How can PhD research contribute to the global health research agenda?

We suggest that PhD and post-doctoral researchers are a strong, untapped resource with the potential to make a real contribution to global health research (GHR). However, we raise some ethical, institutional, and funding issues that either discourage new researchers from entering the field or diminish their capacity to contribute. We offer a number of recommendations to Canadian academic and non-academic institutions and funders, aiming to generate discussion among them about how to overcome these constraints. We need changes in the way graduate research is organised and funded, to create opportunities to work collaboratively within established low- and middle-income countries (LMIC)/Canadian research partnerships. We urge changes in the way that institutions fund, recognise, value, and support GHR, so that established researchers are encouraged to develop long-term LMIC relationships and mentor new Canadian/LMIC researchers. We ask funders to reconsider additional GHR activities for support, including strategic training initiatives and dissemination of research results. We also encourage the development of alternative institutions that can provide training and mentoring opportunities. GHR faces many challenges. If we address those that reduce our potential to contribute, we can become real partners in GHR, working towards equitable global health and solutions to priority health issues.     

Thinking about Ideology and Method: a Comment on Schull

This article addresses some theoretical problems which arise in a recent article by Joseph Schull on ideology and Soviet-type societies. I argue that the conceptualizations of Marxism-Leninism, ideology, and discourse offered by Schull are unlikely to enhance the study of Soviet ideological practices significantly because Schull's approach is both too essentialist and too general. Schull treats these concepts as unities reducible through proper definition. I argue that they are better understood as problematics which, in the first two cases, encompass a wide variety of forms and practices; and, in the third, a variety of methods and approaches. Since the study of Marxism-Leninism or ideology, like anything else, is driven by questions, problems, hypotheses, etc., I suggest that it is unhelpful to engage in a priori generalizations about method.     

Reviews

Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, xx + 401 pp., £40.00.

Hugh Macdonald, The Soviet Challenge and the Structure of European Security. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990, ix + 318 pp., £38.50.

Jonathan Eyal, ed. The Warsaw Pact and the Balkans: Moscow's Southern Flank. London: Macmillan Press, 1989, xvi + 246 pp., £35.00.

Kurt M. Campbell & S. Neil MacFarlane, eds., Gorbachev's Third World Dilemmas. London & New York: Routledge, 1989, xvi + 270 pp., £35.00.

Terry L. Thompson, Ideology and Policy: The Political Uses of Doctrine in the Soviet Union. London: Westview Press, Westview Special Studies on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989, viii + 220 pp., $28.95 p/b.

Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, 266 pp., £9.95 p/b.

Maria Lo?, ed., The Second Economy in Marxist States. London: Macmillan, 1990, xiv + 240 pp., £37.50.

Harley D. Balzer, Soviet Science on the Edge of Reform. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989, xxi + 290 pp., $32.50.

Michael Ryan, Doctors and the State in the Soviet Union. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989, ix + 205 pp., £37.50.

Jerzy Tomaszewski, The Socialist Regimes of East Central Europe: Their Establishment and Consolidation 1944–67, Trans. Jolanta Krauze. London: Routledge, 1989, 305 pp., £40.00.

Paul G. Lewis, Political Authority and Party Secretaries in Poland 1975–1986. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, xix + 340 pp., £35.00.

Leonard J. Cohen, The Socialist Pyramid: Elites and Power in Yugoslavia. Oakville, TX: Mosaic Press, 1989, 499 pp., $29.95 h/b, $19.95 p/b.

Diane P. Koenker & William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, xix + 393 pp., $39.50.     

Autonomy: A study of social exchange in a carceral setting

Marshaling ethnographic data from a county jail, this study introduces “autonomy”—a novel concept and measurement of the degree to which an actor's exchange initiations are regulated by other exchange relations. This study rearticulates mutual dependence arguments about the social order of penological living in terms of social exchange theory and offers several innovations: 1) the structural forms of exchange relations in a penal housing unit stratify “carceral autonomy” across members of a social order; 2) diminished carceral autonomy contributes to the buildup of “exchange frustration”—the mixture of discontent and sadness experienced when goals cannot be achieved due the structure of an exchange network; 3) deprivations, inefficacies, and imported cultural standards contribute to what is exchanged and with whom in a penological setting; 4) caretaking in penological housing units is as much about maintaining social order through a form of generalized exchange as it is about network members helping each other; and 5) the emotional landscape of penological living can be mapped, in part, by examining the distribution of carceral autonomy and exchange frustration.     

Transphobic discourse and moral panic convergence: A content analysis of my hate mail

Recently, new social anxieties about transgender people have begun to emerge, framed as an issue of “grooming”—a term typically used in the context of child sexual abuse. In this way, moral panic about transgender people seems to be merging with oft-repeated social fears about pedophilia, resulting not only in policies criminalizing trans people and their allies but also in escalating hatred and threats toward trans-affirming educators. This pattern requires further inquiry. As a trans academic who has been at the center of moral panic, my own hate mail can provide material for this exploration. I conducted a content analysis of 231 letters and e-mails sent to me containing messages of hate, to answer the following research questions:

1. What beliefs and understandings did my correspondents indicate having about me and my research?
2. To what extent did my correspondents’ beliefs and understandings about me reflect intersecting contemporary moral panics around trans and queer people, pedophilia, and educators?
3. What stated or implied goals did my correspondents aim to achieve by writing to me?

The findings of this study can add to understanding of how moral panics can converge, and the consequences of their convergence for marginalized groups in academia and beyond.     

Woodcock v Cumbria Primary Care Trust: The Objective Justification Test for Age Discrimination

This note discusses the limits to the defence of objective justification when applied to direct age discrimination, specifically with regard to situations where the employer attempts to rely on cost‐saving as a legitimate aim. The author examines the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (formerly the European Court of Justice, ECJ) on which this case relies, and considers whether the defence has been interpreted too widely, opening up the possibility of cost‐saving as a defence to discrimination on the grounds of this particular protected characteristic. The note concludes that, while cost‐saving cannot be the sole justification for less favourable treatment by employers, it may nevertheless form part of an overall legitimate aim when coupled with additional factors.