Examining the Link Between Funding and Intellectual Interventions Across Universities and Think Tanks: a Theoretical Framework

Policy-oriented expert knowledge is increasingly applied, collaborative and socially accountable, created in a variety of organisations and institutions that display a diversity of funding patterns with a wide range of requirements and expectations. Given the complexities of knowledge production and recent changes in its funding environment (e.g. mode and availability of research funding and evaluation), few existing theoretical elaborations consider tensions between structural funding conditions and intellectual production in policy research contexts. This paper examines the role of funding in shaping the policy issues, format and content of intellectual output across two research contexts (universities, think tanks). It sets out a theoretical and methodological approach to understand the link between funding modalities and the type of knowledge and intellectual interventions they facilitate or thwart.     

Unpacking the Public Private Partnership Revival

This paper examines the recent resurgence of interest in public-private partnerships (PPPs) to provide infrastructure in developing countries. First, the paper demonstrates that there has been a revival of support for private sector participation in infrastructure. Second, the paper argues that this revival differs from earlier attempts to increase the involvement of the private sector in public service provision in a number of respects. In particular, the current support for PPPs is related to an increased availability of global financial capital. Third, the paper considers the implications of this distinct feature of the revival for development.     

Civil society: Bringing the family back in

This article explores the complex and contradictory positioning of the family within civil society literature. In some accounts, the family is seen as the cornerstone of civil society. In others, the family is positioned firmly outside – even antithetical to – civil society. This paradox arises from the ways in which civil society is variously defined through a series of binary oppositions – in relation to each of which the family sits uneasily. And while feminist critiques have tried to bring women back into view, they too tend to marginalize the family. In addition, the normative nature of these oppositions has meant that while civil society tends to be seen as the property of the political ‘left’, the family is often associated with the political ‘right’. The article argues that we need to move beyond oppositional definitions of civil society and assumptions about the family if we are to understand the multiple ways in which the family is implicated as not only the ‘reproducer’ of particular resources and dispositions but as a principal source and focus of civil society engagement and activism.     

Missing Masculinities: Gendering Practices in Australian Alcohol Research and Policy

The issue of ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’ has been the subject of intense policy debate in Australia. While this debate is warranted, its contours and content have been informed and shaped by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. Narrow research engagements of this kind warrant scrutiny because they can exclude from consideration crucial issues. In this article we identify one such issue, that of gender. Following a review of the Australian literature on gender, alcohol and violence, our analysis explores four case studies drawn from the Australian research corpus, focusing on large quantitative studies as these tend to receive most attention and citation in policy debate. Such studies consistently erase the contribution of key gender dynamics, namely enactments of particular (often youthful) masculinities, to violence involving alcohol, even where they simultaneously provide strong support in their data for such a conclusion. We show how this research is mobilised specifically in support of claims about the causal role of alcohol in violence and of blanket population-level responses to the problem. There is an urgent need to map the character and scope of the tendency to erase certain gender issues in research on alcohol and violence in order to better inform policy responses.     

Feeling Things: From Visual to Material Jurisprudence

Law and Critique - In this article I analyse the extent to which there has been a shift in the cultural turn in legal scholarship and specifically from visual to what I call material jurisprudence,...     

Use of a Y chromosome probe as an aid in the forensic proof of sexual assault

Currently, the most common procedures for the forensic identification of semen that may be present due to a sexual assault include the microscopic identification of spermatozoa, acid phosphatase activity, or the detection of PSA. However, not all cases of sexual assault result in the deposit of semen. Fluorescent In Situ Hybridization (FISH) has been found to be a very sensitive and specific method for detection of the Y chromosome from male cells. This study was undertaken to demonstrate the presence of epithelial cells of male origin in the postcoital vaginal tract using a commercially available probe. Results identified Y chromosome in intact epithelial cells on postcoital Days 1 through 4, and on Day 7. Additionally, Y chromosome positive epithelial cells were identified in vaginal swabs obtained following intercourse with no ejaculation. The method developed in this study demonstrates that FISH is a sensitive method for the identification of the presence of male epithelial cells in the postcoital vagina.     

Violence and Violation: Women and Secure Settings

This article focuses on service provision for women who are involuntarily referred under the UK Mental Health Act (1983) into medium and high security care in England and Wales. We explore how physical and procedural security in such settings is prioritized over relational care (see also Fallon Report, Department of Health, 1999a and NHS Executive, 2000 – Tilt Report). Weare not arguing against the importance of protecting the public from the acts of dangerous members of our society. However, we are arguing that many of the women in our secure services are inappropriately placed and receive inappropriate forms of treatment and care. Rather than physical security, it is high relational care, which the women require. Further, we argue that current service provision often re-produces forms of violence and violation which have marked many of women's lives prior to their entry into the secure system.