1922 and the problems of docudrama

SUMMARY

In this article the authors use 1922, (a ‘true story’) to probe the social function of television in South Africa. In particular they examine the transformations effected on historical “fact” by the genre of docudrama and the kinds of preferred readings this offers television viewers. The popularity of this form, they suggest, is that in this world of uncertainty, the docudrama gives viewers both pleasurable access to, and a moral orientation towards, the ‘real’.     

Case-mix payment for nursing home care: lessons from Maryland

Even before Medicare adopted case-based payments for hospitals, some state Medicaid programs employed case-mix payment systems for nursing home care. Their purpose was less to promote cost containment than to improve access to nursing homes for the most costly patients. This paper evaluates one such system, adopted by the state of Maryland in 1983 as part of an overall reimbursement reform. Using data on nursing home patient characteristics, costs, and staffing, as well as interviews with officials and various providers of care, the article shows that Maryland's system was successful in shifting nursing home service away from light-care and toward heavy-care patients. Furthermore, the shift occurred without inducing readily measurable declines in quality of care and with little additional administrative cost (partly because the state built its case-mix system on preexisting patient review activities). Although states could learn from and improve upon Maryland's experience--most notably in offering incentives to improve quality of care and in targeting community care on the light-care patients that nursing homes become less willing to serve--Maryland demonstrates that case-mix payment can change nursing home behavior in desired directions without substantial negative consequences.     

Health care of the disadvantaged: the elderly

This paper explores threats to the maintenance and expansion of public commitment to financing health care for the elderly. Threats come from rising costs that increase financial burdens, especially on low-income elderly; efforts to contain costs that may undermine benefits; and financing initiatives that treat the elderly as the sole revenue source for addressing problems in that age group. A review of these threats provides lessons not only for sustaining and improving health care for the elderly, but also for policy toward equally or more disadvantaged groups.     

“Land Grabbing” in an Autocracy and a Multi-Party Democracy: China and India Compared

ABSTRACT

Both China and India have witnessed extensive land expropriation by the state from farmers for use in industrialisation and urbanisation projects. Land conflicts have ensued from these developments. This article poses two questions: (i) Why do we see a similar escalation of land dispossession in both countries, despite their distinctively dissimilar political systems, one being a one-party authoritarian regime, the other being a multi-party democracy?; and (ii) How does the different regime type affect the politics of dispossession? Despite their diverse political institutions, government officials have been given similar incentives to chase growth by developing land, but the institutions create diverging environments for aggrieved citizens to mobilise for collective action. While it is unsurprising that the interests of the poor and weak are not protected in an autocracy, democracy provides no automatic safety valve in defending marginalised citizens either.     

The Vernacular Mobilization of Human Rights in Myanmar's Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Movement

This article examines how activists build a movement for sexual orientation and gender identity minorities in Myanmar, a country that is known for violent suppression of protests and is undergoing political reform. Based on original fieldwork, it finds that activists deploy a strategy of “vernacular mobilization of human rights” to persuade others to join their cause despite the risks to personal safety and to get around political constraints on collective organizing. Conceptualized at the intersection of the cultural study of human rights and social movements scholarship, “vernacular mobilization of human rights” theorizes the relationship between vernacularization—the translation and local adaptation of human rights—and movement micromobilization, specifying how the former unfolds as collective action framing processes. Through vernacularization activities, such as human rights workshops, movement leaders reframe grievances and shift the attribution of blame to empower and recruit new activists. Furthermore, with these framing processes, they generate a political community with a collective identity and social networks that they use to continue expanding the movement. The article enriches debates about the implications of implementing human rights and understandings of the relationship between human rights and movement mobilization, especially under repressive or uncertain political conditions.     

Smallpox vaccination and the limits of governing through contagion in the Straits Settlements, 1868–1926

Vaccination involves the encounter of nonhuman biological matter and human bodies, recalibrating our susceptibility to illness and death. This boundary-crossing act has been caught in conflicting webs of moral significance, including the normalizing frameworks of public health governance and its corresponding forms of resistance. Such tensions and dynamics were a feature of smallpox vaccination - the first modern, systematic state-driven project to build population immunity. Focusing on smallpox vaccination in the British-ruled Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) between 1868 and 1926, we examine the recurrent features of contentions over vaccination from the tentative beginnings of the 1868 Vaccination Ordinance to the systematic extension of vaccination in the 20th century. Engaging science and technology studies of nonhuman agency and social theories on security, we argue that such contentions demonstrate the limits of a power formation we call governing through contagion (GTC). GTC centralizes law and other technologies to normalize public health measures that combat contagious diseases, while dysconnecting populations by its strategies of control. Our history of smallpox vaccination reveals: (i) GTC relies on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman actors in protecting populations against viral threats; law is essential but does not necessarily drive vaccination or other strategies of control and (ii) resistance to GTC, in which law plays an integral role, reinforces inequalities and differentiated treatment, what we term endemic inter/dysconnectedness.