Intimate constellations/constellations of intimacy: an exchange on navigating in collisions

How to imagine alternative forms of attachments and intimacies beside the centrifugal force of compulsory coupledom? This is one of the central questions in this creative exchange between an artist (Fleckner) and art historian (Danbolt), using wood cuts and words respectively in an examination of imaginaries of relation and belonging. With an interest in the power of esthetic figurations in shaping desire and politics, the article’s cross-medium exchange considers the importance–and difficulty–of reconfiguring established plots and institutions of intimacy. While the prints take their starting point in a critical reconfiguration of the visual tradition of mapping relationality in the form of couple-oriented family trees, the textual responses move between the genres of the essayistic, theoretical, and diaristic in an attempt to consider alternative modes of valuing and acknowledging relations. Refusing to let go of the desire for a revolution in the structures of intimacy in times where alternatives to hetero- and homonormative arrangements of desire seem increasingly sparse, the text flaunts an unabashed belief in the world-making power of the esthetic and its ability to produce utopian performatives that gives sense to ways of feeling and relating differently.     

Arab Spring constitution-making: polarization,exclusion, and constraints

What determines the balance that democratizing constitutions strike between majority empowerment and individual rights? Some constitutions deliberately handicap state power to forestall threats to liberty, while others try to empower the government to hold the country together. We answer this question in the context of post-Arab Spring constitution-making, hypothesizing a U-shaped relationship between polarization among politically significant factions and net majority-empowering provisions in constitutions of new democracies, a relationship mediated by breadth of inclusion in the constitutional drafting process. We test the hypothesis through a controlled case comparison of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, the three Arab-majority countries in which protestors successfully toppled authoritarian regimes.     

Profit rather than politics: the production of Lenin monuments in Soviet Latvia

The archived documents on outdoor sculpture commissions in Soviet Latvia reveal that the thesis of art having been colonized by the Communist party is too simplistic. Sculptors and architects had vested business interests in monument production. Until the mid-1950s, the cream of academically-educated Latvian sculptors was sidelined by Russians who mass-produced concrete replicas of statues portraying Lenin or Stalin. The majority of the works came through the mass production of works of visual propaganda in the Māksla art factory. Also, less-talented local sculptors were able to find a role satisfying the demand for cheap, decorative sculpture. Looking for ways to access this market, the local art elite invented aesthetic and semiotic arguments in support of the original, locally-made, Lenin sculptures that would be cast in permanent materials and could serve as the spatial organizers of new communist rituals in the urban environment for which they won municipal commissions resulting in the reconstruction of central squares in Latvian towns. What this means is that artists driven by their mercantile interests and not by ideology played an active part in elaborating the aesthetics of communist ideology, and therefore provided support for the dominant discourse of power relations.     

Belarus' Anti-Crisis Management: Success Story of Delayed Recession?

The response of Belarus to the global economic crisis was shaped by a number of distinctive features of the Belarusian economy and of the economic policies implemented before the crisis. The specifics of anti-crisis management in Belarus resulted in a distribution of output losses for a number of subsequent periods and delayed recession. The scenario of stabilisation policies in Belarus can therefore be regarded as ineffective. The core reasons for this are an inappropriate choice of policy instruments and delayed exit from stabilisation policy. It is argued that this policy mix has long-term implications, including worsening economic growth prospects.     

Perceptions of the health system and public trust in government in low- and middle-income countries: evidence from the World Health Surveys

In low- and middle-income countries, health care systems are an important means by which individuals interact with their government. As such, aspects of health systems in these countries may be associated with public trust in government. Greater trust in government may in turn improve governance and government effectiveness. We identify health system and non-health system factors hypothesized to be associated with trust in government and fit several multilevel regression models to cross-national data from 51,300 respondents in thirty-eight low- and middle-income countries participating in the World Health Surveys. We find that health system performance factors are associated with trust in government while controlling for a range of non-health system covariates. Taken together, higher technical quality of health services, more responsive service delivery, fair treatment, better health outcomes, and financial risk protection accounted for a 13 percentage point increase in the probability of having trust in government. Health system performance and good governance may be more inter-related than previously thought. This finding is particularly important for low-income and fragile states, where health systems and governments tend to be weakest. Future research efforts should focus on determining the causal mechanisms that underlie the observed associations between health system performance and trust in government.     

CASES: European Arrest Warrant Cases and the Principles of Non‐discrimination and EU Citizenship

This case comment provides an analysis of the recent judgment in Wolzenburg (C‐123/08), delivered on 6 October 2009 not yet reported (Grand chamber) concerning the application of the EU principles of nondiscrimination and citizenship to the European Arrest Warrant cases. It also considers the impact of the Lisbon Treaty as well as the implications of the Citizenship Directive 2004/38/EC for this area of law.     

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND STRUCTURAL FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO THE DISENGAGEMENT OF NONCUSTODIAL FATHERS AFTER DIVORCE

The phenomenon of noncustodial fathers' disengagement from their children's lives is critically examined. Based on data obtained from a cross-national (Canada and Scotland) study on the impact of divorce on noncustodial fathers, the argument is developed that these fathers' disengagement from their children's lives results from a combination of structural constraints and fathers' own psychological response to the threatened or actual loss of their children and the predivorce father-child relationship. While divorce represents a loss which deprives fathers of an attachment figure and a role or identity, it also constitutes a situation where fathers are judicially and legislatively disadvantaged on the basis of gender. Attachment theory constructs relating to situations of loss and bereavement frame the analysis of fathers' psychological adaptation to divorce and psychological factors contributing to their disengagement from their children, and analyses of gender are used in an examination of the structural consequences of divorce for noncustodial fathers and structural factors contributing to their disengagement. This study also documents the destructive effect of a purely adversarially based approach to divorce.     

Academic artists’ engagement and commercialisation

The Journal of Technology Transfer - Academic artists are researchers who create artistic work. They form part of the cultural life of cities and contribute to welfare not only through research but...