Police chiefs’ and students’ attitudes about the Miranda warnings

Several studies had concluded that the police subculture holds values and attitudes that are distinct from the rest of the population. Among these values is a focus on law and order. While researchers agree that police tend to hold different values, they disagree on the source of the attitudes. Some had argued that the attitudes reflected differences regarding who was recruited for law enforcement careers while others said that the differences reflected changes that occurred to individuals after becoming officers. This study examined whether police officers and students enrolled in criminal justice/sociology classes held similar or different attitudes towards the Miranda warnings. The findings suggested that in some ways, the two groups perceived the warnings in dramatically different ways, while in other ways their differences were simply a matter of degree. Implications are provided.     

Court Awards of Damages for Loss of Future Earnings: An Empirical Study and an Alternative Method of Calculation

This article examines the effect upon damages for personal injury of methods used in the United States of America to calculate loss of future earnings. The work of lawyers is examined from the perspective of labour economists. The damages calculated by using these alternative methods are compared with those actually awarded in over a hundred cases determined by courts in England and Wales. This interdisciplinary and comparative study reveals that the tort system fails to satisfy one of its main objectives in that it does not provide recipients of damages with 'full' compensation.     

Thomas B. Gold and Sebastian Veg,eds., Sunflowers and Umbrellas: Social Movements,Expressive Practices,and Political Culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.     

Theorizing Gender and Musical Composition in the Computerized Classroom

Classroom The increased use of information technology in schools is generally perceived as a positive, dynamic step into the future. By providing IT facilities for all children throughout their education we are affording them access to a wider range of career opportunities and educational experiences. Feminists have long debated the extent to which technology can be exclusionary for women because of its construction as a masculine domain, emphasizing 'masculine' characteristics of mastery, skill and control. By focusing on the music classroom, Armstrong explores gender and the compositional process and the effects of an overtly technological approach to composition. In the early part of the essay, she draws on Sherry Turkle's early work based on observations of male and female computer programmers. Despite observing a variety of computational styles Turkle concluded that, although technology allowed for this diversity, computer culture did not, noting that many females preferred a style that did not favour the canonical, plan-oriented, abstract thinkers who 'constitute an epistemological elite'. In her own research, Armstrong found that girls often became alienated from their own creative work because the culture of the music classroom appears to privilege a particular style of working. By focusing on the singing voice and the corporeal, Armstrong draws on aspects of cyberfeminism to illustrate how girls can transcend and subvert this masculine culture.