Personality features of an adolescent female offending population

The incidence of adolescent offending has been shown to be different for young males and females. However, there is a lack of literature concerning adolescent female offenders, and despite research suggesting that personality factors may be linked with antisocial and criminal behaviour in adolescents and young adults; there have been a lack of studies investigating intra-sex personality differences in young female populations. The Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory, a 160-item self-report personality measure, was administered to 26 non-offending and 28 offending adolescent females. It was found that the offending group was significantly less submissive, less conforming, more forceful, more oppositional and more likely to exhibit borderline personality traits than the control group. The offending group also had higher reported incidences of childhood abuse and family conflict, and were more prone to substance abuse, impulsive actions and suicide ideation. These initial findings suggest that personality differences may well exist between offending and non-offending adolescent females.     

Gradgrinding the Social Sciences: The Politics of Metrics of Political Science

This article employs an interpretive approach, and in the light of contributions to this symposium by Butler and McAllister, and McLean et al ., holds that metrics of research 'quality' are socially constructed and hence are as 'subjective' as peer review. Thus it rejects the use of stand-alone metrics as an 'objective' basis to inform funding allocations. Rather, the optimum method of 'quality' assessment is a panel-based exercise with expert judgement informed by a range of discipline-sensitive metrics and peer review of publications. The article maintains that the politics of metrics of political science conceals interests about the foundations of social scientific knowledge, and so the dispute over metrics and peer review is a metaphor for the conflicting epistemological preferences of UK political scientists. It is also argued that metrics-led assessment subjects political science to 'Gradgrinding' on two fronts: that political science departments amount to less than the sum of their parts, and the audit culture strips the discipline of its humanism.     

Building synergies in development research: is it time for the Mosaic Approach?

Development research has responded to a number of charges over the past few decades. For example, when traditional research was accused of being ‘top–down’, the response was participatory research, linking the ‘receptors’ to the generators of research. As participatory processes were recognised as producing limited outcomes, the demand-led agenda was born. In response to the alleged failure of research to deliver its products, the ‘joined-up’ model, which links research with the private sector, has become popular. However, using examples from animal-health research, this article demonstrates that all the aforementioned approaches are seriously limited in their attempts to generate outputs to address the multi-faceted problems facing the poor. The article outlines a new approach to research: the Mosaic Model. By combining different knowledge forms, and focusing on existing gaps, the model aims to bridge basic and applied findings to enhance the efficiency and value of research, past, present, and future.     

Speaking volumes: Amélie nothomb's hygiène de l'assassin

This article discusses the first novel of the Belgian writer, Amélie Nothomb, whose irreverent mixing of classical and contemporary models of writing has delighted literary critics in 1990s France. The main argument of this article will be that Hygiène de l'assassin playfully appropriates aspects of both Plato's Socratic dialogues and the classic detective story to question the ways we approach texts and the reading strategies we adopt. Central to Nothomb's concerns is the subversive effect of the woman reader as a figure who contests (male) authorial intentionality. Bakhtin's formulation of the “novelistic” also operates as an important critical reference point for my discussion. It offers a model for understanding the literary experimentation of Nothomb's text as a means of creating “speaking volumes,” dialogised encounters, which unsettle our expectations of genre, literature and culture.     

Governing the suicide bomber: reading terrorism studies as governmentality

This article engages with the suicide bomber as he or she appears in the terrorism studies literature. In contrast to sensationalised narratives of the suicide bomber as pathological or fanatical, terrorism studies has increasingly come to view suicide bombing as a rational phenomenon that follows an identifiable strategic logic. Following Foucault’s articulation of governmentality, I read this literature as a governmental practice that attempts to understand the latent rationality of suicide bombing so that the phenomenon may be effectively governed and managed. With this understanding, I look specifically at the terrorism studies accounts of female suicide bombers and argue that the concerns they articulate regarding the superior capacity of these women to go undetected, such as with the use of fake pregnancies as disguises, produces the female suicide bomber as a uniquely risky and ungovernable subject.