Transformative Illegality: How Condoms ‘Became Legal’ in Ireland, 1991–1993

This paper examines Irish campaigns for condom access in the early 1990s. Against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, activists campaigned against a law which would not allow condoms to be sold from ordinary commercial spaces or vending machines, and restricted sale to young people. Advancing a conception of ‘transformative illegality’, we show that illegal action was fundamental to the eventual legalisation of commercial condom sale. However, rather than foregrounding illegal condom sale as a mode of spectacular direct action, we show that tactics of illegal sale in the 1990s built on 20 years of everyday illegal sale within the Irish family planning movement. Everyday illegal sale was a long-term world-making practice, which gradually transformed condoms’ legal meanings, eventually enabling new forms of provocative and irreverent protest. Condoms ‘became legal’ when the state recognised modes of condom sale, gradually built up over many years and publicised in direct action and in the courts.     

State Facilitated Economic Abuse: A Structural Analysis of Men Deliberately Withholding Child Support

Economic abuse is well established as a widespread and damaging element of intimate partner violence. However research largely addresses cohabiting couples, with few detailed explorations of women’s longer-term experiences after separation. Further, researchers have not developed a gendered analysis of child support related economic abuse. Such an analysis requires understanding gender as a framework that organises institutions and relationships in ways that build and reproduce hierarchical relations of difference. In this paper, I present data from in-depth interviews with 37 single mothers to pursue a structural analysis of how men’s deliberate withholding of child support (termed child maintenance in some countries) can be a form of economic abuse that is facilitated through gendered state processes and institutions that order child support transfers. I argue that masculine financial discretion structures policy and organizational practices in ways that legitimate men’s financial agency at the expense of women’s financial autonomy. On-going compliance issues are not the result of a failure of Australia’s Child Support Program, but suggest that the state’s role can be one of regulation, not prevention, of economic abuse. Thus, Australia’s Child Support Program normalises the potential for post-separation economic abuse.     

Globalised Imaginaries of Love and Hate: Immutability,Violence, and LGBT Human Rights

The U.S.-led global LGBT human rights campaign, formalised on International Human Rights Day 2011, sutures human rights policing with a politics of protection. Centred on a singular LGBT victim of violence, the campaign’s multiple projects legitimate military and financial intervention under the auspices of human rights. This article examines the regulatory production of globalised LGBT rights through the nexus of international LGBT human rights/hate crime laws, U.S. asylum law, and equal protection treatment of sexual orientation. I argue that the juridical and ideological frameworks that guide state action in each of these areas converge in the construction of an immutable LGBT identity that is the object of racialised, culturally othered violence. This rendering of sexual difference through the flattening of culture elides structural violence and advances human rights imperialism.     

Public History and the Study of Law: Reviewing <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Limehouse Golem</Emphasis> (2017)

This interdisciplinary essay looks at the use of popular history for the critical understanding of the reconstruction of crime and patriarchal hierarchy. By way of reviewing the recent movie The Limehouse Golem, it illustrates the significance of theoretically engaging with a period crime fiction movie. It is argued that this assessment is less relevant in terms of producing historical understanding. Rather historical fiction reveals instead our own contemporary cultural fixations.     

Formal and Informal Seed Systems in Kenya: Supporting Indigenous Vegetable Seed Quality

Indigenous vegetables play an important role in Kenyan food security, but production is limited by poor seed quality. Traditionally, seeds have been traded through informal networks, but a new formal seed sector is emerging. This study assessed the relative potential for formal or informal seed systems to meet the need for high-quality indigenous vegetable seed. By evaluating determinants of farmers’ seed purchasing behaviour, we conclude that informal seed systems have greater potential to meet this need and should be strengthened. This study suggests that policy-makers should use context-specific data to guide decisions on seed policy.     

State,Society, and Informality in Cities of the Global South

Contemporary urbanization in the Global South merits greater attention from scholars of comparative politics. Governance, associational life, and political behavior take distinctive forms in the social and institutional environments created by rapid urbanization, particularly within informal settlements and labor markets. In this special issue, we examine forms of collective action and claims-making in these spaces. We also consider how the state assesses, maps, and responds to the demands of informal sector actors. Tackling questions of citizen and state behavior in these informal urban contexts requires innovative research strategies due to data scarcity and social and institutional complexity. Contributors to this symposium offer novel strategies for addressing these challenges, including the use of informal archives, worksite-based sampling, ethnographic survey design, enforcement process-tracing, and crowd-sourced data.     

No Colonial Working Class,No Post-Colonial Development: a Comparative-Historical Analysis of Two Oil-Rich Countries

Development sociologists generally agree that states play a critical role in promoting, as well as in impeding, development. However, far less scholarly consensus exists on the precise historical processes that lead either to strong or to weak states. This paper investigates the factors that shape varied state capacities through a comparative-historical analysis of two similar countries with divergent development outcomes—Trinidad and Tobago and Gabon. In the 1960s, both countries had comparably large amounts of oil wealth, minimal state involvement in the economy, and low levels of development. In the 1970s, state capacity in Trinidad and Tobago dramatically increased and the country went on to achieve high levels of development. The Gabonese state, on the other hand, remained weak resulting in persistent low levels of development. This paper traces the divergence in state capacity to variations in working class mobilization, specifically the particular type of working class movements in each country and the political opportunity contexts. In doing so, this paper reveals new agents and contingencies producing state capacity that are not predominantly discussed in the contemporary development literature, and the meso-level mechanics by which these agents are successful or constrained in doing so.     

Big School,Small School: (Re)Testing Assumptions about High School Size,School Engagement and Mathematics Achievement

In an effort to increase both adolescents’ engagement with school and academic achievement, school districts across the United States have created small high schools. However, despite the widespread adoption of size reduction reforms, relatively little is known about the relationship between size, engagement and outcomes in high school. In response, this article employs a composite measure of engagement that combines organizational, sociological, and psychological theories. We use this composite measure with the most recent nationally-representative dataset of tenth graders, Educational Longitudinal Study: 2002, (N = 10,946, 46% female) to better assess a generalizable relationship among school engagement, mathematics achievement and school size with specific focus on cohort size. Findings confirm these measures to be highly related to student engagement. Furthermore, results derived from multilevel regression analysis indicate that, as with school size, moderately sized cohorts or grade-level groups provide the greatest engagement advantage for all students and that there are potentially harmful changes when cohorts grow beyond 400 students. However, it is important to note that each group size affects different students differently, eliminating the ability to prescribe an ideal cohort or school size.