Referendums

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Qvortrup
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Public Spending ◽  
Voting Behaviour ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Veto Player ◽  
Choice Schools ◽  
Augusto Pinochet ◽  
Recurrent Patterns ◽  
Universal Pattern

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article. Referendums are puzzling because they are ubiquitous. Described in the theoretical literature as “veto-player institutions,” referendums are used as frequently by autocratic dictators as they are employed in constitutional democracies. As an institution championed by both Hitler and Churchill, as well as Augusto Pinochet and Woodrow Wilson it is not surprising that political scientists of an earlier generation felt that they defied all attempts to develop testable hypotheses and that referendums—in the words of Arend Lijphart from his 1984 book Democracies—“fail to fit any clear universal pattern.” More recently, beginning in the 1990s, however scholars from both historical institutional as well as rational choice schools have begun to develop testable propositions as well as they have advanced explanations as to the origins, practice and consequences of the increased use of referendums. Further, in addition to general theories of voting behaviour in referendums, an emerging literature has been established, which has investigated the policy consequences of referendums. These consequences include, lower levels of inequality, higher levels of trust in government and lower levels of public spending. Compared to an earlier period characterised by ideographic single country studies, and a general pessimism regarding the prospect of developing general theories, the study of referendums has entered a ‘revolutionary’ phase in the Kuhnian sense of the word. While no general paradigm has emerged, scholars are increasingly confident that general recurrent patterns exist and that it is possible to develop law-like statements about the emergence, use, and implications of the use of the referendum.

Adult Education for African Victims Of Trafficking In Spain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Alfaro Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Educational Programs ◽  
Multidisciplinary Teams ◽  
Host Society ◽  
Education Programs ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
The People ◽  
Education Psychology

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article. Victims of trafficking, once they are released from their captors, need psychological and educational intervention to achieve their recovery and integration. For this, it is important to design and develop educational programs that foster language learning, professional training, and good habits of nutrition and higiene, and that provide alternatives for leisure and free time. These education programs, designed for adults, should be initiated in the shelter houses where the victims are released. They are developed by multidisciplinary teams formed by professionals in education, psychology, nursing, and social work. The final objective is to provide competences to the people included in the program so that they can leave the shelters and be able to live autonomously and independently in the host society.

Video-Mediated Communication

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Rintel
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Social Presence ◽  
Form Factors ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Being There ◽  
The 1960S

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Please check back later for the full article. Video-mediated communication (VMC) has a long history. Fictional depictions of variously named VMC systems began appearing in late 19th century illustrations and novels as plausible extensions of telegraphy, telephony, and filmic and televisual moving pictures. AT&T demonstrated experimental one-way combined telephone and television streams in 1927, and the German Post Office had a fully operative public videophone system as early as 1936. However, despite the apparent early progress, VMC has had a surprisingly rocky path to mainstream use—indeed, it might even be argued that VMC is still not the ubiquitous medium one would assume of “the next best thing to being there” (as Julius Molnar said of the AT&T Mod I in the 1960s). Commercial VMC and research have intertwined themes. Changing technologies and difficulties in institutional and domestic commercialization are set against research into the value, form-factors, and member methods for conveying social presence over distance. These issues are as relevant to current VMC as they have ever been, and augmented reality technologies will introduce yet more new opportunities and challenges.

Yellow Fever in the Caribbean

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariola Espinosa
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Mortality Rate ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
Latin American ◽  
High Mortality ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Single Episode ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
The Caribbean

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. Yellow fever was one of the most dreaded diseases in the Caribbean region from its first appearance in the 1650s until the confirmation of its spread via the bites of infected mosquitos in 1900. Fear of the disease resulted from not just its high mortality rate, but also the horrifying manner in which it killed its victims: after several days of fever, chills, and body aches, the skin and eyes of those who were most seriously infected would turn yellow as their livers failed, they would bleed from the eyes and nose, and they would succumb to the vomiting of coagulated blood. Because the virus caused only mild symptoms in children and a single episode confers lifetime immunity, the disease did not heavily impact natives of the region. Instead, it was newcomers in the Caribbean who suffered the worst ravages.

The Saamaka Maroons of Suriname

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Price ◽  
Sally Price
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin American ◽  
French Guiana ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
The State ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Amazonian Rainforest

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. Fifty years ago, we began wide-ranging anthropological and historical work with Saamaka Maroons, the descendants of slaves who had escaped from the plantations of coastal Suriname in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and established an independent society and culture deep in the Amazonian rainforest. Then a colony of the Netherlands, Suriname became an independent republic in 1975. Events of the 1980s and 1990s—most notably a civil war between the State and the Maroons and the subsequent decision by the State to exploit the timber and mineral riches of the Saamakas’ traditional territory—have led to wrenching changes for people who were once the masters of their forest realm. As the most visible and activist academic supporters of the Saamakas, the authors were barred from Suriname by the national government and, since 1986, have been condemned to continuing work in neighboring French Guiana (Guyane), where tens of thousands of Saamakas in exile have become part of a complex multi-ethnic society driven by strong assimilationist policies authored in Paris. During this same period, the authors have become increasingly involved in activism, assisting the Saamaka people in Suriname in their struggle to protect their territory, which has unfolded before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. What are the moral dilemmas posed by this activist work? What has it been like writing Saamaka ethnography and history from the excentric location of Guyane? How do we imagine the book that we will never get to write, about changes and continuities in Saamaka life over the past fifty years?

Water and Religion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terje Oestigaard
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Ecological Factors ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Agricultural Communities ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Intimate Relation ◽  
Hydrological Cycles

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article. There are many different and distinct types of religious waters: holy, sacred, neural, and even evil water. The ways various divinities invest waters with specific qualities and capacities depend upon a wide range of ecological, theological, and eschatological factors; some are shaped by the environment, while others are purely ontological—concerned with otherworldly realms—and often there is an intimate relation between the mundane and the divine. Rivers, rain, lakes, springs, and waterfalls are some specific forms of religious water, which also relate to seasonality and changing hydrological cycles, and all these variations create different dependencies not only on ecological factors, but more importantly on divine actors. Religious water may heal and bless individuals and be a communal source for fertility and plentiful harvests, but also it may also work as a penalty, wreaking havoc in society as floods or as the absence of the life-giving rains in agricultural communities. Given the great variation of religious waters throughout history, where even the same water may attain different qualities and divine embodiments, divine waters define structuring practices and principles in ecology and cosmology.

Digital Resources: The Essex Collection of Art from Latin America

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Harwood ◽  
Valerie Fraser ◽  
Sarah J. Demelo
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Art ◽  
Latin American Art ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Digital Resources ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
The University ◽  
Year 2000

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. The Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA) was originally founded as the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art (UECLAA) in 1993, but, with no permanent display space, a versatile online presence has been essential to its success as a resource for students, curators, and researchers. By about the year 2000 it comprised around 400 works from about 10 different countries. While it is important to remember that viewing a work of art onscreen is no substitute for viewing it firsthand, the digital catalogue is an essential aspect of ESCALA’s activities. It can offer resources that a paper catalogue cannot (it can provide a record of an artist’s performance, for example), it serves as a versatile resource for teaching and research, and it generates interest in the field among those who happen upon it through random searches.

Literacy and Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Literacy Instruction ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Structural Power ◽  
Literate Identities ◽  
Language Literacy ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Critical Perspectives

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article. Literate identities, reading identities, and writing identities describe the ways that a person constructs the self as a reader, writer, and user of language. The study of literacy and identities is grounded in the idea that literacy is not just about skills related to language, print, and texts, but about individuals who must develop these skills. The learning of these skills is mediated by a person’s developing beliefs about language, literacy, and the self. Successful readers and writers enter, make sense of, and produce texts through personal and relational connections. Literacy, in this sense, is not just about knowing, using, and producing language and text, but about ways of being in relation to language and text. Processes of socialization have often been used to explain how children learn to act and think like readers and writers through the observation, guidance, or apprenticeship of others. More recently, poststructural perspectives have drawn attention to how people are continuously engaged in the construction and reconstruction of identities across contexts, and have led to an attention to identities that may differ across domains. These views have been broadened by critical perspectives that have drawn attention to how relational and structural power guide individuals to think, act, and use language in ways that reflect social structures and history, and create opportunities and constraints for people’s literate identities. These and other perspectives view literate identities as increasingly complex, malleable, and shaped by factors that are both internal and external to the person. Aspects of schooling, including literacy instruction, play a role in directing and supporting these literate identities.

Ethnographies of Water

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandy Toussaint
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
Living Species ◽  
Presence And Absence

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article. Water, in all its permanent, temporary, salt, and freshwater forms, is vital and life-sustaining to humans and other living species, as well as to landscapes. Ethnographies of water tell a multitude of stories, not only about water’s intrinsic value to life, but also how different societies conceptualize, sustain, and use it. Water as a cultural lens reveals how both the presence and absence of water is managed, as well as how it is believed to have originated and should be cared for. Practices such as the regular enactment of religious rituals, the development of irrigation, origin narratives, and the problem of drought all convey a complex of water-inspired stories. That water features as a subject for artworks, architecture, texts, and sculptures in a myriad of locations also reveals important descriptive and investigative foci, as do disputes about ownership and access when sources are scarce, demands are high, and floods disturb lives. Water’s relationship to other elements—air, wind, fire, cloud, and smoke—is also part of the depth and breadth embedded in ethnographies of water, constituting a richness of narratives, especially when explored from country to country and place to place, as new generations and circumstances across time and space converge.

History and Anthropology

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saurabh Dube
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Space Race ◽  
Analytical Procedures ◽  
Writing Analysis ◽  
The Relationship

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article. In discussing history and anthropology together, it is often acknowledged that the relationship between the two has been contradictory and contentious, but that their interplay has also been prescient and productive. At the same time, such considerations, turning on dissension and dialogue, are principally premised upon framing anthropology and history as already known, taken for granted disciplines. Here, each pre-figured enquiry is seen as characterized by its own discrete desires and distinct methods, concerning research and writing, analysis and description. Arguably, what is required is another approach to the subjects of history and anthropology, their tensions and intersections, their contentions and crossovers. Three matters assume salience. First, to juxtapose anthropology and history is to reconsider these enquiries, sieving them against their formidable disciplinary conceits. Second, this requires exploring the constitutive linkages of the two with empire and nation, time and space, race and reason as well as with wider transformations of the human sciences. These reveal curious connections as much as mutual makeovers, especially when mapped as careful genealogies and critical poetics of anthropological and historical knowledges. Third, and finally, at stake are bids that stay with and think through received configurations of tradition and temporality, culture and power, and hermeneutic and analytical procedures. These make possible the tracking of astute articulations, often recent, of historical consciousness and subaltern pasts, gender and sexuality, nation and state, and colony and modernity—based on the shared sensibilities of anthropology, history, and associated enquiries and perspectives.

Surrogacy as Labor

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anindita Majumdar
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Infertile Couple ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Body Work ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
Born Child ◽  
The World ◽  
Precarious Labor

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article. The theoretical and ethnographic conceptualization of surrogacy around the world has seen it within the prism of labor and work. Such a purported identification has a lot to do with the ways in which the practice of carrying an artificially fertilized embryo in one’s uterus for the express purpose of relinquishing the born child to the infertile couple is paradoxical to social theory. Against the universally socially exalted positioning of motherhood is the problematic practice of surrogacy, which defies social conventions. Thus, surrogacy as labor is a difficult proposition socially and morally, bringing forth questions regarding body work and intimate labor—all of which are represented within the practice of surrogacy. In thinking through the understanding of surrogacy as labor, it is important to trace its linkages with kinship, family, commerce, and medicine. Thus, surrogacy as labor is analyzed within the following themes: as linked to other forms of precarious labor that are also enmeshed in the often hostile worlds of money and intimacy (such as sex work and domestic labor); as a process of kin-making; and as the most legislated form of work, globally.

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