Punishing Mothers for Men’s Violence: Failure to Protect Legislation and the Criminalisation of Abused Women

Feminist Legal Studies - This article explores the gender dynamics of ‘causing or allowing a child to die’, contrary to the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004,...     

The Moderating Effect of Debates on Political Attitudes

In theory, candidate debates can influence voters by providing information about candidates' quality and policy positions. However, there is limited evidence about whether and why debates influence voters in new democracies. We use a field experiment on parliamentary debates during Ghana's 2016 elections to show that debates improve voters' evaluations of candidates. Debates have the strongest effect on partisan voters, who become more favorable toward and more likely to vote for opponent-party candidates and less likely to vote for co-partisans. Experimental and unique observational data capturing participants' second-by-second reactions to the debates show that policy information was the most important causal mechanism driving partisan moderation, especially among strong partisans. A follow-up survey shows that these effects persist in electorally competitive communities, whereas they dissipate in party strongholds. Policy-centered debates have the potential to reduce partisan polarization in new democracies, but the local political context conditions the persistence of these effects.     

Geographical versus social displacement: the politics of return and post-war recovery in Northern Uganda

The civil war in Northern Uganda in the period 1986–2006 fundamentally altered former ways of life and created diverse and complex needs. Protracted conflict and displacement create, reveal, and enforce vulnerability, which can undermine resilience. Based on in-depth interviews with internally displaced persons and returnees, both before and after their return to Amuru District and Gulu District, this article argues that war and displacement constitute more than a temporary disruption. The physical and social wounds of war are engraved and embedded in people’s lives. Therefore, recovery interventions must take these effects into account to forge a new post-war future.     

Lavascape: legal spectacle at Kīlauea

ABSTRACT

In considering the theme “Exploring Legal Discourse: A Sociosemiotic (Re)Construction,” this paper examines the symbolic relationship between law and chaos in the changing landscape of Kīlauea Volcano on Hawai’i Island. The socio-legal dimensions of this relationship provide insight into law’s project of governance in the dynamic natural environment. Most recently, in the summer of 2018, lava spouted and then flowed from Kīlauea in over twenty-four fissures which opened up within two heavily populated residential subdivisions. Law's response to the ensuing chaos provides keen insight into the epistemological positionality of law toward nature. In an attempt to tame this enlivened lavascape of persons and lava, law asserts authority over the spectacle in the areas of sightseeing, access, and mapping. In other words, the legal spectacle of lava eruption is an attempt to jurisdictionally frame the legal imagination of human risk in this dynamic landscape through legal semiotics, legal materiality, and legal topology. However, as this paper will explore, the source of chaos is actually law itself. Attempts to manage chaos are actually attempts to manage human nature as visitation to the erupting volcanic environment is ultimately beyond law's complete control. In a larger sense, this study of Kīlauea's lavascape as a constructed legal spectacle illustrates the phenomenological framing of law's incomplete jurisdiction over kinetic environments.     

The association between Ugandan adolescents’ viewing of specific television genres and sex-related normative beliefs and behaviours

Growing evidence in Western nations indicates that exposure to high levels of sexual media content influences adolescents’ sexual attitudes and behaviours in those countries. Although media in many sub-Saharan markets contain increasingly higher levels of sexual content, little research has investigated the effects of that content on adolescents’ HIV-related risk and protective behaviours. This project used cultivation theory to examine Ugandan adolescents’ media use, and to test the relationship between their exposure to specific television genres and their sex-related normative beliefs and behaviours. Three hundred and sixty secondary school students from four purposively sampled schools filled out a questionnaire about their television viewing, their beliefs about the prevalence of sexual intercourse among their peers, and their own sexual behaviours. Preliminary evidence of relationships between watching comedy and cartoon programming, and high estimates of the proportion of adolescents who engage in sexual intercourse, were observed. Watching comedy programming and non- African programming was associated with the higher likelihood to have ever had sexual intercourse.     

Truth and Consequences: Law,Myth and Metaphor in American Indian Contested Adoption

This article considers the effects of the operations of myth and metaphor on law through a comparison of a United States Supreme Court decision and a novel that deal with the contested trans-racial adoption of an American Indian child. It argues that the United States founding myth of Manifest Destiny—of the divinely ordained fate of the continent to host a (white) Christian state—is determinative of the way in which legal decisions regarding American Indians are made. The myth of Manifest Destiny contains a metaphor of vanished American Indians, such that contemporary American Indians are rendered nearly invisible and whose existence is not easily absorbed into the working of the American legal system. The American Indian Child Welfare Act provides protections against assimilation for indigenous families and community, thus working at cross-purposes to the ultimate aim of Manifest Destiny. What happens in those instances when legal provisions and interpretation run counter to Manifest Destiny? Through the consideration of the situation of a contested adoption, this article reveals the heavy influence of Manifest Destiny in the Supreme Court decision, which is counter to the vision of a pluralistic culture envisioned in both the novel and the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) itself. The consequences of legal resistance to ICWA for American Indian communities and as to the operation of the legal system itself are discussed.     

Patriarchal Investments: Marriage,Dowry and the Political Economy of Development in Bangladesh

This article explores why dowry inflation persists in Bangladesh, despite the country being widely heralded as a development success, especially with regard to gender. The article asks three questions. Does rural Bangladesh show changing patterns of marriage similar to those reported elsewhere in South Asia and more broadly? What might explain the persistent spread and inflation of dowry payments? How might changes in marriage and the inflation of dowry be related to the broader political economy of development in Bangladesh? Analysis of primary data from rural Bangladesh affirms shifts in norms of marriage arrangement and conjugal relationships, but also emphasises considerable continuity. The political economy of development in Bangladesh is briefly described. Dowry is argued to function not as compensation for perceived weakness in women’s economic contribution, but to bolster men’s. In mobilising “additional” resources, dowries help sustain the economic system and indicate ongoing commitment to cultural idioms of masculine provision and protection, against a background of widespread corruption and political and gender violence.     

Negotiating Refugee Empowerment(s) in Resettlement Organizations

In-depth interviews with both organizational staff and refugee clients in two American refugee resettlement organizations explore how empowerment is communicated to and understood by refugees being “empowered.” This study found that while organizational staff professed empowerment focused on self-sufficiency as self-determination, in practice their communication to clients defined self-sufficiency a priori in economic terms. Refugee clients instead constructed empowerment(s) in economic, educational, personal, and family terms. These findings highlight the need for changes in U.S. resettlement policy and for theoretical and practical understandings of refugee empowerment to recognize polysemic and conflicting empowerments in different life arenas and from different positionalities.