World Risk Society and War Against Terror

I interpret the 'war against terror', declared following September 11 2001, as adopting concepts drawn from the work of Ulrich Beck, as a projection of world risk society. Despite its global character, war against terror is constructed through outmoded vocabularies of national security and sovereignty, within which the reasoned negotiation of risk is marginalized. This exclusion contributes to the intensification rather than reduction of terror and terrorism. In so doing the moment of violence inscribed within the concept of the political resurfaces in the constitution of war against terror, Homeland Security, and the identities and anxieties that they reproduce. Contrary to Slavoj Žižek's claim that risk society is incapable of resolving the dilemmas that it exposes, Beck's approach cuts across established ideological and methodological boundaries, anticipating key transformations of discourse required to address the prevailing global predicament through the vocabularies and logic of cosmopolitan risk, rather than those of absolute security, terror and war.     

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Adopting Open Educational Resources in an Introductory American Government Course

In this article, we present findings from a grant-funded initiative to replace traditional, proprietary textbooks with an open content textbook under a Creative Commons license in the introductory American government course (POLS 1101) at Middle Georgia State University. We find that the use of an open content textbook led to somewhat negative effects on student learning outcomes and student course satisfaction, although the associated lower textbook cost increased textbook accessibility to students. We conclude with some suggestions to those adopting textbooks in this course and to the wider discipline regarding measures that may lead to more unequivocally positive outcomes than those experienced in this study.     

Surviving the suicides of significant others: a case study

Psychological pain has been reported to be major contributing factor for completed suicide, and classical suicidology based its wisdom on this construct. In this paper we report the case of a patient whose family experienced a high number of suicides apparently due to an escalation of psychological pain in the family members after the successive suicides. We also briefly discuss the problem of helping survivors after the suicide of loved one.     

Suicide among indigenous peoples: the usefulness of the Human Relations Area Files

The present note describes the resource for studying suicide in indigenous peoples provided by the Human Relations Area Files and describes three ways in which these files can illuminate suicidal behavior: testing theories of suicide, exploring the linguistics of suicide, and challenging myths about suicide.     

Body mass and suicide risk

Body mass has been neglected as a possible predictor of suicidal behavior. The present investigation explores the association between body mass index and completed suicide. Data are from the National Mortality Followback Survey and refer to 373 suicides, and 518 deaths from motor vehicle accidents as controls. The results of a logistic regression analysis indicated that, for females, the greater the BMI the greater the suicide risk. However, this relationship did not hold up under controls for race and other covariates of BMI. For males, the BMI was not significantly related to suicide risk either at the bivariate or multivariate levels of analysis. The best predictors of suicide were living alone for females, and alcohol abuse for males.     

Parenting and Centrality: The Role of Life Meaning as a Mediator for Parenting and Language Broker Role Identity

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Language brokering is a prevalent phenomenon in ethnic minority immigrant populations. Although accruing evidence points to the beneficial impacts of healthy role...