Quick Perusal Research Articles

Reframing the Discourse on Social Work in the Arab World: Considerations for the Accreditation of Social Work in the UAE

Drawing on the author's experience of teaching social work in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this paper will interrogate the pervasive question, significant within academic circles and the wider public discourse, on the issue of values and how they are framed or not by their relevant cultural contexts. This is a critical period in the history of the development of social work in the UAE where the International Association of Schools of Social Work subjected the first professional social work education and training programme offered to the rigour of a review process. Currently most social work programmes are evaluated against Western social work accreditation frameworks and quality assurance processes. While this practice may be appropriate in certain contexts, in others, such as in the Arab world, a more authentic frame of reference is required. To this end, the frame of reference lies in the Islamic prophetic traditions and culture, uniquely characteristic of the Arab world in the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC). It not only provides the backdrop to the ideological context for practice and education but also for quality assurance purposes as in the case of accreditation. A quick perusal of global accreditations of social work programmes reveals intense scholarly debates about what should constitute a dynamic curricula, necessary resources, ideology, administrative needs, processes and structure of social work programmes. Given that all of these criteria satisfy the conditions for accreditation, there is still ample opportunity within the different socio-cultural contexts for variations in the curricula of social work programmes being offered universally.There is little doubt, despite the recent debates on the accreditation processes, that the primary goal is to ensure quality programmes and competent preparation for social work practice. In this paper the author will argue that while subscribing to this academic rigour, a paradigm shift is imperative to understand what constitutes culturally sensitive social work education and training. This paper will demonstrate that the values and ethics rooted in the ideology of the Arab world should determine and influence academic and practice paradigms.

Communicating Resilience: A Discursive Leadership Perspective

Communicating Resilience: A Discursive Leadership Perspective

Guest foreword by Khawar Qureshi QC

I am delighted to have been invited to provide the guest foreword for the 2013 Volume of the International Review of Law. Qatar University College of Law, particularly its Dean and staff, are committed to ensuring that the institution provides a platform for constructive exchange of views on topical legal issues. It has been my pleasure since opening the first Barristers’ Chambers in Qatar in 2008, and regularly being in Doha, to witness the law faculty embrace the opportunities presented to teachers and students alike by comparative law study. In addition to the faculty organising regular seminars and conferences on subjects of practical significance, such as international arbitration, energy law and environmental law, the Review provides a valuable opportunity for legal scholars from all over the world to share their understanding and experience. After all, it is only by studying different systems of law, (or engaging in practice which exposes one to different systems of law as I have been fortunate to benefit from), that one appreciates that all legal systems suffer from imperfections. The true test of any legal system is its ability to engage in critical and constructive self-assessment on a regular basis, as well as being receptive to well meaning input from others interested in promoting a strong legal system. A quick perusal of the contents list of International Review of Law reflects the success of Qatar University College of Law in establishing the position of this legal journal as a source of learning on a wide variety of issues. This Volume contains articles on civil disputes, specifically construction related mediation and claims involving maritime vessels (which developed in the ancient admiralty jurisdiction of the English Courts). There are articles on international law and regulation – in the realms of telecommunications privacy issues, and energy transmission. Corporate liability under the US Alien Tort Statute is examined in one article, and there are articles on medical law and ethics. One must not overlook the significance of Islamic law, and the vital need for greater scholarly endeavour in this regard. Shari’ah law is addressed in two separate articles concerning divorce and “end of life” medical treatment. I look forward to reading future volumes of International Review of Law, which I am sure will continue to address significant subjects and thereby contribute to legal learning and debate.

Digital Curation: A How-To-Do-It Manual

Digital preservation, a term that may be familiar to readers, covers many of the factors that place data at risk, such as technological obsolescence, digital object fragility, and data maintenance. However, Ross Harvey argues that preservation is only a part of the puzzle and much more is needed to ensure that the digital data that are created today will survive through tomorrow, and this process is called digital curation. Digital curation is defined as developing a set of techniques that address “what comes before preservation and what comes after—that is, how the data are created and how they are used before they get to an archive or library and how they will be used, and by whom, in the future” (p. xvi). Essentially, digital curation is a holistic process that looks at the entire lifecycle of the data, from creation through maintenance and in preparation for how the data may be adjusted or migrated in the future. It is about making informed decisions from the beginning to ensure useful data later on. Digital Curation: A How-To-Do-It Manual is largely based on the Curation Lifecycle Model, developed by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), a British organization that seeks to promote digital curation activities. The model describes the processes of digital curation and serves as the structure of the majority of the book, with separate chapters breaking out each step in detail. The introductory chapters frame the need for digital curation, describing cyber scholarship or data-driven scholarship and the need for cyber infrastructure to support the digital data. The author gives an overview of the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model and several other relevant models and includes illustrations to show the stages that data transition through before publication and after. Finally, the term “data” is defined so the reader better understands the content that needs curation and how the term has changed due to technological advancements in recent years. Each chapter ends with a summary and a list of references, which is helpful for quick perusal and for additional research on the topic. The subsequent chapters take a much closer look at each stage of the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model and describe the basic requirements of each sequential step. Curiously, the only graphical representation of the model is on the back cover of the book. Each step, and its place in the framework of the model, could have been reinforced by including a picture of the model in each chapter. However, the chapters are clearly written with sections outlined at the beginning and crucial information broken out in text boxes in the margins. Plenty of examples and/or references are provided, and uniform resource locators (URLs) are included in the text for those who are interested in learning more. The chapters break down each step of the model so as not to be overwhelming. Each chapter includes a single step, such as designing data or preserving data, so users may easily refer back to individual chapters to revisit particular areas of interest. A companion website is also available that includes checklists, templates for developing plans, and additional links. Digital Curation: A How-To-Do-It Manual is a comprehensive guide to designing, creating, describing, preserving, maintaining, and using or reusing data. This book should be useful for those looking for either a theoretical or practical approach to digital curation, as it embraces a model and standards, yet also provides instruction and many examples. Information professionals who are interested in beginning a digital project will find this book a helpful place to start.

Lynne Davis, ed., Alliances: Re/Envisioning Indigenous-non-Indigenous Relationships

Lynne Davis, ed., Alliances: Re/Envisioning Indigenousnon-Indigenous Relationships. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010, 426 pp. $37.95 paper (978-1-4426-0997-6) We are all here to stay. Thus begins 2005 statement between British Columbia government and First Nations leadership in province. is certainly orientation of Davis' edited collection. Across a wide range of case studies and reflective essays, contributors try to envision better relations of cooperation as answers to question: How do we live well together? A quick perusal of table of contents might lead one to believe that this is a book on social movements and movement coalitions. Instead, Alliances is a much richer trove and University of Toronto Press is to be commended for its willingness to publish such a large and varied text. Lynne Davis, a faculty member in Trent University's Indigenous Studies department, has put together 24 essays covering a wide gamut of indigenous and nonindigenous ways of reimagining relations. Alliances is a smorgasbord of loosely connected case studies. can be sampled repeatedly over time and adds up to a satisfying intellectual meal. In introduction, Davis describes three types of current relations between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples: as partners walking side-by-side, in paternalistic governance, and where indigenous partners take lead. Relating is not as simple, of course, and case studies are vital to identifying some of complex tensions. For most part, the authors collectively point to failure of imagination in Euro-Canadian society to move beyond its colonial past (p. 14). Central to living well together is decolonizing. Systematic inequality cannot be overcome merely through relations between individuals or groups. Canada was created as and remains a settler society, growing out of appropriation (sometimes legally) of indigenous lands. That we are all here to stay does not mean we simply move forward from existing positions that privilege those already advantaged by those appropriations and their consequences. As one community member explained what she learned while trying to be an ally over Aboriginal fishing disputes, It really was white people's job to take care of their own (p. 105). Others came to understand that they had to acknowledge colonialism, and un learn habits and attitudes, and challenge institutional manifestations of racism and paternalism. Alliances originated in Davis' SSHRC-funded research and a conference held in 2006 from which many of contributions are drawn. The chapters in Alliances range across personal reflections, individual accounts of praxis, philosophical treatises (from both Euro-Western and indigenous epistemes), and social science case studies of alliances and attempted alliances. Examples include Canadian cases such as controversies at Grassy Narrows and Caledonia, environmentalist-indigenous coalitions on British Columbia coast, and labour-church-indigenous work in Owen Sound. Other examples come from Guyana, a US Hopi legal aid centre, account of developing an American Indian Studies program in Virginia, and Native American-Bulgarian artistic collaboration. Some chapters are uncomfortable to read, such as Christian and Freeman's painfully honest frustrations with each other across years of attempts to bridge colonized-colonizer roles into which they had been socialized. …

A Liberal Biblical Critic Reads the Dictionary

Scholars argue whether it is fitting to speak of ancient Judaism in the singular or whether one should rather speak of “Judaisms” in the plural. Be that as it may, even a quick perusal of the CDC convinces the reader that there would be much weightier reasons for using the plural in the case of Christianity. The CDC paints a big picture of theologies and practices which bear a family resemblance to each other, forming a continuum whose ends are very far from each other. While the entry on “Ancient Judaism” states that “first-century Judaism was diverse, indeed a plurality of ‘Judaisms’,” I have only detected one occasional occurrence of the plural “Christianities.” However, the point is emphatically made that one ought to speak of Christian theologies in the plural: “In a real sense, ’theology’ has become an abstract term. What actually exists are various theologies.”

Political Networks

Political science is diverse in its methods, theories, and substantive interests. A quick perusal of our flagship journals reveals just how heterogeneous we are, with articles ranging from mathematical treatments of theoretical problems to textual exegesis of Plato, and qualitative studies of single countries standing in contrast to quantitative analyses of experiments designed to mobilize voters. At times, the discipline's boundaries are so fuzzy that our territory is alternatively claimed by philosophers, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and psychologists.

“The A-Word” Made Easy

“The A-Word” Made Easy

Advances and Challenges in Empirical Studies of Victimization

A quick perusal through the past 25 years of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology provides a convenient summary of the way in which criminologists often describe the status of victimization research. During this period, a relatively small but respectable number of articles (approximately 10-15%) have focused either on the topic of victimization, or have used victim-based data to assess some other criminological issue. This proportion is not inconsistent with other leading journals in the field, but it seems to have suggested to some researchers that study of the causes and consequences of victimization constitutes a relatively small subfield within the field of criminology, and perhaps an unruly subfield as well. In this paper, I briefly discuss the origins of victimization research to show how this view may have come about, and follow by noting just a few of the contributions of victimization data and research and how they have advanced the field of criminology. I contend that the... Language: en

President's page

Over the course of this year's activities I have had several opportunities to revisit fundamental themes that recur in all professional societies. What is the American Society for Information Science and Technology? Whom does it serve? What problems does it address? Work this year by the publications, membership and Annual Meeting program committees, as well as discussions in my presidential conference calls and at the various meetings, have each given rise to fundamental questions about mission, focus and participation. A look at the “About ASIS&T” page (http://asist.org/about.html) on the ASIS&T website highlights our 73-year history as a society devoted to improving information access. My sense of what ASIS&T is today is somewhat broader in that for me, our mission is to study information — its genesis, propagation, use and effects over time. We tend to be particularly interested in information's effects on people and institutions and in the technologies and techniques associated with it. I claim that ASIS&T is the world's leading society in information science and a home for information science research and the practices that stem from research findings. As a professional society, we aim to promote the information professions through evidence-based research and innovative development. Thus, as researchers, we investigate problems that arise in any stages of the entire information life cycle; and as practitioners, we aim to apply the results of systematic investigations to invent effective and efficient solutions to those information problems. Some ASIS&T members focus more on research and some on practice, but all ASIS&T members are made of the same metal when it comes to understanding and solving information problems. As a result of the recent meeting of the program committee for the upcoming Annual Meeting, I am optimistic that we can forge a program that is well struck on both sides of this coin. A second musing about the nature of ASIS&T arose as I participated in the LIDA conference in Zadar, Croatia, in May. I was struck by the level of excitement and engagement shown by European ASIS&T members. There was a doctoral forum run by the European ASIS&T Student Chapter (well organized by doctoral student Cathal Hoare from University College Cork, Ireland) that highlighted research done in several Eastern European universities. I hope that there will be a follow-up doctoral forum next year. Students and faculty outside of North America recognize ASIS&T as the leading information science society and aspire to participate actively. Additionally, as I read JASIST, I am struck by the international scope of coverage and authorship. Papers from non-North American authors dominate many issues of JASIST. For example the May and June 2010 issues have 30 full papers, only 13 of which are from authors from North American affiliations (and one of these includes an author from Asia). Looking back at May and June issues from 1996 there were nine full papers, four from North America and five from other parts of the world. If we go back another 20 years to the March-April and May-June 1976 issues we find eight of 10 papers from authors with North American affiliations, but two that are not. This quick perusal of the collection on my shelf (yes, paper), demonstrates the long-standing globalization of our primary research publication. These observations of meetings and of our publications validate how international ASIS&T is in fact, if not in name. Indeed, ASIS&T is increasingly international in scope and participation. As the leading information science society, we attract a broad range of participants from around the world and have an obligation to advance research and practice related to information science globally. As we head toward our 75th anniversary (2012) it is important that we reflect on our mission as the leading society in information science to balance discovery and application and leverage information technologies to expand global participation in ASIS&T.

WebWatch

WebWatch

Identification of Rhetorical Roles for Segmentation and Summarization of a Legal Judgment

Legal judgments are complex in nature and hence a brief summary of the judgment, known as a headnote, is generated by experts to enable quick perusal. Headnote generation is a time consuming process and there have been attempts made at automating the process. The difficulty in interpreting such automatically generated summaries is that they are not coherent and do not convey the relative relevance of the various components of the judgment. A legal judgment can be segmented into coherent chunks based on the rhetorical roles played by the sentences. In this paper, a comprehensive system is proposed for labeling sentences with their rhetorical roles and extracting structured head notes automatically from legal judgments. An annotated data set was created with the help of legal experts and used as training data. A machine learning technique, Conditional Random Field, is applied to perform document segmentation by identifying the rhetorical roles. The present work also describes the application of probabilistic models for the extraction of key sentences and composing the relevant chunks in the form of a headnote. The understanding of basic structures and distinct segments is shown to improve the final presentation of the summary. Moreover, by adding simple additional features the system can be extended to other legal sub-domains. The proposed system has been empirically evaluated and found to be highly effective on both the segmentation and summarization tasks. The final summary generated with underlying rhetorical roles improves the readability and efficiency of the system.

On the Limits of Thomas Zeiler's Historiographical Triumphalism

“An era of innovation among historians of American foreign relations is upon us,” proclaims Thomas W. Zeiler in the opening salvo of his comprehensive mapping of U.S. diplomatic historiography. Far from being the maladjusted nerds spending endless hours studying military clashes and diplomatic exchanges, historians of U.S. foreign relations—Zeiler claims—are now not simply an acceptable part of the herd, but indeed “an advance guard,” actually “driving the bandwagon of internationalization.”1 So much then for Zeiler's stated intent to avoid triumphalism. This is very much a triumphalist essay, and there are serious reasons for proclaiming victory, although Zeiler tends to overstate them and downplay some of the most evident shortcomings of U.S. diplomatic historiography. I agree with Zeiler when he underlines the relevance of the increasing “cross-fertilization between the larger discipline and diplomatic history” and the consequent demolition of once rigid, unassailable subdisciplinary bastions. Again, Zeiler goes a bit over the top when he presents this cross-fertilization as a form of “integration.” Just a quick perusal of the programs of the last, say, five annual conferences of the Organization of American Historians belies such a bold statement: 2008 was a welcome exception, but in the previous four years there were very few panels on the history of U.S. foreign relations, even using the broad definition of the field proposed by Zeiler. Nevertheless, rapid advancements, unthinkable just a few years ago, have been made in the field, and perhaps the time has come to recognize and celebrate them. One is left wondering whether it still makes sense to talk of “diplomatic history” or even of “U.S. foreign relations” as fields. Zeiler himself poses that question. His response is to identify a very loose distinctive trait of the field: namely, the attention it continues to pay to the “presence of the state” and the way “power functions.” Accordingly, emphasis on power and the role of state allows U.S. diplomatic history to preserve its soul and distinguish itself from other branches of modern history, while engaging in an intense dialogue and exchange with them. This dialogue, Zeiler maintains, is particularly evident in the three interdependent areas: “realism's engagement with ideology …, the embrace of international history, and the study of culture and identity.”2

American philanthropy and African education: African students in the metropolis in the 1960s

Most memoirs written by the sons and daughters of African immigrants make reference to how the pursuit of education in America provided an impetus for the ‘reverse middle passage’ that their parents (usually, indeed, their fathers) undertook in the 1960s. A quick perusal of biographies and autobiographies of Africans who came to the United States demonstrates that the vast majority of them who made the journey did so with the help of either American philanthropic foundations or the American government. These students, who varied tremendously in background, point of view, and political orientation, were united by one thing – a dream of a better life. Few of them were aware of the political machinations that underwrote the construction of their fellowships. Most were blissfully unaware of how invested the United States government was in putting their own stamp on the people they would become. Their stories are instructive, therefore, for illustrating the power of African diaspora networks in the metropolis for providing these migrants with a sense of community and a connection to collective struggles at home which kept them from becoming political and ideological puppets, carrying out the mandate of their American benefactors.

A Tale Both Old and New: Jamestown at 400

Virginia's Jamestown 2007 agency has promoted the quadricentennial of Jamestown as America's Anniversary and embraced a goal of showcasing] Virginia's unique role as the birthplace of modern America and the cradle of American democratic traditions, cultures, ideologies and principles. Most scholars of American Indian Studies and of early American history and culture are likely to ask whether we can or should describe the arrival of a small band of disputatious leaders and often inept colonists in the Chesapeake Bay as the advent of a modern democracy, especially considering the bloody history of those first few decades of colonization. A quick perusal of Jamestown 2007 s

Species Delimitation: New Approaches for Discovering Diversity

Systematics can be considered to have two major goals: (1) to discover and describe species and (2) to determine the phylogenetic relationships of these species. But even a quick perusal of titles in Systematic Biology through out most of its 15-year history will confirm an obvious fact: most articles focus on reconstructing phylogenies and on using these phylogenies to address evolution ary or biogeographic questions, with few papers on the methodology underlying this first major goal of system atics research (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, species delimitation, the process by which species boundaries are determined and new species are discovered, may finally be emerging as a ma jor topic in modern systematics (e.g., Sites and Marshall, 2003). New methods for species delimitation are being developed (e.g., Puorto et al., 2001; Templeton, 2001; Wiens and Penkrot, 2002; Morando et al., 2003; Pons et al., 2006) and compared (e.g., Marshall et al., 2006; Pons et al., 2006). Ambitious proposals have been made, with the goal of accelerating the rate at which new species are discovered and described, including DNA barcoding (e.g., Hebert et al., 2003, 2004), DNA taxonomy (Tautz et al., 2003), and Web-based taxonomy (e.g., Godfray, 2002; Scoble, 2004; Knapp et al., 2007). Controversies are raging in the literature over these proposals (espe cially over DNA barcoding: Will et al., 2005; Brower, 2006; Hickerson et al., 2006; Meier et al., 2006) and other aspects of species delimitation and over the consequences of new approaches in species delimitation for other fields, such as ecology and conservation (Agapow et al., 2004; Isaac et al., 2004; Padial and de la Riva, 2006). This new em phasis on species delimitation has arisen (at least in part) because of growing concern over threats to biodiversity and the desire to describe as many species as possible as quickly and accurately as possible before they disappear. However, an increased interest in species delimitation is barely reflected in the pages of Systematic Biology, if at all (Fig. 1). This disconnect was my major motivation for organizing a symposium for the Society of Systematic Biologists on this topic. The Symposium

The Social Brain: The Blind Men and The Elephant

Social Neuroscience: Integrating Biological and Psychological Explanations of Social Behavior. Eddie Harmon-Jones and Piotr Winkielman (Eds.). 2007. New York: The Guilford Press, 512 pp., $65.00 (HB)I reviewed this book shortly after reading The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, by Louis Cozolino (2006), hoping that this book, which addresses how our brains exist in relationship to other brains, would be an adequate prerequisite for Social Neuroscience. I had concerns that its focus would be the biology of social psychology proper (rather than the biology of social relationships) for which I would be less qualified and less interested. A quick perusal convinced me that the book was indeed about the biological basis of human social behavior. With that information and a review of a similar title, Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People (Fein, 2006), I proceeded.

Narrative and the Fundamental Limitations of Quantification in Crosscultural Research

at least the last 3 decades, international and crosscultural studies of health, religious beliefs, political attitudes, and much else of a fundamentally subjective nature have proliferated. Interest in comparative research emerges from the desire to understand how different cultural, economic, political, and social systems influence individuals' world views, beliefs, and behaviors. Yet the use of subjective information and self-reports has always presented researchers with serious problems that have to do with assessing the comparability of subjective information gathered from respondents from different cultural and linguistic communities (see the Spring 2001 issue of the Journal of Mental Health and Aging1 for several articles dealing with comparative measurement). Even within the same nation or the same cultural group, differences in such personal characteristics as socioeconomic status, age, gender, and education potentially affect the manner in which respondents interpret and respond to probes concerning their attitudes, beliefs, behavior, or health. These problems are magnified when one adds differences in language and culture to the mix of factors that potentially influence self-reported information.2 The fundamental problem arises from the fact that the privileged world of subjective experience can only be inferred by an observer from external indicators that, in the case of research instruments, are constructed on the basis of assumptions concerning cognitive processes or schemas grounded in the researcher's own culture. These may or may not reflect the cognitive realities of another culture. Proving crosscultural comparability is a challenge to the researcher, but it is a clear imperative. Quantification in heath research inherently rests on the assumption that human experience is largely comparable at least across some range of social and cultural distinctions and that individuals from different cultures can be scored on some common interval-level latent metric related to the phenomena under study. An extreme position in terms of comparison across cultures would hold that all human experience can be translated into a common set of basic cognitive and linguistic constructs and that those can be quantified. Such an assumption requires unambiguous proof, and the degree of comparability of concepts and measurement must be established on the basis of some adequate theoretical and empiric practice. The challenge arises in defining what such an adequate practice might be or perhaps whether any procedure can adequately assure meaningful quantitative comparisons at all. Statistical models can identify significant but small effects that can easily reflect measurement artifacts. A quick perusal of the literature reveals that authors commonly quantify the answers to questions about religious and other highly personal beliefs and relate those to self-reported health practices and outcomes. What is actually demonstrated even in one cultural group by such associations is often unclear. When the probes are asked to individuals from very different social classes and cultures in different languages, the results are uninterpretable. In crosscultural research, what has come to be accepted as common practice, or even considered necessary, is often not based on validated methodological procedures. For example, although back-translation has become the norm for the development of crosscultural measurement instruments, its value for improving validity has never been demonstrated. Back-translation represents a convention, and professional translators are

Research Notes: Measuring Parity

We present a metric to calculate the idealized standard deviation (ISD) in the event that ties are possible and receive points in team-sport league standings. Our aim is to raise some issues regarding the customary application of that concept in leagues that do not employ a binomial system for determining rankings, to suggest that the reciprocal of the ISD may be a more intuitive construct if the intent is to represent parity, to provide scholars with a set of ISDs, and to suggest some interesting topics that arise from a quick perusal of the time series.

Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (review)

Reviewed by: Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon Elizabeth L. Keathley (bio) Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. By Ellie M. Hisama. Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis, Ian Bent, general editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Figures, tables, musical examples plus seven movements or works reprinted in their entirety. Bibliography and index. For at least the last two decades feminists have urged publishers and authors of music history textbooks to include music by women composers. A quick perusal of recently published textbooks intended for the music history sequence reveals that they all include only a small number of works by the same handful of women composers and that analytic discussion of these works is lacking in detail. Moreover, music analysis continues to be underrepresented in feminist treatments of works by women composers, a crucial issue given that academia confers value [End Page 111] on canonical compositions through music analysis based on meaningful methods.1 Such conferral of value through analysis is particularly important for marginalized groups like women whose nonconformance to conventional procedures is more likely to be construed as incompetence than as compositional innovation: in the absence of significant music analysis women's compositions will not be accorded the prestige they deserve. However, conventional analytic methods, which were developed to explain and evaluate canonical works, do not necessarily support feminist interpretations of music and music history. Hisama's Gendering Musical Modernism not only brings innovative tools to the project of analyzing the music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon but also confronts the problem of reading the formalist analyses through feminist theory: for this and other reasons, it is a tour de force of feminist music scholarship. Each of the seven analyses offered here uses a different method, as suggested by the music and the contexts of the composers' lived experiences as gendered subjects, "entwining" music analysis and social critique (181). Hisama makes no global claims about essential difference but rather documents the circumstances and attitudes of Crawford, Bauer, and Gideon through their diaries, letters, and published writings and demonstrates how the musical structures of these particular works comprise analogies to the composers' unspoken protest, experiences of marginalization, sexuality, identity, and political commitments. Her readings do not rely on that always suspect category, the "composer's intention," but rather situate Hisama's own hearing of the music from her subject position as an Asian American woman with experiences similar to those of her subjects. These are powerful premises for musical interpretation, for, as feminist theory's notion of "situated knowledge" shows, there are always epistemological limitations to "truth claims," which this methodology avoids, and these limitations proliferate when interpreting artworks. Because analogy and metaphor are important means for perceiving and interpreting musical works, it is significant that Hisama's analytical methods focus on audible musical features, such as contour, register, texture, and timbre. Although some of her analyses employ pitch class set theory, probably the preeminent method of analyzing posttonal music, her original analytical tools stem largely from recent theories of contour, whose perceptibility offers clear advantages. Hisama's analyses are verifiable by listening and therefore are meaningful and satisfying. Significantly, Hisama rejects the conventional wisdom that modernism is inimical to the aesthetics and interests of women. This is a matter dear to my heart because much feminist music inquiry—following, it seems, the lead of feminist literary scholarship—seems to have leapt from nineteenth-century Romanticism to late-twentieth-century postmodernism, relegating modernism to the domain of men, machismo, and misogyny. This lacuna disadvantages women with modernist sensibilities, leaving their works underrepresented, their participation in modernist projects undertheorized, and a significant segment of musical expression politically unavailable to them.2 Hisama's compelling analyses demonstrate that women composers have indeed used modernist idioms to create original works that also speak to feminist concerns. The analytical methods employed in the seven analyses, although selected—and sometimes invented—to examine the particular material at hand, are in no way exclusive to these works; that is, they are models that may be applied to other musical works, although perhaps (or probably) [End Page...