bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Port Huron Statement at Fifty
Authors: Kazin Michael
Published: March 2012

The Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society, written fifty years ago this June, is the most ambitious, the most specific, and the most eloquent manifesto in the history of the American Left. It is also, at just over 25,000 words, undoubtedly the longest one. But it had to be lengthy to accomplish its aim—to propose an entire "agenda for a generation." Consider the variety of topics about which Tom Hayden and his fellow delegates to that SDS meeting held at the FDR Camp in Port Heron, Michigan, had intelligent and provocative things to say: moral values, American politics, the U.S. economy, the nation's intellectual and academic life, the labor movement, the cold war, the nu-clear arms race, the anticolonial revolution, and a vivid description of why the black freedom move-ment was so pivotal to the birth of a new Left. All this was informed by a sensibility attuned to what one might call the "national psychology." And that's just a summary of the first half of the statement.
The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Populist Left
Authors: Kazin Michael
Published: March 2012

Until the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, a disturbing absence marked American political life. The nation's economic miseries continued, with unemployment high and home sales stagnant or dropping. The gap between the wealthiest Americans and their fellow citizens yawned wider than at any time since the 1920s. Yet, except for the big demonstrations and energetic recall campaigns that roiled Wisconsin, critics of big business, big finance, and government cutbacks had failed to organize a serious protest movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession in the first place. What happened to the anti-corporate Left?
The Last Page
Authors: Phillips Maxine
Published: March 2012

The 1950s : The food is salty, starchy, soothing. Milk arrives in glass bottles; eggs are delivered by a farmer. We can our own tomatoes and fruit. Frozen food is too expensive. I feed sugar cubes to the junkman's horse. The 1960s : College food is salty, starchy, and much less soothing. My roommate and I supplement with Ritz crackers, peanut butter, and jam. She sneers at my store-brand label.
Prêt-à-Manger : Why the French Have Their Cake and Eat It, Too
Authors: Le Billon Karen Bakker
Published: March 2012

Even if you weren't aware of the rising intensity of debates over food politics in recent years, the face-off between Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama probably caught your attention. One of Michelle Obama's most high profile acts as First Lady was to plant an organic food garden on the White House lawn—ironically later found to be contaminated by sewage-sludge-based fertilizer, rendering the lovingly grown vegetables off limits. The launch of the Obama Foodorama (the First Lady's foodie blog) and "Let's Move" (Obama's cause célèbre child anti-obesity campaign) soon followed. Palin's subse-quent attacks on Obama's "interference" in personal food choices culminated in her visit to a Pennsylvania primary school, where Palin publicly proffered cookies to schoolchildren, in a presumed attempt to warn them of nanny state "food police."
John Hersey and Hiroshima
Authors: Gerstle Dan
Published: March 2012

The nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant in March 2011 gave rise to very different sentiments in this country than it did in Japan. Whereas our press, seeking cultural and historical reference points, invoked Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Godzilla, the Japanese responded to the trio of disasters—earthquake, tsunami, Fukushima—with gestures to two moments, two acts of war, two cities vaporized: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who would be forced to resign amid intense questioning of his indecisive response to the disasters, was quoted as saying that his nation's predicament was "in a way the most severe crisis in the past sixty-five years since World War II." Writing in the New Yorker, novelist Kenzaburo Oe admonished his countrymen for their desire to harness nuclear energy by calling on them to remember their first experience of it at Hiroshima.
Revisiting 1989: The Specter Still Haunts
Authors: Ghodsee Kristen
Published: March 2012

In January 2010, I met a Bulgarian friend for dinner in a Georgetown pizza parlor. This friend, whom I will call Svetozara, had recently immigrated to the United States and was looking for a job in D.C. Recently divorced after twenty-six years of marriage, she had been a lawyer in Bulgaria, and one of a core of pro-democracy activists who had been politically influential during Bulgaria's transition from communism. With her liberal colleagues, Svetozara had fought hard to banish communist influences from the Bulgarian government and economy. She believed that democracy and the institution of free markets would improve the lives of her compatriots after more than four decades of totalitarian rule and had worked to make sure that post-1989 elections were free and fair. She had helped reorganize local governments to make them more responsive to citizens' needs and had supported legislation to make the Bulgarian government less bureaucratic and more open and transparent. She had been a darling of liberal reformers come from the West to dismantle the centralized state and the command econ-omy.
Don't Forget Solidarity
Authors: Jones William P.
Published: March 2012

A decade before Abram Hewitt defeated Henry George's bid for mayor of New York in 1886, he delivered a more lasting blow to the American Left. A prominent northern congressman and chair of the Democratic National Committee, Hewitt played a central role in negotiating the notorious Compromise of 1877, which conceded victory in a contested presidential election to the Republican Party in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops that had occupied the former Confederacy since the Civil War. That arrangement freed Southern Democrats to use fraud, intimidation, and outright terrorism to deprive most African Americans and many poor whites of the right to vote; it also gave wealthy landowners and industrialists unchallenged hegemony in the South and tremendous influence in the nation as a whole. When leftists won elections in New York and other northern states, whether as Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, or Progressives, their influence was constrained severely by the disenfranchisement of working-class voters and the weakness of organized labor in the "Solid South." Not until a coalition of civil rights organizations, interracial unions, women's clubs, and left-wing groups set out to "re-align" the Democratic Party during the Second World War did the Left begin to transcend the legacy of 1877.
Making Choices: Ethics and Vegetarianism
Authors: Devries Juliana
Published: March 2012

I was seventeen and taking an elective course in Earth and Environmental Science. We were learning about farming and the food system—genetic modification, land use, organic labeling—when our teacher assigned us an article about beef. The article explained the following process: the U.S. government subsidizes corn, so we feed it to our cows, because corn is cheap and fattens the cows up quickly. Cows are biologically designed to eat grass, so their livers are unable to process the corn. The cows' livers would actually explode if they were permitted to grow to full maturity, but we slaughter them first. This, combined with their living in close quarters and wading in their own feces, causes the cows to get ill often, so we feed them a con-stant stream of antibiotics, a practice that strengthens bacterial strains such as E. coli. Roughly 78 percent of cows raised for beef undergo this process. Similarly nauseating practices are used to raise chickens, turkeys, and pigs, 99 percent, 97 percent, and 95 percent of which, respectively, come from factory farms. Nowadays, these details are less than shocking. Movies such as Food, Inc. and Super Size Me, as well as books such as The Omnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation have raised consciousness, if not much action, on the topic of our food system. But, for me, it was a new story.
Flashpoint in Health-Care Reform
Authors: Skocpol Theda
Published: March 2012

Health care is an explosive flashpoint in U.S. politics this year more than ever. By 2013, Americans will either be headed, however slowly and fitfully, toward virtually universal access to decent health care or most of us will be struggling to use dwindling public vouchers to purchase ever more expensive private insurance. These alternate futures reflect what will happen if there is a Republican takeover of the presidency and Congress in January 2013 compared to what is likely if Barack Obama secures re-election in November 2012 or if Democrats have control of at least one chamber of Congress.
Germany, Far And Near
Authors: Birnbaum Norman
Published: March 2012

At first glance, Germany appears, economically, to be quite unusually successful. Despite the budgetary and financial crises affecting the other nations of the European Union, the German unem-ployment rate is declining. It has a positive export balance, and its own budgetary deficit is shrinking due to increases in national income and tax revenues. Indeed, the other European nations expect a relatively prosperous Germany to take more financial responsibility for the Union as a whole—a view not supported by a German majority. That majority thinks that the German welfare state, with health insurance and retirement pensions and considerable investment in culture and education as well as material infrastructure, is exclusively a national achievement. Having recently spent billions on domes-tic income transfers (from West to East after reunification in 1990), the German citizenry prefers to keep its money in German pockets. Disdain for Eastern and Southern Europeans serves as a solvent, washing away attention to internal differences in income and life chances that might otherwise move to the center of German politics. A truly yellow national popular press, television commentators as clueless as those we know here, and rigid professors of economics insist on austerity as the one true path to economic salvation. Austerity is prescribed not only for other Europeans, but for those Germans so improvident as not to belong to the upper income groups.
Another History
Authors: Katznelson Ira
Published: March 2012

Michael Kazin's bracing intervention asks us to consider why, despite circumstances of rising inequality and ample sources of discontent, it is the Right, not the Left, that has more effectively mobi-lized populist instincts and possibilities. His thoughtful historical answer is marked by an internal tension. Kazin ends by calling on the Left to "stop mourning" and "start organizing," but as his analytical history portrays a Left without adequate assets, one must wonder whether his call to arms is a form of wishful thinking. From where might the Left's initiatives come after a lost half-century? Persuasive answers to this pressing question will not be found, I believe, unless some features that he does not discuss are given more prominence.
Nature as an Ally: An Interview with Wendell Berry
Authors: Leonard Sarah
Published: March 2012

Each generational wave of environmental concern seems to lap at Wendell Berry's doorstep. He gave up teaching and writing in New York in the sixties to return to Kentucky, establishing a small farm at Lanes Landing near Port Royal, and dedicating himself to writing about the roots of the life he leads there. Readers have sought his inspiration to overcome the incessant churning of environmental destruction and industrial food production. Berry embodies a certain sort of alternative. When I arrived at Lanes Landing, I knew that many seekers had come before me to put a face to the writing, and to see this life for themselves.
Indebted
Authors: Luban Daniel
Published: March 2012

As recently as a year ago, the anthropologist David Graeber was well respected within his academic discipline but little-known outside of it. His sole brush with public notoriety had come in 2005, when Yale controversially refused to renew his teaching contract for reasons that Graeber and his supporters linked to his anarchist politics and outspoken activism. When his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years was released in July 2011, there was little to suggest that it had in any way captured the zeitgeist.
Food and the Body Politic
Authors: Leonard Sarah
Published: March 2012

Americans are in the midst of a food-consciousness revival: on television, in the mouth of the First Lady, in endless articles celebrating urban agriculture can be found a sudden enthusiasm for the politically and, perhaps, spiritually curated dinner table. In this special section, writers explore the perilous state of food and food politics in America and a wide range of responses on the Left. Marion Nestle, in her essay on the farm bill, describes how the existing policy disaster came to be, along with the relationship between Reagan-era deregulation and the obesity epidemic. Mark Engler describes both the successes and coopting of the strands of left-wing responses—buying organic, eating local, and agitating for fair trade—and asks, "What's a radical to eat?" Laurie Woolever uncovers the kind of labor exploitation endemic to the elite dining experience. Karen Bakker Le Billon compares American to French school lunches, unpacking the relationship between food and citizenship. Juliana DeVries explores vegetarianism and the politics of everyday life.
Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements
Authors: Sitrin Marina
Published: March 2012

This essay puts forward the basic premises around which the Occupy movements in the United States are organized, locates the movement globally, argues that the movements themselves are the ones that should determine their own success, and then distinguishes these positions from those that Michael Kazin puts forward in his article, "The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Populist Left." Kazin argues that the way to determine if the Occupy movements will be successful is if they articulate "what a better country would look like and what it would take to get there." This, however, is the wrong way to evaluate the Occupy movements. The intention of the thousands of assemblies taking place around the United States, as well as in Greece and Spain, where I have been most recently, is to open spaces for people to voice their concerns and desires—and to do so in a directly democratic way. These movements emerged in response to a growing crisis, the heart of which is a lack of democracy. People do not feel represented by the governments that claim to speak in their name. The Occupy movements are not based on creating either a program or a political party that will put forward a plan for others to follow. Their purpose is not to determine "the" path that a particular country should take but to create the space for a conversation in which all can participate and in which all can deter-mine together what the future should look like. At the same time, these movements are attempting to prefigure that future society in their present social relationships.
Hired Guns on Astroturf: How to Buy and Sell School Reform
Authors: Barkan Joanne
Published: March 2012

If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications of this truism have now taken hold in the market-modeled "education reform movement." As a result, the private funders and nonprofit groups that run the movement have overhauled their strategy. They've gone political as never before—like the National Rifle Association or Big Pharma or (ed re-formers emphasize) the teachers' unions.
Wolfe Tone’s Library: The United Irishmen and “Enlightenment”
Authors: Smyth Jim
Published: March 2012

In some obvious ways the republican ideology of the United Irishmen derived from “Enlightenment” thought. Self-consciously “modern” in outlook, their movement was also, however, heterogeneous, drawing political inspiration from varieties of sometimes surprising sources. Wolfe Tone’s “Library”—what we know he read—illustrates that variety, thus complicating any simple assumption of a straightforward causal relationship between enlightened ideas and revolutionary politics.
Introduction: Ireland and Enlightenment
Authors: Moore Sean D.
Published: March 2012

This article examines the literary relationship between the Presbyterian James Arbuckle and the Anglican Jonathan Swift, arguing that Enlightenment praxis was frequently impolite, antagonistic, and rude. It draws on Michael Waner’s notion of a “counterpublic” to isolate the rude Enlightenment which evolved in Ireland in the late 1720s and 1730s. It further contends that the counterpublic developed new modes of polite and sociable living—which we term the Enlightenment—while attracting criticism and distrust from scholastic writers who feared it and wanted to control it. This tension lay at the heart of the Arbuckle-Swift fracas.
Reading the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Ireland
Authors: Kennedy Máire
Published: March 2012

This paper is concerned with the availability of key Enlightenment texts to Irish readers of the late eighteenth century. Enlightenment ideas were transmitted in various ways, but none so tangible as through print. Books, periodicals and newspapers brought the words and ideas of Enlightenment thinkers to Irish readers, either through their own writings in the original language or in translation, through abstracts and interpretations, or even in simplified form. The analysis explores key Enlightenment authors and the dissemination of significant texts. Through booksellers’ catalogs, texts published abroad were circulated to Irish readers, and thanks to less expensive Irish reprints, major works were made available. Circulating libraries and reading rooms, and libraries of forward-looking institutions such as the Royal Irish Academy, allowed members to consult books and periodicals. Enlightenment texts in English, in French, and in translation from French and other European vernacular languages form part of this enquiry.
The Birth of Scottish Philosophy from the Golden Age of Irish Philosophy
Authors: Berman David
Published: March 2012

This essay looks at the Irish contribution to eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy. Focusing especially on the philosophical work of Francis Hutcheson, but also of George Berkeley, I try to show why the Irish influence has been occluded, and how that influence has been more considerable than has usually been supposed. Hence I oppose the idea that Ireland was intellectually asleep or dozing during the eighteenth century, an idea expressed in the description of Trinity College Dublin as the “sleeping sister,” compared to Oxford and Cambridge, and in the song of Alexander Boswell, famously set to music by Beethoven, according to which the Irish pulse beats strongly when “war is the story or love is the theme,” but not in intellectual matters, where “the pure light of knowledge [is] slow.”
The Biter Bitten: Ireland and the Rude Enlightenment
Authors: Brown Michael
Published: March 2012

This article examines the literary relationship between the Presbyterian James Arbuckle and the Anglican Jonathan Swift, arguing that Enlightenment praxis was frequently impolite, antagonistic, and rude. It draws on Michael Waner’s notion of a “counterpublic” to isolate the rude Enlightenment which evolved in Ireland in the late 1720s and 1730s. It further contends that the counterpublic developed new modes of polite and sociable living—which we term the Enlightenment —while attracting criticism and distrust from scholastic writers who feared it and wanted to control it. This tension lay at the heart of the Arbuckle-Swift fracas.
“With Every Wish to Reconcile”: The Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Charles O’Conor of Belanagare (1796) and Religious Enlightenment in Ireland
Authors: Tsapina Olga A.
Published: March 2012

The Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the late Charles O’Conor, of Belanagare, Esq., M.R.I.A. (Dublin, 1796) is a first and so far the only book-length biography of the celebrated historian, antiquarian, and champion of Catholic emancipation, Charles O’Conor of Ballinagare (1710–1791). The author, the grandson and namesake of the great man, Dr. Charles O’Conor (1764–1828), portrayed his kinsman as the embodiment of Irish Catholicism, the ancestral faith that lay at the heart of Irish civilization and a religion that truly conformed to the Enlightenment ideals of peace, tolerance, and learning.
Sex Versus Class in Two British Trade Unions in the Early Twentieth Century
Authors: Hunt Cathy
Published: March 2012

At the start of the twentieth century, as women moved into traditionally male areas of industry, the "family wage" and the status of the craftsman came under increased scrutiny, leading men to question whether women should be driven from the factory or unionized. If the latter, questions arose as to how they were best organized and by whom. This article considers some of the debates surrounding the organization of women into two British trade unions before and during the First World War. It argues that tensions between the two—the mixed-sex Workers' Union and the single-sex National Federation of Women Workers—were, despite opinions stated by men in the labor movement, focusing on issues of sex and class, less to do with differences in organizational principles than with the insecurities of male workers. While looking at the women who organized for the two unions, this article also seeks to find out what encouraged women to become members.
Women Pharmacists in Twentieth-Century Senegal: Examining Access to Education and Property in West Africa
Authors: Patterson Donna A.
Published: March 2012

In the last forty years, the literature on African women's history has expanded dramatically. Despite such improvement, more studies on female professionals and female property owners are needed, especially with regard to examining the role of women who enter and prosper in medical fields that are considered "masculine," such as medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy. By focusing on the life histories of women pharmacists, this article situates their careers within the overall history of formal education and biomedical health care in mid-to-late twentieth century Senegal. This article illustrates that not only have women acquired property through formal mechanisms but they have also consolidated power through professional leadership positions. The history of female pharmacists in Senegal is central to an understanding of the health sector, especially since, in Senegal, pharmacists are at the forefront of biomedical care.
Lords, Wives, and Vassals in the Roman de Silence
Authors: Tanner Heather
Published: March 2012

In the contrasting lives and fates of the rulers, husbands, vassals, and wives, and through the use of ambiguity and the manipulation of gender stereotypes in the Roman de Silence, Heldris of de Cornüalle offers a model of political and personal lordship which is founded upon consultation, consent, and self-restraint. When superiors, be they lords or husbands, provide an environment for the sharing of wisdom, both home and court nurture loyalty, good service, true liberality, and peace in vassals and wives. While Heldris's portrayal of the characteristics of good lordship is in many senses conventional, his hero(ine) and the parallels he draws between lordship and marriage affirm a very unconventional notion that women should play an active role in both governance and marriage.
The Intimacies of Bondage: Female Indigenous Servants and Slaves and Their Spanish Masters, 1492-1555
Authors: van Deusen Nancy
Published: March 2012

In early colonial Latin America many of the women who had been distributed as war booty, taken in village raids, or illegally branded as slaves became the partners of Spanish men. This article privileges these severely compromised historical subjects to consider how relations of violence and intimacy formed an integral part of their lives. An analysis of notarial and parish records reveals that deracinated women in bondage maintained intimate family ties—sometimes over great distances—despite continual vulnerabilities and legal restrictions. Intimacies involved sexual and other forms of bodily, material, and emotional expression and knowledge. This article questions the usefulness of definitions of "family" based largely on Spanish genealogical models and it also exposes the historiographic gender gap in Latin American colonial history between the "invasion" (Part One) and "early colonial settlement" (Part Two) periods which has stigmatized non-elite indigenous women for so long.
Fashioning Freedom: Slave Seamstresses in the Atlantic World
Authors: Weaver Karol K.
Published: March 2012

In the eighteenth-century French Atlantic world, masters and mistresses sometimes sent their enslaved seamstresses to Europe to learn the latest fashion trends; other seamstresses resided in colonial towns and they moved about freely as they traveled to the linen markets or to the homes of their clients. In addition, skilled seamstresses often negotiated for compensation especially when such slaves were leased to other men and women. Enslaved seamstresses also occupied the top echelons of the slave hierarchy. Slaves involved in the preparation of cloth practiced occupational sabotage—they struck out at their masters using the tools of their trade. These characteristics—mobility, the ability to make money, a privileged position in the slave hierarchy, and occupational sabotage—often translated to freedom. Male slaves most often possessed these qualities; enslaved women, burdened doubly with field work and home work, did not. Hence, as enslaved seamstresses sewed, they also fashioned freedom.
Defining Women's Sickness and Work: Female Friendly Societies in England, 1780-1830
Authors: Rusnock Andrea A. , Dietz Vivien E.
Published: March 2012

This article explores how women defined work in relation to illness and childbearing circa 1800 through an analysis of the rules of English female friendly societies. These mutual aid organizations, established and run by women for women, provided financial benefits to sick members. Their rules defined illness in functional terms as the inability to work. They also reveal how women ascribed value to both paid labor and unpaid domestic duties (childcare and housework) at a time when political economists devalued housework and more generally marginalized women's work. Rather than distinguishing between wage and unpaid labor, societies placed both on a continuum of daily life and toil. The variations among rules—particularly striking in their treatment of housework, pregnancy, childbirth, and the involvement of philanthropists—underscore the complications women faced and solutions they created to safeguard their earnings as well as the economic viability of their societies.
The New “Toy Department”?: A Case Study on Differences in Sports Coverage between Traditional and New Media
Authors: Whiteside Erin , Yu Nan , Hardin Marie
Published: March 2012

Sports journalism is at a crossroads; sports blogs and new media have become prime news sources and destinations for fans seeking content about their favorite teams. New media producers, and especially bloggers, however, may operate with different standards and practices than those in traditional sports media. This research uses a content analysis that compares new media and traditional media coverage on a single, major story: the 2009 announcement of major league baseball star Manny Ramirez’ 50-game suspension for using a banned substance. An analysis of stories found that new media outlets less often critically positioned Ramirez in the wider context of steroid use in baseball, instead opting for coverage that focused solely on him and often did not challenge his rationale for his positive drug test. The authors speculate that the new “toy department” reputation for sports coverage may be more applicable to the new media environment than to traditional sports journalists.
Dinosaurs Approaching Extinction: Local Television Sports Threatened by Job Losses, Cuts in Time and Changes in Newsroom Philosophy
Authors: Halliday Jeffrey A.
Published: March 2012

The current economic climate has led to substantial job cuts across the local television news industry, significantly impacting their sports departments. These cuts have led to reductions in the length and quality of sports coverage, and have increased anxiety among local television sports personnel. This study surveys local network-affiliated sports personnel nationwide, examining staff size, changes in coverage, working relationships between management and sports departments, and their perceptions of the future of local television sports.
Baseball’s Digital Disconnect: Trust, Media Credentialing, and the Independent Blogger
Authors: Holton Avery
Published: March 2012

Non-media affiliated sports blogs represent the largest contingent of sports blogs today, yet bloggers continue to face accessibility problems when it comes to coverage. Most professional sports teams employ media relations personnel who serve as gatekeepers, deciding who receives access and who does not. Such choices are often based on the abstract concept of trust, which this study focused on. The survey results from 126 professional baseball gatekeepers reinforce the fact that accessibility is most likely to restricted for bloggers, especially those not connected with a media outlet. However, this study sought to determine the differences, if any, between the levels of trust gatekeepers place in traditional news media and bloggers as well as how such disparities might impact accessibility.
Tiger Woods’ Apology and Newspapers’ Responses: A Study of Journalistic Antapologia
Authors: Husselbee L. Paul , Stein Kevin A.
Published: March 2012

This content analysis of newspaper treatment of Tiger Woods’ apology uses a hybrid of qualitative and quantitative methods to examine pre-apology coverage and journalistic antapologia (reaction to apology). Findings indicate that before and after the apology, journalists focused on Woods’ alleged character flaws, suggested that the apology did not take adequate responsibility, and questioned the motive for the apology. The tone of coverage was primarily neutral, although a significant amount of the coverage was unfavorable.
TV Sportscasters 1, Burnout 0: Resources Sideline the Job Stressors of Sports Broadcasters
Authors: Reinardy Scott
Published: March 2012

Using the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey, this study determined that about 75% of 272 U.S. television sportscasters were not experiencing a great deal of burnout. However, they did indicate that job demands, role overload and work-family conflict were predictors of burnout’s exhaustion variable. Conservation of Resources theory suggests that during difficult times individuals rely upon stored resources but demands can deplete those resources. In this study, job satisfaction and station support acted as resources.
Use of Social Networking Sites by Sports Fans: Implications for the Creation and Maintenance of Social Capital
Authors: Phua Joe
Published: March 2012

This study examined use of social networking sites (SNSs) by football fans, testing its impact on bridging and bonding social capital. Survey results (N=395) indicated that intensity of SNS usage had a stronger effect on bridging than bonding social capital. SNS usage also interacted with identification, collective self-esteem and satisfaction with life, to influence bridging social capital. SNS usage thereby enhanced fans’ online experience, allowing them to connect to other fans, while maintaining existing relationships.
Caught by the Web: The Case of Guardian News & Media’s Sports Desk
Authors: English Peter
Published: March 2012

Newspaper companies have faced a constant dilemma over which platform to publish news on first since online editions emerged. The London-based Guardian News & Media developed a predominantly web-first policy in 2007 and the strategy has continued to evolve with the integration of the Guardian , the Observer and < www.guardianunlimited.co.uk >. Since then the sports department has become a crucial area in publishing web-first content. This case study examines how the department used its news in 2009.
Bong Hits and Water Bottles: An Analysis of News Coverage of Athletes and Marijuana Use
Authors: Lewis Jonothan , Proffitt Jennifer M
Published: March 2012

This paper examines how sports media framed marijuana incidences involving athletes Michael Phelps, Michael Vick, Josh Howard, and Brad Miller. The analysis finds that Phelps’ actions were generally downplayed, as his youth, his Olympic success, and the perceived irrationality of marijuana laws were frequently used as excuses not afforded to his athletic peers. It concludes that race does affect how media cover athletes and that onfield success can affect how media frame stories involving athletes.
LeBron James and “The Decision”: An Empirical Examination of Image Repair in Sports
Authors: Brown Kenon A. , Dickhaus Josh , Long Mia C.
Published: March 2012

This study looks at LeBron James’ “The Decision” broadcast in light of the effects it had on James’ image and evaluates potential steps to his image repair. The researchers review the previous literature on apologia theory and image repair, discuss LeBron James’ “decision” in particular, and conduct an experiment that will illustrate which image repair tactic would be most beneficial for James in this case. Results found that using the mortification strategy significantly improved James’ image, while the shifting the blame and bolstering strategies hurt James’ image.
Prosodic Correlates of Sentences in Signed Languages: A Literature Review and Suggestions for New Types of Studies
Authors: Ormel Ellen , Crasborn Onno
Published: March 2012

This article contains a literature review of evidence of large prosodic domains that correspond to syntactic units such as a clause or a sentence. In particular, different phonetic nonmanual cues that may relate to clause or sentence boundaries are discussed in detail. On the basis of various ideas and views in the literature, we also describe two types of studies that may further our understanding of prosodic domains and their relation to sentence boundaries. The first type is a refinement of a recent series of perception studies in which signers' intuitions are elicited on break points in stretches of discourse. The second type exploits new visual signal-processing techniques to detect salient events in a video recording of signing. The article concludes with a discussion of how knowledge of the prosody of signed languages can be employed for language technology.
Toward a Phonetic Representation of Hand Configuration: The Thumb
Authors: Johnson Robert E. , Liddell Scott K.
Published: March 2012

In this article, we present a system for the representation of the configurations of the thumb in the hand configurations of signed languages and for the interactions of the thumb with the four fingers proper. The configuration of the thumb is described as a componential combination of the descriptions of thumb opposition, abduction of the CM joint, and extension of the MCP and DIP joints. Interaction with the other fingers is described as a relationship between specific surfaces of the thumb and specific surfaces of the fingers involved. This is the fourth of several papers that describe the authors' complete approach to the phonetic representation of signed languages. One paper will appear in each successive number of Sign Language Studies until the series is completed. These papers deal with the topics of segmentation, hand configuration, placement, orientation, representation of analogical space, and phonological alternations.
ASL Discourse Strategies: Chaining and Connecting-Explaining across Audiences
Authors: Quinto-Pozos David , Reynolds Wanette
Published: March 2012

This study takes advantage of a novel methodology—the use of a single culturally-meaningful text written in English and presented to different audiences in ASL—to examine the ways in which Deaf native signers utilize contextualization strategies in order to match the perceived linguistic and informational needs of an audience. We demonstrate, through close examination of the ASL text in comparison with the English source text, that signers use contextualization techniques (Gumper, 1982), which are discourse strategies that support the construction of meaning. We suggest that two strategies for supporting communication in ASL could be labeled contextualization cues: chaining (Humphries and MacDougall 1999/2000) and what we refer to as connecting-explaining . Both contextualization strategies appear throughout all of the ASL texts, though connecting-explaining is much more prevalent; it appears, on average, once every ten seconds with most audiences. This study of contextualization contributes to our knowledge of ASL discourse strategies and has implications for various professionals, including educators of Deaf children, signedlanguage linguists, signed-language interpreters, and interpreting educators.
Shared Thinking Processes with Four Deaf Poets: A Window on "the Creative" in "Creative Sign Language"
Authors: West Donna , Sutton-Spence Rachel
Published: March 2012

This article discusses a new way of thinking about analyzing sign-language poetry. Rather than merely focusing on the product, the method involves observing the process of its creation. Recent years have witnessed increasing literary and linguistic analysis of sign-language poetry, with commentaries on texts and performances being set within and drawing on a range of disciplines and analytical techniques. However, attention has so far been paid to the texts and performances rather than to the process of their creation. While working with four of the UK's most prolific sign-language poets, exploring and trying to understand more about British Sign Language (BSL) poetry, we became increasingly interested in the creative processes that occur and emerge in the composition itself. We decided to give them a task related to creative anthropomorphism and asked them to think "out loud" about the process as they created their compositions. We took our lead from think-aloud protocols, which have been used extensively in studies of cognitive processes and knowledge acquisition to understand how we solve problems (; ; ). We invited the poets to reflect upon and share with each other how they tackle a particular challenging aspect that is often incorporated in sign-language poems. This shared thinking process enabled them to explore anthropomorphic concepts together and jointly to create poetic examples, while also giving us insight into the processes of task completion (rather than only its final product).
No Dummies: Deafness, Baseball, and American Culture
Authors: Edwards R. A. R.
Published: March 2012

This article begins by examining the historical and social factors that led to 1901 being the "deafest" year in major league baseball history with four deaf players. In particular, the author discusses the career of William Ellsworth "Dummy" Hoy, a deaf man from Ohio who became the most celebrated deaf player in history and explores the reasons why he is not more celebrated in the mainstream culture.
Dictionaries of African Sign Languages: An Overview
Authors: Schmaling Constanze H.
Published: March 2012

This article gives an overview of dictionaries of African sign languages that have been published to date most of which have not been widely distributed. After an introduction into the field of sign language lexicography and a discussion of some of the obstacles that authors of sign language dictionaries face in general, I will show problems related to sign language dictionary making in Africa in particular. In the main part of this article I show who produced these dictionaries, why and for whom they were produced, how data was collected, and I compare their content and their structures.
Agitating the Powers of Habit: Towards a Volatile Politics of Thought
Authors: Bissell David
Published: March 2012

This paper capitalizes on the resurgence of interest in habit within social and political theory as a key concept of our time, following the recent translation and uptake of the work of Félix Ravaisson, to push our understandings of the irreducible vitality and vulnerability of bodies. It seeks to intervene within debates on the habit-body by challenging the way in which the transitions that habit gives rise to are conceptualized. Many theorizations of the habit-body have tended to stress its ever-evolving, adaptive, affective capacities for subtle alteration and gradual, incremental change. However I argue that this lends itself to an image of the habit-body that prioritizes coherence, calculation and proficiency over other more erratic and unpredictable transitions that habit might give rise to. In response, and drawing on Borges’ short story The Zahir as its empirical lure, rather than understanding volatility as something that habit works to quiesce, this paper seeks to enroll volatility into an image of the habit-body by articulating its agitative and destructive tendencies. It does this by proffering obsession as a specific mode of habit that exhibits these tendencies towards volatility, in order to demonstrate how habit participates in some of the more unstable, precarious and heterogeneous modulations of contemporary life. Capitalizing on the ways through which habit refocuses debates on ‘distributed agency’, drawing attention to the volatilities inherent to habit helps us not only to dismantle ideas of the sovereign self, but in doing so, pluralizes the event and performance of subjectivities. This forces us to conceptualize the relations between thought, will and responsibility in a way that rethinks a radical politics through a revolution of the body over that of the mind.
Sula and the Sociologist: Toni Morrison on American Biopower after Civil Rights
Authors: Santori Gregg
Published: March 2012

This paper examines Toni Morrison’s politics of maternal violence and inter-civilizational contact in her novel Sula. Sula ends with a chapter entitled “1965”; I therefore take the entire story to be a rebuttal to the 1965 Moynihan Report and the normative sociology the Report represents: specifically the pathology the Report’s attaches to matriarchal families and its calls for cultural and behavioral normalization. I conclude by claiming that Sula’s figurative treatment of maternal violence and racial uplift—represented by fire and water—suggests a preference for a truly political relationship between black and white Americans over the increasingly moral, disciplinary, and bio-political relationship the Report epitomizes.
Heroic Identifications: Or, “You Can Love Me Too – I am so Like the State”
Authors: Anker Elisabeth
Published: March 2012

“Heroic Identifications” examines the American public’s willingness to affirm expansions of state power they supposedly protest. It argues that in the post-9/11 era, Americans who legitimated violent and impinging state actions may have done so as an expression of their own individual power. Legitimation stemmed from individual identifications with state power, as if state action was an extension of individual action and an expression of individual freedom. Violent unilateralism modeled an autonomy denied to individuals who are shaped both by daily experiences of unfreedom in a neoliberal era, and by the expectations of individual mastery generated within the terms of liberal individualism. Figurations of individualism thus set the conditions for the expansion of state power through a fantasy that this power could be an extension of each individual’s own. Engaging Sigmund Freud’s work on identification, this essay examines how individuals could identify with state action in an effort to experience freedom. It concludes that support for post-9/11 state power reflected a disheartening form of contemporary political subject whose quest to experience freedom is obstructed by the very methods it draws upon in its efforts.
The Race of a More Perfect Union: James Baldwin, Segregated Memory and the Presidential Race
Authors: Brendese P.J.
Published: March 2012

The 2008 U.S. presidential race dramatized the connection between America’s segregated memory and its segregated polity. This essay makes the case that James Baldwin offers valuable insight into the legacy of segregated memory in contemporary racial politics in general, and the presidential race in particular. To do so, I provide a brief historical overview of segregated memory since the Civil War, and offer an analysis of Baldwin’s account of the conscious and unconscious dimensions of memory and the impact of myth-histories on African Americans and whites. This is followed by an exposition of Baldwin’s approach to de-segregating memory, as well as the tensions and correspondences between his contributions to addressing mnemonic divides and those of Barack Obama in his “More Perfect Union” speech on race. The essay closes by outlining the political relevance of the theoretical tensions between Baldwin and Obama in an era alleged to have been made “post-racial” by the first black president.
Unexpected Opposition: Independence and the 1809 Leva de Vagos in the Province of Caracas
Authors: Gonzalez-Silen Olga
Published: March 2012

In late 1809 and early 1810, die city of Caracas witnessed an extraordinary spectacle as over 350 men were marched into its prisons. Local provincialauthorities had apprehended these men as part of aleva de vagos, a campaign to coercively recruit vagrants into the army. Such recruitment campaigns were neither novel nor particularly controversial in the late Bourbon period. However, Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 had unhinged the Spanish world, inspiring a profound re-examination of values and traditions. In this context, this new leva generated an unexpected opposition tliat stunned the new captain general of Venezuela, field marshal Vicente Emparan y Orbe. The opposition, which was led by the Caracas audiencia—the province's highest court—ostensibly questioned the legality of die procedures being used to validate charges of vagrancy, but beneath the surface, the resistance reflected a broadbased coalition dedicated to the defense of a status quo that was unraveling under the twin forces of Napoleon and the Junta Central. In this essay, I argue that the Leva de Vagos of 1809 contributed decisively to the overthrow of Emparan, paving the way for the creation of the Junta of Caracas in April 1810.
Indians in the Lobby: Newspapers and the Limits of Andean Cosmopolitanism, 1896–1930
Authors: Hiatt Willie
Published: March 2012

JOSH: So there are these two Indians in the lobby … C. J.: Yeah? (waiting for the punch line) JOSH: No, that's not the beginning of a joke. I'm saying, … there are these two Indians in the lobby.

Modernizers in Cuzco, Peru, ushered in the twentieth century by exalting newspapers as a universal vehicle for peace, prosperity, and progress. Although the city stood at more than 11,000 feet above sea level in the remote and rugged southern highlands, editors, public officials, and intellectuals were convinced that small but plentiful local newspapers contributed to a robust international public sphere. The writer who in 1910 lauded the press as die “aurora of salvation of the people” that “propagates itself through time and distance to keep redemptive thought alive” was hardly alone in his cosmopolitan idealism or emancipatory zeal. In the decades to come, a flood of pretentious self-tributes conveyed the idea that newspapers were almost divinely appointed to propagate a modern liberal project.