1,720,963 research outputs found
Luo Women Voters/Aspirants and the New Constitutional Dispensation in the March 2013 Kenya Elections: The case of Siaya and Kisumu Counties
No full textIntroduction Women are slightly over fifty per cent (50%) of world population but occupy only twenty per cent (20%) of political positions. According to Andrea Wikham, they are less than 10% of the world’s leaders and of the 193 member states of the UN, only 21 have either a female Head of State or of Government. Hence despite decades of enfranchisement, only a small fraction of political representatives around the world are women (Wickham, 2013). Given this state of affairs it is clear that ..
Women’s Organising for Self Improvement in Colonial and Post Colonial Kenya: A Historical Analysis
Get PDFResearch on women’s activities and interests was spurred by the feminist movement in the 1960s and has sustained its recognition as a genuine field of investigation. Since early 1970s national and international attention has focused on women. In Africa, research on women grew intermittently in the wake of the global feminist movement and despite numerous setbacks it has grown incredibly. It was particularly boosted after the UN Declaration of Women’s Decade in 1975. The declaration of the UN decade for women produced both rhetoric from government officials and feminist leaders about women’s significance in all aspects of life and determined efforts to improve women’s education, economic situation, social status and political participation. Consequently discussions by and about women began to take centre stage and continues to play an important role in contemporary political debate. This means that what was considered the women question in the 19th Century became a central or core issue in the 20th Century. The potential and actual contribution of women to political, cultural, and socio-economic development of Africa and their special needs and problems in development have been reiterated in the expanding literature on women.[1] There is generally an expanded database on the operation of women in society and group context internationally. Such publications have increased as the production of social knowledge on women proliferates. In Kenya women are currently remaining in several research agenda and efforts of many scholars have made the literature on gender and women to increase enormously. Although it is recognised that women are agents of historical change and objects of policy consideration there is still paucity in what can be considered her story in Africa and Kenya specifically. [1] See Ndeda 2002
Population movement, settlement and the construction of society to the east of Lake Victoria in precolonial times: the western Kenyan case
No full textInternational audienceThe communities’ in Nyanza and Western Kenya situated to the east of Lake Victoria have come from various directions to their present day settlements. They encompass two linguistic families the Bantu and the Nilotic. These communities came from different directions but interacted with each other and borrowed extensively from each other. The Abaluhya sub-groups which moved to western Kenya from eastern Uganda are likely to have been the earliest settlers in the lake region. According to some scholars it could be inferred that the Abaluhya and Gusii people represent the spearhead of migration in this region. The Gusii and Luhya settlers to the Lake Victoria are the descendants of possibly the earliest Bantu groups to have arrived in Kenya, and are believed to have introduced iron smelting and the use of iron tools to the region. The period between 1500 and 1850 saw the migration of many Bantu clans and families from eastern Uganda into western Kenya and the emergence of the present day Abaluyia, Abagusii, and Abakuria communities. The formation of the Abaluyia entailed the fusion of the pre-1500 inhabitants of western province with those Bantu groups that arrived in the region in the 16th century and 18th centuries. While the Bantu who lived to the north of Lake Victoria evolved into a single community (the Abaluyia) the Bantu to the south of Winam Gulf evolved into three distinct societies the Abagusii, Abakuria and Abasuba. Similarly the Luo from the Sudan traversed Uganda which was the centre of their encounter with the Bantu. As they moved on the interactions between them persisted right into their settlements in the region. They continue to interact extensively in modern western Kenya. But each group has a history that should be detailed because as these people groups interacted with each other they did it as smaller entities, for instance as clans and their immediate neighbours. It was occasional that several clans combined to fight the Bantu or other neighbours.The territorial maneuvering by the three groups was not always peaceful as war over the land often erupted. However the interethnic relations between the Bantu and the Nilotes were not confined to confrontation. The Luo, Luhya and the Gusii shared much. Their economic systems were adapted to the same environments and their common words for domestic crops and tools indicate an intimate contact. Moreover between 1870 and 1900 they had fixed markets where all groups exchanged their products of different environments. These groups did not live in isolation from each other they had various levels of interaction thus practicing convergence and conversion.This paper has examined the movement, settlement and the construction of society to the east of Lake Victoria among the Bantu Gusii and the Luhya and the Nilotic Luo on the eve of colonial rule
Kenya’s Past as Prologue
No full textDuring the run-up to Kenya’s 2013 general elections, crucial political and civic questions were raised. Could past mistakes, especially political and ethnic-related violence, be avoided this time round? Would the spectre of the 2007 post-electoral violence positively or negatively affect debates and voting? How would politicians, electoral bodies such as the IEBC, the Kenyan civil society, and the international community weigh in on the elections? More generally, would the 2013 elections bear witness to the building up of an electoral culture in Kenya, characterized by free and fair elections, or would it show that voting is still weakened by political malpractices, partisan opinions and emotional reactions? Would Kenya’s past be inescapable or would it prepare the scene for a new political order? Kenya’s Past as Prologue adopts a multidisciplinary perspective - mainly built upon field-based ethnography and a selection of case studies - to answer these questions. Under the leadership of the French Institute for Research in Africa (Institut français de recherche en Afrique, IFRA), political scientists, historians and anthropologists explore various aspects of the electoral process to contribute in-depth analyses of the last elections. They highlight the structural factors underlying election and voting in Kenya including the political system, culture and political transition. They also interrogate the short-term trends and issues that influence the new political order. The book provides insight into specific case studies, situations and contexts, thus bringing nuances and diversity into focus to better assess Kenya’s evolving electoral democracy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Kenya’s Past as Prologue. Voters, Violence and the 2013 Election
No full textInternational audienceDuring the run-up to Kenya's 2013 general elections, crucial political and civic questions were raised. Could past mistakes, especially political and ethnic-related violence, be avoided this time round? Would the spectre of the 2007 post-electoral violence positively or negatively affect debates and voting? How would politicians, electoral bodies such as the IEBC, the Kenyan civil society, and the international community weigh in on the elections? More generally, would the 2013 elections bear witness to the building up of an electoral culture in Kenya, characterized by free and fair elections, or would it show that voting is still weakened by political malpractices, partisan opinions and emotional reactions? Would Kenya's past be inescapable or would it prepare the scene for a new political order?Kenya's Past as Prologue adopts a multidisciplinary perspective - mainly built upon field-based ethnography and a selection of case studies - to answer these questions. Under the leadership of the French Institute for Research in Africa (Institut français de recherche en Afrique, IFRA), political scientists, historians and anthropologists explore various aspects of the electoral process to contribute in-depth analyses of the last elections. They highlight the structural factors underlying election and voting in Kenya including the political system, culture and political transition. They also interrogate the short-term trends and issues that influence the new political order. The book provides insight into specific case studies, situations and contexts, thus bringing nuances and diversity into focus to better assess Kenya's evolving electoral democracy
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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