Regulation as a political question

There are at least two frameworks within which the debate on proper institutional arrangements for regulation can be carried out. One rests on seeing the various possibilities as instruments and its central concern is with the most efficient means for achieving regulatory objectives. The second framework views regulation as an essentially political act. It focuses on adapting our choice of institutional alternatives to take account of valued features of our existing political world. It also involves an understanding of how our choice of institutional alternatives actively shapes that world and thus helps to form our regime or the way of life to which we aspire. These two frameworks are examined with special attention being given to the political view.     

REFLECTIONS ON THE STATE OF CONSENSUS-BASED DECISION MAKING IN CHILD WELFARE

Consensus approaches to child protection decision making such as mediation and family group conferencing have become increasingly widespread since first initiated about 25 years ago. They address but are also constrained by paradoxes in the child protection system about commitments to protecting children and to family autonomy. In a series of surveys, interviews, and dialogues, mediation and conferencing researchers and practitioners discussed the key issues that face their work: clarity about purpose, system support, family empowerment, professional qualifications, and coordination among different types of consensus-building efforts. Consensus-based decision making in child protection will continue to expand and grow but will also continue to confront these challenges.     

Can We Talk? What We Have Learned About How to Have Productive Conflicts About Family Policy and Family Law

How we handle professional conflicts affects our capacity to help others in conflict. Two AFCC dialogues, one about domestic violence, the other about shared parenting, illustrate the challenges of taking on professional differences. The former resulted in considerable consensus. The latter involved a frank exchange of differences but little overall consensus. It was, however, an important beginning of a critical conversation. Other issues calling out for constructive conflict engagement, include the crisis in providing access to justice for family litigants who cannot afford legal representation. Professional groups must move beyond defending their own self interests to addressing this crisis.     

Book Review: Game Theory and the Transformation of Family Law by Kenneth H Waldron and Allan R. Koritzinsky

In this book, Waldron and Koritzinsky, provide a stimulating and interesting new way of understanding the impact of traditional approaches to divorce on families and divorcees. They ask whether the structure of divorce can be altered so that the payoff systems for a divorcing couple lead toward a more constructive and cooperative approach. Waldron and Koritzinsky encourage us to understand how what appears to be irrational behavior actually makes sense when you analyze the payoffs built into the divorce process and argue that we can change that system to reward more constructive behavior. They also urge us to look at subjective payoffs as well as objective outcomes. Their application of game theory yields rich insights to divorce practitioners, but it is important to remember that a rational actor model can only go so far in explaining the complexities and variations of the divorce process.     

The Room and the Street: Gwen John’s and Jean Rhys’s Insider/Outsider Modernism

The modernist city is commonly thought of as a city of exteriors; we envision the ‘spaces of modernity’ as sites of industry or leisure, and apply the very notion of the ‘urban’—urban planning, urban studies—to the way we approach public spaces. But by reading together the paintings of Gwen John (1876–1939) and the writings of Jean Rhys (1890–1979), we discern a different modernist story than we are used to hearing—one that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. By focusing on tropes of rooms in their works, the author seeks to nuance our understanding of John’s and Rhys’s relationship to community from within the supposed safety or isolation of their interior rooms, and argues more broadly for a women’s modernism of the city that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. These two figures, who are usually read as ‘outsiders’ to mainstream modernist culture, produce a distinct ‘insider/outsider’ aesthetic which reveals them to be working not outside, but at the very heart of modernist experimentation.