Publication Type: Single Paper Format
Abstract: Training professional educators within 21st Century learning environments is imperative, so as to meet learning objectives and engage learners within face-to-face, hybrid and online social communities of learning environments.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Culturally-appropriate health interventions can yield more effective results than those that do not consider the cultural significance of a population. Few attempts at theory-based interventions have been created for Alaska Native populations. The current HIV/STD program in Alaska does not closely examine cultural considerations as much as it could. This paper proposes a theory-based intervention using Social Cognitive Theory for reducing HIV/AIDS among Alaska Native populations.

Publication Type: Panelist Abstract
Abstract: This article examines and problematizes the contribution of the paradigm known as Afrocentric Thought to our understanding of Black sexuality. Using an Afrocentric analysis as well as resources from Black Feminist Thought and Postcolonial Queer Theory, it identifies gaps and weaknesses in previous Afrocentric analysis, particularly as it relates to sexual practices to which certain Afrocentric and Pan-African scholars have been antagonistic such as same-sex sexual practice. In discussing those gaps and weaknesses, it also proposes an approach, Afrocentric Decolonizing Queer Theory (ADQT), for scholars who are interested in using Afrocentric Thought as a liberatory framework for engaging in sexuality studies. ADQT suggests ways of deploying an Afrocentric analysis of queer sexual practices without summarily and incorrectly dismissing these practices as Eurocentric, pathological, or problematic. It particularly addresses scholars who are simultaneously Pan-African and queer in their theoretical and ideological orientations. ADQT provides renewed intellectual life to a paradigm that has, since the 1990s, declined in impact, relevance, innovation, and engagement across Black/Africana Studies as a field. Consequently, ADQT offers new tools for examining, understanding, and utilizing the current challenges and dynamics in Black sexuality in the interests of decolonization, liberation, and empowerment.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The war in Iraq, social unrest accompanying controversial proposal of the Bolkstein directive on services, and the tax-system reform in Germany ? all these events have recently made obvious that the enlargement of the EU is not only a matter of dealing with quantitative differences in terms of GDP and living standards, but also the problem of qualitative differences in terms of world outlooks and orientations of elites and wider structural socio-economic and regulatory features that may have profound consequences on the institutional operation of the European Union as a whole. What are then wider implications of the Eastern enlargement for the social and economic model of the European Union? In order to answer this question, I deal with the specific features of the states of ?New Europe? by investigating their strategies of ?transition? from state socialism to capitalism. Thus, I analyze specific mode of socio-economic governance that has crystallised in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs). These strategies and their outcomes, however, cannot be seen in isolation from the strategy of the European Union towards these countries in the process of transition. Then, I investigate the European regulatory framework of socio-economic governance as crystallised so far. Finally, I assess the implications of the Eastern enlargement for the European regulatory framework, its social content, and consequences for the European social model, on the one hand, and consequences of EU enlargement on the regulatory modes of socio-economic governance in CEECs, on the other hand.It is argued, among others, that the new EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe have reoriented their regulatory structures to pursue a neo-liberal competitive strategy of foreign direct investment attraction based on the Ricardian economies of comparative advantage. This strategy, however, is not only product of indigenous forces but also an outcome of EU?s Ostpolitik in the process of enlargement. In the European Union, a regulatory framework of socio-economic governance has crystallised around the project of EMU. An essential feature of this mode of governance is an asymmetry between supranational monetary and intergovernmental fiscal policy that pushes EU states into competitive austerity restrictions. I argue that EMU?s institutional structure has a neoliberal social content. Eastern Enlargement has increased strains of this regulatory framework as it exacerbates its centrifugal effects of uneven development and tightens the regulatory competition. After speculating on viability of CEECs?s niche strategies that would further increase the difficulties in the core, I make a case for a progressive European social and economic model that would leave the impasse of monetarist supply-side solutions that have been pursued both in old and new Europe so far. However, I conclude in a rather pessimistic fashion since the configuration of social forces within Europe is not very favourable to such a strategy and the Eastern enlargement does not make this situation better.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper, I explore the pattern of economic reform at the sub-national level in India: why some states have moved in the direction of market reforms while others have not (if any) in the face of systemic pressures towards reform coming from the central government and the international environment. Furthermore, I am also interested in the question of the patterns of reform in those cases where apparently similar policy outcomes have occurred. This paper, thus, aims to illuminate the dynamics of policy change in ?federal systems,? through an in-depth analysis of the Indian case. In particular, I will argue that 1) there are a number of factors pushing all states in the same direction (towards ?reform?), namely, political and economic pressures from the centre and the private sector, as well as a widespread resource shortage triggered principally by an earlier period of intensified intra-state competition and 2) variation in ?reform orientation? among the states can be partially traced to the political strategy and degree of influence at the centre of state elites.