Trapped in Space? Children's Accounts of Risky Environments

The purpose of this article is to explore children's perceptions and experiences of safety and risk in one highly contested interface area in Belfast. Interface areas are landscapes divided by physical and symbolic boundaries on the basis of religious/ethno‐national identification. The research draws on maps and focus group discussions with young teenagers from four schools in an interface area located in North Belfast. The teenagers identified both private and public places of risk that they faced in their everyday lives. The types of risks produced by this environment are outlined and the teenagers’ strategies for managing the daily risks that they faced in their everyday lives are assessed. The data reveal how teenagers negotiate movement across different types of space and illustrate the extent to which their immediate geographical environment is dependent on its location within wider political, social and cultural systems.     

Imaginary Vitebsk: the view from the inside

While the term “imagined geography” most often relates to outsiders, views of an unfamiliar environment, also of interest are the views of insiders whose personalities were formed within and by the social space of their original milieu. Sometimes impressions of the latter were written down during the period they discuss and, thus, present an immediacy that appears to be unmediated. When, however, the insider memoirs were written later, the researcher encounters the additional problem of evaluating the work’s authenticity, due to subsequent views of the memoirist which he adopted from his later environment. In regard to places with an ethnically heterogeneous population like Vitebsk, in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century ideas about social space were often expressed in terms of ethnic symbolism and reflected values about what was considered prestigious in cultural and social terms and also on the basic distinction between “us” and “them.” The major cultural and social transformations of the first half of the twentieth century seriously altered the “imagined geography” that had been formed under the conditions of traditional society. The present article examines changes in ideas about social space via a case study of the Belarusian city of Vitebsk, which for many people has become a symbol of the traditional Jewish world. However, the article indicates that, despite all the changes, on the eve of the Second World War the city’s Jews continued to view their social and ethnic space in a traditional manner.     

East European Jewish migration: inside and outside

This introductory article provides an overview of modern Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. It engages the foundational historiography of the field and explores intersections of Jewish migration with general migration theory. In addition to framing the six articles in this special collection, this essay presents longue durée factors linking today's post-Soviet diaspora communities on three continents with social and political trends beginning in the late nineteenth century and during the interwar period and postwar periods.     

Professional feminists: Challenging local government inside out

Gender equality work in local government carried out during the 1980s presents a valuable site to explore the interaction between professional and feminist working. In the history of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) and feminist organizing more broadly in the UK, professional working has often been positioned as antithetical to feminist working, and relatively little scholarship has examined the interface between the two. This article argues that the individuals involved should be considered ‘professional feminists’ as opposed to ‘femocrats’, drawing from across feminist, social movement and organizational theory, and interviews carried out in 2011 and archival texts from three UK councils. It also suggests their work (undertaken between the beginning of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s) serves to blur the boundaries usually marked between social movement and state. This contributes to the existing literature by exploring the specific understandings and practices put to work by those working on gender equality professionally, but not in an elected capacity, within local government, and how their work can be positioned in relation to feminist organizing more broadly.     

Trapped bodies,moving minds: Uncertainty and migration among marginalised urban youth in Ethiopia

This paper from YOUR World Research highlights and explores the role of positive uncertainty in lives, strategies and transitions towards adulthood of marginalised children and youth in two urban locations in Ethiopia. Young men and women embraced notions of positive uncertainty, making journeys to street situations and internationally in search of more hopeful futures. While youth navigate uncertainty positively in the short term, the research suggests this is temporal and their agency relational and embedded. They seek support from peers but still want to belong and be accepted by their families and communities.     

The body in sociology: tensions inside and outside sociological thought

The human body has in recent years become a ‘hot’ topic in sociology, not just in empirical research but also in sociological theorizing. In the latter context, the body has been variously a resource for broadening the parameters of traditional sociological thought deriving from the nineteenth century, and for overturning that paradigm and fundamentally reorienting the assumptions and concepts of sociological thinking. Attempts to abandon the old paradigm and foster a new one through the means of thinking about bodies are many and manifold, and in this paper we trace out the intricate history of moves towards a ‘corporeal sociology’. We identify the dilemmas that have attended these developments, especially as concerns the ways in which new modes of thinking sociologically have tended to founder over the classical sociological dichotomy between social structure and social action. Through tracing out the various moves and counter‐moves within this field, we identify a central contradiction that affects all contemporary sociological practice, not just that dealing with the body: an oscillation between judging the utility of conceptual tools in terms of criteria derived from the discipline of Cultural Studies, and evaluating the arguments created by those tools on the basis of the incompatible criteria of classical sociology. The paper challenges sociologists to choose one set of criteria or the other, for sociological practice cannot be based on both such antagonistic paradigms.     

Federal nutrition programs and childhood obesity: inside the black box

In response to the dramatic rise in childhood obesity, particularly among low income individuals, federal nutrition assistance programs have come under scrutiny. However, the vast majority of this research focuses on the direct relationship between these programs and child health, while little is known about the mechanisms by which such relationships arise. Using the 2007 American Time Use Survey and the Eating and Health Module, we explore differences in time use—albeit in a non-causal framework—across families that participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the School Breakfast Program, and the National School Lunch Program to better understand behavioral differences across participants and non-participants. These differences have important implications for future research and policy.     

Rethinking everyday life: And then nothing turns itself inside out

The contingencies and permeabilities and rhythms of everyday life make it notoriously difficult to pin down in any determinant way. Hence, everyday life places unique demands upon critical practice and conceptualization. In following one potential angle of approach, this essay looks at the influence that philosopher Gottfried Leibniz played in the thinking of sociologist and everyday life philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s theory of moments and his conceptions of ‘the everyday’ draw upon often overlooked (and controversial) elements from Leibniz’s monadology and other later writings. This essay concludes by considering how substituting ‘everyday life’ for the ‘culture’ of cultural studies requires, among other things, a closer consideration of the immanently biopolitical implications that Lefebvre teased out of Leibniz. As the introductory essay for this special issue of Cultural Studies, we also set up, in the final section here, an overview of our contributors’ own unique angles of approach to the study of everyday life at the dawn of the 21st century.     

公司治理结构与民营企业内部控制的构建

近年来,相对薄弱的公司治理结构几乎成为制约我国民营企业可持续发展的“瓶颈”。究其原因,一是家族式管理现象比较普遍。它的封闭性和对关键岗位的家族化控制,以及内部管理上的非制度化带来的决策随意性和非程序化,限制了企业的发展;二是企业决策的透明度不高;三是信息来源不足;四是企业财务不公开,很难吸引外来资金,也不容易得到大的合同,加之民营企业之间的三角债问题,使民营企业信用度大打折扣,一定程度上降低了企业的效益。因此,构建符合公司治理结构的企业内部控制制度,是民营企业实现第三次创业的必然选择。公司治理结构下的内部控制…     

Stuck inside the federal-Indian funding relationship: a tale of two evaluations

Two case studies are presented to compare and contrast the challenges encountered when attempting to conduct participatory evaluations (P-Es) with tribal programs that represented two extremes of collaboration between the programs and evaluators. In one case, the P-E was successful because the principals were invested in the program, whereas in the second case, the absence of a shared program vision hampered the ability to adequately evaluate the program. The authors contend that governmental funding agencies have responsibilities to ensure that their expectations are appropriate, the proposed program is feasible, and that technical assistance should be provided before the grant is written, not after it has been funded.     

Research trends in nonprofit graduate studies in China: An inside perspective

This paper explores the growth of the academic study of nonprofit management and organizations in China by examining theses and dissertations written in China between 2000 and 2018. Using a keyword search, we collect and review 5,346 abstracts available in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure Thesis and Dissertation database. The number of these theses and dissertations accelerated between 2000 and 2015 and slowed thereafter. Most theses and dissertations focus on the external context of nonprofit organizations (78%) and fewer on nonprofit management per se (22%). Thematic analysis reveals several broad subjects of study including organizational development, the character of the external environment and internal operations, financial and other resource support, and organizational performance. Trends across the 19‐year study period relating to national regions of origin, discipline, and theme are also explored. The development of nonprofit studies in China in some ways resembles the growth of this field in the United States and other western countries in past decades, but with distinct Chinese historical, sociocultural, and geographical characteristics.     

Loving and living the Zapatista event: understanding affect inside youth Mexican activism

This paper will detail youth political engagement in one of the most important activist organisations that the Mexican city of Puebla (the fourth largest in the country) has known in its recent history. In particular, the paper will focus on the leadership of two of the leaders of this organisation, who were also lovers. As we will see, the relationship between these two activists proved to be very important for this organisation, so much so that when the couple broke up, the entire collective collapsed. In this sense, the theoretical challenge I am interested in is the one of inserting the study of the affective dimension of youth political practices in the social and political contexts in which these practices make sense. It is hoped that by studying this case in a rather explorative way, we will gain a better understanding of how youth politics and engagement interact with interpersonal affect.