Drawing the Line: Sex Education and Homosexuality in South Australia, 1985

This paper examines a specific controversy over the control and content of sex education in South Australia in 1985 that was triggered by concerns about homosexuality. Drawing on Foucault's idea of the "deployment of sexuality", the paper examines the way in which the issue of homosexuality became the focal point for a concerted struggle over sex education in state schools. It is argued that the idea of homosexuality, or more accurately male homosexual sexuality, served as a boundary marker that both defined and revealed the content and scope of school-based sex education. It is shown that this controversy was an instance of the "deployment of sexuality" through which public opinion was concentrated and mobilised to ensure that prevailing heterosexual norms remained the defining parameters for sex education. Thus it is also demonstrated that sex education is deeply implicated in both the construction and maintenance of prevailing (gendered) sexual norms.     

WASH and Nutrition Synergies: The Case of Tunisia

This paper develops a simple econometric strategy to operationalise the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF’s) conceptual framework for nutrition. It estimates the extent to which child stunting correlates with investments in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) across population groups (poor and nonpoor) and residence (urban and rural). Moving away from estimating single intervention marginal returns, the empirical framework of intervention packages is tested in Tunisia, a country with notable but uneven progress in reducing stunting. A successful nutritional strategy will thereby require mapping the distinctive intervention packages by residence and socio-economic status, away from universal policies, that more strongly correlate with reduction in stunting.     

The devil we know and the angel that did not fly: An examination of devil/angel shift in twitter fracking “debates” in NY 2008–2018

Recent work has applied the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine narrative strategies in policy debates on social media platforms. We contribute to the literature by applying the NPF to fracking policy debates in New York using well-established Natural Language Processing tools, including sentiment analysis. We combine this computational approach with a qualitative hand-coding of pro- and antifracking Twitter influentials. This approach allows us to consider a much larger corpus of tweets over a much longer time frame than has been done thus far. We adapt and test NPF propositions related to the use of the devil/angel shift strategies before and after a major state-wide policy change, that is, a state-wide moratorium on high volume hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Overall, we find evidence for the use of the devil shift narrative strategy by the pro-fracking coalition aimed at the Governor prior to the moratorium. After the moratorium, the relative percentage of Tweets containing devil shift sentiments decreases as the pro-fracking coalition generally downshifts in its use of angel shift language without a corresponding increase in devil shift language, whereas, conversely, the anti-fracking coalition generally downshifts in its use of devil shift language without a general increase in angel shift language. When we shifted our analysis to Tweets containing fracking and the Governor, we found a similar postban decrease in devil shift language among anti-fracking users. Our findings offer lessons for using computational tools in the NPF as an approach to expand analytic ability and for the operationalization of concepts such as narrative strategies and policy entrepreneurs.     

“The guerilla is like a poet”

Abstract

And once more, the company brought with it harassment and destruction. This time, however, it was the PANAMIN main office that sent the orders to have the Manobos taken off their land. PANAMIN, the supposed friend of the cultural minorities, ordered their evacuation. And so they were trucked in a BUSCO vehicle like cattle, and dumped at the Quezon public school and Catholic chapel. Dumped and left there. With little food, little medicine, little shelter. It was there they lived for one month. One long month.     

Criminalystic: effectiveness of lysochromes on the developing of invisible lipstick-contaminated lipmarks on human skin. A preliminary study

Latent prints are an important evidence for identification. Nowadays, the technical means, the implementation of image processing techniques and the use of database makes it possible to detect and get information from some prints that seem to be useless at first sight. On the other hand, the possibility of using the print as a DNA source has to be considered, so as to double its identifying value. Human skin is a particularly difficult surface for developing this kind of evidences. Although different methods for locating and developing latent fingerprints on the skin have been already described, it has not been found any method, at the revised bibliography, to obtain and develop invisible lipmarks, that is, lipmarks from protective lipstick, or permanent or long-lasting lipstick. The aim of the work that follows is to determine the effectiveness of several reagents for developing invisible lipmarks on the corpses' skin. Preliminary results show that, under the described experimental conditions, the reagents used, Sudan III, Oil Red O and Sudan Black, are effective for obtaining recent latent lip prints on corpse's skin.     

Experimenting with Law: Brecht on Copyright

Law and Critique - Can one reject copyright law and be a qualified observer of its dispositives? This question was taken up by Bertolt Brecht in an intriguing essay concerning the litigation...