Digital Commons Network^™

Review Of Restoring The Connection To The Natural World: Essays On The African American Environmental Imagination, Uwe Küchler

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader from 1995, a landmark in the short and dynamic development of this new field of knowledge, Cheryl Glotfelty anticipated that "Ecocriticism has been predominantly a white movement. It will become a multi-ethnic movement when stronger connections are made between the environment and issues of social justice, and when a diversity of voices are encouraged to contribute to the discussion" (Glotfelty 1996, xxv). The collection of essays reviewed here, published in 2003, fills this gap in ecocritical research. The nine contributors to Sylvia Mayer's edition have critically evaluated various aspects of African …

Camping Out With Ray Bourbon: Female Impersonators And Queer Dread Of Wide-Open Spaces, Don Romesburg

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Mid-twentieth century pansy comedian and female impersonator Ray Bourbon's biography and stage materials suggest a disdain for "wide-open spaces" and queer ambivalences about the rural and the open road as sites of threat and danger. The performer's struggle reflected larger concerns for many queer men, especially traveling professional female impersonators. Often relying on long trips to small towns in order to find work, impersonators were vulnerable to a host of legal and socio-cultural repressions with little recourse. Examining how impersonators negotiated the natural and built environments of small towns and roadsides raises new questions about historical and contemporary understandings of …

Review Of Decade Of Disaster, By Ann Larabee, Vibha Arora

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

High-risk technologies cannot prevent, predict, or contain disasters while discourses about such disasters exhibit uncontrolled interpretive possibilities. There is no safe haven, no place that can be free of technological disasters, and such 'unnecessary' violence. What we can plan are escape routes and lifeboats that may rescue us occasionally and fail at other times. Paradoxically lifeboats, radars, containment measures, meters, backup systems cannot shelter all of us from technological risk. Is this the meaning of civilization and human progress? We need to question not merely high-risk technology and its engendered profit but the cultural future premised on such …

Contributors, Alexandra Ganser, Vibha Arora

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 7 issue 2 of Reconstruction.

Introduction, Alexandra Ganser, Vibha Arora

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

At the time of finalizing EcoCultures for publication, nearly all discussions in mass media remind us that climate change has been caused by anthropogenic excesses in the last three centuries. Environmental concern, intertwined with a critical and scholarly perspective, is also at the heart of EcoCultures: Culture Studies and the Environment. The twelve academic articles comprising this issue were written by scholars based in the North and South, speaking different languages yet living in a multicultural global world, and positioned in disciplines ranging from landscape and environmental history, literature and gender studies to visual studies and art. …

Front Matter, Comparative Civilizations Review

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Editor's Note, Joseph Drew

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Spirituality And The Impact On Social Responsibility, Jonothan Ridenour

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Community and social organizations play an important role in developing social responsibility. Religious groups comprise a considerable number of community and social organizations that attempt to foster pro-social behavior. While religion has been proposed to have both a negative and positive influence on social responsibility, spirituality has been largely overlooked. This study between spirituality and social responsibility explores the assumption of a positive correlation. Data were collected from undergraduate students (N = 136) at two Pacific Northwest Universities by a number of scales measuring social responsibility, religiosity, spirituality, and demographic information. The Social Responsibility Scale (Starrett, 1996) was administered and …

Towards An Effective Christian Cross-Cultural Youth Training Model: A Youth Ministry International Case Study, Jeddy Katule Kaleli

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This project is an attempt to explore the indispensable components of an effective Christian cross-cultural youth training model within the context of contemporary youth culture. Taking Youth Ministry International training philosophy as a case study, it analyzes it from an African Christian perspective within the framework of Biblical, anthropological and missiological perspectives. The study has revealed that an effective Christian cross-cultural youth training model must take seriously the cultures in which others live without compromising the authority of Biblical absolutes.

Religion And Community: Mexican Americans In South Omaha (1900-1980) - Ollas Report No. 4, Maria S. Arbelaez

Latino/Latin American Studies Reports

Mexicans, like all other ethnic groups that created the United States as a nation of immigrants, were adamant in establishing churches of their own. Ethnic religious affiliations were essentially of Judeo-Christian origin and benefited effectively from the tolerance of worship mandated by the Constitution. Freedom of belief was known, demanded, and exercised by all immigrants. For Mexican and other ethnic communities, religious belief and centers of worship were the very heart of their community and identity bonds, their source of strength and reason to persevere in a new society where multiple nationalities, cultures, languages, and ethnicities converged.

This report provides …

Mind Over Morality, Steven K. Erickson

Buffalo Law Review

Book review of Charles Patrick Ewing & Joseph T. McCann's Minds on Trial

A Short History Of Winfield C. Arn And The Institute For American Church Growth, Gary L. Mcintosh

Journal of the American Society for Church Growth

This article is being reprinted from the Fall 2005 issue of the Journal of the ASCG in tribute to Win Arn. Readers who are not familiar with the early history of church growth, and particularly the role played by Win Arn and the Institute for American Church Growth, will find this article of interest. —Editor

Fabricating Freddy Vs. Jason: Understanding A Motion Picture As A Social Encounter Between Fans And Filmmakers, Jason M. Rapelje

Dissertations

The break in the mass communicative chain, which separates producers and receivers from one another in both time and space, impedes researchers from studying motion pictures as social encounters. As with face-to-face encounters, producers and receivers of motion pictures depend upon the use of "rules of relevance" (Goffman, 1961) and "typifactory schemes" (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) for their encounters to take place. I examine the social encounter that takes place between some of the filmmakers and fans of Freddy vs Jason through the use of these concepts, as well as a revision of John B. Thompson's (1990) methodological framework of …

University Reporter - Volume 11, Number 08 - April 2007

1996-2009, University Reporter

This issue of the University Reporter includes articles about the 2007 commencement ceremonies which will feature Governor Deval Patrick, the Lynch Foundation's support of College of Nursing and Health Sciences PhD students, UMass Boston’s 21st annual Community Breakfast, upcoming Spring Enrichment Week activities at the University, the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and UMass Boston’s Center on Media and Society's co-sponsorship of Boston’s NEXT Regional Conference, and other news from UMass Boston.

Mcnair Messenger- Spring 2007, Mcnair Staff

McNair Messenger

McNair Scholars Program

From The Reference Desk, Thomas Gilson

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Thinking Like A God: Nature Imagery In Advertising, Catherine M. Roach

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This essay examines selected recent imagery from American advertising that evinces a "negative" sense of nature as hostile other - often portrayed as a persecuting and conquered female - and of humans as its/her master. Examples to be examined of nature as this "Bad Mother" include TV commercials, print advertisements, and a comic strip. I argue that these images spring from a fundamental ambivalence toward nature and that they assuage the anxiety aroused by such ambivalence through a fantasy that casts humans as gods. More specifically, I use the medieval Christian scholastic concept of 'aseity' to suggest that these media …

The Place Of Translation In Jerusalem's Criminal Trial Court, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

The court-appointed translator is largely an invisible actor in the legal space. The Israeli context provides an extreme example of this invisibility: apart from a general statutory definition of the court's obligation to translate criminal proceedings, the work of translation in the Israeli courtroom is mostly unregulated by state law, rendering it highly susceptible to informal manifestations. This article offers a critical empirical investigation into the micropractices of translation performed in the Jerusalem criminal trial court in 2002. On the face of things, the court-appointed translator performs a technical task in the everyday working of the court. Expected to mediate …

Nature In Ayn Rand's Fountainhead, Anand Silodia

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Half a century ago the novelist Ayn Rand [1], a Russian refugee who settled in America, gave us one of the most original and influential philosophies of individualism namely objectivism, which she advanced as 'a philosophy for living on earth.' First propounded through her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism has surpassed the test of time. In her objectivist philosophy, human-nature relationships are an important (indirect) concern although rarely discussed in an explicit manner in her humongous novels.

Review Of Castes Of Mind: Colonialism And The Making Of Modern India, By Nicholas B. Dirks, Laxman D. Satya

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

An anthropologist by training, Dirks employs methodologies from a wide range of disciplines to present a critique of British colonialism and its protégé, the caste system. The author lets both the primary and secondary sources speak for themselves to tell the story of how caste under modern colonial conditions came to acquire the status that it had never enjoyed in India's pre-colonial history. The British colonial state made caste the central pillar of Indian civilization and used it to justify its rule by institutionally generating an enormous body of archival data, to prove the authenticity of caste. So …

Ipulse: April 2007, Lynn University

Student Newspapers

Issues:

• April 3, 2007
• April 4, 2007
• April 10, 2007
• April 11, 2007
• April 12, 2007
• April 13, 2007
• April 25, 2007
• April 26, 2007
• April 27, 2007

Lynnsights: Spring 2007, Lynn University

(2004-2021) LynnSight(s)

Spring 2007 LynnSights:

• African Art and artifacts collection at Lynn University
• Employees vote Lynn best place to work

Reliability And The Interests Of Justice: Interpreting The Military Commissions Act Of 2006 To Deter Coercive Interrogations, Peter S. Margulies, Laura Corbin

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Democracy On Stilts: Bolivia’S Democracy From Stability To Crisis, Miguel Centellas

Dissertations

Bolivia’s recent political crisis starkly contrasts to the preceding two decades of relative democratic stability. Though a unique system of “parliamentarized” presidentialism together with lingering consensus on the national project inherited from the 1952 Revolution supported democratic stability, using qualitative and quantitative methods, this study shows that seemingly benign changes in institutional design made in the 1990s contributed to the acceleration of already existing tendencies towards divisive sectoral, regional, and ethnic politics. A key observation is that successful long-term democratization requires institutions for adequately channeling and representing social demands as well as a shared vision of a political “imagined community” …

The Effects Of Post-Secondary Education On State Troopers’ Job Performance, Stress Levels, And Authoritarian Attitudes, Carl J. Lafata

Dissertations

This study was designed to determine the effects of post-secondary education on police officers' job performance, stress levels, and levels of authoritarianism as measured by Altemeyer's (1996) Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale questionnaire. It involved the analysis of data voluntarily and anonymously submitted via an internet-based survey by 356 of the Michigan State Police's approximately 1,800 enlisted members (those members who are state-certified police officers), along with information collected from informal personal interviews held with a select group of seven of the department's senior leaders. Subsequent analysis of the collected quantitative data revealed no statistical support for the project's first two hypotheses, …

Library Perspectives, Issue 36, Spring 2007, Friends Of The Oberlin College Libraries

Library Perspectives Newsletter

This issue includes items about the Academic Commons, Dr. Thomas W. Roush's gift of some 6,000 films, an author rights and open access workshop for faculty, and much more.

The First Women Lawyers: "Piecemeal Progress And Circumscribed Success", Mary Jane Mossman

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This paper explores the context in which women gained admission to the bar at the end of the nineteenth century, discusses the stories of some of the first women lawyers in different parts of the world, and reflects on their challenges and choices as members of the legal professions.

Systems Ideas And Sustainability, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

Slides from a presentation that provides an outline of ideas to understand how systems science and systems theory is related to, and can work for, sustainability. It illustrates how sustainability requires input from many disciplines, including graph theory, game theory, and thermodynamics, and is dependent on theories from ecology, sociology, and history.

Gender-Linked Stereotypic Content In Youth Magazines, Devon Cadwell Bazata

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Theses

This study evaluates youth magazines aimed at or read by three different target audiences--boys, girls, boys and girls--and examines whether the magazines reinforce gender stereotypes, and whether the intended audience makes a difference in that reinforcement or lack of it. First, this study established a theoretical framework upon which the selection of the target age group for the sample was based. Piaget and Kohlberg's seminal work, and Gilligan and other feminist theory, is considered in the context of the results. Second, it defined stereotypic, counter-stereotypic, and gender-neutral attributes based on five previous peer-reviewed studies dating from 1957-1975, and confirmed the …

Focus, 2007, Spring, Andrews University

Focus

FOCUS (ISSN 1077-9345) is published quarterly, free of charge, for alumni and friends of Andrews University, an institution owned and operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.