‘Bread and butter’ human rights: NGOs in Fiji

While ‘rights-based’ approaches to development – those in which development and poverty alleviation are viewed through the lens of human rights – have become the language of choice among the international development community, less is known about how human rights are used for development at the local level. Using a case study of Fiji, this research investigates how local NGOs understand and use human rights for development. It demonstrates some of the tensions involved in translating broad and supposedly universal approaches to human rights into local contexts.     

The lived experience of adults bereaved by suicide: a phenomenological study

In recent years, a plethora of research studies have attempted to delineate the grief experiences associated with suicide from those of other sudden traumatic deaths. The emerging consensus suggests that bereavement through suicide is more similar than different to other bereavements, but is characterized by the reactions of shame, stigma, and self-blame. The causal nature of these reactions has yet to be fully understood. This study reports on the lived experiences of eight adults bereaved by suicides, which were obtained through in-depth interviews. Data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Four main themes dominated the relatives' grief experiences. First, the early months were checkered by attempts to "control the impact of the death." The second theme was the overwhelming need to "make sense of the death" and this was coupled with a third theme, a marked "social uneasiness." Finally, participants had an eventual realization of a sense of "purposefulness" in their lives following the suicide death. Overall, the findings suggest that suicide bereavement is molded and shaped by the bereaved individual's life experiences with the deceased and their perceptions following social interactions after the event. The findings from this study suggest that "meaning making" may be an important variable in furthering our understanding of the nuances in suicide bereavement.     

Are Discrimination and Social Capital Related to Housing Instability?

Existing studies examining social capital and housing instability have overlooked structural factors such as discrimination, providing an incomplete explanation of the relationship between social capital and housing instability. This study addresses this limitation by exploring how discrimination and social capital are related to housing instability. This study is a secondary analysis of data collected during the Atlanta Neighborhood Pilot study. The sample consists of mostly African American adults who resided in the Atlanta metropolitan area in 2013 (n = 691). After controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, residential mobility, and public assistance, stepwise logistic regression identified social capital and discrimination as significant predictors of housing instability. Lower social capital and higher everyday discrimination scores were associated with increased odds for housing instability. Individuals 35 or older, those with annual incomes between $25,000 and $50,000, and those who reported receiving public assistance during their lifetime also had increased odds for housing instability. Findings identify characteristics of individuals vulnerable to housing instability and suggest that social capital development as a housing intervention warrants further exploration. These findings can be utilized by policymakers and practitioners to better target funding and to create efficient systems better equipped to deploy early homelessness prevention interventions.     

The masochist's masquerade: Kōno Taeko's ‘Beautiful Girl’ (Bishōjo)

Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's literary life and corpus when historical contexts are also brought to bear. In reading closely ‘Bishojo’ (Beautiful Girl, 1962), a story that appeared at the same time as Kōno's most famous award-winning stories in the early 1960s, I contend that Kōno's fictional world can best be grasped with attention to two key factors: the impact of Kōno's wartime girlhood on her fiction; and, in ‘Bishōjo’ in particular, the Occupation Period (1945–1952) context, which serves as more than mere background to the story's revenge plot. Girls, or shōjo, form the core of the story and expose the disavowed shōjo at the core of protagonist Shōko's psyche. To survive, Shōko must cloak her masculine strengths in a masochistic masquerade indistinguishable from femininity itself. She threads her masochistic masquerade between two abusive men whose efforts to humiliate her cannot be separated from the national Occupation context and postwar masculinity. Finally, this essay demonstrates that Kōno's masochism functions as a literary technique for constructing subjects differently by gender in historical contexts, thereby exposing the psychic distortions that only fiction, as a light into the darkened interior world of human beings, can illuminate.     

Managerial Ambivalence and Electronic Civic Engagement: The Role of Public Manager Beliefs and Perceived Needs

This article addresses an important yet often neglected component of electronic civic engagement efforts: managerial ambivalence about public participation. We examine how managers’ beliefs about public participation and their perceived needs for participation in agency decision making work together to shape electronic engagement efforts. Based on observational data collected in 2010 and 2014 and data from a 2014 survey of managers in 500 U.S. municipal governments, we find that managerial beliefs about participation and their perceived needs for participation are two valid and separate constructs. There is a positive relationship between managerial beliefs and electronic engagement. Perceived needs for participation interact with managers’ beliefs to affect electronic civic engagement. A high level of perceived needs for participation reinforces the effect of managerial beliefs on electronic engagement efforts, but a low level does not offset the effect of managerial beliefs on electronic engagement.     

Understanding the Relationship between Health PACs and Health Lobbying in the American States

We examine how health PAC activity in the states is connectedto lobbying. Is the political money that health interest organizationsbring to the policy process a powerful, independent means ofinfluence or is it better understood narrowly as a tactic usedto support lobbying? We examine the relationship between campaigncontributions and lobby activity and the limited work that hasbeen conducted on them and raise a number of questions aboutthe process by which they are connected. We utilize 1998 dataon state lobbying and PAC activity, allowing us to answer causalresearch questions generated from existing studies at the nationallevel. We conclude that PAC activity is best viewed as an adjunctof lobbying rather than an independent form of political activity.     

The US Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, the US Torture Victims Protection Act of 1992, and the Gongadze Case: A Right without Adequate Remedy?

The US 1992 Torture Victims Protection Act (TVPA) strengthens the reach of the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) to US citizens alleging claims of torture and/or extrajudicial killings that occur abroad, but only if the plaintiffs were US citizens at the time of the criminal acts. Should the later-in-time statute, which gives effect to the United Nations Convention against Torture and extends remedies under the ATCA, be amended to apply to those given political asylum in this country from the moment of their entry? Is not the limbo status of victims given haven in the USA but not automatic citizenship, victims who rightly need resolution of brutal facts which occasioned rupture with their country of origin, a situation that cries for more precise remedy? This note explores this issue as raised by the case of Myroslava Gongadze, the widow of slain political journalist Georghy Gongadze in the Ukraine in September 2000. Only three of the perpetrators, policemen who say they followed orders, were put on trial in 2007–2008. Those who allegedly gave the orders for the killing continue to evade justice.