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Operating in both traditional schools and alternative learning systems (ALS) requires organizations to have a strong understanding of what drives the cultural acceptance of violence and the capacity of the local populace to find peaceful solutions. This paper explores the results from a formative social network analysis (SNA) study on out-of-school youth (OSY) in the Philippines for educational programming in crisis settings. SNA views relationships in terms of nodes and ties – nodes are the individual actors in networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. As part of a process evaluation, SNA can shed light into the “black box” of how and why people and groups interact.

Study data came from a survey of 1,006 youth between the ages of 18–24, in a cluster-randomized sample from eight municipalities in Mindanao, Philippines. The survey captured information on demographics, acceptance of violence, resilience and the relationships between youth/voluntary organizations, as well as between youth/trusted contacts (“alters”). These data were transformed into findings using both descriptive techniques and regression analysis.

This paper finds that among Mindanao youth, the patterns connecting OSY with organizations, trusted contacts, acceptance of violence and resilience are extremely complex. The evidence paints a picture of OSY who are disconnected with institutional support, largely confined to their barangays (villages/neighborhoods) and surrounded by people who have overlapping roles as neighbors, relatives and friends. The analysis fails to outline a single, unified picture and instead reveals a tapestry of disparate points. More abstractly, SNA as a methodology captures a unique slice of the complexity of youths’ lives and how aspects of this complexity evince the need for more effort to be put into adapting OSY programming to local conditions. The results also support previous research highlighting how push and pull factors combine in uniquely individual ways that defy general demographic patterns. Demographic variables, for example, explain little of the variation in youths’ perceptions of violence and resilience, despite the strong significance of gender, age and urban/rural residence in most models. Variables for ethnicity and religion, in contrast, generally did not significantly influence acceptance of violence or perceived resilience.

From the constellation of findings, this study posits the following conclusions: regarding future development projects, practitioners can use SNA to better understand the complex patterns of influence on OSY at the community level. There is still ample opportunity to broaden and deepen institutional engagement with Mindanao’s OSY population. Programs hoping to involve OSY should expect to dedicate special time, attention and resources to their recruitment, education and training. Regarding the design of interventions, programs focusing on mitigating or addressing violence/violent extremism should acknowledge the complexity of social networks. Education programs should thus be explicit about specific desired outcomes, elaborating how they intend to mitigate which types of violence and under what circumstances for which subgroups of youth.

Regarding future research and evaluation, the study demonstrates how SNA, as an innovative monitoring and evaluation method, can map and measure human and organizational relationships, both visually and mathematically. The suite of methods under the SNA umbrella deserve greater attention and use by those seeking to learn about what works in providing quality educational services in crisis settings.

In recent years, the number of journals focusing on a single literary figure has increased substantially. No longer are only a few select authors the sole focus of a journal or newsletter. With the proliferation of single‐author periodicals, implications for their use in locating literary criticism increases the importance of identifying such publications and recommending them to users. The importance of the effective use of journals devoted to a single author is highlighted by the fact that many such titles are not indexed in MLA International Bibliography, long deemed the most complete of the traditional sources for locating literary criticism. Perhaps the greatest strength of the relatively recent American Humanities Index lies is its coverage of single‐author titles. Humanities Index and Abstracts for English Studies also provide access to such journals. Arts and Humanities Citation Index does include a number of the titles too, but it is relatively difficult to use because of its subject approach.

When William Faulkner sent off his manuscript of Sanctuary in 1929 to the publisher Cape and Smith, Harrison Smith responded, “Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail.” From its very inception, Sanctuary, Faulkner's shocking novel of a young co‐ed initiated through rape and murder into the criminal world of hoodlums, was controversial. When Smith sent Faulkner the galleys, the author decided to revise the manuscript. This revised version of Sanctuary, published in 1931, went on to become his most scandalous and, not coincidentally, his best selling work. While The Sound and the Fury and Light in August languished and went out of print, the horrific tale of Temple Drake and the gangster/thug, Popeye, generated sustained sales as well as a flurry of popular interest in the young writer from Mississippi.

Business writing can be effectively taught and created using examples drawn from the best modern literature and by borrowing analytical tools from the theory and practice of practical criticism. Looks at examples from Michener, Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck to demonstrate this.

THIS essay has two origins—a habit and a request. It was an Italian friend of mine who asked me to choose for him twenty novels which contained the spirit of Britain to‐day: and it was a very English friend who enquired “Why do you read only American magazines, and so many of those?”

For centuries, Brer Rabbit stories have communicated the values and experiences of enslaved Africans and of indigenous African American culture (Abrahams, 1985; Brewer, 1968; Levine, 1977). According to Blassingame (1972, p. 127), Brer Rabbit stories are “a projection of the slave's personal experiences, dreams and hopes.” Dunn (1979, p.183) explained that the stories are “paradigms dictating how to act and how to live,” and Stuckey (1977, p.xuii) observed that they “revealed more about slave culture than… whole books on slavery by experts. Levine (1977) maintaned that Brer Rabbit stories survived the experiences of slavery and urban poverty because they were a vehicle by which African American cultural values could be shared by the masses of African American people, and Leslie (forthcoming) observed that urban Black mothers continue to share in these values by teaching their children that Brer Rabbit's tricks demonstrate the importance of “protecting the physically small and weak against the physically big and powerful.”