Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Obesity During the Transition to Adulthood: The Contingent and Nonlinear Impact of Neighborhood Disadvantage

Neighborhood disadvantage in early adolescence may help explain racial and ethnic disparities in obesity during the transition to adulthood; however the processes may work differently for males and females and for minority groups compared to Whites. The present study examines the relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and young adult obesity and the extent to which it contributes to racial/ethnic disparities among males and females. Data are from waves I and III of The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of adolescents administered between 1994 and 2002. The final sample of 5,759 adolescents was 54% female, 63% White, 21% African American, 16% Hispanic, and 14 years of age, on average, at wave I. Using hierarchical logit models and controlling for prior obesity status, findings indicate that, for females, adolescent neighborhood disadvantage partially explains racial/ethnic disparities in young adult obesity. Further, neighborhood disadvantage increases the odds of becoming obese for adolescent females in a curvilinear form, and this relationship significantly varies between Whites and Hispanics. Neighborhood disadvantage does not increase the risk of obesity for males, regardless of race/ethnicity. Implications for obesity prevention are discussed.     

‘We Must Advance,We Must Expand': architectural and social challenges to the domestic model at the College for Ladies at Westfield

This article examines the earliest principles of architectural design and social operation at one of the first higher education institutions for women in Britain. The domestic model for women's education combined residential design with a social emphasis on familial relationships in an attempt to inculcate what was understood to be women's domestic character and assuage contemporary anxieties about women's education. However, a coincident emphasis on the college's growth, necessary for it to be understood as effective, presented challenges to the college's original organisation. This article considers official memoranda alongside early students’ diaries, scrapbooks and letters to argue that Westfield's success contributed to the erosion of its foundational ideologies.     

Etchings from the Attic: looking back at feminist print-making from the 1980s

ABSTRACT

Drawing on autobiographical memories of the influence of the Women's Liberation Movement, this article discusses feminist etchings made for my final undergraduate show. Etching, historically related to satire, was deliberately chosen to mock the disparaging treatment of the female artist. The article offers both an experiential and a contextual discussion of the atmosphere of social activism, political activity and consciousness-raising of the WLM as well as the journalism and feminist art history scholarship which informed my practice. Further, the article evaluates the potential naivety of my feminist strategy of ‘body art', as it risked being misunderstood as conventional sexually explicit imagery of female sexuality.     

Desublimating monstrous desire: the horror of gender in new extremist cinema

Known for graphic gore and formal experimentation, films of European new extremism stand out for the way in which they combine sex with violence, stressing the body in extreme modes of being and rendering its materiality emphatic, uncanny and profoundly disturbing. While this emphasis on sex and violence has been widely recognized in scholarly literature on new extremism, its connections to gendered conventions of genre cinema have not. In this article, we contend that films such as Philippe Grandrieux's Sombre (1998), Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009) and Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day (2001) directly reference gendered tropes and conventions of horror cinema in their explorations of desire, sexual difference and violence. Far from being inconsequential or secondary concerns, we argue that emphatically gendered characteristics of cinematic horror are crucial to the disturbing impact of these films. By appropriating tropes from the horror film, but refusing them the closure and recuperation customary to narrative conventions of the genre, new extremist films critique these gendered implications, calling attention to the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the gender politics of horror.     

Socioeconomic Stress and Academic Adjustment Among Asian American Adolescents: The Protective Role of Family Obligation

Socioeconomic stress has long been found to place youth at risk, with low family income conferring disadvantages in adolescents’ school achievement and success. This study investigates the role of socioeconomic stress on academic adjustment, and pinpoints family obligation as a possible buffer of negative associations. We examined direct and interactive effects at two time points in the same sample of Asian American adolescents—early high school (N = 180 9th–10th graders; 60 % female) and 2 years later in late high school (N = 156 11th–12th graders; 87 % of original sample). Results suggest that socioeconomic stress is indeed associated with poor academic adjustment, measured broadly through self-reported GPA, importance of academic success, and educational aspirations and expectations. Family obligation was positively related to adjustment, and also was found to buffer the negative effects of socioeconomic stress, but only during adolescents’ later high school years. Adolescents reporting more family obligation experienced less of the negative effects of financial stress on academic outcomes than those reporting lower obligation. Cultural and developmental implications are discussed in light of these direct and moderating effects.     

Australian Democracy and Priveleged Parliamentary Speech

This article responds to recent cases of parliamentary speech which reflect the ascendancy of a totalising 'mainstream' approach to public discourse and a political leadership that may, at times, be overly attentive to the majority-rule dimension of democracy. These developments spark a more general discussion of the phenomenology of privileged parliamentary speech, the role of speech freedoms in liberal democratic orders and the duties of parliamentary representatives within them. I make two general conclusions. First, the ways in which we normally argue and think about free speech will not generally apply to the speech of parliamentarians because their speech rights cannot be universalised. Secondly, even if parliamentary speech could be treated as standard speech there would be no legitimate defence (from a liberal democratic point of view) for a strictly populist approach to its use since this could undermine the deliberative function of parliament and lead to the violation of other important liberal democratic principles.     

Women Solicitors as a Barometer for Problems within the Legal Profession – Time to Put Values before Profits?

This article will consider the theoretical explanations for why women are not remaining within and progressing through the ranks of the solicitors' profession in England and Wales. It sets out the findings from a Law Society commissioned project to examine the reasons why women have had a break from practice or chosen to leave the profession. Finally, it considers whether one of the purported strategies used to empower women solicitors – the business case for equality of opportunity in the solicitors' profession – is actively working against women and the profession (more broadly), and that only a return to a wider values-based approach to professional identity will meet the criticisms raised by many of the women who participated in this research.     

Railtrack is Dead – Long Live Network Rail? Nationalization Under the Third Way

This essay offers, by way of an examination of the proposals to reform the railway industry, a case study of the government's attempt to operationalize the third way. That these proposals are consistent with the third way is identified within this essay and yet they would appear to give rise to the de facto renationalization of the railway infrastructure. In accounting for this apparent contradiction in the (third way) means used and the (old-style democracy) ends achieved, it will be argued that this new form of nationalization is consistent with the third way rather than any socialist understanding of the term. To this extent, therefore, New Labour have attempted to reconceptualize the process of nationalization in pursuit of the 'new mixed economy'.