Student-Directed Blended Learning with Facebook Groups and Streaming Media: Media in Asia at Furman University

Furman University prizes itself on being an engaged learning, liberal arts institution with extensive faculty-student interaction. 96% of students live on campus, leading some to question whether reducing face-to-face instructional time makes any sense pedagogically. Coming from a different institution that encouraged faculty to create hybrid courses, and seeing the creativity and freedom that offered, I wanted to experiment with the format in this new institutional environment. Would it still be effective? What adaptations would be necessary, and how would students react to this different course format? In Fall 2013, I taught a carefully designed blended learning course that met once weekly for two hours and offered students extensive choices for meeting the course and unit learning objectives, using Facebook groups to report on and discuss their progress and communicate with their peers. This case study examines the course experience and outcomes. It discusses practical and logistical elements of teaching a flipped-classroom, hybrid version of a general-education, Asian Studies course. The case study delves into student responses to the freedom provided by the course requirements and the implications of using Facebook as a learning management system. Finally, the case study analyzes the role of courses like Media in Asia at a residential campus like Furman University and the broader role of hybrid pedagogy in the liberal arts context. It concludes with recommendations for institutional support of hybrid course initiatives

Notes from the Editors

It gives us great pleasure to publish our first issue of ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal of Asian Studies for the Liberal Arts as a part of the Open Library of the Humanities (OLH)

Unequal Tourism Growth in an Alpine Lake Zone: Varied Responses in Na Communities

While tourism studies scholars debate the impact of tourism on indigenous people living in relatively remote areas, individuals, villages, government units and companies all over China are cashing in on these areas’ appeal to the newly affluent touring class

The Case for Community Self-Governance on Access and Benefit Sharing of Digital Sequence Information

Digital sequence information (DSI),  a placeholder term commonly understood to refer to information related to genetic sequences stored in a digital format, has become a foundational component to biological research and its applications, including biodiversity conservation and biotechnological innovation. DSI results from the physical access to and use of genetic resources, which falls under the purview of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization (NP). The CBD and the NP are legal frameworks governing access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from their use, a mechanism widely known as access and benefit sharing (ABS). Despite good intentions, a number of national regimes adopted in pursuance of the CBD and NP have created complex, ineffective frameworks that exacerbate the risk of counterproductive effects for biodiversity conservation and sustainable use. The debate on DSI focuses on what DSI includes, whether it is covered by the CBD or the NP and the possible implications of its inclusion or exclusion from these agreements. The CBD and NP parties agreed on a science- and policy-based process to debate the treatment of DSI. This process entailed the submission of views and information by parties, other governments, indigenous and local communities, and relevant organizations and stakeholders; the commissioning of technical studies; and the establishment of the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group (AHTEG) on DSI. In the present article, we propose recommendations that can contribute to the upcoming discussion on DSI.Fil: Adler Miserendino, Rebecca A. Lewis Burke Associates; Estados UnidosFil: Meyer, Rachel Sarah. University of California; Estados UnidosFil: Zimkus, Breda M. Harvard University; Estados UnidosFil: Bates, John. Field Museum of National History; Estados UnidosFil: Silvestri, Luciana Carla. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Ambientales; ArgentinaFil: Taylor, Crispin. American Society Of Plant Biologists ; Estados UnidosFil: Blumenfield, Tami. University of New Mexico; Estados Unidos. Yunnan University; ChinaFil: Srigyan, Megha. University of California; Estados UnidosFil: Pandey, Jyotsna L. American Institute Of Biological Sciences; Estados Unido

Market integration, income inequality, and kinship system among the Mosuo of China.

Increased access to defensible material wealth is hypothesised to escalate inequality. Market integration, which creates novel opportunities in cash economies, provides a means of testing this hypothesis. Using demographic data collected from 505 households among the matrilineal and patrilineal Mosuo in 2017, we test whether market integration is associated with increased material wealth, whether increased material wealth is associated with wealth inequality, and whether being in a matrilineal vs. patrilineal kinship system alters the relationship between wealth and inequality. We find evidence that market integration, measured as distance to the nearest source of tourism and primary source of household income, is associated with increased household income and 'modern' asset value. Both village-level market integration and mean asset value were associated negatively, rather than positively, with inequality, contrary to predictions. Finally, income, modern wealth and inequality were higher in matrilineal communities that were located closer to the centre of tourism and where tourism has long provided a relatively stable source of income. However, we also observed exacerbated inequality with increasing farm animal value in patriliny. We conclude that the forces affecting wealth and inequality depend on local context and that the importance of local institutions is obscured by aggregate statistics drawn from modern nation states.NSF BCS 1461514 - National Science FoundationPublished versio

A Funeral as a Festival: Celebrations of Life in the Mosuo Tribe in China

This article attempts to provoke a discussion concerning the definition and nature of festivals by considering the process of Mosuo funerals in Southwest China as a festival event. The role of women and men in daily life and within the funeral ceremony is discussed – the Mosuo is a matriarchal society – as are the vernacular architectural settings which have evolved for both ritual and everyday activities. The article looks at the religious perception of death in Mosuo culture, which considers funerals as celebrations of a life cycle including birth, growing up and death; through onsite observations, it documents the process of a Mosuo funeral in relation to its physical space. Even though, unlike most other festivals, funerals occur at unpredictable times, it is argued that for the Mosuo the funeral event is also a festival

Social support, nutrition and health among women in rural Bangladesh: complex tradeoffs in allocare, kin proximity and support network size.

Malnutrition among women of reproductive age is a significant public health concern in low- and middle-income countries. Of particular concern are undernutrition from underweight and iron deficiency, along with overweight and obesity, all of which have negative health consequences for mothers and children. Accumulating evidence suggests that risk for poor nutritional outcomes may be mitigated by social support, yet how social support is measured varies tremendously and its effects likely vary by age, kinship and reproductive status. We examine the effects of different measures of social support on weight and iron nutrition among 677 randomly sampled women from rural Bangladesh. While we find that total support network size mitigates risk for underweight, other results point to a potential tradeoff in the effects of kin proximity, with nearby adult children associated with both lower risk for underweight and obesity and higher risk for iron deficiency and anaemia. Social support from kin may then enhance energy balance but not diet quality. Results also suggest that a woman's network of caregivers might reflect their greater need for help, as those who received more help with childcare and housework had worse iron nutrition. Overall, although some findings support the hypothesis that social support can be protective, others emphasize that social relationships often have neutral or negative effects, illustrating the kinds of tradeoffs expected from an evolutionary perspective. The complexities of these effects deserve attention in future work, particularly within public health, where what is defined as 'social support' is often assumed to be positive. This article is part of the theme issue 'Multidisciplinary perspectives on social support and maternal-child health'

Using evolutionary theory to hypothesize a transition from patriliny to matriliny and back again among the ethnic Mosuo of Southwest China

Transitions to matriliny are said to be relatively rare. This evidence is sometimes used to support arguments that perceive matriliny as a problematic and unstable system of kinship. In this article, we use an evolutionary perspective to trace changes in kinship to and from matriliny among the Mosuo of Southwest China as potentially adaptive. The Mosuo are famous for practicing a relatively rare form of female-biased kinship involving matrilineal descent and inheritance, natalocal residence, and a non-marital reproductive system (‘walking marriage’ or sese). Less well documented is their patrilineal subpopulation, who practice male-biased, patrilineal inheritance and descent, patrilocal residence, and exclusive marriage. Our analysis supports the existence of a prior transition to matriliny at least a millennium ago among Mosuo residing in the Yongning Basin, followed by a subsequent transition to patriliny among Mosuo residing in the more rugged mountainous terrain near Labai. We argue that these transitions make sense in light of economic, social, and political conditions that disfavor versus favor disproportionate investments in men, in matriliny versus patriliny, respectively. We conclude that additional evidence of such transitions would shed light on explanations of variation in kinship and that convergent approaches involving analysis of genetic, archaeological, and ethnohistorical data would provide holistic understandings of kinship and social change.Published versio

Heritage Storytelling, Information Ethics, and Post-Neutrality Archival Practice: Drawing from Critical Heritage Studies and Critical Archivist Approaches to Move Toward a Polyvocal Archival Record

This paper traces a path through post-neutrality heritage storytelling that brings together the anthropological analysis of cultural heritage creation, preservation, and promulgation; critical heritage studies (e.g., Smith, 2006); contemporary institutional archival practice; and critical archival interventions by Archives for Black Lives (e.g., Drake, 2016) and The Blackivists, among others. Robinson-Sweet (2018) has argued that simply putting massive numbers of documents and other materials online, without being able to control what level of contextualization can happen, is a dangerous and potentially irresponsible act. The widespread existence of authorized heritage discourse (Smith, 2006) serves to limit and control what stories are valued and shared, but critical heritage theorists have argued that even within established spaces, room can be made for different sets of voices. Oral history collection is an often-adopted strategy for pluralizing archival collections, but this ought not be the only method used to amplify different voices. Participatory, community-oriented or community-driven ethnographic research can also be an important strategy. Beyond bringing more content into archival collections, archival description and those who develop archival descriptions need to move beyond imagining a single, universal history that can be objectively shared with anybody, and move toward nuanced storytelling that offers retellings from multiple angles and points of view. Institutional archives have often been stymied by relationships with donors that preclude, or seem to prohibit, interventions aimed at reshaping existing narratives. Yet it is these interventions that are poised to deliver a new breath into heritage storytelling that can bring new relevance to archival collections. Building on calls to move beyond neutrality rhetoric (Pagowsky and Wallace, 2015), this paper draws on successful examples from museum studies literature and on analysis of intangible cultural heritage preservation projects to establish both space for new conversations about ethical archival practice, and a broader set of parameters for what counts as archives in the first place. References Drake, J. (2016, June 27). “Expanding #ArchivesForBlackLives to Traditional Archival Repositories.” Medium. https://medium.com/on-archivy/expanding-archivesforblacklives-to-traditional-archival-repositories-b88641e2daf6#.fr1uexerh Pagowsky, N. & Wallace, A. (2015, April). “Black Lives Matter! Shedding library neutrality rhetoric for social justice.” College and Research Libraries News ACRL. http://crln.acrl.org/content/76/4/196.full Robinson-Sweet, A. (2018). “Truth and Reconciliation: Archivists as Reparations Activists.” American Archivist, 81(1), 23-37, doi:10.17723/0360-9081-81-1.23. Smith, Laurajane. (2006). The Uses of Heritage. Routledge