Welfare and child support: Complements,not substitutes

In most states, child support paid on behalf of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) participants is used to offset TANF and child support administrative expenditures; this policy primarily benefits taxpayers. In contrast, Wisconsin allowed most custodial parents to keep all support paid on their behalf. This policy, which treats welfare and child support as complements, was evaluated through an experimental design. This paper reports the key results of the experimental evaluation, using state administrative data to examine the effects on child support outcomes and governmental cost. We find that when custodial mothers keep all child support paid on their behalf, paternity establishment occurs more quickly, noncustodial fathers are more likely to pay support, and custodial families receive more support. These outcomes are achieved at no significant governmental cost. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The Anthropology of Extraction: Critical Perspectives on the Resource Curse

Abstract

Attempts to address the resource curse remain focussed on revenue management, seeking technical solutions to political problems over examinations of relations of power. In this paper, we provide a review of the contribution anthropological research has made over the past decade to understanding the dynamic interplay of social relations, economic interests and struggles over power at stake in the political economy of extraction. In doing so, we show how the constellation of subaltern and elite agency at work within processes of resource extraction is vital in order to confront the complexities, incompatibilities, and inequities in the exploitation of mineral resources.     

Brexit and UK International Development Policy

In this article we explore the implications of Brexit for the UK and the EU's development policies and strategic directions, focusing on the former. While it is likely that the operational process of disentangling the UK from the various development institutions of the EU will be relatively straightforward, the choices that lie ahead about whether and how to cooperate thereafter are more complex. Aid and development policy touches on a wide range of interests—security, trade, climate change, migration, gender rights, and so on. We argue that Brexit will accelerate existing trends within UK development policy, notably towards the growing priority of private sector‐led economic growth strategies and blended finance tools. There are strong signals that UK aid will be cut, as successive secretaries of state appear unable to persuade a substantial section of the public and media that UK aid and development policy serves UK interests in a variety of ways.     

Political leadership and ‘non-traditional’ development cooperation

This article explores the relationships between (so-called) ‘non-traditional’ development cooperation (NTDC) and political leadership. Using the case studies of Brazil and South Korea, we propose that certain emblematic elements of NTDC discourse and practice can act to influence the relationship with political leaders in particular ways. These are (a) elevated language of affect, (b) interleaving of personal biographies with the developmental trajectories of states, (c) the use of NTDC to legitimise domestic policies and promote domestic political leadership, (d) the prominence of presidential diplomacy and (e) the challenges confronting rapidly expanding domestic development cooperation institutions and systems.     

The Real Thing: Transsexuality and Manhood in Rose Tremain's Sacred Country

Thinking about Mothers

Tess Cosslett, Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994, £13.99.

Roszika Parker, Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence, London: Virago Press, 1995, £12.99.

Nancy Scheper‐Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, Los Angeles: California University Press, 1992, £15.00.

Female Tones and Timbres

Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (eds.), Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth‐century French Narrative, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Claire Kahane, Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

The Joy of Footnotes

Darian Leader, Why do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, London: Faber and Faber, 1996, £9.99.     

using pain,living with pain

This paper presents the early findings of research into the experiences of pain for those who live with chronic pain and engage in BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism), explored using a critical crip approach rooted in crip theory and feminist disability studies. The research took the form of a series of interviews with eight disabled people living with chronic pain who experience pain in their BDSM practices, developing a narrative of experiences. The majority of those living with chronic pain, or who have diagnoses of chronic illnesses causing chronic pain, are women. Chronic pain is frequently assumed to be similar to acute pain; however, thinking through pain in terms of normativity and able-bodymindedness reveals the ableist structures that underpin normative attitudes towards pain and those who are in pain. Pain is understood as dehumanising—and thus the person living with chronic pain is understood as not human, abnormal, and disabled. The disabled body, the body in pain, is a horrifying object of abjection, and the non-disabled observer assumes that to be in pain is to suffer; therefore, living with chronic pain is understood as an ontological impossibility and must be stopped. BDSM is a series of practices forming a space in which the people living with chronic pain in this study are able to engage with their somatic experience in ways that do not expect normalcy, while being disabled and living with chronic pain gives them space to explore non-normative sexual practices.     

Juvenile convicts and their colonial familial lives

Convicts were transported from Britain to Van Diemen’s Land from 1803 until 1853. Approximately 10 000–13 000 juveniles were among the 148 000 convicts transported. This article has traced the lives of female and male juvenile convicts transported, who were sentenced at the Old Bailey (the Central Criminal Court in London), and voyaged to Van Diemen’s Land. By exploring individual lives, and contextualising their experiences, it is possible to go beyond the circumstances of offending–through to their punishment period, to their lives upon release. This article will focus on one aspect of juvenile convict lives post-transportation–their familial life. The method of nominal record-linkage has been used across a variety of criminal and non-criminal records (including civil records and newspapers) in order to build up a picture of these young offenders. Going beyond the institution and focusing directly on female and male juveniles is important in understanding the lives of this unique group. From the behaviour of the juvenile convicts themselves, to the decisions of the administrators and the conditions of the penal colony into which they were thrust; were these female and male juvenile convicts able to form ‘settled’ colonial lives and which factors inhibited or facilitated this process?     

‘Sustainable Mining’? Corporate Social Responsibility,Migration and Livelihood Choices in Zambia

Whilst corporate social responsibility is now part and parcel of many multinational mining operations, and a ‘sustainable mining’ narrative a fundamental part of their public persona, companies still struggle to provide secure, long-term livelihoods for either locals or the swathe of migrants mining attracts. Minimal opportunities in the formal sector leave migrants in particular engaging in informal and illegal activities that offer poor livelihood security. In this paper we examine these activities in northern Zambia’s emerald mines to highlight some of the issues and barriers to sustainable development that exist across mining zones. We conclude that livelihood choices are not augmented by a so-called ‘sustainable mining’ approach that fails to engage all sectors of the population. We show the numerous challenges faced by migrants in this part of Zambia to accentuate the factors that need to be addressed before favourable environments for fostering sustainable mining might be achieved.