“Because That’s What Justice Is to Us”: Exploring the Racialized Collateral Consequences of New Parochialism

Renewed interest in communities as spaces for criminal opportunity has generated numerous studies of neighborhood social dynamics and crime. Most of this research is rooted in social disorganization theory, which examines neighborhood structural characteristics that facilitate effective social control. While many studies tout the benefits of community-based controls, the potential externalities of these efforts remain underexplored. In the modern neoliberal context, where policing strategies stress community involvement and often focus on vaguely-defined problems like “quality of life” or “incivilities” and where police have considerable enforcement discretion, the unintended consequences of community-based controls are important to document. I use the ethnographic case study of Gardner Village to explore the potential collateral consequences of one form of collective social control: new parochialism. Applying a critical lens to the social disorganization literature, I argue that when embedded in particular structural contexts, new parochialism contributes to the reproduction of inequality and undermines community-building processes.     

Trauma Characteristics and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder among Adolescent Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse

This study examined the relationship between the characteristics of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and the severity of consequent posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, suicidal ideation, and substance use in a sample of 83 female adolescents aged 13–18 years seeking treatment for PTSD. Nearly two-thirds of the sample (60.7 %, n?=?51) reported the perpetrator of the CSA was a relative. A large portion (40.5 %, n?=?34) of the sample reported being victimized once, while almost a quarter of the sample reported chronic victimization (23.8 %, n?=?20). PTSD and depression scores were in the clinical range, whereas reported levels of suicidal ideation and substance use were low. The frequency of victimizations was associated with suicidal ideation. Contrary to expectation, CSA characteristics including trauma type, perpetrator relationship, and duration of abuse were unrelated to PTSD severity, depressive symptoms, or substance abuse.     

Must Internal Working Models be Internalized? A Case Illustrating an Alternative Pathway to Attachment

Internal working models of attachment are conceptualized as internalizations of interpersonal dynamics involving attachment—schemata derived from secure therapeutic relationships if not established in childhood. The potential for developing internal working models in the absence of adequate attachment history is demonstrated by the case of a dismissing (avoidantly-attached) client with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) abandoned in early childhood. Using the Collective Heart model (Krakauer 2001)—which targets posttraumatic misattributions of power and quickly challenges the client’s perceived brokenness and helplessness—the client formed an intimate bond with a formerly unconscious inner guidance resource experienced as a maternal attachment figure long before a robust therapeutic relationship was established. Verbatim case material illustrates autohypnotic interventions potentiating this “Wise Mother’s” guidance of the client’s identity development and mastery of relational tasks by mining and augmenting fragmentary attachment experiences. Theoretical and clinical implications of the evolution and function of the Wise Mother are discussed.     

Can the Public Trust Doctrine Save the High Seas?

Abstract

The high seas is one of the last remaining commons on the planet, but comprehensive efforts to save this area beyond national jurisdiction have not been successful. This article examines the feasibility of applying the public trust doctrine to the high seas by first evaluating tools that are currently in place to protect biodiversity then analyzing the public trust doctrine in its traditional application in the United States and other countries. With this foundation, the article examines the possibility and methodology of applying the public trust concept to protect the high seas.     

‘The Woman was a Stranger’: childbirth and community in eighteenth-century England*

On 17 December 1766 James Field stood accused at the Old Bailey of the ‘wilful murder of a new born child, by casting it into a tub of water’. The case was exceptional in many ways—not only was the accused male but he and his family had removed themselves from the network of neighbourly interactions that characterised lower status life in this period. As a result, the court's deposition statements record ideas of belonging and community with unusual clarity. Using Field as a case study, this article explores the involvement of the local community in the experience of childbirth in the eighteenth century. It will argue that childbirth had an active role in the creation of neighbourhood, and momentarily captured shifting eighteenth-century understandings of community.     

The paradox of grading systems

We distinguish between (i) voting systems in which voters can rank candidates and (ii) those in which they can grade candidates, using two or more grades. In approval voting, voters can assign two grades only—approve (1) or not approve (0)—to candidates. While two grades rule out a discrepancy between the average-grade winners, who receive the highest average grade, and the superior-grade winners, who receive more superior grades in pairwise comparisons (akin to Condorcet winners), more than two grades allow it. We call this discrepancy between the two kinds of winners the paradox of grading systems, which we illustrate with several examples and whose probability we estimate for sincere and strategic voters through a Monte Carlo simulation. We discuss the tradeoff between (i) allowing more than two grades, but risking the paradox, and (ii) precluding the paradox, but restricting voters to two grades.     

Towards a Decolonial Critical Political Economy of the Media: Some Initial Thoughts

Abstract

How the media are organised and funded has implications on who gets to speak and the stories that are told or silenced. The critical political economy of the media approach allows an understanding of the ideologies and power structures that influence media operations, ownership, and funding. Although the critical political economy of the media remains central in understanding these issues, the approach needs to be decolonised to address the dynamics of media power from the perspective of the global south. In this paper, we explore what the theoretical contributions of decoloniality can make to the project of rethinking political economy of the media. We argue that the critical political economy approach, whose core vocabulary is Marxist, contains inherent limitations in understanding conditions of media-state relations in Africa. Decolonial thought and its recent engagement with Marxism has produced new thinking and fresh ways of reflecting the relationship between Western capitalism and modernity. We contend that this approach allows us to foreground issues of modernity, coloniality, and race and their impact on contemporary media systems in Africa.     

Ausbruch aus dem Gehäuse der Economic Governance. Überlegungen zu einer Soziologie der Wirtschaftsdemokratie in transformativer Absicht

The New Economic Governance (NEG) in the European Union is a core element of a neoliberal crisis constitutionalism that has to be seen as blatantly deficient when measured with democratic yardsticks. Strongly normative criticism generates important findings, but ignores the economic dimension of damage to democracy. From the perspective of capitalism theory, the NEG can be recognised as a product of a capitalistic land grab (“Landnahme”) of the political field and as a system of institutions whose functional logic corresponds to the imperative of a crisis-ridden economy characterised by the financial markets. In this context, viewpoints are confirmed that regard the integration of the economic causes of blatant deficits of democracy as an essential element of a new type of inclusive democracy project. The work on a new economic democracy as a core element of such a democracy project thus also becomes a desideratum for a public sociology that wishes to contribute evidence-based knowledge to social disputes.