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The Conflict In Sudan: An Overview, Mad Gabriel

The Journal of Social Encounters

It has been more than two years since the war erupted in Sudan. Although the crisis initially started between two warring parties, it has expanded beyond the two with the involvement of multiple actors. However, the current conflict is complicated and has deep historical origins. It increased after the 2019 revolution, with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) battling for power and control. On the other hand, the situation has deteriorated dramatically, as the economy suffered from the continuation of the war, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Additionally, Health systems have crumbled, schooling has …

Sudan: A War Of Atrocities Report Of The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission For The Sudan, - Annual Report Of The United Nations High Commissioner For Human Rights And Reports Of The Office Of The High Commissioner And The Secretary-General

The Journal of Social Encounters

This report documents attacks on civilians and objects essential for their survival in Sudan. It concludes that both parties to the conflict violated international human rights and humanitarian law, with most violations amounting to war crimes. The Rapid Support Forces’ conduct may also constitute crimes against humanity, including persecution and extermination. The report calls for accountability and sets out a roadmap for justice.

Introduction: Continuing The Exploration Of The Darfur And Sudan Crisis, Mawa Mohamed, Ron Pagnucco

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

The Late Father Rev. John Anthony Kaiser: “A Case For Justice”, Mbuthi Gathenji

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Engaging The Somali Diaspora: A Case Study Of One Agency’S Community Programming Approach, Farhia Abdi

The Journal of Social Encounters

This case study investigates how a local community agency engages with the Somali diaspora to design and implement culturally responsive services, such as the Settlement and Integration Program. It also explores the potential of fostering meaningful dialogue with community members to inform the development of culturally sensitive programming. The research question guiding this study was developed by findings from previous research, which highlighted the significance of community engagement, sustained dialogue, and the necessity for agencies to design clearly defined programs. These programs should prioritize active participation from community members in both the creation and implementation of tailored initiatives.

Hezbollah's Military Setback: From Strategic Strength To Political Dilemma—A Comprehensive Analysis, Habib Albadawi

The Journal of Social Encounters

This study examines the unprecedented military transformation of Hezbollah from 2024 to 2025, analyzing how technological superiority and strategic constraints have fundamentally altered the effectiveness of irregular warfare organizations. Through extensive analysis of organizational adaptation, technological disruption, and external dependencies, this research investigates the paradox of how advanced military capabilities, when constrained by external dependencies, can become operational liabilities rather than strategic assets. The study employs multiple theoretical frameworks to understand this transformation and its implications for future irregular warfare.

Dalit Poetry On The Eve Of Indian Independence: Gurram Jashuva And The Quest For Critical Consciousness And Collective Remembering, Chris Conway

The Journal of Social Encounters

The Dalit Literary movement irrupted on the scene in the early 1970s in the state of Maharashtra, India. Unblinking in its criticism of casteism and unnerving in its depiction of Dalit oppression, the movement sought to concretize the political aims of B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) through cultivating a critical Dalit consciousness liberated from caste identity and history. The movement enjoyed success in uniting Dalit groups across the country under this new name. However, fifty years later a new generation of Dalit and Dalit-supporting thinkers have begun to critically examine the implications of Dalit identity focusing particularly on its rootedness in suffering …

Talking With Dragons: How Dragons Reveal The Hero's Heart, Anne Elise Crafton

The Ozark Historical Review

The author shines a light onto the transformation Dragons over time and their relationships with heroes in European narrative and art. The study provides primary source analysis as well as a review of the secondary literature as represented through the works for Frazer, Dundes, and Tolkien.

The Ozark Historical Review, V. 46, 2018

The Ozark Historical Review

No abstract provided.

Black Somatic Liberatory Practices: The Africanist Aesthetic In Psychotherapeutic Movement Observation, Ebony Nichols

Counseling and Psychology Dissertations

This critical ethnographic qualitative study explored Black body-based healing practices and coping strategies used to resist and titrate the impact of racism and oppression. It also examined how Black individuals use their bodies to regulate their nervous systems to heal and cultivate liberatory practices. Grounded in theoretical frameworks such as Black Psychology, African Indigenous Healing Systems, Liberation Psychology, and Critical Race Theory, this research investigated the intersections of Black Aesthetics, Psychology, and the body through the lens of the Africanist Aesthetic. The study employed interaction analysis and reflexive thematic analysis to analyze non-verbal and verbal data collected from two focus …

Disaster Resilience And Normalization: Facing Facts, Naomi Zack Phd

Publications and Research

Disaster resilience requires acknowledgment and preparation to be normalized or integrated into normal life. But denial without preparation normalizes disaster by  leaving it out of normal life. In Disaster Resilience and Normalization: Facing Facts, Naomi Zack explores the normative and factual dimensions of a Climate Change Paradigm, through a global scope. Apart from the normative issues of who is responsible and who should pay for mitigation, the facts of Rising Average Earth Temperatures and more Intense and Frequent Disasters must still be faced.

But facing those facts has always been voluntary for powerful signatories to the 2015 Paris Climate …

Matty's First Hike: Hiking Spain's Northwest Coast With A Baby And A Beagle, Katy Dycus

Appalachia

New parents venture along the coast of Galicia, from the Cliffs of Loiba to O Esteiro and back, with their son in a carrier.

"Elements Don’T Mix!": Unearthing Racial Scripts And A Rhetorical Economy Of Whiteness In Disney And Pixar's Elemental, Linsay M. Cramer, Gabriel A. Cruz

Communication, Media, and Culture

Using a narrative rhetorical approach, we map how Disney and Pixar’s 2023 film, Elemental, sustains a rhetorical economy of whiteness, as theorized by Asen and Kelly, which emphasizes the degree to which rhetorical constructions of racial difference are foundational to whiteness and economic systems. We identify and critique how Elemental discursively contributes to a system of exclusivity for those within the bounds of whiteness concerning economic mobility via racial scripts. Created and produced during Joe Biden’s United States (U.S.) presidential term (2021–2025), Elemental offers a metaphorical tale that engages the fractious, politically conservative anxieties concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) …

Migration In The Early Chesapeake: Dorchester Co., Md, As A Case Study, 1650–1750, Thomas Daniel Knight

History Faculty Publications

This article examines the migration patterns that shaped the early settlement of Dorchester County, Maryland. Dorchester County is located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, an area distinctive in terms of its geography, history, and culture. In U.S. history, migration has generally proceeded from eastern areas to western ones and from northern areas to southern ones, a pattern dating back to the earliest colonial settlements. Settlement in Dorchester County proceeded primarily from east to west and south to north, with additional migration streams coming from the north out of Delaware and from the west out of Somerset County. This gave Dorchester County …

The Meaning Of Christian Suffering In Aquinas, Pedro Cardoso Figueiredo Santiago

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This thesis investigates the theological meaning of Christian suffering in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. While much attention has been given to Aquinas’s treatment of the problem of evil, little has been written on the positive and salvific meaning of suffering as it appears in his Christology, sacramental theology, and moral theology. This study aims to demonstrate that for Aquinas, suffering—when united to Christ—acquires a redemptive value that transforms human pain into a means of configuration to the crucified and risen Lord.

The first chapter develops the Christological foundation of Christian suffering. Drawing primarily from Summa Theologiae III, q. 69, …

Staying Alive: Negotiating Life With The Contamination Of Kitchener Drain., Zein Hassib

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how rural communities in Kafr El Sheikh governorate, Egypt, negotiate everyday life with the contamination of Kitchener Drain, the largest agricultural drain in the central Nile Delta. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in three villages at the tail-end end of the drain, the study explores how water contamination shapes social and ecological, social life for farmers living in the catchment of the drain. The thesis situates the farmer’s present experience within the broader history of colonial and modernist national irrigation reforms and developments highlighting how systemic neglect and uneven governance reproduce conditions of vulnerability. At the same time, …

Encountering The Sublime: Early Hermit Lifeways, Visual-Spatial Worlds, And The Global Recluse, James Brown

The Ozark Historical Review

This paper will assess the degree to which reclusion in the early period can be labeled a global phenomenon and will examine three key areas, the institutional ambits of reclusion, the visual-spatial world of the eremite, and the enduring cultural canon associated with eremitisms across both geographical and temporal distances. In addition, the author will perform an epistemological and phenomenological exercise in deriving humanistic insight from the experiences of recluses, as gleaned through deep consideration of their environments and cultural products.

Luxury: The Shifting Moral Perspective In Eighteenth-Century Netherlands, Meaghan Morelock

The Ozark Historical Review

This work describes the changing views of luxury during the 18th Century. Using a case study of the Netherlands, the author examines the changing views on the role and availability of luxury items.

“Who Wrought It Slowly Long Ago” : Anonymity, The Unnamed, And The Ethical Use Of Objects Found On The Barrow-Downs, Nicholas Birns

Journal of Tolkien Research

This essay delves into the significance of two objects found by the Hobbits and Tom Bombadil on the Barrow-Downs in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." It considers how the sword found by Merry and the brooch with Tom Bombadil gives to Goldberry have different fates and tell different ethical stories. The essay contrasts the ethical implications of Merry's use of a sword from the Barrow-Downs, which plays a crucial role in the plot, with Goldberry's wearing of a brooch, raising questions about cultural appropriation and the moral reclamation of a artifacts The combination of the importance of these …

Assertions Of Monastic Identity And Power In The Cloister And Nave Of St. Gall, John D. Treat

The Ozark Historical Review

The Carolingian monastery lived in an unresolved tension between the purity of separation from the world and the benefits to be gained from secular engagement. To confront this dilemma, the parts of the monastery received new layers of symbolic meaning, opening some spaces to lay penetration while shielding others more securely. Here I will examine the monastic cloister and the nave of the abbey church as instances of these two tendencies.

The Ozark Historical Review, V. 42, 2013 Entire_Issue

The Ozark Historical Review

No abstract provided.

The Social Aesthetics Of Recognition, Italo Alves

Dissertations

The history of social philosophy is a history of suspicion toward the aesthetic (1). However, since we apprehend social reality fundamentally through its aesthetic appearances, an account is needed of how “the aesthetic” must enter the social-philosophical discourse, particularly in reconstructive models of social critique. I call this account “social aesthetics.” Social aesthetics illuminates how certain social experiences generate normative claims even in the lack of discursive articulation. (2) I argue that the philosophy of recognition, concerned with this relationship between social experience and normative claim-making, contains an unacknowledged aesthetic dimension, which I uncover through a critical reading of Axel …

The "Uniform Rule" And Its Exceptions: A History Of Congressional Naturalization Legislation, Daniel Rice

The Ozark Historical Review

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution empowers Congress “[t]o establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” In Part I of this article, I discuss the American colonial experience with naturalization laws and account for the Naturalization Clause’s. I then examine the historical development of Congress’s “uniform rule” and deconstruct the mechanism by which certain groups have been excluded from and brought back within its reach. Lastly, I scrutinize Congress’s posture towards expatriation, the logical converse of naturalization. In Part II, I ask why Congress might have thought it expedient to carve out statutory exceptions to the naturalization procedures it had …

The Quest For Liberation: Philosophy And The Making Of World Culture In China And The West, Chunjie Zhang

Philosophy & Theory

Contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism routinely refers to Immanuel Kant as its intellectual origin. A group of Chinese and German-speaking thinkers in the early twentieth century, however, used classical Chinese philosophy as an alternative intellectual genealogy to reimagine ethics, politics, society, and modernity for the entire world. Their engagement with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism broadens the scope of global intellectual history to include a non-European origin of concepts and ideas.

Due to the differences in their local crises, the Chinese and the European stories are often narrated in separate national and cultural contexts. Bridging the critical divide between China and the …

Editor’S Note: Comparative Civilizational Turn: The Future Of The Iscsc In The Wake Of Geopolitical “Grey Rhino” Events, Greg Lewicki

Comparative Civilizations Review

The last few years seem to have brought some bitter realizations among political scientists, forecasters, and security analysts. Namely: they tend to err, and their forecasts too often remain off-target.

Civilization: The Gaze Of Photography, William Alexander Ewing

Comparative Civilizations Review

If the lifetime of our species were imagined as a single 24-hour day, then civilization makes its appearance at the 23.02 mark. And photography? It comes on stage under a minute before midnight.

How marvelous it would have been to have had photography recording our lives throughout those millennia.

Resisting Islamophobia: “Westophobia” In Social Media, Peter O'Brien, Jordan Nelson

Comparative Civilizations Review

Both the practice and study of Islamophobia repose on the concept of comparative civilizations. Purveyors of Islamophobia use what Roger Westcott calls a “denotative” understanding to posit an objective conflict (or “clash” à la Samual Huntington) between Western and Islamic civilizations. Scholars who analyze Islamophobia tend to take what Westcott calls a “connotative” approach that views civilizations as subjective, social constructs (à la Edward Said’s “Orient”).

Despite many advantages, the latter approach tends to dismiss the agency of Muslims to resist Islamophobia. This article counters that trend by exploring Islamist resistance to Islamophobia, to which we give the shorthand label, …

Towards The Systematic Cross-Civilizational Comparison: How Civilizations Work - Case 1: The Monotheistic Civilization, Liah Greenfeld

Comparative Civilizations Review

The purpose of this essay is to offer several hypotheses based on the concept of civilization and the conceptual scaffolding for the study of the cultural reality, proposed in the Spring 2024 CCR paper, regarding the three civilizations coexisting in the world today: the monotheistic, the Sinic, and the Indic. It introduces the modal dimensions along which civilizations may differ on the level of the individual mind — cognitive (pertaining both to the structure and contents of thought), moral, and emotional; and that of the society (separate institutions and institutional systems) and history.

Books Of Interest Fall 2025, Stephen T. Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

Books that may be of interest to scholars of the comparative study of civilizations, and may add significantly to the body of scholarship in the civilizational field. These books are also available for book reviews in future editions of Comparative Civilizations Review.

Indigenous Women’S Reproductive Traditions: Reclaiming Sovereignty Through 500 Years Of Colonization, Stephanie A. Sellers

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

In Indigenous Women’s Reproductive Traditions, Stephanie Sellers delves into the rich history of Indigenous women’s reproductive practices before European colonization. The book highlights traditional methods such as birth control, abortion, and child spacing, which were integral to maintaining agency over their bodies. Sellers explores how these practices were disrupted by European patriarchal structures and examines the impact of forced sterilization in the 20th century. Today, Indigenous women are reclaiming their rights through movements for reproductive justice, advocating for a return to their ancestral practices and redefining concepts of womanhood and motherhood on their own tribal terms.