Zombie Law: Conjugality,Annulment, and the (Married) Living Dead

This article deploys and extends Ulrich Beck’s critique of ‘zombie categories’ (Beck in J Consum Cult 1 (2):261–277, 2001) to consider how conjugal relationships are brought into being before the law. The argument presented here is that sexual performatives relating to marriage—and especially, in this instance, consummation—continue to produce a kind of social-legal magic, even as the social flesh of their enactment is rotting. Rules concerning annulment relating to wedding ceremonies, consent, disclosure, and consummation demonstrate that certain frameworks of conjugality involve a kind of corporeal magic animating the privileged place of heterosexual marriage. Thus, rules and regulations pertaining to weddings continue to produce and protect heterogendered, sexually dimorphous bodies, even though this privileging is—or at least, is becoming—socially obsolete.     

The Mistreatment of Others: Discrimination Can Undermine University Identification,Student Health,and Engagement

Past research documents the extent that discrimination experiences and observations can undermine people’s health and performance. In addition to discrimination’s direct consequence for targets, discrimination implicates the morality of the larger community where it occurs. Perceptions of community morality could predict community identification that, in turn, could predict health and performance. To test this serial mediation hypothesis, 615 second- and third-year university undergraduates reported the frequency of discrimination observations and experiences. Students’ perceptions of the university community’s morality mediated the relationship between discrimination and the extent that they identified with the university. In turn, university identification mediated the relationship between university morality and students’ academic engagement and mental health. However, only university morality reliably mediated the relationship between discrimination and physical health. Discrimination can affect the health and engagement of all community members, even observers who are not part of the targeted group.     

Pursuing performance and maintaining compliance: Balancing performance improvement and accountability in Ontario's public health system

This article examines the compatibility between performance improvement and compliance‐based accountability in the implementation of a new system of public health performance management in Ontario. Findings from this mixed‐method study show that only minor elements of performance improvement get incorporated into pre‐existing compliance‐based accountability structures, that reinforcement of accountability structures works to the detriment of performance improvement intentions, and that limiting managerial influence in developing performance measures and targets diminish the utility of information for improvement. The study concludes that achieving a better balance requires an alternative to top‐down decision making that goes beyond consultation to include partnership.     

Public Opinion, Political Communication and the Internet

In contemporary society public opinion is generally mediated by the mass media, which has come to encompass the Habermasian 'public sphere'. This arena is now characterised by the conflict between market and democratic principles, by competing interests of politicians and the media. The presentation of information for debate becomes distorted. The opinion of the 'public' is no longer created through deliberation, but is constructed through systems of communication, in conflict with political actors, who seek to retain control of the dissemination of information. The expansion of the internet as a new method of communication provides a potential challenge to the primacy of the traditional media and political parties as formers of public opinion.     

Feminist histories

Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp: Sydney 1870–90 Oxford University Press) Melbourne, 1987; Marilyn Lake, The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria 1915–38 (Oxford University Press) Melbourne, 1987.     

Childhood sexual abuse and multiple dimensions of self-concept

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the relationship between child sexual abuse (CSA) and self-concept in a nonclinical sample of female college students. Participants with a history of CSA had lower scores than participants without a history of CSA on four domains of self-concept: familial, affect, competence, and physical. History of CSA was not associated with lower self-concept in the social and academic domains. The primary conclusions to be drawn from this study are that CSA may be differentially associated with various domains of self-concept, and thus multidimensional assessment of self-concept can yield useful information that cannot be gathered from global measures which yield a single composite score.