Digital Commons Network^™

The Quasi-Human Child: How Normative Conceptions Of Childhood Enabled Neoliberal School Reform In The United States, Debbie Sonu

Publications and Research

This paper argues that normative conceptions of the child, as a natural quasi-human being in need of guidance, enable current school reforms in the United States to directly link the child to neoliberal aims and objectives. In using Foucault’s concept of governmentality and disciplinary power, we first present how the child is constructed as a subject of the adult world, then trace how such understandings invite school policies and practices that worked on the child, rather than with the child. In order to understand how the child comes to be known and recognized as a learner, both at the intersections …

Disability As Diversity: A New Biopolitics, Michele Friedner, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Female Role Models In Bukusu Folktales: Education At The Mother’S Hearth, Namulundah Florence

Publications and Research

Folktales serve a descriptive, as well as prescriptive role, by consistently depicting societal and cultural norms. Sexist portrayals sanction the marginality of Bukusu women, particularly when these reflect prevailing gender roles and expectations. However, contests over identity and representation are as ancient as (unwritten) history. The analysis of tales From Our Mothers’ Hearths: Bukusu Folktales and Proverbs, offers a wide range of role models for women; some of which depict female agency in exacting circumstances (Florence, N., 2005. From our Mothers’ Hearths: Bukusu Folktales and Proverbs. NJ: Africa World Pres/The Red Sea Press). Further, females as narrators, protagonists, and the …

Review: Living In Obscurity: Danté Fenolio – Life In The Dark., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

The reduction and/or disappearance of phenotypic features is a biological phenomenon that has intrigued humans ever since prehistoric times. The earliest known anthropological representation of a creature showing the loss of phenotypic features dates back to ca. 22,000 YBP (Upper Paleolithic). It is a carved drawing of a wingless cave cricket, Troglophilus sp., on a bison (Bison bonasus) bone found in the Grotte des Trois Frères (Three Brothers Cave) in the central Pyrénées, France. Since then, we have witnessed how the study of organisms living in lightless environments went through a number of scientific historical periods. First was the age …

Working For Food Stamps: Economic Citizenship And The Post-Fordist Welfare State In New York City, Maggie Dickinson

Publications and Research

In the United States, the number of people receiving state-subsidized food aid has risen dramatically since 2001. This increase complicates the well-worn story that the post-Fordist welfare state has been continuously cut back in the neoliberal era, indicating instead that it is expanding to subsidize poor workers’ participation in the formal labor market. In New York City, welfare office workers operationalize policies that ease access to food assistance for poor workers who can demonstrate that they are formally employed. Meanwhile, workfare programs punish the unemployed and marginal workers by making them work for food stamps. This conservative, paternalistic welfare regime …

Social Imagination Amid Neoliberal Times, Debbie Sonu, Chloe Asselin

Publications and Research

With beautiful irony, Maxine Greene (1995) writes in the first chapter of Releasing the Imagination that we are caught by seeing things small and by seeing things big. Small, she describes, is to see the world from a distance, as trends, patterns, and systems of ordered representation. Big, by contrast, is to illuminate the singular uniqueness of the human being, to regard the individual as something glorious and significant. Although she authored this book over twenty years ago, her concerns over the “small” condition of schooling are woefully familiar. Small are the lenses of seemingly-benevolent policy-making that trend toward test …

Self-Identified Feminist Mothers' Naming Practices For Their Children: Accepting Being "As Feminist As Everyone" Else, Amy Eshleman, Jean Halley

Publications and Research

In this study, we apply the complexities of feminism to feminists’ choices regarding the surnames of their children. Along with other progressive movements, feminism acknowledges that names matter. Across diverse perspectives within feminism, we do not want to be called girls, but women. We do not want to be called chairmen, but chair or chairperson. We want the title we earned, Dr., or the title we share with all women, Ms., not Miss or Mrs. Given this awareness, and given feminist scholars’ privileged position in the world, we examine the often-patrilineal naming decisions of self-identified feminist faculty members.

Exploring Relations Between Teachers’ Beliefs, Instructional Practices, And Students’ Beliefs In Statistics, Melissa C. Duffy, Krista R. Muis, Michael J. Foy, Gregory Trevors, John Ranellucci

Publications and Research

We examined the epistemic climate of statistics classrooms across two different classrooms by measuring teachers’ espoused beliefs about teaching statistics and observing their teaching practices. We then explored whether students’ beliefs became more aligned with the epistemic climate of the classroom over time. Post-secondary students’ beliefs were measured at the beginning and end of the semester. To measure the epistemic climate, teachers completed self-reports of their beliefs about teaching and learning, and participated in two semi-structured interviews at the beginning and end of the semester. Moreover, several classroom observations were conducted over the course of the semester. Analyses of the …

Shakespeare's Blush, Or "The Animal" In Othello, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactual statement (“Were I the Moor, I would not by Iago”) that is most significant about his relation to Othello. From there I consider the overlap between the play’s representations of animality and black skin. Read in the context of Jacques Derrida’s reflections on animals, I consider the deconstructive value of linking …

Hostos Online Learning Assessment: A Survey Of Student Perceptions, Kate Wolfe, Sarah Hoiland, Kate Lyons, Carlos Guevara, Kristopher B. Burrell, Jacki Disanto, Sandy Figueroa, Aaron Davis, Iber Poma, Wilfredo Rodriguez, Linda L. Ridley

Publications and Research

The Office of Education Technology (EdTech) at Hostos Community College and faculty members from various departments created the Hostos Online Learning Assessment (HOLA) Task Force to design a survey for gathering and assessing data about students’ perceptions of their online learning experiences. The task force wanted to utilize the survey results to identify strengths and weaknesses in online instruction and student preparedness for the online learning environment. Student perceptions of online learning are integral to building upon current best practices and also gauging the preparedness of the students for the online learning environment, particularly in an urban, Hispanic-serving community college. …

Disciplines, Institutions—And Desires, Will Stockton, Mario Digangi, Ruth Mazo Karras, Melissa E. Sanchez

Publications and Research

Will Stockton: I would like to begin by asking you to consider the chiasmus under which we gather: “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire.” The chiasmus focuses our attention on the crossing of two terms, each with noun and verb forms their grammatical flexibility indexed, perhaps, to the methodological flexibility of the fields in which most of us work: early modern (here both Renaissance and late-medieval) queer and/or sexuality studies. Talk a bit about the definitions of desir/e/ing and histor/y/icizing, and the relation of these terms to the periodization and thematization of your and our work. Is defining these words more …

The Issues Of Chronology In Cataloging Chinese Archaeological Reports And Related Materials: An Investigation Of The Cultural Bias In The Library Of Congress Classification And Subject Headings, Junli Diao, Haiyun Cao

Publications and Research

This article discusses peculiarities of Chinese chronology in cataloging Chinese archaeological reports and related materials. It first examines cultural limitations embedded in the Eurocentric Library of Congress Classification (LCC) and calls for catalogers’ sensitivity to authors’ cultural background while cataloging the Bronze China archaeological materials. It then discusses the ambiguity in Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) Manual H1225 and presents a debate on the necessity of including Chinese dynastic information in constructing subject headings through the comparison of facets extracted in this manual and elements derived from title patterns of Chinese archaeological reports. Furthermore, this article elaborates the significance …

Review Paper: The Shape Of Phylogenetic Treespace, Katherine St. John

Publications and Research

Trees are a canonical structure for representing evolutionary histories. Many popular criteria used to infer optimal trees are computationally hard, and the number of possible tree shapes grows super-exponentially in the number of taxa. The underlying structure of the spaces of trees yields rich insights that can improve the search for optimal trees, both in accuracy and in running time, and the analysis and visualization of results. We review the past work on analyzing and comparing trees by their shape as well as recent work that incorporates trees with weighted branch lengths.

Symptomatic Leadership: The Impact Of Changing Demographics On Global Business, Linda L. Ridley

Publications and Research

The past several decades have displayed a focus on diversity in the workplace throughout the corporate environment. Questions remain: has the effort been at all impactful – or, due to its symbolic nature, has it only been a distraction? What behaviors would have been better emphasized to achieve full participation and opportunity by all actors in a firm?

Considerable research has revealed that attempts at diversity are clumsy at best; and spurious at worst. [i] The challenge for firms has been to develop a “business case” for why those contributing groups represented by women and people of color should be …

Indigenous Ecuadorian Mobility Strategies In The Clandestine Migration Journey, Victoria Stone-Cadena

Publications and Research

Based on testimonials of migration journeys of indigenous Cañaris from southern highland Ecuador, this paper examines strategies of mobility and social networking employed by migrants and facilitators in the human smuggling market. Following a series of economic crises in the late 1990s, Ecuadorian transnational migration increased significantly, with a 55.5 percent increase to the United States between 2000 and 2008, and staggering 12,150 percent increase to Spain between 1998 and 2005. This article focuses on the growth of a regional migration industry in the southern high-land region, and pays special attention to the roles of indigenous Cañari migrants and migration …

Can Colour Vision Re-Evolve? Variation In The X-Linked Opsin Locus Of Cathemeral Azara’S Owl Monkeys (Aotus Azarae Azarae), N. I. Mundy, N. C. Morningstar, Andrea L. Baden, E. Fernandez-Duque, V. M. Davalos, B. J. Bradley

Publications and Research

Background: Do evolutionary specializations lead to evolutionary constraint? This appears plausible, particularly when specialization leads to loss of complex adaptations. In the owl monkey lineage, nocturnality clearly arose from a diurnal ancestor. This behavioural shift was accompanied by morphological changes in the eye and orbit and complete loss of colour vision via missense mutations in the gene encoding the short-wave sensitive visual pigment (SWS opsin). Interestingly, at least one subspecies of owl monkey, Azara’s owl monkey (Aotus azarae azarae), has regained activity in daylight. Given that all primate species that are active in daylight, including primarily diurnal species and species …

Bronx Community College’S Education And Reading Department’S Catalytic Research Programs, Joan Wilson, Edward Lehner

Publications and Research

Faculty driven research is central to the intellectual integrity and financial viability of any college community. Greenwood and Levin (2005) highlight how colleges and universities have increasingly professionalized and commodified investigative practices in such a way that they no longer benefit the communities that they were created to serve. Bronx Community College's (BCC) Education and Reading Research Program is designed to question and interrupt research tendencies which propel self-fulfilling education and learning paradigms to produce and reify inter-generationally lived-realities and socio-economic reproduction of the least-advantaged communities. It is anticipated that the research efforts will also break the continuity of unintended …

The Relationship Between Foot Arch Measurements And Walking Parameters In Children, Simone V. Gill, Sara Keimig, Damian Kelty-Stephen, Ya-Ching Hung, Jeremy M. Desilva

Publications and Research

Background: Walking mechanics are influenced by body morphology. Foot arch height is one aspect of body morphology central to walking. However, generalizations about the relationship between arch height and walking are limited due to previous methodologies used for measuring the arch and the populations that have been studied. To gain the knowledge needed to support healthy gait in children and adults, we need to understand this relationship in unimpaired, typically developing children and adults using dynamic measures. The purpose of the current study was to examine the relationship between arch height and gait in a sample of healthy children …

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …

Middle Preclassic Period Maya Greenstone "Triangulates": Forms, Contexts, And Geology Of A Unique Mesoamerican Groundstone Artifact Type, Terry G. Powis, Sherman Horn Iii, Gyles Iannone, Paul F. Healy, James F. Garber, Jaime J. Awe, Sheldon Skaggs, Linda A. Howie

Publications and Research

Over the past twenty years our understanding of the Middle Preclassic (900–300 BCE) period has become much clearer through archaeological investigations at a number of sites located in the Upper Belize River Valley region of the eastern Maya Lowlands. While the picture of Middle Preclassic Maya life, including their material culture, has sharpened, there are aspects that remain uninvestigated. One artifact type, identified as greenstone triangulates, has been found at several Belize Valley sites and in a variety of contexts. Although a number of these multifaceted, polished groundstone items have been recovered, little research has focused on their distribution and …

Application Of Cognitive Apprenticeship Model (Ca) To Library Instruction, Elizabeth K. Tompkins

Publications and Research

The cognitive apprenticeship model, which links apprenticeship-learning techniques and classroom practices, offers a flexible framework for planning and implementing library sessions. Originally developed by educators Collins, Brown, and Newman, cognitive apprenticeship illuminates the thought process of teachers and other experts while they deliver instruction in problem solving, close reading, critical thinking, or other higher order reasoning. This paper discusses how librarians can employ the cognitive apprenticeship model to collapse the thought process associated with library research into components that are comprehensible to all levels of students.

Estudios Agrarios Críticos: Tierras, Semillas, Soberanía Alimentaria Y Los Derechos De Las Y Los Campesinos, Marc Edelman

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Oldowan Hominin Behavior And Ecology At Kanjera South, Kenya, Thomas W. Plummer, Laura C. Bishop

Publications and Research

The Early Stone Age archaeological record does not become persistent and widespread until approximately 2.0-1.7 million years ago, when Oldowan sites spread across Africa and ultimately into Eurasia. However, good records of hominin behavior from this important time interval are uncommon. Here we describe recent findings from the two million year old Oldowan site of Kanjera South, on the Homa Peninsula of southwestern Kenya. Kanjera South is the oldest Oldowan site with large assemblages of stone artifacts and well-preserved archaeological fauna. Our research indicates that hominin activities were situated in an open habitat within a grassland dominated ecosystem, the first …

Political Dynamics Of Transnational Agrarian Movements, Marc Edelman, Saturno M. Boras Jr.

Publications and Research

In Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements Marc Edelman and Saturnino M. Borras Jr. offer a state-of-the-art review of scholarship on transnational agrarian movements (TAMs), a synthetic history of TAMs from the early twentieth century to the present, and an analytical guide to TAM research.

Teaching Human Rights: Confronting The Contradictions, John L. Hammond

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Place Matters: Contextualizing The Roles Of Religion And Race For Understanding Americans’ Attitudes About Homosexuality, Amy Adamczyk, Katherine A. Boyd, Brittany E. Hayes

Publications and Research

As laws and policies related to homosexuality have evolved, Americans' attitudes have also changed. Race and religion have been established as important indicators of feelings about homosexuality. However, researchers have given almost no attention to how county characteristics shape Americans' attitudes. Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling techniques, we examine how personal characteristics and the religious and racial context of a county shape feelings about homosexuality drawing on data from the American National Election Survey and information about where respondents reside. We find that African Americans initially appear less tolerant than other racial groups, until we account for the geographical distribution of …

Exchanges Of Identity In Prehistoric Anatolian Figurines, Ellen H. Belcher, Karina Croucher

Publications and Research

This paper examines exchange imagery and ideology of the human body manifested through figurines from prehistoric (7 th –6 th millennia BC) Anatolian contexts. These figurines document local, regional and inter-regional communication of identity, use of materials, ideologies and skills. Taking a new approach to understanding the assemblages, this paper suggests four key themes of analysis: materials and materiality; fractured bodies; gender spectrum; and ambiguities and relationships.

The Trouble With White Feminism: Whiteness, Digital Feminism And The Intersectional Internet, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

In August, 2013 Mikki Kendall, writer and pop culture analyst, started the hashtag #SolidarityisforWhiteWomen as a form of cyberfeminist activism directed at the predominantly white feminist activists and bloggers at sites like Feministing, Jezebel and Pandagon who failed to acknowledge the racist, sexist behavior of one their frequent contributors. Kendall’s hashtag activism quickly began trending and reignited a discussion about the trouble with white feminism. A number of journalists have excoriated Kendall specifically, and women of color more generally, for contributing to a “toxic” form of feminism. Yet what remains unquestioned in these journalistic accounts and in the scholarship to …

Ideologías Lingüísticas, José Del Valle, Vítor Meirinho

Publications and Research

This article provides an introduction to the concept of linguistic ideologies and its applicability to sociolinguistic analysis.

Los Problemas De Las Fronteras Humanitarias, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

Resumen:

Este texto plantea un análisis crítico del papel de los discursos y prácticas humanitaristas en nuestra concepción de la migración y en las políticas públicas desarrolladas en relación a la movilidad poblacional a través de las fronteras internacionales. Se parte de la premisa de que el humanitarismo, aunque fuera bien intencionado, puede tener efectos perniciosos sobre la situación que se vive en las fronteras, especialmente si acaba por sustituir a la justicia y a los derechos que tienen los emigrantes. Para estudiar esta paradoja, el texto analiza, sucesivamente, varios problemas asociados a la acción humanitaria: el problema con la …