War in the Age of TikTok

The rise of social media has revolutionized information-sharing and the way in which people learn about important events. As evidenced by the use of TikTok in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, social media has the ability to connect people from conflict zones to individuals around the world. Although dramatic video clips can be critical for our understanding of real-time developments and for pressuring policymakers to act, they also open the door to misinformation that creates confusion and division

Strategies Insurance Leaders Use to Reduce Sales Agent Turnover

High turnover of new sales agents costs insurance leaders millions of dollars and adversely impacts profit margins. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the retention strategies that insurance leaders from central New Jersey used to reduce sales agent turnover. Study participants included 5 insurance leaders with sales management experience ranging from 3 to 5 years. Job embeddedness theory was the conceptual framework for the study. Data were collected via semistructured interviews, company reports, and archival records. Using thematic analysis, the data were examined and coded and generated 4 key themes: recruiting and selection process; value of coaching, training, and mentoring; leadership engagement; and organizational culture. The implications of this study for social change include the ability of insurance leaders to allocate increased profits to funding local and community-based service organizations and philanthropic initiatives. Additionally, with increased profits, insurance leaders may be able to invest in developing indemnity products and services tailored for underserved populations, such as women, minorities, and low-income individuals and families, thereby contributing to positive social change

Putin's Information War Against the United States

Information warfare between the United States and Russia is not a new phenomenon. However, recent developments, including an increase in Russia's disinformation activities, the social media revolution, and the invasion of Ukraine have created challenges for the United States, forcing officials to reevaluate current policies and develop new innovative strategies to combat the Kremlin’s information warfare attacks

We and the Woods

We and the Woods is a collection of three short stories and an excerpt from the novel-in-progress The Spinney. Spanning a range of genres from horror to science fiction, these pieces explore our yearning for connection, the violence and grace of time, and the responsibilities we hold to ourselves, to our loved ones, and to the natural world. Come the Monsters explores familial trauma and the slow journey towards acceptance of oneself as well as the fact that other people are, at heart, unknowable. A Brief History of Dowsing delves into violence against women on a scale that is both vast and claustrophobically intimate. Endling demands justice for the slow violence of climate change. Finally, The Spinney wonders whether connection is possible when truth is subjective, and what we owe the people and places we\u27ve hurt. Together, they speak to the helplessness, the rage, and the stubborn desire to do better that damn and define us in equal measure

"The Path to Freedom"? Transocean and German Wireless Telegraphy, 1914-1922

This article examines the early years of Transocean, a news agency owned and run by the German government, and its use of wireless telegraphy from 1914 to 1922. This investigation of the infancy of wireless technology demonstrates that technology plays a constitutive role in defining news. The German government used the new possibilities innate in the medium of wireless to carve out their own sphere of operation in the seas and on continents where German telegraph news had never played a major role, in particular East Asia. Wireless telegraphy enabled the German government to circumvent the British communications blockade in World War I. Afterwards, Transocean's wireless transmissions to East Asia and ships en route caused an uproar in Britain disproportionate to its circulation. It was the Germans' innovative use of wireless telegraphy that other nations, particularly the British, found most disturbing, rather than the content of the reports themselves.Histor

Peace through Truth? The Press and Moral Disarmament through the League of Nations

The League of Nations Assembly passed a resolution in September 1931 to consult the press about the “spread of alse information which may threaten to disturb the peace or the good understanding between nations.” By September 1932, 16 nations and two international associations of journalists had replied with suggestions for the Third Conference of Press Experts in Madrid in 1933. This article uses these proposals from journalists as a springboard to discuss how we can use comparative and transnational history to understand the press’s role during the interwar period. After analyzing the current methodological debates on comparative and transnational history, I address the use of both for histories of the press. How can comparative or transnational history help us to investigate the press? How can scholars think about journalists’ associations and conceptualize their role within the interwar diplomatic framework? More specifically, how did the press fit into the League of Nations’ efforts towards disarmament? Ultimately, an investigation of the two methodologies shows that we cannot class the press neatly into national boxes, but rather have to recognize the messy networks that overlapped, crisscrossed, and intersected to create those apparently national press systems.Histor

Imagined Communities of 'Whiteness': Racial-Nationalist Origins of Settler-State Formation in Argentina and Canada, 1840-1914

This dissertation sits at the intersection of critical international political economy and a decolonizing, anti-racist approach to empirical political science. Specifically, I examine how liberal state forms are presupposed by and premised upon illiberal practices of sorting, policing, and defining populations. Rather than view such practices as anomalous to the modern state form, I view them as productive. I depart from the dominant literature in this field of study (postcolonial theory) with a typical focus on discursive and local practices, and instead advance a defense of Marxism rooted in an examination of the material practices of states responding to global political-economic pressures. This analytical and methodological focus stems from an engagement with the theoretical and empirical work conducted through Political Marxism, and through an engagement with the concept of uneven and combined development. I compare instances of racialized nation-building from the nineteenth century, focusing on the ways in which the creation of racialized hierarchies of belonging were seminal to the production of liberal state capacity and legitimacy. I examine the cases of Canada and Argentina to explore how the dispossession and management of indigenous peoples served to foment vast networks of bureaucratic, fiduciary, and coercive state capacities. Such capacities were necessary in the project of constructing competitive liberal economies to respond to pressures generated by an emergent global market in agricultural goods. This work sheds new light on the role of race and racialization in the formation of the nation-state system, while responding to and contesting common assumptions about the legal equality assumed to underpin Western nationalism(s)

Framing the Magdalen: sentimental narratives and impression management in charity annual reporting

We analyse the annual report narratives, between 1801 and 1914, of the Edinburgh Magdalen Asylum, a reformatory for ‘fallen’ women. We aim to provide new insights by combining interdisciplinary perspectives: the work of Erving Goffman on stigma, asylums, impression management and framing, and writings on literary genres, in particular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. We also contribute to research on the annual report as source material for social history and to accounting histories of women. We find that the narratives were employed to discharge the directors’ accountability by portraying their work and the asylum as socially and economically useful, accounting for the inmates in their charge, securing funding and finding suitable employment for inmates after release. The narratives and their subjects were framed in accordance with conventions of sentimental novels and recurring literary plot structures. By creating a dichotomy between victims of seduction and ‘hardened’ prostitutes, the directors could manage expectations: not all Magdalens could be saved. On the other hand, this dichotomy allowed the directors to advertise their ‘product’ in the market for domestic labour: Case histories and personal narratives were presented to show that the remorseful Magdalen could become a docile domestic servant and productive citizen

Updated review of marine alien species and other 'newcomers' recorded from the Maltese Islands (Central Mediterranean)

An updated review of marine alien species and other ‘newcomers’ recorded from the Maltese Islands is presented on account of new records and amendments to a previous review in 2007. Species were classified according to their establishment status (‘Questionable’, ‘Casual’, ‘Established’, ‘Invasive’) and origin (‘Alien’, ‘Range expansion’, ‘Cryptogenic’). A total of 31 species were added to the inventory, while 6 species have been removed, bringing the total number of species to 73. Of these, 66 are considered to be aliens (or putative aliens but with uncertain origin) with the remaining 7 resulting from range expansion. Six records are considered to be questionable and hence unverified. For verified records, the dominant taxonomic groups are Mollusca (represented by 21 species) and Actinopterygii (15 species), followed by Crustacea (8 species) and Rhodophyta (7 species). Eight of these species (aliens: Caulerpa cylindracea, Lophocladia lallemandi, Womersleyella setacea, Brachidontes pharaonis, Percnon gibbesi, Fistularia commersonii, Siganus luridus; range extender: Sphoeroides pachygaster) are considered to be invasive. The introduction pathway for 30 species is unknown. Amongst the alien species, ‘Shipping’ is the most common introduction pathway, followed by ‘Secondary dispersal’ from elsewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. An increasing trend in the number of alien marine species reported from the Maltese Islands is evident, with a peak of 22 species recorded during the last decade (2001–2010). A discussion on the rationale for including range-expanding species in national inventories of recent arrivals, and in the analysis of trends in records from the Maltese Islands, is included. In particular, the general warming trend of Mediterranean surface waters appears to be facilitating the westward spread of thermophilic alien species from the Eastern to the Central Mediterranean, and the eastward range expansion of tropical and subtropical Eastern Atlantic species.peer-reviewe