Cite this article: Shen, J., McFarland, A.G., Blaustein, R.A. et al. An improved workflow for accurate and robust healthcare environmental surveillance using metagenomics. Microbiome 10, 206 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-022-01412-x and Background: Effective surveillance of microbial communities in the healthcare environment is increasingly important in infection prevention. Metagenomics-based techniques are promising due to their untargeted nature but are currently challenged by several limitations: (1) they are not powerful enough to extract valid signals out of the background noise for low-biomass samples,...
On February 22, 2022, I gave a talk hosted by the African Studies Program of Georgetown University. Two days later, Russian battalions were sent across Ukraine’s borders by President Vladimir Putin. In real time, viewers around the world have seen immense distress unleashed on innocent citizens. In Africa, distress has...
A review of the literature demonstrates that being anonymous by wearing a mask has been hypothesized to create many psychological effects, but mainly deindividuation. Numerous distinct explanations have been suggested as to why that effect has come about.
Using an ethnographical approach and open-ended interviews, this study investigates through two...
In 2011, after just eighteen days, from January 25 to February 11, the Egyptian public overthrew the 30-year-long dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. A decade afterward, we sought to have Egyptians reflect on the collective memory of those days. What fueled the revolution? Was it successful? Did it lose its way?...
Why did political independence not lead to economic autonomy and sustained development which were confidently predicted by many development economists and nationalists in the 1950s and 1960s. Africa will not make sustainable progress in building democratic systems and fostering economic development until the continent acquires coherent, legitimate, and effective states....
Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Virtual reality (VR) have attracted growing attention within the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry in recent years. Integration of BIM and VR technology can develop workflow efficiency through enhanced common understanding and prepare students in architecture and engineering programs to become leaders of the...
Banquet lecture for the 37th annual conference of the Sudans Studies Association in conjunction with the 70th anniversary of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University, May 12, 2018
Within the world of art music, composers have employed a variety of techniques to infuse popular music elements into their writing. This document is an examination of specific instances of this trend in twenty-first century wind ensemble repertoire. The study is limited to twenty-first century wind ensemble works by living...
In this talk and related activities, I hope to inspire others to take up one of the greatest challenges of our era: narrowing the governance gap which is at the root of many of Africa’s development and security dilemmas. In view of the emergence of many fragile and failed states,...
This paper examines conflictual relationships among British members of the Gold Coast administration. It adds to the literature that problematizes earlier notions of colonialism by highlighting tensions and contradictions inherent in colonial governance structures. This paper argues that at its inception, the Gold Coast colonial administration had deep cracks as...
This working paper focuses on the themes, authors, and changing modes of production of 152 booklets published (or purchased) in Nigeria relating to marriage. The author obtained them from bookshops mainly in Ibadan and Lagos, from church bookstores in Ado-Ekiti and Kabba, but also from motor parks in Lokoja, Kaduna,...
In order to make informed policy recommendations, development research faces two broad challenges: first, to identify and estimate the effects of interventions where they have occurred, and second to build and test theories about the effects that a related intervention would be hypothesized to exert in a different context. I...
This paper examines the relationship between a party'’'s descriptive representation of women and its ideological proximity to female and male voters. I find that male and female voters are both objectively closer to parties with more females in their delegations. However, males are more likely to subjectively assess parties with...
In this paper, Morgan and Orloff survey the contemporary study of states in the social sciences. They begin by tracing the history of scholarship on the state. The authors identify six main clusters of research on states that emerged through the effort to “bring the state back into” history and...
This Handbook provides resources that help explain and contextualize the intersecting crises that destabilized Mali in 2012-2013. These crises included a rebellion by Tuareg separatists, a coup by junior officers, and violence carried out by Muslim militants. In addition to an overview of the crisis, the Handbook contains historical timelines,...
This is the introductory chapter of my forthcoming book with the same title. The three primary objectives of this book are to reveal the paradigm shift of the contemporary international judiciary, conceptualize how new–style international courts (ICs) contribute to international politics, and normalize our understanding foremost as courts, and second...
In this paper, I present two distinct approaches to migrant entrepreneurship. I conducted an ethnography of two Ghanaian migrant businesses, one of which draws on the Ghanaian community, and the other which distances itself from it. I show that our current understanding of social capital romanticises the notion of community,...
To analyze institutional dynamics, it is first necessary to determine when change has occurred, when not, and the nature and magnitude of change. If social institutions are defined in terms of rules, then a change of rules forms the core of institutional change. A number of complications arise from the...
In order to understand the role of international courts (ICs) in the international legal system, this chapter examines 25 permanent international courts by analyzing four roles that states have delegated to courts: enforcement, administrative review, constitutional review, and dispute settlement. The chapter finds that ICs can become not only agents...
This paper explores the link between the public policy and the survival strategies of a hybrid political regime. Using the case of higher education in Russia, I show how the Russian state elites use the policy tools widespread in Western democracies to achieve domestic political goals. Introduction of quasi-market mechanisms...
The central thesis of the paper is that authoritarian cases have systematically been excluded from welfare state theories despite the existing empirical research on authoritarian welfare provisions. This theoretical gap has limited the instruments available for comparative welfare state research. As a result, such research has attended to the democratic...
This paper traces the relationship between the development of Ahmedabad’s sewerage system and the caste structure, examining how sanitation technology threatened caste politics, as well as how the caste system modified the way sewers were used and maintained. It looks at how sewers came to be understood as markers of...
This paper examines the current state of Turkish-U.S. relations. While many have noted a chill in the relationship between the two countries, Finn suggests that recent tension has a longer historical background. Rather than a recent development, Finn suggests that Turkish-U.S. relations have seen periods of tension before over the...
This article examines the ramifications of international law on political refugees. The Cessation Clause, or Article 35 of the 1951 Refugee Convention of the United Nations, guarantees the right of refugees to return home under the assumption that return is the primary objective of refugees. Yet, Harrell-Bond argues in this...
This article presents preliminary, selected findings from a larger study of students experiences in international education. The paper focus on those findings that are related to student understand ing of citizenship identity during the mobility experience. Specifically, it draws on interviews and surveys collected in Germany from 387 students participating...
This article examines the successes and challenges of using the open-source mapping software Ushahidi for tracking instances of violence (riots, looting, sexual assault etc.) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While mapping software has the power to aggregate data on displaced populations, the article discusses the challenges of verification and...
During the Second Lebanon War of 2006, Israel's government applied a capital- and firepower-intensive military doctrine poorly suited for its ambitious, and publicly declared, goals. The paper explains this apparently non-strategic behavior with a theory of democratic militarism, arguing that a capitalized military doctrine results in a condition of moral...
This article explains the rapid proliveration in international courts first in the post WWII and then the post Cold War era. It examines the larger international judicial complex, showing how developments in one region and domain affect developments in similar and distant regimes. Situating individual developments into their larger context,...
Europe created the model of embedded international courts (IC), where domestic judges work with international judges to interpret and apply international legal rules that are also part of national legal orders. This model has now diffused around the world. This article documents the spread of European-style ICs: there are now...
Seven to ten percent of the world's 43.3 million forcibly displaced persons are believed to be people with disabilities. This report examines the health-related needs of displaced persons with disabilities and how these needs can be better addressed in the context of displacement camps. It uses two methodological stages: first,...
This paper explores the importance of the Low Countries to Habsburg Spain in the sixteenth century and the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt. It examines the upper tiers of the Low Country nobility, the grands seigneurs and the gentileshommes, and the tensions over religious practice and political rights that developed...
Are the lending programs of the International Monetary Fund bad for democracy? The conventional wisdom is that the implementation of IMF conditional lending programs triggers cycles of austerity, social protest, and government repression that result in democratic backsliding. We present evidence which suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong. We...
This paper provides an overview of key governance issues of relevance to the upstream oil and gas industry in Canada. The focus is on implications of Canada's constitutional organization as a federation. Regulatory structures and provisions are described, as are revenue-sharing arrangements. Challenges for macro-economic management and for the environmental...
The surge in "unconventional" oil projects such as Alberta's Tar Sands in the last decade signals a shift in global production from relatively accessible conventional reserves to "frontier" oil. This paper examines one aspect of the oil/environment tension – the environmental regulatory system surrounding the tar sands – by adopting...
The past decade has witnessed exponential growth in study abroad participation. During these same years the promise that studying abroad will make students into Global Citizens has been a nearly ubiquitous feature in the promotion of the experience. Yet, Global Citizenship remains a highly contested concept that is rarely defined,...
This article examines how powerful policy actors defend themselves against opponents' strategies of conflict expansion through a case study of the Alberta oil sands subsystem. In response to changes in the key issues surrounding the oil sands subsystem, the provincial government along with industry have pursued a strategy of engaging...
This article offers a new interpretation of The Gift written by Marcel Mauss. It provides a contextual interpretation of the formation of Mauss' thinking about the international relations in the question of German reparations paid to the Allies. The article starts by showing the intellectual origins of the concept of...
This paper opens the analysis of treaties in the security field to sociological and hermeneutic analyses of international lawmaking practices. In a legal world where tensions exist between legal regimes, it claims that the interpretive quality of past treaties determines which legal rules survive and which ones disappear when new...
The International Criminal Court is considemring adding "aggression" to the crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted by the Court. Michael Glennon's recent article on the subject criticizes this effort from many angles, but a close consideration of his objections shows that each of them misses its target. I use...
Canada's aboriginal peoples are one of the constituencies most affected by the oil sands boom that has swept across northeastern Alberta in western Canada since the mid-1990s. This paper considers the reaction of these First Nations to exploiting the oil sands. It argues that the conventional view of the First...
Traditional accounts in both the international law and international relations literature largely assume that great powers like the United States enter into international legal communities in order to resolve global cooperative programs or to advance objective state interests. Contrary to these accounts, this article suggests that an incumbent regime (or...
The proponants of international courts (ICs) expect that creating formal legal institutions will help to increase respect for international law. International relations scholars question such claims, since ICs have no tools to compel state compliance. Such views are premised on the notion that states have unique preferences that ICs must...
President Barack Obama is escalating an ambitious, U.S.-directed covert war, relying on Special Forces and high-tech strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other countries to track down and eliminate Al Qaeda leaders and militants around the world. Meanwhile, administration officials in Washington are attempting to create a legal framework for...
This paper examines secularism in Senegal from a legal viewpoint and traces the history of the deliberate manner in which the Senegalese constitution was constructed to ensure the secular orientation of the state. The author emphasizes that Senegalese secularism is not anti-religious, but rather emphasizes mutual tolerance among diverse religious...
This paper discusses the recent (2007) declaration of the Caucasus Emirate by Islamist guerilla fighters waging jihad against Russia in several republics of the Northern Caucasus (Russian Federation). It analyzes the practical reasons and ideological agendas behind the creation of this new polity that remains largely virtual with the website...
This essay asks whether the existence of a viable public sphere hinges upon the banishment of religion to the private realm. While some scholars have suggested that the encounter between "public" Islam and the democratization inevitably produces political collapse (as in the case of Algeria), the author contends that the...
Among the linkages identified between human rights law and environmental protection, the problem of anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a central concern. Some of the early focus on climate change as itself a human rights violation has given way to a more complete and forward-looking approach that considers how...
The growing religious identity throughout the world is challenging conventional social science wisdom, according to which modernization leads to the marginalization of religion in the public sphere. This discussion suggests different and alternative models for being both Muslim and modern. The focus is the family law reform within the context...
This essay discusses the role of the ulama (Islamic scholars) in the 2007 Nigerian elections. Based on interviews and the political activities and statements of the twelve members of the ulama, most of whom are from Kano, the author observes four areas of consensus among these scholars: 1) The compatiblity...
This essay analyzes the historical struggle of the Muslim community to have a voice in Kenyan politics and the Islamic topics that have surfaced during electoral periods. A minority group in Kenya, Muslims have faced political marginalization more on the basis of race and ethnicity than religion. The pre-independence period...
This essay explores Nigerian women's negotiation of public and private spheres through the meanings of hibjab (Islamic head covering for women) has taken in different contexts, both liberating and limiting women. In the 1970s with the new oil economy, increasing migration to cities and the expansion of education for women,...
Delegation to ICs has increased rapidly since 1990, leading to a proliferation of international courts with a fundamentally different design. There are now 20 active ICs, plus eight more ICs that exist mostly on paper. "New style" international courts have compulsory jurisdiction, and often they have access for non-state actors...
This essay provides an introduction to eight papers on the theme of Islam and the Public Sphere in Africa that resulted from two conferences organized by the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) in 2007. The author argues that these papers challenge the dichotomous thinking that...
This essay explores how the evolving relationship between religion and the state is affecting the educational system in Senegal. In 2002, the state enacted reforms that introduced the religious education into the state school system and also allowed all children enrolled in the daara (Senegalese Qur'anic schools) to be considered...
This essay examines the relationship between religion and the state as articulated in the thought of the founding father of the Republic of Senegal: Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senegal's first President) and Mamadou Dia (Senegal's first Prime Minister). Although Senghor was Catholic and Dia a Muslim, they shared a vision of...
The object of this working paper is to present a new explanation for the behavior of rebel groups in relation to host communities. This study, which represents the main argument and ideas of my forthcoming dissertation, accounts for the change in rebel group behavior, from coercive to contractarian and vice...
Most scholars think of courts as a single category of adjudicative bodies or triadic dispute adjudication. But courts play a variety of roles in the domestic political system. Increasingly, the roles and tasks delegated to International Courts (ICs) mimic in form and content the roles and tasks delegated to courts...
From peacekeeping to telecommunication standards, the number, level of detail, and subject matter of international agreements have grown exponentially in recent decades. What are the consequences of the sheer complexity of international governance today? This symposium suggests a new framework to understand this proliferation of international accords: "international regime complexity."...
The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was the first step in the process of European integration. Its founders had lofty aspirations that integration in the coal and steel would spill into a larger endeavor, and early scholarly analyses suggested that coal and steel integration was spurring more fundamental political...
In this essay, I will focus on the fifth theme of the Collaborative Learning Initiative: Reclaiming Security. Attempts to reclaim security in many African countries, tragically, often lead to greater insecurity as rulers respond by heightening repression. Some even close down access to social media and global communications thereby harming...
Patrick F. Quinn states that Edgar Allan Poe wrote poems at an age “too young to have any knowledge of the world but from his own breast,” and attributes Poe’s decision to leave flaws in his “smaller pieces” intact to “[fondness fostered by] his old age” (Quinn 9). While readers...
In May 1991 the allied armies of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) overthrew the 27-year military regime (Dergue) in Ethiopia. During the succeeding 27 years, the EPRDF-dominated government attracted one of the highest per capita levels of external aid in the...
As the result of centuries of transregional commerce by Muslim merchants and the attendant networks developed by Muslim scholarly families, Islam was well established in the Sahel and Upper Guinea Coast by the seventeenth century. Commercial markets, Muslim states and Islamic institutions developed during a long, generally peaceful process of...
This working paper surveys Islamic organizations, movements, and ideologies in Nigeria, roughly identifying them along the lines of Islamic traditionalism, Sufi orders (turuq lit. pathways), Salafi/Wahhabi revivalism2 modernist and insurgent Islam(ism), trado-Islamic and Christo-Islamic syncretism and deviant “Islamic” cultism. Previous academic studies of Nigerian Islam were often limited to the...
The apparent interest today in Nigerian visual culture has necessitated this paper. Therefore, its
primary focus shall be on the status of visual data from the burgeoning ephemera as a source of
historical knowledge. Using selected visual illustrations in the posters, cartoons and photographs
that were at the core of...
This paper examines participation in the public economy among two groups of African women, the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria and the Baganda of central Uganda, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analysis considers many kinds of economic activity other than growing food for one’s own family, including independent income-generating...
Contemporary pattern of relationship between European Union and Africa-Caribbean and
Pacific countries reflects more than two centuries of unequal exchange. Unequal exchange
between the North and the South denotes the falling terms of trade for underdeveloped countries,
while correspondingly increasing the terms of trade for the developed countries. It has...
How could so many students of one scholar, one who is not immediately
remembered for his work on the arts, have produced so much major research on African
and African-American arts and artists in virtually all media? This question became the
genesis of this panel; but before turning to our...
Within Kenya’s political scene, racial and ethnic identities play a crucial role in creating division
in Muslims’ political engagement. Since independence, the racial and ethnic antagonism among
them has weakened a united Muslim’ voice whenever political issues concerning the community
arose. As Kenya was preparing for independence, a section of...
Writing this keynote address has been a fraught and sobering experience, heightened by
an acute feeling of stepping outside my scholarly comfort zone in east and central African
history before the 19th century CE. The discomfort encouraged me to shift positions, in this case
from that of a scholar writing...
As a world power after World War II, some U.S. government officials and private
foundations realized how little we knew of Africa, though allied troops had been engaged
in North Africa and transported through West Africa. And the Cold War was leading to
growing USSR influence in Africa. “It...
On 6 February 2007, President Bush announced that the United States would
create a new military command for Africa, to be known as Africa Command or Africom.
Throughout the Cold War and for more than a decade afterwards, the U.S. did not have a
military command for Africa; instead, U.S....
This collection of papers contains most of the papers that were delivered at the workshop on
“Normality in Health and the Reproductive Body” at Northwestern in March 2001. The seminar
was used to discuss individual research projects around convergences of thought on the theme at
hand. In their present state,...
The completion of this study could not have been possible without the invaluable support
of several individuals. This work is a revised version of my first year research paper, and as such,
I would first like to thank Timothy Breen and my colleagues in the E-70 seminar for their
thoughtful...
The primer addresses interdisciplinary work on two levels. It outlines and exemplifies
anthropological modes of thinking, and how those can be applied to numbers through the capacities of the
Epi Info program. At a more practical level it uses particular material to guide the reader through setup
and analysis.
Section...
This paper explores the relationship between the French state and francophone Africa since
decolonization, rather than narrating the history of French-African policies (Domergue-Cloarec 1994;
Wauthier 1995) or providing an introduction to the full range of cultural, social, and political relations
8
(Manning 1988; Chipman 1989; Andereggen 1994). The focus is...
This paper was commissioned by the Program of African Studies (PAS) as a complement
to the new edition of Dahomean Narrative that was published by Northwestern University Press
as part of the celebration of the PAS’s fiftieth anniversary. The new forward to the volume
places Dahomean Narrative within the history...
Though brief, this study has benefited from the intellectual and moral support of many individuals. I
owe an enormous debt of gratitude to colleagues who have provided me with both their time and
criticism in the preparation of this paper. I am particularly grateful to those who have been most...
The following bibliography developed in conjunction with the research project AMoney Morals:
The Decline of the Naira in the Social Life and Popular Culture of Nigeria, 1985B1995,@
undertaken by Jane Guyer and LaRay Denzer.
To prepare this bibliography, Northwestern University=s Online Catalog (NUcat) and
Northwestern=s online catalog of papers presented...
In 1936 Modibo Keita, a twenty-year-old student at the distinguished Ecole William Ponty in Gorée, Senegal, wrote his “mémoire de fin d'étude” on Soninke childhood. The original manuscript is held in the archives of French West Africa in Dakar, part of the collection of “cahiers de William Ponty.” This paper... and En 1936 Modibo Keita, un étudiant de vingt ans à l'école distingué William Ponty à Gorée, au Sénégal, a écrit son mémoire de fin d'étude sur l’enfance sarakollé. Le manuscrit original se trouve dans les archives de l'Afrique occidentale française à Dakar, où il fait partie de la collection de...
Les manuscrits connus comme les « cahiers Ponty », écrits par les étudiants du célèbre Ecole William Ponty près de Dakar, ont été créés sous une politique qui a favorisé l’ethnographie comme outil aussi bien que discipline. Quelques extraits de ces cahiers sont discutés ici, comme un échantillonage pour illustrer... and The manuscripts known as the "cahiers Ponty", written by students at the famous Ecole William Ponty near Dakar, were created under a policy that favored ethnography as a tool as well as a discipline. Several extracts of these student notebooks are discussed here, as a sampling in order to illustrate...
Presentation slides from Open Repositories, 2018. Jekyll is an open source publishing system that relies on plain text files to produce websites. Because it was created as a simple blogging platform, Jekyll can be extended to support the journal publishing needs of any library with a scholarly communication or digital...
There are few concerns greater than those of a parent with an adult with an intellectual or developmental disability (I/DD). How is she or he going to be taken care of as she or he ages? The government provides services and support in the pursuit of care and services, but...
It has been hypothesized that mindfulness-based programs with a primary focus on teaching self-compassion or empathy will have greater effects on self-compassion and empathy than will mindfulness-based exposure programs, which focus primarily on enhancing present moment awareness and reducing distress. However, because research on mindfulness-based exposure programs has centered on...
Over the last decades, there have been many changes in the business world that are associated with 52 percent of Fortune 500 companies either going bankrupt, being acquired by other companies, or ceasing to exist. One critical change is the transformation of the economy into a knowledge-based economy, where information...
The goal of this research paper is to analyze concepts of armed conflict and peacebuilding from a gender perspective using a feminist epistemology approach.
I examine the impact of armed conflict on women, and the implications of women’s roles in armed conflict and in peacebuilding processes post-conflict. In doing so,...
Negative emotional behaviors, such as criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling, that spouses may show during conflict are key predictors of marital dissatisfaction. Existing research has focused on middle-class couples, but little is known about how these negative emotional behaviors predict marital satisfaction among couples from socioeconomically diverse backgrounds. The present...
