Christine Parker's Peach: The Politics of Filming Desire in 1990's New Zealand

Christine Parker's 1993 live-action short begins with music, the kind of repetitive, slow, percussion-heavy, saxophone-dominated score usually associated with low-budget porn. The film's opening visual, however, is a close-up not of the expected soft flesh, but of the skin of a soft fruit. Lest the viewer miss the joke-i.e., that the rounded, indented, rosy surfaces on display are not attached to a human body at all-the main title Peach appears, underlining the witty substitution. As the exaggeratedly sensual music continues, there is a long dissolve to a fixed frame shot of green background foliage, while a truck drives into view and approaches the camera. The front grille soon fills the screen, as does the truck's license plate, which remains in sight for several seconds. It reads "PF 9037."     

Cooperatives as Sustainable Livelihood Strategies in Rural Mexico

The sustainable livelihoods perspective and cooperative movement are rooted in frameworks that value social justice in the form of participatory democracy, distributional equity, and solidarity. Unlike studies of cooperatives that focus mainly on economic efficiency and productivity, we argue that this socio‐political dimension of the cooperative projects is crucial for understanding their potential as sustainable livelihoods. This exploratory research examines the experiences of two rural Mexican communities in Guanajuato and Oaxaca, which formed cooperatives as alternative livelihood strategies. Our results show that each community used similar grassroots political culture to develop cooperatives designed to meet local needs.     

In Books One Finds a House of Gold: education and labor market outcomes in urban China

Data from a 1999–2000 survey of urban workers are employed here to examine the role of education and other factors in both preventing lay-offs and obtaining re-employment. The data are also used to compare the effect of education on the earnings of re-employed workers to that of workers who have never been laid off. The empirical results demonstrate that by the late 1990s education had become a key determinant of successful labor market outcomes. The more education a worker had, the less likely he or she was to be laid off. Similarly, the more education a worker had, the better his or her chances of finding new employment once laid off. Interestingly, the education of workers who experienced a lay-off and then found new employment was rewarded more, in terms of incremental earnings for each additional year of schooling, than that of continuously employed workers.     

FEAR OF CRIME IN RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITIES

Three variables were hypothesized to cause a fear of crime and a potential change in behavior. These were: (1) crimes against a person rather than crimes against property; (2) a crime committed in an area frequented rather than a crime occurring in an area one never entered; (3) a recurring crime rather than a crime that occurred once. Two different samples of female subjects (n = 249) were approached at their residences and were asked to read one of a number of fictitious crime stories that the news media supposedly had not reported and to complete two scales measuring: (1) an emotional response to crime and (2) a potential behavioral response to crime. The results indicate that a physical assault produces both more fear and more potential behavioral change than a burglary. A crime that occurs eight times causes people to consider taking precautions in comparison to a crime that occurs once. There is some evidence that a crime in an area one frequents causes more fear than a crime occurring in an area one never enters.