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In Chile, ethnographic studies of schools started 30 years ago. At the time, most of the educational research in Latin America was done through quantitative methodologies, which didn’t show school processes in their proper contexts. In this scenario, a group of Latin-American educational researchers came together to develop a critical qualitative research network, in which Chile adopted the form of the first school ethnography research team in the country. From that, a new means of research was developed, aimed towards understanding everyday life in schools, which was what the “black box” quantitative research was unable to see. This innovation allowed these ethnographers to understand schools as a singular and complex reality. They took up a Latin American critical-historical epistemological approach, understanding that schools require a thick description, historically contextualized, that also considers the structures that determine a school’s singularity. Chilean school ethnographies in the last 30 years have focused on the ways in which concrete social relationships take place in situated historical contexts, from the dictatorship of the 1980s to current neoliberal educational policy. They have allowed the visualization of the effects that more general political, economic, and social transformations have had in the schools’ daily organization and practices. In this trajectory, there have been different approaches to educational policy; some take on a critical perspective and others aim to inform and influence policy. School ethnography has addressed a variety of topics, from school failure in its beginnings, to youth culture, civic engagement, ethnicity, learning and development, and gender and educational policy. This diversity, however, has a common interest: the subordinated or excluded cultural forms and subjectivities, which are the consequence of power relationships and normative structures that are reproduced in schools.

Throughout history, communicable diseases have impacted humanity. If present experiences are any indication, diseases must have had significant impact on transforming the economic and social organization of past communities. Some aspects of what is regarded as normal modern human behavior must have emanated from responses to diseases, especially epidemics and pandemics. Unfortunately, few studies have been conducted in this area of archaeological investigations to shed more light on the influence of these on past communities. This is more so in African countries such as Zimbabwe where the history of pandemics stretches only as far as the beginning of colonialism, less than 200 years ago. Although the earliest world epidemic was recorded during the 5th century, it was not until 1918 that Zimbabwe recorded the first incidence of a worldwide epidemic. There is little knowledge on how precolonial communities were affected by global pandemics such as Black Death, the bubonic plague, and similar occurrences. It has to be noted that global pandemics became more threatening as society made the shift to agrarian life around 10,000 years ago. This has led many scholars to regard the adoption of agriculture as the worst mistake in the history of the human race as they argue that the creation of more closely connected communities gave rise to infectious diseases and presented these diseases with the chance to grow into epidemics. Diseases such as influenza, smallpox, leprosy, malaria, and tuberculosis are among those that have thrived since this shift. With its long human history, Africa is well positioned to shed light on the occurrence of global pandemics as well as their distinct impact on communities living in diverse social, economic, and natural environments. As such, it is important to explore the study of diseases, especially epidemics and global pandemics, to augment the worldwide knowledge generated from other continents. This knowledge should also be juxtaposed with what is already known about changing social, economic, and political developments to see the potential impacts that these pandemics had on the human past. The history of migration should be viewed as a potential history of the spread of new diseases. For all the known pandemics, the South African coast has served as the major corridor of transmission of disease pandemics into Zimbabwe. However, archaeologically, it is known that migrations were mostly over land from the northern and eastern regions. It is interesting to delve into how the spread of diseases could have differed when the movements of people over land, rather than coastal ports, are the nodes. Since there are few documentary sources to help in the comprehension of past outbreaks in the precolonial period, archaeological evidence becomes key. Without doubt, human skeletons represent the most ubiquitous source of information on ancient diseases. Zimbabwe has remains that stretch from the Stone Age to historical times. Paleopathology is an underdeveloped discipline in southern Africa, but with increased awareness of the possibilities of the presence of various diseases in prehistory, it is expected to grow.

Over the past six decades, the historiography of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade has shown remarkable growth and sophistication. Historians have marshalled a vast array of sources and offered rich and compelling explanations for these two great tragedies in human history. The survey of this vibrant scholarly tradition throws light on major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and indicates potential new pathways for future research. While early scholarly efforts have assessed plantation slavery in particular on the antebellum United States South, new voices—those of Western women inspired by the feminist movement and non-Western men and women who began entering academia in larger numbers over the second half of the 20th century—revolutionized views of slavery across time and space. The introduction of new methodological approaches to the field, particularly through dialogue between scholars who engage in quantitative analysis and those who privilege social history sources that are more revealing of lived experiences, has conditioned the types of questions and arguments about slavery and the slave trade that the field has generated. Finally, digital approaches had a significant impact on the field, opening new possibilities to assess and share data from around the world and helping foster an increasingly global conversation about the causes, consequences, and integration of slave systems. No synthesis will ever cover all the details of these thriving subjects of study and, judging from the passionate debates that continue to unfold, interest in the history of slavery and the slave trade is unlikely to fade.

The history of concepts about the adult and that of research into adult constructs show progression from a simple characterization of growth to a variety of complex constructs that define the terrain. Originally, the term adult encompassed all species and events that had attained full physical maturation, a product connotation. Later, time and events (e.g., marriage, the birth of children) became proxies for adult development. The absence of considerations of adult development was augmented by the fact that, for much of the past, adults could not be seen in long-term individual evolution since lifetimes were not extensive. In the 73 years of Psychological Abstracts, adults under various headings (e.g., adulthood, middle age) was referenced in a mere .01% of citations. The first mention of “adult” in a journal title was in 1994. Into the 21st century, although the exploration of various adult constructs abounds, the use of single terms (e.g., intelligence, wisdom) to describe multidimensional attributes leads to misunderstanding and reductionism. There is scant cross-construct analysis and, along with its parent discipline of psychology, analysis of adult development remains at the nascent descriptive level. Looking at the two major constructs of adult personality and intelligence, personality has had the lion’s share of publications. An examination of trends in its analysis reveals that the constructs are defined in various ways, little in the way of socio-contextual appraisal has occurred, and, with respect to the appraisal of intelligence, motivation to perform is ill-examined.

Forensic psychology in the 21st century entails the application of psychology to all aspects of the criminal justice process. Forensic psychologists, therefore, are engaged in the theorization of offending, offender profiling, the psychology of testimony, investigative interviewing, the psychology of juries and judges, and psychological approaches to the punishment and treatment of offenders. Historically, however, forensic psychology, has been narrower in scope. Founded principally in Europe during the late 19th century as a response to the reform of criminal procedure and research on suggestion, which undermined confidence in witness credibility, forensic psychology was initially pursued by jurists and psychiatrists eager to understand the behavior of all those involved in the criminal justice process. While this ambition was pursued piecemeal by jurists throughout the early 20th century in their studies of guilty knowledge, judges, jurors, and investigators, the exigencies of the courtroom, soon saw the field become focused on the psychology of the witness, particularly the juvenile witness. Important, in this regard were the efforts of both European and American experimental psychologists, whose precarious position within universities at the fin de siècle saw them look for real-world applications for psychology and led them to campaign voraciously for the inclusion of psychological knowledge and psychological expertise in legal proceedings. Competition between several disciplines, including law, psychology, psychiatry, and pedagogy, over the role of psychological expert made the professionalization of this field difficult up until the Second World War. During the late 1940s and 1950s, however, not only did forensic psychology increasingly become the exclusive purview of psychologists, but the discipline’s scope began to expand. Notable in this regard was offender profiling, which emerged from the psychological analysis of war criminals and the application of the insights gained here to several high-profile criminal cases in the United States.

This entry regards intervention research as an essential part of social work as a profession and research discipline. A brief history of intervention research reveals that use of intervention research for the betterment of human conditions is contemporary with the genesis of modern social science. Advances in intervention research are attributed to the comprehensive social programs launched during the 1960s in the United States. A contemporary and generic model of intervention research is described. It is argued that it is ethical to use intervention research and unethical not to use it. Assessment of some of the recent advances in policy making and science gives an optimistic picture of the future of intervention research.

This entry traces American social welfare development from the 1890s to 1950. It also includes social work's participation and response to need during two critical times in American history: the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Social reformers were instrumental in the development of social legislation, including the establishment of the Children's Bureau as well as the development of a public welfare system at the state level. America's response to human suffering left many groups, such American Indians, African Americans, and Asians, marginalized. In response, African Americans established a parallel system of private relief through organizations such as the National Urban League, unlike the other racial groups.

Family intervention has become an important tool for social work practitioners. This entry provides a brief history of family intervention and important influences as well as a synopsis of current research. Although these interventions require more research to better understand the populations for whom they are most effective, the evidence supports their usefulness in addressing such issues as aggression, substance use, and depression, among others.

Since critical discourse analysis (CDA) was introduced to China, it has developed into an influential field. Studies in CDA in China from the 1990s to 2020 can be delineated through four stages of development. The first stage focused on introducing the theories and concepts in CDA to China’s academia. During the second stage, CDA in China was no longer confined to reviewing theories abroad but was extended to deeper and more extensive theoretical, methodological, and empirical investigations. During the third stage, Chinese scholars in CDA became more concerned with domestic issues than in the previous stages and started to conduct interdisciplinary studies. The fourth stage marked the flourishing of CDA studies in terms of the numbers of studies published and scholars engaged in the field, and in terms of the breadth and the variety of research methods, topics, and disciplines involved. Chinese scholars tend to gear CDA to China’s social, political, and cultural contexts.

Sindiwe Magona started writing in pursuit of agency as opposed to victimhood. With no training in writing, she felt nonetheless she could paint a much better, more realistic picture than what she found in stories of her people written by white people, to say nothing of how history books represented black Africans or “Bantu” as the terminology of the day went. Another fact that pushed her to dare to write was the almost total absence of records left to her generation by the preceding one. She wanted to close that lacuna. Her first book, To My Children’s Children, was published in 1990 when she was almost fifty years old. Magona wrote the autobiography as a record of life lived in a specific period, by specific people, using hers as an example. The book references other lives, not only that of her family. The cultural milieu and the overarching theme, given the times, however, is of the oppressive system of apartheid—legalized racism. Memory represents not only what is remembered but the inescapable past as represented by the still felt, still visible, still “performing” insights, ideas, ideology, actions, and reactions of South Africans almost a quarter of a century since the end of apartheid came with the first democratic elections of April 27, 1994. Each of her books—four novels, two collections of short stories, two autobiographies, two published plays, three biographies, a book of poetry, as well as her articles, essays, and talks—gives evidence of Magona’s witness of what happens, how it happens, and its observed or acknowledged consequences. She takes the journey further, exploring the inner meanings of the observed. The inner lives of victims and perpetrators, of oppressed and oppressor, and all the other binaries of which she is aware concern her. She set out to write, to leave a record for all posterity, not only black posterity, for it is her firm belief, hope, and prayer that, ere long, humanity will find itself, regain its former oneness or sense of belonging, and understand there are no races but one, the human race.

Edmund V. Cowdry’s Problems of Ageing (1939), the first U.S. handbook in gerontology, spurred efforts to systematize and communicate data and hypotheses in a “discouragingly difficult field,” as one of the volume’s contributors put it. Researchers, educators, and practitioners subsequently published handbooks of aging to share basic concepts, norms, and metaphors—and eventually to construct theories. Compared to theoretical constructs that animate African American studies, paradigms that inform inquiries into sex and gender, and queer theory-building, research on aging is sustained by few evidence-based, methodologically robust, heuristic theories. No single construct yet seizes the gerontological imagination. Analyzing notable handbooks reveals that the modern history of ever-emerging gerontological theory building went through three phases. First, attempts to formulate Big Theories of Aging resulted in more disappointments than scientific advances. In the second phase, researchers on aging set more modest aims, often giving priority to methodological innovation, but failed to promote consilience in a data-rich, theory-poor arena. Psychological theories, pertaining to lifespan development, merit special attention in the third phase, because they proved useful to biomedical and social scientists doing research on aging.

In the history of Spanish psychology in the 19th century, three stages can be distinguished. An eclectic first stage was defined by the coexistence of currents such as spiritualism, sensism, ideology, and common-sense realism. Jaime Balmes was the most prominent and original author, integrating empiricism and associationism in the Spanish tradition of common-sense philosophy. The second stage was characterized by the influence of Krausism, a version of German rationalist pantheism imported by Julián Sanz del Río, that reached great acceptance during the 1860s and 1870s among intellectuals opposed to traditional Catholicism. The third stage began in the late 1870s: the reception, adaptation, development, and debate of the “new psychology” flowing from Germany, Great Britain, and France. A group of neo-Kantian intellectuals led by Cuban José del Perojo, a disciple of Kuno Fischer, introduced and popularized experimental psychology and comparative psychology in Spain. His project was vigorously seconded in Cuba by Enrique José Varona, author of the first Spanish manual of experimental psychology. In this path, the Marxist psychiatrist and intellectual Jaime Vera promoted in Madrid a materialistic view of psychology, and his colleague and friend Luis Simarro won the first university chair of Experimental Psychology, fostering a school of psychologists oriented toward experimental science. In turn, the publication in 1879 of the papal encyclical Aeterni Patris stimulated the development of a Spanish neoscholastic scientific psychology, developed under the influence of Cardinal Mercier of the Catholic University of Louvain. Authors such as Zeferino González, Marcelino Arnáiz, and Alberto Gómez Izquierdo broke with the anti-modern tradition of the Spanish Church and developed an experimental psychology within the Aristotelian-Thomistic framework. In the first three decades of the 20th century, applied psychology expanded radically, linked to a period of strong socioeconomic growth. Abnormal and educational psychology developed vigorously, and Spanish psychotechnics, led by José Germain in Madrid and Emilio Mira in Barcelona, was at the forefront of European science. In 1936 the Spanish Civil War imposed a bloody parenthesis to the economic and scientific development of the country. In the postwar period, the psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Nágera and his group tried to manipulate psychological research to legitimize some of general Franco's policies. Simultaneously, two neoscholastic scholars, Manuel Barbado and Juan Zaragüeta, supervised the recovery and scientific development of Spanish psychology through institutions such as the Department of Experimental Psychology of the Higher Council for Scientific Research, the National Institute of Psychotechnics, and the School of Applied Psychology and Psychotechnics of the University of Madrid. José Germain was chosen to direct and guide these projects, and a new generation of academic psychologists was formed: Mariano Yela, José Luis Pinillos, and Miguel Siguán, among others. The economic expansion of the 1960s and 1970s and the end of Franco’s dictatorship produced a huge development of academic and professional psychology, with Spanish psychology becoming positively integrated into Western science. On the other side of the Atlantic, the psychology of liberation developed by Ignacio Martín-Baró in El Salvador promoted the theoretical and methodological renewal of Latin American psychology.

Research methods in sport and exercise psychology are embedded in the domain’s network of methodological assumptions, historical traditions, and research themes. Sport and exercise psychology is a unique domain that derives and integrates concepts and terminologies from both psychology and kinesiology domains. Thus, research methods used to study the main concerns and interests of sport and exercise psychology represent the domain’s intellectual properties. The main methods used in the sport and exercise psychology domain are: (a) experimental, (b) psychometric, (c) multivariate correlational, (d) meta-analytic, (e) idiosyncratic, and (f) qualitative approach. Each of these research methods tends to fulfill a distinguishable research purpose in the domain and thus enables the generation of evidence that is not readily gleaned through other methods. Although the six research methods represent a sufficient diversity of available methods in sport and exercise psychology, they must be viewed as a starting point for researchers interested in the domain. Other research methods (e.g., case study, Bayesian inferences, and psychophysiological approach) exist and bear potential to advance the domain of sport and exercise psychology.

Although more scholars have used archival evidence to analyze foreign policy in recent years, relatively little has been written on the methods involved in using archives as well as the evidentiary value of different types of documents. Analyses of foreign policy decisions often make use of narratives or process-tracing. Process-tracing should uncover the causal mechanisms wherever possible in order to explain foreign policy decisions. Primary sources are extremely useful in uncovering causal mechanisms, whether public opinion, bureaucratic politics, advisory group dynamics, or psychological processes. Through archival evidence, the researcher can capture how policymakers perceived the world at the time, unbiased by hindsight, and their calculations. Because psychological evidence shows that people do not necessarily know what influenced their decision, scholars should not necessarily take at face value the reasons that policymakers give for their actions. It is useful for political scientists to carry out their own archival research because historians have different implicit theories and may not gather data of relevance to the theories being tested. In addition, through examining the documents, political scientists may be able to discriminate between competing historical interpretations of the same event. It is important to interpret documents within their historic, situational, and communication contexts. The document’s place in the policy process—the sequence of memos and discussions—helps to determine its meaning and impact on the final decision. In order to interpret statements that are apt to be biased by instrumental motives, the investigator should consider who said what to whom under what circumstances and with what purpose.

Historians Urs App and Martino Dibeltulo Concu have argued that the European “discovery” of Buddhism as a “religion” can be dated to the 16th century rather than the 19th, and that the presentation of the Buddha as a philosopher by the likes of Eugène Burnouf is a secularized holdover from the Jesuit accounts of the 16th century. These claims have a tenuous basis, and Burnouf’s portrayal of the Buddha as a philosopher was a radical break from earlier Jesuit accounts. Unlike the Asian Buddhists who preceded him, Burnouf separated the facts from beliefs and concluded the Buddha was a human philosopher. The essay explores the 16th-century Jesuit encounter with Buddhists in Japan and the accounts that were generated therefrom, with particular attention to the notion that the Buddha taught both an inner materialist doctrine and an outer moral one; it looks to the dissemination and development of these ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a focus on the “African hypothesis” as it is found in various European savants; it turns to the 19th-century “discovery” of Buddhism by the likes of Ozeray, Abel-Rémusat, Hodgson, and Burnouf. it then draws out the implications of the defense of Masuzawa and Droit’s position given in this article for the field of Buddhist studies, particularly with regard to methodological issues.

Oral history tells of an indigenous trader who lived in the middle belts of the River Gambia known as Kambi. His wealth and popularity transcended boundaries, villages, and communities from the interior of western Africa to the Atlantic Ocean. When the Portuguese arrived in the region during the first half of the 15th century, they immediately realized that Kambi wielded economic and social authority because of the frequent movements of traders up and down the river. The traders told the Portuguese that they visited Kambi-yaa (or Kambi’s place in Mandinka) in order to trade, and the Portuguese decided to name the region Gambia. Whether the above oral narrative is accurate is not of great concern. What is important is that the account provides a glimpse of the history of the region and the changes that were already under way by the 15th century. It is evident that the ancestors of present-day Gambians had arrived in waves, or series of migrations, and were fully established on both banks of the Gambia River when Portuguese explorers first arrived in the 15th century. The Portuguese reported having found Mandinka kings on the river who claimed to be vassals of the king of “Melle.” In 1620, Richard Jobson also reported that the Mandingo were the “lords and commanders” of all the Gambia. These early 15th century contacts, led to a continuous Europeans’ presence in the River Gambia that still persist. By 1816, Bathurst was established as the new capital of the Gambia but it was not until nearly 100 years later that the entire territory we now know as Gambia came firmly under British influence. British rule lasted until 1965, when a new era of self-rule began. The country has since witnessed three republics, the first ending in 1994, the second in 2016, and the third still existing as of 2018.

Dark matter is one of the most fundamental and perplexing issues of modern physics. Its presence is deduced from a straightforward application of Newton’s theory of gravity to astronomical systems whose dynamical motion should be simple to understand. The success of Newton’s theory in describing the behavior of the solar system was one of the greatest achievements of the 18th century. Its subsequent use to deduce the presence of a previously unknown planet, Neptune, discovered in 1846, was the first demonstration of how minor departures from its predictions indicated additional mass. The expectation in the early 20th century, as astronomical observations allowed more distance and larger celestial systems to be studied, was that galaxies and collections of galaxies should behave like larger solar systems, albeit more complicated. However, the reality was quite different. It is not a minor discrepancy, as led to the discovery of Neptune, but it is extreme. The stars at the edges of galaxies are not behaving at all like Pluto at the edge of the solar system. Instead of having a slower orbital speed, as expected and shown by Pluto, they have the same speed as those much further in. If Newton’s law is to be retained, there must be much more mass in the galaxy than can be seen, and it must be distributed out to large distances, beyond the visible extent of the galaxy. This unseen mass is called “dark matter,” and its presence was becoming widely accepted by the 1970s. Subsequently, many other types of astrophysical observations covering many other types of object were made that came to the same conclusions. The ultimate realization was that the universe itself requires dark matter to explain how it developed the structures within it observed today. The current consensus is that one-fourth of the universe is dark matter, whereas only 1/20th is normal matter. This leaves the majority in some other form, and therein lies another mystery—“dark energy.” The modern form of Newton’s laws is general relativity, due to Albert Einstein. This offers no help in solving the problem of dark matter because most of the systems involved are nonrelativistic and the solutions to the general theory of relativity (GR) reproduce Newtonian behavior. However, it would not be right to avoid mentioning the possibility of modifying Newton’s laws (and hence GR) in such a way as to change the nonrelativistic behavior to explain the way galaxies behave, but without changing the solar system dynamics. Although this is a minority concept, it is nonetheless surviving within the scientific community as an idea. Understanding the nature of dark matter is one of the most intensely competitive research areas, and the solution will be of profound importance to astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics. There is thus a huge “industry” of direct detection experiments predicated on the premise that there is a new particle species yet to be found, and which pervades the universe. There are also experiments searching for evidence of the decay of the particles via their annihilation products, and, finally, there are intense searches for newly formed unknown particles in collider experiments.

History has provided a site of theoretical inquiry for scholars of International Relations since the discipline’s inception. However, serious and sustained historical inquiry has only returned to the foreground of international studies in the last two decades or so, after a prolonged period of postwar uninterest. How can scholars identify moments or processes of systematic change? Does history have a long run structure or trajectory? Moreover, scholars have begun to take seriously the epistemological problem of historicism. International relations scholarship on history during this period addresses the intersection of theory and history in four broad ways. The first encompasses substantive historical studies that take history as a site of theory building about world politics. Here, accounts of early modern Europe, ancient China, precolonial South Asia, European colonial expansion, and other settings have challenged previous historical narratives that assert or assume linear progress or realist cyclicality alike. A second category follows on the first, comprising a plurality of methodological turns. Here, scholars have developed ways of inquiring into history, ranging across macrohistorical or structural analysis, rationalist accounts of international-system building, relational accounts of international hierarchies, discursive accounts of colonialism and resistance, and others. A third focuses directly on theoretical questions drawn from philosophy of history. These works aim to provide not methods of historical inquiry so much as theoretical tools for thinking philosophically about the historical long run itself. Fourth and finally, scholars of the history of international thought have developed contextualist accounts of the intellectual history of international theory. These approaches rethink how theory interfaces with history by interrogating international thought itself.

Like the contested remembrance of historical events, collective memory shapes interstate relations, foreign and security policy, and global politics. International relations (IR) scholars studying the relationship between collective memory and international politics link the memory concept to the notions of security, power, language, emotions, gender, identity, trauma, justice, law, and the like. The study of the international politics of memory relies on a plurality of theoretical approaches gained from interdisciplinary works on collective memory. Although collective memory is viewed as a variable influencing foreign policymaking in structural terms within a positivist paradigm in IR scholarship, from an interpretive perspective, collective memory is a practice of remembrance that constitutes a state’s foreign and security policy. Following the advances of the interpretive paradigm in the social sciences, it is expected that more interpretive studies on the international politics of memory will appear. .