Encounters with the clandestino/a and the nomad: the emplaced and embodied constitution of non-citizenship

Taking the ‘encounter’ as an analytic, this paper will argue for an understanding of citizenship as an emergent condition that is emplaced and embodied, rather than as simply a collection of rights to be possessed or endowed. This is not to deny the importance of legal status to the ways in which one inhabits the city (and therefore the nation-state), but show how this status is modulated in the everyday to constitute a range of legitimately and illegitimately present non-citizen subjects. The nature of the encounter as a constitutive event in which particular bodies are deemed in- or out-of-place will be discussed relative to two imagined figures that have been used to represent outsiders that are deemed to be illegitimately present in Italy: the clandestino/a and the nomad. These figures have been invoked in legislation and in political and popular discourse. In this paper, they are also imagined to be encountered in the spaces of the city.     

Looking for Sustainability in Not‐for‐Profit Program Delivery: An Experiment in Providing Post‐Bushfire Recovery Programs

This article examines an experiment in delivering services and programs in communities that were affected by the 2009 Victorian bushfires. Three not‐for‐profit agencies received funding to develop and deliver programs over a period of three years with the aim of achieving sustainability for the programs thus created. They were not constrained by the requirements of normal government funding, which is short term, subject to competitive tendering and targeted at specific programs and client groups. The nature of the funding allowed the three agencies to introduce innovative programs tailored to the needs of the community and with the aim of building community capacity. However the question of whether the programs are sustainable when existing funding runs out remains open.     

Remembering remotely: would video-mediation impair witnesses' memory reports?

Witnesses often experience lengthy delays prior to being interviewed, during which their memories inevitably decay. Video-communication technology – favored by intergovernmental organizations for playing larger roles in judicial processes – might circumvent some of the resourcing problems that can exacerbate such delays. However, whereas video-mediation might facilitate expeditious interviewing, it might also harm rapport-building, make witnesses uncomfortable, and thereby undermine the quality and detail of their reports. Participants viewed a crime film and were interviewed either one day later via video-link, one day later face-to-face, or 1–2 weeks later face-to-face. Video-mediation neither influenced the detail or the accuracy of participants' reports, nor their ratings of the quality of the interviews. However, participants who underwent video-mediated interviews after a short delay gave more accurate, detailed reports than participants who waited longer to be interviewed face-to-face. This study provides initial empirical evidence that video-mediated communication (VMC) could facilitate the expeditious conduct of high-quality investigative interviews.     

The devil is in the detail: deception and consistency over repeated interviews

ABSTRACT

Research indicates that truthful statements typically contain more details than fabricated statements, and that truth tellers are no more consistent than liars over multiple interviews. In this experiment, we examine the impact of (i) multiple interviewers and (ii) reverse order recall on liars’ and truth tellers’ consistency and amount of reported detail over repeated recall attempts. Participants either took part in a mock crime (lying condition) or an innocent event (truth telling condition) which they were subsequently interviewed about in two separate interview phases. Truth tellers provided more details overall, and more reminiscent details than liars. There were no differences between veracity groups for the number of omissions made or repetitions reported. Despite the popular belief that inconsistency is a cue to deception, we found little support for the notion that consistency (or lack of consistency) offers a diagnostic cue to deception. We found little evidence that switching interviewer or recalling in reverse order induced inconsistencies in liars. In fact, due to the number of reminiscent details in truth tellers’ accounts, our findings suggest that accounts provided by liars tend to be slightly more consistent than those provided by truth tellers. Materials for this paper can be found at osf.io/hgvmk/.     

Famines in 19th century Indian history: A materialist alternative to ecological reductionism

This article charts the ways in which gender politics have featured within political landscape of contemporary Singapore. It is shown that there has been remarkable consistency in the approaches of the Singaporean government to women and gender relations in the post-independence period. Gender policies have consistently been interventionist and proactive, and have revealed the willingness of the government to subordinate the interests of women to those of the state. Fluctuations in policy regarding women are traced, and shown to be related to such factors as changes in Singapore's position within the global economy, the putative invasiveness of Western culture and perceived ethnic imperatives of Singapore's dominant ethnic group, the Chinese.