“Making It”: Understanding Adolescent Resilience in Two Informal Settlements (Slums) in Nairobi,Kenya

Many adolescents living in contexts characterized by adversity achieve positive outcomes. We adopt a protection–risk conceptual framework to examine resilience (academic achievement, civic participation, and avoidance of risk behaviors) among 1,722 never-married 12–19 year olds living in two Kenyan urban slums. We find stronger associations between explanatory factors and resilience among older (15–19 years) than younger (12–14 years) adolescents. Models for prosocial behavior and models for antisocial behavior emerge as key predictors of resilience. Further accumulation of evidence on risk and protective factors is needed to inform interventions to promote positive outcomes among youth situated in an ecology of adversity.     

Not-Knowing or Knowing Naught: Revisiting the Concept of Collaboration and Expertise in Child and Youth Care Practice

This article discusses the complexities associated with adopting a not-knowing stance in Child and Youth Care practice. By highlighting some of the challenges, it also clarifies the distinctions between practitioner lack of knowing how to proceed and an intentional, uncertain attitude when working with children, youth and families. Recommendations or caveats are provided if a practitioner chooses to adopt this kind of orientation to practice.     

“Use words. Not your body”: The hunger that has no name

This essay examines the competing readings of food refusal that emerged from a student hunger strike held at Columbia University in fall 2007. The invisibility of the act of food refusal forces hunger strikers to adopt performance strategies that make their (non)action visible as protest. To make the politics of their food refusal legible, advocates for the hunger strike promoted their actions as part of a 40 year tradition of student protest. However, that same invisibility allowed the protest's detractors to deride the hunger strikers as anorexic. At the center of the protest and the commentary about it was a wasting female body that confused for spectators the line between the political and the pathological. Attention to this body raises questions of how community is created and disciplined through performative acts, how easily female protest is evacuated of political meaning and the uneasy role of whiteness in popular attention to anorexia.     

Here be monsters: a choreomaniac's companion to the danse macabre

Consider this a vade mecum: an invitation to “walk with me” through more or less uncanny terrains of worlds in the making in search, of(f) course, of monsters. The search will be delving into the areas of “creepypasta:” pieces of cursed prose and pictures that circulate online, waiting to contaminate and possess the next reader. Using a theoretical framework of posthuman and feminist theory, not least the work done by Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway, this vade mecum asks what it might mean to engage ethically with that which is not supposed to exist, but which haunts us nonetheless. In other words: what does it mean to move, live and engage with spectres in digital times?     

Labor radicalism and the local politics of Chinese exclusion: Mayor Jacob Weisbach and the Tacoma Chinese expulsion of 1885

ABSTRACT

The 1885 Chinese expulsion from Tacoma, Washington Territory highlights the importance of local political economy in shaping how a wider anti-Chinese movement played out in a particular community. Tacoma was a newly emerging city where white residents felt the threat of corporate domination in the form of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In this context, the city’s German immigrant mayor, Jacob Weisbach, could draw upon his longstanding labor radicalism to mobilize a broad anti-Chinese coalition that blurred the divide between white workers and the local business class. The result was the forceful removal of Chinese residents following a year-long campaign that culminated in mob action and became known as the ‘Tacoma Method’. This local violence in turn fed into ongoing national efforts to secure Chinese exclusion. Tacoma’s Chinese expulsion illustrates how radical labor traditions could be turned, under particular conditions, to the politics of racial repression even as the proponents of expulsion framed their efforts in terms of an egalitarian and democratic agenda. The participation of the Knights of Labor and other labor radicals in a politics exemplified by the Tacoma Method was accordingly tied to the larger racialized American state-building project as it unfolded in the late 19th Century.     

The role of universities in the promotion of worker protection: UCLA labor occupational health and safety program as a model for countries with developing economies

ABSTRACT

Protection of the workers’ health in countries with developing economies is increasingly important because of the adverse effects of globalization, along with changing industrial relations, the rise of precarious work and outsourcing, and the decline in unionization. In this study, I examine whether the institutes created by universities might serve as an interface between workers, academia, and state agencies, and provide assistance for both improving workplace conditions and enforcing occupational health and safety rules. I describe the history of one such effort: The Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program (LOSH) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Using a review of written sources along with participatory observation and interviews as methods, I found that the challenges faced by LOSH historically have important parallels in countries with developing economies today. Ultimately, university-based occupational health programs like LOSH need to be followed in other parts of the world and be supported by governments if the mission to reduce workplace injuries and diseases is going to be realized in the United States and in other countries.     

论劳动者的休息权及其法律保障

休息权是劳动者所享有的宪法权利,具有自由权和社会权的双重属性.当劳动者享有休息权时,国家负有尊重和不干预的义务;在劳动者的休息权受用人单位侵害时,国家负有保护的义务;发展劳动者休息和休养的设施,国家负有给付义务.保障劳动者的休息权,立法机关需要完善相关立法,劳动行政部门需要切实履行法定监管职责,司法解释的举证责任分配规...     

中原油田劳务派遣工劳动权益问题的调研与思考

劳务派遣作为一种新型的、特殊的劳动用工形式,近年来在我国得到迅速发展,成为某些企业用工主流方式.劳务派遣工的劳动权益维护也逐渐成为一项社会问题,对于这一问题的解决,需要各界人士献计献策,需要党和国家的政策支持和各级工会组织的紧密配合.     

The Africa-China relationship: challenges and opportunities

The dramatic growth in the relationship between Africa and China is one of the great stories of the twenty-first century, part of the profound transformations taking place in the global political economy. It has been greeted with excitement, consternation, and confusion. To its cheerleaders, it represents the enduring partnership between Africa and China, spawned by the historical affinities of struggles against Western imperialism and humanistic aspirations for development. To its critics, it is reminiscent of European colonisation a century earlier, in which Africa serves as a cheap source of raw materials, a lucrative export market for Chinese manufactured goods, and an outlet for its surplus capital. Rather than a development partner, some see China as Africa's biggest development competitor, whose explosive growth and insatiable quest for global markets threatens Africa's industrialisation and competitiveness. This paper examines the factors behind the development of Africa-China relations, especially its economic magnitude, and the challenges and opportunities it offers both regions.     

Campañas negativas en las elecciones 2000 y 2006 en México

This article explores the nature of negative campaigns that were held in both 2000 and 2006 Mexican presidential elections. The purpose is to establish that the generalized use of negative campaigning concurs with the development of two unusual electoral processes: the transition of the State party into an opposition party (2000), and its consolidation as government (2006). Based on the theoretical claims of Shiv (1997), Lau (1999), and Finkel (1998), the author describes the development of negative campaigns in those elections that represented the starting point and the presumed consummation of the use of this kind of campaigns. With journals’ documented records and the monitoring of tv spots of both elections it is established that the 2000 presidential election used negative campaigns based on decrying the official party, while the 2006 election resorted to negative tv spots.