Technology,Reason and Globalisation?—O Brother!

The Coen Brothers' movie O Brother Where Art Thou is a ragbag of intertexts and gags that also pays very serious attention to questions of community and culture, class and race. In tracing the path of the protagonists through De-pression-era Mississippi, it takes its audiences through the experience of social transformation, from superstition and local concerns to a supposedly brave new (global and technological) world. Although the film is set in a distant time and place, it is informed by a very contemporary issue—the politics of technology, and its relation to the forces of globalisation. It is also a film that exemplifies what Certeau describes as the "cleavage which organizes modernity", a cleavage designated by the terms "science" (which is predicated on a law of rationality, and an imperative to explain, control and order) and "culture". We analyse the work of the film by drawing on the writings of Manuel Castells, Arjun Appadurai and Armand Mattelart to trace its explication of the questions of progress and communication in a world increasingly dominated by neo-liberal values.     

Correlates of campus crime: An exploration of minority attitudes at an HBCU

Despite a recent increase in the reporting of crime, student attitudes associated with crime on college campuses have been well documented. To the contrary, there is a deficiency of studies that examine the views of students who attend Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The purpose of this exploratory study is to identify student attitudes in relation to crime within the context of victimization, offender characteristics, and crime prevention measures. Analyzing nearly 200 questionnaires, chi-square analyses reveal that age, gender, and residential status bear statistically significant relationships in association with student attitudes towards various aspects of campus-related crime. In a similar vein, binary logistic regression models demonstrate the existence of significant associations in a number of specific categories such as victimization and crime prevention measures. Limitations, areas of further research, and policy implications are discussed.     

The problem of the straits

Siberian Development and East Asia. Threat or Promise? By Allen S. Whiting. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. 1981. Pp. 276. Index, notes, maps. Price $22.50 (hardback).