Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Cognitive Benefits Of Participation In Lifelong Learning Institutes, Patricia M. Simone, Melinda Scuilli

Psychology

This essay examines the role of cognitive stimulation in maintaining high cognitive functioning in later life. Cognition is dependent upon brain function and brain function can be improved through physical exercise and cognitive stimulation. Lifelong learning institutes offer older adults a myriad of opportunities to enhance their cognitive function. These institutes are not unique to the United States and need not offer courses in any particular format in order to facilitate cognitive benefits.

The ‘We Say What We Think’ Club: Rural Wisconsin Women And The Development Of Environmental Ethics, Nancy Unger

History

The “We Say What We Think” Club: This article discusses the radio program “We Say What We Think Club” which aired on WIBA radio from 1937 to 1957. Though aimed at a female audience, it did not focus on homemaking tips or relationship advice but rather featured a topic-of-the-day. These included a wide range of subjects, such as "Better Clubs for Women" or "Feeding the Family in War Time,” about which the women held a folksy discussion. The author contends that the program reflected an increasing separation of gender spheres that emerged on farms during that era. The five Dane …

The Economic Resource Receipt Of New Mothers, Laura Nichols, Cheryl Elman, Kathryn M. Feltey

Sociology

U.S. federal policies do not provide a universal social safety net of economic support for women during pregnancy or the immediate postpartum period but assume that employment and/or marriage will protect families from poverty. Yet even mothers with considerable human and marital capital may experience disruptions in employment, earnings, and family socioeconomic status postbirth. We use the National Survey of Families and Households to examine the economic resources that mothers with children ages 2 and younger receive postbirth, including employment, spouses, extended family and social network support, and public assistance. Results show that many new mothers receive resources postbirth. Marriage …

Official Representations Of The Nation: Comparing The Postage Stamps Of Sudan And Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane

Economics

An analysis of the imagery on postage stamps suggests that regimes in Burkina Faso and Sudan have pursued very different strategies in representing the nation. Sudan's stamps focus on the political center and dominant elite (current regime, Khartoum politicians, and Arab and Islamic identity) while Burkina Faso's stamps focus on society (artists, multiple ethnic groups, and development). Sudan's stamps build an image of the nation as being about the northern-dominated regime in Khartoum (whether military or parliamentary); Burkina Faso's stamps project an image of the nation as multi-ethnic and development-oriented.

Future City: More Than A Competition—It Grows Into A Campus Collaboration Project!, Susan K. Boyd

Staff publications, research, and presentations

A public event on campus can spark creatively on the part of campus organizations and be a real marketing win for all involved. A competition can also be the centerpiece of a learning experience for the campus and surrounding community as well.

When the Chair of Santa Clara University’s Civil Engineering department asked for library lobby space to display the regional winners’ models of the National Engineers’ Week-sponsored Future City Competition, little did he know that it would also evolve into a collaborative library exhibit and presentation.

This is how the university’s Civil Engineering department, University Library, Environmental Studies department, …

Exploring Young Adults' Perspectives On Communication With Aunts, Laura L. Ellingson, Patricia J. Sotirin

Women's and Gender Studies

Women are typically studied as daughters, sisters, mothers, or grandmothers. However, many, if not most, women are also aunts. In this study, we offer a preliminary exploration of the meaning of aunts as familial figures. We collected 70 nieces' and nephews' written accounts of their aunts. Thematic analysis of these accounts revealed nine themes, which were divided into two categories. The first category represented the role of the aunt as a teacher, role model, confidante, savvy peer, and second mother. The second category represented the practices of aunting: gifts/treats, maintaining family connections, encouragement, and nonengagement. Our analysis illuminates important aspects …

Women’S Access To Credit In Sub-Saharan Africa: Sudan, Michael Kevane, Endre Stiansen

Economics

Women in Sudan have been largely excluded from formal financial institutions of the Anglo-Egyptian and independent Sudan, even as they have demonstrated the ability and desire to profit from financial transactions. The exclusion is not based on legal criteria, but rather on informal practices that control institutions of the formal sector. However, women –particularly in urban areas of northern Sudan – have access to informal financial institutions, and in recent years there have been some attempts by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to offer financial services, especially loans at discounts, to women

Communications, Alexander J. Field

Economics

The communications sector of an economy comprises a range of technologies, physical media, and institutions/rules that facilitate the storage of information through means other than a society's oral tradition and the transmission of that information over distances beyond the normal reach of human conversation. This chapter provides data on the historical evolution of a disparate range of industries and institutions contributing to the movement and storage of information in the United States over the past two centuries. These include the U.S. Postal Service, the newspaper industry, book publishing, the telegraph, wired and cellular telephone service, radio and television, and the …

Introduction To Socialism's Muse, Naomi J. Andrews

History

The disappointment of feminist aspirations in 1848 nevertheless demands more thoroughgoing explanation than its impracticality in politically charged times. We must not lose track of the fact that during the July Monarchy a truly remarkable intellectual revolution took place. For the shy twenty years of Louis Philippe’s reign the formerly unthinkable became relatively commonplace: women’s equality came to be a central tenet of the most avant-garde intellectual and political movement of the day, romantic socialism. Given its integral importance to the earliest pronouncements of socialist philosophy, the totality of feminism’s neglect during the moment of political opportunity afforded to socialism …

Portrayals Of Information And Communication Technology On World Wide Web Sites For Girls, Chad Raphael, Christine Bachen, Kathleen-M. Lynn, Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Kristen A. Mckee

Communication

This study reports a content analysis of 35 World Wide Web sites that included in their mission the goal of engaging girls with information and communication technology (ICT). It finds that sites emphasize cultural and economic uses of ICT, doing little to foster civic applications that could empower girls as citizens of the information age. The study also finds that sites foster a narrow range of ICT proficiencies, focusing mostly on areas such as communication, in which girls have already achieved parity with boys. An examination of the role models portrayed in ICT occupations indicates that the sites show females …

Edward Said, John Berger, Jean Mohr: In Search Of An Other Optic, John C. Hawley

English

We have no known Einsteins, no Chagall, no Freud or Rubenstein to protect us with a legacy of glorious achievements.
-Said, After the Last Sky ( 17)

This humble epigraph spoken on behalf of the Palestinian people by one of its most visible apologists now serves ironically as his own epitaph, for Edward Said surely has achieved as impressive a position in academia as anyone in the twentieth century, and he now enters the lists of memorable contributors to the human project. One notes that such a sentence, relatively brief as it may be, nonetheless & bristles with the combative …

Gendered Approaches To Environmental Justice: An Historical Sampling, Nancy Unger

History

While race and class are regularly addressed in environmental justice studies, scant attention has been paid to gender. The environmental justice movement formally recognized in the 1980s in no way, however, marks the beginning of the central role played by women in the long history of its concerns.' Abuses based in gender as well as race and class have subjected women to a variety of environmental injustices. However, women's responses to the ever-shifting responsibilities prescribed to their gender, as well as to their particular race and class, have consistently shaped their abilities to affect the environment in positive ways. Especially …

Technological Change And U.S. Productivity Growth In The Interwar Years, Alexander J. Field

Economics

Manufacturing contributed almost all—83 percent—of the growth of total factor productivity in the U.S. private nonfarm economy between 1919 and 1929. During the depression manufacturing TFP growth was not as uniformly distributed, and only half as rapid, accounting for only 48 percent of PNE TFP growth. Yet the overall growth of the residual between 1929 and 1941 was the highest of any comparable period in the twentieth century. This resulted from the combination of a still potent manufacturing contribution with advances in transportation, public utilities, and distribution, fueled in part by investments in public infrastructure.

Embodied Knowledge: Writing Researchers’ Bodies Into Qualitative Health Research, Laura L. Ellingson

Women's and Gender Studies

After more than a decade of postpositivist health care research and an increase in narrative writing practices, social scientific, qualitative health research remains largely disembodied. The erasure of researchers’ bodies from conventional accounts of research obscures the complexities of knowledge production and yields deceptively tidy accounts of research. Qualitative health research could benefit significantly from embodied writing that explores the discursive relationship between the body and the self and the semantic challenges of writing the body by incorporating bodily details and experiences into research accounts. Researchers can represent their bodies by incorporating autoethnographic narratives, drawing on all of their senses, …

Invitation To The Table Conversation: A Few Diverse Perspectives On Integration, Natalia Yangarber-Hicks, Charles Behensky, Sally Schwer, Kelly Schimmel Flanagan, Nicholas J.S. Gibson, Mitchell W. Hicks, Cynthia Neal Kimball, Jenny H. Pak, Thomas G. Plante, Steven L. Porter

Psychology

This article represents an invitation to the "integration table" to several previously underrepresented perspectives within Christian psychology. The Judeo-Christian tradition and current views on scholarship and Christian faith compel us to extend hospitality to minority voices within integration, thereby enriching and challenging existing paradigms in the field. Contributors to this article, spanning areas of cultural, disciplinary, and theological diversity, provide suggestions for how their distinct voices can enhance future integrative efforts.

Bridging The Digital Divide In Public Participation: The Roles Ofinfrastructure, Hardware, Software And Social Networks In Helsinki’S Arabianranta Andmaunula, C. J. Gabbe

Environmental Studies and Sciences

Information and communications technology (ICT) itself does not provide communities with a more effective voice in the planning process. However, when ICT is used as a tool to build stronger neighborhood social networks, it can catalyze public participation in planning. The use of ICT as a community-building tool requires a combination of network infrastructure, hardware and software, according to the literature. Additionally, it requires the utilization of human social networks. Based on my study of Helsinki’s Arabianranta and Maunula neighborhoods, I found that catalyzing collaborative planning in Helsinki using ICT requires a combination of infrastructure, hardware, software, and, most importantly, …

Revealing Santa Clara University's Prehistoric Past: Ca-Sci-755, Evidence From The Arts & Sciences Building Project, Richard Carlson, Joe Hendrickson, Jessica Noller, Vanessa Rodriguez, Cindy Arrington, Kevin Bender, Lisa Brown, Sandra Kelly, Jong Lee, Katherine Mcbride, Jennifer Peritz, Peter Preciado, Ryan Vandenbroeck, Margaret A. Graham, Mark G. Hylkema, Karen Oeh, Lorna C. Pierce, Russell K. Skowronek, Victoria Wu

Research Manuscript Series

This monograph, bearing the unpretentious subtitle "Evidence from the Arts and Sciences Building" stands as an elegant contradiction to all of those easy excuses. Russell Skowronek and his co-investigators have produced a report that stands not only as a template for what can be done with a modest data-set of ten prehistoric burials, but as a template for cooperation with the Ohlone descendants of those who, well over a millennium ago, carefully prepared their loved ones for eternity.

Working from ancient maps and city directories, Carlson and associates have produced a fine summary of virtually everyone who ever occupied what …

Dim Delobsom: French Colonialism And Local Response In Upper Volta, Michael Kevane

Economics

Dim Delobsom was one of the first indigenous colonial bureaucrats in the French administration of Upper Volta. Born in 1897, he rapidly rose through the ranks of colonial administration, becoming a high-level functionary. He also served as the resident anthropologist of the dominant Mossi tribe of Upper Volta, and published numerous books and articles on Mossi customs. Delobsom fell afoul of an important faction of the colonial apparatus, however, when he decided to assume the chieftaincy of his natal village upon his father's death. Colonial officials and French Catholic priests thought he would be compromised as a bureaucrat-chief, and sought …

Technical Change And Us Economic Growth: The Interwar Period And The 1990s, Alexander J. Field

Economics

Multifactor productivity growth in the U.S. economy between 1919 and 1929 was almost entirely attributable to advance within manufacturing. Distributing steam power mechanically over shafts and belts required multistory buildings for economical operation. The widespread diffusion of electric power permitted a shift to single story layouts in which goods flow could be optimized around work stations powered by small electric motors. Within this framework, as well as opportunities to produce a variety of new products, economies of scale and learning by doing permitted rapid and across the board gains in manufacturing productivity. The sector contributed 83 percent of the 2.02 …

Conflict, Learning, And Frustration: A Dynamic Model Of Conflict Over Time, Matthew A. Cronin, Katerina Bezrukova

Psychology

A continuing question in the study of conflict and conflict management is, "When is conflict helpful, and when is it harmful?" Though many have offered explanations for this (Jehn, Northcraft, & Neale, 1999), data in support of these notions have been less forthcoming, especially in relation to the helpfulness of conflict (De Dreu & Weingart, 2003). In this paper we 2 present a dynamic model of conflict that we hope will both explain and clarify the confusion by conceptualizing conflict as simultaneously containing helpful (learning related) and harmful (negative sentiment related) components. We argue how both learning and negative emotion …

The Psychological Assessment Of Applicants For Priesthood And Religious Life, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

The recent clergy sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church have focused a great deal of attention on how we evaluate applicants to the priesthood and religious life. The crisis has underscored the critical need to ensure that men who have a sexual predilection towards children be barred from entering religious life and priesthood. Additionally, men who have other significant psychiatric conditions that put them at risk of harming children or others have no place as Church leaders or clergy in positions where they have access to and power over vulnerable others.

Importing Extended Producer Responsibility For Electronic Equipment Into The United States, Chad Raphael, Ted Smith

Communication

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy approach that holds manufacturers accountable for the full costs of their products at every stage in their life cycle. EPR typically involves requiring that producers take back their products at the end of their useful lives, or pay a recycling contractor to do so, thereby internalizing the costs of recycling or disposal in a manufacturer’s bottom line. When companies know that they will bear the costs of product return and recycling, they are more likely to redesign their products for easier and safer handling at each step in the life cycle. This approach …