Globalization forces and social policy choices: Glass half‐full or half‐empty?

Globalization, Europeanization and the End of Scandinavian Social Democracy?Edited by robert geyer, christine ingebritsen and jonathon w. moses. London: Macmillan. 2000. Changing Politics of Canadian Social Policy. By james j. rice and michael j. prince. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2000. Four Strong Winds: Understanding the Growing Challenges to Health Care. By michael b. decter Toronto: Stoddard. 2000. Now resident on Vancouver Island, the author was until recently a faculty member in the Department of political science at the University of Windsor.     

Is there a global environmental justice movement?

One of the causes of the increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world is the changing metabolism of the economy in terms of growing flows of energy and materials. There are conflicts on resource extraction, transport and waste disposal. Therefore, there are many local complaints, as shown in the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJatlas) and other inventories. And not only complaints; there are also many successful examples of stopping projects and developing alternatives, testifying to the existence of a rural and urban global movement for environmental justice. Moreover, since the 1980s and 1990s, this movement has developed a set of concepts and campaign slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include environmental racism, popular epidemiology, the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous, biopiracy, tree plantations are not forests, the ecological debt, climate justice, food sovereignty, land grabbing and water justice, among other concepts. These terms were born from socio-environmental activism, but sometimes they have also been taken up by academic political ecologists and ecological economists who, for their part, have contributed other concepts to the global environmental justice movement, such as ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ or the ‘ecological footprint’.     

Types of Malingering in PTSD: Evidence from a Psychological Injury Paradigm

Psychological Injury and Law - The extent to which persons may feign or malinger psychological symptoms is an important concern for civil litigation, specifically in the context of personal injury....     

Building ‘implicit partnerships’? Financial long-term care entitlements in Europe

Policy Sciences - The design of public subsidies for long-term care (LTC) programmes to support frail, elderly individuals in Europe is subject to both tight budget constraints and increasing...     

The impact of surplus sharing on the portfolio mix of public sector defined benefit pension plans: a public choice approach

The riskiness of state employee pension plan portfolios varies across states. We investigate whether this variation is related to how public employees and taxpayers share actuarial surpluses of pension accounts. We focus on two determinants of a plan’s asset mix: the relative influence of public employees to taxpayers; and whether a surplus-sharing contract is specified. Our theoretical model demonstrates that the effect of public employee influence on the asset mix is ambiguous. Our empirical results corroborate this complex theoretical result. In our theoretical and empirical analyses, if a surplus sharing rule is specified, plans adopt a more aggressive investment allocation.     

activist-mothers maybe,sisters surely? Black British feminism,absence and transformation

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women’s theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence.     

Young Adult Unemployment and Later Depression and Anxiety: Does Childhood Neighborhood Matter?

Young adulthood represents a developmental period with disproportionately heightened risk of losing a job. Young adult unemployment has been linked to increased mental health problems, at least in the short term. However, their possible long-term impacts, often referred as “scarring effects,” have been understudied, possibly underestimating the magnitude of mental health burden that young adult unemployment generates. This longitudinal study examined whether duration of unemployment during young adulthood is associated with later mental health disorders, after accounting for mental and behavioral health problems in childhood. Furthermore, the current study investigated whether childhood neighborhood characteristics affect this association and if so, in what specific functional ways. Data were drawn from a longitudinal study of developmental outcomes in a community sample in Seattle. Data collection began in 1985 when study participants were elementary students and involved yearly assessments in childhood and adolescence (ages 10–16) and then biennial or triennial assessments (ages 18–39; N?=?677 at age 39; 47% European American, 26% African American, 22% Asian American, and 5% Native American; 49% female). The current study findings suggest that duration of unemployment across young adulthood increased mental health problems at age 39, regardless of gender. Childhood neighborhood characteristics, particularly their positive aspect, exerted independent impacts on adult mental health problems beyond unemployment experiences across young adulthood. The current findings indicate a needed shift in service profiles for unemployed young adults—a comprehensive approach that not only facilitates reemployment but also addresses mental health needs to help them to cope with job loss. Further, the present study findings suggest that childhood neighborhoods, particularly positive features such as positive neighborhood involvement, may represent concrete and malleable prevention targets that can curb mental health problems early in life.