Social Sciences

AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES (Social Science)

African American studies (also called black studies, African and African American studies, Africana and Pan-African studies, and African diaspora studies) combines general intellectual history, academic scholarship, and a radical movement for fundamental educational reform (Alkalimat et al. 1977). From its inception the field has embraced the focus of academic excellence and social responsibility in a […]

AFRICAN AMERICANS (Social Science)

The term African American has typically referred to descendants of enslaved and indentured black Africans transplanted by force into what is now the United States. The terms African American, black, and Afro-American are sometimes used interchangeably. African American has supplanted other designations, such as Negro, derived from the word Negroid, coined in the eighteenth century […]

AFRICAN CRISIS RESPONSE INITIATIVE (Social Science)

The African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI) is a program that the United States launched in 1996 to address challenges of peacekeeping and conflict management in Africa. Its formation was prompted by fears that the ethnic massacres that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 might also take place in neighboring Burundi, and by the desire of the […]

AFRICAN DIASPORA (Social Science)

The African diaspora was the dispersal of African peoples to Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The term is used most commonly for the coerced movement in various slave trades, but the word diaspora has also been used to refer to voluntary migrations from Africa and for population movements within Africa. In some ways, the most […]

AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS (Social Science)

The origins of the African National Congress (ANC) were a conference of black South African notables assembled in 1912 to protest impending legal restrictions on African land ownership. Until the 1940s, the ANC remained decorously circumspect: lobbying, submitting memorandums, and relying heavily on white liberal intermediaries. During World War II (1939-1945), the ANC began to […]

AFRICAN STUDIES (Social Science)

The studies of African peoples, history, and philosophy; arts, literature, and culture; political, economic, and social organization; geography, ecology, and paleontology are and have long been contested domains of intellectual inquiry. In the modern era this is perhaps best represented by the 1969 annual meeting of the (American) African Studies Association (ASA; founded in 1957 […]

AFRICVILLE (CANADA) (Social Science)

Africville has correctly been called Canada’s most famous black community. It has been the subject of topics (both scholarly and fiction), award-winning documentaries, thousands of newspaper articles (local, national, and international), hundreds of graduate student theses, poems, songs, a jazz suite, symposia, and an exhibition that traveled across Canada and is now housed permanently at […]

AFROCENTRISM (Social Science)

Over the last three decades or so, the production, validation, legitimation, and mediation of knowledge about peoples African and of African descent were subjects of often very heated debate. A significant number of the generations of black academics, independent scholars, and teachers who came of age during the civil rights and black power movements became […]

AGENDA SETTING (Social Science)

Barbara Sinclair provides a concise definition of agenda setting: "the process through which issues attain the status of being seriously debated by politically relevant actors" (1986, p. 35). The study of agenda setting began as a reaction to the pluralist claim that policy outcomes are the result of competing groups (Dahl 1956, 1961; Truman 1951). […]

AGGREGATE DEMAND (Social Science)

The notion of aggregate demand formally made its appearance in John Maynard Keynes’s (1883-1946) General Theory in 1936 and, in its numerous guises, quickly rose to become a vital concept in economists’ tool kit of analytical devices. Despite pleas by some economists, notably new classical economists, to reject the aggregate demand/supply framework because of lack […]

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