How Legislation is Drafted and Enacted in Bangladesh

The creation of laws is the most direct and powerful legislativetool available to governments to fulfill their political mandate.Not surprisingly, the drafting and enactment of legislationin many Commonwealth countries often follow the same generalpattern as that established by the United Kingdom. Nevertheless,each country adds a sprinkling of local flavour and custom toits own practices. What follows is an overview of the legislativeprocess in the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, highlightingthe various distinct stages involved in the making of laws—suchas developing policy, drafting legislation, presenting proposedlaws to Parliament, final approval by the president, and publicationin the Official Gazette. Comparisons are also made with theCanadian and United Kingdom legislative drafting experiencewhere appropriate.     

‘Our songs were our stones’: song and struggle in the treatment action campaign

With 3 million people receiving anti-retroviral therapies (ARV) in South Africa, it has the largest public ARV programme in the world. The implementation of this programme was made possible by the efforts of AIDS advocacy groups that lobbied the government to make ARV available. Chief among these was the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). The group mobilised South Africans across socio-economic and racial lines against the AIDS denial of key members of the African National Congress (ANC). Through interviews with TAC members and ethnographic accounts of ©current activism, this paper examines song as a method of mobilisation against HIV/AIDS-related injustices. As instrumental components of the liberation struggle, songs have become ubiqioutus within protest action, as demonstrated by the recent hashtag student movements. By utilising similar forms of rights-based activism found in the country's liberation struggle, TAC is able to tap into reservoirs of emotional potential rooted in political struggle.     

“Our biggest killer”: multimodal discourse representations of dementia in the British press

A recent (2016) Office for National Statistics report stated that dementia is now “the leading cause of death” in England and Wales. Ever fixated with the syndrome (an unfailingly newsworthy topic), the British press was quick to respond to the bulletin, consistently headlining that dementia was the nation’s “biggest killer,” while (re)formulating other aspects of the report in distorting and emotive metaphorical terms. In this paper we examine how the media, through use of a recurring set of linguistic and visual semiotic tropes, portrayed dementia as an agentive entity, a “killer,” which remorselessly attacks its “victims.” Such a broadly loaded and sensationalist representation, we argue, not only construed dementia as a direful and pernicious disease, but also, crucially, obscured the personal and social contexts in which the syndrome is understood and experienced (not least by people with dementia themselves). This intensely lurid type of representation not only fails to address the ageist misinformation and common misunderstandings that all too commonly surround dementia, but is also likely to exacerbate the stress and depression frequently experienced by people with dementia and their families.     

No Country for Made Men: The Decline of the Mafia in Post‐Soviet Georgia

This article studies the decline of a long‐standing mafia known as thieves‐in‐law in the post‐Soviet republic of Georgia. In 2005 an anti‐mafia campaign began which employed laws directly targeting the thieves‐in‐law. Within a year, all Georgia's thieves‐in‐law were in prison or had fled the country. This article looks at the success of the policy by investigating how Georgia's volatile socio‐economic environment in the 1990s affected the resilience of the thieves‐in‐law to state attack. The article presents data showing that the chaos of this period impacted on the ability of thieves‐in‐law to coordinate activities, regulate recruitment, and protect their main collective resource—their elite criminal status. Due to this, the reputation of the thieves‐in‐law as a mafia drastically declined creating vulnerability. The article adds to the literature on resilience in criminal networks and the study of organized crime in the post‐Soviet space.     

Research collaboration in universities and academic entrepreneurship: the-state-of-the-art

There is abundant evidence that research collaboration has become the norm in every field of scientific and technical research. We provide a critical overview of the literature on research collaboration, focusing particularly on individual-level collaborations among university researchers, but we also give attention to university researchers’ collaborations with researchers in other sectors, including industry. We consider collaborations aimed chiefly at expanding the base of knowledge (knowledge-focused collaborations) as well as ones focused on production of economic value and wealth (property-focused collaborations), the latter including most academic entrepreneurship research collaborations. To help organize our review we develop a framework for analysis, one that considers attributes of collaborators, collaborative process and organization characteristics as the affect collaboration choices and outcomes. In addition, we develop and use a “Propositional Table for Research Collaboration Literature,” presented as an “Appendix” to this study. We conclude with some suggestions for possible improvement in research on collaboration including: (1) more attention to multiple levels of analysis and the interactions among them; (2) more careful measurement of impacts as opposed to outputs; (3) more studies on ‘malpractice’ in collaboration, including exploitation; (4) increased attention to collaborators’ motives and the social psychology of collaborative teams.     

Are Alternative Livelihood Projects Alleviating Poverty in Mining Communities? Experiences from Ghana

This paper critiques the approach being taken in Ghana to implement Alternative Livelihood (AL) projects in mining communities. The rapid insurgence of illegal artisanal gold mining has forced policymakers to think more creatively about ways in which to deal with mounting unemployment in the country's rural areas. Most of the economic activities being promoted, however, have proved highly unpopular with target groups. The adopted policy approaches reflect how little in tune the organisations championing AL activities are with the mindsets and ambitions of rural populations.     

Reading Katrina: Race,Space and an Unnatural Disaster1

Beneath the fleeting commotion of natural disaster, the events of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 revealed deep-rooted dynamics of racial and class inequalities. National media frenzy in the wake of the storm on the Gulf Coast reported on the plight of black poor populations, especially in New Orleans, as those worst impacted and also most neglected. The first part of this article elaborates on the contested concepts of “race” and “racism” in a contemporary context, in which popular visual and narrative representations inform contemporary racial discourses and the perpetuation, in turn, of a dominant neoconservative hegemony. A discursive reading, in part two, of emergent political and media narratives around Katrina reveals the processes and tropes operating to (re)construct “race” in dominant American culture. In this deconstructive analysis, the devastated urban space of New Orleans emerges as a physical as well as highly symbolic regime of knowledge in relation to which dehistoricized racial constructions are propagated and naturalized. Finally, hegemony is reconceptualized as an inherently contingent contemporary power. Discursive processes of racial domination reinforced by popular representations of Hurricane Katrina have been effectively subverted by activist movements in New Orleans which mobilize alternative, experiential and spatial narratives; signifying a grassroots politicization to counter the naturalized racial tropes of neoconservative discourse and intervene with more democratic processes in the ongoing reconstruction of the devastated city.