Perpetration of Gay and Lesbian Partner Violence: A Disempowerment Perspective

Gay men and lesbians may experience domestic violence at rates as high as, or higher than heterosexuals, yet there is a noticeable absence of empirical research investigating this phenomenon. This study investigated same-sex partner violence from a disempowerment perspective to determine the influence of (a) individual characteristics, (b) family of origin factors, and (c) intimate relationship factors. A sample of 77 individuals in distressed relationships (40 gay men and 37 lesbians) were administered a series of quantitative measures in our project office. Data primarily were analyzed using two-way ANOVAs (gender×perpetrator of violence). The greatest number of differences between perpetrators and nonperpetrators was found in individual characteristics. Implications for practitioners working with gay men and lesbians experiencing partner violence are discussed.     

Some Minor Reflections on Conflict Resolution: The State of the Field as a Moving Target

Based on several recent meetings between the scholarly and practice communities of the conflict resolution field, the author observes that our understanding of what we consider to be conflict resolution is changing rapidly, and that the context of a particular dispute is often determining. To continue to build knowledge in the field, scholars and reflective practitioners should examine such topic areas as the nature of practice; differences between in-house and external mediation; expectations of all parties about change and outcomes; and the ethics of intervention.     

Merger Melancholia: An Empirical Analysis of the Perceptions of the Residents of the Forcibly Amalgamated Manilla Shire Council

Notwithstanding cogent reasons for the continued existence of small local authorities in the sparsely populated Australian hinterland, compulsory council consolidation has been a recurring theme throughout the history of Australian local government. Despite its ubiquity, especially in rural, regional and remote Australian communities, its local consequences have not yet been fully examined by scholars or policy makers. The present paper seeks to remedy this neglect with an exploratory study of the social and economic consequences of forced local government amalgamations through the lens of the ‘lived experience’ of the small rural community of Manilla, which was forced in merge with the much larger Tamworth in 2004.     

Black visuality and the practice of refusal

What constitutes a practice of refusal? This article engages the practice of refusal collaboratively articulated by the Practicing Refusal Collective, a group founded three years ago by myself and Saidiya Hartman. It does so by unpacking a series of keywords that, I argue, define the contours of an emergent black visuality that itself constitutes a practice of refusal as enacted by two contemporary artists who are creating radical modalities of witnessing that refuse authoritative forms of visuality which function to refuse blackness itself. Focusing on works by Arthur Jafa and Luke Willis Thompson, and viewing them through their use of critical optics of relationality and adjacency, the article explores the affective labor required by their respective cinematic practices and their capacity to engage negation as generative and radically transformative.     

Health disparities: Using policies to rethink our strategies for eliminating the impact of food deserts by focusing on unhealthy dietary patterns

For years, we have been interested in understanding the relationship between dietary patterns and diseases, and most recently, we have put efforts toward analyzing the impact of food deserts as they relate to dietary patterns. Unhealthy eating has become an epidemic in low‐income neighborhoods that are considered to be food deserts due to the fact that people are not meeting their recommended daily intake of nutritionally dense foods. Adults should be consuming at least 20 to 35 g of fiber daily, however, many Americans only consume 12 to 17 g of fiber daily at best. Furthermore, as a society, we Americans consume way too much added sugar, saturated fat, and salt. Although there are a number of reasons that unhealthy dietary patterns exist in our society especially in low‐income communities, it is important that we pay particular attention to how food deserts have developed and how they are major contributors to the overall poor health of low‐income Americans. Therefore, the purpose of this is paper is to encourage its audience to rethink how we can implement policies to address the issue of unhealthy dietary patterns by reducing or eliminating food deserts. Specifically, we explore the effect of implementing evidence‐based policies such as nutrition initiatives, corner store initiatives, menu labeling, food assistance programs, and the punitive taxation of sugary beverages and unhealthy foods similar to the punitive taxes placed on tobacco.     

Proficiency Testing as a Basis for Estimating Uncertainty of Measurement: Application to Forensic Alcohol and Toxicology Quantitations

Abstract: While forensic laboratories will soon be required to estimate uncertainties of measurement for those quantitations reported to the end users of the information, the procedures for estimating this have been little discussed in the forensic literature. This article illustrates how proficiency test results provide the basis for estimating uncertainties in three instances: (i) For breath alcohol analyzers the interlaboratory precision is taken as a direct measure of uncertainty. This approach applies when the number of proficiency tests is small. (ii) For blood alcohol, the uncertainty is calculated from the differences between the laboratory’s proficiency testing results and the mean quantitations determined by the participants; this approach applies when the laboratory has participated in a large number of tests. (iii) For toxicology, either of these approaches is useful for estimating comparability between laboratories, but not for estimating absolute accuracy. It is seen that data from proficiency tests enable estimates of uncertainty that are empirical, simple, thorough, and applicable to a wide range of concentrations.