The Potential of Cosmetic Applicators as a Source of DNA for Forensic Analysis

Personal products, such as toothbrushes, have been used as both known reference and evidentiary samples for forensic DNA analysis. This study examined the viability of a broad selection of cosmetic applicators for use as targets for human DNA extraction and short tandem repeat (STR) analysis using standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) conditions. Applicator types included eyeliner smudgers, pencils and crayons, eye shadow sponges, mascara wands, concealer wands, face makeup sponges, pads and brushes, lipsticks and balms, and lip gloss wands. The quantity and quality of DNA extracted from each type of applicator were examined by assessing the number of loci successfully amplified and the peak balance of the heterozygous alleles in each full STR profile. While degraded DNA, stochastic amplification, and PCR inhibition were observed for some items, full STR profiles were developed for 14 of 76 applicators. The face makeup sponge applicators yielded the highest proportional number of full STR profiles (4/7).     

Bullying in Context: An Analysis of Psychosomatic Complaints Among Adolescents in Stockholm

Using multilevel modeling, this study examined how different types of bullying, involving both peers and teachers, relate to psychosomatic health complaints. Data were obtained via the Stockholm School Survey from 41,032 ninth- and eleventh-grade students in the years 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010. Results showed that students involved in bullying as either a bully, a victim, or both a bully and a victim displayed poorer psychosomatic health than those not involved in bullying. Victims of peer-bullying also reported significantly poorer health than perpetrators. Two class-aggregated measures of bullying remained positively associated with ninth-grade student health complaints even when their individual-level analogues were taken into account. Thus, both the proportion of victims of teacher-bullying and peer-bullying in the school class appeared to generate health problems that go beyond the directly exposed students. However, an interaction revealed that the latter association was confined to female students only.     

Motherhood as the Value of Labour

This article concerns migrant domestic labour. It departs from existing analyses of such labour by examining the place of workers' mobility and workers' intimate life histories in the valorisation of migrant domestic labour. Drawing on insights from the literature on the autonomy of migration and on affective labour, this article argues that migrant domestic workers' status as mobile bodies infused with affective histories of maternal care is critical in the constitution of a market for their labour. This history endows migrant domestic workers' labour with unprecedented value, not least because the worker is expected to exude the affects of motherhood authentically in the home of her employer. The analysis forwarded here demands a new understanding of the operations of global care chains and transnational motherhood.     

Turkey’s struggle with the PKK and civilian control over the Turkish Armed Forces

Although most scholars of Turkey’s civil-military relations argue that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) insurgency has led to a decrease in civilian control over the Turkish military from the 1980s onwards, this has not always been the case. This article argues that the presence or the degree of the PKK threat is not sufficient to explain the civil-military balance of power in Turkey throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. Instead, the article shows that in the face of the PKK threat, three major factors have influenced the behaviours of both civilian and military policy-makers in Turkey and shaped the level of civilian control. These factors are first, the Turkish political leaders’ control over their political parties and these parties’ control of a majority of seats in the parliament; second, how negatively or positively the military perceives the political leadership; and third, European Union pressures for democratisation.     

Climate Change and the US Security Sector: the Securitization of Climate Change

This preliminary study traces how climate change came to be viewed as a security issue in the United States through a review of policy documents and reports prepared for and by the US security sector. The paper draws upon the ideas of constructivist schools of security studies to provide an analytical framework for understanding the meaning of the securitization process as it has occurred in the United States. It then refl ects upon the adequacy of those frameworks to interpret the securitization of climate change. In the US, new knowledge of the phenomenon of climate change was fi rst constructed in the research sector, in the fi elds of meteorology and atmospheric science. Environmental and Earth sciences then became a locus of research, and climate change fi rst entered security discourse as a topic of environmental protection. As the implications of climate change and its potential impact on water resources, food production, diseases, infrastructure, and human migration came to the attention of the security sector, this knowledge stimulated an internal discourse, where each new document functioned both as a new securitization statement and as a policy response to prior documents in a chain of discourse. Actors in this securitization process included not only “speakers” making a securitization claim (knowledge claim) and “audiences” that accept or reject a claim. Importantly, it also included actors who were instrumental in translating knowledge between research and security sectors. This brief consideration suggests that social science theories that center on practice are more robust than those that center on discourse for interpreting the securitization of climate change. Improved analytic frameworks need to better account for actors whose role is to transfer and translate knowledge from one sector to another.