New markets,old struggles: Large and small farmers in the export agriculture of coastal Peru

Although the output of high-value crops in Peru has increased during the era of ‘globalization’, producers still tend to contextualize this development in relation to the 1969 agrarian reform. Considered here is how large and small farmers in the Cañete region perceive the changes that have occurred in agriculture since a generation ago, with particular reference to market competition and the implications of the new economic conditions for environmental sustainability. Despite the fact that farmers located at each end of the rural hierarchy experience the economic impact of globalization differently, small cultivators exporting their produce to the international market being particularly vulnerable to its laissez faire regime, they nevertheless share a common belief in the importance of agriculture for the well-being of the nation. The latter, it is suggested, is a discourse that reproduces much of the ideology associated historically with the agrarian and foundation myths.     

Product prices and technological choice: The case of the international cocoa processing industry

Economic appraisals have often relied heavily on the factor use and factor price characteristics of process. In this article we treat impact of product characteristics in choice of technology. Product characteristics are specially important in the earlier stages of manufacturing, namely, commodity processing. The study elaborates also on circumstances which lead to the emergence of different and fluctuating relationships between product prices in different countries, respectively, developing and developed, and their implication for the choice of technology in these countries.     

Parenting Coordination In Cases Involving Intimate Partner Violence

Parenting Coordination is a “hybrid legal‐mental health role that combines assessment, education, case management, conflict management, dispute resolution and, often times, decision‐making functions (AFCC, 2019, https://www.afccnet.org/Portals/0/PublicDocuments/Guidelines%20for%20PC%20with%20Appendex.pdf?ver=2020-01-30-190220-990 ). This article addresses issues that arise when the case has allegations or findings of intimate partner violence (IPV). Considerations of the type of IPV, the severity, timing, perpetrator and effects on coparenting are discussed in the context of the parenting coordinator's role. Through screening and assessment, we differentiate the kinds of cases with the presence of IPV where a PC may be effective as opposed to other IPV cases that may not predict success for retaining a PC.     

Ebola vaccines,evidentiary charisma and the rise of global health emergency research

Abstract

The 2013–2016 West African Ebola outbreak was both a catastrophic public health disaster and a rare research opportunity. This paper analyses how the tensions between the humanitarian imperatives of disease control and the epistemic conventions of bioscientific inquiry played out in the accelerated development, testing and licensure of Ebola vaccines. Beginning with the epidemiological projections of the disease’s spread, the paper develops the notion of evidentiary charisma to capture the power of experimental designs and data packages to marshal public health salience, recruit moral legitimacy and short-circuit scientific contestation. Attention to the charismatic dimensions of Ebola vaccine R&D helps to unpick the simultaneous appeals to exception and convention in the unfolding of a global health crisis, and to trace the normative and technical contours of the emerging paradigm of emergency research.     

Facts,power and global evidence: a new empire of truth

Abstract

What are the epistemological and political contours of evidence today? This introduction to the special issue lays out key shifts in the contemporary politics of knowledge and describes the collective contribution of the six papers as an articulation of what we describe as a ‘new empiricism’, exploring how earlier historical appeals to evidence to defend political power and decision-making both chime with and differ from those of the contemporary era. We outline some emerging empirical frontiers in the study of instruments of calculation, from the evolution of the randomized controlled trial (RCT) to the growing importance of big data, and explore how these methodological transformations intersect with the alleged crisis of expertise in the ‘post-truth’ era. In so doing, we suggest that the ambiguity of evidence can be a powerful tool in itself, and we relate this ambiguity to the ideological commitment and moral fervour that is elicited through appeals to, and the performance of, evaluation.