Reviews

Women writing in India

Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (eds), Women Writing in India — 600 B. C. to the Present; Volume 1: 600 B. C. to the Early Twentieth Century (The Feminist Press, City University of New York) New York, 1991.

Poststructuralism and politics

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge) New York and London, 1990; Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell (eds), Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (University of Minnesota Press) Minneapolis, 1989.

Postponed lives, secondary data and pushing our own barrow

Laura S. Brown and Esther D. Rothblum (eds), Fat Oppression and Psychotherapy: A Feminist Perspective (Haworth Press) New York, 1989; Helen Roberts (ed.), Women's Health Counts (Routledge) London, 1990; Health Sharing Women, The Health Sharing Reader: Women Speak about Health (Pandora) Sydney, 1990.

Primatology and feminism

Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (Routledge) New York, 1989, distributed by the Law Book Company Limited.

Domestic violence

Heather McGregor and Andrew Hopkins, Working for Change: The Movement Against Domestic Violence (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Jan Horsfall, The Presence of the Past: Male Violence in the Family (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991.

Feminist strategies and the state

Clare Burton, The Promise and the Price (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Hester Eisenstein, Gender Shock (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Gretchen Poiner and Sue Wills, The Gifthorse (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Margaret Thornton, The Liberal Promise (Oxford University Press) Oxford, 1990.     

Who's the Boss? Patterns of Perceived Control in Adolescents' Friendships

This study examined the nature and correlates of different patterns of perceived control in adolescents' relationships with their best friends. Participants included firstborn adolescents (M = 14.94 years), their younger siblings (M = 12.44 years) and both their mothers and fathers in 163 families as well as a best friend of each adolescent (M = 15 years). Data were collected from family members during home visits regarding adolescents' family relationships, friendships, and psychosocial adjustment; time use data were gathered during a series of 7 nightly phone interviews. Information was obtained from best friends during a brief phone interview. We developed a typology of 3 different patterns of perceived friendship control based on the combination of adolescents' and their best friends' ratings of relational control. Patterns of control in adolescents' friendships were associated with the distribution of control in both parents' marriages and adolescents' sibling relationships. Further analyses, designed to test developmental predictions, revealed connections between friendship control and other qualities of adolescents' friendships (i.e., intimacy, conflict, perspective-taking).     

Parental involvement in adolescent romantic relationships: patterns and correlates

This study examined dimensions of mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in adolescents’ romantic relationships when offspring were age 17. Using cluster analysis, parents from 105 White, working and middle class families were classified as positively involved, negatively involved, or autonomy-oriented with respect to their adolescents’ romantic relationships. Patterns of parental involvement were generally not associated with parent–offspring relationship quality at about adolescent age 13, but earlier parent–offspring relationship quality moderated the associations between parental involvement and adolescent romantic experiences at about age 18. Positive parent–offspring relationship quality buffered the effects of negative parental involvement, whereas poorer parent–offspring relationship quality was a more adaptive context for adolescents of autonomy-oriented parents. Discussion focuses on the importance of parenting practices in adolescent romantic relationships and the emotional climate of parent–offspring relationships as a developmental context for those practices.

Development agencies: Global or solo players?

This paper questions whether development agencies and their staff, at whatever level (community-based organisations, national or international NGOs) are sufficiently clear about their own values and roles, and seeks to analyse tensions and dilemmas that arise when roles are confused. Clarity about the roles of the people and agencies involved is essential for the development of a valid global citizens' movement that can interconnect local and global problems and actors, and work towards sustainable solutions.     

Ebola vaccines,evidentiary charisma and the rise of global health emergency research

Abstract

The 2013–2016 West African Ebola outbreak was both a catastrophic public health disaster and a rare research opportunity. This paper analyses how the tensions between the humanitarian imperatives of disease control and the epistemic conventions of bioscientific inquiry played out in the accelerated development, testing and licensure of Ebola vaccines. Beginning with the epidemiological projections of the disease’s spread, the paper develops the notion of evidentiary charisma to capture the power of experimental designs and data packages to marshal public health salience, recruit moral legitimacy and short-circuit scientific contestation. Attention to the charismatic dimensions of Ebola vaccine R&D helps to unpick the simultaneous appeals to exception and convention in the unfolding of a global health crisis, and to trace the normative and technical contours of the emerging paradigm of emergency research.     

Facts,power and global evidence: a new empire of truth

Abstract

What are the epistemological and political contours of evidence today? This introduction to the special issue lays out key shifts in the contemporary politics of knowledge and describes the collective contribution of the six papers as an articulation of what we describe as a ‘new empiricism’, exploring how earlier historical appeals to evidence to defend political power and decision-making both chime with and differ from those of the contemporary era. We outline some emerging empirical frontiers in the study of instruments of calculation, from the evolution of the randomized controlled trial (RCT) to the growing importance of big data, and explore how these methodological transformations intersect with the alleged crisis of expertise in the ‘post-truth’ era. In so doing, we suggest that the ambiguity of evidence can be a powerful tool in itself, and we relate this ambiguity to the ideological commitment and moral fervour that is elicited through appeals to, and the performance of, evaluation.