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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Broad Are Nebraska's Rolling Plains: The Early Writings Of George Bird Grinnell, Richard Vaughan Nov 2015

Broad Are Nebraska's Rolling Plains: The Early Writings Of George Bird Grinnell, Richard Vaughan

Richard Vaughan

Profiles the life of writer George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938) and the influence his first trip to Nebraska had in shaping his early writings about the American West. Among the works he published were several groundbreaking books about the Plains Indians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not only did this 1870 trip to Nebraska, as a member of O. C. Marsh’s first Yale Paleontological Expedition, influence Grinnell's scholarly endeavors, but his deep interest in the state also influenced his lifelong devotion to environmental preservation and established him as an important advocate for the protection and welfare of Native …


The Genealogy, Ideology, And Future Of Isil And Its Derivatives, Ahmed E. Souaiaia Nov 2015

The Genealogy, Ideology, And Future Of Isil And Its Derivatives, Ahmed E. Souaiaia

Ahmed E SOUAIAIA

The organization known today simply as the “Islamic State,” or by its Arabic acronym, Daesh (English, ISIL), has historical and ideological roots that go beyond the territories it now controls. These deep roots give Daesh confidence that it will succeed in dominating the world, but give others reasons to believe that it will fail in controlling even a single nation. Mixing puritan religious and political discourses, ISIL managed to dominate all other armed opposition groups in conflict zones (Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya) and has inspired individuals in many other countries (Egypt, Pakistan, France, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia) to …


New Desires, New Selves: Sex, Love, And Piety Among Turkish Youth, Gul Ozyegin Jul 2015

New Desires, New Selves: Sex, Love, And Piety Among Turkish Youth, Gul Ozyegin

Gul Ozyegin

As Turkey pushes for its place in the global pecking order and embraces neoliberal capitalism, the nation has seen a period of unprecedented shifts in political, religious, and gender and sexual identities for its citizens. In New Desires, New Selves, Gul Ozyegin shows how this social transformation in Turkey is felt most strongly among its young people, eager to surrender to the seduction of sexual modernity, but also longing to remain attached to traditional social relations, identities and histories.          
 
Engaging a wide array of upwardly-mobile young adults at a major Turkish university, Ozyegin links the biographies of …


Gender Equality, Community Divisions And Autonomy: The Prospera Conditional Cash Transfer Program In Chiapas, Mexico, Óscar G. Gil-García Jun 2015

Gender Equality, Community Divisions And Autonomy: The Prospera Conditional Cash Transfer Program In Chiapas, Mexico, Óscar G. Gil-García

Óscar F. Gil-García

This article examines the gender equality component of Prospera, a conditional cash transfer program in Mexico that provides cash contingent on three nodes of civic engagement: health, nutrition and education. This article draws on ethnographic research in La Gloria, a settlement of indigenous Mayan refugees from Guatemala in the Mexican state of Chiapas. I identify the Prospera program’s neoliberal features, the impact its gender equality measures have in the lives of women, their families, and in the political structure of the community of La Gloria. My findings reveal how Prosperareinforces gender and racial hierarchy, fosters community divisions that …


The Vote On Bilingual Education And Latino Identity In Massachusetts, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce Jun 2015

The Vote On Bilingual Education And Latino Identity In Massachusetts, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

In November 2002, the Massachusetts electorate voted overwhelmingly to pass Referendum Ballot Question 2 (Q. 2), sponsored by California millionaire Ron Unz. The passage of this initiative by close to 70% of the voters effectively ended bilingual education in the state as it had been known for thirty years. Exit polling done at selected cities in Massachusetts by the Mauricio Gaston Institute and UMass Poll revealed, however, that out of a total 1,491 Latinos polled, a vast majority of them, around 93%, had voted in favor of rejecting Q. 2 and keeping bilingual education in place. Indeed, Q. 2 became …


Exploring Gloria Anzaldúa’S Methodology In Borderlands/La Frontera—The New Mestiza, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce Jun 2015

Exploring Gloria Anzaldúa’S Methodology In Borderlands/La Frontera—The New Mestiza, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera--The New Mestiza does not fit into the usual critical categories simply because she follows inclination of interest, as opposed to working at achieving systematization. Not only does she shift continually from analysis to meditation, and refuse to recognize disciplinary barriers, but she speaks poetically even when dealing with cultural, political, and social issues. Indeed her method, like Simmel's, is more akin to "style" in art than it is to "analysis" or "inquiry" in the social sciences. A critic proclaims her/his own incompetence, however, if the mere fact that a text has a certain interdisciplinary quality scares …


A Narrative Inquiry Of Successful Black Male College Students, Malou Chantal Harrison Feb 2015

A Narrative Inquiry Of Successful Black Male College Students, Malou Chantal Harrison

Malou Chantal Harrison

Despite a growing enrollment of Black males in colleges and universities in the U.S., the nationwide college degree completion rate for Black males remains at disproportionately low numbers as compared to other ethnicities and to that of Black females. The purpose of this narrative inquiry study was to evoke and promote the voices of successful Black male students and to understand their perspectives on factors that contributed to their college success. Findings from this research provide insight into college experiences and interventions that have positive implications for Black male college student success. Valencia's (2010) work on educational attainment served as …


Volunteering For Development: Tensions Around Conducting Multi-Sited Ethnography With Volunteers, Nichole Georgeou Jan 2015

Volunteering For Development: Tensions Around Conducting Multi-Sited Ethnography With Volunteers, Nichole Georgeou

Nichole Georgeou

A scholarly and personal account of the ethical, and human issues and values involved in a specific example of ethnographic research and field-work, with wider research implications and relevance.


More Than Images: Postcards And New Reflections On Information Literacy, Rachel Wen-Paloutzian Dec 2014

More Than Images: Postcards And New Reflections On Information Literacy, Rachel Wen-Paloutzian

Rachel Wen-Paloutzian

Focusing on a case study of postcard instruction for an American Culture course in the William H. Hannon Library at LMU, this presentation discusses how library instruction with postcards works within the new ACRL Information Literacy Framework. Specifically, Native Americans postcards are great resources to explore and illustrate one of the Framework concepts, “Authority is constructed and contextual.” Also, this presentation highlights metaliteracy, in particular, the affective engagement with information. Alongside behavioral and cognitive analytic skills, affective value is central to learning with cultural artifacts and visual resources, such as postcards.  


The Myth Of The White Minority, Andrew Pierce Dec 2014

The Myth Of The White Minority, Andrew Pierce

Andrew J. Pierce

In recent years, and especially in the wake of Barack Obama’s reelection, projections that whites will soon become a minority have proliferated. In this essay, I will argue that such predictions are misleading at best, as they rest on questionable philosophical presuppositions, including the presupposition that racial concepts like ‘whiteness’ are static and unchanging rather than fluid and continually being reconstructed. If I am right about these fundamental inaccuracies, one must wonder why the myth of the white minority persists. I will argue that by re-envisioning whites as a minority culture struggling against a hostile dominant group, and by promoting …


Food Sovereignty As Decolonization: Some Contributions From Indigenous Movements To Food System And Development Politics, Sam Grey, Raj Patel Dec 2014

Food Sovereignty As Decolonization: Some Contributions From Indigenous Movements To Food System And Development Politics, Sam Grey, Raj Patel

Sam Grey

The popularity of ‘food sovereignty’ to cover a range of positions, interventions, and struggles within the food system is testament, above all, to the term’s adaptability. Food sovereignty is centrally, though not exclusively, about groups of people making their own decisions about the food system—it is a way of talking about a theoretically-informed food systems practice. Since people are different, we should expect decisions about food sovereignty to be different in different contexts, albeit consonant with a core set of principles (including women’s rights, a shared opposition to genetically modified crops, and a demand for agriculture to be removed from …


The Contemporary Ethnic Minority In China: An Introduction, Margaret Maurer-Fazio, Reza Hasmath Dec 2014

The Contemporary Ethnic Minority In China: An Introduction, Margaret Maurer-Fazio, Reza Hasmath

Reza Hasmath

This article introduces the historical context behind the practice of fixed ethnic identification currently employed in the People’s Republic of China. Notwithstanding the major problems to clearly delineate the boundaries of many ethnic groups in the Chinese context, the article contends there was a strong pragmatism for officially classifying ethnic minority groups rather than adopting the self-identification method used in many Western nations. Finally, the article poses the query whether ethnic minority status continues to hold a meaningful category of analysis in contemporary China.


Othering, An Analysis, Lajos L. Brons Dec 2014

Othering, An Analysis, Lajos L. Brons

Lajos Brons

Othering is the construction and identification of the self or in-group and the other or out-group in mutual, unequal opposition by attributing relative inferiority and/or radical alienness to the other/out-group. The notion of othering spread from feminist theory and post-colonial studies to other areas of the humanities and social sciences, but is originally rooted in Hegel’s dialectic of identification and distantiation in the encounter of the self with some other in his “Master-Slave dialectic”. In this paper, after reviewing the philosophical and psychological background of othering, I distinguish two kinds of othering, “crude” and “sophisticated”, that differ in the logical …