Collaboration in the shadow of the wall: shifting power in the borderlands

Border security places a heavy burden on public and private land managers affecting rural livelihoods and limiting managers’ ability to collectively act to deal with environmental issues. In the southern Arizona borderlands, natural resource managers come together to solve complex environmental issues creating a diverse set of formal and informal institutional arrangements between state and nonstate actors. We explore the effects of the border on these collaborative institutions, as well as the managers’ views of the border, invoking theoretical work on power, institutions, literature from the burgeoning field of borderland studies, and recent work on collaboration and the common interest in civil society. In doing so, we seek to understand how a rural community that has taken center stage in national discourse copes with the border on a daily basis and how changing power differentials in the borderlands affect a governance network. This study informs our understanding of when and where collaboration occurs, as well as our conceptualization of the border and the effects of border policy and immigration on natural resource management.     

Neuromarketing: The New Science of Consumer Behavior

Neuromarketing is an emerging field that bridges the study of consumer behavior with neuroscience. Controversial when it first emerged in 2002, the field is gaining rapid credibility and adoption among advertising and marketing professionals. Each year, over 400 billion dollars is invested in advertising campaigns. Yet, conventional methods for testing and predicting the effectiveness of those investments have generally failed because they depend on consumers’ willingness and competency to describe how they feel when they are exposed to an advertisement. Neuromarketing offers cutting edge methods for directly probing minds without requiring demanding cognitive or conscious participation. This paper discusses the promise of the burgeoning field of neuromarketing and suggests it has the potential to significantly improve the effectiveness of both commercial and cause-related advertising messages around the world.     

The Shifting Politics of Climate Science

The global warming controversy has experienced a tumultuous period, with the credibility of climate science repeatedly questioned and a lack of international solidarity on the issue. While climate science institutions have accomplished much in their history, the current impasse highlights the limits of previous approaches. Determined critics have contested the authority of established scientific institutions, which have failed to measure up to their mythic ideals. While the imperfections of climate science have exposed some avenues for reform, they also suggest that the public stands to benefit from a more accurate understanding of science as both a process and body of knowledge. Uncertain and incomplete knowledge need not be an obstacle for action, and climate science can be made more robust and credible if it is removed from the center of what are largely political disagreements.     

Is the Sun Setting on Cosmopolitan Justice?

Reports on the UN criminal tribunals and the related hybrid courts raise grave concerns about their sustainability in terms of costs and their legal standards in respect of evidence. The effectiveness of the current courts is compared to the domestic prosecution of offenders from the Auschwitz concentration camp. Although the Auschwitz court failed to capture the enormity of the crime of genocide, there are nonetheless good reasons to re-visit the use of domestic courts and other remedies for such crimes today, particularly after adoption of the genocide law by nation states. Ideals of cosmopolitan justice behind the UN courts are being exported to societies that are ill-equipped to apply or afford them; and domestic legal development suffers as a consequence.     

The Social Value of Self-Esteem

This essay reflects upon the current cultural skirmishes over the parenting practices of Americans, which have pitted “Helicopter Parents” against “Free-Range Kids”; “Tiger Mothers” against “Panda Dads;” and at-risk communities “Waiting for Superman” against privileged students in the “Race to Nowhere.” Despite the exaggerated claims of difference in these and other popular representations of the parenting wars, a common theme of building children’s self-esteem is evident as a cornerstone of contemporary American parenting practices. Through different means, the relatively privileged parents who write child-rearing memoirs (or confessionals) pursue a similar end: to build and enhance their children’s self-concept and emotional competence. In particular, professional-class parents who are anxious about their own prospects for continued success in a risky economy turn toward emotional capital as a necessary supplement to educational and extra-curricular success to ensure inter-generational transmission of advantage. The goals of emotional competence and self-esteem replicate the mechanisms of control to which elite parents are subjected in professional careers and therefore represent an important form of cultural capital in the reproduction of class advantages.