Fictions of Humanitarian Responsibility: Narrating Microfinance

This article explores competing narratives of humanitarian responsibility that emerge in the digital life writings of Westerners who seek to mitigate global poverty through the American microfinance website Kiva. Using word maps to identify dominant rhetorical gestures, data analysis to detect emergent patterns, and close readings to interpret individual tone and genre, I look at a range of ways in which individuals on Kiva narrate their understanding of humanitarian motivation. In addition to conventions of an ethics of care, norms of reciprocity, and perceptions of worldliness, these digital life writings include an increasing emphasis on the responsible lender as the antiheroic, perverse subject who impersonates a responsible citizen without fully claiming or accepting full responsibility for humanitarian actions. These different modes not only work to articulate connections between givers and receivers of aid but also to seek to recalibrate the grounds of what aid givers consider their own community. These different modes offer a window into what I call the fictionalization of humanitarianism, or the way in which humanitarian responsibility constitutes a layered anthology of collaborative and competing stories.     

The Rituals of Public Meetings

Public meetings are often referred to as “rituals” to denote a largely symbolic activity with little concrete meaning. This essay explores how public meeting rituals may produce very real impacts on participants and pragmatic outcomes. Whereas tangible outputs of rituals are not always evident, ritual theory suggests that participants can derive latent meaning and significant comfort from their application. Although rituals serve to reify certain norms or control behaviors, they may also reaffirm civic values and encourage group cohesion. A deeper appreciation of public meeting rituals will enable participants and officials to respond more effectively to restructured or nontraditional formats as well as better deal with the challenges of maintaining participation when rituals lose their meaning.     

Understanding Gorbachev: The Importance of Politics

Two senior CIA economists analyze the status of interrepublican economic relations in the former USSR from the fall of 1991 through July 1992. Critically assessed are Russia's role in forcing adjustments in other republics' economic policies, their failure to agree on an economic union in 1991, and efforts to cooperate in 1992. Strategies to cope with mounting debt, new currencies, reliance on barter, and severed supply links are then examined, as are prospects for near-term stabilization of interrepublican trade (including prices) and longer-term outlook for the republics in light of ongoing discussions on a ruble zone. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: P20, P27, P40.     

The subjective and objective violence of terrorism: analysing “British values” in newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack

This article examines how ?i?ek’s analysis of “subjective” violence can be used to explore the ways in which media coverage of a terrorist attack is contoured and shaped by less noticeable forms of “objective” (symbolic and systemic) violence. Drawing upon newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack, it is noted how examples of “subjective” violence were grounded in the externalisation of a clearly identifiable “other”, which symbolically framed the terrorists and the attack as tied to and representative of the UK Muslim community. Examples of “systematic” violence were most notable in the ideological edifice that underpinned this framing but also in the ways in which newspaper reports served to draw upon British values in the aftermath of the attack. This directed attention away from the contradictions within the UK, towards narratives that sought to “fix” these contradictions through eradicating the problem of “the other” and/or by violently protecting the British values “they” seek to undermine. As a consequence, newspaper coverage worked to uphold the illusion that “peace” could be achieved by eradicating terrorism through further forms of objective violence, including, internment without trial; the “ripping up” of human rights; and closer surveillance of Muslim communities. Indeed, it was this unacknowledged violence that worked to maintain British values in the press' coverage.     

Early Menarcheal Age and Risk for Later Depressive Symptomatology: The Role of Childhood Depressive Symptoms

Previous research has investigated the relationship between pubertal timing and depression in girls, with most results suggesting that earlier menarche predicts more depression in adolescence. However, few studies have controlled for the potentially confounding effects of childhood depressive symptoms. The current study uses a prospective, longitudinal sample of 1,185 girls (47.8 % Caucasian) to examine the relationships between pubertal timing, childhood depressive symptoms, and adolescent depressive symptomatology. Using multiple linear regression analyses, our results suggest that higher levels of childhood depressive symptoms and earlier menarche have independent effects on adolescent depressive symptoms. Surprisingly, childhood depressive symptomatology predicted later age of menarche, although the magnitude of this effect was small. Taken together, the results suggest that early childhood depressive symptoms and early menarche represent independent pathways to later depressive symptoms.