No Child Left Behind: flowers don’t grow in the desert

The No Child Left Behind legislation purports to effectively eliminate the long standing “achievement gap” between poor and minority students and their white [sic.] peers. We employ a multi-method approach to investigate (1) the discursive dominance and construction of NCLB, (2) the quantitative validity of the law's implicit causal model of educational achievement and reform, and (3) the experiences of teachers forced to negotiate the demands of NCLB in “failing” schools. Using data drawn from federal and state policy documents, U.S. Census, the State of Connecticut Department of Education, and interviews with teachers from urban schools, we find that: (1) Through the advocacy of state regulated systems of accountability and the imposition of “scientifically proven” pedagogical methods, NCLB constructs a model that removes the effects of structural inequalities from consideration. (2) Quantitative analysis of data drawn from Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT) displays the inadequacy of this model. (3) Interviews with urban teachers further validate the inadequacy of this model and the importance of social structural variables in understanding and/or addressing the “achievement gap.”     

Rejecting “rights-based approaches” to development: Alternative engagements with human rights

Following the growth of “rights-based approaches,” an increasing trend within recent research has been to establish the diverse opportunities, challenges, and potential pitfalls such approaches offer development NGOs. Although these areas remain important to current policy and practice, they equally stifle further research that is required concerning alternative engagements with human rights. This article argues that closer attention must be directed towards understanding how and why numerous development NGOs have rejected such approaches, whilst also embedding a strong and strategic use of “rights talk” within everyday campaign practice. This article draws upon recent qualitative research into practitioner responses to “rights-based” and wider human rights practice and, in so doing, enlists an in-depth analysis of two distinct subcategories of development NGOs — “faith-based” and “political.” The article proposes two current “perspectives” on human rights practice and a new and alternative engagement with a discourse of rights.     

Hailing Hitler with the Red Hand: The Link in Northern Ireland 1937–40

Loughlin's article assesses the activities of The Link, a British pro-Nazi organization promoting Anglo-German conciliation in Northern Ireland in the years leading up to the Second World War. It situates the Ulster branch of the movement within the context of the domestic politics of the region, the British state, Anglo-Irish relations and wider European developments. As a field of activity for The Link, Northern Ireland posed unique and complex problems. The regional branch's prospects for development were complicated, for instance, by how, for nationalists, the aggression of Nazi domestic and foreign policies was reflected in the Northern Ireland government's domestic policies, and also in the way in which Nazi policy towards religion alienated the region’s Catholic and Protestant communities. Loughlin also illustrates how the government's approach towards the local Jewish community and Jewish refugees—in a region largely without the levels of antisemitism found in both British and southern Irish public opinion—was informed by a combination of sympathy and local political considerations. Perhaps most uniquely, he illuminates the singularity of the Ulster branch within The Link organization, especially the attitude of its chairman, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, who regarded Northern Ireland as an obstacle to the establishment of an effective Anglo-Irish defence policy and wished to see the region united with Eire.     

Peace in Northern Ireland and the Remaining Issue of the “On-the-Runs”

The return of devolution to Northern Ireland in May 2007 marks an important turning point in the Northern Ireland peace process, but there remains the issue of the “on-the-runs”—a term used to describe persons suspected of committing a range of terrorist acts during the Troubles, who were never arrested, charged, prosecuted, or tried. It is thought that the On-the-Runs want to return to Northern Ireland, but determining the conditions for their return is a difficult and controversial issue, raising legal and moral concerns and causing strong and painful reactions among the victims of terrorist violence on all sides of the Northern Ireland conflict. It is also an issue that is complicated by the fact that while the Belfast Agreement of 1998 did not address expressly the situation of the On-the-Runs, it did provide for the accelerated release of a significant number of paramilitaries, both republican and loyalist, from prisons in both Ireland and Northern Ireland. This paper reviews the possible options in law for addressing the situation of the On-the-Runs, including extradition and prosecution, as well as trial and amnesty, and pardons. While the paper makes clear that the political offence exception to extradition is no longer the obstacle it once was, it also concludes that politics, rather than law, or simply the passage of time is more likely to offer the solution to the problem posed by the On-the-Runs.

“A borderline issue”: Are there child soldiers in the United States?

The human rights literature on child soldiers has long emphasized conflict zones in the Global South, fostering the stereotype of the gun-toting African child while ignoring militarizing practices in the West. Of note, the existing human rights legal framework fails to address the reality of Western youth exposed to military recruiting in their schools. Seeking to address this limitation, we examine some of the primary methods the US military employs to “penetrate” American high schools in search of new recruits. We discuss the apparent targeting by military recruiters of communities with large numbers of low-income students, immigrants, and youth of color. Indeed, in many educational settings, students with limited access to college preparatory programs find themselves ensnared in a “web of militarism” that sharply limits their career options. Drawing on primary source material and military recruiting documents, we demonstrate how US schools are sites for the socialization of youth to a culture of militarism and, ultimately, the production of child soldiers. Thus, we argue that the military presence in US schools be included in the debate over the militarization of youth. We conclude by assessing the discourses and organizing strategies employed by US “counter-recruitment” activists, including some of those who use human rights-based arguments to curb militarism in American schools.     

‘Responsibilty’ as a strategy of governance: regulating people living with AIDS and lesbians and gay men in Ontario

This paper investigates responsibility/irresponsibility as an important regulatory strategy, in two instinct but interrelated social sites – people living with AIDS and HIV, and lesbians and gay men, especially within the Canadian province of Ontario. This responsibility/irresponsibility technique of governance is developing in response to the struggles of people with AIDS and community-based AIDS groups and lesbians and gay men and the alternative strategies of regulation articulated through these struggles. Practices of ‘resistance’ and activism alter the grounds of hegemonic regulation/governance and point towards new techniques of governance. I show how responsibilizing and normalizing strategies in the context of social struggles over AIDS and sexual regulation allows for those constructed as ‘responsible’ to be managed through forms of self-regulation and professional forms of goverance of their live. For those who continue to be constructed as ‘irresponsible’ forms of criminal law, policing and public health governance are called into action.     

“Your Wilderness:” The White Possession of Detroit in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive*

After a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit (re)appeared in the national imaginary as an “urban frontier” open for (re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Recently, scholars have addressed the ways in which this frontier rhetoric arouses settler colonial desire for land based not just on a notion of black criminality or ineptitude, but also more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession. Though this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized (re)development in the Motor City, it ignores white possession as a process that mythologizes Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. In this paper I read Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a “landscape of monstrosity” that inadvertently and momentarily recovers Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and absence, as werewolves and ghosts to the white vampire elite and zombie working class. More broadly, I argue that Only Lovers Left Alive actively participates in an ideological process of (re)settlement that disguises land speculation (and its inherently disruptive cycles of uneven development) in a renewed frontier mythology. I read the film’s central characters, the vampires Adam and Eve, as disaster tourists whose nostalgia for Detroit’s lost civilization heralds in its renewed form.     

“We Need to Have a Meeting”: Public Housing Demolition and Collective Agency in Atlanta,Georgia

The last two decades have witnessed widespread demolition of public housing and a large-scale relocation of public housing residents. Much of the current literature has examined the impact of demolition on relocated residents, focusing primarily on individual outcomes such as employment, housing quality, and health. This article examines the potential collective consequences of relocation by using data from 40 in-depth interviews conducted with relocated public housing residents in Atlanta, Georgia, to examine experiences of civic engagement and tenant activism before and after relocation. Participants describe frequent experiences of civic engagement and tenant activism in their public housing communities prior to demolition and also discuss how these collective actions often translated into meaningful gains for their communities. Participants also describe challenges associated with reestablishing these sources of collective agency in their new, post demolition, private-market rental communities where opportunities for civic engagement and tenant activism were perceived to be limited, where stigma was a barrier to social interaction, and where they experienced significant residential instability.     

Resisting LGBT Rights Where “We Have Won”: Canada and Great Britain

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) human rights are often assumed to travel from the core to the periphery, namely from the Global North to the Global South. However, these rights flows and resistances are more complex than a unidirectional model might suggest. Using a transnational perspective, we consider resistances to LGBT rights in places where LGBT rights are supposedly assured. In Canada and Great Britain, where various forms of equities legislation for LGBT people have been enacted, there is an increasing opposition to LGBT gains. The transnational circulation of these oppositional discourses can be seen in how Canadian and British organizations talk to, and about, each other and illustrate transnational networks that create resistances in the places where “we have won.” This questions a sole focus on resistances in places that do not have LGBT equalities legislation, usually those outside the Global North and associated with “less developed others.”     

“Pioneers but not guinea pigs”: experimenting with climate change adaptation in French coastal areas

Uncertainty surrounding climate change has encouraged policy makers to engage in flexible and exploratory policies and forms of policy making. The article examines the potential of experimentation in devising coastal adaptation policies, taking into account its political dimensions. We analysed a multi-level experiment, funded by the French Ministry for the Environment from 2012 to 2015, where coastal municipalities volunteered to simulate the implementation of planned retreat as an adaptation strategy. Using insights from discursive institutionalism, we tracked developments throughout the experiment period. We highlight a combined process of governance experiment, allowing social innovation at local and regional scales, and a more strategic tool for the state, governing and steering local coastal policy with new instruments. We shed light on a particular policy entrepreneur (a public organization dealing with coastal management) playing at the intersection of these two forms, and in the interplay of policy scales. Although the experiment contributed to the innovation of legal and economic instruments and produced policy feedbacks in local planning and governance, learning capacities of the multi-scale architecture are still moderate to make planned retreat a reality in the near future. The conclusion considers performative and interpretive effects of policy experiments as further research questions to explore.     

The problem with the “portfolio approach” in American energy policy

One predominant theme in American energy and electricity policy is the idea of a “portfolio approach,” or that society must embrace an assortment of different energy technologies simultaneously. This article argues that such a strategy, in practice, is (a) biased, since fossil fuel and nuclear technologies have been heavily favored; (b) opaque, obscuring the different full social costs of energy systems; (c) inequitable, promoting technologies that contribute to climate change; and (d) unsophisticated, ignoring important qualitative differences among technologies. The article estimates the full social costs of electricity generation, concluding that the five cheapest forms of electricity generation are all renewable resources; that intermittency is not a reason to reject renewable energy technologies; that nuclear power has significant technical and environmental problems, especially from a greenhouse gas emissions and climate change perspective; and that “clean coal” and carbon capture and sequestration technologies face significant challenges to deployment.     

“No one shall be held in slavery or servitude”: A critical analysis of international slavery agreements and concepts of slavery

Conclusion  No international agreement has been completely effective in reducing slavery. This stems in part from the evolution of slavery agreements and the inclination on the part of the authors of conventions to include other practices as part of the slavery defintion, resulting in a confusion of the practices and definitions of slavery. What has been missing is a classification that is dynamic and yet sufficiently universal to identify slavery no matter how it evolves. We have attempted to build on theories and examples to clarify the identification of slavery by focusing on an irreducible core of three elements. Assessing the presence of all three can then be applied to a variety of social relationships: first, the complete control of one personal by another; second, appropriation of labor power; and third, the enforcement of these conditoins by threats or acts of violence. Many practices identified in international agreements have some but not all of these three aspects; all three are present in traditional forms of slavery, bonded labor, forced prostitution, and sexual slavery. Effective research and legislation against slavery is important, as it affects an estimated 27 million people worldwide, and as slavery is on the increase now that many developing countries are forced to compete for income in a global economy. Finally it is important to remember that slavery, like all social and economic relationships, evolves over time. Any definition that is based on a historical form of slavery will soon lose its power to capture new forms of slavery within its aegis. Our understanding and our definition of slavery must become as dynamic as the phenomenon itself. This article draws upon a report made to the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, prepared by Anti_Slavery International and Professor David Weisbrodt. (See Report of the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery on Its Twenty-Third Session, UN Doc./E/CN.4/Sub.2/1988/14, para. 22 (1998). Michael Dottrigher Director of Anti-Slavery International, was a lead author of that report. Norah Gallagher also provided important research, along with Matthew Armbrecht, Marcela Kostihova, and Mary Thacker. Production of the report was supported in part by Kevin Bales. Caroline Tendall aided the editing of this article.