thus the corpus of poems attributed to Sūrdās and collected in the Sūrsāgar (Sūr’s Ocean) named after him has grown steadily, even dramatically over time. In the largest manuscript yet discovered, a 19th-century tome housed in Datiya, these poems number almost ten thousand. The best known among them are sung throughout India and the world.
Public Memory and Heritage of Slavery
Authors: Araujo Ana Lucia
Published: March 2013

The study of public memory and heritage of slavery emerged during the 1980s. In various former slave societies, the rise of the public memory of slavery and the development of specific projects to highlight the multiple facets of its heritage were carried out by social actors who identify themselves as descendants of the victims of the Atlantic slave trade and who attempted to denounce the present social and racial inequalities. Since the 1990s, especially in West Africa, an increasing number of venues sought to “crystallize” the public memory of slavery in more permanent forms, including monuments and memorials. These initiatives were associated with cultural tourism and sought to attract tourists to countries with severe economic needs. Institutions played an important role in this process. Launched in 1994, the Slave Route project of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) developed numerous initiatives, which contributed to a growing interest in public memory and heritage of slavery among scholars. Three events played an important role in promoting the study of the memory and heritage of slavery in Europe, Africa, and the Americas: In 2001, France passed law number 2001-434 recognizing slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity; in 2007 and 2008, Britain and the United States, respectively, commemorated the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. These celebrations resulted in numerous public activities, which, in turn, created a growing scholarly interest on how slavery was remembered in the public sphere. Despite this growing interest, several regions remain to be covered. Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America remain largely understudied. In Europe, Portugal and Spain have not yet developed initiatives to remember slavery and the slave trade in the public space. Moreover, the need is urgent to study the memory of slavery in East and West Central Africa, as the latter regions exported the largest number of Africans. The study of public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade faces particular challenges. First, the slave trade and slavery lasted more than three hundred years, affecting various regions of the world. Second, the witnesses of these crimes against humanity are not alive, and in most regions of the Americas, except for the United States, and Africa where slavery was a central institution their testimonies were not systematically collected. Third, there are competing memories in the public space. Whereas the descendants of the victims formulate demands to redress inherited social, economic, and racial inequalities, the descendants of the perpetrators also attempt to make their past officially recognized.
Great Awakening
Authors: Kidd Thomas S.
Published: March 2013

The Great Awakening was the most profound social, cultural, and religious upheaval in the North American British colonies prior to the American Revolution. The most intense phase of these evangelical Christian revivals transpired in New England and the Middle Colonies in the early 1740s, but revivals associated with the Great Awakening began in the 1730s and continued through the American Revolution and beyond. There were similar, and often associated, revivals happening in Britain and Europe in the same time period, but the term “the Great Awakening” is usually understood to apply to revivals in the American colonies. The key figure in precipitating the Great Awakening was the English revivalist George Whitefield, who became one of the greatest media and marketing sensations of early modern history. Since the 1980s, debates over the Great Awakening have primarily focused on the significance of the revivals in colonial American history, and their effect (or lack thereof) on the American Revolution. Since the nineteenth century, scholars had largely assumed the Great Awakening’s existence and importance, but some modern scholars have raised serious questions about how “great” the awakenings really were. A rough consensus seems to have emerged that we can accurately speak of a “Great Awakening,” but that participants and later evangelical historians were undoubtedly eager to promote its “great” significance. Moreover, many historians have suggested that while the revivals hardly caused the American Revolution, the Great Awakening did help make American colonial culture more receptive to an uprising against British authority thirty years later.
Feminism
Authors: Allen Ann Taylor
Published: March 2013

Although women, as individuals and in groups, have protested against the various forms of subordination they experienced at many times in history, organized feminist movements date only to the late 18th century, the era of revolutions in several parts of the Atlantic world. This bibliography will cover the years from the late 18th until the early 20th century—a period when feminist organizations on both sides of the Atlantic created a dense network of contacts. These took many different forms: individual visits, international conferences, letters, periodicals, pamphlets, and many other publications. Although most feminist organizations identified themselves primarily with individual nations, they derived energy and inspiration from international contacts that provided support, resources, and opportunities for self-expression that were often not available at home. A great variety of literature attests to the interest that these movements have attracted among historians, particularly in recent years. This bibliography focuses on international contacts within the Atlantic world. The internal history of national feminist movements will not be included, as this would be far too broad a scope for a single bibliography. Here, we define “feminists”—a term that was not in common use until the 20th century—as persons, male, or female, who recognized and opposed the subordination of women as a group to men as a group and who worked for the rights and welfare of women. The emphasis here will be on organized movements, but contacts among individual activists will also be included. Particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, these activists emphasized not only the rights, but also what they considered the responsibilities, of women in many areas of social reform: the abolition of slavery, the restriction of alcohol consumption, and assistance to vulnerable women and children, to name only a few such areas. Such reform movements were closely linked to feminism because they demonstrated women’s ability and determination to broaden their sphere of action, to work effectively outside the home, and to pursue what they identified as “women’s mission” in the public sphere. The dense international and transatlantic networks formed by women social reformers also transmitted feminist ideas and programs. In this bibliography, the term “Atlantic” will designate territories bordering on the Atlantic Ocean, including North and Latin America, Europe, and Africa. The terms international, transnational, and transatlantic will be used in a general sense to refer to contacts among people or organizations from two or more of these areas.
The Supreme Court of the United States
Authors: Nackenoff Carol
Published: March 2013

The Supreme Court of the United States as a subject offers many different choices of direction. Academics in law schools sometimes approach the court and its work in ways that are different from those of historians, sociologists, political scientists, economists, and philosophers. The court is an institution, it produces outputs (decisions) in a wide array of issue areas, and it consists of individual members whose decisions can be treated as votes; it is a set of practices, it interprets a written Constitution, it is located in a system of separated (and sometimes shared) powers, it is lodged in a system of courts, and it is located in a federal system of government. The US Supreme Court and what it does can be compared to other constitutional courts in democratic systems of government. There are vigorous debates about whether the Constitution it interprets has a fixed meaning that should not change without Article V amendments, but few believe that, for good or ill, the meaning of the Constitution and its clauses has actually remained static. The Supreme Court as a subject raises questions about the relationship between ordinary statute law and constitutions, about constitutionalism, about the proper scope for judicial review, and about judicial supremacy and whether the court is claiming more authority for itself than in the past. A number of these issues are introduced here along with alternative approaches to the study of the court. One way of introducing the court has not been chosen: by areas of case law and the scholarship focused on particular issues or constitutional moments. Histories, encyclopedias, and bibliographies included here can introduce some of these issues and moments. Greater emphasis is placed on scholarship in the past half century than on earlier classics.
Partisan Polarization in the US Electorate
Authors: Levendusky Matthew S.
Published: March 2013

The literature on party polarization in American politics focuses on two distinct (though related) topics, elite polarization and mass polarization. The literature began at the elite level, focusing on the divisions between the parties as captured in roll-call voting behavior in Congress (though there is a small literature looking at elite institutions beyond Congress). At the elite level, there is little debate: elites have become more divided since midcentury, and today are as polarized as they have been in living memory (though levels of polarization in the 19th century were higher). The debate at the elite level centers primarily on the causes of this polarization, with five related main arguments: changing party strategies, redistricting, primary elections, activists, and changes in the mass public. With the exception of redistricting, which finds only very limited empirical support in the literature, there is solid evidence supporting each of the other explanations. Determining the relative importance and contribution of each factor, however, is somewhat more complicated and remains an open question. While it is clear that elites are polarized, the state of affairs for the mass public is somewhat muddier. After the disputed 2000 election, electoral polarization became the conventional wisdom. While some scholars agree with this popular consensus, others do not, and argue that Americans have not become more divided over the past generation. What is clearer, on the other hand, is that the mass public has become better sorted—citizens have aligned their partisanship and ideology so that Democrats are more likely to be liberals and Republicans are more likely to be conservatives. Elite polarization drove this party sorting: as elites polarized, they clarified where the parties stood on the issues, which made it easier for citizens to align their party and issue positions. Another portion of the literature also addresses the consequences of these mass and elite changes. Scholars are essentially unanimous that polarization harms the policy process by fostering gridlock, leading to suboptimal policy outcomes. There is more debate, however, about whether polarization (at either the mass or elite level) harms the electoral process. While some argue that it leads to a harmful disconnect between voters and elites, others claim it allows voters a clearer choice between the parties, which boosts participation. It is also worth mentioning that various authors operationalize the concept of “polarization” differently. Some authors conceptualize polarization as a static construct: are Democrats and Republicans polarized (that is, divided) at a particular point in time? Others refer to polarization over time: have Democrats and Republicans become more divided over a period of years? In each work, readers should pay close attention to determine exactly how the author is using “polarization” in a particular work.
Pierre Bourdieu
Authors: Ollion Etienne
Published: March 2013

Pierre Bourdieu was born on 1 August 1930 in a rural area of southwestern France. The only child of a peasant sharecropper turned postman, he left his region on the recommendation of a high school teacher to pursue an elite academic curriculum in Paris. He graduated from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, then at the apex of French academic life. There he studied philosophy. He concentrated on epistemology and on the history of science, which set him against the then dominant current, existentialism, personified by Jean-Paul Sartre. Bourdieu’s vocation in philosophy shifted abruptly to the social sciences after he was drafted into the French army and sent to Algeria at the height of its Liberation War (1956–1962). There he turned to empirical inquiry, carrying out both ethnographic and statistical studies of colonial transformation, as well as absorbing the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Upon his return to France, Bourdieu completed his conversion to sociology: he became Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1964); he founded a research center (1968), launched a journal (Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1975), and assembled a research team focusing on symbolic power, and social inequality in their broadest manifestations. After the 1970s, Bourdieu tackled an increasingly diverse set of empirical topics (spanning art, ritual, kinship, religion, science, intellectuals, language, social classes, and political institutions, inter alia) while developing his own paradigm, seeking a pathway out of the opposition between structuralist objectivism and constructivist subjectivism—first proposed in Outline of a Theory of Practice. He then honed his distinctive conceptual triad of habitus, capital, and field in Distinction (1984) before he was elected to the Collège de France in 1982, where his research expanded to encompass the state, gender domination, the social foundations of the economy, and the experience of social suffering in contemporary society. Bourdieu addressed salient social issues, as in The Weight of the World (1999), and deepened his rethinking of the distinctive logic of practice and the epistemological dilemmas of social inquiry in Pascalian Meditations (2000). He became a leading public figure in the global mobilization against neoliberalism, while his work gained international influence across the social sciences and the humanities. At the time of his sudden death in 2002, he was working on a “general theory of fields.”
Entrepreneurship
Authors: Yang Ling , Thornton Patricia H.
Published: March 2013

Entrepreneurship is the process of identifying and developing economic and social opportunities through the efforts of individuals and organizations, which can result in starting and building new businesses, either as independent enterprises or within incumbent organizations. Entrepreneurial opportunities are discovered in markets and organizations; how these opportunities are pursued results in different forms of entrepreneurship, such as independent start-ups, licensing activity, corporate ventures and spin-offs, and nonprofits. Entrepreneurship is therefore an engine of innovation and job creation that results in changing the distribution of wealth and fostering the well-being of individuals and groups in society. The field of entrepreneurship research is composed of interdisciplinary perspectives initially drawing from the social sciences. Because entrepreneurship is inexorably linked to institutional processes and organizational forms, the discipline of sociology has been and still remains central to the development of entrepreneurship research. In the early 21st century, considerable resources have been devoted to the study of entrepreneurship, and this momentum points to an increasing variety of research perspectives. Although this article takes a sociological view, it also includes selected works of authors in the sister social, management, and financial sciences that borrow sociological concepts or that more fully flesh out the relevance of the sociology of entrepreneurship. In keeping with scholarly practice this article strives to include the roots of ideas and theories stemming from the classics, including the initial theoretical formulations and subsequent empirical research, focusing on the mechanisms rather than the phenomena of entrepreneurship.
Precautionary Principle
Authors: Alvarez Evelyn , Vu Yazmin Amado , London William M.
Published: March 2013

Precautionary actions to protect health and ensure safety have always been an important part of public health practice. When hazards are well established with scientific evidence, precautionary action is most likely to receive consensus support. But when there are significant gaps in the scientific understanding of putative hazards, precautionary regulatory policies and recommendations to consumers are often controversial. Advocates for precautionary action against speculated threats have traditionally referred to commonsensical notions such as “better to be safe than sorry” and “better to err on the side of caution.” Since the 1970s, these notions have been codified into various formulations of the “precautionary principle” and have been invoked when scientific support is lacking as justifications for restricting specific technologies and requiring warnings. The precautionary principle has been applied to biotechnology, chemical pollutants, radiation exposure, food safety, medical technologies, occupational hazards, exposure to pathogenic organisms, and other public health concerns. International, national, local, and public health organizations have formally adopted frameworks for applying the precautionary principle. This article is an introductory guide to diverse formulations, analyses, applications, controversies, and implications of the precautionary principle relevant to public health practice. It is multidisciplinary with references to the literature of philosophy, ethics, law, economics, public policy, technology, risk analysis, toxicology, and other fields as well as public health.
Gender and the Media
Authors: Carter Cynthia
Published: March 2013

Gender and media research has been a central field of academic inquiry since the 1970s. It is notable that two distinctive, and yet often overlapping, approaches characterize this field. The first is that of mainstream forms of gender and media studies research, which has been grounded in large part by assumptions about the ways in which the media contribute to the individual acquisition of gendered attitudes and behaviors and how sex-role stereotypes can impact negatively on an individual’s life chances, especially in terms of a person’s sense of self-worth, and social perceptions of women and their career prospects. The other field is that of feminist media studies, which is characterized as a political movement for gender justice, examining how gender relations are represented, the ways in which audiences make sense of them, and how media practitioners contribute to perpetuating gender injustice. At the center of this is the view that hierarchical gender relations (re)produce social inequalities across time and cultures, thereby making it difficult for men and women to be equal partners in a democratic society. In recent years, gender and media research has become much more globally oriented, with increasing attention paid to cultural, social, and economic differences as well as a greater awareness of the importance of interrogating media and masculinity.
Social Cognition
Authors: Roloff Michael E.
Published: March 2013

Successful communication requires much more than sending and receiving linguistic and nonlinguistic cues. Individuals must also have at least rudimentary knowledge about how people express and interpret intention. Communication researchers who study social cognition investigate how such knowledge is developed and organized and also how it influences human behavior. Although communication scholars have long recognized that cognitive processes play a key role in creating and responding to messages, not much research focused directly on social cognition until the late 1970s, when scholars began to adopt theories used by social psychologists to study how people make sense of others. Initial interest in social cognition was primarily among researchers studying interpersonal communication, but over time social cognition perspectives have been used to study persuasion, small-group decision making, organizational socialization, mass media effects, computer-mediated communication, and cross-cultural communication. Although most social cognition theories remain derivative of those developed by social psychologists, some communication researchers have developed their own perspectives, and perspectives from other fields and disciplines have been imported. The critical mass of social cognition scholars is sufficient enough that they organized a Communication and Social Cognition division within the National Communication Association.
Indexing
Authors: Lawrence Regina G.
Published: March 2013

“Indexing” is a theory of news content and press-state relations first formulated as the “indexing hypothesis.” At its core, the indexing hypothesis predicts that news content on political and public policy issues will generally follow the parameters of elite debate: when political elites (such as the White House and congressional leaders) are in general agreement on an issue, news coverage of that issue will tend to reflect that consensus; when political elites disagree, news coverage will fall more or less within the contours of their disagreement. Put differently, those issues and views that are subject to high-level political debate are most likely to receive news attention that is wide-ranging; issues not subject to debate receive less critical attention. Indexing theory thus attempts to predict the nature of the content of news about political and policy topics. This notion of “indexing” may not be intuitively obvious at first glance, but it can be understood in terms akin to how economists use the term—as a single number calculated from an array of numbers. Thus, just as a price index tracks variation in prices for various goods and services over time, indexing theory predicts that as the degree of conflict among officials over some political or policy topic grows, so too does the degree of conflicting views found in news coverage of that topic. Conversely, at times when officials are not debating the topic, the range of views included in the news will be correspondingly smaller. Views not voiced within current elite debate will thus tend to be marginalized in news as well, particularly in times of elite consensus, yet topics treated to little critical news coverage in one time period may be treated to more expansive and critical coverage in others. According to Bennett’s foundational article, the indexing hypothesis “applies most centrally to how the range of . . . legitimate, or otherwise ‘credible’ news sources is established by journalists” (p. 107). Indexing thus offers not only an empirical theory of how daily news is constructed but also a normative framework for analyzing press performance in democracy. When the democratic process is functioning well, news that is indexed to elite debate probably offers a reasonably good representation of public opinion. But when elites do not act in good faith or when political pressures hamper elite debate, a press that merely indexes that debate may not be operating in ways that support a healthy democracy.
Mobile Communication Studies
Authors: Chen Yi-Fan
Published: March 2013

Mobile media are recognized as the fastest-growing media category. Although mobile media users were already enjoying mobile devices in their everyday lives, prior to the millennium there was a lack of research in the area of mobile communication studies. Communication research swelled during the first two decades of the 21st century, reflecting the increase in mobile media use. Most researchers focus on three perspectives: human interaction through mobile media, mobile culture, and mobile media as a means to a better life. They have studied how mobile phones, short message services, and mobile music devices have changed the way people do everyday things. An increasing number of mobile communication studies focus on how mobile social media, such as Twitter, help to foster civic engagement. This article mainly takes a sociological perspective to document mobile communication studies in the field. It includes research into how people adopt mobile media, how mobile media are used, and how mobile culture meanings and norms are created in everyday life. The bibliographies here include and analyze case studies from around the world, many of which focus on the social consequences of ever-present mobile media use. Many of the mobile communication studies mentioned here investigate how youths use mobile media to create their personal identities, group identities, and social networks. Some of the works cited here reflect researchers’ attempts to understand if mobile media separate their users—or bring them together. Some of the studies focus on mobile media “haves” and “have-nots,” while others pay more attention to how mobile media can be used for positive socioeconomic development. Additionally, these sources explore some possible quandaries resulting from mobile media use.
Feminist Theory
Authors: Rakow Lana
Published: March 2013

Feminist theory in communication is developed and used by scholars to understand gender as a communicative process, with the goal of making social changes important to the well-being of women and, ultimately, everyone. Despite a common purpose, feminist scholars differ on many grounds and typically work in subareas across the discipline of communication. Contemporary feminist theory blossomed among scholars interested in women and communication in the United States in the 1980s, with attention devoted to it in programming in academic communication associations and with a new wave of publishing that theorized, rather than assumed, gender differences. Its arrival grew from at least three inspirations over prior decades. First, developments in feminist theory in many disciplines were brought into the field by feminist scholars working across traditional disciplinary boundaries. When these developments made their way into the field of communication, they shook assumptions about women and men by rejecting the idea of an essentially gendered individual in favor of a view of gender and sexuality as culturally constructed and reproduced. Second, feminist communication activists, scholars, and professionals had laid important groundwork preceding the infusion of feminist theory into the field. They raised issues about media content and industry employers, questioned the androcentric nature of the history and research canonized in the field, proposed changes to media systems, and focused attention on women’s experiences with communication. Feminist theory, then, arrived in communication amid a strong record of research on women as speakers, organizers, and professionals and on sexist mass media images. Third, feminist theorizing, as it was undertaken in communication as well as in other disciplines, too often failed to consider its own theoretical assumptions about race and ethnicity, sexuality, class, and nationality, which, as a result, produced countervailing critiques of both white and Western feminist scholarship. These critiques pushed feminist theorists to reexamine assumptions about the universality of women’s experiences and the difficulties of solidarity in light of white privilege and Western colonialism. Because contemporary feminist theory in communication continues to reformulate taken-for-granted approaches about differences within and across gender systems and geographies, the choice of selections reflects the decision to reject canonizing texts and authors in favor of casting a wide net to cover the range of issues broached by, or that are important to, feminist scholars. Further, the selections that have been made address, or contribute substantially to, theory rather than primarily describe or summarize, and they include those that are focused on communication by communication scholars.
Family Communication
Authors: Braithwaite Dawn O. , Galvin Kathleen M. , Chiles Benjamin , Liu Esther
Published: March 2013

Communication scholars joined the interdisciplinary conversation on family in the 1980s, springing from the breadth of research on interpersonal and small group communication. Family communication scholars focus on the messages and discourses by which members define, develop, and enact families and on the specific communication processes by which family is performed across different family types and contexts. Although scholars across disciplines may study communication variables relevant to family processes, most are examining communication from a message transmission model with communication as an antecedent variable. Family communication scholars view communication as the primary, constitutive social process by which family relationships are formed and enacted. Central to family communication, scholarship is the recognition that families are discourse dependent, meaning that all families form and negotiate expectations and identities through interaction. From this perspective, all families are discourse dependent. However, families that depart from cultural norms, for example, stepfamilies; gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) families; or multiethnic families, are even more dependent on discourse to define themselves as a family and to legitimate their family form to those outside the family. At its core, family communication scholarship enlightens the discourses and processes by which families talk themselves into being, that is, how families are maintained, changed, and challenged through interaction. Some of the theories used to guide the research are imported from the broader study of interpersonal communication, some from allied disciplines, and some developed within family communication. Although a preponderance of the research has come from the postpositivist paradigm, family communication has been home to interpretive scholarship and, of late, to critical scholars as well.
Andrés Bello
Authors: Jaksic Iván
Published: March 2013

Andrés Bello (b. 1781–d. 1865) is widely recognized as a leading Latin American intellectual whose life spanned the late colonial period, the independence process, and the postindependence building of new nations. He lived in three cities, all of which had a major impact in his life, career, and thought: Caracas (1781–1810), London (1810–1829), and Santiago de Chile (1829–1865). During the first period, he received his university education, joined the colonial administration as a minor official, and was recruited by the new provisional junta established in 1810 in response to the Spanish imperial crisis. In London he was commissioned, along with Simón Bolívar and Luis López Méndez, to secure the support of Great Britain in case of a French invasion or retaliation on the part of the recently established Spanish Council of Regency. The diplomatic mission failed in these objectives, and Venezuela soon collapsed before a royalist assault. Bello remained in England for nineteen years, initially barely making ends meet and eventually representing Chile and Colombia as legation secretary. He was recruited by the government of Chile in 1828 to join its fledgling nation-state in an administrative capacity, first in the ministry of finance and then in the ministry of foreign relations. Chile proved to be a congenial place for Bello’s impressive level of activity. He was editor of the official newspaper El Araucano, prolific contributor to other journals, teacher, senator for twenty-seven years, founder and rector of the University of Chile, and author of works that, once collected, numbered twenty-six volumes. He is best known for his Principles of International Law (1832, 1844, 1864), Grammar of the Spanish Language (1847, 1850, 1853, 1857, 1860), and Civil Code of the Republic of Chile (1855), but a fuller assessment must consider the wide range of his interdisciplinary concerns, including philosophy, poetry, education, literary criticism, and science. In political terms he was first a loyal member of the imperial government, then a supporter of constitutional monarchy when independence seemed imminent, and eventually a committed republican once independence was secured. His main concern became providing the new republican systems with enough authority and legitimacy to become self-sustaining. It is for this reason that he contributed to the writing of the constitution of 1833, a highly centralist constitution with strong executive powers, and then he devoted over twenty years to reforming civil legislation to provide a stable environment for the rule of law to prosper. He became influential far beyond Chile and his native Venezuela. In the early twenty-first century virtually no country in Latin America is without some university, street, or monument to commemorate his life and works. He is certainly one of the most studied intellectuals in Latin America. This article provides guidance on how to locate the central and most informative sources to understand Bello’s variegated work.
Connectionism
Authors: Li Ping , Zhao Xiaowei
Published: March 2013

Connectionism, also known as parallel distributed processing (PDP) or artificial neural networks, and most recently reengineered as Deep Learning, has been an important theoretical framework as well as a computational tool for the study of mind and behavior. It adopts the perspective that human cognition is an emergent property that is due to the interaction of a large number of interconnected processing units (neurons) that operate simultaneously in a network (thus “parallel”). In addition, connectionism advocates that learning, representation, and processing of information are dynamic and distributed. Language as a hallmark of human behavior has received in-depth treatment since the beginning of connectionist research. The acquisition of morphosyntax, the recognition of speech, and the processing of sentences are among the studies of the earliest connectionist models. The application of connectionism to second language acquisition has also gathered momentum in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Learning a language entails complex cognitive and linguistic constraints and interactions, and connectionist models provide insights into how these constraints and interactions may be realized in the natural learning context.
John Wayne
Authors: Schnioffsky Ross , Thompson Richard
Published: March 2013

John Wayne’s film career began in Hollywood silent films in the late 1920s and, in one sense, ended in 1976—a half-century later—with his last film, Don Siegel’s The Shootist (1976). Wayne died three years later, having become not only an actor, but also a film director and the head of his own production company. By then he had also become a major cultural figure, a carrier of myth, an icon of a certain Americanness, and this iconic status continues today; he and his work continue to be cited, commented upon, analyzed, and evaluated, as this article documents. He acted in different genres but became identified mainly with two: the Western (he spent the 1930s making quickie B Westerns) and, with the advent of World War II, military and quasi-military films. When this identification began, those genres were generally dismissed as sophomoric and were not taken seriously; with the rise of serious film studies in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and North America, these genres and Wayne’s contribution to them became valued. After World War II, as the hegemony of the major studios began to fade, Wayne was one of the first actors to form his own independent production company, which eventually became Batjac Productions. He had always learned everything he could on set about all aspects of filmmaking. As an actor, Wayne was a thoughtful craftsman from early in his career (something overlooked by commentators until much later). In the postwar period, he chose roles that increasingly complicated his characters—retaining his earlier outward strength and independence, but now adding a very dark, sometimes tragic set of contradictions, first, in Red River (1948) and then The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1961), and other films. The rise of authorship criticism enhanced this acknowledgment, emphasizing his long collaboration with John Ford and his key films with Howard Hawks. His acting performances began to attract serious attention: Writers began to investigate Wayne’s representation of masculinity, including his characters’ relations to both male and female sexuality. From the late 1940s, Wayne, now a major public figure, became politically active, first, in the anticommunist days of the Hollywood blacklist and, later, in other conservative causes (e.g., the Vietnam War). His controversial public political stances became a separate issue, overshadowing his other work. Wayne’s work continues to be justified by the amount of writing currently devoted to it.
Erich Von Stroheim
Authors: Lignon Fanny
Published: March 2013

Austrian-born Erich von Stroheim (b. 1885–d. 1957) is one of the greatest directors of the American silent movie era. Every one of the nine films he made is considered a masterpiece. He was also an actor whose career started in the United States and continued in France. Lastly, he was a prolific writer. In addition to the scripts of the movies he directed, he wrote a play, three novels, about ten articles, and numerous scripts and film drafts, most of which have never been published and remain dormant in the American and French archives. In the world of cinema and the world at large, Stroheim is an icon. He is considered a rebellious genius in constant conflict with financiers, the accursed artist crushed by Hollywood whose work was massacred. However, Stroheim was also a brilliant mystifier. Although he was widely seen as the epitome of the Prussian aristocrat, a regular officer of the Imperial Army, the cinema’s dirty Hun, in fact, he had only just managed the rank of corporal and had spent only eight months in the army before being discharged as unfit for active service. His father was a hat maker, and both his parents were practicing Jews. It is when he immigrated to the United States that Stroheim began to give shape to his mythic personality. He never ceased to better this myth, day after day, film after film, making quite sure that myth would replace reality. The stratagem worked so well that the truth was discovered only ten years after his death and has not yet completely replaced the fiction. The man and his work, art and life, are here so intertwined that it seems necessary, in order to introduce the bulk of Stroheim’s works, to take into account the moviemaker’s degree of actual involvement in his writings. Because, although Stroheim was an immense artist, he was also a past master in the art of communication, familiar with all the tricks of self-promotion, in which he overindulged. Anyone interested in this question would be advised to read Max Nordau’s Paradoxe (1885), a book at greatly impressed Stroheim in his youth and whose precepts he later followed with talent.