Waiting for change: youth,caste and politics in India

Abstract

This paper examines waiting, caste and politics through reference to the cultural and political practices of educated unemployed young men in India. We show through ethnographic fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh how a shared sense of young male limbo sometimes erodes caste divides. While waiting in poorly provisioned north Indian universities, young men develop novel cultures that bridge caste, class and religion. They also collaborate across class, caste and religious boundaries in protests against the state and university bureaucracies. At the same time, some students have responded to a sense of ‘waiting’ by developing collusive relationships with local government and university bureaucrats. Waiting emerges not as a passive condition but as a seed-bed for new cultural and political forms.     

Passion's re-territorializations: mapping the mixed semiotics of unsafe homo passional assemblages

This paper conducts a mixed semiotics of unsafe homo passional assemblages. It begins with an exposition of Deleuze and Guattari's instructions for mapping the multidimensional circuitry of assemblages along the generative and transformative poles. Unsafe sex is a line of desiring movement involving expressive matter from the pick-up machine. After HIV/AIDS, the pick-up machine's de-territorialised movements have been problematised, their a-semiotic matter becoming a testimony to the limits of the imperative to practice safe sex. These assemblages have been overcoded as being unconscious and ineffable; however, this paper traces their mixed semiotics involving the a-signifying particle-signs of the pick-up machine as well as conscious lines of desiring movement involving the segmentarity and mirror vision of a recognisable social identity as a gay man. In all of these passional assemblages the pick-up machine's nomadic movements have become buckled by a number of sovereign, consuming microfascisms. The lines of movement have reached their threshold limit, weakening their capacity for making new connections for new lines of becoming and creative mutation. Throughout the paper it is argued that the macropolitics of safe sex has failed to grasp the possibilities for new passages that can be drawn from the molecular soup of the pick-up machine and its micropolitics of perception, affection and conversation. It is not necessary to prohibit its lines of movement as new possibilities for homo sexual culture will emerge by drawing on affective potentials drawn from the pick-up machine in conjunction with new affective material.     

Examining Perceptions About Mental Health Care and Help-Seeking Among Rural African American Families of Adolescents

Rural African American children living in poverty have a higher prevalence rate of mental health disorders than their urban counterparts. While access to mental health services is lacking in resource scarce rural communities, African American rural residents may also be the most likely to confront significant barriers to care and help-seeking. Studies of mental health help-seeking behavior among rural families are rare, even rarer are studies of African Americans living in these areas. To address this gap, the current study examined perceptions about help-seeking for adolescents with mental health problems among rural African American families. Data were obtained from African American mothers in rural Georgia to assess their perceptions of the mental health service system, help-seeking processes, and service experiences. A mixed-method approach was implemented, integrating a quantitative survey (n = 163) with qualitative interviews (subsample n = 21). Most of the mothers expressed confidence in mental health care providers’ to help. Preferred sources of support, however, were family, church, and schools. Community stigma towards children with mental health problems and their families was a frequently endorsed perceived barrier to help-seeking. Although cultural mistrust was one of the two most frequently endorsed barriers in the survey, it did not emerge as a universal barrier to help-seeking for the mothers in this sample. Implications for research, policy, and practice include addressing family concerns about stigma, preferences for informal support and non-specialty services in addressing adolescents’ mental health problems, and building community resources to enable all youth to participate in community life.     

The Challenges of Moving into Middle Management: Responses from Police Officers

The role of the middle manager is crucial to a police organization. Despite this, little research exists concerning the characteristics of effective police managers, or the role that the promotional process and/or training plays in identifying and developing effective managers. To examine these issues, 328 Canadian police officers were surveyed and interviews were conducted with an additional 50 police professionals. The results highlight: (1) the importance of management in achieving organizational goals, (2) key characteristics of effective managers and common mistakes managers make, and (3) concerns surrounding the promotional process and the lack of managerial training. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

An empirical investigation of insanity defense attitudes: exploring factors related to bias

This study's primary aim was to evaluate factors that influence attitudes toward the insanity defense in a sample of 578 college undergraduates. In addition to a comprehensive demographics survey, participants completed the Insanity Defense Attitude Scale-Revised (IDAS-R) and the Attitude Toward the Death Penalty (ATDP) Scale. Favorable attitude toward capital punishment and misperceptions about overuse of the insanity defense were related to negative attitudes toward the insanity defense. Hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that possessing a favorable attitude toward capital punishment was the most robust predictor of a negative attitude toward the insanity defense. These findings provide valuable information about factors that create and maintain biases against the insanity defense and suggest areas of inquiry that could aid attorneys in selecting unbiased jurors.     

Certifying Death in the United States

Accurately identifying death and its causes is integral to the compilation of mortality data and ultimately to the operation of the criminal justice and public health systems. A clear understanding of who is in charge of such processes is paramount to establishing the quality, or lack thereof, of the information provided in death certificates. Our study provides a comprehensive overview of all state statutes identifying death investigators charged with classifying and certifying death in the United States. We found that state statutes designate a broad range of individuals as responsible for the classification and certification of death. Those vary by state and set of circumstances and can include medical examiners, coroners, pathologists, other physicians, registered nurses, and more. Our findings highlight the important need for a unified standard of qualifications in the medico‐legal system, as well as, regulatory reform at the state level regarding who can complete and sign death certificates.     

The importance of staff practice in delivering effective correctional treatment: a meta-analytic review of core correctional practice

Several meta-analyses have rendered strong support for the clinically relevant and psychologically informed principles of human service, risk, need, and general responsivity. However, each of these reviews has focused on specific program components and not on the characteristics of the staff or the specific techniques used to deliver the program. This meta-analytic review examines the role of core correctional practices in reducing recidivism and provides strong preliminary evidence regarding their effectiveness. Staff characteristics and training in core skills must be addressed to ensure the maximum therapeutic impact of correctional treatment programs.     

Dissatisfaction with relationship power and dating violence perpetration by men and women

This study focuses on the relationship between an individual's dissatisfaction with the level of power they have in their dating relationships, parental violence they experienced during their childhoods, and their dating violence perpetration. A sample of 352 male and 296 female undergraduate college students completed a dating violence survey, including selected subscales from the Revised Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2) and the Relationship Power Scale. Findings show that relationship power dissatisfaction is associated with the use of violence in dating relationships for both men and women. However, parental violence emerged as an even stronger predictor of dating violence perpetration. Findings also indicate that male perpetration of dating violence is related to mother's violence, whereas female perpetration of dating violence is related to father's violence. The results indicate the importance of including gender in the study of dating violence perpetration.