A functional approach to sudden unexplained infant deaths

There is a great deal of variation in the methods and wording used by medical examiners in the medicolegal investigation and certification of infant deaths. This paper was created by the NAME Ad Hoc Committee on Sudden Unexplained Infant Death to address several specific issues, namely: * To establish a functional approach to the investigation of sudden unexplained infant deaths; * To outline a "bare minimum" set of recommendations to define the scope of investigation required; * To recommend methods and wording to be used when certifying infant deaths; * To develop a list of potential stressors or possible external causes of death that should be identified and reported on the death certificate and/or within a medical examiner/coroner office database. This paper was electronically posted for NAME member review and comment for a period of 30 days. The paper was further revised based on member comments and then submitted to the NAME board of directors in the fall of 2005 prior to the annual meeting. This text of this paper was officially approved and endorsed by the NAME board of directors on October 14, 2005, at the annual meeting in Los Angeles, CA.     

Exchange Rising? Karl Polanyi and Contentious Politics in Contemporary Latin America

Free‐market reforms in the last quarter of the twentieth century weakened the point of production—labor unions—as the source of effective nonparty political countermovement to liberal capitalism. Has another significant source of societal resistance arisen in association with the resurgence of market economics? Building on the work of Karl Polanyi, this article argues that circuits of exchange—the commodification of labor, land, and money—can be powerful sources of movement against contemporary forms of free‐market capitalism. It draws on the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador to explore how Polanyi's exchange‐based approach helps to elucidate three phenomena: the great variety of identities behind the myriad movements against free‐market capitalism, the emergence of community as a powerful locus for organizing, and the proliferation of new forms of transgressive and highly disruptive direct action to reinforce the debilitated effectiveness of the strike.     

Review Article Note bibliographique

A Review of the Working Papers on Citizen Involvement Prepared for the Committee on Government Productivity of the Ontario Government (COGP) Citizen Involvement By the STAFF OF THE COGP, 1972. Pp. 50 A Public Communications System. By LLOYD AXWORTHY, 1971. Pp. 60 Gone Today and Here Tomorrow. By CATHERINE STARRS and GAIL STEWART, 1971. Pp. 89 Public Bureaucracy and the Possibility of Citizen Involvement in the Government of Ontario. By GEORGE S. SZABLOWSKI, 1971. Pp. 37 Participation and Liberal Democratic Government. By FREDERICK C. THAYER, 1971. Pp. 41 All are available from the Queens Printer, Government of Ontario; 1.00 each     

Mapping the road to development: a methodology for scaling up participation in policy processes

Understanding local variability in context and mobilising local participation to define development agendas are widely accepted development strategies. There remain, however, significant challenges to the systematic and effective inclusion of local communities and households. Projeto MAPLAN, a pilot project in Ceará, Brazil, is a joint effort of the public sector and civil society designed to create a process of participatory development planning which integrates local-level contextual variations. In this effort, the use of a Participatory Geographic Information System (PGIS) stimulates the participation of community members in analysing their needs, goals, and priorities. The visualisation of these factors through easily understood maps facilitates communication and contributes to a democratic and transparent planning process, thus permitting the articulation of local priorities with the state-level planning apparatus. MAPLAN represents part of a shifting paradigm for rural development planning in the state and provides the tools for the effective inclusion of citizen voice in development policy.     

Ethics by Design: The Impact of Form of Government on Municipal Corruption

While trust in government at all levels is at an all‐time low, actual corruption at the municipal level has been declining. One factor often credited with this decline is the introduction of the council‐manager form of government. One of the key reasons the council‐manager form was created in the early 1900s was to act as an antidote to the corruption prevalent in the big‐city machine politics of the era. Despite this, no one has tested whether the council‐manager form has in fact influenced the decline in corruption rates. This article uses a rare events logit model to analyze corruption convictions in municipalities between 1990 and 2010 to determine which factors, including form of government, affect the probability that a corrupt act will occur. The findings indicate that municipalities with the council‐manager form are 57 percent less likely to have corruption convictions than municipalities with the mayor‐council form.     

Rejecting the gift horse: international politics of disaster aid refusal

This is a study of the increasingly common phenomenon of developing states refusing some or all international aid following serious natural disaster. Aid refusal by the Myanmar junta following a 2008 cyclone is only the most recent prominent example of this practice, and I present here an original dataset of all cases of disaster aid refusal occurring between 1982 and 2006. Through quantitative analysis, I show that although poorer states are indeed less likely to refuse aid than wealthier states, recipient need does not alone drive the decision-making process. Nor are autocratic regimes any more or less likely to refuse aid than democratic regimes. Rather, just as recently transitioned states have been shown by other scholars to be particularly likely to engage in military conflict, I find that they are also particularly likely to publicly and explicitly refuse aid and insist on their own ability to handle disaster relief and recovery. Aid refusal, much like aid provision, is at its core a political act.     

Domestic relations in Brazil: legacies and horizons

Grounded in literature review and an ethnographic study, this article examines contemporary Brazilian domestic life. Relations among women (employers and maids) and between women and men are analyzed with a focus on the home as a space in which gender, race, and class inequalities are constantly reproduced. The article argues that what happens in domestic life is constitutive of wider social divisions and that the domestic is a universe integral to the national social context. A case in point is the connection between the widespread use of paid domestic labor and the naturalization of black women as subservient, complementing the pairing of whiteness and class entitlement. Another case is the buffering role of maids in the development of gender conflicts in well-off homes, thus blurring gender hierarchies at a broader scale. Locating the domestic within the recent discussion on global domestic labor, the article compares particularities of Brazilian domestic life to those elsewhere.