bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Refugee Girlhood and Visual Storied Curriculum
Authors: Bae-Dimitriadis Michelle
Published: April 2021

Decolonizing girlhood illuminates an attempt to refuse and recover the pathological representation of Indigenous refugee girls by going beyond the discourse of the Western construction of girlhood. It takes an anticolonial, critical race feminist approach to the understanding of girlhood that challenges the intersectional, racialized exclusion and the deficit representations of Indigenous refugee girls, which are often reinforced by humanitarian schemes of embodied vulnerability. The digital visual fiction stories created by Karen tribe refugee girls in a media arts summer workshop reposition their presence by creating spaces in which they can speak their own desires, share their imaginings, and portray their struggles. Through this experience, these girls challenge colonial social realities and the fantasies of democracy. Ultimately, their futuristic visual fiction acts as a form of counter-storytelling that illustrates an alternative curriculum space and flips the hegemonic script for empowerment.
An Ecological Preventative Approach to Adolescent Psychology and Youth Mental Health Needs in China
Authors: Zhao Xu , Chen Zhiyan , Bao Leiping
Published: April 2021

Adolescent psychology and mental health needs in China are part of an interdisciplinary area of research. In this area of research, macro and micro processes are closely linked; biological, cultural, and socio-structural influences tightly intertwined; and patterns identified in other societies fall apart due to the impact of powerful societal forces on individual psychology. As a result, there has been a fundamental and long-lasting split between the idea that “Chinese adolescent psychology” should be a distinctive science within China, addressing issues specific to the circumstances of Chinese children and families, and the argument that it should contribute to a universal theory of human development by documenting its applications to Chinese societies. The problem of the first idea lies in its assumption of cultural relativism or the incommensurability of the human experience of growing up in particular sociocultural contexts. In contrast, the problem of the second argument lies in its failure to ask what is “universal,” when a universal theory is applicable to China, and when it may not be. Arguably, adolescents in all cultures carry vulnerabilities and strengths as they go through the process of major biological and psychological transitions. Certain psychosocial needs, such as the needs for self-exploration, quality peer relationship, and continuous guidance and support from adults, are shared by adolescents across the world, albeit through different forms. When their basic needs are neglected by ideology-driven policies and practices that are carried to an extreme extent, youth mental health is seriously threatened. It is important for researchers not only to go beyond the dichotomous view of the field by taking an ecological approach and multidisciplinary perspectives to investigate the salient issues in adolescent psychology and mental health needs in their specific sociocultural context, but also to consider their broader implications for understanding universally relevant questions about success and sacrifice in human and social development.
Catholic Theology and Philosophy of Education
Authors: Ozoliņš Jānis T.
Published: April 2021

It has been said that little or no Catholic philosophy of education has been articulated since about 1980, suggesting that it has been subsumed under more general philosophical conceptions of education. This implies that there is nothing particularly distinctive about a Catholic conception of education that would enable us to distinguish it from a nonreligious conception of education. There is no doubt that a philosophy of Catholic education shares many of the features of liberal education. The roots of a Catholic philosophy of education are grounded in Catholic theology. That is, the great Mediaeval Christian commentators articulate their conceptions of education and its purposes informed by a Christian theological understanding of the nature of human beings, their relationship to God, and to their common, final end. Without theology to articulate how human knowledge, purpose, and fulfillment are connected, education is incomplete and reduces to training and the gaining of skills for the workforce. It is theology that enables us to understand how training and gaining of skills is connected to the final end of human beings, which is God. A philosophy of education that is Christian cannot be separated from theology.
Human Rights Education
Authors: Ahmed A. Kayum
Published: April 2021

Human rights education (HRE) can be described as a tool for popularizing and giving effect to the universal human rights regime. The United Nations (UN) defines HRE as (a) acquiring knowledge about human rights and the skills to exercise these rights, (b) developing values, attitudes, and beliefs that support and reinforce human rights; and (c) defending and advancing human rights through behavior and action. HRE is therefore an ideological instrument deployed as a tactic to inspire agency and activism, primarily as a counterbalance to state power. HRE as tactics is used to denote the education and training of individuals and groups working toward claiming certain protections for themselves or on behalf of those on the margins of society. This typology encompasses the range of legal, advocacy, and policy tools available within human rights frameworks to uphold and protect the rights of individuals and communities. But it is also important to recognize that human rights discourses can been appropriated by certain states to strengthen their sovereign power. HRE as sovereignty acknowledges that states, as well as corporations and far-right civil society groups, can appropriate human rights language in order to reinforce power and legitimacy. States who engage in HRE as sovereignty deliberately employ human rights language with the aim of constructing a self-serving narrative that entrenches power or legitimizes their behavior and actions. HRE as sovereignty characterizes the appropriation of HRE to entrench power through the creation of an official, immutable narrative embedded in human rights language.
Critical Autism Studies, Race, Gender, and Education
Authors: Roscigno Robin
Published: April 2021

Critical autism studies (CAS) is an emergent field that challenges deficit-based thinking about autism. Early scholars of autism, such as psychologists Bruno Bettelheim, Leo Kanner, or Ivar O. Lovaas, adopted a biomedical or behavioral approach to the study of autism. Rejecting such an approach, critical disability studies and by extension CAS have developed robust theoretical frameworks to account for the sociocultural and embodied experience of disability, including the social model of disability, the cultural model of disability, and poststructural models of disability. These approaches to the study of disability challenge medical models of disability that understand disability as an individual experience of impairment. Disability is framed as a problem to be solved via biomedicine and helping professionals and instead conceive of disability as a web of sociocultural entanglements.

In contrast, theoretical approaches to critical autism studies include critical discourse analysis (CDA), feminist theory, and critical race theory. Scholars using CDA explore how ableism is produced and sustained through discourses, particularly public discourses within the media, scholarship, non-governmental organizations, and schools. Critical autism scholars who employ critical race theory seek to understand the intersectional identities of autistic people of color and the compounding effects of racism and ableism. Feminist approaches to the study of autism trouble gender stereotypes about autistic people, most notably Simon Baron Cohen’s extreme male brain theory.
Mathematics and School Reform in India
Authors: Khan Farida Abdulla , Gupta Charu
Published: April 2021

Initial efforts toward reform in mathematics education in India evolved out of a more general concern for educational reforms as they assumed a pivotal role in the agenda of modernization and development after independence. Mathematics as a foundational aspect of science and technology assumed a privileged status with recommendations to keep up with developments in technologically advanced countries. This led to the creation of an unduly loaded curriculum with little attention to children’s cognitive and developmental capacities and other more social and humane aspects of a well-rounded education. The early decades after independence were largely focused on providing access, and other than the rhetoric of equality and quality and overarching recommendations, little investment was made into researching the more nuanced aspects of learning and teaching and the social implications of schooling.

Several important national commissions and two major policies put forward important recommendations for reform in mathematics education with suggestions for both curriculum and pedagogy. The early decades after independence saw a greater commitment to higher education, especially in the sciences and technology, and this began to shape the school curriculum, with mathematics as a major concern. Although critiques of the system were never totally absent, efforts at intervention in schools and at the ground level were initially made by smaller groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOS), and then also nationally and regionally, to transform processes of schooling and learning with a focus on the learner rather than the content alone. A particularly large and comprehensive national effort at reforming school education in all subject areas was the National Curricular Framework, coordinated and initiated by the National Council of Educational Research and Training in 2005. This was a radical attempt at framing an alternative idea of schooling and learning, focused on the child, but with an acute awareness of the larger social, economic, and political structures within which schools, classrooms, teachers, and students are implicated.
The Ismaili Tradition in Iran: 13th Century to the Present
Authors: Beben Daniel
Published: April 2021

The Ismailis are a minority community of Shiʿi Muslims that first emerged in the 8th century. Iran has hosted one of the largest Ismaili communities since the earliest years of the movement and from 1095 to 1841 it served as the home of the Nizārī Ismaili imams. In 1256 the Ismaili headquarters at the fortress of Alamūt in northern Iran was captured by the Mongols and the Imam Rukn al-Dīn Khūrshāh was arrested and executed, opening a perilous new chapter in the history of the Ismailis in Iran. Generations of observers believed that the Ismailis had perished entirely in the course of the Mongol conquests. Beginning in the 19th century, research on the Ismailis began to slowly reveal the myriad ways in which they survived and even flourished in Iran and elsewhere into the post-Mongol era. However, scholarship on the Iranian Ismailis down to the early 20th century remained almost entirely dependent on non-Ismaili sources that were generally quite hostile toward their subject. The discovery of many previously unknown Ismaili texts beginning in the early 20th century offered prospects for a richer and more complete understanding of the tradition’s historical development. Yet despite this, the Ismaili tradition in the post-Mongol era continues to receive only a fraction of the scholarly attention given to earlier periods, and a number of sources produced by Ismaili communities in this period remain unexplored, offering valuable opportunities for future research.
Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Sokoto Caliphate
Authors: Last Murray
Published: April 2021

Established using a conventional Islamic model of government, the new Muslim state in Sokoto, known as the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903), possessed eventually very large numbers of men, women, and children, taken captive (usually when children) in jihad from mainly non-Muslim communities, to serve as slaves. These slaves worked on farms or within households, they might be concubines and bear children for their owners; or they might be sold as children for export to North Africa in payment for the luxury imports the new elite wanted. Slaves were, under Islamic law, deemed “minors” or “half-persons,” and so had rights that differed from those of the free Muslim. By the end of the 19th century there were more slaves on the local markets than could be sold; exports of captives to North Africa had already dropped. For some captives enslaved as children, however, the career as a slave led eventually to high political positions, even to owning many slaves of their own. But slaves’ property, even their children, ultimately belonged to the slave’s owner. Revolts by male slaves were very rare, but escape was commonplace. Concubines, if they ever became pregnant by their owner, could not be sold again. The abolition of slavery c.1903 was slow to become a reality for many individual slaves, whether men or women.
The Islamic State in the Maghreb
Authors: Pieri Zacharias P.
Published: April 2021

On June 29, 2014, The Islamic State (IS), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), Islamic State of Iraq and the Islamic Levant (ISIL), and Daesh, proclaimed the establishment of a caliphate in areas straddling Iraq and Syria. IS is a Sunni Muslim extremist movement that was under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi until his killing in 2019, and it is driven by a vision to unite all extremist Muslims under its caliphate, which was grounded in Syria. IS was, for a period, the most robust and adept insurgent force in Syria and Iraq, and by 2015, it controlled a landmass and population larger than that of many existing states. At the height of its power, it included a vast coastline in Libya, a portion of Nigeria’s northeast where affiliated Boko Haram declared an Islamic territory, and a city in the Philippines.

Beyond this, IS was able to establish franchises in different parts of the world including North Africa and the Sahel. Leaders of IS called on extremist Muslims from across the world to leave their homes, and to travel to the so-called caliphate to take up residency there as jihadists and citizens of a proto-state. Those that could not physically join were encouraged to participate online, and others were instructed by Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the IS’s chief spokesman, to find an infidel and smash his head with a rock.

IS, from its inception, has looked to the Maghreb and the Sahel as strategic geographic areas for the expansion of its ideology, incorporation of territory into its caliphate, and operational purposes. It is clear that the notion of an Islamic state was popular for a segment of the population in the Maghreb, with many leaving the countries of Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and beyond to join, train, and fight with IS in Syria and Iraq. Tunisia had the highest number of IS foreign fighters, estimated at approximately 6,000; Morocco had 1,200; Libya and Egypt had 600; and Algeria had 170. Returning fighters are destabilizing North Africa. Libya was an early focus of IS due in part to the fall of the Gadhafi regime in 2011, and the ensuing political chaos, which caused a weak and fragile state. Libya served as the first addition to the territories of IS’s caliphate outside Syria and Iraq. Tunisia faced several large-scale attacks linked to IS activities in the country. In 2015 a number of terrorist attacks were carried out, including the massacre of 38 tourists at a beach resort in Sousse, the bombing of a bus containing presidential guards in Tunis, and an attack on the Bardo museum in Tunis. Algeria has had to monitor the country’s borders to prevent the entry of jihadists affiliated with IS who operate in neighboring countries. At the time of writing, concerns were being raised about different franchises of IS that are seeking to better integrate and to take advantage of insecurity in the Sahel, especially around the borders of Mali, Burkina Faso, and into Niger and Nigeria.
Economic History of the United States: Precolonial and Colonial Periods
Authors: Mancall Peter C.
Published: April 2021

The economy of territory that became the United States evolved dramatically from ca. 1000 ce to 1776. Before Europeans arrived, the spread of maize agriculture shifted economic practices in Indigenous communities. The arrival of Europeans, starting with the Spanish in the West Indies in 1492, brought wide-ranging change, including the spread of Old World infectious disease and the arrival of land- and resource-hungry migrants. Europeans, eager to extract material wealth, came to rely on the trade in enslaved Africans to produce profitable crops such as tobacco, rice, and sugar, and they maintained connections with Indigenous communities to sustain the fur trade. The declining number of Indigenous peoples, combined with growing numbers of those of European or African origin, altered the demographic profile of North America, particularly in the territory east of the Mississippi River. Over time, Europeans’ consumer choices expanded, though the wealth gap between white colonists grew, as did the economic gap between free colonists, on the one hand, and unfree Black and Native peoples on the other.
Simple and Intuitive Business Practices in Financial Economics
Authors: Ben-David Itzhak
Published: April 2021

In stark contrast to the sophisticated methods advocated by academics in business schools, actual business practices are typically simple and intuitive (e.g., valuation, debt management, compensation). Methods that have these characteristics are more likely to become widely used business practices for two reasons. First, they are less prone to overfitting to a particular setting and therefore are robust across economic environments and applicable in new settings. Second, they are easy to communicate and are verifiable. Therefore, they can spread easily across organizations and are hard to replace with new and improved methods. This explanation of business practices can help resolve puzzles in corporate finance, such as the variation in debt leverage across industries.
International Capital Flows
Authors: Chen Yanshuo , Hale Galina
Published: April 2021

International capital flows have challenged economists’ models for decades. They exhibit a number of patterns that standard economic theories have struggled to explain. Over time, global capital flows go through boom and bust cycles, sudden stops, and unprecedented bonanzas. Determinants of capital flows include “pull factors,” recipient countries’ economic and structural characteristics, and “push factors” or “global factors,” which mostly depend on the global financial cycle and U.S. monetary policy. The relative importance of global factors has increased since the early 2000s.

The rise in international capital flows that has accompanied the wave of globalization in the early 21st century has helped to deliver crucial capital resources that facilitated development of many economies and helped transmit technologies across borders. On the flip side, international capital flows also increased transmission of financial shocks and policy changes across countries, most prominently experienced during the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. On balance, is it beneficial for small open economies to allow for free capital flows? Mainstream economists’ and policymakers’ answer to this question has evolved from an unequivocal “yes” to a much more nuanced view.
Growth Econometrics
Authors: Temple Jonathan R. W.
Published: April 2021

Growth econometrics is the application of statistical methods to the study of economic growth and levels of national output or income per head. Researchers often seek to understand why growth rates differ across countries. The field developed rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, but the early work often proved fragile. Cross-section analyses are limited by the relatively small number of countries in the world and problems of endogeneity, parameter heterogeneity, model uncertainty, and cross-section error dependence. The long-term prospects look better for approaches using panel data. Overall, the quality of the evidence has improved over time, due to better measurement, more data, and new methods. As longer spans of data become available, the methods of growth econometrics will shed light on fundamental questions that are hard to answer any other way.
Migration of Low-Mass Planets
Authors: Masset Frédéric S.
Published: April 2021

Planet migration is the variation over time of a planet’s semimajor axis, leading to either a contraction or an expansion of the orbit. It results from the exchange of energy and angular momentum between the planet and the disk in which it is embedded during its formation and can cause the semimajor axis to change by as much as two orders of magnitude over the disk’s lifetime. The migration of forming protoplanets is an unavoidable process, and it is thought to be a key ingredient for understanding the variety of extrasolar planetary systems. Although migration occurs for protoplanets of all masses, its properties for low-mass planets (those having up to a few Earth masses) differ significantly from those for high-mass planets.

The torque that is exerted by the disk on the planet is composed of different contributions. While migration was first thought to be invariably inward, physical processes that are able to halt or even reverse migration were later uncovered, leading to the realization that the migration path of a forming planet has a very sensitive dependence on the underlying disk parameters.

There are other processes that go beyond the case of a single planet experiencing smooth migration under the disk’s tide. This is the case of planetary migration in low-viscosity disks, a fashionable research avenue because protoplanetary disks are thought to have very low viscosity, if any, over most of their planet-forming regions. Such a process is generally significantly chaotic and has to be tackled through high-resolution numerical simulations. The migration of several low-mass planets is also is a very fashionable topic, owing to the discovery by the Kepler mission of many multiple extrasolar planetary systems. The orbital properties of these systems suggest that at least some of them have experienced substantial migration. Although there have been many studies to account for the orbital properties of these systems, there is as yet no clear picture of the different processes that shaped them. Finally, some recently unveiled processes could be important for the migration of low-mass planets. One process is aero-resonant migration, in which a swarm of planetesimals subjected to aerodynamic drag push a planet inward when they reach a mean-motion resonance with the planet, while another process is based on so-called thermal torques, which arise when thermal diffusion in the disk is taken into account, or when the planet, heated by accretion, releases heat into the ambient gas.
Telecommunication Law
Authors: Hofmann Mahulena
Published: April 2021

Telecommunication law is a broad complex of legal rules, the aim of which is to regulate telecommunication services—the conveyance of signals by means of telecommunication networks; it also covers satellite and space research services. The utmost purpose of these norms is to enable an interference-free transmission of signals, both on a domestic and an international scale. Telecommunication law is composed of three levels of regulations: international, regional, and domestic. The international regulation is performed traditionally by states organized in the International Telecommunication Union on the basis of the ITU Constitution, Convention, and Radio Regulations; trade aspects of telecommunications are regulated by the World Trade Organization. There are several regional cooperation structures dealing with telecommunications; the telecommunication framework of the European Union can serve as an example of a highly harmonized regional regulation based on the Electronic Communication Code. Domestic telecommunication laws are adopted by sovereign states; however, the international rules and regional regulations influence their content and structure. These legal mechanisms are very useful regulatory frameworks that guarantee that telecommunication signals are conveyed to their consumers without administrative and factual obstacles. They have functioned for decades on a pragmatic basis driven mostly by technical and economic needs.
Constitutive Theory in International Relations
Authors: Frost Mervyn
Published: April 2021

Constitutive theory is a philosophical analysis of the logical interconnections between actors, their actions, and the social practices within which they perform these. It draws on insights from the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, as developed and extended by Peter Winch and John Searle. It highlights that actors and their actions can only be understood from within the practices in which they are constituted as actors of a certain kind, who have available to them a specific repertoire of meaningful action. It stresses that the interpretation of their actions involves: understanding the language internal to the practices in which they take place; understanding the rule-boundness of that language; the meaning of its terms; a holist perspective on the practice; and, crucially, an understanding of the ethics embedded in it. It briefly explores the implications of such a philosophical analysis for those seeking to understand the actors and their interactions in global practices. It highlights how international actors (both states and individuals) are constituted as international actors in two major international practices, the practice of sovereign states and the global rights practice. It indicates the guidance constitutive theory might provide for all who would better understand international affairs.
State Terrorism
Authors: Brown Joseph M.
Published: April 2021

State terrorism is a contentious topic in the field of terrorism studies. Some scholars argue that the concept of terrorism should only be applied to the behavior of nonstate actors. Others argue that certain government behaviors may be understood as terrorism if the intent of state violence and threats is to stoke fear and influence the behavior of a wider audience. Three possible conceptualizations of state terrorism are worth exploring: government sponsorship of nonstate actors’ terrorism, terrorism perpetrated by government agents outside a legal framework, and “inherent” state terrorism—acts perpetrated by the state in the everyday enforcement of law and order that, if perpetrated by nonstate actors, would clearly qualify as terrorism. Each of these conceptualizations yields insight about state behavior, highlighting particular uses of violence and threats as instruments of state policy. Depending on one’s conceptualization of state terrorism, common policies and functions of government possess an underlying terroristic logic. Analytical tools developed in the field of terrorism studies may be useful in helping us understand state behavior, when violence and threats appear to have a broader communicative function in influencing an audience beyond the immediate target.
Landscapes and Memory
Authors: Bridges Ben , Osterhoudt Sarah
Published: April 2021

Broadly, landscapes can be considered terrains of connectivity. Landscapes encompass wild, cultivated, urban, feral, and fallow spaces, as well as the human and nonhuman entities who inhabit and shape them. Memory refers to the past as it exists in the present, bridging temporally discrete moments through the intentional or unintentional act of remembering. Memory studies, from the view of anthropology, include explorations of individual forms of remembrance, as well as the collective, heterogenous ways of marking, interpreting, and erasing the past. Taken together, landscapes and memory co-constitute one another: landscapes store, depict, and evoke memories while memories recall, revise, and shape landscapes. Knowledge and power are inevitably wrapped up in the relationship, and anthropologists have investigated the manifest ways such forces emerge through human acts of cultivation, commemoration, nostalgia, and forgetting. Because landscapes and memory appear in both physical and immaterial forms, the social constructs, cultural expressions, and human and nonhuman relationships on which they are based generate rich material for anthropological study. While landscape and memory are surely topics independently worthy of study, undertaking the two in tandem elucidates the intertwining threads that bind together space and time; such studies interrogate realms of personal meaning and political power while simultaneously highlighting dynamic processes of adaptation, improvisation, and erasure.
Early American Slave Law
Authors: Hadden Sally
Published: April 2021

Slave law in early America may be found in the formal written laws created in metropolitan places such as Paris or Madrid as well as locally within English colonies such as Barbados or South Carolina. These written laws constitute only one portion of the known law governing slave behavior, for individual masters created their own rules to restrict enslaved persons. These master-made rules of conduct almost never appear in print and were conveyed most often through oral transmission. Such vernacular laws provide another element of the limitations all enslaved people experienced in the colonial period. Those without literacy, including Native Americans or illiterate settlers, nonetheless had rules to limit slave behavior, even if they remained unwritten. Customary law, Bible precepts, and Islamic law all provided bases for understanding the rules that bound unfree persons. Most colonial law mandated barbaric punishments for slave crime, though these were sometimes commuted to banishment. Spanish and French codes and local ordinances did not always agree on how slaves should be treated.

The numerous laws found in English colonies, sometimes wrongly denominated as codes, spread widely as individuals migrated; the number and variety of such laws makes comprehensive transimperial comparisons challenging. Laws might occasionally ban keeping slaves or trading in them, but most such laws were ignored. Slave courts typically operated in arbitrary, capricious ways that assumed slave guilt and accepted weak evidence to prove it. Runaways might, if they joined strong maroon communities (bands of runaways living together), end up enforcing the laws against slave flight, much as slave catchers and slave patrols did. Laws to prevent manumission by a master frequently required the posting of bonds to prevent those freed from becoming a financial burden on their communities. Later manumission laws often mandated the physical departure of those freed, creating emotional turmoil for the newly emancipated.
Black Soldiers in World War II America
Authors: Jefferson Robert F.
Published: April 2021

The history of the African American military experience in World War II tends to revolve around two central questions: How did World War II and American racism shape the black experience in the American military? And how did black GIs reshape the parameters of their wartime experiences? From the mid-1920s through the Great Depression years of the 1930s, military planners evaluated the performance of black soldiers in World War I while trying to ascertain their presence in future wars. However, quite often their discussions about African American servicemen in the military establishment were deeply moored in the traditions, customs, and practices of American racism, racist stereotypes, and innuendo. Simultaneously, African American leaders and their allies waged a relentless battle to secure the future presence of the uniformed men and women who would serve in the nation’s military. Through their exercise of voting rights, threats of protest demonstration, litigation, and White House lobbying from 1939 through 1942, civil rights advocates and their affiliates managed to obtain some minor concessions from the military establishment. But the military’s stubborn adherence to a policy barring black and white soldiers from serving in the same units continued through the rest of the war.

Between 1943 and 1945, black GIs faced white officer hostility, civilian antagonism, and military police brutality while undergoing military training throughout the country. Similarly, African American servicewomen faced systemic racism and sexism in the military during the period. Throughout various stages of the American war effort, black civil rights groups, the press, and their allies mounted the opening salvoes in the battle to protect and defend the wellbeing of black soldiers in uniform. While serving on the battlefields of World War II, fighting African American GIs became foot soldiers in the wider struggles against tyranny abroad. After returning home in 1945, black World War II-era activists such as Daisy Lampkin and Ruby Hurley, and ex-servicemen and women, laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.
Faith and Devotion: Reading the Ceramic Architectural Programs of the Baroque
Authors: Carvalho Rosário Salema
Published: April 2021

In Portugal, the use of azulejos (glazed ceramic tiles) in architecture has a long history, extending uninterruptedly from the late 15th century to the present 21st century. For more than five centuries, the azulejo reinvented itself periodically to meet the demands of different historical periods, and one of its most expressive transformations took place in the Baroque period (1675–1750). Baroque azulejos stand out not only for the almost exclusive use of blue and white painting, but above all for the exploration of narrative programs, which were displayed in vast ceramic walls. These decorations covered the interiors of different buildings, but mostly churches.

The use of azulejos, dominating the interiors or in connection with other arts, was instrumental in creating a unique spatial form, which echoed Baroque spirituality by appealing directly to the senses and exploring the brightness and color of the tiled surfaces within majestic and lusciously decorated settings. But the azulejo was also a medium for religious painting and, as such, a vehicle for the doctrine and values of the Counter-Reformation, which were dominant at the time. Therefore, these ceramic architectural programs resort both to devotional and visual discourses. On the one hand, azulejo compositions relate to central aspects of Christian faith and liturgy, and particularly to the religious discourse and practice of the Baroque period. On the other hand, their visual features add new layers of meaning, mostly related to the organization of azulejos within a church’s architecture, the frames and inspirational sources, as well as issues linked with the creation and running of azulejo workshops.
Frontier, Backlands, and Indigenous Presence in Colonial São Paulo
Authors: Vilardaga José Carlos
Published: April 2021

The residents of the Captaincy of São Vicente, which would become São Paulo in the 18th century, were known in the late 17th century as “Paulistas.” Their reputation in the colonial period was ambiguous: on the one hand, they were viewed as crude and unruly enslavers of Indigenous people; on the other, they were known as skilled backwoodsmen and soldiers. This image derived mainly from a character that would later come to be known as the bandeirante, a member of the expeditions that forged into remote backlands mainly to capture Indigenous people for their own use, without waiting for orders from the Crown or church. This source of labor enabled the internal reproduction of enslaved labor in a region whose economy was based on subsistence and supplying other regions in the high plateau where São Paulo de Piratininga was established in 1554, first as a school, later as a town. As the occupation of the region advanced over the following decades, a network of chapels, parishes, and towns linked by river and overland routes grew up, forming the geographical area of the colonial captaincy.

This occupation, which extended to the remote edges of the regions that would eventually make up Brazil and even into frontier lands contested by both Iberian empires, was motivated by a search for Indigenous peoples, a quest for precious metals, a demand for land, and the dictates of political disputes. In this sense, the backwoodsmen were not acting out of a strategic geopolitical motivation, as a certain school of self-congratulatory historiography would have it. In any event, the Paulistas played a role in shaping the internal and external frontiers of colonial Brazil through the 18th century in the context of the boundary treaties. The society formed under these circumstances was intrinsically tied to the Indigenous world, to the backlands, and to frontier living, and resulted in varied forms of crossbreeding and cultural interactions embodied in the mestizo type that became known as mameluco; the violent practices inherent in colonization, however, cannot be overlooked.
Environmental History of Commodities in Central America
Authors: Goebel Anthony , Montero Andrea
Published: April 2021

One way of approaching the environmental history of Central America is through the analysis of the evolution of the main agricultural commodities. Until the present day, the economy of the isthmus still depends on agri-exports, while agriculture (whether extensive or intensive) continues to transform landscapes, fragment territories, and alter ecosystems. Agriculture has been an important agent of change in the Central American space from the time of pre-Columbian societies to the present. However, the way human societies have appropriated natural resources and services allows explanation of the socio-historic transitions that the different agri-ecosystems in the region have gone through, ranging from organic production systems to semi-industrial or industrialized production systems. This transition responds to a series of institutional factors linked to the international dynamic of tropical commodities and agricultural decisions taken in the region. Commercial agriculture has had an environmental impact in the area through distinct productive activities such as the production of coffee, banana, sugar cane, and cotton, and extractive activities such as forestry and cattle ranching.
Economics of Hazardous Waste Management
Authors: Sigman Hilary
Published: April 2021

Hazardous waste management involves treatment, disposal, or recycling of a wide range of different waste streams from industry, households, and others. The diversity of wastes and management methods means that many choices affect its environmental harms, which result from possible contamination of groundwater, surface water, soil, and air. Efficient public policies that would fully reflect such varied external costs are unlikely to be feasible. In practice, governments principally apply three policy approaches to hazardous waste: taxes on hazardous waste, liability for environmental damages, and standards-based regulation of waste management facilities. Hazardous waste taxes may help internalize environmental costs but do not reflect all the variability in these costs. By contrast, liability for environmental damage can make waste generators and managers confront environmental costs that vary with their particular choices. However, environmental liability is often linked to programs for cleanup of contaminated sites and may not create efficient incentives for active waste management because this liability does not reflect the social costs of the contamination. Regulation usually takes the form of technology and performance standards applied to treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs) and affects generation decisions only indirectly. Research finds that public policies that raise costs of hazardous waste management, such as taxes and regulation, encourage less waste generation, but may also provoke detrimental responses. First, facilities may substitute illegal waste dumping for legal management and thus exacerbate environmental damage. Second, generators may ship waste to jurisdictions with weaker environmental protections, especially developing countries, giving rise to a “waste haven” effect. This effect may create offsetting environmental damage, facilitate destructive policy competition among jurisdictions, and worsen inequities in exposure to environmental harm from hazardous waste.
The Value of the Environment in Recreation
Authors: Grilli Gianluca
Published: April 2021

Natural environments represent background settings for most outdoor recreation activities, which are important non-consumptive benefits that people obtain from nature. Recreation has been traditionally considered a non-market service because it is practiced free of charge in public spaces and therefore of secondary relevance for the economy. Although outdoor recreation in natural parks became relevant during the 19th century, the increased popularity of recreation after the Second World War required tools for the assessment of recreational benefits, which were not considered in the evaluation of investments in recreational facilities, and increasing spending for recreational equipment captured the attention of outdoor recreation as an economic sector. In the 1990s, it was observed that many recreational activities were commercialized and started being considered equally important to tourism as a means to boost the economy of local communities. The expansion of outdoor recreation is reflected in a growing interest in the economic aspects, including cost–benefit calculations of the investments in recreational facilities and research on appropriate methods to evaluate the non-market benefits of recreation. The first economic technique used for valuing recreation was the travel cost method that consisted in the assessment of a demand curve, where the demanded quantity is the number of trips to a specific site and the cost is the unit cost of travel to the destination. After this first intuition, the number of contributions on recreation valuation exponentially grew, and new methods were proposed, including methods based on stated preferences for recreation that can be used when travel cost data that reveal consumers’ behavior are not available. A regular assessment of recreational benefits has several advantages for public policy, including the evaluation of investments and information on visitor profile and preferences, income, and price elasticity, which are essential to understand the market of outdoor recreation and propose effective strategies and recreation-oriented management. The increasing environmental pressure associated with participation in outdoor recreation required effective conservation activities, which in turn posed limitations to economic activities of local communities who live in contact with natural resources. Therefore, a balance between environmental, social, and economic interests is essential for recreational destination to avail of benefits without conflicts among stakeholders.
Documentation of Do-Not-Attempt-Cardiopulmonary-Resuscitation orders amid the COVID-19 pandemic
Authors: Connellan David , Diffley Kara , McCabe John , Cotter Aoife , McGinty Tara , Sheehan Gerard , Ryan Karen , Cullen Walter , Lambert John S , Callaly Elizabeth L , Kyne Lorraine
Published: April 2021

Introduction

the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the decision-making process regarding cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) into focus. The aim of this study is to compare rates of Do-Not-Attempt-CPR (DNACPR) documentation in older hospitalised patients before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods

this was a retrospective repeated cross-sectional study. Data including co-morbidities and resuscitation status was collected on 300 patients with COVID-19 hospitalised from 1 March to 31 May 2020. DNACPR documentation rates in patients aged ≥65 years with a diagnosis of COVID-19 were compared to those without COVID-19 admitted during the same period and were also compared to the documentation rates pre-COVID-19 pandemic (1 March–31 May 2019).

Results

of 300 COVID-19-positive patients, 28% had a DNACPR order documented during their admission. Of 131 older (≥65 years) patients with COVID-19, 60.3% had a DNACPR order compared to 25.4% of 130 older patients without COVID-19 (P < 0.0001). During a comparable time period pre-pandemic, 15.4% of 130 older patients had a DNACPR order in place (P < 0.0001). Almost fifty percent of DNACPR orders were recorded within 24 h of a positive swab result for SARS-CoV-2. Of older COVID-19-positive patients, 39.2% were referred to palliative care services and 70.2% survived.

Conclusion

the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted more widespread and earlier decision-making regarding resuscitation status. Although case fatality rates were higher for older hospitalised patients with COVID-19, many older patients survived the illness. Advance care planning should be prioritised in all patients and should remain as part of good clinical practice despite the pandemic.
In silico binding profile characterization of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and its mutants bound to human ACE2 receptor
Authors: Zhang Yuzhao , He Xibing , Zhai Jingchen , Ji Beihong , Man Viet Hoang , Wang Junmei
Published: April 2021

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), a novel coronavirus, has brought an unprecedented pandemic to the world and affected over 64 million people. The virus infects human using its spike glycoprotein mediated by a crucial area, receptor-binding domain (RBD), to bind to the human ACE2 (hACE2) receptor. Mutations on RBD have been observed in different countries and classified into nine types: A435S, D364Y, G476S, N354D/D364Y, R408I, V341I, V367F, V483A and W436R. Employing molecular dynamics (MD) simulation, we investigated dynamics and structures of the complexes of the prototype and mutant types of SARS-CoV-2 spike RBDs and hACE2. We then probed binding free energies of the prototype and mutant types of RBD with hACE2 protein by using an end-point molecular mechanics Poisson Boltzmann surface area (MM-PBSA) method. According to the result of MM-PBSA binding free energy calculations, we found that V367F and N354D/D364Y mutant types showed enhanced binding affinities with hACE2 compared to the prototype. Our computational protocols were validated by the successful prediction of relative binding free energies between prototype and three mutants: N354D/D364Y, V367F and W436R. Thus, this study provides a reliable computational protocol to fast assess the existing and emerging RBD mutations. More importantly, the binding hotspots identified by using the molecular mechanics generalized Born surface area (MM-GBSA) free energy decomposition approach can guide the rational design of small molecule drugs or vaccines free of drug resistance, to interfere with or eradicate spike-hACE2 binding.