Do Retributive and Restorative Justice Processes Address Different Symbolic Concerns?

In support of a unitary conceptualization of retributive justice (justice through the imposition of punishment) and restorative justice (justice through dialogue aimed at consensus), three studies using hypothetical and recalled experiences of victimization found that people’s endorsement of, and satisfaction with, either justice notion depends on the symbolic meaning of the transgression. In Study 1, perceiving the transgression as a status/power violation was uniquely related to the endorsement of retributive justice, whereas perceiving it as a violation of shared values was uniquely related to restorative justice. In Study 2, motivation to restore status/power was related to retributive responses, whereas motivation to restore value consensus with the offender was uniquely related to restorative responses. In Study 3, a scenario experiment, respondents called for greater additional sanction when the applied justice process (retributive vs. restorative) did not fit the salient meaning of the transgressions compared to when it did (status/power vs. values).     

Babble: A Theater in Justice and Discourse

The world studied by empirical criminal justice research is babble—a congeries of voices whose meanings represent many normative worlds. Our research designs provide a frame for the babble, and our statistics codify and simplify it. We provide analytic portraits of it and, using the substantive language of crime control, give those portraits meaning. Yet, those meanings are located in a crime control discourse that de-legitimizes and destroys those normative worlds. This paper, an interpretive montage, is a collection of fractured narratives assembled to show that interpretation has something to offer the way we think about knowledge production in the field of criminal justice. It is also a cautionary tale to students in criminal justice, to remember that our scientific abstractions are an abstraction from the underlying realities of human life, not a “deeper” or in some way more real understanding. Our aim is to move the babble—the humanity from which the voices emerge—back into the foreground of justice research.

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The War with the Ottoman Empire: The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War,Volume 2

The War with the Ottoman Empire: The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War, Volume 2. By Jeffrey Grey (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp.x + 238. 16 Maps. AU$59.95 (cloth).     

Queering the World or Worlding the Queer? New Readings of Anna Kavan’s Who Are You?

Abstract

This essay explores world-literary and queer approaches to Anna Kavan’s little discussed 1963 novel Who Are You?. It argues that world-literary scholarship demonstrates the centrality of white colonial masculinity to capitalist modernity, while a queer reading highlights the anxious performativity at the heart of such power. The most distinctive feature of Kavan’s text is its unusual format, whereby the story is told once, in detail, before immediately being retold, in more concise fashion and with some adjustments. What both fields add to the analysis of this formal deviation is a shared concern with the failings of normative order—whether that be the bourgeois, heteropatriarchal family or the capitalist system itself—and, in turn, the relationship of such failure to narrative disjuncture.     

Mixing Up

Increased interactions between groups of people through modernization may be embraced as mutually enriching or denounced as causing “negative social impacts.’ This paper is predicated on the assumption that people's perceptions of modernization projects influence their outcomes, because people resist rather than commit to negatively perceived projects. The nature of social contact brought about through modernization is a key factor in perceptions of modernization projects. Three types of social contact in a fishing joint venture between the Solomon Islands government and a Japanese company are explored in this paper: contact between men and women, between ethnic groups within Solomon Islands, and between Solomon Islanders and foreigners. Some of the criteria by which interviewees judged social contact included whether it was peaceful or caused friction, whether it caused cultural change, and whether it was hierarchical. The types of contact are discussed in terms of those criteria to reveal their varied effects on perceptions of modernization.