INTRODUCING PERSPECTIVES IN FAMILY LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH

This article provides an editorial introduction to the following three related articles on the growing use and influence of social science research in family law. It first considers why this has become problematic and identifies some common strategies used by advocates, sometimes under the guise of scholarship, to destroy the standing of research findings contrary to their ideological or political position. Then it discusses briefly the remedies proposed to mitigate these kinds of problems within the following three articles.     

Entpreprenerial Universities and Technology Transfer: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Knowledge-Based Economic Development

This paper offers a framework to illuminate the role of universities in systems of innovation. The framework attempts to incorporate economic, social, and political influences that affect the ability of universities to both create new knowledge and deploy that knowledge in economically useful ways and thereby contribute to economic growth and prosperity. The objective of this paper is to build a more general understanding of university–industry relationships and their role in knowledge-based innovation systems.     

EEOC guidance on psychiatric disabilities: many problems, few workable solutions

The EEOC recently issued "Enforcement Guidance" on psychiatric disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Although the Guidance provides clarification of a few issues involving mental disabilities under the ADA, in most respects the Guidance is problematic. For example, the Guidance suggests that the inability to get along with a supervisor or coworkers may constitute a disability under the ADA, that an employer may have to "accommodate" a disabled employee's misconduct, that an employer cannot require an employee to follow doctor's orders as a condition of employment, and that an employer may be obligated to modify work rules and procedures to accommodate a mentally disabled employee but is prohibited from explaining to coworkers why it is making such modifications. As the EEOC's Guidance exceeds or conflicts with the ADA in some respects and is largely unworkable in many respects, it remains to be seen how many courts will actually follow it.     

Mental disabilities under the ADA: a management rights approach

While numerous sources have focused on employee rights and employer obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, this article will emphasize employer rights with respect to mental disabilities under the ADA. Specifically, it addresses the ADA's definition of "mental disability," the right of employers to screen job applicants in spite of the ADA, the conditions under which an employer may require an employee to undergo a "fitness for duty" examination, and the limits of the duty to "reasonably accommodate" an employee with a mental disability.     

Citizenship in a time of empire: the World Social Forum as a new public space

Under conditions of neoliberal globalization, structural adjustment and the war on terror, the progressive expansion of modern citizenship, both in its substance and geographic reach, is increasingly in question. Yet, popular demands for democratization, rights and participation are exploding worldwide. This article argues for shifts in focus in the study of citizenship from states, institutions and the national scale to cultural practices in civil society at multiple scales in order to discern and theorize emergent citizenship practices under conditions of ‘empire’. The article examines the World Social Forum as a new kind of public space, ‘placed’ but transnational, and giving rise to a transnational subaltern counterpublic. Through its practices, this counterpublic is forging a new paradigm of citizenship.     

A Pacific Sojourn: Anna Kavan and the New Zealand Connection, 1941–2

Abstract

This article examines Anna Kavan’s sojourn in New Zealand from February 1941 to November 1942 in the company of the pacifist playwright Ian Hamilton. Living in the most remote of the ex-British colonies reinforced Kavan’s ontological sense of homelessness and wish to disidentify from British society, yet the colony’s anglophone orientation offered familiarity within the strange and alien. The geography, landscapes and communities of its Pacific islands encouraged a reshaping of her imaginative engagement with otherness. Referring to Kavan’s recently published diary, ‘Five Months Further or What I Remember ab[ou]t New Zealand’, the essay argues that the New Zealand ‘experience’ encouraged her use of tropes of the Gothic and uncanny as she grappled with issues of distance, homelessness and disjunctive reality. The discussion focuses on the alternative/parallel world that New Zealand represents in stories published in I Am Lazarus (1945). It identifies experimental techniques associated with Gothic fiction by which Kavan registers the overlapping dualisms of war-torn London and idyllic rural New Zealand, and represents memory through framing devices and defamiliarizing rhetorical tropes as a distancing activity interrupting the present moment: dream sequences, irruptions into and splittings of reality, space and time reversals, doublings of self/other, disjunctive non sequiturs and ghostly mirror imaging.     

Pacifists and Revenge-Seekers in Response to Unambiguous Peer Provocation

In order to better understand why some children retaliate when they feel provoked and others do not, the present study identified “pacifistically-oriented” children who made negative interpretations in response to unambiguous provocations, yet did not endorse revenge goals, and compared them to “revenge-seeking” children who also made negative interpretations but did endorse revenge goals. Groups were identified based on seventh graders’ (N?=?367; 54.77% male; 22.89% racial/ethnic minority) responses to hypothetical situations in which a peer excluded and insulted them. Comparing these groups revealed that Pacifists endorsed relationship-maintaining goals and emotion regulation goals more highly than Revenge-Seekers. Revenge-Seekers reported more anger and endorsed beliefs about negative reciprocity and aggression being legitimate more highly than Pacifists. Additionally, Revenge-Seekers were more disrespect sensitive than were Pacifists, based on a measure of vigilance for signs of disrespect and expectations that others would disrespect them. Together these findings point to social-cognitive and emotion-related processes that may inhibit revenge-seeking in unambiguous provocation situations, even when children interpret the peer’s behavior quite negatively.     

Interrogating Gender Divides in Technology for Education and Development: the Case of the One Laptop per Child Project in Ghana

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project aims to make low-cost computers accessible to the “world’s poorest children,” presuming that the gadgets will support their empowerment via education. The project’s success globally, however, has been mixed at best, with many countries terminating their purchases due to cost, inadequate infrastructure, and negative side effects. In October 2010, Ghana suspended the country’s 3-year participation. This study examines the complex history and failure of OLPC Ghana in two pilot schools, one urban and one rural, with particular attention to gender bias. The analysis draws on interviews with government personnel, students, and teachers in the pilot classes. Despite lacking electric power in the rural community, UNDP’s Millennium Villages Project played a strong support role, making OLPC somewhat more effective with less of a gender divide in the rural school than in the urban school in Accra. Both pilot schools faced severe sustainability challenges raising decade-old questions about modernity and technological determinism. Further, in both schools, particularly the urban school, a digital divide by gender was evident.