Nana Asma’u

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alaine Hutson
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Only Children ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Sokoto Caliphate ◽  
Literary Output

Asma’u bint Shehu Usman dan Fodio (1793–1865) was an Islamic scholar, poet, and educational leader in what is now Northern Nigeria. She is best known as Nana Asma’u. A daughter of Shehu Usman dan Fodio, the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate and sister to one of the Shehu’s successors, Muhammad Bello, Nana Asma’u used her writings to help the Shehu in his quest to break the syncretistic practice of Islam in Hausaland, convert more people to Islam, and help the newly reformed community of faithful Muslims maintain their orthodox religious practice. As one of the longest surviving members of Shehu’s family and of the Degel community, her prolific literary output and enduring presence helped shape the reputation of the Shehu, Muhammad Bello, and early 21st-century scholarship of the Sokoto Caliphate. As a member of a Fulani scholarly family of long standing, Nana Asma’u benefitted from an early childhood education taught by the scholarly Fulani women of her family. She also transformed that tradition of women as the first teachers of Islamic religious knowledge. Nana Asma’u educated not only children but men and women and established the yan-taru (the associates or disciples), a school of women teachers who traveled to rural areas to improve Hausa women’s education. She was a prolific writer of poems in three languages. Her writings continue to be read, memorized, and recited: the yan-taru concept of making education accessible, especially to women, continues into the 21st century and has expanded into the United States.

scholarly journals War in the 21st century as a tool of the imperial control of planetary “periphery”

2018 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 412-431
Author(s):  
Srdjan Korac
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Control Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethical Framework ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Defensive Role ◽  
State Actors

The paper analyses how the (mis)use of the concept of international society in the context of the US and other Western countries` foreign policies legitimises an alleged defensive role of the interventionist imperial policy towards rogue, weak and failed states, as well as towards various non-state actors who contest the universality of liberal order. The starting assumption is that the asymmetric character of armed conflicts in the late 20th and early 21st century - combined with notions of international society, democratic peace, and world division into the ?civilised? (liberal) centre and ?uncivilised? periphery - has conditioned the planning and waging wars as disciplinary tools of the Western imperial control policy which is asserted over planetary periphery. The analysis focuses on several indicators which reveal how the methodology of the policing, the criminal justice system and the penalty system is embedded into the ontology of military interventions pursued by the United States, alone or within ad hoc coalitions with other Western and/or regional powers. The author concludes that war as a social practice lost in the early 21st century its traditional ontological features by assuming the structural characteristics of crime control policy, which caused the disruption of the ethical framework in the discursive and practical treatment of hostile states and their soldiers and non-state actors.

scholarly journals Accounting for Student Success: Academic and Stakeholder Perspectives That Have Shaped the Discourse on Student Success in the United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor M. H. Borden ◽  
Gretchen C. Holthaus
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Student Success ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
College Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Time To Degree ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Stakeholder Perspectives

Abstract The meaning of student success differs according to the goals, interests and roles among prospective students, their parents and extended family, educators, scholars, employers, legislators and other stakeholders. Despite this wide variation, accountability for student success has been mostly equated with readily available measures like degree completion rates, time to degree and credit accumulation. Recently, especially in the United States, where the student assumes a large cost burden for attending college, interest has increased regarding the amount of debt incurred and the employment and wages obtained post-graduation to enable students to pay off that debt. There are many from within and outside the academy who criticize these simplistic measures of student success and seek evidence about how a college education develops students intellectually and morally, preparing them to lead lives as productive citizens and members of the 21st Century workforce. In this article, we review the key concepts of student success that have emerged from the U.S. higher education research literature, as well as major U.S. policy initiatives related to improving student success. The purpose of this analysis is to develop an organizing framework that enables scholars and policy makers to place their work within a broader context as related to the discourse on student success in the early 21st Century, especially within the United States, but with increasingly common elements internationally.

Paul Muldoon

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Karhio
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
21St Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Paul Muldoon ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Irish Poetry

Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, Northern Ireland, in 1951 and spent his childhood in the village of Moy at the border of County Armagh and County Tyrone—a setting for several of his poems. He studied at Queen’s University Belfast and published his first collections of poetry in the early 1970s. At the time of the publication of his first volumes, Muldoon famously enjoyed the mentorship of Seamus Heaney, and this biographical and literary connection has been a constant reference point in criticism, to an extent that other significant literary exchanges and influences initially remained underexplored. After working for the BBC in Belfast until the mid-1980s, Muldoon moved to the United States in 1987. Now a US citizen, he currently lives in New York and works at Princeton University, where he holds the Howard G. B. Clark ’21 chair in the humanities. Muldoon has published twenty-two major collections of poetry, nineteen chapbooks and interim collections, two volumes of critical essays, three opera libretti, song lyrics, translations, and children’s literature. He has been repeatedly characterized as a shapeshifting figure, whose work simultaneously reaffirms and undermines preheld conceptions of what we mean by “Irish poetry.” Thus, to propose that his idiosyncratic style and the remarkable complexity of his verse resists critical categorization is a case of stating the obvious. A reverse claim, however, might be more appropriate: that his writing embraces such a variety of categories that attempts at classification lose their purpose. Muldoon’s densely referential writing and his technical mastery of poetic language are matched by few poets of his generation, and the issue of how successfully his undeniable dexterity translates into poetic efficacy has been a persistent tendency in his critical reception. Muldoon has been, in turns, praised for his unrivaled skill and technical virtuosity or accused of his poetry’s evasiveness, perceived as a lack of social or political commitment. Yet, few would question that his verse has a place in any overview of modern Irish writing, modern English-language poetry, or experimental 20th- and 21st-century poetics. In the early 21st century, Muldoon’s perceived obliquity, or his distaste for direct political engagement with the crises of late-20th-century Northern Ireland, has made way to a more outspoken approach, in poetry as well as in public life. His work has been highly critical of the US invasion of Iraq, for example, and also tackled problematic aspects of Irish culture and history in an increasingly direct manner.

The Posthuman Subject in/of Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle N. Huang
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Early 21St Century

Is the posthuman postracial? Posthumanism, an interpretive paradigm that unseats the human individual as the de facto unit of literary analysis, can be a powerful tool for Asian American literary studies when deployed with attention to critical race theory and literary form. Throughout American literature, Asian Americans have frequently been figured as inhuman—alien, inscrutable, and inassimilable. Representations of Asian Americans as either sub- or superhuman populate many genres, including adventure literature, domestic realism, comics, and science fiction. This trope, which combines yellow peril and model minority stereotypes, forms a through line that runs from depictions of Asian Americans as nerveless 19th-century coolies to 21st-century robotic office workers. Manifesting both threat and promise for America, posthuman representations of Asian Americans refract national and racial anxieties about the fading of the United States’ global influence as Asian nations, especially China, become political and economic superpowers. Rather than directly refuting these characterizations, Asian American writers have creatively engaged these same thematics to contemplate how developments in science and technology produce different ways of understanding the human and, concomitantly, engender changes in racial formation. Novelists, dramatists, poets, and artists have all deployed posthumanism in order to conduct imaginative experiments that challenge expectations regarding the typical purview of Asian American literature. Several nodes of inquiry that demonstrate the importance of posthumanist critique for Asian American literary studies include race as an index of humanity, the mutability of race through biotechnology, the amplification of racial inequality through infrastructure, and the reproduction of race through algorithmic culture. In the wake of early 21st-century ecological disaster and biotechnological fragmentation, examining the evolving relationship between Asian American racialization and posthumanism continues to provide important insights into how race is structured by the changing boundaries of the human and, in turn, demonstrates that the posthuman subject is never “beyond” race. In addition to offering an overview, this article provides a case study regarding the stereotyping of Asian Americans as robotic.

Political Competition Beyond Ethnic Politics in Africa

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominika Koter
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Ethnic Politics ◽  
Ethnic Mobilization ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Ethnic Networks ◽  
Electoral Mobilization

Ethnic cleavages are present in many elections across the continent, and scholars frequently view ethnic mobilization as the default way in which politicians appeal to African voters. Ethnic electoral patterns already emerged in many countries during the first mass elections around the time of independence and they continue to be visible to this day. The prevalence of ethnic politics has been commonly seen as a result of limited ideological and programmatic debates in African elections and the centrality of ethnic networks in voters’ access to scarce resources. Yet, early-21st-century scholarship increasingly reveals the varied degrees in which ethnicity plays a role in African political contests, raising the question of when do politicians engage in alternative forms of electoral mobilization? And when are voters inclined to vote for candidates outside their ethnic group? Emerging scholarship suggests that it is easier for politicians to pursue programmatic and populist campaigns that do not cater to specific ethnic groups in cities rather than in rural areas where politicians rarely avoid clientelist strategies. Other research also suggests that the nature of social organization and the composition of rural areas can determine whether clientelist strategies are organized along ethnic lines or not.

US–Mexico Borderlands and Religion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne M. Martínez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Political Cultures ◽  
Political Economic

The border between the United States and Mexico has artificially divided languages, cultures, landscapes, and religions for more than a century and a half. This region is the crossroads not only of Anglo-America and Latin America, but also of multiple empires; the Aztec, Spanish, and US empires each staked a claim on this region, leaving political, economic, cultural, and religious markers on the landscape and its peoples. These imperial bodies brought their preferred religious practices and religiously inspired social, economic, and political cultures, which reshaped populations and landscapes from the 15th century to the present. Religion has been a significant dimension of this region from prior to the arrival of the Spanish through the early 21st century.

Trends in Survival after Diagnosis with Hematologic Malignancy in Adolescence or Young Adulthood in the United States, 1981- 2005

Blood ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 112 (11) ◽  
pp. 877-877
Author(s):  
Dianne Pulte ◽  
Adam Gondos ◽  
Hermann Brenner
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Hematologic Malignancy ◽  
Lymphoblastic Leukemia ◽  
Relative Survival ◽  
Hematologic Malignancies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Acute Leukemias ◽  
Period Analysis ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Survival Expectations

Abstract Background: There are few population based studies of long-term survival of adolescents and young adults (AYA) with hematologic malignancies, mostly pertaining to patients diagnosed in the 1990s or earlier. Traditionally, survival in AYA with hematologic malignancies has been worse than survival for children with similar malignancies. Here, we use period analysis to obtain up-to-date information on survival expectations of AYA diagnosed with hematologic malignancies through the early 21st century. Methods: Period analysis was used to calculate 5- and 10-year relative survival for AYA aged 15–24 diagnosed with hematologic malignancies for five calendar periods from 1981–85 to 2001–2005, using data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. Results: Data from 9836 patients aged 15–24 included in the SEER database who were diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma (HL), non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), acute myeloblastic leukemia (AML), and chronic myelocytic leukemia (CML) were analyzed. HL was the most common malignancy, accounting for about 50% of all hematologic maligancies in each calendar period examined. Survival strongly improved for each of the five hematologic malignancies. Increases in 10-year relative survival were as follows: HL, from 80.4 to 93.4%; NHL, from 55.6 to 76.2%; ALL, from 30.5 to 52.1%; AML, from 15.2 to 45.1%; CML, from 0 to 74.5% (p<0.0001 in all cases, see table). However, while survival improved steadily throughout the period examined for the lymphomas and CML, survival was stable during the late 1990s and early 21st century for the acute leukemias. Survival has not improved for AML since 1990–95 or for ALL since 1996–2000 (see table). Discussion: Survival expectations for AYA with hematologic malignancies have strongly improved since the 1980s. However, with the exception of HL, survival rates have not reached the levels observed for children diagnosed with the same malignancies. In particular, 10-year survival in children aged 10–14 with ALL was over 75% for the 2000–04 period1 compared to about 50% for AYA in 2001–05. Similarly, 10-year survival for children aged 0–14 diagnosed with acute non-lymphoblastic leukemia was about 60% in the 2000–04 period compared with less than 50% for AYA with AML in the 2001–05 period. Some caution must be used when comparing survival in AYA versus in children since survival estimates for children are for absolute survival, while those for AYA are for relative survival. However, relative survival in children and AYA is close to 100%, making the comparison relatively straightforward. Furthermore, survival estimates for the acute leukemias have not improved since the 1990s while survival for children continued to improve during the early 21st century. Reasons for the poorer survival observed may include differences in the biology of the malignancies, poorer compliance in AYA, differences in treatment protocols in children versus AYA, lower availability of clinical trials in AYA than in children, and low rates of health insurance in AYA patients, particularly after age 18. Further examination of the reasons for the poorer outcomes observed for AYA with acute leukemias may clarify this issue. 1 Pulte D, Gondos A, Brenner H. Trends in 5- and 10-year survival after diagnosis with childhood hematologic malignancies in the United States, 1990–2004. Accepted JNCI 7/08. Table: 10-year relative survival 1981–85 to 2001–05 by hematologic malignancy Diagnosis 1981– 85 1986–90 1991–95 1996–2000 2001–05 Diff1 p-val2 PE3 SE4 PE SE PE SE PE SE PE SE 1 Difference in survival, 1981–85 versus 2001–05. 2 P-value for trend. 3 Point estimate 4 Standard error HL 80.4 1.5 82.6 1.4 86.9 1.2 88.9 1.2 93.4 1.0 +13.0 <0.0001 NHL 55.6 3.1 59.9 2.9 62.7 2.7 67.9 2.6 76.2 2.3 +20.6 <0.0001 ALL 30.5 4.1 35.8 4.0 42.1 3.9 51.6 3.9 52.1 3.7 +21.6 <0.0001 AML 15.2 3.4 22.3 4.1 43.6 4.7 39.5 4.0 45.1 4.0 +29.9 <0.0001 CML 0 0 22.5 6.5 20.8 6.5 41.4 7.9 74.5 7.6 +74.5 <0.0001

Commercialization of Journalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Kvalheim ◽  
Jens Barland
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Penny Press ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Modern Sense

Commercialization of journalism is not a new concern. Indeed, journalism has always been bought and sold in the market, and commercialization has thus always been a central part of the production of journalism. In a modern sense, however, commercialization became an issue with the emergence of the penny press in the United States and the abolishment of the “taxes on knowledge” in the United Kingdom. These developments altered the content of newspapers and brought along discussions concerning the effects of commercialization. In the late 20th and early 21st century, commercialization of journalism again took a new turn. Developments such as digitalization and the emergence and communization of the internet, has led to an increased attention to market logics. This, in turn, makes studies of the commercialization of journalism increasingly more important.

Climate Change Communication in Spain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Carmen Erviti ◽  
Bienvenido León
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
United States ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Population ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Change Communication ◽  
The Media

It is not easy to determine the precise moment when climate change became a public communication issue in Spain. Among early references, the national newspaper El País published a story titled “World climate is going to change,” on November 17, 1976, and the term “global warming,” imported from the United States, appeared frequently in the media, from 1988 onward. However, academic research about communication of this important issue is relatively recent. A seminar held in 2005 warned that there were “no specific studies on the way the Spanish citizenry is facing the climate change threat” (II Seminario de Comunicación, Educación y Participación frente al Cambio Climático, Lekaroz, Navarra). This seminar precipitated the first study on public perception of climate change in Spain. According to more recent research, 90.1% of Spanish citizens are aware that climate change is happening, whereas only 4.6% are not. Historical records indicate that awareness has grown consistently in the early 21st century, with awareness levels that are similar to those of other countries. However, although there exists a strong consensus within the scientific community on the existence and the anthropogenic origin of climate change, polls indicate that only a small part of the Spanish population (39.0%) is aware of this agreement; a figure that is similar to that of other countries, such as the United States. In addition, two thirds of the Spanish population (64.4%) believe that climate change is mainly a consequence of human activities; a higher percentage than in other countries, like the United States. This ambivalent picture is not surprising, considering climate change is a marginal topic for mainstream Spanish media. According to a study conducted in 2005 and 2011, only 0.2% of all stories in the main national newspapers and 0.19% of national TV news focused on climate change, a lower percentage than in other countries. Media coverage of this issue has fluctuated since the 1990s, depending on several factors, like the existence of links to current affairs (such as international climate summits), notable report publications (from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and public engagement efforts (such as the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth). As far as the quality of the coverage is concerned, research shows similar trends to those detected internationally, including politicization, superficiality, and catastrophism. However, compared to other countries, there is a lower representation of skeptic viewpoints in the Spanish media that may be related to a weaker public visibility of skeptic think tanks and personalities. Academic interest in climate change communication has risen since 2010. Only four publications (books or articles) were released from 2001 to 2005, whereas more than 30 appeared in the period 2011–2015. Research has primarily focused on public perception and media coverage of climate change and has been conducted mainly by four universities (Universidad Complutense, Universidad de Málaga, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, and Universidad de Navarra). Communication actions related to climate change have been carried out by several nongovernmental organizations, often as part of international events and campaigns. In the early 21st century, national and regional public institutions have conducted several campaigns to communicate and raise climate change awareness, producing several exhibitions and publications, mainly on climate change mitigation. Several forums have suggested that the current weaknesses could benefit from a closer relationship among the media and scientific institutions. This could contribute to provide more credible information on the reality of climate change, as well as the options for mitigation and adaptation. Future research could also address climate change coverage in online media and social networks, as well as reception studies, currently underrepresented in academic studies conducted in the country.

Afroasiatic Languages

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zygmunt Frajzyngier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Writing System ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Semitic Languages ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
North West

Afroasiatic languages are the fourth largest linguistic phylum, spoken by some 350 million people in North, West, Central, and East Africa, in the Middle East, and in scattered communities in Europe, the United States, and the Caucasus. Some Afroasiatic languages, such as Arabic, Hausa, Amharic, Somali, and Oromo, are spoken by millions of people, while others are endangered with extinction. As of the early 21st century, the phylum is composed of six families: Egyptian (extinct), Semitic, Cushitic, Omotic, Berber, and Chadic. There are some typological features shared by all families, particularly in the domain of phonology. Languages are also typologically quite distinct with respect to syntax and functions encoded in the grammatical systems. Some Afroasiatic languages, such as Egyptian, Akkadian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ge’ez, have a longtime written tradition, but for many languages no writing system has yet been proposed or adopted. The Old Semitic writing system gave rise to the modern alphabets used in thousands of unrelated contemporary languages. Two Semitic languages, Hebrew (with some Aramaic) and Arabic, were used to write the Old Testament and the Koran, the holy books of Judaism and Islam.

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