Carnal teachings: raunch aesthetics as queer feminist pedagogies in Yo! Majesty's hip hop practice

This essay puts forward a notion of “raunch aesthetics,” theorizing raunch as an aesthetic, performative, and vernacular practice: an explicit mode of sexual expression that transgresses norms of privacy and respectability. Raunch aesthetics describe creative practices that often blend humor and sexual explicitness to launch cultural critiques, generate pleasure for minority audiences, and affirm queer lives. The author activates her formulation of raunch in analyzing Yo! Majesty, a hip hop group comprised of black female emcees who openly describe their sexual desire for women, and explores how the queer youth of color she works with have responded to their music. Working beyond the unexamined moralisms that give critiques of raunch culture their legitimacy, the author argues that Yo! Majesty's raunch aesthetics transmit queer and feminist teachings. While celebrating carnal pleasures, these artists critique heterosexism, subvert narratives about the incompatibility of belief in Christ and queer sexualities, and trouble notions concerning the emancipation of coming out of the closet and declaring a stable homosexual identity. In demonstrating how raunch aesthetics generate consciousness raising, the author discusses how her youth participants critically read and consume hip hop while negotiating unwieldy meanings of sexuality and gender presentation.     

“I’m totally transariffic”: Exploring how Transgender and Gender-expansive Youth and Young Adults Make Sense of their Challenges and Successes

As transgender and gender-expansive (TGE) youth and young adults (YYA) navigate challenging environments, they often seek spaces for safety and acceptance. This study explores ways in which a group of TGE YYA who were engaged with a community-based service organization make sense of their experiences, challenges, and successes in ways that illuminate the factors and processes associated with resilience. Secondary data analysis was conducted on qualitative responses from 85 TGE YYA ages 13–24. The themes that emerged provide insight into the ways community-based programs and providers can understand and support the resilience of TGE YYA.     

Stage model for female criminals: business school students’ perceptions of white-collar offenders

We know that half of the population in Norway is female, and we know that females represent 6% of the white-collar crime prison population. In the stage model overview, we derive percentages from the literature into the gender model to explain stepwise reduction from 50% to 6%. In our empirical research, we asked two groups of business school students to come up with their own estimates for the stages in the model for female criminals. While estimates from executive students resulted in 3% women in prison, bachelor students’ estimates resulted in 10% women in prison. The most obvious discrepancy between the research literature and our two survey groups is related to relative convictions. Based on the literature, we suggested that female defendants receive more serious convictions because they may perceive and feel more guilt for a crime, for example in terms of regret, shame and depression. Thus women may have a tendency to confess more easily. Both executive students and bachelor students disagree with this estimate of 140%, as they suggest 62% and 69% respectively. One reason for their suggestion of less serious convictions for female white-collar criminals – sometimes labelled pink-collar criminals – might be that family situation and other elements are taken into account before a verdict is passed on a woman. Another substantial discrepancy is related to detection risk. The literature suggests a low detection risk for women, but may be not as low as we estimated at 30%. Both executive and bachelor students believe that the gender difference in detection likelihood is not that formidable, as they suggest 75% and 65% respectively.     

Coming out of the shadow? Studies of local governments in Central and Eastern Europe in European academic research

This article is an analysis of the changing role of research on local governments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) within mainstream European studies. It refers to dependency theory (Wallerstein, Prebish) as applied to scientific research. It classifies CEE as being in the semi-periphery of academic research. The empirical analysis consists of two parts: (1) qualitative review of the most important of the comparative studies of European local governments. It includes a discussion on the role of local governments and researchers from CEE in these studies; (2) quantitative based on an analysis of articles published in international journals and citations for those articles in Scopus. The analysis covers 14 countries (all new member states who joined the EU from 2004 onwards, plus the Balkan countries: Albania, Macedonia, and Serbia).     

Connecting research and practice: Perspectives on the role of manualized programs in youth work

While there is a strong movement in favor of the use of manual-based programs in the arena of social care, there is a view that such programs are not applicable in the more fluid setting of youth work, which operates informally, using dynamic and organic methods. A critical pedagogical approach to youth work engages young people by encouraging them to become inquisitive, to question why things are the way they are and to pose problems through which they can learn. For some, manualized or evidence-based programs are not seen as having a role in such contexts. However, to date, the international debate in relation to this issue has been limited by an absence of published studies focusing specifically on strategies to implement evidence-informed practice in youth work contexts. This article aims to address this gap in the literature. The Irish national youth organization Foróige, which works with more than 56,000 young people in Ireland on an annual basis, has developed a range of manualized evidence-informed resources to support its youth work over recent years. Drawing on research findings from a range of studies conducted with youth workers focusing on implementation of these resources, the article explores the benefits and tensions associated with the use of program manuals in a youth work context. The findings suggest that such resources have a valuable role to play in youth work if designed in collaboration with youth workers, showing respect for core youth work values and allowing for flexibility and adaptability in implementation.     

Investigating Ministry Names for Comparative Policy Analysis: Lessons from Energy Governance

This commentary contends that ministry names offer a valuable construct for furthering the state of comparative policy analysis. Using energy governance as an example, this study shows that ministries’ names are stable in some countries but subject to changes in others. Furthermore, there is variation in the ministries’ names over time. Creating or maintaining a ministry that explicitly mentions “energy” is interpreted as signaling enhanced political attention to this issue, whereas removing the referral to “energy” signals the opposite. The names of ministries responsible for energy matters also affect energy policy outputs. Drawing on 43 OECD and BRICS countries, the empirical analysis shows that countries which have ministries in place that mention “energy” together with “economy” in their names are swifter in adopting renewable energy targets. Ministries that mention “economy” along with “climate” and/or “environment” also have an inclination to be faster in adopting such targets, but the coefficients fail to reach conventional levels of statistical significance. Given this finding, it appears worth pursuing this line of research further.     

Choosing to be political: some reflections on youth activism in the US

This article explores youth activism in the US, not through the lens of collective action, but as the product of personal choices. By drawing on existentialism, and particularly on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, this article proposes to shift the focus of the debate from youths’ collective action to the self – a conscious self that observes, perceives and makes sense of the surrounding world through personal experience. It is this conscious self that decides how, and whether, to intervene against the ‘wrong’ that the self experiences. In this perspective, it is not only the acts (of citizenship) that matter, but the conscious process through which the self chooses to become political. Such an understanding will ultimately help uncover not only how the undocumented act and how to conceptualise their acts but also how they perceive and experience their current status and who they want to become.     

Data Analysis and Data Visualization as Active Learning in Political Science

While data analysis and the related skills of data management and data visualization are important skills for undergraduates in the field of political science, the process of learning these skills can also be used to develop critical thinking, encourage active and collaborative learning, and to apply knowledge gained in the classroom. Drawing on our experiences using data work in upper-level courses in International Relations and American Politics, we discuss how data work and quantitative analysis can be incorporated into subject-based (i.e., nonmethods specific) courses, and how it can also enhance critical reasoning skills. An evaluation of this approach using direct and indirect assessment is included.     

Vote Oswego: Developing and Assessing the Campaign-as-Course Model

College campuses have taken on increased responsibility for mobilizing young voters. Despite the discipline’s commitment to civic engagement, political science departments play a minimal role in this programming. This article outlines a course structure—including learning objectives, course outline, and assessments—that treats a campus-wide voter mobilization drive as the basis of an applied political science course. Transforming a campus voter mobilization program into a political science practicum offers advanced skill-building for students seeking political careers and links learning objectives to real world activities. Participants report gains in both knowledge of campaigns and grassroots campaign skills. We argue this type of course particularly benefits students attending colleges and universities in geographic areas that receive little attention from political campaigns as well as those students for whom the traditional route of gaining political experience—an unpaid, off-campus internship—is impractical or even impossible.     

“Vivimos en Jaula de Oro”: The Impact of State-Level Legislation on Immigrant Latino Families

This study sought to learn from Latino immigrant parents which and how state-level immigration policies impact their families. Fifty-four Latino immigrant parents participated in interviews. Constructivist grounded theory methods were used to complete the analysis. Results indicate that fear of detainment, deportation, and family separation affects participants emotionally and behaviorally. Participants experience exploitive practices in the workplace and through traffic infractions. Social support networks are constantly changing and weakened when families relocate in search of immigrant friendly communities. Simultaneously, parents develop strategies to protect their families against stringent immigration enforcement. Implications for practice, policy, and research are discussed.