“I’m totally transariffic”: Exploring how Transgender and Gender-expansive Youth and Young Adults Make Sense of their Challenges and Successes

As transgender and gender-expansive (TGE) youth and young adults (YYA) navigate challenging environments, they often seek spaces for safety and acceptance. This study explores ways in which a group of TGE YYA who were engaged with a community-based service organization make sense of their experiences, challenges, and successes in ways that illuminate the factors and processes associated with resilience. Secondary data analysis was conducted on qualitative responses from 85 TGE YYA ages 13–24. The themes that emerged provide insight into the ways community-based programs and providers can understand and support the resilience of TGE YYA.     

Conceptualising and tracing the increased territorialisation of politics: insights from Argentina

The territorialisation of politics is a crucial transformation in state–society relations that has implications on how contemporary politics works. Defined here as the dispute for the physical control of space, be it a municipality, province or portion of land, within one or more politically constituted entities. It does not mean the emergence of a new regime type, but the process through which the territory re-emerges as a new cleavage after neoliberal reforms and authoritarian regimes have weakened/dissolved neo-corporatist arrangements for the resolution of socio-political conflicts in society. It is a cleavage because central political divisions are produced as a result of the physical encounter of or distance between political actors and of the dispute for the control of a territory for sociopolitical goals and causes that are not always territorially defined. Departing from this definition, I also raise potential explanatory hypotheses for the transformations that favoured this transformation in Argentina.     

End of the Lone Wolf: The Typology that Should Not Have Been

This research note argues that the “lone wolf” typology should be fundamentally reconsidered. Based on a three-year empirical research project, two key points are made to support this argument. First, the authors found that ties to online and offline radical milieus are critical to lone actors' adoption and maintenance of both the motive and capability to commit acts of terrorism. Second, in terms of pre-attack behaviors, the majority of lone actors are not the stealthy and highly capable terrorists the “lone wolf” moniker alludes to. These findings not only urge a reconsideration of the utility of the lone-wolf concept, they are also particularly relevant for counterterrorism professionals, whose conceptions of this threat may have closed off avenues for detection and interdiction that do, in fact, exist.     

Contested Resource Extraction,Anti-Corporate Protests and the Politics of Movement Alliance in Bangladesh

Why do activist groups form alliances and why do some alliances later fall apart? This article asks these questions in the context of a popular mobilisation against resource extraction in Bangladesh. It focuses on the dynamics of a strategic alliance between a locally organised community mobilisation against a British mining company and an urban radical activist group, known for its anti-capitalist activism, to explore the subsequent collapse of the alliance and the demobilisation of one group. Based on the qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with activists and organisational documents, the article probes the underlying causes of rupture. Although several individual and organisational factors are identified, it is argued that Bangladesh’s confrontational political culture and its authoritarian party system played a critical role, with local activists vulnerable to co-optation or being silenced by powerful political actors. The article contributes to social movement scholarship by emphasising that specific political cultures can undermine efforts to build strategic alliances between diverse social movement organisations.     

Patterns and Correlates of Offender Versatility and Specialization Across a 23-Year Span for At-Risk Young Men

The authors examined patterns and correlates of offender specialization versus versatility, or more random offenses, among 206 at-risk men. Both official records and self-report data of offending from late childhood to ages 31–32 years old were used. Aggregate- and individual-level analyses indicated that the predominant offender pattern for this sample was versatility. Three correlates of offender versatility were examined (offense frequency, early onset, gang association). Aggregate-level findings consistently revealed offense frequency as a robust correlate of offender versatility, whereas individual-level findings differed among the three measures of offender versatility. The congruence of these findings with predictions from Patterson’s (1982) coercion model is discussed.     

RNICE Model: Evaluating the Contribution of Replication Studies in Public Administration and Management Research

Replication studies relate to the scientific principle of replicability and serve the significant purpose of providing supporting (or contradicting) evidence regarding the existence of a phenomenon. However, replication has never been an integral part of public administration and management research. Recently, scholars have called for more replication, but academic reflections on when replication adds substantive value to public administration and management research are needed. This article presents the RNICE conceptual model, for assessing when and how a replication study contributes knowledge about a social phenomenon and advances knowledge in the public administration and management literatures. The RNICE model provides a vehicle for researchers who seek to evaluate or demonstrate the value of a replication study systematically. The practical application of the model is illustrated using two published replication studies.     

On scale work: evidential practices and global health interventions

Abstract

Scalability can be understood as the ability to expand without changing. Yet, expanding an intervention to a global scale, we suggest, is a significant and difficult accomplishment. In this paper we propose to explore the kind of evidential exigencies that this accomplishment involves. To do so, we focus on the field of global health and examine how child immunization against the pneumococcus bacterium has been scaled up in low-income countries. The paper first attends to initial epidemiological scrutiny that revealed the existence of a large-scale public health problem and the possibility of an expandable solution (vaccination). It then describes the set-up of a funding arrangement using overseas aid to purchase vaccine doses manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, before paying attention to various frictions that affect the widespread use of pneumococcal vaccines. In these different moments through which scalability is accomplished, always partially and temporarily, we show that a dual activity can be witnessed, a pivoting between referential work and forward projection. To conclude, we suggest that scalability is more usefully approached as a form of expansion that is always attentive to the possibilities of change.