Double Lives, Double Narratives: Tracing the Story of the Family in Rousseau, the Swiss Civil Code and the Fathers’ Rights Debates

A recent parliamentary postulate in Switzerland calling for joint custody as the legal norm argues that fathers are discriminated against in Swiss divorce law. This postulate has incited a debate which circles around issues of equality, the role of fathers and mothers, and the good of the child. Our article, uniting approaches from literature, cultural studies, and science and technology studies, examines the arguments sparked by the debate with a view to different takes on gender and family. In doing so, it traces the roots of contemporary Swiss family law in the Rousseauian narrative of family life in Emile ou de l’education; it explores the manner in which scientific knowledge is marshaled to lend political legitimacy to current debate; and it asks finally how narrative bridges the gap between public discourse and lived experience.

Community Privilege and Environmental Justice: An Agent‐Based Analysis

Several theories compete to explain observed race‐ and ethnicity‐based environmental injustice in society. This paper focuses on analyzing the extent to which firms' siting decisions based on community privilege can explain this outcome. A unique feature of this analysis is that we include analysis of both unwanted land uses (disamenity firms) and desired land uses (amenity firms). The environmental justice analysis of amenities other than green spaces is rare, but amenities are crucial components of urban areas to which environmental justice studies must attend. We use an agent‐based model to explore community outcomes when environmental disamenities choose locations based on low community privilege, and compare this with scenarios in which disamenities only seek to minimize the cost of land. We also assess differences in environmental justice outcomes when amenities choose locations in areas with high community privilege. While disamenities' focus on locating in areas with low community privilege indeed affects environmental equity, the effect of amenity location is also important, and there are powerful interaction effects. The importance of privilege‐based location is found in these simulations regardless of which social group—majority or minority—is assumed to be the privileged group. This study suggests a limitation of EJ policies and models that focus on the politics of disamenity siting without considering the politics of amenity siting.     

“Socialist in content,national in form:” the making of Soviet national art and the case of Buryatia

This article examines the fine art of the Soviet national republics and its discourse in the Soviet Union, which were considerably shaped under the influence of socialist realism and Soviet nationality policy. While examining the central categories of Soviet artistic discourse such as the “national form,” “national distinctness,” and “tradition,” as well as cultural and scientific institutions responsible for the image of art of non-Russian nationalities, the author reveals the existence of a number of colonial features and discursive and institutional practices that foster a cultural divide between Russian and non-Russian culture and contribute to the marginalization of art. Special attention is paid to the implications of this discursive shaping for the local artistic scene in Buryatia.     

Interpretation,judgement and dialogue: a hermeneutical recollection of causal analysis in critical terrorism studies

ABSTRACT

This article problematises Critical Terrorism Studies’s (CTS) seeming reluctance to engage in causal explanation. An analysis of the meta-theoretical assumptions on causation in both orthodox and critical terrorism studies reveals that the latter’s refusal to incorporate causal analysis in its broader research agenda reproduces – despite its commitment to epistemological pluralism – the former’s understanding of causation as the only sustainable one. Elemental to this understanding is the idea that causation refers to the regular observation of constant conjunction. Due to the positivist leanings of such a conception, CTS is quick to dismiss it as consolidating Orthodox Terrorism Studies’s lack of critical self-reflexivity, responsibility of the researcher, and dedication towards informing state-led policies of counterterrorism. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of science and International Relations, this article advances an alternative understanding of causation that emphasises its interpretative, normative and dialogical fabric. It is therefore argued that CTS should reclaim causal analysis as an essential element of its research agenda. This not only facilitates a more robust challenge against Orthodox Terrorism Studies’ conventional understanding of causation but also consolidates CTS’s endeavour of deepening and broadening our understanding that (re)embeds terrorist violence in its historical and social context.     

Placing School Victimization in a Global Context

ABSTRACT

Although often considered to be safe havens, schoolhouses have a darker side: they are places where students are victimized. Research in the United States shows that students are victimized by various forms of misconduct, ranging from property-related crime (e.g., theft, destruction) to violent behavior (e.g., assault, homicide) in schools. Notably, international studies reveal that school victimization is a serious concern across the globe. In this context, the present study provides an overview of the extent and nature of school victimization from international perspective. Special attention is given to bullying, a form of victimization found across the globe. Important school-based prevention efforts developed outside the United States are discussed. Finally, this study raises awareness to another type of serious victimization—terrorist attacks—that are on the rise, particularly among nations located in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa.     

Coverage of bombings for political advantage: Turkish on-line news reporting of the 2016 Ankara attacks

On 17 February 2016, a suicide bomber blew himself up, killing 28 people and injuring another 61 in the “heart” of Turkey’s capital Ankara. A few hours after the attack, the Turkish government blamed Salih Neccar from the (mostly) Kurdish-Syrian People’s protection Unit (YPG). Two days later, the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK) claimed responsibility and named the bomber as Abdülbaki Sömer a Turkish citizen. The bombing is part of a resumption of violence in Turkey between Turkish government authorities and Kurdish groups. In this paper, we examine how on-line news stories recontextualise the bombing. We assert that news sources multimodally recontextualise the bombing in ways which are advantageous to the news organisations’ owners, political alliances and supporters. By each news source representing their political interests unquestionably positive and opposition unconditionally negative, polarisation in Turkish politics is articulated. This does nothing to solve problems and heal wounds in a time of national crisis.     

Subsidized Housing and Residential Trajectories: An Application of Matched Sequence Analysis

Scholars have long debated the relative merits of site-based, subsidized housing owned and operated by a public entity or by the private sector. This is the first study to classify long-term residential trajectories of nationally representative low-income households in the United States by their initial assisted housing status. We employ a matched sequence analysis of neighborhood poverty and racial trajectories of low-income households in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics who formed during 1988–1992. Among households carefully matched by their demographic and economic attributes, we find that those first forming households in public housing spend much longer durations over the subsequent 20 years in poorer, minority dominant neighborhoods than similar households first forming in market-rate housing do. In contrast, forming a household in private site-based subsidized housing is associated with superior neighborhood socioeconomic (but not desegregated racial composition) trajectories compared with starting in market-rate housing. Implications for housing policy are discussed.     

A New Way to Compare Horizontal Connections of Policy Sectors: “Coupling” of Actors,Institutions and Policies

This paper proposes an innovative framework to compare the coordination of policy sectors in an encompassing way. Building on recent contributions to the literature, this paper proposes a typology to analyze the coordination of policy sectors from a comparative perspective. To this end, the paper adapts Karl Weick’s concept of coupling to the comparative analysis of public policies, particularly to horizontal relations of policy sectors. The paper argues that it is possible to distinguish four forms of sectoral coupling: tight coupling, loose coupling, de-coupling and non-coupling. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of this typology for empirical research, the paper applies coupling to analyze the relations of the healthcare and public health sectors. To conclude, the paper discusses the possibilities and limits of the typology, and suggests other examples the approach could be transferred to.     

“Dynamite bombs of New York manufacture”: the terrorist perspective in the Stevensons,Greer and James

This article examines the first three literary reactions to Fenian terrorism: Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson’s co-written novel, The Dynamiter (1885); Tom Greer’s A Modern Daedalus (1885) and Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima (1886). Although these works approach terrorism from different angles, they set the pattern for subsequent treatments that will “give primary voice to the perspective of the terrorist”. “Zero”, the hapless bomb-makers in The Dynamiter, is a surprisingly urbane, sympathetic figure; Greer illustrates both the necessity and the moral quandaries of terrorism and James shows considerable sympathy for anarchism’s causes, even though terrorism threatens high art and culture. I also hope to show that fiction can provide excellent source material for studying the cultural imaginary of terrorism and, by extension, make a bid for the inclusion of literature scholars under the umbrella of Critical Terrorism Studies.     

Decolonising online development studies? Emancipatory aspirations and critical reflections – a case study

Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely ‘mirroring’ relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to ‘decolonise development studies’ and the complex power dynamics they encounter, we reflect on this question by analysing experiences of faculty and students in a United Kingdom-based online development studies programme, focusing particularly on perspectives of development practitioner-students working from Africa. We discuss barriers to social inclusivity – including the politics of language – that shaped participation dynamics in the programme as well as debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacks key tensions in addressing intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.