Cortisol Stress Response Variability in Early Adolescence: Attachment,Affect and Sex

Attachment, affect, and sex shape responsivity to psychosocial stress. Concurrent social contexts influence cortisol secretion, a stress hormone and biological marker of hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis activity. Patterns of attachment, emotion status, and sex were hypothesized to relate to bifurcated, that is, accentuated and attenuated, cortisol reactivity. The theoretical framework for this study posits that multiple individual differences mediate a cortisol stress response. The effects of two psychosocial stress interventions, a modified Trier Social Stress Test for Teens and the Frustration Social Stressor for Adolescents were developed and investigated with early adolescents. Both of these protocols induced a significant stress reaction and evoked predicted bifurcation in cortisol responses; an increase or decrease from baseline to reactivity. In Study I, 120 predominantly middle-class, Euro-Canadian early adolescents with a mean age of 13.43 years were studied. The girls’ attenuated cortisol reactivity to the public performance stressor related significantly to their self-reported lower maternal-attachment and higher trait-anger. In Study II, a community sample of 146 predominantly Euro-Canadian middle-class youth, with an average age of 14.5 years participated. Their self-reports of higher trait-anger and trait-anxiety, and lower parental attachment by both sexes related differentially to accentuated and attenuated cortisol reactivity to the frustration stressor. Thus, attachment, affect, sex, and the stressor contextual factors were associated with the adrenal-cortical responses of these adolescents through complex interactions. Further studies of individual differences in physiological responses to stress are called for in order to clarify the identities of concurrent protective and risk factors in the psychosocial stress and physiological stress responses of early adolescents.     

Narrating Indigenous Boundaries: Postcolonial and Decolonial Storytelling in Northern Minnesota

This article examines two narrative case studies, one biography and one traditional indigenous story, as they inform the dynamics of community, politics, and nationhood for Anishinaabe indigenous people in northern Minnesota. The narratives both provide power and legitimacy to Anishinaabe national identity but inform different political projects of decolonial and postcolonial nationalism, respectively, complicating both settler and indigenous attempts to define indigenous nationhood in a way that is fixed and static. This finding is used to critique the dominant nation-state centric notions of nationhood and to propose alternative modes of understanding nationhood in the context of indigenous politics.     

Performing blackness in the “Rainbow Nation”: Athi-Patra Ruga’s The Future White Women of Azania

This article applies Saidiya Hartman’s framework of performing blackness to South African performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s performance series, The Future White Women of Azania, to consider the ways in which the performances index the convoluted imbrications of colonialism, specifically Apartheid policy in South Africa, and postcolonialism, specifically the anti-Apartheid struggle(s) and the current political and economic structure of South African democracy. It argues that Ruga’s performance makes evident political and economic systems that tout black and queer liberation while perpetuating black queer death. Ruga’s work also relocates Hartman’s framework to a transnational, postcolonial context, expanding the notion of performing blackness (and the entangled processes of domination and subordination that it maps) beyond the trans-Atlantic paradigm, suggesting that performing blackness could be used to understand the correlation between broader spatial and temporal phenomena that shape blackness. Finally, situating The Future White Women of Azania as not only a performance of blackness, but of queerness as well, postulates that layering sexuality onto Hartman’s model reveals that the dynamics articulated under performing blackness are evident between oppressors and oppressed and between members of each of these groups as Hartman notes, but also between the contingent axes of subjectivity within an individual’s experience.     

Secrecy and Self-Interest: When Mediators Act Deceitfully

3rd party intervention in interstate conflict is a common strategy for mitigating conflict and obtaining a final agreement. However, not all mediations are successful, leading to the development of a rich literature on the mechanisms which decrease the probability of failure in a 3rd-party intervention. Within this literature, some studies examine how a mediator’ behavior and incentives affect the result of the mediation. Virtually all these studies assume that the mediator is virtuous such that peace is the most desired outcome of a conflict for her. However, this study challenges this assumption and contends that a mediator can gain benefit from the conflict between disputants. If this benefit is adequately large to overcome the benefits of peace, then the mediator has enough incentive not to conduct the mediation toward a peaceful outcome. We develop a signaling game model to study this issue formally and test the proposed hypothesis empirically.     

Elite Influence? Religion and the Electoral Success of the Nazis

In Weimar Germany, the Catholic Church vehemently warned ordinary parishioners about the dangers of extremist parties. We establish that constituencies' religious composition is a key empirical predictor of Nazi vote shares—dwarfing the explanatory power of any other demographic or socioeconomic variable. Even after carefully accounting for observational differences, Catholics were far less likely to vote for the NSDAP than their Protestant counterparts. The evidence suggests that this disparity was, in large part, due to the sway of the Catholic Church and its dignitaries. At the same time, we show that attempts to immunize Catholics against the radical left failed to achieve the desired result. To explain the puzzling asymmetry in the Church's influence at the ballot box, we develop a simple theoretical framework of elite influence in electoral politics.     

The Future of Leadership in Public Universities: Is Shared Leadership the Answer?

Leadership of public universities has come under fire—from scandals, from funding, from students, from every direction. Top‐down leadership of institutions of higher education has been described as a “disease.” Shared governance—a mechanism of faculty representation in the leadership and decision‐making processes—a seeming alternative, has been described as “a recipe for paralysis.” In this article, the authors proffer shared leadership as a potential elixir for leading public institutions of higher learning, unleashing creative potential, focusing on pressing strategic imperatives, and enabling sustainable systems that leverage true talent to maximum effect. It is time to move beyond the moribund myth of top‐down heroic leadership and beyond the bureaucratic, political quagmire of the current state of affairs in shared governance. Is shared leadership the answer?      

INSTITUTIONAL LAYERING IN GOVERNING HEALTHCARE QUALITY

Since the 1980s, regulated markets and New Public Management have been introduced in the public sector across the world. How they have affected existing governance mechanisms such as self‐regulation and state regulation has remained largely unexplored, however. This article examines the origins and consequences of institutional layering in governing healthcare quality. Dutch health care, where a market‐based system has been introduced, is used as a case study. The results show that this market‐based system did not replace but modified existing institutional arrangements. As a result, hospitals have to deal with the fragmentation of quality demands. Using the concept of institutional layering, this study shows how different arrangements interact. As a consequence, the introduction of a certain policy reform will work out differently in different countries and policy sectors. Our ‘archaeological’ study in this layering can be seen as an example of how such incremental change can be studied in detail.     

The Challenges to Cooperation Posed by the Nexus of Terrorism and Organized Crime: Comparing the Situations Between the Andean and the Sahel Regions

The recent conflict in the Sahel area is another case where the nexus of terrorism and organized crime causes challenges to the international community. Comparing the situation with that of the Andean region brings forth the challenges faced when dealing with this type of conflict: the states’ weak presence in the remote regions, the insurgents’ ability to offer income and “security” to the people, immediate threat to international investments, unresolved political/regional issues, the marriage of convenience of insurgents/terrorists and organized crime, internal divisions of the insurgent groups and also ideologies surviving or suffering after the elimination of their leaders.