The Wars of the Sioux

This paper examines the wars fought by Plains Indians for over forty years following the Civil War as they attempted to preserve their homeland and ancestral way of life

A Study of the Twenty-Four Hour Day of Cherokee County High School Pupils with a Comparison of Similar Findings in 1942

A time-study of the twenty-four hour day of pupils in a senior high school in a rural area (Cherokee County) of Alabama has been made in order to discover the amount of time being devoted by these pupils to various activities, and to compare these findings to a similar study made in 1942. Time spent for sleep, classes, chores, productive work, study, transportation, leisure, eating, listening to radio and television, other recreation, reading, dressing, and miscellaneous activity will be charted and comparisons will be made

Social Practice Theory and the Historical Production of Persons

Working collaboratively we and others have developed a historical, material theory of social practice that integrates the study of persons, local practice, and long term historically institutionalized struggles. We have drawn on the work of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Mead to develop this approach to “history in person.” Social Practice Theory, like Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) takes activity as a central focus. But, in contrast to CHAT, social practice theory emphasizes the historical production of persons in practice, and pays particular attention to differences among participants, and to the ongoing struggles that develop across activities around those differences. Through Holland’s ethnographic work on environmental groups in the Southeastern United States we show the integration of emotion, motivation and agency into cultural-historical activity theory by means of Vygotskian and Bakhtinian inspired ideas concerning “history in person.” Lave’s research focuses on tension, conflict and difference in participation in cultural activities in an old port wine merchant community in Porto, and looks to both local and trans-local institutional arrangements and practices for explanations

Assessing the Transformative Significance of Movements & Activism: Lessons from A Postcapitalist Politics

How do researchers and/or practitioners know when change efforts are bringing about significanttransformation? Here we draw on a theory of change put forward by the feminist economicgeographers, Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. Proposing “a postcapitalist politics” thatbuilds on possibility rather than probability, they direct theoretical attention and communityengaged action research to recognizing and supporting non-capitalist economic practices andsensibilities that already exist despite the dominance of capitalism that keeps them hidden andignored and to understanding the “reluctant subject” of change efforts. We enter into aconversation with their theory of change by inferring criteria for assessing significance and usingthose criteria in dialogue with two social movements we have researched: the feminist movementin Bogotá in the 1970s and 1980s and the contemporary local food movement in North Carolina.Lessons from these movements, in turn, help refine the criteria. Gibson-Graham are unusual – andconsequently resonant with cultural-historical activity theory and related social practice theoriesof identity – in that they bring into dialogue theorists of the political and those interested inembodiment and the micro-politics of everyday life enabling both to better understand and supportconditions for positive social and economic transformation

Novel Distances for Dollo Data

We investigate distances on binary (presence/absence) data in the context of a Dollo process, where a trait can only arise once on a phylogenetic tree but may be lost many times. We introduce a novel distance, the Additive Dollo Distance (ADD), which is consistent for data generated under a Dollo model, and show that it has some useful theoretical properties including an intriguing link to the LogDet distance. Simulations of Dollo data are used to compare a number of binary distances including ADD, LogDet, Nei Li and some simple, but to our knowledge previously unstudied, variations on common binary distances. The simulations suggest that ADD outperforms other distances on Dollo data. Interestingly, we found that the LogDet distance performs poorly in the context of a Dollo process, which may have implications for its use in connection with conditioned genome reconstruction. We apply the ADD to two Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT) datasets, one that broadly covers Eucalyptus species and one that focuses on the Eucalyptus series Adnataria. We also reanalyse gene family presence/absence data on bacteria from the COG database and compare the results to previous phylogenies estimated using the conditioned genome reconstruction approach

God in the Machine: Perceptions and Portrayals of Mechanical Kami in Japanese Anime

Robots are an increasingly common staple of realistic science fiction. Summer blockbuster movies warn us of the dangers of giving in to hubris by creating machines that are as intelligent and capable as we are, and humorous books provide the wary with helpful tips on how to prepare for the inevitable robot revolution. In Japan, however, this trope is reversed. Instead of being coldly rational enslavers of humanity, unsympathetic to their creators, fictional Japanese robots are just as emotional as their human counterparts and often strive to defend humans and humanity. The roles for robots that are common in American movies almost never appear in Japanese works, and the reverse is true as well. Fictional Japanese robots tend to fall into three categories: being equivalent to humans, being god-like, or serving as a spiritual vessel for gods. For the first category, some robots are so much like humans that their mechanical nature is not even a particularly salient feature. Instead, it is about as important and emphasized as the blood type of a human character. Almost never are questions raised about whether the robot has a soul. This can be seen to be consistent with Buddhist and Shinto beliefs that treat animals as being spiritually similar to humans, while the Abrahamic traditions espouse that only human beings have souls. Since Japanese religions already accept animals as spiritual beings, the extension to robots is a small one. In the second category, giant robots in anime are frequently portrayed as being god-like. They are sometimes built by humans in need of protection, but they also frequently appear as ancient, unfathomable beings. They greatly resemble Shinto gods, being worthy of respect due to their impressive size and power, and existing independently of humanity while being willing to grant the requests of those they have chosen as worthy representatives. Finally, fictional robots that are not gods themselves may serve as spiritual vessels for them, as puppets can serve as vessels for gods in Shinto ceremonies. This allows even those robots that are not spiritual creatures themselves to touch the realm of the holy

Science, the endless frontier of regulatory capture

In this paper we explore five recent cases of regulatory capture in Europe and zoom in on a form of corporate penetration which is based on a strategic use of the image and legitimacy of science. We examine cases in which lobbyists present themselves as upholders of science and of evidence-based policy, intervene directly in the methodological and ethical aspects of science for policy-making, thus imprinting their own agenda on the societal functions of science. We propose the existence of a process whereby private interest ascend an ideal ‘epistemic ladder’. In this vision, lobbying intervention moves from questioning the evidence to questioning its legitimacy, all the way to acting as to create a worldview where not only the evidence, but the very idea of regulation, become irrelevant or undesirable, other than as a vehicle for the pursuit of private interest. Caught in this project, science and its future appear vulnerable.publishedVersio

Structures for Environmental Action

This article develops a typology of what we term “structures for action”—strategies, mechanisms, and means—used by local environmental groups to facilitate actions such as lifestyle shifts, civic protest, and environmental preservation. Based on data from nineteen groups in several states, we distinguish between internal structures that facilitate action for members of the groups and external structures that facilitate action among nonmembers and other groups. Within both internal and external structures, we identify three dimensions: knowledge, meaning, and praxis. Our typology of structures for action is designed to stimulate further research and to be useful for environmental groups, as well as for other social issue-oriented local groups that seek to be more effective