Adolescents as mothers: An interdisciplinary approach to a complex problem

Pregnancy among adolescents, and especially among low-income adolescents, represents a high-risk situation from multiple points of view. When compared to data for the population at large, obstetrical outcome is worsened, subsequent educational attainment is poor, social prognosis is guarded, and repeat unwanted pregnancies are common. The surviving infants, similarly have relatively high incidences of medical and developmental problems. In recent years, comprehensive interdisciplinary programs have been organized to offer more meaningful help to these individuals. The present report describes the authors' 5-year experience with one early intensive program. Considerable medical, educational, and social successes have been noted. The results are especially striking when contrasted with the authors' current experience with an improving but still more fragmented and less successful program. Findings concerning infant development and the mother-infant interaction are also noted. Finally, issues related to the achievement of successes and the persistence of problems after provision of more adequate comprehensive services are discussed.This study was supported in part by Grant No. 03-H-000-079-03-0, Maternal and Child Health Service, H.S.M.H.A., H.E.W.While on the faculty of the State University of New York, College of Medicine at Syracuse, was a founder and the first medical director of the YMED program.Specialty is Developmental Psychology, and research interests concern infant and early child development and the effects of children on parents. While on the faculty of Cornell University, served as a consultant to the YMED program.Project director of the high-risk program.While on the faculty of the State University of New York, College of Medicine at Syracuse, was obstetrical director of the YMED program.     

Bibliography of Recent Publications on Africa

This bibliography covers publications noticed between Augustand November, 1954. It has been compiled with the co-operationof Miss Ruth Jones (International African Institute).     

Capacity Building as an Instrument of Institutional Reform: Improving the Quality of Higher Education through Academic Audits in the UK, New Zealand, Sweden, and Hong Kong

As countries convert from state to market-centered public policies, there is increasing interest in new forms of public accountability. Capacity building initiatives that reform institutional frameworks are useful policy instruments during this period of transition. What are the impacts and implementation problems characteristic of this approach? This article reviews the experience with "Academic Audit," a capacity building accountability instrument for universities adopted in the UK, Sweden, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. Academic audits altered the incentives for cooperative behavior among faculty members to improve student learning. Identified implementation problems included: training for the new process, the uncertainty of capacity building benefits, and the central role of information.     

Governance and order-making in Central Asia: from illiberalism to post-liberalism?

ABSTRACT

This forum brings together five different angles on the question as to whether and how political regimes and forms of order-making can and should be researched through the concept of ‘illiberalism’. The discussion engages critically with this and associated concepts, such as ‘illiberal peace’ and ‘authoritarian conflict management’, which have been developed out of the Central Asian / Eurasian context and discussed in their wider global ramifications and, within the framing of ‘illiberal peace’, explored in various contexts in and beyond Central Asia. While further assessing the relevance and implications of this approach, this forum also attempts to think beyond ‘illiberalism’ by introducing and discussing the idea of ‘post-liberalism’. This way, the authors engage in an exchange that serves to probe both concepts and to determine their strengths and limitations when it comes to analysing and understanding politics and societal processes in Central Asia.     

Political Parties,Australia and the U.S. Alliance: 1976-2016

ABSTRACT

What causes variation in the foreign policies of U.S. allies regarding their desired U.S. military role in their region and their troop commitments to U.S. military interventions? This paper addresses this question through documenting and explaining the sources of variation in Australia’s foreign policies regarding these issues over four decades. Treating the two major political parties in Australia and their respective leaders who self-select into them as endogenous, the paper argues that Australian foreign policy, whilst always supportive of the U.S. alliance, has systematically varied. This variation has correlated with the political party in power while the late Cold War and post-Cold War balances of power remained constant. While the Labor party has only been willing to send combat troops to large U.S. military interventions when the latter have a supporting United Nations Security Council Resolution, the conservative Liberal party has been willing to military intervene without this multilateral support. The Labor party, unlike the Liberal party, has also frequently proposed the formation and consolidation of multilateral regional institutions. These preferences render the U.S. to have been necessary for the Labor Party but sufficient for the Liberal party. Future Sino-U.S. armed conflict would provide a harder test of these hypotheses.     

“Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way”: imagination,agitation, and raging against the machine in Ali Smith’s Spring

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the third novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Spring. Using Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics as a conceptual frame, I analyze Smith’s rendering of a Britain grappling with Brexit in times of transnational populism. As with Autumn and Winter, Smith’s prose is saturated with intertextual borrowings from pop and “high” culture, also interrogating the links between “nanoracism” and the “immunity and community” knot (Dillet). This paper reads Spring alongside Smith’s contribution to and advocacy of the Refugee Tales project regarding the diverse discourses surrounding migration, xenophobia, and indefinite detention. Smith’s writing traces the darkness of our populist present with its rhetorical and material violence, as well as the possibilities for creative response and resistance. I argue that her seasonal quartet to date and her work with Refugee Tales aesthetically and ethically defend the principle that human dignity, both individual and collective, rests on the ability to tell stories.