Resistance and Creativity in Social Interaction: For and Against Memory in Poland, Israel–Palestine, and the United States

In this paper, I present an analysis of Adam Michnik’s notion of “Amnesty without Amnesia”. His was a wise political judgment presented at a critical moment in the struggle to constitute a democratic polity in Poland. Mine is an appreciation of his political position, along with a sociological analysis that highlights the empirical difficulties of its realization in practical action. I will show how at critical moments of social change creative political action works to erase memories of the relevant past, which act as a repressive force, while “re-remembering” (to use Toni Morrison’s formulation). Three cases will be compared, Michnik’s, after the fall of the communist regime in east central Europe, and cases drawn from the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and the American presidential campaign. A paper prepared for presentation at Cerisy, France, Summer, 2008.     

The political economy of global firms from India and China

This article attempts to build a bridge between contemporary studies of global firms from emerging economies and existing theories in comparative political economy. It argues that given the primacy of the state as an economic actor in developing countries, the variety of capitalism literature could provide a theoretical foundation for firm-level analyses of emerging market multinationals. For example, the authors suggest that China and India may be moving towards a ‘hybrid market economy’. They also offer a typology of Indian and Chinese corporates to demonstrate an empirical approach to analysing domestic business–government relationships and the ways in which these firms are shaped by the peculiarities of their respective institutional setting. Finally, they identify some of the likely pitfalls of doing cross-national comparisons of emerging market multinationals, particularly with respect to the reliability of corporate data.     

Gender,ethnicity and feminism: an intersectional analysis of the lived experiences feminist academic women in UK higher education

Studies have begun to explore how those women academics committed to social justice, namely feminist academics, are navigating the increasingly managerial Academy. To understand how these multiple social identities, including gender and ethnicity, interact and intersect, this paper adopts an intersectional approach to understanding the heterogeneity of women’s experiences in academia. Five focus groups with feminist academics (n = 6–10 in each focus group) reveal concerns of hampered career progression as a consequence of being female and openly feminist. Some ethnic minority academics felt that they were forced to choose between a feminist identity or that of their ethnic background. For some women, their feminist identity provided opportunities for challenging dominant practices. The paper concludes that the heterogeneity of feminist academics’ experiences within academia is under-researched and that the lens of intersectionality helps to illuminate this. This paper advances understanding of multiple identities at work, though demonstrating that intersectionality can lead to the accumulation of advantage as well as disadvantage in relation to social identities such as gender and ethnicity, and a political identity such as feminist.     

Transformative Illegality: How Condoms ‘Became Legal’ in Ireland, 1991–1993

This paper examines Irish campaigns for condom access in the early 1990s. Against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, activists campaigned against a law which would not allow condoms to be sold from ordinary commercial spaces or vending machines, and restricted sale to young people. Advancing a conception of ‘transformative illegality’, we show that illegal action was fundamental to the eventual legalisation of commercial condom sale. However, rather than foregrounding illegal condom sale as a mode of spectacular direct action, we show that tactics of illegal sale in the 1990s built on 20 years of everyday illegal sale within the Irish family planning movement. Everyday illegal sale was a long-term world-making practice, which gradually transformed condoms’ legal meanings, eventually enabling new forms of provocative and irreverent protest. Condoms ‘became legal’ when the state recognised modes of condom sale, gradually built up over many years and publicised in direct action and in the courts.     

State Facilitated Economic Abuse: A Structural Analysis of Men Deliberately Withholding Child Support

Economic abuse is well established as a widespread and damaging element of intimate partner violence. However research largely addresses cohabiting couples, with few detailed explorations of women’s longer-term experiences after separation. Further, researchers have not developed a gendered analysis of child support related economic abuse. Such an analysis requires understanding gender as a framework that organises institutions and relationships in ways that build and reproduce hierarchical relations of difference. In this paper, I present data from in-depth interviews with 37 single mothers to pursue a structural analysis of how men’s deliberate withholding of child support (termed child maintenance in some countries) can be a form of economic abuse that is facilitated through gendered state processes and institutions that order child support transfers. I argue that masculine financial discretion structures policy and organizational practices in ways that legitimate men’s financial agency at the expense of women’s financial autonomy. On-going compliance issues are not the result of a failure of Australia’s Child Support Program, but suggest that the state’s role can be one of regulation, not prevention, of economic abuse. Thus, Australia’s Child Support Program normalises the potential for post-separation economic abuse.     

Globalised Imaginaries of Love and Hate: Immutability,Violence, and LGBT Human Rights

The U.S.-led global LGBT human rights campaign, formalised on International Human Rights Day 2011, sutures human rights policing with a politics of protection. Centred on a singular LGBT victim of violence, the campaign’s multiple projects legitimate military and financial intervention under the auspices of human rights. This article examines the regulatory production of globalised LGBT rights through the nexus of international LGBT human rights/hate crime laws, U.S. asylum law, and equal protection treatment of sexual orientation. I argue that the juridical and ideological frameworks that guide state action in each of these areas converge in the construction of an immutable LGBT identity that is the object of racialised, culturally othered violence. This rendering of sexual difference through the flattening of culture elides structural violence and advances human rights imperialism.     

Public History and the Study of Law: Reviewing <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Limehouse Golem</Emphasis> (2017)

This interdisciplinary essay looks at the use of popular history for the critical understanding of the reconstruction of crime and patriarchal hierarchy. By way of reviewing the recent movie The Limehouse Golem, it illustrates the significance of theoretically engaging with a period crime fiction movie. It is argued that this assessment is less relevant in terms of producing historical understanding. Rather historical fiction reveals instead our own contemporary cultural fixations.     

Development of Friendship and Task Values in a New School: Friend Selection for the Arts and Physical Education but Socialization for Academic Subjects

Friends provide important social contexts for student development. Research has shown that adolescent friends are similar to each other in their interest and values for different school subjects. Yet our current understanding does not extend to knowing whether selection, deselection, or socialization processes are responsible for this phenomena. Without this knowledge, it is very difficult for parents, teachers, and schools to know how and when to intervene. This study investigated selection, deselection, and socialization effects on adolescent students’ task values for academic (languages, math and science, and social sciences) and non-academic subject areas (the arts and physical education). A social network approach was used to examine two waves of annual data collected from school-based networks of adolescents in the first and second years of high school education in Finland (N?=?1419; female?=?48.6%; mean age at first measurement point?=?16). The results revealed that adolescents tended to select friends with similar levels of task values (friend selection) for the arts and physical education, but friends did not become more similar in these areas over time (friend socialization). In contrast, there was evidence of friend socialization, but not friend selection, for the academic school subjects. Across all subjects, differences in task values did not predict friendship dissolution (friend deselection). These findings suggest that to a significant extent, students make agentic choices in developing friendship with schoolmates based on their task values in non-academic subjects. The resultant friend contexts that individuals created, in turn, affected their task values in academic subject areas. These results shed light on the complexity of friend effect mechanisms on task values at the subject domain-specific level.     

Positive and Negative Emotions: Differential Associations with Sleep Duration and Quality in Adolescents

Despite positive and negative emotions being equally important predictors of adolescent wellbeing, research examining positive emotions is limited. In 4582 adolescents (69.4% females; age M?±?SD?=?14.55?±?1.74 years), we used structural equation modelling to examine associations between self-reported sleep duration and quality with positive affect, negative affect, and happiness, controlling for age and sex. Overall, sleep quality displayed stronger associations with all measures of emotions compared to sleep duration. Shorter sleep was more specifically associated with lower positive emotions (happiness, followed by positive affect), whereas poorer sleep showed stronger associations with negative affect. Protecting sleep duration may promote positive emotions and enhancing sleep quality may reduce mood disturbances. Future research could incorporate both positive and negative emotions to better understand adolescents’ wellbeing.