Stereotypes and National Identity: Experiencing the “Emotional Brazilian”

In this article, I examine how stereotypes are deployed in the process of experiencing national identities. Specifically, I analyse how a group of Brazilian academics who have studied in Europe and the United States have dealt with stereotypical notions of Brazilians as “warm people” who establish friendship “easily.” Ideas about a “greater emotionality,” which were often seen as negative from a European colonial perspective, are embraced and re-signified by them as a positive feature of Brazilian national identity, particularly when compared to the supposed “closed nature” of some Europeans. I argue therefore that the presence of such stereotypes contributes to reinforce a subjective sense of Brazilianess and also reveals the negotiations of power relations in the process of elaborating Brazilian national identity.     

From Health Crisis to Rights Advocacy? HIV/AIDS and Gay Activism in China and Singapore

The relationship between HIV/AIDS and gay activism has been primarily informed by the American experience and understudied in nondemocratic contexts. Drawing upon qualitative research on China and Singapore, we refine understanding of HIV/AIDS’ influence on the development of gay activism under authoritarian conditions, by examining the processes through which activist organizations interact with laws and regulations, political norms, HIV/AIDS funding, and government responses to both HIV/AIDS and collective organizing. We show how HIV/AIDS’ influence plays out in multiple patterns, depending on the strategic responses that gay activists select from a constrained range of options to shape their organizations’ destinies. Therefore, we provide insights for development agencies and international donors into whether and how international assistance intended to encourage activism and wider social change are mediated by political and legal controls on local activism.     

Enhancing the Justice System's Response to Elder Abuse: Discussions and Recommendations of the “Improving Prosecution” Working Group of The National Policy Summit on Elder Abuse

ABSTRACT

Original analysis of data from the British national disability surveys is undertaken to throw light on the problem of elder abuse. The prevalence of behavioral problems among individuals living in private households in Great Britain in 1985 is described, and the ages and living arrangements of those with potentially aggressive behavior is examined. The data suggest that the potential for abuse arises in a variety of living arrangements. Tentative estimates are provided for the numbers of older people potentially at risk because they themselves have, or are living with someone who has, a disability that involves violent or aggressive behavior.     

“The most bombed nation on Earth”: Western Shoshone resistance to the Nevada National Security Site

This article explores a set of protests challenging U.S. occupation of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site as a means of understanding the deployment of bordering rhetorics in colonial expansion and indigenous resistance. The protests have used a variety of strategies that appropriate artifacts historically controlled by colonial powers such as passports and No Trespassing signs to assert their own sovereignty and demand a change to the material conditions of U.S. occupation of land recognized as belonging to the Western Shoshone in the Treaty of Ruby Valley. These protests offer a chance to complicate current scholarly understandings of decolonial protest. This article analyzes the verbal, visual, and performative elements of these protests and argues that indigenous citizenship and border protests can coopt and reappropriate traditionally hegemonic rhetorics as a means of challenging naturalized assumptions about nationhood, borders, and sovereignty.     

The turn to the self: From “Big Character Posters” to YouTube videos1

This paper explores the process by which user‐created content in contemporary China has evolved from being appropriated as a weapon of political mobilization and accusation to serving as a vehicle of independent self‐representation. The analysis is set in the context of the social, political and economic metamorphosis that China has undergone in the past five decades and foregrounds the dynamics of political, economic and technological forces transforming Chinese media. The metaphor of “the wall” is used to chart the contours of the struggle for self‐expression and representation. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the political and social implications of the Internet and networked user created media content for China.     

From smuggled migrants to ‘alleged smugglers’: Empirical evidence and policy perspectives on the criminalization of people on the move in Italy

Since 2014, numerous people on the move have been accused of migrant smuggling in Italian courts for steering makeshift vessels or for assisting in navigation across the Mediterranean Sea. This is the case regardless of the fact that such behaviour was the result of coercion or threats. In this contribution, drawing upon extensive empirical research and following a socio-legal paradigm, I first explore the criminalization of people on the move in relation to migrant smuggling charges in the years following the so-called 2014–2015 refugee crisis and discuss the impact on their rights. Second, I tackle the issue from a policy perspective, considering three potential EU/national policy reforms and the ways in which they could successfully address an existing policy problem. Such reforms vary in scope, from a damage limitation logic to a fully fledged change of paradigm, and the three can be described as follows: alignment of EU and national frameworks with the United Nations Protocol against migrant smuggling; a more significant differentiation between migrant smuggling and the facilitation of undocumented migration; and an explicit exoneration from criminal liability for people on the move accused of migrant smuggling. This article presents innovative insights, providing on the one hand an up-to-date empirical understanding of this form of criminalization of people on the move and, on the other, extensive reflections on the way in which policy reforms could prevent it.     

“Trees Die From the Top”: International Perspectives on NGO Leadership Development

This paper examines the role of leadership development in NGO capacity building and assesses some of the challenges of developing a new generation of NGO leaders. The paper draws on the analysis of new and existing research into the dimensions of NGO leadership highlighting the importance of both individual attributes and contextual relevance. Effective NGO leaders are able to balance a range of competing pressures from different stakeholders in ways that do not compromise their individual identity and values. Leadership development programmes therefore need to focus on both the values and identity of individual leaders while also assisting leaders understand and proactively respond to their rapidly changing external environment. We conclude that there is an urgent need to build the capacity of NGOs to develop their leadership capability. Unless systems and processes to support this work are put in place then the apocryphal warning trees die from the top will have more than a ring of truth in it.     

From salons to the native reserve: reformulating the “native question” through pictorial photography in 1950s South Africa

The article provides a critical reflection on the practice of photographic salon exhibitions in the 1950s. In South Africa and abroad, there was a resurgence of photographic societies from the early 1950s that encouraged amateur photographers to create images based on a distinct visual grammar, thereby offering them not only an opportunity to display their work but to compete amongst each other. Subsequently, salon exhibitions produced work that would be judged on its pictorial rather than strict representational value thereby depoliticising the exhibition space. On the other hand, this article seeks to place this practice in the realm of racial segregation under apartheid by considering the deployment of the “black subject” in the native rural reserve in Joseph Denfield’s (1911–1967) work. Through a study of his ethnographic photographs which were exhibited internationally in this period as pictorial work, as well as his intellectualisation of his practice as native photography, it argues that the space of the salon allowed him to pose the “native question” pictorially, that is, provided a discourse through which the “native” could be “known” and ordered.     

From Bondage to Freedom on the Red Sea Coast: Manumitted Slaves in Egyptian Massawa, 1873–1885

The study of 239 manumission acts registered in the court records of the Red Sea port of Massawa, now in the modern state of Eritrea, allows us glimpses into the practice of slavery and emancipation in that town in the 1870s and 1880s. The evidence sheds light both on urban slaves owned by local Massawans, commercial entrepreneur-sojourners, Egyptian officers and the Egyptian government, as well as on those slaves who might have been captured en route before their shipment across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East. In the context of the scanty historiography of slavery in the Ethio-Eritrean area, the data provides unique information about gender, age, names, origins, geographic provenance and the circumstances of manumission of 276 slaves, many of whom originated in what are today areas of south-western and western Ethiopia, but also from the Eritrean borderlands and the Sudan. The evidence also provides insights into ethnic and racial distinctions and categorisations, as well as the experience of slaves before and after manumission, including concubinage, marriage and, perhaps, employment with the Egyptian government which ruled Massawa between 1865 and 1885.     

From “Just Us” to Justice: Connecting the Environment,Community, and Academy

Sociological Forum -     

“Ovo Je Srbija”: The Horror of the National Thing in A Serbian Film

In this article, the authors discuss the recent horror film A Serbian Film (2010 A Serbian Film (2010). Dir. S. Spasojevic, Invincible Pictures, Serbia.  [Google Scholar]) as a representation of the catastrophic nature of Serbian society in the Milosevic era. The authors start their analysis by talking about the construction of the Serbian ethno-nation under Milosevic, arguing that it emerged as a kind of reaction-formation to the collapse of Soviet-led communism in the Eastern bloc in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Their argument is that Milosevic constructed a new idea of Serbia based on a utopian theory of the ethnically homogenous nation to try to oppose the social, political and economic chaos produced by the end of communism and the related collapse of the ethnically mixed Yugoslav state. Following this work, the authors analyse the detail of Milosevic’s state and, in particular, the criminalization of Serbian society in the 1990s, and attempt to show how A Serbian Film dramatizes these conditions in a horror story about sexual violence and state-sponsored sadism. Throughout the article, the authors employ Freudian–Lacanian theory to argue that what A Serbian Film illustrates is the horror of the Serbian real and the terrible consequences of the state-sponsored collapse of normal civilization into an ultraviolent, hypersexualized, criminalized state of nature. In this respect, the authors suggest that the message of A Serbian Film has relevance beyond the case of Serbia, because even though the social and political context of Milosevic’s Serbia is essential to understanding its historical significance, the authors’ view is that it also speaks about the universal human condition of the death drive explored by Freud in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and the potential contained in every society to descend into barbarity and sadistic violence.     

Political Advocacy in the Context of “Show Me Your Papers”: How Do Human Service Administrators Respond to Policy Upheaval?

This study focuses on the political advocacy of human service administrators following implementation of a highly restrictive state immigration law. It tests hypotheses to assess whether factors associated with the political advocacy of human service administrators generally are also associated with advocacy at a time of policy crisis. Findings suggest that few human service administrators engaged in immigration-related advocacy, and that those who did advocate were those most likely to perceive organizational benefit for doing so. The findings raise questions about the conditions under which human service administrators will advocate for social benefit in an organizational or individual role.     

From College Counselor to “Risk Manager”: The Evolving Nature of College Counseling on Today's Campuses

Abstract

College counselors are increasingly being called upon to assess “risk” and protect the college community from harm. This paper explores how this changing role for counselors might be impacting its reputation with students. It further discusses the complex and ever-changing dimensions of “risk,” noting the difficulty in developing reliable risk assessment tools.     

A note on “Banks winners in tournaments are difficult to recognize” by G. J. Woeginger

Given a tournament T, a Banks winner of T is the first vertex of any maximal (with respect to inclusion) transitive subtournament of T. While Woeginger shows that recognizing whether a given vertex of T is a Banks winner is NP-complete, the computation of a Banks winner of T is polynomial, and more precisely linear with respect to the size of T.The article of G.J. Woeginger appeared in Soc Choice Welfare 20: 523–528 (2003)