Scholarly Interest (scholarly + interest)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Real Women or Objects of Discourse?

RELIGION COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2009
The Search for Early Christian Women
Scholarly interest in gender and sexuality in early Christianity, which has typically been tied to an interest in women and women's roles, experiences, and influences, is a relatively new addition to the study of early church history. Women and women's issues entered the academy through the women's movement of the 1970s. Early on this scholarship was driven, in part, by a political or theological agenda that sought to empower women of the twentieth century by reconstructing the lives of their foremothers. Often the early studies of women in the church were optimistic that real, historical women could be found within our sources. Soon, however, scholars became more suspicious of the male-authored texts and turned, instead, to study the social effect of discourses about women. Many scholars, however, are not yet ready to give up investigations of ancient women's lives. Thus the field of early Christian studies is developing a variety of methodologies that offer sophisticated readings of ancient male-authored texts while still acknowledging the inherent difficulties involved in reconstructing women's lives in early Christian history. [source]


Instrument to assess depersonalization-derealization in panic disorder

DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY, Issue 4 2002
Brian J. Cox Ph.D.
Abstract There is a long history of scholarly interest on depersonalization-derealization (DD) and its role in clinical anxiety, but there is a paucity of appropriate assessment instruments available. Our objective was to develop and evaluate a self-report measure of DD for use with clinically anxious patients. Panic disorder patients (n=169) were surveyed about DD experiences and provided data on a new item pool for psychometric development. DD episodes were common and a 28-item Depersonalization-Derealization Inventory was found to possess good reliability and validity. DD appears to be prevalent and clinically relevant in panic disorder. Continued study of DD is warranted and may be facilitated by the availability of a suitable instrument with promising psychometric properties. A 12-item version of the instrument may be appropriate as a brief screen. © 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


A Fearsome Trap: The will to know, the obligation to confess, and the Freudian subject of desire

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, Issue 7 2010
John Ambrosio
Abstract The author examines the relation between Michel Foucault's corpus and Freudian psychoanalysis. He argues that Foucault had a complex and changing relationship to psychoanalysis for two primary reasons: his own psychopathology, personal experience, and expressed desire, and due to an ineluctable contradiction at the heart of psychoanalysis itself. The author examines the history of Foucault's personal and scholarly interest in psychology and psychiatry, tracing the emergence, development, and shift in his thought and work. He then argues that Foucault's critique of psychoanalysis can be extended to the constitution of the Western educated subject, and that Foucault ultimately resolved his personal dilemma in relation to psychoanalysis by rejecting the ,will to knowledge' and refusing the notion of a stable and fixed identity. [source]


Re-Forging the ,Age of Iron' Part II: The Tenth Century in a New Age?

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 9 2010
John Howe
The tenth century, once dismissed as an unpleasant ,Age of Iron', now receives increased attention as an important age of transition. Historians are attempting to understand how it fits into the broader narrative of Western Civilization. Although some scholars have identified it as the last act of the post-Roman world, others see it as a new age. Perhaps the High Middle Ages with its agricultural and demographic revolution, its new villages and parishes, its revived cities, its reformed churches and schools, and its medieval monarchs began in the tenth century? Or were those changes not novelties of the tenth century but rather manifestations of a ,take off' that had already begun back in the Carolingian Empire, and which, despite the problems posed by late Carolingian wars and invasions, was able to continue, spread, and blossom into the growth and prosperity of the High Middle Ages? New scholarly interest in the tenth century has made it much less of a ,dark age', but scholars still are not quite certain how to conceptualize its historical significance. [source]


THE ECONOMICS OF FISCAL DECENTRALIZATION

JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 4 2010
Duc Hong Vo
Abstract There is no complete overview or discussion of the literature of the economics of federalism and fiscal decentralization, even though scholarly interest in the topic has been increasing significantly over recent years. This paper provides a general, brief but comprehensive overview of the main insights from the literature on fiscal federalism and decentralization. In doing so, literature on fiscal federalism and decentralization is grouped into two main approaches: ,first generation approach' and ,an emerging second generation approach'. The discussion generally covers the two notions of fiscal decentralization: ,fiscal autonomy' and ,fiscal importance' of subnational governments as the background of the most recently developed index of fiscal decentralization in Vo. The relevance of this discussion to any further development of a fiscal decentralization index is briefly noted. [source]


Policy entrepreneurship for poverty reduction: bridging research and policy in international development

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, Issue 6 2005
Julius Court
Bridging research and policy is a topic of growing practical and scholarly interest in both North and South. Contributions by four experienced practitioners and in four papers by researchers illustrate the value of existing frameworks and add four new lessons: the need for donors and research foundations to foster research capacity and to protect it from political interference; the need for researchers to use detailed case material in order to inform high-level policy debates within and across national boundaries, often by working in cross-country teams; the importance of presenting research results in such a way that they cannot be over-simplified; and the value of creating alliances between researchers and civil society advocacy groups. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Visual Images of America in the Sixteenth Century

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2008
Elaine Brennan
Artists rarely accompanied sixteenth-century voyages of discovery and exploration.1 As a consequence, few first-hand visual representations of the New World were produced. Despite this, published accounts of the Americas in the sixteenth century often included illustrations. With some notable exceptions, the voyagers themselves did not supply the images, or directly supervise their publication. Accurate or not, these images, together with the texts they illustrated, contributed to the construction of the Americas in European consciousness. Only a small number of original first-hand pictorial works survive today, the most important being John White's drawings of the Algonquian Indians of Roanoke, Virginia, from 1585,86. The recent major exhibition of John White's drawings may provoke new scholarly interest in sixteenth-century visual images of the Americas, a topic which offers a rich and relatively neglected area of study.2 This article offers an introduction to the field together with some suggestions for avenues of further research.3 [source]


Learning and Opinion Change, Not Priming: Reconsidering the Priming Hypothesis

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 4 2009
Gabriel S. Lenz
According to numerous studies, campaign and news media messages can alter the importance individuals place on an issue when evaluating politicians, an effect called priming. Research on priming revived scholarly interest in campaign and media effects and implied, according to some, that campaigns and the media can manipulate voters. There are, however, alternative explanations for these priming findings, alternatives that previous studies have not fully considered. In this article, I reanalyze four cases of alleged priming, using panel data to test priming effects against these alternatives. Across these four cases, I find little evidence of priming effects. Instead, campaign and media attention to an issue creates the appearance of priming through a two-part process: Exposing individuals to campaign and media messages on an issue (1) informs some of them about the parties' or candidates' positions on that issue. Once informed, (2) these individuals often adopt their preferred party's or candidate's position as their own. [source]


The study of federalism, 1960,99: A content review of several leading Canadian academic journals

CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION/ADMINISTRATION PUBLIQUE DU CANADA, Issue 3 2002
David R. Cameron
They contend that scholarly interest has shifted away from areas like fiscal federalism and the division of powers to newer areas of interest like social movements, identity politics and citizenship issues. An interdisciplinary review of a number of Canadian journals reveals, however, that studies in traditional areas of federalism are not in decline and continue to dominate the field in English-language federalism scholarship. At the same time, the authors did not find a robust literature on federalism-related issues in French for the forty-year period under review. Sommaire: Un certain nombre d'observateurs semblent indiquer que le niveau de la recherche entreprise au Canada sur le féléralisme « traditionnel » a baissé. Us prétendent que les intelleduels se sont détournés des domaines comme le fédéralisme fiscal et la répartition des compétences pour s'orienter vers de nouveaux centres d'intérêt comme les mouvements sociaux, la politique identitaire et les questions relatives à la citoyenneté. Une étude interdisciplinaire d'un grand nombre de revues canadiennes révèle cependant que les études portant sur les secteurs traditionnels du fédéralisme ne sont pas en baisse et que ces secteurs continuent à faire l'objet de la majorité des bourses d'études en langue anglaise sur le fédéralisme. Par contre, nous n'avons pas parallèlement trouvé d'études importantes en langue française sur les questions liées au fédéralisme au cours de la période de 40 ans que nous avons étudiée. [source]


An Interview with Diego Gambetta

OXONOMICS, Issue 2 2009
Article first published online: 18 DEC 200
Diego Gambetta is Professor of Sociology and official fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Born in Turin, Italy, he received his PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, U.K. in 1983. Since 1992 he has been in Oxford in various positions. He has been visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Science Po and the College de France in Paris. His main scholarly interests are trust, signalling theory and its applications, organised crime, and violent extremists. In 2000 he was made a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of numerous books including The Sicilian Mafia (Gambetta, 1993), Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Gambetta, 2005) and, most recently, The Codes of the Underworld (Gambetta, 2009). [source]