Leisure Experience, Prison Culture, or Victimization? Sex Offenders Report on Prison Gambling

Opportunities for gambling in mainstream North American society have increased greatly over the past two decades. Despite the popularity of legalized gambling and attention it is receiving among social science researchers and economists, gambling within jails and prisons has been overlooked. This study utilized a semistructured interviewing procedure (Smith, 1995) to gain information about prison gambling from 11 sexual offenders on parole—all had spent significant time incarcerated. Qualitative analyses of responses suggest that offenders may gamble in various forms and for a variety of reasons, including a means of alleviating boredom, providing excitement and risk, and an opportunity to socialize. Prison gambling appears to be a complex phenomenon. A substantial amount of prison gambling seems to be associated with certain psychosocial benefits, while for a minority of cases there may be severe violence and victimization.     

'Just because we are amateurs doesn't mean we aren't professional': the importance of expert activists in tenant participation

The current UK government is committed to extending participation in civil society, with the aim of significantly increasing volunteer numbers by 2005. It has put much effort into attracting 'representative participants', particularly from traditionally under-represented groups. 'Natural joiners' attract far less interest and are often written off as 'the same old faces'. But the growth in opportunities for participation has actually encouraged the natural joiners because the nature of much modern participation requires people like them. Focusing on natural joiners and their motivations rather than looking at why the non-joiners don't join, should increase understanding of why people participate and suggest new ways forward. This article looks at people active in tenant participation – a case study of a government 'Sounding Board' and some preliminary results of a survey of activists. There are some unexpected findings, including that the motivations of natural joiners are close to those of career professionals in the same field, and that interest in the 'subject' of participation may be a motivator, rather than an outcome.     

Personalizing solidarity? The role of self-tracking in health insurance pricing

Can data-driven innovations, working across an internet of connected things, personalize health insurance prices? The emergence of self-tracking technologies and their adoption and promotion in health insurance products has been characterized as a threat to solidaristic models of healthcare provision. If individual behaviour rather than group membership were to become the basis of risk assessment, the social, economic and political consequences would be far-reaching. It would disrupt the distributive, solidaristic character that is expressed within all health insurance schemes, even in those nominally designated as private or commercial. Personalized risk pricing is at odds with the infrastructures that presently define, regulate and deliver health insurance. Self-tracking can be readily imagined as an element in an ongoing bio-political redistribution of the burden of responsibility from the state to citizens but it is not clear that such a scenario could be delivered within existing individual private health insurance operational and regulatory infrastructures. In what can be gleaned from publicly available sources discussing pricing experience in the individual markets established by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010 (ACA), widely known as ‘Obamacare’, it appears unlikely that it can provide the means to personalize price. Using the case of Oscar Health, a technology driven start-up trading in the ACA marketplaces, I explore the concepts, politics and infrastructures at work in health insurance markets.     

The Philadelphia predictive policing experiment

Journal of Experimental Criminology - This place-based, randomized experiment explored the impact of different patrol strategies on violent and property crime in microscale predicted crime areas....     

Jacob Zuma, the social body and the unruly power of song

This article tracks the life of the song ‘Umshini Wami’(My Machine Gun) adopted by Jacob Zuma, the President of theAfrican National Congress, since early 2005.  It exploresthe wider implications of political song in the public spherein South Africa and aims to show how ‘Umshini Wami’helped Jacob Zuma to prominence and demonstrated a longing inthe body politic for a political language other than that ofa distancing and alienating technocracy. The article also exploresthe early pre-Zuma provenance of the song, its links to thepre-1994 struggle period and its entanglement in a seamlessmasculinity with little place for gendered identities in thenew state to come. It argues too that the song can be seen asunstable and unruly, a signifier with a power of its own andnot entirely beholden to its new owner.     

Maytree: A respite center for the suicidal: an evaluation

This paper evaluates the contribution to suicide prevention made by an innovative project, Maytree, a respite center for the suicidal. Maytree offers a distinctive brief period of sanctuary for four nights for suicidal people; within this limited time it aims to provide opportunities through talking, reflecting, and relaxing for reducing the intense feelings that lead to suicidal behavior. The focus of this paper is on evaluating the first 3 years of Maytree's operation, exploring how Maytree works, and its effects on the people who stay there as "guests". This shows that Maytree reaches people who are at significant risk of suicide. Guests report both short term relief and longer term benefits. These changes are understood, through applying crisis intervention theory, as being generated by the opportunities for change in the Maytree approach. Thus, there is the potential for a benign cycle to be established. Maytree's model is different from that of mainstream, statutory services; we conclude that Maytree complements these services and also challenges the values and frameworks of statutory provision in the field of suicide prevention.     

Women have servants and men never eat: issues in reading gender,using the case study of mass-observation's 1937 day-diaries

Abstract

The category ‘gender’ has become axiomatic to feminist analysis: analysing the dynamics and outcomes of gender has come to be seen as constituting ‘what academic feminists do’. Within feminist analysis, gender is positioned as ana prioricharacteristic of social life; and gender is also analytically privileged as the most salient characteristic of people and social situations. Both assumptions are challenged. This article argues instead that gender is not a discovery, something innately ‘there’ in social life, but is rather to be understood as an invention, an imposed analytic category of great utility for academic feminism, but also one which creates as many analytic troubles as it solves. The article problematises thea prioriand privileged status of gender within feminist analysis by discussing various interpretational issues involved in analysing a set of day-diaries written by women and men for Mass-Observation in 1937, in particular focusing on reading and writing as interpretational acts which are often treated as analytically transparent. Here, however, this epistemological bracketing is suspended, and instead both are scrutinised in analytical detail. Although the argument is discussed in relation to these specific historical materials, it is argued that the same epistemological issues arise in relation to the analysis of all kinds of research materials, whether historical or present-day, for reading and writing are the crucial elements of interpretation, and interpretation is itself central to feminist as to all other analysis.     

DESIRING YOUNG LES(BI)AN VISIONARIES IN THE ARCHIVE

This paper presents a critically reflexive account of the experiences of a group of researchers at the Canadian Women's Movement Archives. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, Claire Colebrook, and Victoria Hesford, it argues that the researchers shared intensely embodied and emotional encounters with the archival record of lesbians’ struggles to create and define community. These encounters encouraged the researchers to explore the potential of their own sexual subjectivities. Their deepened understanding of the complex lesbian and feminist past provided them with the desire to reconsider the collective promise of ‘lesbian’ and ‘bisexual’ for their own future community.