bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Membrane Components of Crustacean Neuromuscular Systems.
Authors: OZEKI MASAHIRO , FREEMAN ALAN R. , GRUNDFEST HARRY
Published: February 2012

The present work provides additional evidence for the occurrence of a number of electrogenic components in crustacean and particularly crayfish muscle fibers. It demonstrates that these different components are independent. One or another can be eliminated or modified by various procedures without affecting the rest. However, interactions can occur between the different components. The coupling may be effected by the changes in membrane potential which result from changes in ionic permeabilities or by changes in the membrane conductance. Some interactions of such couplings which can perturb electrophysiological measurements are described and analyzed.
SBAL: a practical tool to generate and edit structure-based amino acid sequence alignments
Authors: Wang Conan K. , Broder Ursula , Weeratunga Saroja K. , Gasser Robin B. , Loukas Alex , Hofmann Andreas
Published: February 2012

Summary: Both alignment generation and visualization are important processes for producing biologically meaningful sequence alignments. Computational tools that combine reliable, automated and semi-automated approaches to produce secondary structure-based alignments with an appropriate visualization of the results are rare. We have developed SBAL, a tool to generate and edit secondary structure-based sequence alignments. It is easy to install and provides a user-friendly interface. Sequence alignments are displayed, with secondary structure assignments mapped to their corresponding regions in the sequence by using a simple colour scheme. The algorithm implemented for automated and semi-automated secondary structure-based alignment calculations shows a comparable performance to existing software.

Availability and implementation: SBAL has been implemented in Java to provide cross-platform compatibility. SBAL is freely available to academic users at http://www.structuralchemistry.org/pcsb/. Users will be asked for their name, institution and email address. A manual can also be downloaded from this site. The software, manual and test sets are also available as supplementary material.

Contact:  conan.wang@griffith.edu.au

Supplementary information:  Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Research, Best Practices, and Evidence-based Group Work
Authors: Macgowan Mark J.
Published: February 2012

Both the methods used to study groups and discussions on the use of research in group work have advanced in the early 21st century. For example, statistical methods have been described that help address traditional limitations to group-based research (e.g., clustering problems resulting in nonindependence of observations). In addition, there have been discussions of the systematic utilization of best available evidence in groups, called evidence-based or evidence-informed group work. Recent books and special journal issues have been dedicated to helping practitioners to integrate best available evidence into practice. This entry provides a comprehensive list of sources related to group work research, best practices, and evidence-based group work, with an emphasis on publications since 2000. The entry begins with material on the utilization and application of research by practitioners. Specifically, there is a presentation of standards for the practice of group work, followed by sections on evidence-based group work and on practice evaluation. These are followed by a section on conducting formal research on group work. The entry also includes a guide to the major group work journals.
Mahayana
Authors: Boucher Daniel
Published: February 2012

The origin, nature, organization, and influence of the collection of Buddhist movements subsumed under the label “Mahayana” (Great Vehicle) have long been a matter of scholarly and insider debate. The Mahayana is most essentially thought to be characterized by a commitment to the bodhisattva path along with an acceptance of the canonical authority of at least a certain number of Mahayana texts. Scholarly consensus has generally dated the appearance of this movement to roughly the 1st century bce, and, since the late 20th century, the finds of Mahayana texts in Gāndhārī Prakrit from northern Pakistan, datable to the first two centuries ce, makes this date all the more likely. These movements are generally believed to have started as a loose confederation of small monastic fraternities within mainstream environments and to have remained very much a minority for the first several hundred years. The Mahayana appears prominently in the epigraphical and art-historical record around the 5th century ce and becomes increasingly mainstreamed within Indian monastic culture thereafter. Much of its most profound influence, however, took place outside India, particularly in Tibet and East Asia.
Buddhism and Islam
Authors: Elverskog Johan
Published: February 2012

Although Buddhists and Muslims have interacted for more than a millennium across the length and breadth of Eurasia, there has been relatively little scholarly work on this particular religious encounter. Why scholars have overlooked this meeting is certainly an important question; however, it is one that is beyond the scope of this bibliography. Nevertheless, one can note that scholarship often creates artificial boundaries of study that obscure the messy realities of lived human experience. Indeed, it is presumably on account of various scholarly frameworks—such as nation-states, area studies, linguistic specializations, and even disciplines—that the history of Buddhist–Muslim interaction has largely been ignored. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, because these conceptual frameworks have come under increasing scrutiny, new chapters of human history are beginning to be explored, and one of these is the meeting between the worlds of Buddhism and Islam. Work in this field is still very much in its infancy, and thus what follows is not a conventional annotated bibliography surveying centuries of scholarship; rather, it is simply an overview of some of the available scholarly literature on the meeting of Buddhists and Muslims in both the past and present across various regions of Asia.
Buddhist Art and Architecture on the "Silk Road"
Authors: Wang Michelle C.
Published: February 2012

The “Silk Roads,” a term first coined by the German geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877, refers to the east–west overland trading routes crossing Central Asia that for centuries served as the conduit for the transmission not only of consumer goods such as silk textiles, but also of religions, including Buddhism. One terminus of the Silk Road lay in the Mediterranean, crossing through Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran, and Turkmenistan to Kashgar in present-day Xinjiang Autonomous Uighur Region of China. The Silk Road then split into northern and southern routes, skirting the forbidding Taklamakan Desert and reuniting at the Chinese military garrison of Dunhuang in Gansu Province, from which point the route continued further inland in China to the capital cities of Chang’an (present-day Xi’an) and Luoyang. Archaeological discoveries document the presence of trade from the Neolithic period. However, the earliest Chinese monk pilgrim to travel overland from China to India was Faxian, who departed in 399 ce on a fifteen-year journey. His travels paved the way for countless numbers of monks, among them Xuanzang, who embarked in 629 ce on a seventeen-year journey. The Buddhist sites situated in present-day Afghanistan, Xinjiang Autonomous Uighur Region, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and Gansu Province continued the traditions of rock-cut architecture first introduced in India. In addition to housing monastic communities, the rock-cut sites of the Silk Road also functioned as pilgrimage sites that were the recipients of patronage from local elites, traders, and Chinese rulers. The sites that have received the most attention, particularly from Western scholars, have been the Mogao cave shrines in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, and the Kizil cave shrines in Kucha, Xinjiang Autonomous Uighur Region. In addition to the mural paintings and sculptures of these rock-cut sites, Mogao Cave 17, commonly known as the “library cave,” contained tens of thousands of paintings and manuscripts that were sealed c. 1000 ce and that were dispersed in the early 20th century into library and museum collections around the world.
Tibetan Book of the Dead
Authors: Kemp Casey Alexandra
Published: February 2012

The most famous work of Tibetan literature known to the West, the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol), has become the normative source for European and American popular understandings of Tibetan Buddhist conceptions of death. Numerous translations, commentaries, and comparative studies continue to be produced both by scholars and adherents of the tradition. Walter Y. Evans-Wentz first coined the title Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927 with his edition of Kazi Dawa Samdup’s selected translation of The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State (Bar do thos grol chen mo). This collection of texts was originally compiled in the 17th century by Rigdzin Nyima Dragpa (b. 1647–d. 1710) and has since been redacted in multiple editions. Rigdzin Nyima Dragpa’s collection is drawn from Karma Lingpa’s (b. c.1350) revealed treasure (gter ma), known as the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities: A Profound Sacred Teaching; A Natural Liberation through [Recognition of] Enlightened Intention (Zab chos zhi khro dgongs pa rang grol). This cycle of Nyingma (rNying ma) teachings is based on the mandala scheme of the 108 Peaceful and Wrathful Deities (zhi khro) according to the Guhyagarbha Tantra system. This treasure-anthology was allegedly authored in the 8th century by Padmasambhava, who is considered one of the originators of the Nyingma tradition. Although the texts were initially disseminated through this lineage from the 15th century onward, the compilation, particularly in its condensed version as the Bardo Thödol, has since also been transmitted through the Kagyu (bKa’ brgyud) Buddhist lineage in Tibet and has been found to be used by adherents of various sects of Tibetan Buddhism. The Bardo Thödol is intended to be used in a funerary ritual context as an instruction manual for an individual to recognize the signs of impending death, to traverse the intermediate state (bar do) between death and rebirth, and to guide one’s consciousness to a favorable next life. These instructions provide detailed descriptions of visions and other sensory experiences that one encounters when dying and during the postmortem state. The texts are meant to be read out loud to the deceased by the living to encourage the consciousness to realize the illusory or dreamlike nature of these experiences and thus to attain liberation through this recognition.
Pragmatics
Authors: Green Mitchell
Published: February 2012

Pragmatics is a branch of the philosophy of language as well as a field of linguistics. Pragmatics is to be distinguished from pragmatism, which is a doctrine concerning the nature of truth and knowledge. Whereas proponents of pragmatism are pragmatists, students of pragmatics are pragmaticists. Imagine a communicative interaction among two or more parties. Pragmaticists generally study that part of what is communicated that is left over after the conventionally determined, literal meaning of any words used has been subtracted out. (This is in contrast to what remains after the conventionally permitted, literal meaning has been subtracted out—see The Pragmatic Determination of What is Said) In part because pragmatics falls within the ambit of linguistics, it has an empirical, indeed an experimental dimension. Topics comprising pragmatics include speech acts (a special case of which are performatives), implicature, indexicals, presupposition, speaker meaning, and the pragmatic determination of what is said. A topic that has recently received intensive discussion and is of obvious importance to pragmatics is the very delineation of semantics from pragmatics. Other topics that have received less extensive scrutiny include expression and expressiveness and the relation of illocutionary force to semantic content and grammatical mood. In addition to the topics comprising the field, the value of pragmatics as an explanatory enterprise may be gauged by its ability to illuminate familiar communicative phenomena: among these are metaphor, irony, the significance of epithets and other “charged” language, the distinction between lying to and misleading an audience, facial expression, communicative properties of intonation, and so-called pragmatic paradoxes. Theoretical discussions of pornography have also been influenced by pragmatics. Aside from linguistics, logical theory also has a stake in pragmatics insofar as the notion of good reasoning cannot be captured simply with the notion of soundness. (A circular argument, for instance, can be sound.) Further, on the strength of certain ways of drawing the pragmatics/semantics boundary, some phenomena traditionally in the purview of semantics have been construed as pragmatic instead: among these are Frege’s distinction between sense and reference and the phenomenon of non-referring proper names. Certain semantic strategies, then, have a stake in pragmatics.
Modularity
Authors: Machery Edouard
Published: February 2012

One of the liveliest debates within cognitive science and the philosophy of psychology concerns the extent to which, and in which sense, the mind is modular. Several different notions of module have been developed over the years, and clarifying the weaker and stronger notions of module is an important, substantial philosophical project. A range of arguments has been conceived to show that modular processes subserve all cognitive competences, some of them, or none of them, and these need to be scrutinized with care. Of particular importance are, first, Fodor’s view that modules subserve only input systems (roughly, our senses) and linguistic systems, while nonmodular, domain-general processes subserve thinking and deciding; and, second, evolutionary psychologists’ massive modularity hypothesis, according to which cognition is modular through and through.
The Renaissance
Authors: King Margaret L.
Published: February 2012

The whole of the Oxford Bibliographies Renaissance and Reformation module is devoted to the period 1350–1650, one of the many possible time spans scholars use to denote the Renaissance era, and includes many entries pertaining to people, events, and movements associated with the Renaissance. This bibliography entry limits itself to the concept of the Renaissance: the monographs and articles that define it, debate its nature, and challenge its existence; general overviews of some aspects of the Renaissance; textbooks and sourcebooks suitable for classroom use; and journals and reference works useful for the exploration of the Renaissance as a whole. The concept of the Renaissance needs its own bibliography because its nature is not self-evident. The Renaissance does not have natural boundaries, as does Antiquity, which begins with the first civilizations and continues until the fall of Rome. Renaissance specialists do not agree on its chronological limits, although 1350 to 1650, or the somewhat longer period from Petrarch to Milton, is a designation with which many agree. Use of the term implies an interpretation of the nature of the Middle Ages, and the notion of a shift after 1300 from the main features of that era in the realms of culture, society, and politics. Most of those who employ the concept of the Renaissance see developments in thought and the arts as critical, but not as the sole elements in that transformation. Many medievalists have denied the existence of a Renaissance altogether, finding the roots of all its characteristic themes in the Middle Ages. Many scholars, especially of the later period (16th into the 18th centuries), prefer the term “early modern,” which seems to some more appropriately used when discussing European expansion, gender and sexuality, and even the modern state. But the editors of this Oxford Bibliographies module and most of its contributors find the concept of the Renaissance still to be indispensable, as denoting the era when, for the last time in the history of European civilization, the legacy of the Greco-Roman past was integrated with the firmly established Judeo-Christian one, thus reestablishing, on the threshold of modernity, its dual foundation.
Women Writing in English
Authors: Travitsky Betty
Published: February 2012

However much of a Renaissance early modern Englishwomen writers may, or may not, have experienced—a question raised in 1977 by Joan Kelly (“Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977], 137–164) and revisited in 2013 in a forum in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (8); see Trends in Modern Interpretation—their writing practices seem not to have been immediately affected by the coming of the book. Of over thirty-three thousand entries in A Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991), eighty-five have been assigned to women authors, or approximately 0.5 percent, and these titles appeared predominantly between 1545 and 1640. The dramatic increase in printed writings by women from 1641 to 1700 constitutes approximately 1.2 percent of the titles in print from a period in which fewer than seven hundred titles have been assigned to women of the over 120,000 recorded titles in Donald Goddard Wing’s Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1972–1988). These small numbers of works can be explained, in part, by relatively low literacy rates among women compared to men and by the disapproval of women’s expressing their thoughts in public(ation). With the fairly recent growth of research into manuscript writings by women, it seems indisputable that most early modern Englishwomen writers raised their voices in manuscript rather than in print and in what we now term private, noncanonical forms like letters and diaries. It also seems that most of those women who wrote poems or dramas or prose of traditional types circulated their writings in familial and social manuscript networks (a proportion suggested by recovered materials); scholars are turning increased attention to these manuscript writers and writings.
Epic and Romance
Authors: Looney Dennis
Published: February 2012

Epic and romance are distinct literary genres that poets combine in some of the most effective narrative poems of the early modern period, such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Critics refer to these sorts of poems variously as “romance” or “romantic epics” or “epic romances” or “chivalric epics” or “heroic poems,” with each designation emphasizing a slightly different part of, or way of looking at, the hybrid literary form. To simplify greatly, one might say that the focus of epic is war, whereas that of romance is love. Renaissance rewritings of epic often include catalogues of armies, elaborate battles, extended similes, and funeral games; in addition to love, romance narratives tend to focus on adventure, magic, disguise, and flight. The primary goal of Renaissance humanism, the pedagogical movement that began in Italy in the 14th century and spread out from there over the following centuries, was the revitalization of contemporary culture through the recuperation of antiquity. Classical epic was a genre that humanistically inspired poets were eager to adapt to modern literary culture to establish the value of their own respective vernacular traditions. Canonical models like Homer and Vergil, as well as more adversarial and disputed ones, such as Ovid, Lucan, and Statius, served well. There is a tradition of prose romances in antiquity, and there are many romance-like passages in classical epic, but when critics speak of the romance tradition that a poet like Ariosto used, they generally mean Arthurian romances or the “matter of Britain.”This was a vast body of work codified in literary form by Chrétien de Troyes in the 12th century, which was the inspiration for numerous romance works, prose and poetry, in different vernaculars from the medieval through the early modern period. The combination of epic and romance conventions and themes into a single literary work, then, is a fusion of elements of classical antiquity and literary medieval culture.
Rembrandt
Authors: Atkins Christopher
Published: February 2012

The son of a miller in Leiden, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn turned to art as a profession relatively late. While many began artistic training early in their youth, Rembrandt did not do so until after he had enrolled at the University of Leiden. Rembrandt then learned the rudiments of painting from Jacob van Swanenburgh before apprenticing for the renowned artist Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam. Familiarity with Lastman’s proclivity for well-wrought and researched representations of scenes from antiquity and the Bible provided Rembrandt with the tools to excel as a history painter. On his return to Leiden in 1626, Rembrandt shared a studio with Jan Lievens, who had studied with Lastman just a few years earlier. Together they inspired and propelled one another, attracting considerable attention in the process. Through the mediation of the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh, Rembrandt ventured into the larger market of Amsterdam and relocated to the city shortly thereafter, in 1632. While the bulk of Rembrandt’s early works can be categorized as history paintings, he quickly became an accomplished portraitist. Indeed, it was through portraiture that Rembrandt secured clients and established a market presence. It is likely that through his portrayal of Amsterdam patricians he landed prestigious commissions and sales for historical works. From the mid-1630s through the end of his career, Rembrandt produced history pieces and portraits concurrently. Perhaps as a result, many of his history paintings possess some qualities of portraiture while he also introduced multi-figured narrative strategies into his portraits. Rembrandt was a multimedia artist. In addition to painting, he was also an accomplished draftsman and printmaker. In drawings, Rembrandt searched for pictorial solutions to form and subject, though individual drawings rarely served as preparatory models for paintings. In prints, Rembrandt was the pre-eminent etcher of his time. Each etching is independent from his paintings and constituted an original work of art it its own right. Etchings also constituted a significant part of his business plan as they circulated his abilities widely, even beyond the borders of the Dutch Republic, and they were offered at lower costs than were his paintings, ensuring a wider market. In all media, Rembrandt is admired for the humanity of his representations and the boldness of his formal explorations.
Huguenots
Authors: Van Ruymbeke Bertrand
Published: February 2012

The Huguenots are French Calvinists. The word “huguenot” is an adaptation from eidgenossen, a Swiss German term meaning “confederates,” which was applied to the Genevans who rebelled against their lord in the early 16th century. This term is rarely used in contemporary French, the generic word protestant being widely used. Other terms used over the centuries have been “Lutherans” (luthériens) in the 16th century, “members of the self-styled reformed religion” (membres de la religion prétendue réformée) in the 17th century, and “new converts” or “new Catholics” (nouveaux convertis, nouveaux catholiques, or simply NCs) in the 18th. There are five periods in the history of the Huguenots: the Reformation and the French Wars of Religion (c. 1530s–1598; see Reformation in France and the Wars of Religion); the 17th century (1598–1685; see 17th-Century French Protestantism); the refuge or diaspora (c. 1680–1760s; see the Post-Revocation Diaspora); the 18th century (1685–1787; see 18th-Century French Protestantism); and the contemporary era (since the Revolution; see Contemporary French Protestantism). The 1550s were the formative years of French Protestantism. Then began a series of eight Wars of Religion (1562–1598) that preserved the throne to a Catholic monarch and condemned French Protestantism to a peripheral role in the history of France. In 1598 Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes at the end of the wars. This highly significant document guaranteed the Huguenots religious, economic, educational, judicial, political, and military rights. In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes after decades of harassment followed by violent repression. This led to a major exodus—roughly 200,000 individuals—of Huguenots to northern Europe and to a lesser extent to British North America and Dutch South Africa. The period that extends from the revocation to the Edict of Toleration of 1787 is referred to as le désert. Following the dislocation brought about by the exodus and the War of the Cévennes (a localized Huguenot rebellion in a mountainous region of southern France), the 18th century was marked by sporadic and regional persecution interspersed by periods of calm. First the edict then the Revolution and the Napoleonic years opened a permanent era of toleration and acceptance for the Huguenots. In contemporary France, even if at times they could be victims of virulent attacks from Catholic extremist pamphleteers, the Huguenots have enjoyed peace and prosperity—some of them even reaching high positions in the state—and have remained a small religious minority in a country increasingly secular.
Slavery in Africa
Authors: Reese Ty M.
Published: February 2012

Slavery is viewed as an ancient and universal institution and thus it can be found in a diversity of forms throughout Africa. During the period of the Atlantic world, slavery served multiple roles within Africa and provided a foundation for the transatlantic slave trade in that Europeans found slaves for sale within Africa. In many parts of Africa, land was held in common and therefore people’s ability to work the land, and their position within their society, related to the number of people whom they controlled. This patron-client system meant that patrons were always looking for more clients, both free and unfree, as a way to increase their power. The nature of this agricultural and political system made slavery and pawnship (debt peonage) a common system in Africa, yet it was a system that is hard to generalize about and one that possessed great differences from the African slavery that developed in the Americas. While the role of African slavery in the Americas has been more thoroughly studied, and is better known, than slavery in Africa, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and then its gradual abolition in the 19th century, had important consequences for slavery within Africa.
China's One-Child Policy
Authors: White Tyrene
Published: February 2012

In 1979 China’s “one-child-per-couple” policy, or one-child policy, was launched. The policy was part of a multifaceted reform program pursued by the new regime under Deng Xiaoping, and its goal was to limit young, childbearing-age couples to only one child or, failing that, two children. With a population of about 1 billion in 1980, China’s leaders were convinced that only a strict program of population control would make it possible for China to achieve its development goal of “modernization by the year 2000.” This radical social engineering effort was directly at odds with much of China’s reform policy, which saw the state begin to retreat from its pervasive role in every aspect of family and social life. By subjecting childbearing to direct state regulation—that is, claiming that the state had the right and obligation to decide who was allowed to have a child and when—childbearing was effectively “collectivized” at a time when the economy was heading the opposite direction. It is no surprise, then, that the progression of the one-child policy was followed very closely by scholars, journalists, and human rights activists. An impressive body of scholarship has been compiled on this topic, despite serious constraints on research in the 1980s and 1990s. Four national censuses and annual sample surveys have helped improve the quality of demographic data available, but data on policy implementation has been patchy. As a result, two types of studies are dominant: (a) comprehensive works that provide an overview of policy evolution, implementation, and outcomes and (b) case studies that provide more detailed analysis of local policy processes. A third category of scholarship explores the impact and consequences of enforcement, particularly a skewed sex ratio at birth and a rapidly aging population. The scholarship on the one-child policy reflects the nature of the topic, which is broadly interdisciplinary, and the policy has been of great interest not only to political scientists but also to sociologists, economists, anthropologists, historians, and demographers. The works included here bear witness to this breadth of scholarly interest.
Comparative Politics of North America
Authors: Smith Miriam
Published: February 2012

Comparative politics is a subfield of political science that compares the domestic politics of nation-states. In the current era of globalization, comparative politics often overlaps with the subfields of international relations or area studies (studies of a particular region of the globe). The comparative politics of North America, therefore, is the comparative study of the domestic politics of the three North American neighbors—the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It also extends to the politics of North America as a region, especially with respect to trade and economic links, immigration, the environment, and security. In addition, because Mexico is a developing country, while the United States and Canada are developed countries, comparative studies of domestic politics usually focus on US–Canada comparison, while the domestic politics of Mexico are often compared to other Latin American countries or considered as an element in Latin American area studies. The comparative politics of North America is a relatively new topic and has received greater interest since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993.
Federalism in the United States
Authors: Smith Troy
Published: February 2012

Federalism is one of America’s unique contributions to modern political systems. Generally, federalism refers to a political system that unites separate polities into an overarching political organization with protections to maintain the fundamental political integrity of each. This definition limits federalism to a specific governmental structure and emphasizes the state and sovereignty. Federalism is also understood as the institutionalization of relationships via a particular constitutional framework that facilitates autonomy, diversity, and equality among participants, in contrast to the subordinate relationships found in ordered, hierarchical, and centralized political structures and institutions. Federal structures commonly fragment authority and create overlapping jurisdictions to foster coordinative relationships. Federalism studies are interested in the causes and foundation of federal systems, what federal systems require to be self-reinforcing, how different units of government interact with each other and the public, and how federal institutions affect political outcomes, including fostering democratic values, diversity, and good policy.
Indigenous Rights and Governance in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand
Authors: Gover Kirsty
Published: February 2012

Indigenous rights are now a core part of the constitutional frameworks of the western settler states, including Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The recognition of specific group rights for indigenous peoples raises complex challenges for the political and legal theory of the liberal democracies. Notwithstanding the significant constitutional and historical differences between these three states, in the past several decades, all have embarked on processes of land claims settlement and official recognition of indigenous peoples. The resulting arrangements are designed to protect the distinctive identities of indigenous peoples, to give effect to historic agreements, and to restore indigenous rights to property, territory, and self-governance. Legal mechanisms include those giving effect to common-law aboriginal title rights, cultural rights and exemptions, self-governance rights, special representation rights, and nondiscrimination rights. In Canada and New Zealand, but not Australia, some indigenous rights are premised on historic treaties. Recognized indigenous rights are expressed in various provisions of public legislation (including, in Canada, the Constitution Act), in indigenous-state agreements on land claims and self-governance, in formal and informal agreements on local governance, and in official apologies. Literature on indigenous rights includes a small but important body of political theory exploring and critiquing the application of theories of cultural pluralism, a large field of secondary legal literature on country-specific arrangements, comparative work considering matters of transnational application in the western settler states, and a sizable body of work on anthropological and cultural theories of indigeneity. This bibliography is intended to provide a sample of commentary to guide researchers in forays into the rapidly developing field of indigenous rights and indigenous governance. There is a vast and growing body of commentary on the legal and political status of indigenous communities in the western settler states. This collection cannot hope to be comprehensive. The emphasis of this selection is on secondary legal sources and analysis and does not include reference to cases or legislation. Wherever possible, comparative works have been included, to show the development of transnational law and policy on indigenous peoples and the sharing of concepts across legal jurisdictions. Likewise, the bibliography has been designed to emphasize works on indigenous laws and institutions, and commentary by indigenous commentators.
Politics of West Africa
Authors: Ehrhardt David
Published: February 2012

Nigerian “419” scams, civil war violence in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the relatively recent traumas of colonial rule: all examples of the troubling features that people commonly associate with West African societies. At closer inspection, however, a more complex picture emerges. In this picture, West Africa boasts a historical legacy of one of the most developed precolonial forms of statehood on the continent, the Sokoto Caliphate, as well as contemporary examples of ambitious regional integration. Moreover, from the arid Sahel to the voluptuous greens of the Niger Delta, the region contains unparalleled riches in resources and biodiversity. Diversity also extends into the social realm, with the complex and myriad ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities that weave and maintain West Africa’s social, political, and economic fabrics. From grinding poverty to stupendous resource riches, and from civil wars to tourist beaches, West Africa is thus a region of contrasts and the politics of the region, understood to include all actions and institutions involved in the governance of West Africa, reflect these contrasts. This article presents a selection of excellent academic texts on this diverse and fascinating realm of African politics. It discusses the themes of electoral politics, the nature of the state, and democratization alongside the impact of ethnic, religious, class, and gender identities and the politics of collective violence, in an attempt to do justice to the disciplinary and thematic heterogeneity of the academic works it presents.
Public Opinion and Public Policy in Advanced Democracies
Authors: Wlezien Christopher
Published: February 2012

The representation of public opinion in public policy is of obvious importance in representative democracies. While public opinion is important in all political systems, it is especially true where voters elect politicians; after all, opinion representation is a primary justification for representative democracy. Not surprisingly, a lot of research addresses the connection between the public and the government. Much of the work considers “descriptive representation”—whether the partisan and demographic characteristics of elected politicians match the characteristics of the electorate itself. This descriptive representation is important but may not produce actual “substantive representation” of preferences in policy. Other work examines the positions of policymakers. Some of this research assesses the roll call voting behavior of politicians and institutions. The expressed positions and voting behavior of political actors do relate to policy but are not the same things. Fortunately, a good amount of research analyzes policy. With but a handful of exceptions noted below, this research focuses on expressed preferences of the public, not their “interests.” That is, virtually all scholars let people be the judges of their own interests, and they assess the representation of expressed opinion no matter how contrary to self-interest it may seem.
Transitional Justice
Authors: Murphy Matt
Published: February 2012

Transitional justice (sometimes called retroactive justice) is broadly defined as policies undertaken by a new regime to rectify or ameliorate injustices perpetrated by the previous regime. It differs from regular “justice” in that it spans different legal or constitutional structures resulting from regime transitions. Its contemporary meaning is usually slightly narrower, referring almost exclusively to policies enacted in an unconsolidated or newly democratic regime to address injustices of the previous authoritarian regime. The primary actors implementing transitional justice are states and international organizations, although increasingly the roles of actors such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), villages, and private citizens are considered as well. The relevant injustices are often understood first as human rights violations, such as war crimes, genocide, torture, or disappearances, but transitional justice policies can also be aimed at a much wider range of targets, such as more conventional legal crimes, political decisions, bureaucratic crimes, corruption, collaboration, and socioeconomic injustices. The range of policies falling under the rubric of transitional justice includes criminal trials, purges, screening, truth commissions, amnesties, reparations, compensation, rehabilitation, apologies, property restitution, memorialization, and policies aimed at reconciliation. Although there is a long history of literature on these issues, there was no field called “transitional justice” until the 1980s. Since then it has developed across all the main subfields of political science, primarily international relations, comparative politics, and political theory, and less so in American politics. Much analysis comes in the form of collections of case studies and is descriptive or normative, concerning what policies are necessary, appropriate, or beneficial in what contexts. Rapidly expanding since the early 2000s has been empirical and comparative work on the causes of and constraints on transitional justice policies; the impacts of policy choices at political, social, and psychological levels; and the effects of the process of implementation on outcomes.
Workers’ Politics in China
Authors: Blecher Marc
Published: February 2012

Workers’ politics in China has attracted a great deal of academic attention since the country’s structural reforms went into high gear in the mid-1990s, producing a drumbeat of protest that could potentially threaten to derail not just the country’s breathless development, but also, conceivably, the very future of the state. By contrast, in scholarship on Chinese popular politics before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 and during the Maoist period, ending in 1976, workers attracted less scholarly attention than farmers—a product of the rural basis of the revolution and the country’s predominantly rural character for four decades thereafter. Yet, workers have been politically active ever since the country’s proletariat was born in the early 20th century, tracked by a small but significant literature. The burst of new scholarship, while not always locating its subject historically, is nonetheless broad in disciplinary, thematic, and geographic terms and has grown deeper and more nuanced as new sources of information have opened and the political constraints on research on workers have begun gradually to soften. And, in a most encouraging development, as comparative politics has become more theoretically sophisticated, scholarship on Chinese workers has followed suit with a still small number of studies that systematically tease out differences within China and that compare it with other countries. Thanks to Julian Kessell for outstanding research assistance.
Assessing School Leader Effectiveness
Authors: Alvoid Lee , Weiser Beverly L.
Published: February 2012

The urgency in the first decade of the 21st century to scrutinize American student achievement, compared with global competition, has resulted in a greater emphasis in the literature on the role and influence of school leaders in relation to student outcomes. As a result of this emphasis on accountability, researchers have aimed to determine the relationship between successful school leadership behaviors and practices and their effect on increasing teacher effectiveness and student achievement outcomes. Although an attempt was made to include the empirically validated research, much of the literature and research on linking principal leadership skills, knowledge, and actions to academic performance is qualitative in nature, meaning that findings are generally based on surveys, interviews, questionnaires, self-report checklists, and researcher observations. Accounting for the variability that principals contribute to raising teacher knowledge, teacher instructional abilities, student motivation, and student academic achievement has confounded researchers and statisticians for many reasons. Most of all, it is very difficult to control for such variables as teacher experience, teacher training and content knowledge, principal preparation programs, the resources available for professional development and continuing education, the community and family involvement in a school, and the presence or lack of research-based curriculum materials and resources. Fortunately, researchers, program evaluation specialists, educational agencies, and foundations have begun designing mixed-method and quantitative research studies isolating the areas of influence that school leaders can have and tying those areas directly to student achievement results. Summary findings from national reports, policy briefs, journal articles, online sources, and books that represent early-21st-century evidence-based principal behaviors, qualities, skills, and preparation programs directly related to improving teaching instruction and student achievement have been included in this article. Although empirically validated evidence linking principal performance to student achievement outcomes is limited, and there is need of further research efforts, this article reports on the reliable information on why leaders need to be more accountable for increasing students’ academic performance and how they can achieve this.
Sociology of Education
Authors: Williams Sheneka M.
Published: February 2012

The sociology of education refers to how individuals’ experiences shape the way they interact with schooling. More specifically, the sociology of education examines the ways in which individuals’ experiences affect their educational achievement and outcomes. Scholars and professionals who are interested in the interaction of education and society typically participate in this field. This field also includes education policy issues that arise from the social context of schools. The citations included in this bibliography guide users to works that primarily pertain to the structure of schooling. Certain citations have been included because of their significance to the discipline, in particular, and their influence on the overall field of education, in general.
Archaeology
Authors: Ashmore Wendy , Patterson Thomas C.
Published: February 2012

Archaeology is a historical social science concerned with study of past societies and cultures through material traces, called the archaeological record. These traces may have been left by early human ancestors, millions of years ago—or by contemporary people as recently as yesterday. Study may be text aided among literate societies; most of the human past, however, involved societies with no writing, what some call “prehistory.” Research involves examination of artifacts (objects of human manufacture), features (arrangements of artifacts, construction elements, or other items), ecofacts (naturally occurring items that inform about human lives, such as soils), and sites (locations in which one or more of the foregoing occur). Archaeological ethics promotes growing collaboration with descendant communities in framing research goals and techniques. For that reason, and because the research process commonly destroys the archaeological record, practitioners increasingly seek less invasive or destructive methods. In all cases, archaeologists employ systematic scientific methods for recovery and study of material remains, documenting as fully as possible the materials encountered along with the temporal (stratigraphic) and spatial (association) contexts in which they were found. Archaeology is inherently interdisciplinary, calling on expertise in such fields as geology, biology, ethnology, and history. Interpretive aims vary with the research project, and with the theoretical orientation of its directors. In that way, theory is central to archaeology. Although in many parts of the world, archaeology is a discipline unto itself, in the United States it is most commonly considered part of anthropology. Exceptions are classical archaeology, allied more closely with history and art history, and historical archaeology, often teamed in the United States with history and American studies.
Culture
Authors: Ren Hai
Published: February 2012

Culture is a term that describes and characterizes various ways in which human differences and similarities are recognized and marked. It is inseparable from many important ideas such as cultural tradition, cultural relativism, cultural imperialism, popular culture, mass culture, etc. Moreover, culture is often used as a recognizable genre that marks a division of labor among anthropologists (and other scholars). Cultural anthropology itself is built on the conceptualization of culture’s meanings, its changes, and its problems, all of which are interdisciplinary. The questions of culture, its conceptualization, and its embedded meanings of civilization, the nation-state, aesthetics, economy, and everyday life are tied to the entire history of anthropology as an academic discipline, not just in Western countries such as the United States, Britain, France, and Germany but also in many other countries. As a foundational concept of anthropology, culture has been continuously shaped to adapt to changes both inside and outside the discipline.