The Pivotal Role of Adolescent Autonomy in Secondary School Classrooms

Student engagement is an important contributor to school success, yet high school students routinely describe themselves as disengaged. Identifying factors that alter (increase) engagement is a key aspect of improving support for student achievement. This study investigated students’ perceptions of autonomy, teacher connection, and academic competence as predictors of changes in student engagement within the classroom from the start to the end of a course. Participants were 578 (58% female) diverse (67.8% White, 25.2% African American, 5.1% Hispanic, 1.2% Asian American) high school students from 34 classrooms who provided questionnaire data both at the start and the end of a single course. Novel results from a cross-lagged model demonstrated that students who perceived their classrooms as allowing and encouraging their own autonomy in the first few weeks increased their engagement throughout the course, rather than the typical decline in engagement that was demonstrated by students in other classrooms. This finding is unique in that it extended to both students’ perceptions of engagement and observations of student engagement, suggesting a fairly robust pattern. The pertinence of this finding to adolescent developmental needs and its relationship to educational practice is discussed.     

Sexual Orientation, Partnership Formation, and Substance Use in the Transition to Adulthood

Evidence suggests that lesbian and gay young adults use substances more frequently than their heterosexual peers. Based on the life course perspective, we argue that this difference may be due to the unavailability of marriage as a turning point in the lives of lesbian/gay young adults. We use data from a nationally representative sample of youth (N = 13,581, 52.4% female, 68.6% white, ages 18—26) to examine sexual orientation differences in substance use and explore whether these differences vary by romantic partnership formation in young adulthood. We find that the formation of more serious partnerships (e.g., cohabitation, marriage) is associated with less frequent substance use among heterosexual young adults, though this pattern does not hold for lesbian and gay young adults. We conclude that the partnership options available to lesbians and gay men do not provide the same health-protective benefits that marriage does for heterosexuals.     

The Road to Pergau Dam: Aid Policy,Ideology, and the Thatcher Government

This analysis charts the changes in British aid policy under the Margaret Thatcher government (1979–1990). In particular, it examines the impact of so-called neo-liberal ideology in overseas development strategy in an era where “structural adjustment”—aid in return for market-based reforms—became World Bank and International Monetary Fund orthodoxy. There is some evidence to show British increases in multilateral aid during the 1980s supported a neo-liberal aid policy. Bilateral aid policy, however, demonstrated a subordination of aid to foreign policy and a pro-business—not ideologically pro-market or neo-liberal—alignment. One of the results of these structural changes was the Pergau Dam scandal at the end of the Thatcher years.     

The Relational Dynamics of World Bank Survey Missions

This article demonstrates that World Bank internal learning has led to significant changes in how the organization interacts with government officials through survey missions. Reviewing evidence of institutional learning and associated changes in practice and focusing on the relational modes being manifest in technical assistance, the article identifies three main phases of World Bank survey missions: general survey missions (1940s–1960s), country assistance strategies (1990s–2000s), and country partnership frameworks (2010s). Overall, World Bank reviews have repeatedly highlighted the importance of non-hierarchical interactions between Bank staff and country officials. In recent years, practice has begun to catch up with these operational insights.     

The nonarrival of black freedom (c. 12.6.84)

This article seeks to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America through a series of meditations on questions of time, embodied performance, the political concept of emancipation, and Oliver L. Jackson’s painting, Untitled 12.6.84, which graces the cover of this seminal work. This effort to recall Hartman’s argument regarding the nonevent of emancipation moves in the service of developing an understanding of the nonarrival of black freedom as a conceptual frame for addressing the recursive and untimely dimensions of black self-making. Ultimately, this article argues that Scenes of Subjection allows us to glimpse the making of worlds within the historical archive that fall outside of the normative horizons and expectations of political emancipation. Neither durable nor everlasting, neither verifiable nor guaranteed, such worlds take shape and dissolve within the mysterious rapport between the “could be” and the “not yet” and leave traces on the broken flesh of the black body.     

Vladimir Iowa Lenin,Part 2: On Rural Proletarianization and an Alternate Food Future

In the second of our two-part review of Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 study of American agriculture, we extrapolate upon Alexander Chayanov’s neoliberal appropriation, Giovanni Arrighi’s treatment of partial proletarianization, the propagandistic “family farm,” agribusiness’s fluctuating territorial embeddedness, agriculture as an industry, and land and rent as commodities themselves. We finish by deploying Lenin’s alternate history as a Benjaminian détournement in the face of what now appear insurmountable obstacles. An alternate food future is not only possible, it is already underway.