Parental Influence on Eating Behavior: Conception to Adolescence

The first years of life mark a time of rapid development and dietary change, as children transition from an exclusive milk diet to a modified adult diet. During these early years, children's learning about food and eating plays a central role in shaping subsequent food choices, diet quality, and weight status. Parents play a powerful role in children's eating behavior, providing both genes and environment for children. For example, they influence children's developing preferences and eating behaviors by making some foods available rather than others, and by acting as models of eating behavior. In addition, parents use feeding practices, which have evolved over thousands of years, to promote patterns of food intake necessary for children's growth and health. However in current eating environments, characterized by too much inexpensive palatable, energy dense food, these traditional feeding practices can promote overeating and weight gain. To meet the challenge of promoting healthy weight in children in the current eating environment, parents need guidance regarding alternatives to traditional feeding practices.     

Breaking Bodies Into Pieces: Time,Torture and Bio-Power

This article is an attempt to comprehend the bureaucratic phenomenon of the deathwatch, the last 24 hours of a prisoner’s life, stressing the theoretical applications scholars can make to the study of docile bodies on death row. Because years of work are necessary to obtain obedience from condemned inmates, health care professionals lend more than an aura of legitimacy to the capital punishment process. As an integral part of the prison and capital punishment, they provide stability, reliability, and the means to achieve the goals of peaceful executions. The ultimate objective of utilizing health care professionals is the sanitization of penal practice and penal language to effect the complete absence of resistance from the condemned.     

Voter Engagement,Electoral Inequality and First‐Time Compulsory Voting

This paper reviews the problem of declining turnout and proposes as a solution a system whereby each elector would be legally obliged to vote in the first election for which they were eligible. Popular attitudes toward first‐time compulsory voting are measured and probed by means of UK data. The main findings of the paper are that first‐time compulsory voting is a politically and administratively feasible proposal that appears tentatively to command popular support and has the potential to help address a number of the problems associated with declining turnout, and in particular low rates of electoral participation among younger citizens.     

Transnational Cultural Studies: What Price Globalisation?

One of the most significant aspects of globalisation has been the developing focus upon local resistances, of various types, and the ways in which these resistances seek to carve out specific spaces that both maintain and construct cultural difference. Performing cultural studies in those spaces, particularly those not determined by the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of cultural theories that are traditionally highly resistant to orthodoxies, is both challenging and exciting. Questions of whether a transnational cultural studies is possible in such contexts have been exercising a number of scholars in the past few years. This paper reviews some of those concerns and considers some of the issues involved in the developments of cultural studies within a transnational humanities context, which often operates in ways unfamiliar with the anti-establishment beginnings of Anglo-American/Australian cultural studies.     

Editorial

This article addresses Pierre Bourdieu's work on the principal logics under which human beings negotiate fields and engage in practice: either practical or reflexive knowledge. Bourdieu argues that reflexivity is capable of being taught and learned, and consciously incorporated into different levels of praxis. We describe and analyse the paths Bourdieu takes in arriving at this notion via both the usual suspects associated with his body of theory (field, habitus, illusio, capital) and the theoretical specificities associated with reflexive knowledge--most importantly, the distinction made between science, practical reason and the 'scholastic point of view'. Drawing particularly on his recent (translated) works Weight of the World and Pascalian Meditations , we extend his discussion of agency as it relates to habitus, the objectivities engendered by fields, and the 'game' of social intercourse.     

The impact of parental homeownership on children's outcomes during early adulthood

Abstract

Whether children benefit from being raised in a home owned by their parents has important policy implications and has been the topic of much scholarly debate. We match Panel Study of Income Dynamics data with census tract data to examine the impact of childhood experiences on adult outcomes for children followed over three decades. This allows us to document a wide range of characteristics.

For children born between 1968 and 1974, we analyze data on their first 18 years and also various outcomes when they are between 25 and 31 in 1999. We control for a comprehensive set of observable parental characteristics and develop a method to control for unobservable child characteristics together with an instrumental variable for the remaining selection problems. Parental homeownership status and children's college education and home‐ownership status are closely related, although the former is generated partially by the greater residential stability associated with homeownership.