Improving neighborhood quality: A hierarchy of needs

Abstract

A sample of 306 residents of New Jersey stratified by type of neighborhood was gathered in order to measure the association of residents’ ratings of neighborhood quality with neighborhood attributes and residents’ characteristics. Poor neighborhood quality was strongly associated with crime/vandalism and physical decay, as well as with mistrust of authority, negative emotions, pessimism, and a lack of sense of mastery of the environment.

The policy implications of these findings are important. First, improving schools, controlling locally unwanted land uses, and improving other neighborhood conditions will help improve neighborhood quality only if crime and blight are controlled. Second, many residents of poor and fair quality neighborhoods mistrust authority, including the local officials and potential investors who will spearhead neighborhood redevelopment. This destructive form of mistrust must be addressed.     

Domestic violence and minoritisation: legal and policy barriers facing minoritized women leaving violent relationships

This article on service responses to women of African, African-Caribbean, Irish, Jewish and South Asian backgrounds facing domestic violence draws on our recently completed study based in Manchester, UK () [Batsteeler, J., Burman, E., Chantler, K., McIntosh, S.H., Pantling, K., Smailes, S., Warner, S., et al. 2002. Domestic violence minoritisation: Supporting women to indepence. Women's Studies Centre: The Manchester Metropolitan University]. We frame our analysis of domestic violence and minoritisation around the question that is frequently posed in relation to women living with domestic violence: 'why doesn't she leave?' In response, we highlight the complex and intersecting connections between domestic violence, law, mental health provision, entitlement to welfare services, which function alongside constructions of 'culture' and cultural identifications, structures of racism, class and gendered oppression. All these contribute to maintain women, particularly minoritized women, in violent relationships. Further, we illustrate how leaving violent relationships does not necessarily guarantee the safety of women and children escaping domestic violence. Despite many recent legal and social policy initiatives in the UK that have usefully brought domestic violence into the public domain, there have also been counter-measures which have made leaving violent relationships correspondingly more difficult, in particular for women from minoritized communities. We offer an analysis of how state practices, particularly facets of immigration law in the UK (although , provides an equivalent U.S. analysis), interact with domestic violence. These not only equip perpetrators with a powerful tool to oppress minoritized women further, but it also indicates how state structures thereby come to impact directly on women's distress (Chantler et al, 2001). In addition, we highlight how other aspects of state policy and practice which enter into the material well-being of survivors of domestic violence, for example, housing, levels of state benefits, and child-care also pose significant obstacles to minoritized women leaving violent relationships. Whilst women from majority/dominant groups also face many of these barriers, we illustrate how the racialized dimensions of such policies heightens their exclusionary effects. It is argued that legal and psychological strategies need to address the complexity of how public, state and institutional practices intersect with racism, class and gender oppression in order to develop more sensitive and accessible ways of supporting minoritized women and children living with domestic violence.     

Does US presidential rhetoric affect asymmetric political violence?

Although political violence has proven to be difficult for governments to manage, predict or control, previous research on the impact of relevant federal government actions and US presidential rhetoric on terrorist attacks and hate crimes demonstrates that what the US government does matters in ways that are both expected and unexpected. In the US, government counterterrorism strategies changed rapidly in response to the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the US. The Bush administration formed a new executive department, centralised intelligence agencies, invested in tangible counterterrorism measures, implemented two invasions and occupations, and spoke publicly about terrorism on a near-daily basis. Yet much has changed since that research, as the US has since elected a president whose presidential campaign relied upon espousing antagonism towards Muslims, immigrants and other minority groups. Further, President Trump’s administration has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to isolate and suppress Muslims as a strategy to combat Islamist extremism in contrast to previous administrations’ more cooperative approaches. This article considers what existing research tells us about whether and how the different actions of the Trump administration may fuel both Jihadi and far-right extremism.     

Environmental disobedience and the dialogic dimensions of dissent

In this paper, the potential for applying deliberative disobedience as a legitimation framework for environmental disobedience is unpacked. At present, disobedience on behalf of non-humans is not justified within the liberal theory of disobedience put forward by Rawls. Instead of framing harms to environment as indirect harms to humans, Smith’s framework of deliberative disobedience may be invoked on the premises that disobedients publicize not fundamental rights violations, but systematically distorted communication in the process that enacted the environmental policy or decision. To this end, the paper engages in a critical discussion about the dangers of legitimating environmental disobedience through deliberative disobedience. Indeed, its justification hinges on possessing deliberative or “dialogic” credentials as an alternative mode of address to distorted official channels. But its consequence, that of characterizing environmental disobedience as dialogic, means embracing the increasingly violent, clandestine and coercive acts as dialogue. I argue, this from deliberative premises with precarious implications for the legitimacy and uptake of environmental disobedients.     

Corporate power in the agro-food system and the consumer food environment in South Africa

This contribution maps the South African agro-food system with a focus on corporate ownership and power, inspired by value chain work applied to the food system as a a whole. Corporations tend to dominate some nodes, for example input supply, grain storage and handling, and feedlots. Other nodes have a corporate core but with a wide number of smaller economic actors, for example agricultural production, food manufacturing, wholesale and retail, and consumer food service. This wide number of actors points to possible areas of intervention to boost livelihoods by supporting their economic activities. The paper considers the influence of corporations in structuring consumer perceptions on food quality and health, from input into apparently neutral dietary-based guidelines to advertising. Financialisation in the food system, including the institutionalisation of share ownership and the rise of agri-investment companies, and the multi-nationalisation of South African agro-food capital especially into Africa, have implications for the ability of the nation state to regulate activities in the agro-food system. The paper concludes with some recommendations for further work.     

Transtexuality and the Precarious Materials of Dissent (1973): Radicalism in Cecilia Vicuña,Felipe Ehrenberg and the Beau Geste Press (1970–1976)

The article analyses the material strategies of dissent through two transtextual bookworks, Cecilia Vicuña's Sabor a mi (Vicuña, 1973) and Felipe Ehrenberg's Pussywillow (1973) produced at the Beau Geste Press radical collective. Contesting Pinochet's coup in Chile, they resorted to visibly undisciplined responses to ‘the New Disorder now in power’. Experimenting with embodied poetics based on the page as a site of resistance, on textual construction predicated on relational impetus, they exploited litter and impoverished materials. Heterodox aesthetics at the BGP personified equivocal gender imagery. Word objects and body contours transmogrified to bring to the surface the interpenetrated textures of perception, identity and language.     

Results of the 2018 Rapid DNA Maturity Assessment

Three commercially available integrated rapid DNA instruments were tested as a part of a rapid DNA maturity assessment in July of 2018. The assessment was conducted with sets of blinded single-source reference samples provided to participants for testing on the individual rapid platforms within their laboratories. The data were returned to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for review and analysis. Both FBI-defined automated review (Rapid DNA Analysis) and manual review (Modified Rapid DNA Analysis) of the datasets were conducted to assess the success of genotyping the 20 Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) core STR loci and full profiles generated by the instruments. Genotype results from the multiple platforms, participating laboratories, and STR typing chemistries were combined into a single analysis. The Rapid DNA Analysis resulted in a success rate of 80% for full profiles (85% for the 20 CODIS core loci) with automated analysis. Modified Rapid DNA Analysis resulted in a success rate of 90% for both the CODIS 20 core loci and full profiles (all attempted loci per chemistry). An analysis of the peak height ratios demonstrated that 95% of all heterozygous alleles were above 59% heterozygote balance. For base-pair sizing precision, the precision was below the standard 0.5 bp deviation for both the ANDE 6C System and the RapidHIT 200.