Digital Commons Network^™

Book Review: Race Against Time, Amanda Burrows

The Utah English Journal

US Supreme Court, 1923. More than 50 years after the ratification of the 14th amendment and the end of the Civil War, the promise of" equal protection of the laws" was under attack. Moore vs Dempsey was the first case where the federal court overturned the ruling of a state court; more significantly, it was the first case to rule in favor of a black defendant. Four years earlier, in Elaine, Arkansas, a meeting of sharecroppers at a local church had been bombarded with gunfire. After a few days of rioting, -five white men and an uncounted number of black …

Too Fast? Too Slow? A Novel Approach For Identifying Extreme Response Behavior In Online Surveys, Manasvi Kumar, Joseph S. Valacich, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, David Kim

Faculty Publications

Some participants of online surveys engage in extreme answering behavior while generating responses (i.e., they respond too fast or too slow) relative to population norms. Here, we demonstrate how participants’ navigation behaviors can be used to potentially identify such responses. We administered an online survey where students (who were earlier instructed to complete a task) report lenience scores towards non-appropriate behavior while completing the task. We draw on cognitive dissonance theory to posit that failure to follow instruction predicts lenience scores. We then created different datasets by excluding data from participants flagged by our metrics and generated predictive models. We …

Green Energy Usage In The United States, Chad Hyer

Ballard Brief

Greenhouse gas emissions are the largest contributor to climate change. Green energy solutions prove a promising approach to remedying these emissions, but major economic reliance on fossil fuels, complacent and dismissive attitudes towards climate change, and political polarization and gridlock have encouraged inaction regarding the adoption of green energy in the United States. Such inaction has led to a host of consequences that are detrimental to the United States's environment, economy, and international image. Some efforts by NG0s and for-profit companies have helped remediate such inaction. This brief aims to address the context, contributing factors, and consequences of this inaction …

Sexual Abuse Of Children In The United States Foster Care System, Abigail Hessing

Ballard Brief

Foster care is a long-running and relatively commonplace system in the US: however, in 2019 there were an estimated 400,000 children in foster care, leaving the system overwhelmed and at its peak capacity. Of those children, it is estimated that up to 40% of them had experienced some type of abuse within the system. Looking at sexual abuse specifically, vulnerable children are often targeted by sexual predators, and when grouped together in a system underequipped to provide adequate protection, foster care children can become easily accessible targets for sexual abuse. Caretakers who are undersupported and households that are overfilled create …

Covenants, Kinship, And Caring For The Destitute In The Book Of Amos, Joshua M. Matson

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

At the outset of the book of Amos, the Old Testament prophet captures the attention of the ancient Israelites when he condemns the inhabitants of Tyre, a port city north of Israel often used synonymously to reference the Phoenicians, for not remembering “the brotherly covenant” (Amos 1:9), or as it appears in a different translation, “the covenant of kinship” (1:9 NRSV). [1] The Israelites easily recognized and eagerly accepted this condemnation because they were the victims of the covenantal breach from one of their neighboring regional powers. [2] Amos, however, did not travel from the southern kingdom of Judah to …

Full Issue

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

David Christian. Maps Of Time: An Introduction To Big History. University Of California Press, New Edition, 2004. Leonid E. Grinin, Andrey V. Korotayev, Barry H. Rodrigue, Eds. Evolution: A Big History Perspective. Volgograd: Uchitel Publishing House, 2011., Stephen T. Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

What is history? Or rather, what are the appropriate time-scales that can be constituted as “history”? The general consensus among scholars is that history is the study of approximately the last 5,000 years or so due to the existence of written records. Anything prior to that is generally considered pre-history, at least as far as it concerns the existence of human beings on earth. As for the creation of the earth we live upon, or the solar system our planet dwells within, or the universe as a whole these are considered outside the formal domain of historical …

Mormon Studies: A Critical History By Ronald Helfrich Jr., Roger Terry

BYU Studies

This short but dense critical history of Mormon studies is unique in several ways. First, author Ronald Helfrich Jr. is a self-described “Gentile” scholar who spent “probably far too many years,” including a year as a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at Brigham Young University, researching and writing this history. Second, the book is surprisingly thorough. I have been the editorial director at BYU Studies for the past sixteen years and thought I had a fairly decent grasp of Mormon studies, past and present, but Helfrich repeatedly describes the work of historians and other scholars with whom I …

“To Moderate And Unify” The Role That Latter-Day Saint Citizen-Rhetors Can Play In Healing American Political Discourse, Kristine Hansen

BYU Studies

In the April 1997 general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, then-Elder Henry B. Eyring stated, “When the words of prophets seem repetitive, that should rivet our attention.” Repetition, he asserted, means the Lord’s servants are “warning the people, telling them the way to safety.” In both the October 2020 and the April 2021 general conferences, President Dallin H. Oaks stressed the importance of the rule of law and the best ways to participate as citizens in political processes. Although he focused on the United States, President Oaks reassured his global audience that the principles he …

“Boys Will Be Boys”: Antithetical Boyhood In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen, Madilyn Abbe

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper explores Claudia Rankine’s work Citizen: An American Lyric and how the text applies boyhood and manhood differently to white and black males. The text subverts these terms’ straightforward relationship with actual age, instead recognizing them as reverse age categorizations. While these contradictory applications minimize black men through infantilization and expedite the maturation of black children, these same converse categorizations excuse the violence of white men. Through this distinction, Citizen exposes childhood as a subjective categorization to benefit white power. To address the resulting self-fragmentation for African American males, I maintain that the text proffers storytelling as symbolic mothering …

Thank You To Minna And Gordon Hewes: Friends Of The International Society For The Comparative Study Of Civilizations From The Ecumene, John Grayzel

Comparative Civilizations Review

The ISCSC is always extremely appreciative when it receives a special gift from those who support its intellectual and organizational endeavors. This certainly was the case when it recently received a generous bequest from the estate of Mrs. Minna Hewes, the most substantial financial donation in the history of this organization.

Ottomanism: A Transition From Byzantinism To Balkanism, Blagoj Conev Phd

Comparative Civilizations Review

Ottomanism as an ideology and way of life is nothing but a pale copy of Byzantinism. Ottomanism is the direct successor of the Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire), which is the legal and sole successor to the only Roman Empire. But Ottomanism itself has not been sufficiently studied because much more attention has been paid to the way the Ottoman Empire was governed than to the identities that it sought to define as its own, which were in fact nothing more than a faint copy of Byzantinism before 1204.

Ottomanism can be defined as the imperial identity of the …

An Attempt To Arrive At The Meaning Of Civilization As The Third Millennium Dawns, Mojtaba Sadeghi Independent Scholar

Comparative Civilizations Review

Civilizations may be understood as phenomena subject to differing perspectives. This article views civilization from the perspective of Geography. A civilization is a “Geographical Space” that arises from complex interactions over time. The core of civilization from a geographical perspective is this: every civilization is a geographical space, but not every geographical space is necessarily a civilization. A civilization has a “cultured soul” and an “advanced body.” We may use this approach to understand, measure, critique, and emancipate civilization in the third millennium.

Mental Illness As A Vulnerability For Sexual Assault: A Retrospective Study Of 7,455 Sexual Assault Forensic Medical Examinations, Leslie Miles, Julie L. Valentine, Linda Mabey, Nancy R. Downing

Faculty Publications

Background: Persons with severe mental illness (MI) are at a high risk of becoming victims of sexual assault (SA). Vulnerability for SA with any type of MI is unknown. This study aimed to identify the prevalence of preexisting MI and other significant factors in patients reporting preexisting MI at the time of their SA medical forensic examinations (SAMFEs).

Method: A retrospective SAMFE chart review of patients ( N = 7,455) from 2010 to 2020 was conducted. Sexual assault nurse examiners completed SAMFEs. Inclusion criteria included (a) aged 14 years and older, (b) completed SAMFE with SA kit evidence collection, and …

Visualizing Russian: Illuminating Corpora, Conjugations, And Classrooms, Steven J. Clancy, Paige Lee

Russian Language Journal

The Visualizing Russian (Clancy, 2014–2022) project offers a suite of tools benefiting language learners, teachers, and linguists and enabling each of these user groups to access the complex system of the Russian language through visualization methods in order to leverage the powers of compression and expansion of a massive data set. Users can analyze texts for relative difficulty with regard to vocabulary content with Visible Vocabulary, create frequency lists and identify the most commonly used word forms for each lemma in a text or compare sets of target vocabulary to covered forms in a particular text with the Mini-Story …

Introducing Undergraduates To Instructional Design In A Graduate Studio: An Experiential, Model-Centered Approach, Rebecca Stull Zundell, William Sowards, Scott L. Howell, Jason K. Mcdonald

Faculty Publications

This case study describes a combined graduate and undergraduate instructional design studio that introduced undergraduate students to instructional design in a multifaceted, holistic, and applied way. Reviewing the experience of the undergraduates in the course, this design case describes four learning interventions used to create this applied experience: (1) instructional design team projects—one non-profit and the other in higher education, (2) weekly seminars and biweekly training sessions from field experts, (3) an experiential out-of-state trip, and (4) weekly reflection journals. These studio-based learning interventions are presented within the context of the Experiential Learning Theory and Model-Centered Instruction. Overall, the course …

Macroarchaeology, Epistomology, And The Quality Of The Archaeological Record, James R. Allison

Faculty Publications

Perrault (2019) combines a critique of current archaeological practice with a call to re-center research on questions of culture history as well as “macroarchaeology”, or the search for large-scale patterns of human behavior and cultural development. His arguments for what archaeologists should do (and stop doing) are driven by the way the quality of the archaeological record underdetermines the answers to questions that archaeologists often seek to answer. There is much to like in Perrault’s arguments, but there also are some problematic aspects. I agree that something like Perrault’s macroarchaeology should receive greater focus within the discipline, and that archaeologists …

Final Thoughts And Observations, James R. Allison, Heidi Roberts, Jerry D. Spangler

Faculty Publications

This chapter addresses three topics inspired by the discoveries made during Jackson Flat’s archaeological investigations. The first topic examines the implications of the discovery of early maize agriculture in the Far Western region. Our data suggest that the Far Western Basketmaker tradition developed on a trajectory separate from the Western Basketmaker groups associated with the White Dog Phase in the Four Corners region.

Sr. Ciencia And El Mago: A Legacy Of Archaeological Discovery And Lifelong Learning, Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

As partners in the pursuit of archaeological discovery, Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen developed an enduring professional relationship that resulted in productive careers marked by multiple field projects and numerous scholarly publications. While engaged in academic archaeology, they also fostered a new generation of archaeologists along the way. An integral part of their pedagogy was carried out in the field where students worked alongside Mike and Paul, learning not only how to carry out an archaeological project from beginning to end, but also how to collaborate in a field of study that has become increasingly interdisciplinary. This paper presents my …

Parent–Child Leisure And Parent Affect: The Role Of Family Structure, Camilla Hodge, Jocelyn Wikle

Faculty Publications

This study evaluates differences in parent–child leisure and parent affect across single- and two-parent families. The Ecology of Family Experiences framework suggests contextual factors such as family structure and the novelty of the activity environment contribute to heterogeneity in how parents experience leisure, partly because constraints may differ across family structures. Using a large, nationally representative data sample of parents from the American Time Use Survey (N = 78,353), this study shows single-parents experience leisure deficits compared to other parents, and leisure deficits are greatest in home-based leisure. Additionally, using a subsample (N = 16,214), we found that at-home leisure …

Leisure, Eudaimonic Behavior, Physical Activity And Well-Being Of Older Adults, Jungsu Ryu, Jinmoo Heo, Gary Ellis, Mark A. Widmer

Faculty Publications

This study explored how different types of daily experiences (leisure activity, eudaimonic behaviors) and select habits and dispositions (neuroticism, dispositional depression, physical activity level), are related to situational well-being (situational depression, immediate positive affect) among older adults from a community center. Six hundred thirty-eight situational experience sampling observations were provided by 19 participants ranging in age from 59 to 81 years (M¼68.68, SD¼7.17). Each participant was signaled on five randomly selected occasions each day for seven consecutive days. Upon receiving a signal, participants completed questionnaires measuring their activity participation and situational well-being at the time of the signal. Significant predictors …

Foundations Of Online Learning: Challenges And Opportunities, Christine Greenhow, Charles R. Graham, Matthew J. Koehler

Faculty Publications

Online learning—learning that involves interactions that are mediated through using digital, typically internet-based, technology—is pervasive, multi-faceted, and evolving, creating opportunities and challenges for educational research in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this special issue, we advance an interdisciplinary agenda for online learning research at the intersection of educational technology, educational psychology, and the learning sciences. In this first article in the issue, we define online learning including its variants, review historical and current contexts, explore its multidimensionality, and assert key issues shaping contemporary online learning. We propose five important lenses: community, engagement, pedagogy, equity, and design-based research, through …

Psychological Safety In The Russian Language Classroom, Kelly Knickmeier Cummings, B. Amarilis Lugo De Fabritz, Tia-Andrea Scott, Nsikakabasi Ekong, Isabella Mason

Russian Language Journal

This article seeks to join the ongoing, vibrant discussion about how to foster inclusivity in our classrooms and build a pipeline of Russian language students that is more reflective of the demographic fabric of the United States. Three BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) third-year Russian language students and their instructors at Howard University collaborated as coauthors. We drew from the field of organizational behavior to consider the relevance the concept psychological safety may have for second language acquisition (SLA), and we begin to assess its utility in the Russian language classroom.

Models Of Motherhood Expansive Mothering In The Old Testament, Avram R. Shannon, Thora Florence Shannon

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

Motherhood, both in the scriptures and in our own experiences, is a wonderful and beautiful thing, but it can sometimes be a fraught category. Societal and religious expectations on mothers can be overwhelming and can lead to despair, difficulty, and marginalization.[1] Motherhood is often defined as a narrow range of nurturing behaviors such as bearing, nursing, feeding, and fulfilling other physical needs of children.[2] Some people have used the Old Testament to proscribe women's roles to motherhood and then to define their roles of motherhood as a limited range of these mostly physical acts of childcare.[3] While these are vitally …

From Stumbling Blocks To Stepping Stones What America Can Learn From Germany About Reconciliation, Melissa Dalton-Bradford

BYU Studies

On December 7, 1970, while in Poland to sign the Warsaw Treaty, German chancellor Willy Brandt visited the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The towering stone and bronze monument commemorates the bloody confrontation between Polish resistance groups and German military that took place on the eve of Passover in April 1943, when seven hundred Jewish insurgents wielding only pistols and homemade grenades fought against the well-equipped SS, who, in the end, leveled and incinerated the entire ghetto. More than seven thousand Jews died in that uprising, and an additional forty-two thousand were rounded up and deported to concentration camps. …

Saving A Child (Exodus 1-2), Kevin L. Tolley

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

Exodus is arguably the most essential book in the Hebrew Bible because it depicts the pivotal events in Israel’s history and the definitive institutions of its religion. These themes have reverberated through all subsequent Jewish and Christian history.[1] Nahum Sarna wrote that the Exodus narrative “profoundly influenced ethical and social consciousness” in the Torah and was the “motivation for protecting and promoting the interests and rights of the stranger and disadvantaged of society.”[2]

Experimenting Upon The Feelings: Maria Edgeworth’S Empirical Approach To Love In Belinda, Emily Hopwood Durney

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In her 1801 novel/moral tale Belinda, Maria Edgeworth presents a story of love, family, reconciliation, and education in a time when the popularity of companionate marriages was rising in British society along with the acceleration of scientific innovations and advancements. Belinda mixes these two interests of love and science as Edgeworth, empirically minded like her inventor father, frequently has her characters debunk illusion and deceit through induction and logic. Critics, such as Nicole Wright, have argued that Belinda is a far more significant character than is often recognized because of her logic and reason—especially as she helps other characters …

Full Issue

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.

Review: Elisa Eastwood Pulido. The Spiritual Evolution Of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident, And Utopian Founder, 1878–1961. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020., Susie S. Porter

Mormon Studies Review

Margarito Bautista was born in 1878 in Atlautla, Mexico, a small farming community tucked into the folds of the Popocatépetl volcano in the state of Mexico. Even today, the community remains small, with fewer than thirty thousand people in 2010. Bautista’s father was a farmer and respected community member, serving at one time as municipal president. Elisa Eastwood Pulido provides no occupation for his mother, whom she describes as “pure Nahua” (50). Margarito Bautista converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1901, moved to the Mormon colonies in Northern Mexico, and became a volunteer evangelizer. His …

Moving Histories: On Mobility, Materiality, And Experience In Mormon Heritage, Simon Coleman

Mormon Studies Review

In her engaging account of the intersections of Mormon history, memory, and place across the American West, Sara Patterson often returns to a striking narrative—one that is well known within LDS Church circles. It describes the occasion in 1847 when Brigham Young is said to have looked out at the Salt Lake Valley and declared, “This is the place.” From one perspective, Young’s words—both description and prescription—could hardly have been more unequivocal. They came at the end of a difficult journey and signaled the burgeoning fulfilment of Young’s vision of a Mormon Zion. Nowadays, the spot where he is assumed …