Search results

Legal and Sharīʿah issues abound in creating security to finance waqf property development in Malaysia, for it involves integrating the Sharīʿah concept of waqf with requirements of Malaysian land law as well as the requirements of modern finance under civil law. Banks and financial insti­tutions will not generally finance property development without any form of security for the loan. The best type of security transaction under Malaysian land law is to create a charge on the land under the National Land Code 1965, rendering the land liable as a security which upon default of the chargor, would entitle the chargee to seek statutory remedies including sale of the land. Such may not be feasible for waqf properties due to the inalienable nature of such properties. Due to the remedy of sale of the land upon default, the same issues would arise in regard to other types of securities like a lien and a loan agreement cum assignment. There is therefore a need to diversify the available options in creating security over waqf property. What are the existing Sharīʿah restrictions on waqf property? Do these restrictions affect the creation of security over waqf lands under conventional Malaysian land law? What are the legal and Sharīʿah issues relating to creating a charge over waqf lands? What are some feasible options? Initial findings are that creating a charge on a lease of waqf land as well as resorting to a hybrid form of a traditional security transaction in Malaysia, called ‘Jualjanji’, may hold some answers. Through doctrinal legal research and content analysis, this chapter explores these issues and recommends feasible solutions.

This chapter seeks to classify condominium crime, explain its neglect in light of the growth of condo living in cities and closely consider the prospects for greater visibility and legal regulation of these acts. We deploy traditional dichotomies of white-collar/street crime and insiders/outsiders to construct a two-dimensional typology of condo crime and illustrate each type using empirically grounded examples from extensive qualitative research in Ontario and New York State entailing analysis of media accounts, condo owner association and corporation websites, and numerous interviews with owners, board directors and industry actors. We argue that the condo form retains peculiar characteristics that tend to prevent public reporting of condo crimes and leaves the ‘usual suspects’ (i.e. street criminals) in the spotlight while other, potentially more damaging, acts are neglected. We conclude by discussing barriers to knowing the extent of condo crime and their relationship to legal regulation.

Learning-via-gaming is an emerging area of interest and research within kindergarten to grade 12 (k-12), in US schools. As a vital part of the k-12 instructional mission, school libraries are exploring the potential role of videogames in mediating information-oriented skills development. Although the general concept of learning-via-gaming is not new to school libraries (e.g., library review card games), empirical knowledge of videogames’ representational landscapes is needed to assist school librarians in developing instructional programming. This study examined representations of information across three distinct genres of mainstream videogames (shooters, action-adventure, and role-playing). Specifically, qualitative content analysis was used to examine the types of inscribed, information resources that players could use to generate solutions during problem-solving events. Across the three video gaming genres studied, there were seven strata of information: socially constructed, interpersonal, environmental, process, resource, task, and symbolic stratums. The results of this study could assist school librarians in (1) designing instructional lessons around videogames and/or (2) guiding students through the process of transporting meanings from the domain of gaming to other domains (e.g., academic, community, and everyday information problem-solving).

In this paper I explore how members of rural Maya households in central Quintana Roo (Mexico) interact with the wider social system and cope with long-term transformations in productive relations since c. 1840. Maya householders integrate elements of capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production. Through particular cultural forms they regulate internal uses of wealth and their relationships with the larger capitalist world. Social and economic stratification is a fundamental feature of life among Maya householders today as it was in the past. While disparities between wealth strata within the local context have increased, the community is far from disintegrating into antagonistic groups.

This paper aims at a better understanding of contemporary women’s relationship paths and their reasoning behind them. Qualitative interviews with 48 rural and urban women from Western Mexico were conducted and analyzed using a thematic approach and data discussed from a feminist, gender approach and late modernity approach. Findings reveal civil and religious marriages were the paths two-third of women followed to start a family and that women living in permanent and alternating cohabitation did not seek to marry. Women held ambivalent views on marital life and poorer and less-educated women, particularly urban participants, had no choice but to marry. Findings on reasoning reveal a more complex and diverse reality than previous sociodemographic studies have portrayed, where pragmatism and social order were the main causes for marrying and cohabitation. Narratives show premarital sex and the symbolism of marriage and family are changing. A comparative approach between contexts of study, age groups, civil status, and social strata enriched and strengthened the discussion of the findings. The results were contrasted with existing Mexican literature from different fields. A larger qualitative study is needed to broaden the scope of the findings made by this study, whilst large-scale studies should consider either the use of mixed approaches or the inclusion of items that allow them to identify the elements of social and cultural change. The study could help to demystify women’s attitudes toward marriage, sex, and love; a field currently sprinkled with western romantic love values and gender-driven idealizations. This paper might be of interest for social demographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians conducting research on these themes from feminist and gender perspectives.

In vol. 6, 1976, of Advances in Librarianship, I published a review about relevance under the same title, without, of course, “Part I” in the title (Saracevic, 1976). [A substantively similar article was published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (Saracevic, 1975)]. I did not plan then to have another related review 30 years later—but things happen. The 1976 work “attempted to trace the evolution of thinking on relevance, a key notion in information science, [and] to provide a framework within which the widely dissonant ideas on relevance might be interpreted and related to one another” (ibid.: 338).

This chapter examines the training of indigenous Mayan catechists by the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, and their subsequent role in the establishment and growth of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in the period prior to the Zapatistas' 1994 uprising. It considers the adequacy of Timothy Wickham-Crowley's model of guerrilla insurgencies in Latin America in explaining the Zapatista case. It finds, contrary to Wickham-Crowley's model of the relations between urban university leadership groups and peasant support bases, that the catechists constituted a stratum of “organic indigenous-campesino intellectuals” that radically undermined their communities’ traditional intellectual dependence on outsiders and enabled them to constitute themselves as a new collective political subject.

This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon Carver and Frank W. Taussig published works in which they established a close nexus between an individual’s economic position and his biological fitness. Carver, writing in 1929, argued that social class rigidities are attributable to the inheritance of superior and inferior abilities on the respective social class levels and proposed an “economic test of fitness” as a eugenic criterion to distinguish worthy from unworthy individuals. In 1932, Taussig, together with Carl Smith Joslyn, published American Business Leaders – a study that showed how groups with superior social status are proportionately much more productive of professional and business leaders than are the groups with inferior social status. Like Carver, Taussig and Joslyn attributed this circumstance primarily to hereditary rather than environmental factors. Taussig, Joslyn, and Carver are not the only protagonists of our story. The Russian-born sociologists Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin, who joined the newly established Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930, also played a crucial role. His book Social Mobility (1927) exercised a major influence on both Taussig and Carver and contributed decisively to the survival of eugenic and hereditarian ideas at Harvard in the 1930s.