Enacting Oblivion

After periods of major political change, incoming regimes have often declared “acts of oblivion” in which courts and sometimes citizens are commanded to forget what happened under the preceding regime. But how are courts and citizens supposed to obey this command? Must they not remember what it is they are commanded to forget? If so, obedience is only possible at the price of disobedience. This paper suggests this paradox raises important issues about the concept of memory. It argues that in order to understand acts of oblivion we need to distinguish between two aspects of memory: the cognitive, concerned with the transmission of information, and the conative, concerned with the transmission of will and affect. This distinction provides a way of avoiding the more overtly paradoxical features of acts of oblivion. However, there remain significant difficulties facing the political project of forgetting.     

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.     

Racial Disparities in Service Referrals for Families in the Child Welfare System

Among families in the child welfare system, family reunification depends largely upon the services to which families are referred. This study examines whether race/ethnicity influences the number and types of services to which families are referred. Findings suggest that compared to African American families, Hispanic families were more often referred to psychosocial services (e.g., mental health) than basic needs (e.g., housing). These findings indicate a need to reduce service referral disparities between ethnic groups.     

Using Bayesian Aldrich‐McKelvey Scaling to Study Citizens' Ideological Preferences and Perceptions

Aldrich‐McKelvey scaling is a powerful method that corrects for differential‐item functioning (DIF) in estimating the positions of political stimuli (e.g., parties and candidates) and survey respondents along a latent policy dimension from issue scale data. DIF arises when respondents interpret issue scales (e.g., the standard liberal‐conservative scale) differently and distort their placements of the stimuli and themselves. We develop a Bayesian implementation of the classical maximum likelihood Aldrich‐McKelvey scaling method that overcomes some important shortcomings in the classical procedure. We then apply this method to study citizens' ideological preferences and perceptions using data from the 2004–2012 American National Election Studies and the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Our findings indicate that DIF biases self‐placements on the liberal‐conservative scale in a way that understates the extent of polarization in the contemporary American electorate and that citizens have remarkably accurate perceptions of the ideological positions of senators and Senate candidates.