Social and Stress-related Influences of Police Officers’ Alcohol Consumption

Prior research on the use of alcohol by police officers has shown that there are correlations between the officers’ alcohol consumption and stress or social relationships within the police sub-culture. By looking at 1,328 full time officers from municipal, county, and state departments, the researchers found that there were correlations between these two reasons as in prior literature. Surprisingly, the officers drew a clear distinction between drinking alcohol as a social outlet and drinking alcohol to fit in with their peers. As a result, this study explains a third reason the officers used when consuming alcohol. The officers most at risk for drinking problems admitted that fitting in was highest on their list of why they drank alcohol.     

Histories of now: listening to women in British film

ABSTRACT

The research project ‘Calling the Shots: Women and contemporary film culture in the UK, 2000–2015’ investigates contemporary women's film history through two primary routes: the statistical analyses of the numbers of women in six key above-the-line professions (director, writer, producer, executive producer, cinematographer and editor), and interviews with 50 women in those same roles (by August 2018 we had interviewed 58). This paper focuses specifically on the permutations of the interview process for constructing women's film history in the contemporary period. Taking into consideration the theoretical, methodological and political issues at stake in recording oral histories of working women filmmakers, we contemplate the consequences of collecting and writing history that is still in medias res.     

The forgotten ‘mateys’: women workers in Portsmouth Dockyard,England, 1939-45

Abstract

This paper is based on nearly 30 interviews with women who worked in Portsmouth Dockyard before and during the Second World War. Their testimonies show that women experienced their wartime work in different ways, with attitudes that were to impinge on employment relations, on calls for equal pay and on the provision of facilities to relieve their domestic responsibilities. Government response to these problems reveal the duality of policy decisions and the difficulties of balancing the need for labour with dominant ideals about the cultural position of women. Shifts in employment practices in wartime conditions highlight the debates around the impact of wartime work on gender divisions in the workplace and perceptions of female paid employment by both men and women at that time.     

“Survival Mode”: Rebel Resilience and the Lord’s Resistance Army

ABSTRACT

To date, scholarly work on armed groups has seldom considered the notion of rebel resilience, or the factors that enable these groups to survive despite time, military pressure, and the myriad contingent events of civil war. In an effort to develop an explanatory framework for resilience as a distinct outcome of civil war and rebellion, this article examines the conditions under which the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has persisted for nearly three decades. Based on fieldwork and original research, the article explains the LRA’s resilience in light of the group’s organizational structure and resource self-sufficiency, which have been well suited for the borderlands of East and Central Africa. The LRA is a key case of rebel resilience. It is important because it sheds light on the organizational foundations of armed groups, the relationship between resources and rebellion, and the broader study of conflict duration and termination. Understanding the sources of the LRA’s resilience can inform efforts to end such insurgencies.     

The politics of ‘wrongful life’ itself: discursive (mal)practices and Tay-Sachs disease

Abstract

This article examines eight wrongful life/wrongful birth suits filed by parents of children born with Tay-Sachs disease. Their legal claims are analysed in terms of the biopolitics of genetic risk that has emerged in recent decades with a view to arguing that, as health and disease are increasingly understood within a genetics framework, the individual is becoming responsibilized to be proactive and undergo genetic testing. At the same time, this responsibilization is being defined as a kind of entitlement rooted in historically specific ideas about personhood and quality of life. The only option for reconciling this contradiction has been simply to define responsibilization as the individual's right, thereby calling into question the notion of agency in genetic decision-making and revealing that choice in this context is in fact becoming the unfreedom to choose.     

The seductive quality of central human capabilities: sociological insights into Nussbaum and Sen's disagreement

Abstract

In an era when relativism and questions of modernity have unsettled the premises and goals of the development project, there is a seductive quality to the universalism of Nussbaum's capabilities approach. We query Nussbaum's philosophically based contribution and raise epistemological concerns about her commitment to a list of central human capabilities. We argue that attention to state forms and practices, as well as unequal power relations, must be incorporated into analyses of capability and development. This leads us to support Sen's advocacy of deliberative democracy as a productive space for collectivities and individuals to strive for social justice and equity. Such a focus is necessarily attentive to multiple forms of inequality and domination and is best understood by engaging historically specific analyses of state formations.