“We Don't Want a Teacher”: Using the Past to Offer Fresh Eyes to Contemporary Practice

Much historical and contemporary writing lauds the Citizenship Schools of the Civil Rights Movement, and the Highlander Folk School that supported them, as major players in the struggle to educate Black people across the South as citizens and voters. However, little scholarly literature explores the pedagogical and programmatic elements of these community-driven schools or the ways these schools provided an infrastructure to the movement. Drawing from archival research, this article examines these schools and connects their educational methods to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. It names ways these methods influenced present practice in youth work for social change while also identifying the ways that many of the practices of these schools have been ignored or lost in contemporary youth work. It concludes by identifying from this work 9 questions youth workers can pose to orient their youth work toward social and racial justice.     

Problems of assessing sibship probabilities by means of genetic analysis

Nowadays, kinship studies based only on STR analysis are a very common practice. Apart from regular paternity cases, there is a rising number of cases in which the type of sibship between two persons has to be determined. Very often the parents or further relatives are unavailable for testing, so that the probability e. g. for a half-sibship has to be calculated as a deficiency situation. 50 unrelated persons (Group 1), 50 full siblings (Group 2), and 50 half-siblings (Group 3) were genotyped using the 15 STRs comprised by the AmpFlSTR Identifiler multiplex PCR-kit to investigate the reliability of common statistics programs and the indicative value of the calculated probabilities. Using a commercially available statistics program, we calculated probabilities for the following hypotheses: 1. The persons investigated are full siblings; 2. the persons investigated are half-siblings; 3. the persons investigated are unrelated. After STR analysis, half-sibling probabilities between 0.03 %-97.56% for group 1, between 0.01%-78.46% for group 2, and between 24.28%-90.18% for group 3 were calculated. In addition, the authors present two complicated deficiency cases which could be resolved only by extensive DNA typing using X- and Y-chromosomal loci, respectively, as well as the investigation of further relatives. The results of this study suggest that typing of autosomal STRs alone is no sufficient tool for resolving cases of possible half-sibship, even if probabilities of more than 90.0% are obtained. Due to the results of our study we suggest the implementation of mandatory standards for the investigation and interpretation of complicated kinship cases.     

Hat die Moderne einen normativen Gehalt?

Das Projekt einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie steht und fällt seit ihren Anfängen mit der Begründung ihres normativen Standpunktes, der den Hintergrund für eine kritische Gesellschaftsdiagnose bereitstellt. Vor der Soziologie war dieser Standpunkt insofern unproblematisch, als die moderne Gesellschaft mehrere normative Diskurse pflegte, mit denen sie ihren normativen Gehalt zu rekonstruieren versuchte. Die soziologische Entdeckung der Kontingenz hat demgegenüber den Zweifel genährt, dass ein solches Projekt einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie unter Kontingenzbedingungen überhaupt möglich ist. Kontingenz und normative Begründung scheinen sich spätestens seit Weber auszuschließen. Adornos kritische Theorie hat versucht, dieses Problem durch zwei widerstreitende Argumente zu lösen: durch ein geschichtsphilosophisches und ein erkenntniskritisches. Das geschichtsphilosophische ist von Habermas in eine Diskurstheorie transformiert worden, während das erkenntniskritische zwar Eingang in die postmoderne Gesellschaftstheorie Baumans gefunden hat, aber durch eine anthropologische Lesart entschärft wurde. Der am Schluss des Aufsatzes vorgeschlagene Weg der Neufassung einer Begründung kritischer Gesellschaftstheorie versucht dagegen zu zeigen, dass sich aus einer erkenntniskritischen Argumentation eine normative Konsequenz ziehen lässt: Die erkenntniskritisch aufgezeigte Unbegründbarkeit von Normen ist dann nicht länger ein Argument gegen eine kritische Gesellschaftstheorie. Sondern sie zeigt, inwiefern sich die Unbegründbarkeit als normativer Gehalt der modernen Gesellschaft verstehen lässt.     

Political entrepreneurship and the formation of special districts

Where general purpose governments provide a bundle of services within their boundaries, special district governments provide specific services inside the boundaries of general purpose governments. The alternative to forming a special purpose government is providing the service within a general purpose government. Formation of a special district represents the establishment of a new political enterprise, in contrast to the addition of a new product line to an existing government. We explore the formation of special districts as a particular form of the universal entrepreneurial search for gain or profit from exchange. Political entrepreneurship, like market entrepreneurship, operates inside some framework of rules, and the formation of special districts reflects the search for political gain within that framework of rules. We use an entrepreneurial framework to formulate several hypotheses concerning the formation and organization of special districts.