bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Adjusting to International Standards: Has Sweden Learned from the European Charter of Local Self-Government?
Authors: Lidstrom Anders , Madell Tom
Published: May 2019

Following Swedish ratification of the European Charter of Local Self-Government in 1989, a number of further reforms of Sweden’s system of local government have taken place. Based on premises derived from institutional theory, this article examines the extent to which these reforms can be seen as further adjustments to the Charter. Analyses of monitoring reports and policy documents indicate that the reforms are largely inspired by the Charter but that some key features of the Swedish legal system, such as the lack of a significant judicial remedy, remain unaffected despite the demands of the Charter.
Challenges of the Implementation of the European Charter of Local Self-Government in Polish Legislation
Authors: Radwanowicz-Wanczewska Joanna , Dąbek Dorota
Published: May 2019

Poland is one of the few countries to have ratified the European Charter of Local Self-Government in full and without reservations. The Polish approach is perceived as a positive example of a country’s response to the challenges resulting from recognizing local self-governments as institutions typical of a political system. This article presents the achievements of the Polish legislator in terms of the law of self-government, including a verification of the efficiency of these achievements in view of local self-governance practice. The degree of implementation of the Charter’s provision in the Polish legal system is also outlined. The article covers not only the issues related to a diagnosis of the current state of affairs, but also several specific proposals, guidelines, and suggestions in terms of improving the existing situation.
Governance Relations in Small Nations: Competition vs. Cooperation and the Triple Role of Big Cities
Authors: Beeri Itai , Skjöld Magnússon Magnús Árni
Published: May 2019

This article examines and compares governance relations of big cities in relatively small nation states in Reykjavík, Iceland, and Tel Aviv, Israel. The international literature has extensively explored governance at the municipal and national levels. We aim to enlarge this discussion by examining the unique role, experience and dynamics of large, dominant cities vis-à-vis other governance entities in the era of local governance. Using a grounded theory approach we suggest the frameworks of 'building strong nations', new localism, and 'cooperation versus collaboration' to enlighten nation-big city, state-big city and big city-city governance relations, respectively. We employed a qualitative design, using textual analysis and in-depth interviews with both state and local actors in the two countries. The results show that in both countries examined, dominant cities are required to fill a unique triple role: as leading cities in their metropolitan areas, in their respective states, and in their respective nations. Yet the two cases also differ in important ways. While Reykjavík is the head of a well-functioning community of co-producers, Tel Aviv is closer to a local jungle, where competition and competing interests prevent effective cooperation. Implications of the findings are discussed in the era of local governance.
Good Governance and Public Trust: Assessing the Mediating Effect of E-Government in Pakistan
Authors: Jameel Arif , Asif Muhammad , Hussain Abid
Published: May 2019

Administrative practices have always been acknowledged as a crucial tool for establishing good governance. Strong evidence shows that good governance extensively influences citizens’ behaviors toward government. This study empirically examines how good governance promote public trust with possibly mediating role of e-government. A field survey was conducted by distributing questionnaires to 1000 Pakistani individuals. The response rate was 76.3%. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling were used to analyze the data. The results confirmed the casual relationship between good governance and public trust. The results also reveal that e-government plays a mediating role in the relationship between good governance and public trust. The findings may be practically useful for both research and policy making, since it investigated the citizens' perspective of good governance, public trust and e-government.
Fenologia de Cariniana pyriformis na região do Magdalena Médio de Santander, nordeste da Colômbia
Authors: Zuluaga Peláez Jhon Jairo , Prato Sarmiento Andrés Iván , Zapata López Lina Patricia , Zaraté Caicedo Diego Alegrandro
Published: May 2019

Durante um ano a fenologia de mogno colombiano (Cariniana pyriformis Miers), uma espécie nativa florestal, foi registrada em uma área rural do município de El Carmen de Chucuri, nordeste da Colômbia. A floração teve pico ao final do período das chuvas (outubro e novembro). Posteriormente, as árvores desfolharam mais intensamente durante os meses mais secos (dezembro a fevereiro). A fenofase de frutos maduros foi mais intensa ao iniciar o período de chuvas seguinte (abril a junho). Os resultados indicaram tendência das fenofases avaliadas de C. pyriformis nesta região registrarem ciclos anuais e estarem relacionadas com as precipitações.
Working in Hollywood
Authors: Regev Ronny
Published: May 2019

A history of the Hollywood film industry as a modern system of labor, this book reveals an important untold story of an influential twentieth-century workplace. Ronny Regev argues that the Hollywood studio system institutionalized creative labor by systemizing and standardizing the work of actors, directors, writers, and cinematographers, meshing artistic sensibilities with the efficiency-minded rationale of industrial capitalism. The employees of the studios emerged as a new class: they were wage laborers with enormous salaries, artists subjected to budgets and supervision, stars bound by contracts. As such, these workers—people like Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, and Anita Loos—were the outliers in the American workforce, an extraordinary working class. Through extensive use of oral histories, personal correspondence, studio archives, and the papers of leading Hollywood luminaries as well as their less-known contemporaries, Regev demonstrates that, as part of their contribution to popular culture, Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM cultivated a new form of labor, one that made work seem like fantasy.
Writing
Authors: Regev Ronny
Published: May 2019

Wordsmiths were torn between their desire for the creative control traditionally enjoyed by authors and the available economic security offered by working for the movies and writing scripts. Their story is a story of assimilation. When Hollywood entered the sound era a flock of writers, including Charles Brackett and Samson Raphaelson, emigrated to the city and to the world of motion pictures from other fields of writing such as theater and magazines. They oscillated between creative worlds, between East Coast and West Coast, and their previous experience shaped their response and interaction within the studios. The chapter demonstrates that while contending with an ignoble division of labor, which all but shattered the once respected authorial voice, screenwriters also carried with them some of the cultural capital and legitimacy of the more established worlds they came from.
Introduction
Authors: Smith Benjamin T.
Published: May 2019

This chapter introduces the history of newspapers and print culture in twentieth-century Mexico. The introduction also talks about various influences on the production of newspapers.
The Union Army’s Struggle over the Limits of Confiscation in the West
Authors: Teters Kristopher A.
Published: May 2019

From the beginning of the war to the summer of 1862, officers in the West adopted policies toward fugitive slaves that ranged from barring them altogether from their lines to aggressively liberating them. In August 1861, Congress offered some guidance on the issue with the First Confiscation Act, but the act’s limited scope led to minimal confiscation or none at all by top officers. Sensitive to the sentiments of border states like Missouri, who supported the Union but wanted slavery preserved, Lincoln was not yet ready to push for emancipation. At times, however, officers in the Border South still carried out the First Confiscation Act, but much depended on the dispositions and political views of the officers. Some Union officers, like William T. Sherman, Henry Halleck, and Ulysses S. Grant, held conservative views and pushed back against letting fugitive slaves enter Union lines and confiscating slaves belonging to Unionists. Officers, particularly in states like Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana, had very different ideas about how to handle fugitive slaves, and they were willing to pursue them even if it meant conflict with each other, their superiors or subordinates, or Washington.
An Emancipationist Turn of Policy
Authors: Teters Kristopher A.
Published: May 2019

During the second half of 1862, most Union officers in the West adopted more emancipationist policies. They routinely confiscated the slaves of rebels and employed many of them as scouts, spies, laborers, cooks, etc. This became the predominant policy across the several armies operating in the West. Official policy not only authorized confiscation but also made the practice more uniform. In July of 1862, Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, which allowed for the seizure of any slaves belonging to rebels. At the same time, army commanders such as Samuel Curtis and Benjamin Butler began to realize how slaves could serve the Union army and the military necessity of taking them away from rebels, and developed pro-emancipationist policies and attitudes as a result. Though some radical officers, like John Phelps, were on a mission to eliminate slavery, Butler and many others were simply hard-nosed realists who shifted towards emancipationist policies out of military necessity. There remained conflict over the status of fugitive and confiscated states, mainly in border states like Kentucky and Missouri. Yet on the whole, by the end of 1862, Union armies were much more consistent and emancipationist in their policies.
How the West Was Known
Authors: Strang Cameron B.
Published: May 2019

Although the Second Seminole War marked the effective end of the Gulf South as a borderland, encounters instigated by imperialism in the Southwest continued to affect the pursuit of knowledge in America. The rise of the Smithsonian Institution and the extension of U.S. governance into the West were interrelated processes: territorial expansion influenced the Smithsonian’s foundational mandate and early activities, while the Smithsonian organized, facilitated, and patronized an array of expansion-promoting scientific projects in collaboration with federal officials. The relationship between the conquest of the Southwest and the emergence of the Smithsonian reflects that violence, competition, exchange, and encounters with the environment and history were still inextricable from knowledge production at both the local and imperial levels.
Hashtag Islam
Authors: Bunt Gary R.
Published: May 2019

This book explores the diverse ways digital technology is shaping how Muslims across vast territories relate to religious authorities in fulfilling spiritual, mystical, and legalistic agendas. From social networks to websites, essential elements of religious practices and authority now have representation online. Muslims, embracing the immediacy and general accessibility of the internet, are increasingly turning to cyberspace for advice and answers to important religious questions. Online environments often challenge traditional models of authority, however. One result is the rise of digitally literate religious scholars and authorities whose influence and impact go beyond traditional boundaries of imams, mullahs, and shaikhs. The book shows how online rhetoric and social media are being used to articulate religious faith by many different kinds of Muslim organizations and individuals, from Muslim comedians and women’s rights advocates to jihad-oriented groups, such as the “Islamic State” and al-Qaeda, which relied on strategic digital media policies to augment and justify their authority and draw recruits. Hashtag Islam makes clear that understanding CIEs is crucial for the holistic interpretation of authority in contemporary Islam.
Introduction
Authors: de la Torre Oscar
Published: May 2019

The introduction argues that despite the changes set in motion by the constitutional Article 68, passed in 1988 in Brazil to recognize black rural communities as the recipient of special rights and recognition, a number of discourses and practices inherited from past generations continue to be a source of identity for the black peasants of Brazil. Dating from the era of slavery, such traditions have subsisted embedded in the landscape in the form of agro-ecological strategies, political discourses, and even relationships with political and economic elites. They have not resulted in hard ethnic boundaries sharply separating black peasants from other rural Brazilians, but rather have been part of a flexible toolbox of strategies and narratives inscribed on the landscape and used in moments of conflict over land, labor, and citizenship. While the relationships between black rural communities and the natural world have been largely overlooked as a vehicle for the maintenance of an Afro-Brazilian identity, this book is devoted to unearthing their existence, interrogating their relevance, and putting them in dialogue with the broader history of slavery and its legacies in post-emancipation Brazil. Finally, the introduction also outlines the basic data and chronology of the slave trade to Amazonia.
The Lesbian South
Authors: Harker Jaime
Published: May 2019

In this book, Jaime Harker uncovers a largely forgotten literary renaissance in southern letters. Anchored by a constellation of southern women, the Women in Print movement grew from the queer union of women’s liberation, civil rights activism, gay liberation, and print culture. Broadly influential from the 1970s through the 1990s, the Women in Print movement created a network of writers, publishers, bookstores, and readers that fostered a remarkable array of literature. With the freedom that the Women in Print movement inspired, southern lesbian feminists remade southernness as a site of intersectional radicalism, transgressive sexuality, and liberatory space. Including in her study well-known authors—like Dorothy Allison and Alice Walker—as well as overlooked writers, publishers, and editors, Harker reconfigures the southern literary canon and the feminist canon, challenging histories of feminism and queer studies to include the south in a formative role.
Epilogue
Authors: Purdy Michelle A.
Published: May 2019

The book concludes by addressing how formal schooling for many African Americans is still an avenue for upward mobility in a U.S. society very much grappling with race and racism. The decisions African Americans make about schooling are not simple, and black families struggle with the many variables that affect black students’ academic, social, psychological, and emotional outcomes. As African Americans continue to face dilemmas about schooling options and endure gaps in access to equitable public schools, they sometimes believe that historically white private schools are the better choice for their children. Yet racism and racial matters transcend school type, and many are challenging school cultures, no matter the type of institution, to be more inclusive and diverse.
Intellectual Traditions in Black Agriculture
Authors: White Monica M.
Published: May 2019

This chapter analyses the theoretical and applied contributions to Black agriculture of three influential African American intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Booker T. Washington built institutions, developed agricultural extension services, and organized conferences for Black farmers. George Washington Carver produced, systematized, and disseminated scientific agricultural knowledge. W. E. B. Du Bois focused on strengthening Black communities by advocating agricultural cooperatives as an economic and political strategy. While the three had different – and sometimes controversial – approaches, all saw agriculture as a strategy of resistance and community building. Through a historical analysis of these thinkers’ ideas about Black agriculture, this chapter offers fresh perspectives on classical African American intellectual traditions. This history challenges contemporary ideas that community agriculture is new, unearthing Black intellectual contributions to current conversations about sustainable, organic, and local food, as well as food security and food sovereignty. In doing so, it offers a historical precedent and framework for contemporary food justice movements for enacting the connection between agriculture and freedom.
Drawing on the Past toward a Food Sovereign Future
Authors: White Monica M.
Published: May 2019

Whereas previous chapters discussed strategies employed by those who stayed in the South, this chapter tells the stories of the descendants of those who migrated north, focusing on Detroit. While far in time and space from the other examples of Black agricultural resistance discussed in this book, contemporary communities in Detroit are similarly turning to agriculture as a strategy of survival and resistance. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN) formed in 2006, setting goals of improving education, food access, and collective buying. DBCFSN is rooted in a pan-African philosophy of pride and solidarity and draws from founders’ experiences in Detroit’s Black Power era and in city government. Central to DBCFSN’s approach to community food sovereignty are antiracist and anticapitalist principles that guide cooperative efforts, political education, and organizing designed to dismantle systems of white supremacy embedded in the food system. DBCFSN’s most well-known projects – the Detroit Food Policy Council, D-Town Farm, and the Ujamaa Food Buying Club – enact the strategies of prefigurative politics, economic autonomy, and commons as praxis to build collective agency and community resilience.
Preserving Our Heritage?
Authors: Gill Hannah
Published: May 2019

This chapter considers the reception of migrants as an introduction to issues of demographic change and economic transition in the state. Using Alamance County as a case study, this chapter discusses how immigration has reopened debates on race, resources, and diversity in the South. It examines the impact of local deportation policies on Latino communities and considers long-term consequences for the county and state as a whole.
Immigration in North Carolina’s Past
Authors: Gill Hannah
Published: May 2019

Chapter 2 recalls North Carolina’s four-hundred-year history of migration to the state. Immigrant populations from Europe and Africa provide a background for later Latin American immigration to North Carolina. Importantly, the chapter places North Carolina immigration history in a larger national context. U.S. policies have shaped who has migrated to North Carolina by dictating the inclusion and exclusion of immigrant groups throughout the nation’s history. Political and economic relations between the United States and Mexico have also created extensive migration networks between the two countries and have led to the formation of centuries-old Latino communities in border states that now look to North Carolina for new opportunities. In more recent years, Asian immigrants have settled in the state and represent one of the fastest growing demographic groups.
The Dreamers
Authors: Gill Hannah
Published: May 2019

Chapter 6 describes the efforts of North Carolina’s “Dreamers,” young undocumented people who were part of a national social movement for immigrants’ rights and access to higher education. Dreamers began to mobilize throughout the United States soon after the implementation of local immigration enforcement programs in the mid-2000s and an increase in restrictive state and local policies. The Dreamers’ generation came of age in a society that barred them from attending college, obtaining a driver’s license, applying for jobs with a liveable wage, joining the military, or starting a business. Many of these problems had persisted for decades for immigrants, and Dreamers both engaged in and diverged from a tradition of immigrant advocacy led by Latin Americans and others since the 1980s in North Carolina. Dreamer actions publicly exposed the inequalities and dysfunction in the U.S. immigration and educational system and influenced President Obama to create the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Conclusion
Authors: Gill Hannah
Published: May 2019

It was standing-room only in the South Graham Elementary School (SGE) gym at the “Latin America through the Decades” event on a September evening in 2016. Principal Elizabeth Price welcomed students and their families, speaking Spanish and English in her usual fashion. An audience of more than two hundred people cheered and clapped as kindergarten classes walked onstage wearing white gloves and jean jackets, Michael Jackson– style. They performed choreographed dances to Latin pop music from the 1980s and sang songs with great enthusiasm and huge smiles. Older students followed with different performances highlighting music from the Americas. Afterward, a salsa band appeared onstage and played music as families met teachers and students got stamps on “passports” they had made in school. Despite the fact that the gym was crowded and hot, the audience lingered, laughed, and learned about the extraordinary work of the SGE community, which has embraced learning models that celebrate the heritage and linguistic skills of its Latino students....
Introduction
Authors: Thorp Holden , Goldstein Buck
Published: May 2019

American higher education is envied around the world and owes its success to an extraordinary partnership with the federal government. Despite this, there is significant political strain in the relationship between the public and higher education. This is due in part to a number of misunderstandings about who goes to college and how much they pay.
Strategy Is Critical, and Very Difficult
Authors: Thorp Holden , Goldstein Buck
Published: May 2019

Strategy is about being different and about making hard choices but a university community is governed by consensus and therefore resists direction from the top and has difficulty choosing between competing priorities generated from below that create winners and losers. Nevertheless, external forces such as changing demographics, financial realities and emerging technology will force rapid change either voluntarily or involuntarily. The schools that survive will be those who develop an effective strategy and stick to it.
An Education and a Job
Authors: Thorp Holden , Goldstein Buck
Published: May 2019

The expectation of employment after graduation is fundamental to the rationale for American higher education. The public is challenging the economic value of a college education and job readiness is at the heart of the debate. Ironically, academics believe their students are being well prepared for employment in the private sector but potential employers strongly disagree. To address this challenge schools must be transparent about the credential they are offering and if job readiness is not an explicit objective that should be disclosed. Other steps that cannot enhance job readiness include involving non-traditional instructors; develop innovative faculty training; integrate internships and experiential learning into the curriculum; address the career issue during the first year and set measurable goals for career readiness initiatives.
Stopping: Jesus Take the Wheel
Authors: Balay Anne
Published: May 2019

Trucking is one of the most dangerous jobs, and truckers also see many fatalities while working. At the same time, few have health insurance, most can’t schedule mental health care, and mental illness is stigmatized in their culture anyway. Thus, they live with trauma, and regulations compound, rather than mitigate, this situation.
Amplitude–phase calibration of tri-axial accelerometers in the low-frequency range by a LDV
Authors: D'Emilia Giulio , Gaspari Antonella , Natale Emanuela
Published: May 2019

Abstract. A method for amplitude–phase calibration of tri-axial
accelerometers in the low-frequency range (0 to 20 Hz) is proposed, based on
a linear slide, used to excite all the axes of the accelerometer at the same
time, and a laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) as a reference. For the phase
evaluation different methods, like cross-correlation analysis
and cross-spectrum analysis, have also been used for validation purposes. The procedure
includes many further validation actions in order to verify the correctness
of modelling of the systems being tested, of the data processing and to reduce
the calibration uncertainty. Results show that the phase is a critical aspect to consider in calibration,
more than the amplitude, and the comparison with the theoretical model is
useful to verify the hypotheses. Different behaviours result depending on
the elements of the measurement chain and not only on the type of
accelerometer.
Women Fans' Journeys through Darkness
Authors: Mangione Lorraine , Luff Donna
Published: May 2019

What is important to women fans of Bruce Springsteen's work? Why do women listen to Springsteen and what does his work mean to them? These were some of the animating questions that propelled us, a psychologist and a sociologist and also Springsteen fans, to construct an on-line survey to hear from women fans about their motivations and the meaning that they construct from Springsteen's music. In this article, we explore how women fans find Springsteen's work to be critical in struggling through dark times. Many women cited Darkness on the Edge of Town as a starting or turning point in their journey as fans. Women fans predominantly see themselves as on a personal and developmental journey with Springsteen, and that Springsteen and his music serve in a role of a teacher/therapist/guide, friend, or family member, as women strive to make meaning in their own lives. Darkness on the Edge of Town in particular serves as a companion to women during troubled times. We explore how elements of relationship, authenticity, hope, energy, and renewal in this companionship traverse gender and connect to psychotherapy, sustaining women fans as they understand, shape, and survive the darkness in their lives.
Runaway American Dream: Nostalgia, Figurative Memory, and Autofiction in Stories ofBorn to Run
Authors: Hermann Veronika
Published: May 2019

In this article I propose an argument about not one, but three different renditions of Born to Run. Two of them are books. Just before his hit records Darkness on the Edge of Town and Born in the U.S.A., Born to Run was a milestone in Bruce Springsteen's four-decade career. The album contains songs that despite their loudness offer haunting, depressing explorations of betrayal, isolation, and the despair of post-Vietnam War America. While a great deal of research has approached hometown nostalgia and transformations of blue-collar identity in Springsteen's musical oeuvre, what has yet remained underdeveloped what could the connection be between songs that shaped American cultural memory, Dave Marsh's early Springsteen biography published in 1979, and Springsteen's newly released autobiography—both with the title Born to Run. While the previous piece is clearly calls for a historical approach, the contemporary autobiography by Springsteen raises issues about the spatial nature of social nostalgia, the possibility of intertextuality between different cultural products and the book's relation to the two decades that changed everything.
COMPANHEIROS ESTRANHOS: TRADUÇÃO E ENSINO DE LÍNGUAS. O ENSINO DE TRADUÇÃO PARA L2 NOS CURSOS DE LETRAS MODERNAS: USOS E LIMITAÇÕES
Authors: Carreres Angeles , Raymann de Souza (Tradutora) Deborah
Published: May 2019

Cursos de tradução inversa nos quais os alunos aprendem a traduzir para sua segunda ou terceira língua podem ser encontrados em programas de Letras Modernas em Universidades de todo o mundo. A rejeição apaixonada ao método gramática-tradução que acompanhou a chegada da abordagem comunicativa, deu lugar a um exame mais equilibrado do potencial e das limitações do uso da tradução no ensino e aprendizagem de línguas. No entanto, uma visita rápida à literatura mostra que o papel da tradução para L2 no ensino de línguas continua sendo motivo de discórdia. Dada a opinião de alguns tradutores de que tradutores profissionais devem trabalhar apenas na sua língua materna, várias vozes argumentam que a tradução para L2 é irrelevante no treinamento de tradutores e inútil ou mesmo contraproducente como ferramenta de ensino de línguas. Ainda assim, muitos departamentos de Letras Modernas mantiveram essa prática em seus cursos de graduação. Qual é o fundamento pedagógico que justifica a permanência do ensino de tradução inversa nas universidades? Quais são os benefícios, se eles existirem, que os alunos podem obter desses cursos? Se esse tipo de curso deve ser mantido, é possível estabelecer um conjunto de parâmetros que possam ser usados como diretrizes para a melhor prática? Este artigo abordará essas questões com base em pesquisas recentes sobre treinamento de tradutores.
Peirce's Philosophical Perspectives
Authors: Potter Vincent G.
Published: May 2019

This book focuses primarily on Charles Sanders Peirce's realism, pragmatism, and theism, with attention to his tychism and synechism. It is a collection of the author's essays on Peirce. The essays run counter to many selective readings of Peirce, including those encouraged by his friend and champion, William James. The influence of Bernard Lonergan and John E. Smith on the author is clear throughout. In the book, the author brought several distinctive assets to his scholarship. First, his appreciation and understanding of medieval philosophy enriched his discussion of John Duns Scotus's influence on Peirce's “scholastic realism.” Second, a background in the history of science and mathematics generated careful discussions of Peirce's analysis of probability in physics and of the continuum in mathematics. Finally, knowledge of theology yielded fruitful explorations of Peirce's argument of God's reality as vaguely like a man.
William James on the Courage to Believe
Authors: O'Connell Robert J.
Published: May 2019

William James' celebrated lecture on “The Will to Believe” has kindled spirited controversy since the day it was delivered. In this lively reappraisal of that controversy, the author contributes some fresh contentions: that James' argument should be viewed against his indebtedness to Blaise Pascal and Charles Bernard Renouvier; that it works primarily to validate our “over-beliefs”; and most surprising perhaps, that James envisages our “passional nature” as intervening, not after, but before and throughout, our intellectual weighing of the evidence for belief.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Hill Green on Natural Rights
Authors: Singer Beth J.
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses three modern philosophers whose views run counter to the established tradition of “natural rights”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Hill Green. While they all reject the concept of “natural rights” in the classical sense, Rousseau, Mill, and Green have given theories of rights that are naturalistic, in the sense that they are grounded in these philosophers' respective analyses of empirically observable human behavior and motivation. According to Rousseau, rights neither are innate nor belong to individuals prior to or outside the framework of society. For Mill, rights are products of empirically discoverable psychological tendencies, including the interest of all in protection by society. Meanwhile, Green argues that for rights to exist is for people not only to conceive them, but also to understand them to serve a common good that each conceives as his own and that each therefore acts to promote.
Multiculturalism, Identity, and Minority Rights: Will Kymlicka and the Concept of Special Rights
Authors: Singer Beth J.
Published: May 2019

This chapter focuses on the arguments of the Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka for “special rights” designed to protect indigenous minorities and their cultures. Kymlicka rests his argument for the rights of cultural minorities on the fact that membership in a cultural community is “an important good for the individual.” He finds this good to be, in the first place, a function of the relation between membership in cultural communities and personal identity. However, he seems to be thinking of identity more as a matter of “identifying with” than as consisting in the traits by which a person can be identified and recognized. This identity would include, in addition to such traits as that person's appearance and voice, the characteristic ways in which she or he deals with the world and with other people. Identity in this sense can include having a sense of belonging to a cultural community.
Self, God and Immortality
Authors: Fontinell Eugene
Published: May 2019

Can we, who have been touched by the scientific, intellectual, and experimental revolutions of modern and contemporary times, still believe that we as individual persons are immortal? Indeed, is there even good cause to hope that we are? In examining the present relationship of reason to faith, can we find justifying reasons for faith? These are the central questions in this book, a compelling exercise in philosophical theology. Drawing upon the works of William James and the principles of American Pragmatism, the book extrapolates carefully from “data given in experience” to a model of the cosmic process open to the idea that individual identity may survive bodily dissolution. Presupposing that the possibility of personal immortality has been established in the first part, the second part of the book is concerned with desirability. Here, it is shown that, far from diverting attention and energies from the crucial tasks confronting us here and now, such belief can be energizing and life enhancing. The wider importance of the book lies in its pressing both immortality-believers and terminality-believers to explore both the metaphysical presuppositions and the lived consequences of their beliefs. It is the author's expressed hope that such explorations, rather than impeding, will stimulate co-operative efforts to create a richer and more humane community.
Introduction
Authors: Wallace Mark I.
Published: May 2019

At one time, God was a bird. But it is said that Christianity evolved away from its animocentric origins in order to defend a pure form of monotheism. This narrative, however, misses the startling scriptural portrayals of God as the beaked and feathered Holy Spirit—the third member of the Trinity who is the “animal God” of historic Christian witness. Appearing as a winged creature at the time of Jesus’ baptism (Luke 3:21-22), the bird-God of the New Testament signals the deep grounding of biblical faith in the natural world. The Introduction calls this perspective “Christian animism” in order to signal the dialectical relationship between biblical religion and the beliefs of indigenous communities that Spirit enfleshes itself within all beings on Earth. It argues that all things are alive with sacred personhood and worthy of human beings’ love and protection in a time of massive environmental devastation.
Worshipping the Green God
Authors: Wallace Mark I.
Published: May 2019

This chapter begins with a visitation by a great blue heron to the author’s class taught in Swarthmore College’s Crum Woods. Is the Crum Woods holy ground? Some ecotheologians (John B. Cobb Jr., Richard Bauckham) caution against this way of speaking, but this chapter argues that Christianity is a religion of double incarnation: in a twofold movement, God becomes flesh in both humankind (Jesus) and otherkind (Spirit), underscoring that corporeality and divinity are one. The chapter focuses on historical portraits of Jesus’ relationship to particular birds as totem-beings in his teaching ministry; Augustine’s repudiation of Neoplatonism and natalist celebration of the maternal, birdy Holy Spirit in the world; and Hildegard of Bingen’s avian pneumatology in which earth’s “vital greenness” is valorized for its curative powers in a manner similar to Jesus’ mudpie healing of the blind man in John 9. It concludes with a meditation on nature-worship in a Quaker meetinghouse in Monteverde, Costa Rica.
An African Diasporic Critique of Violence
Authors: Ford James Edward
Published: May 2019

This chapter makes a critique of violence a central heading for understanding black thought, aesthetics, and politics. This is important not only because of how the Black Radical Tradition has theorized violent oppression and insurrection, but also because of how these theorists surpass their European counterparts. In this context, Phillis Wheatley’s poem “Niobe In Distress of Her Children” receives close attention for how it anticipates and surpasses Walter Benjamin’s and Immanuel Kant’s explorations of imperial force. Wheatley rethinks Niobe as a figure who rejects the violence and guilt of imperial expansion, in contrast to the European tradition’s rendering of this figure, from Ovid up to Benjamin. This reinterpretation drastically alters Wheatley scholarship, debates on violence in political theory, and discussions of the origins of Black American letters.
System and Subject in Adam Smith’s Political Economy: Nature, Vitalism, and Bioeconomic Life
Authors: Packham Catherine
Published: May 2019

This paper discusses the role of “systems” in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, reading this foundational text of political economy as elaborating a system that linked national prosperity to the lives, bodies, and even health, of its subjects. Specifically, it explores the role of vitalism in eighteenth-century human sciences and addresses how a vitalist conception of life informs Smith’s economic system, with consequences for the way Smith theorizes labor, the human subject, and the relationship between subject and economic system. Political economy is thus demonstrated to be, at its inception, a bioeconomic practice. It concludes by considering the relations among nature, political economy, and imagination in Smith’s thought, and suggests that “nature” in Smithian political economy offers both the possibility of system and the potential for its own critique.
Writing Generation: Revolutionary Bodies and the Poetics of Political Economy
Authors: Mann Annika
Published: May 2019

This chapter reconsiders the emergence of political economy, biology, and literature as separate fields of research—disciplines—by examining representations of noxious generation in the politics and poetry of the late eighteenth century. In the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the status of the French Revolution, both writers collapse biological theories of reproduction and political theories of social collectivity, depicting generation as the proliferation of embodied collectives stimulated by print. In their poems The First Book of Urizen (1794) and “To a Little Invisible Being, Soon to Become Visible” (probably composed in 1799), William Blake and Anna Barbauld critique that collapse, even as they reflect upon how that collapse is itself facilitated by the tools of poetic discourse, by form and figure. Both poets explore how the “visible form” of writing, the structure of the book, and the figure of the womb are complicit in the generation of new kinds of bodies in the world. In so doing, Blake and Barbauld expose the unavoidably shared ground of poets, political economists, and scientists at the very moment those writers began increasingly articulating their own separateness.
Concerning Hunger: Empire Aesthetics in the Present Moment
Authors: Chakravorty Mrinalini
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines enduring ties among political economy, hunger, and art in the transnational present. Discussing liberal theories of sustenance (Marx, Smith, Malthus, and Darwin), it shows how the politics of alterity and altruism that attach to present artistic representations of hunger refashion colonial ideas about civilizational and subjective differences in order to reflect contemporary concerns about global culture and consumption. In addition to theories of hunger, there is a discussion of colonial famines and emerging hunger art from India.
Suffering Incarnate
Authors: Falque Emmanuel
Published: May 2019

The phenomenological experience of the “toucher-touching” is one that shows the Son incarnate in his flesh. We see this in the episodes of the woman with hemorrhages, the washing of the feet, or in Nicodemus at the deposition from the cross. The excess of the suffering body is unveiled in Christ’s suffering at Golgotha and in the rupture of the flesh.
Jews, Theory, and Ends
Authors: Ginsburg Shai , Land Martin , Boyarin Jonathan
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter discusses the intersections of the terms Jews, theory, and ends. These intersections have informed strategies of scholarly and intellectual engagements with society, culture, history, and politics that informed the “human sciences” in Western and Central Europe and North America. Often, such strategies came to be grouped together under the monikers criticism, theory, or, at times, critical theory. The chapter then considers the question of Jewishness in relation to critical theory. Tracing the spectral figure of the Jew in theory, the chapters put forward “spectral reading,” one that entails appellation: identification and naming. In light of the great catastrophes that have befallen Jews, which were often accompanied by the endeavor to extricate culture from the figure of the Jew and the Jewishness of the figure, spectral reading has often been an endeavor to excavate traces of a past that cannot be thought of but under the sign of violence.
The Off-Modern Turn: Modernist Humanism and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Shklovsky and Mandelshtam
Authors: Boym Svetlana
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the Russian literary critic Victor Shklovsky and poet Osip Mandelshtam to discuss the relationship between theory and Jews, exploring their autobiographical narratives to articulate what can be called the off-modern turn. That turn is a zigzag movement that defies the demands of systematic thinking and that does not follow any of the popular “isms” of Jewish intellectual engagement of the day: idealism, Marxism, nationalism, or messianism. Indeed, both Shklovsky and Mandelshtam look for artistic, political, and existential practices that defy theoretical conceptions along with their hierarchies and logics, for modes of art and thinking that undercut prescribed rules. Such practices bear the promise of freedom, of seeing the world anew, of a new beginning.
Buber versus Scholem and the Figure of the Hasidic Jew: A Literary Debate between Two Political Theologies
Authors: Hever Hannan
Published: May 2019

This chapter looks at one of the most famous and significant debates in Jewish studies: between Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber over the character of Hasidism. On the face of it, the debate was a literary one, centering on the significance of the Hasidic tale and its role in the interpretation of the Hasidic movement. It was a debate between two conceptions of Hasidism, one as a system of theological concepts, and the other as a way of life. Yet this debate was not merely historicist, but topical and political as well. For in this debate, Buber and Scholem negotiated the question of Jewish sovereignty and endeavored to determine the desired relationship between Jews and the state.
People's Car
Authors: Majumder Sarasij
Published: May 2019

People's Car explores one of the major movements for resisting the acquisition of land by the government in the interests of siting a Tata Motors car factory in Singur, India. The factory becomes the alibi for nuanced interrogations that are both material and theoretical on resistance, changing rural realities in globalizing India and the very nature and idea of land. It asks why such long drawn resistances against corporate industrialization coexist with political rhetoric and slogans promoting fast paced industrialization. It argues that such contradictory rhetoric and promises target divided sentiments in rural India where land is more than a simple agricultural plot to middle caste small and marginal landowners aspiring nonfarm futures. People's Car breaks new ground by ethnographically establishing the incommensurability between land and money. Such incommensurability or non-equivalence, the book shows, simultaneously drives protests against land acquisition and fuels the demands for non-farm jobs and industrialization, the crux of rural middle-caste aspirational politics. It questions the dominant trend of romanticizing rural life and associated anti-development protests that uses the clichéd dichotomous tropes—rural Bharat vs. urban India.
Life Beyond Land: Aspirations, Ambivalence, and the Double Life of Development
Authors: Majumder Sarasij
Published: May 2019

The introduction frames the context and events that inform the central theme of the book. It also raises the theoretical questions regarding contradictory trends in populist politics. The declaration of incommensurability between money and land is, the chapter claims, an index of villagers’ desires and aspirations, which remain largely unacknowledged in the dominant political representations of rural Indian villages as purely agricultural and populated by farmers, peasants, cultivators, or laborers. It argues that Landownership is a pause, a distance and a vantage point from which the world and the totalizing narratives of development and modernity make sense enabling them to imagine themselves as subjects of mobility and aspiration.
Pecularities of Water Supply of Gas Wells in Massive Type Oil Reservoirs
Authors: N. Маkhmudov N. , Kh. Аgzamov А. , Kh Ermatov N. , Sh. TurdiyevSh.
Published: May 2019

This article describes some problems on water supply of gas wells and reliable forecasting of watering gas outlets. Moreover, many ways of solving the issues have been recommended with scientific provident.
Social and Physical Entrapments of Women in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
Authors: Lodhi Muhammad Arfan , Khalid Faiza , Mehmood Iqbal , Rasool Faiz , Akbar Farhan , Kamal Muhammad Amir
Published: May 2019

The study highlights the social and physical entrapments of women in two novels: Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Both writers belong to two different cultures. Bapsi Sidhwa is a Punjabi, Parsi, Pakistani novelist while Arundhati Roy is an Indian Author. Regardless of their different cultures, they have discussed similar issues faced by women of their contemporary societies. This case study adopted exploratory research framework to gather data and undergo its content analysis from the text of two selected novels. The findings explicate that woman exploitation can be observed evidently among different societies irrespective of any culture, religion, caste or creed. In both novels, women are represented as shallow creatures and they are utterly victimized physically as well as emotionally. They are raped and beaten brutally by males being their unbidden masters. Sidhwa and Roy enlighten the plight of women in their novels, though slight elements of unjust maltreatment of the male characters can also be seen at many places.