Interrogating Gender Divides in Technology for Education and Development: the Case of the One Laptop per Child Project in Ghana

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project aims to make low-cost computers accessible to the “world’s poorest children,” presuming that the gadgets will support their empowerment via education. The project’s success globally, however, has been mixed at best, with many countries terminating their purchases due to cost, inadequate infrastructure, and negative side effects. In October 2010, Ghana suspended the country’s 3-year participation. This study examines the complex history and failure of OLPC Ghana in two pilot schools, one urban and one rural, with particular attention to gender bias. The analysis draws on interviews with government personnel, students, and teachers in the pilot classes. Despite lacking electric power in the rural community, UNDP’s Millennium Villages Project played a strong support role, making OLPC somewhat more effective with less of a gender divide in the rural school than in the urban school in Accra. Both pilot schools faced severe sustainability challenges raising decade-old questions about modernity and technological determinism. Further, in both schools, particularly the urban school, a digital divide by gender was evident.     

Self-rated health and barriers to healthcare in Ukraine: The pivotal role of gender and its intersections

The ongoing health crisis in the Ukraine has persisted for 48 years with a clear division of gender-based outcomes as seen in the decline of male life expectancy and stagnation of female longevity. The purpose of this paper is to investigate differences in self-rated health and system barriers to health care applicable to gender and its intersections because of the differing negative health outcomes for men and women. Intersectionality theory provides an analytic framework for interpreting our results. Utilizing a nationwide sample of the Ukrainian population (N = 1908), we found that low socioeconomic status (SES) women rate their health worse than men generally and any other socioeconomic group. Yet women also face the greatest barriers to health care until older ages when the ailments of men cause them to likewise face the obstacles. In reviewing the barrier to health care scale, one barrier—that of health care services being too expensive—dominated the responses with some 52.5 percent of the sample reporting it. Consequently, the greatest problem in Ukraine with respect to health reform reported by the population is the out-of-pocket costs for care in a system that is officially free. These costs, constituting some 40 percent of all national health expenditures, affect women and the aged the most.     

Conflict resolution classrooms to careers: an emergent theory of change with implications for a strategy in peace education

Peace education provides for the development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions appropriate to effective peacebuilding. Therefore, the development of curriculum in degree programs which builds bridges by which students in conflict resolution/peace studies classrooms may cross over to the field of conflict transformation and peacebuilding may properly be thought of as within the sphere of peace education. This paper describes an emerging theory of change in the context of the peace education offered by a graduate and undergraduate program of conflict resolution. It is argued that employability exists at the nexus of student skills and attributes, and the demands of a labor market which a partnership between experienced practitioners and academics has a responsibility to inform and shape through outreach, education, practice, evaluation, research, and publication.     

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.     

Indicators for economic vulnerability to drought in South Africa

This article identifies and estimates economic drought vulnerability indicators among communal farmers in South Africa, using an economic vulnerability index based on a household survey of 121 communal farmers. The results show that lack of resources, unemployment, price sensitivity, market access, the level of farm debt, output, on- and off-farm diversification, management, and financial safety nets were the main economic vulnerability variables. Farm debt and financial safety provide the bulk of the vulnerability index. The study’s findings suggest that government should reconsider priorities in the implementation of appropriate policy measures in response to drought.     

Party politics,elections and (mis-)trust in Japan

Abstract

Trust matters profoundly for many dimensions of political life. In this article we focus on political trust: how the trust or mistrust citizens have toward the political process, politicians and government affects politics. Prior research has shown that political trust influences such crucial dimensions of politics as the basic legitimacy of government, political participation, voting behavior, compliance with government, and reform orientation. In this article, we seek to answer three major questions. First, is political trust declining in Japan? Second, we are interested in exploring the determinants of trust and distrust in politics: why do people lose trust in politics? What kinds of voters lose political trust? Third, we explore the consequences: what happens when people lose trust in government and politics.     

Effects of Economic and Symbolic Threat Appeals in Right-Wing Populist Advertising on Anti-Immigrant Attitudes: The Impact of Textual and Visual Appeals

Right-wing populist parties portray immigrants as economic or symbolic threats in their political advertisements by constructing a moral divide between the “good” ordinary people and “bad” immigrants. Yet, it remains unclear how these different threat appeals contribute to the formation of anti-immigrant attitudes among citizens and what role visual elements play in producing these effects. A survey-experiment with a quota sample of 471 participants reveals that, overall, symbolic threat appeals exert stronger effects on anti-immigrant attitudes than economic ones. When presented via text alone, only symbolic—not economic—threat appeals increased anti-immigrant attitudes via the activation of heuristic processing such as the reliance on negative stereotypes or feelings of anxiety, in particular among lower-educated citizens. When visuals were present, both types of threat appeals enhanced anti-immigrant attitudes among citizens across all education levels based on heuristic processing. Additionally, high image-text congruency induced cognitive argument approval resulting in higher anti-immigrant attitudes.