Digital Restructuring: Gender,Class and Citizenship in the Information Society in Canada

‘Digital restructuring’ denotes a phenomenon integral to but also distinct within economic and political restructuring broadly conceived. The concept of restructuring can be modified with ‘digital’ to forefront the important technological dimension of global restructuring, as well as to indicate developments associated with the new ‘information economy’. Digital technology and digitization have been integral to the scope and speed of the global economic and political restructuring of recent decades. They have constituted the technological conditions for some of the more characteristic aspects of this process; from the flexiblization or outright shedding of labour, to the mobility of production and capital and the globalization of trade and financial markets. This paper seeks to debunk much of the corporate and state mythology of digital restructuring currently in circulation by drawing upon the analyses of digital technology and restructuring advanced by critical scholars and progressive social movements, and to highlight the dangers to progressive political movements and discourses posed by the very nature of these representations.     

AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF SUPERVISED ACCESS AND CUSTODY EXCHANGE SERVICES

An exploratory outcome study to investigate the ability of a supervised access and custody exchange center to function as a safe visitation enforcement mechanism of the court was accomplished as part of a larger study investigating child well-being. During a 6-month period of program participation, frequency and consistency of noncustodial parents' access to children dramatically increased and interparental conflict significantly decreased, demonstrating that supervised visitation and custody exchange centers that function in partnership with family court during interim court processes can address the unmet needs of family court and high-conflict domestic disputant as well.     

The Rhetorical Syllogism (Enthymeme) in Judicial Argumentation

The thesis here expounded can be divided in three parts: in the first place, it is supposed that the syllogism is not the rhetorical way, and less still the logical way, indeed used to reach the decision in the legal proceedings monopolized by the modern State. At the most, it can be seen as a form of presenting a decision that has already been reached by other means. It sure constitutes a highly functional procedure, effective and legitimating. It is generally not a conscious strategy on the part of the so called official legal agents (judges, prosecutors, state attorneys, lawyers, plaintiffs), which seem to believe that the decision before the concrete case is in fact produced by the previous general norm enunciated by the system. If there would be a chronological order, the general norm comes afterwards. In the second place, the judicial discursive structure seems to be rather enthymematic than syllogistic, because not all the effectively used norms are revealed, many of them staying not only out of question but also hidden. Finally, it is suggested that, in the atmosphere of faking dogmatic law in which acts the underdeveloped State, those implicit norms are not just presupposed as evident, but they are also uncertain, being rendered to manipulation.     

Histoire/histoires: special issue in honour of claire duchen

Claire Duchen died on 15 March 2000 after a long and very brave struggle with ovarian cancer. She died aged 45, but already with an established reputation as a leading scholar of French feminism. As Siân Reynolds wrote in her obituary for The Guardian newspaper, Claire was central to a global network of feminist scholars as a writer, translator, research coordinator, and for over 10 years, from 1987–1997, regional editor for Africa and Europe of Women's Studies International Forum. Her particular areas of specialism, in which she published widely were French Studies, especially French feminisms on which she published two well-known books, Women's Studies, and contemporary French and European Women's History, on which she published her last book this year.² She was respected as a scholar and valued as a colleague and a friend by many women and men around the world.     

Literatur

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Impacts of abstinence education on teen sexual activity, risk of pregnancy, and risk of sexually transmitted diseases.

This paper examines the impacts of four abstinence-only education programs on adolescent sexual activity and risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Based on an experimental design, the impact analysis uses survey data collected in 2005 and early 2006 from more than 2,000 teens who had been randomly assigned to either a program group that was eligible to participate in one of the four programs or a control group that was not. The findings show no significant impact on teen sexual activity, no differences in rates of unprotected sex, and some impacts on knowledge of STDs and perceived effectiveness of condoms and birth control pills     

Evaluation of a semi-automated, magnetic bead-based DNA extraction method for genetic fingerprinting of forensic casework samples

In order to cope with the demanding workload for DNA profiling of forensic casework samples a concept for a semi-automated processing system was developed at the Landeskriminalamt (Office of Criminal Investigation) Baden-Württemberg, Germany [K. Vollack, et al., Implementation of a semi-automated processing system for DNA profiling of forensic casework samples, this issue]. The applied magnetic bead extraction method is based on ChargeSwitch^® Technology (CST) from Invitrogen and was established on a liquid handling workstation Freedom EVO^® 150 from Tecan.