‘Pinstripes on the prairies’: examining the financialization of farming systems in the Canadian prairie provinces

Drawing on recent scholarship on the financialization of agro-food systems and the global land grab, this paper examines new forms of financial investment in agriculture in the Canadian prairie provinces. We examine the factors underpinning investor involvement in the sector, including its anticipated financial performance as well as processes of agricultural restructuring that, combined with government actions to liberalize farmland ownership, have facilitated the enrollment of land and labour into new financial vehicles. We focus in particular on the emergence of two new forms of investment vehicles – farmland investment funds and an exchange-traded farming corporation – comparing the business model and investment strategy of each. In doing so, we highlight the ways in which the new investment patterns may propel the restructuring of the agricultural sector, alter power relations among key actors, and introduce new logics into the farming landscape. Our findings allow us to comment on the relevance of the land grabbing frame for making sense of the financialization of agriculture in the global North.     

Gender and Modernity in Post‐War British Cinema; a case study of Young Wives’ Tale (1951)

This article explores the interrelationship between gender and modernity within the context of post‐war Britain, focusing upon the representation of women in the popular film genre of the ‘marriage comedy’. It uses a case study of the 1951 film Young Wives’ Tale to explore post‐war ideas about the ‘companionate marriage’ and the emergence of a ‘modern’ British society. Critical examination of female performance style and the gendered negotiation of domestic space within the film suggests the ways in which anxieties about the ‘new’ and the ‘modern’ are displaced onto the female protagonists. The article explores the ways in which ‘tradition’ is usurped in the film and concludes that it was a box office failure because it was out of step with the cultural consciousness of post‐war cinema audiences. The film’s lack of success demonstrates the extent and manner to which gender relations could be challenged in the early 1950s.     

Perceived Interparental Conflict and Early Adolescents’ Friendships: The Role of Attachment Security and Emotion Regulation

Although there is strong evidence for the effect of interparental conflict on adolescents' internalizing and externalizing problems, little is known about the effect on the quality of adolescents' relationships. The current study investigates the link between adolescents' friendships and interparental conflict as reported by both parents and adolescents. It considers early adolescents' emotion regulation ability and attachment security as mediators. The analysis is based on a longitudinal study with two waves separated by 12?months. The participants were 180 two-parent families and their adolescent children (50.5?% girls), the average age of the latter being 10.61?years (SD?=?0.41) at the outset (Time 1). Binomial logistic regression analysis revealed that perceived interparental conflict increased the risk of instability in friendship relationships across the 1-year period. Structural equation modeling analysis indicated that the association between perceived interparental conflict and friendship quality was mediated by emotion regulation and attachment security. The discussion focuses on mechanisms whereby interparental conflict influences early adolescents' friendship relationships.     

African–American Parents’ Racial and Ethnic Socialization and Adolescent Academic Grades: Teasing Out the Role of Gender

This study examined the relationship of racial and ethnic socialization and academic achievement in a sample of 218 African American adolescents (grades 9–12; 52% girls) attending a public high school in the northeastern United States. Researchers were particularly interested in whether adolescent gender moderated the relationship between racial and ethnic socialization and academic grades. Results indicated that aspects of ethnic socialization, African American cultural values and African American heritage were linked to adolescent grades. Additionally, adolescent gender was found to moderate the association between these socialization variables and grades. The findings also suggest that socialization provided by paternal caregivers around African American cultural values and African American heritage may have differential effects for academic grades than the socialization messages provided by maternal caregivers. Information generated from this study broadens the understanding of socialization factors that can facilitate positive academic outcomes in African American youth and has practical implications for parents and educators.

The Daily Social and Emotional Worlds of Adolescents Who Are Psychologically Maltreated by Their Romantic Partners

The purpose of this study was to examine how partner psychological maltreatment is associated with depression, daily interpersonal experiences, and affect. Participants were 67 late adolescents (17- to 22-years-old). Each participant completed a survey followed by reporting affect, and interpersonal hassles and uplifts for seven consecutive days. Compared to those low in maltreatment, participants in the high maltreatment group reported more hassles with partners and friends, less uplifts with family, and more depressive symptoms. Multilevel modeling showed that adolescents in the high as compared to the low maltreatment group were more interpersonally sensitive (defined as greater affective reactions to day-to-day interpersonal hassles). Results reveal that psychological maltreatment by partners is an especially potent experience that occurs along with greater romantic hassles and more interpersonal sensitivity. The effects of maltreatment were also found to spill over into relationships with friends and families by either being associated with more hassles and greater reaction to hassles or fewer uplifts and less reaction to uplifts.

Children’s and Adolescents’ Expectations about Challenging Unfair Group Norms

Youth often hold group norms that perpetuate inequality. One way these norms can be changed is by challenging these norms by choosing to include new members into these groups who hold morally just norms. In the current study, children’s and adolescents’ inclusion decisions and social reasoning about challenging group norms through inclusion were investigated. The sample included 9–10 (children) and 13–14 year-olds (adolescents) (N?=?673, 54.4% female). Participants supported including challengers into groups holding norms supporting relational aggression and unequal allocation of resources, but they were less likely to support including a challenger into a physically aggressive group. Age-related differences and gender differences were found: children and female participants were more likely to include challengers than were adolescents and male participants. The findings indicate that youth support including new members who would challenge morally questionable group norms, but that their support depends on the specific norm the group holds.     

Foreign,criminal: a doubly damned modern British folk-devil

An association of strangers with danger and criminality is one of the most enduring social myths. However, in the UK, it was only after a media outcry 10 years ago over the release of foreign nationals from British prisons, that the ‘Foreign Criminal’ exploded into political and popular consciousness. Despite the small numbers of people involved, the location of this folk devil at the intersection of legal and moral assessments of ‘wickedness’ and alterity imbues it with considerable potency and has ensured that its reverberations are still felt strongly a decade later. Drawing on qualitative research with immigration detainees, deportees and irregular migrants, the article considers some of the many faces of the Foreign Criminal and illuminates their racialised, classed and gendered natures. It argues that a twin set of developments – coalescing around Operation Nexus and curtailed Article 8 right protections – work together to taint a growing number of non-citizens with criminality, whilst simultaneously undermining their claim to belong. Case studies are presented to demonstrate the fault lines of this malleable and expanding category, and to argue that the Foreign Criminal is paradigmatic of both social disorder and national boundaries, and is fundamentally shifting the lines of citizenship and belonging.     

Self-organisation and Development: A Comparative Approach to Post-communist Transformations from the Perspective of Social Systems Theory

The article addresses post-communist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe through the conceptual apparatus of Luhmann’s social systems theory, which sees increasing functional differentiation in terms of subsystems’ autonomous autopoietic self-organisation as the key aspect of these transformations. By applying fuzzy-set analysis, it is demonstrated that a radical break with the former communist regime is sufficient for the self-organisation of the political subsystem, and necessary for the market reforms that are sufficient for the self-organisation of the economic subsystem. Moreover, the self-organisation of both functional subsystems has clearly contributed to development in terms of an increase in the Human Development Index after 1990.     

R.S. Thomas: Ministering Otherness

This article is built around a deeply personal `response to text' –of a poem in response to a poem, where both deal with notions of identity. For myself, writing poetry is a cathartic (though infrequent) source of resolution; a space subject to different constraints from those present in the production of analytic scholarship. A consideration of the broader ideological matrix at work behind the poems suggests links between nationhood and language, class and religion, private and public identity, history and politics. Vast subjects, explored but briefly in the thoughts and notes produced for this article as `background' to the story of the poem cited at the end. For legal and political theory it is a reminder of the delicate interstices of influences traversed in any assertion concerning broad policy. As `scholar' I am constrained in the provision of any further assessment of my own process as `poet': what is provided attempts honesty. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.