Review Essay Research Articles

Bronze casting in Late Antiquity in the Marche Region

This essay reviews the discovery of three sites where deposits of bronze fragments have been found, in the Roman cities of Pisaurum, Sentinum and Potentia. Each site yielded small bronze fragments and some tools, which lead us to suppose that these were sites of Late Antique foundries, where large bronze statues and other bronze objects were broken up to be remelted. The foundries were located on land previously occupied by taverns in the forum area or by residential quarters. This means that the urban plan of the cities had already been partially transformed, probably due to Christianisation and the construction of churches, which became the new community centres, to the detriment of the older areas of the forum. The rampant poverty and shortage of raw materials, especially metals, made foundries indispensable and, consequently, their widespread presence, even within the cities, probably became customary. Perhaps the numerous bronze fragments found in other centres of the region should also be interpreted in this same sense, as indications of foundries, even if the structures where the metal was worked have not been preserved.

Correction to: Review Essay: Where have all the gay bars gone?

Correction to: Review Essay: Where have all the gay bars gone?

Contingency and increasing returns: a review essay of the Corporation and the Twentieth Century

Contingency and increasing returns: a review essay of the Corporation and the Twentieth Century

Jack in the Black Box

This essay reviews the design and deployment of a critical generative AI and information literacy assignment along with its inspirations for instructional librarians in American colleges today.

Review essay: Reframing trauma through social justice: Resisting the politics of mainstream trauma discourse edited by Catrina Brown

Manja Visschedijk reviews Catrina Brown’s (2024) edited collection Reframing trauma through social justice: Resisting the politics of mainstream trauma discourse. Routledge. 356pp. ISBN 9781032459899, ISBN 9781003379591 (ebook).

Review essay: Trans bodies, trans selves: A resource by and for transgender communities, edited by Laura Erickson-Schroth (2nd edition)

Tiffany Sostar reviews Trans bodies, trans selves: A resource by and for transgender communities, edited by Laura Erickson-Schroth (2022, 2nd edition). Oxford University Press. 728pp. ISBN 9780190092726.

Impact of Ownership Structure on Financial Performance of Listed Companies on the Hanoi Stock Exchange

This essay reviews studies on the types and levels of fragmentation in firm ownership, focusing on how ownership structure impacts firm performance. Using a property rights framework, the essay integrates sociological, organizational, legal, and economic research that explores the relationship between ownership organization and firm performance. Agency theorists typically assume that shareholders are uniform in nature, and that their impact on firm performance correlates directly with their equity stakes. However, empirical studies based on this assumption have not produced clear evidence. Class analysis perspectives view these mixed results as evidence that firms, regardless of ownership structure, primarily serve the capitalist class. An alternative view suggests that shareholders are not homogeneous, and certain types of shareholders use their formal authority, social influence, and expertise to capture property rights, thereby exerting significant influence on firm performance. The impact of various owners may vary based on industry characteristics, and the essay reviews literature supporting a contingency theory of ownership structure.

Bibliographical foundations of information science: a review essay

PurposeThe narrow purpose of this article is to review de Fremery’s (2024) book about the bibliographic foundations of information science. The broader purpose is to consider the actual as well as the potential relevance of the field(s) of bibliography for information science besides the book under review.Design/methodology/approachThis review essay examines the arguments put forward by de Fremery (2024), introduces concepts and traditional lore from the study of bibliography and presents internal conflicts or paradigms in the field of bibliography. It relates this information to foundational issues in information science.FindingsDe Fremery’s basic ambition of basing information science in the field of bibliography is important, and so is the attempt to consider bibliography in relation to contemporary information technologies such as machine learning and data science. The book under review fails, however, to describe the relations between different positions in bibliography, such as enumerative, analytical, descriptive, critical and historical bibliography in relation to information science. It rather tends to make problematic claims, for example, that scientific experiments are based on bibliographical methods, and to describe the relation of bibliography to information science on the basis of such interpretations. Nonetheless, the book is a serious attempt to consider the field of bibliography and thereby support the focus on documents in information science.Originality/valueInformation science often suffers because of ambiguities in the concept of information. When information science is understood as the study of literature-based answering, much else falls into place. The field of bibliography is a core concept for this understanding and re-orientation of information science, for example, by establishing the core relation between bibliography, information searching and knowledge organization.

Essential Steps and Strategic Considerations for Successfully Launching a Small-Scale Business

To achieve a successful launch of a small-scale firm, one must carefully navigate through many crucial procedures and strategic considerations. This review essay thoroughly analysed the fundamental activities and techniques required for a successful company’s commencement. Essential elements include completing comprehensive market research to find possibilities and comprehend competition, formulating a comprehensive business plan that delineates objectives, strategies, financial forecasts, and operational plans, and obtaining sufficient finance. The research highlighted the significance of robust financial management methods, including budgeting, cash flow management, and financial forecasting, to guarantee stability and facilitate development. Efficient allocation of resources, adaptation to market changes, and harnessing technology were important strategic considerations for overcoming common difficulties and attaining lasting success. The essay consolidated the latest research and optimal methodologies, offering practical insights for entrepreneurs to improve their company performance and overcome frequent challenges. Suggestions included consulting with specialists, being attentive to market fluctuations, and enhancing the availability of financial resources and support networks. This exhaustive analysis provided a beneficial structure for small-scale enterprises seeking to develop a robust basis for expansion and long-term sustainability. Keywords: Small-scale business, Business launch, Market research, Business plan, Financial management.

The state and radicalization: Overlooked perspectives for internationalist far-right scholarship

The purpose of this review essay is to examine four monographs that study the far-right and discuss their approaches as is relevant to the international level of analysis. This essay argues that these monographs engage with international analysis but do so in a way that has generally not been covered by the mainstream political science approaches to the far-right. This essay will first cover the mainstream political science approaches and international approaches of the far-right. Then this article will explore two overlooked approaches: (1) The statist approach to the far-right explores the transnational and domestic development of far-right ideology in specific states. (2) The radicalization approach focuses on the space and place of the far-right. This review essay will consider the international implications of these approaches and highlight key themes and methodologies that may prove useful to international far-right scholarship. This article concludes with the place of these monographs in the international far-right literature and the scope of this article.

Review Essay: Where have all the gay bars gone?

Review Essay: Where have all the gay bars gone?

Towards grounding differences: review essay on South Asian comparative constitutional studies

Towards grounding differences: review essay on South Asian comparative constitutional studies

Short takes on disjointed times: literary form and social thought in Graham K. Riach’s The Short Story After Apartheid

This essay reviews Graham K. Riach’s recently published monograph The Short Story After Apartheid: Thinking With Form in South African Literature (2023) against the background of a growing preoccupation with temporality, in recent years, in South African writing and criticism. The mode of political formalism Riach espouses in this significant new contribution to the field of South African literature threads together aesthetic and social concerns to propose the post-apartheid short story as a critical vector for making sense of our disjunctive times. Through close readings of stories by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe and Henrietta Rose-Innes, Riach opens important new discursive terrain in our apprehension of the social in South Africa, while at the same time advancing our understanding of, and appreciation for the short fiction of these important writers.

Suffering without Remedy: The Medically Unexplained Symptoms of Fibromyalgia Syndrome and Long COVID

The term “Medically Unexplained Symptoms” (MUS) describes chronic symptoms for which medical investigations fail to reveal a specific pathology or biomarker. Even as MUS are among the most prevalent chronic health problems in the global north, patients who experience them reside in a nebulous space. Such nebulousness is heightened for women patients. Moreover, women report MUS at higher rates than men. In this review essay, we analyze the medicalization and feminization processes vis-à-vis MUS by focusing on two particular syndromes: Fibromyalgia (FMS) and Long COVID (LC). FMS and LC present clear parallels that allow us to trace an unhappy marriage of women and MUS. We demonstrate how the medical constructions of these two syndromes as knowledge categories are representations of medical uncertainty vis-a-vis women patients. We then scrutinize the resulting gendered consequences of these categories for the illness experience. We conclude our review by calling for a cultural reorientation in our thinking about MUS that centers a recognition that the origins and manifestations of a great deal of human suffering reside outside of medicine’s ways of knowing. In so doing, we connect to foundational claims in medical anthropology and sociology; namely, that illness is more than disease, and health cannot be achieved primarily via biomedical means.

Becoming Modern and Secular: A Review Essay on Recent Work on Islam and South Asia

Abstract The Muslims of South Asia are more than five hundred million people, distributed between Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, and there are more Muslims in South Asia than in any other region in the world. After Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim country in the world, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are the second, third, and fourth largest Muslim countries, respectively. Although the prevalent approach in the study of Islam is to consider its so-called Arab character as central, the Muslims in pre-Partition India constituted the largest body of Muslims in the world, and the vast political and intellectual influence exerted by South Asian Muslims on the wider Muslim world is often neglected. Many of the most important political, intellectual, and spiritual developments within Islam have had their origins, or have flourished, in South Asia, and Muslims from the region have played important roles in the global history of Islam, including during the colonial period, in resistance to colonial rule, and in intellectual responses to and dialogue with Western thought. Pakistan was specifically created to provide a homeland for South Asia’s Muslim population and its trials and tribulations over the past seventy-five years have been carefully watched by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Muslims constitute India’s largest minority, with an often uneasy—to say the least—relationship to the majority. In the context of the three books under discussion, I explore issues, such as secularism, modernity, and religion, and their impacts on the conception of the nation-state that was promoted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an expression of political modernity.

The art, science and technology studies movement: An essay review.

This is a review essay based primarily on the 2021 Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies, edited by Hannah Star Rogers, Megan K. Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, and Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone. It focuses particularly on the use of art for public engagement with science and technology and it also draws upon the following books: Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies (2023), edited by Henk Borgdorff, Peter Peters, and Trevor Pinch, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (2020) by Patrick McCray, and Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (2022), by Hannah Star Rogers.

Review Essay: Jandhyala B. G. Tilak (Ed.), Education in India: Policy and Practice

Jandhyala B. G. Tilak (Ed.), Education in India: Policy and Practice, Sage Publications, 2021, 364 pp., ₹1350, ISBN: 978-93-5388-742-1 (Hardbound).

Dark intelligence: When the possibility of 1984 becomes reality

This essay reviews a concept that is too rarely dealt with, if at all, in the literature on human intelligence, namely, dark intelligence. I argue that dark intelligence is the possession and, as relevant, deployment of creative, analytical, and practical abilities and attitudes that, in particular tasks confronted in particular situations, can be, and are used for negative, harmful, and, sometimes, malign purposes. Dark intelligence is extremely common, and the world is the worse for it. Yet intelligence research continues to focus largely on solving test-like problems that do not speak to how intelligence is deployed on particular tasks in particular situations, either for good or for evil purposes. The world is facing severe crises, such as climate change, weapons of mass destruction, violence, and enormous income disparities. Creativity researchers, recognizing these problems, have developed a thriving field of “dark creativity.” Intelligence researchers have been largely absent, however, largely ignoring the dark side of intelligence. Yet dark intelligence can be and is being used to cause harm. The world is at increasing peril from its intended and unintended consequences; understanding dark intelligence may help to mitigate some of that peril.

Other Things Said

The common view in legal education and practice has been that obiter dicta or ‘the things said in passing’ are not part of the corpus of legal reasoning that is binding, which then begs the question, ‘If so, what is their value?’ This review essay offers a detailed overview of Neil Duxbury’s The Intricacies of Dicta and Dissent, highlighting the significance of Duxbury’s contribution to the literature on this important subject. Against a backdrop of few book-length treatments of these commonly deemed ‘subsidiary’ forms of legal reasoning, Duxbury offers a comprehensive historical account of dicta and dissent in adjudication, and of their varied impacts on legal development. Though falling short of advancing a normative account, Duxbury’s book nevertheless provides a nuanced and balanced description of the natures of dicta and dissent, engaging with the complexities of judicial reasoning beyond a conventional black-and-white approach. In so doing, this book sets the groundwork for any normative analysis of the role dicta and dissent can play in shaping common law principles. It is anticipated that this book will remain an invaluable contribution to the field of judicial interpretation, especially as a necessary, vital resource upon which future scholarship may build.

Review Essay: The Literature of the Sages – A Re-visioning

Review Essay: The Literature of the Sages – A Re-visioning