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This essay explores the idea of “decanonization” in reference to the “Wolf’s Glen Scene” (the Act II Finale) of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz. It uses the presence of Der Freischütz excerpts in succeeding editions of the Norton Anthology of Western Music as an index of the opera’s centrality to the music-historical canon. While Weber’s opera seems to have maintained its relative position in the anthology, the very idea of music history as organized around a canon of works has been in steep decline.

A narrowband receiver was installed at the SANAE IV base in Antarctica to monitor specific very low frequency (VLF) radio signals from transmitters around the world. VLF waves propagating through the Earth-Ionosphere Waveguide are excellent probes of the varying properties of the lower region of the ionosphere. This paper describes the set-up of the narrowband system and demonstrates its capabilities with data from a set of solar flares on 08 February and 12 February 2010.

The UW-Madison Libraries Library Course Page system is used to deliver electronic reserves materials and course-focused library instruction webpages to students. As part of a rewrite of our system we broke the application into three component pieces: a file repository, a course timetable data service, and an interface application for building and viewing individual course pages. The new three-piece system was written with an inward facing service-oriented architecture that allowed us to choose the best technologies to solve each of the tasks the entire system needs to accomplish.

The concept of citizenship was instrumental to the formation of the disability movement in the West by recasting disability as the denial of equal citizenship of persons with impairments. The disability movement expanded notions of citizenship by not only focusing on nondiscrimination and the protection of civil and political rights, but also the necessity of self-directed, but state-provided, social rights as prerequisite for substantive equality. With the passage of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Western approaches to disability citizenship as state protected rights have globalized. Critical disability scholars are increasingly arguing that Western theories of disability, citizenship, and rights are inappropriate in local contexts in the Global South where weak welfare states are the reality. In such cases, self-help and mutual support are more determinative in the lives of disabled persons than formal rights. I extend these arguments by analyzing three grassroots disability associations in Nicaragua that assist their members achieve citizenship through self-help, service and solidaridad with the community.

The UNCRPD is unique amongst international rights instruments because it empowers civil society organizations to represent the rights-bearers themselves—persons with disabilities. As such, DPOs in the Global South have become a major concern for UN agencies and international NGOs who believe that grassroots disability associations need political advocacy training in order to take up their role as rights advocates. These expectations contain implicit assumptions regarding civil society-state relations and the existence of governmental capacity. The authors, however, hypothesize that not all civil societies will fit the rights advocacy model due to the political culture and public resources available within their respective, local communities. Disability movements in Nicaragua and Uruguay are compared and contrasted. In Nicaragua, a disability rights coalition dismisses many international expectations in favor for continuing to follow traditional civil society expectations to provide services. In Uruguay, a long history of high levels of social spending and disability organizing enabled DPOs to successfully advocate for progressive laws. The deaf community, however, decided to implement their own, separate advocacy strategies to ensure a fairer distribution of public resources. The authors conclude that rather than top-down civil society training, the international movement should allow local organizations set their own priorities.

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is unique among international human rights instruments for including a “civil society mandate”. Within the convention, disabled persons organizations (DPOs) are identified as having the responsibility to “be involved and participate fully in the monitoring process” of the CRPD. In response to this mandate, international funders, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and networks committed to the CPRD have begun to implement capacity-building programs that target grassroots DPOs with the goal of ensuring they become advocates and monitors of the CRPD. While the goals of these capacity-building programs are admirable, they must be critically assessed. The NGO-ization theory within development studies offers a framework for analyzing the potential unintended consequences of donors providing new funding, NGOs providing training, and global networks integrating local partners. NGO-ization studies have identified how grassroots associations are co-opted by outside actors through formalization and professionalization processes that significantly alter local groups and alienate members, thus making those associations less representative and less responsive to local needs and interests. Human rights scholars and international organizations focused on the CRPD should incorporate an NGO-ization perspective into their research and project-implementation to ensure that grassroots voices are heard and local needs addressed.