State Agencies’ Use of Administrative Data for Improved Practice: Needs,Challenges, and Opportunities

Growing interest in the use of administrative data to answer questions around program implementation and effectiveness has led to greater discussion of how government agencies can develop the necessary internal data infrastructure, analytic capacity, and office culture. However, there is a need for more systematic research into how states find different pathways and strategies to build administrative data capacity. Drawing on interviews with almost 100 human service agency staff and their data partners, the authors examine the realities of administrative data use. They summarize the experiences of data users in order to address two main challenges: limited analytic capacity and challenges to linking or sharing data resources. The article concludes by examining a range of approaches that government agencies take to improve data quality and capacity to analyze that data.     

SCAMPER and Creative Problem Solving in Political Science: Insights from Classroom Observation

This article describes the author’s experience using SCAMPER, a creativity-building technique, in a creative problem-solving session that was conducted in an environmental conflict course to generate ideas for managing postconflict stability. SCAMPER relies on cues to help students connect ideas from different domains of knowledge, explore random combinations between ideas in the same area and reduce mental blocks. Insights from classroom observation show SCAMPER’s utility in helping students formulate novel ideas and encourage divergent thinking and classroom participation. Combining SCAMPER with another session designed to evaluate the ideas’ logical connection to the problem is likely to maximize the students’ ability to deliver both original and relevant ideas. SCAMPER is a promising tool that instructors could use to develop their students’ creative problem-solving skills to tackle policy challenges across different subfields in political science.     

Contemporary Irish youth work policy and practice: A Governmental analysis

This article analyzes the governmental rationalities informing youth work policy in the contemporary Irish context. Since 2008, the implementation of neoliberalized austerity in Ireland has been destructive in terms of the number of young people's services closing and disruptions to youth work provision. Adopting a governmentality perspective, we argue that recent youth work policy developments are also undermining the integrity of youth work as youth work. Against current governmental rationalities, which privilege evidence-based practice, value for money approaches and the delivery of prescribed outcomes, we argue for a re-imagining of youth work for a postneoliberal, postevidence-based practice world.     

Analysing social-change practice in the Peruvian Amazon through a feminist reading of participatory communication research

This article analyses the social-change practices of Minga Perú, an NGO in the Peruvian Amazon which promotes gender equality and reproductive health through radio broadcasts and community-based interventions. This analysis, grounded in participatory research methods, reveals a feminist and gender-equitable approach, allowing participants to take the role of leader rather than of passive research subject. Such participatory research methods helped to empower both individuals and their communities in the Peruvian Amazon, encouraging the development of more productive group dynamics and leadership.     

Whatever Happened to the Banu¯ Jama¯'a? The Tail of a Scholarly Family in Ottoman Syria

The Banu¯ Jama¯ 'a were an eminent family of Sha¯ fi'i¯jurists, three of whose members became chief judges of Egypt, holding office for 61 out of 92 years between 1291 and 1383. Meanwhile, the Jerusalem branch of the family provided the preachers for the Aqsa¯ Mosque. They formed part of a new Arab Muslim noblesse de robe in the Mamlu¯ k State, rising suddenly from an obscure provincial background in the central Syrian town of Hama¯ . This article traces the fortunes of the Banu¯ Jama¯ 'a under the Mamlu¯ k sultans and asks what happened to their descendants after the Ottoman conquest. It explores, in particular, the vicissitudes of a line of the family established as Sha¯ fi'i¯, and later as Hanafi¯, jurists in Damascus from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, contrasting their position with that of their distinguished ancestors.