The role of eviction in veterans’ homelessness recidivism*

Eviction is one of the leading causes of homelessness in the U.S.A. Though permanent supportive housing (PSH) helps participants maintain housing, some still leave due to eviction. This study aimed to determine whether eviction is an important predictor of recidivism and time to return to homelessness for participants exiting PSH. The characteristics and post-exit service use of 2802 Veteran PSH participants were analyzed based on exit reason. A Cox proportional hazards survival analysis modeled risk factors for returning to homelessness within 360 days of exit. Compared with other exiters, evicted Veterans remained in the program for less time, were less likely to be receiving service-connected compensation, and used more services – particularly mental health and substance use services – following their exit, and those who returned to homelessness did so more quickly. Identifying participants who might benefit from more intensive services, project-based housing, or income supports may prevent evictions and subsequent returns to homelessness.     

Disrupting the ‘life-cycle’ of violence in social relations: recommendations for anti-trafficking interventions from an analysis of pathways out of sex work for women in Eastern India

This article argues for the need to change the ways in which anti-human trafficking (AT) non-government organisations (NGOs) and their interventions in India frame and address violence in sex work. The article asserts that AT NGOs need to move beyond their ideological allegiances and infuse their interventions with a better understanding of the lived realities of women who are coerced into sex work. This argument is based on an analysis of women's pathways out of sex work in Eastern India, which include both finding independent routes, and also reliance on AT interventions. The research suggests that AT interventions need to acknowledge the centrality of social relationships in women's lives and experiences of violence. Social relations influence women's entry into sex work, affect their experiences within it, and shape their pathways out of sex work.     

Crying for Food: The Mexican Myths of ‘La Llorona’ and ‘The Hungry Woman’ in Cherríe L. Moraga

The Mexican legend of ‘La Llorona’ (‘The Weeping Woman’), who drowned her children out of revenge for being abandoned by her lover, and the Aztec creation myth of ‘The Hungry Woman’ — crying constantly for food, with mouths all around her body — have inspired Chicana writers in the symbolic representation of their own yearning, be it sexual, identity-building, or anti-patriarchal. This essay seeks to lay the mythical groundwork within this topic, as well as to illustrate with some particular examples the different reappropriations of these myths in Cherríe L. Moraga, mainly in her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001). With a view to opening up a past ‘that can provide a kind of road map to our future’ (: ix), these examples of transgressive women will be deprived of the feminine colonial passivity imbued by the dominant male discourse, and analysed as a complex, active, polyvalent mythological female corpus that integrates both life and death, womb and grave. This hybrid approach is inherent to the Aztec mythology on which Moraga relies in order to transcend Manichaeistic resolutions and probe the social, political, and gender reasons leading a hungry mother to commit infanticide.     

Educational interventions for people with social and health difficulties in Italy: the case of a ‘welcoming community’ for young and adults

This article presents a case study that we consider significant for the social work of ‘welcoming communities’ in Italy. In the first part, we describe the history, methodologies and educational instruments aimed at young adults with social and work integration difficulties. In the second part, we present research questions, methods and results of a field research study carried out over 8 years, during which researchers were continuously present. All the 375 persons living in the welcoming community Villa S. Ignazio, in Northern Italy, have been observed. In the conclusions, we point out the main elements for a critical reflection that may lead to a methodological enhancement of the activities, also considering the global economic and political crisis, which is particularly dangerous for the rights of the vulnerable people.     

Constructions of ‘vulnerability’ in comparative perspective: Scottish protection policies and the trouble with ‘adults at risk’

This paper places Scottish adult support and protection (ASP) policy in the context of debates about the nature of ‘vulnerability’ and its usefulness as a defining concept in law and social policy. It examines the construction of ‘adults at risk’ in ASP policy, using a comparison with the construction of children in Scottish child protection policy, on the one hand, and women in Scottish domestic abuse policy, on the other, to illuminate the nature of the vulnerability that ASP considers itself to be addressing. It then problematises this construction, drawing both on the social model of disability and on an ethic of care. It concludes that current ASP policy remains underpinned by unhelpful assumptions about disabled people, older people and people with mental or physical health problems. A more inclusive understanding of vulnerability would be more empowering to these people and others, in policies concerned with mistreatment and abuse.     

The evolving construction and conceptualisation of ‘disability’ in Bhutan

This study – a year-long ethnographic exploration of disability and education in Bhutan – finds that two dominant discourses around ‘disability’ are entering Bhutan simultaneously: the discourse of the medical model of disability and the discourse of the social or human rights model of disability. In this paper, I argue that these two discourses are especially exposed in the Bhutanese context to be opposing forces in shaping local conceptualisation and construction of ‘disability’. By examining the Bhutan case, it can be seen that these kinds of disparate and contentious exogenous constructions of ‘disability’ occur everywhere in the world and negotiate with local constructions of ‘disability’ uneasily. Understanding the interactions of disability discourses in the Bhutanese context can help to understand the interactions of disability discourses writ large.     

‘The Slavery of East and West’: Abolitionists and ‘Unfree’ Labour in India, 1820–1833

This article explores abolitionist treatments of East Indian slavery in the 1820s. It argues that rather than resulting from a lack of information or a conception of the qualitative difference between East and West Indian slavery, ambivalent and muted abolitionist responses to this issue prior to 1833 were conditioned by the wider imperatives of the anti-slavery campaign. Abstentionist substitution of ‘free-grown’ East India sugar for morally tainted West Indian produce, together with wider economic arguments about the equalisation of the sugar duties and the potential of India to provide a free labour alternative to the West Indian slave system, marked points of intersection between abolitionist and East India economic interests that relied on the assumption that labour in India, however cheap, was fundamentally ‘free’. As a result, rather than engaging with the various forms of slavery in India, abolitionists focused on discursively distancing them both from sugar production and from their campaign. This response suggests that abolitionist ideology was intersected by pragmatic political, economic, and discursive imperatives that precluded the universal application of humanitarian anti-slavery ideals.     

The ‘gong beat’ against the ‘uncultured’: contested notions of culture and civilization in Mongolia

This article explores the Mongolian concept of ‘culture’ (soyol) and its transformation in the state socialist and post-socialist eras. The notion of culture and those without it – the soyolgui or ‘uncultured’ – played enormously important parts in the construction of the new society of the Mongolian People’s Republic. The history of the twentieth century shows a transformation of this highly normative concept from a category associated with teachings, doctrine, ethics and nurturing to one linked to modernist notions of hygiene, secular education, urbanism and cosmopolitanism. In addition, however, it became a category that included a set of historical styles and works thought of as national ‘cultural heritage’ (soyolyn öv). This was the result of a movement that in the late socialist period led to the critical re-evaluation of earlier Eurocentric uses of the ‘culture’ concept, and that sought new applications of the notion of ‘civilization’ – in particular by popularizing the metaphorical term ‘nomadic civilization’ (nüüdliin soyol irgenshil). I argue that these strands of thought have become central to the new nationalist politics of post-socialist Mongolia and form the basis of what remains by way of political orthodoxy, following the collapse of Soviet ideology.     

‘The Mexican’ and ‘The Cancer in the South’: Discourses of Race,Nation and Anti-blackness in Early Twentieth-Century Debates on Mexican Immigration

This article explores the flexible manner in which discourses of anti-black racism were employed within congressional debates on the proposed restriction of Mexican immigration at the end of the 1920s. I examine how both sides of this debate placed Mexicans within a particular historical narrative of race and nation, positioned in relation to a range of other populations, including Chinese and Japanese immigrants, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Within these narratives, slavery and the imagined negro problem were particularly salient, being frequently used to orient racial interpretations of Mexican immigrants as well as the manner in which they were positioned in relation to other ‘racial elements’. Imprinted with US histories of slavery, conquest and empire, these discourses offer insight into the ambivalent interrelationships of American’s multiple trajectories of racism.     

‘Us’ and ‘them’: the limits and possibilities of a ‘politics of neurodiversity’ in neoliberal times

The neurodiversity movement claims that there are neurological differences in the human population, and that autism is a natural variation among humans – not a disease or a disorder, just ‘a difference’. A ‘politics of neurodiversity’ is based on the claim that the ‘neurodiverse’ population constitutes a political grouping comparable with those of class, gender, sexuality or race. This paper considers the limits and possibilities of neurodiverse political activism, and concludes by calling for a politics of identity that does not depend on a politics of ‘us’ and ‘them’.     

‘The Rule of Men Entirely Great’: Republicanism,Ritual, and Richelieu in Melville’s ‘The Two Temples’

Abstract

This article explores the complex and multifarious reasons behind Herman Melville’s decision to refer to the English playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1839 work Richelieu, or The Conspiracy in his 1854 diptych ‘The Two Temples’. It responds to a critical consensus that has seen the reference merely as a sarcastic attack on William Macready (whose rivalry with the American actor Edwin Forrest was the nominal cause of the bloody 1849 Astor Place Riot in New York), by contextualizing the play within traditions of antebellum American Anglophilia. By using a combination of new critical work on Anglo-Americanism and anthropological ritual theory, I show how Bulwer-Lytton’s play was significant to Melville’s artistic development. In particular, I demonstrate how the play influenced his increasing engagement with republican and theatrical forms of expression that emphasized the importance of filial relationships between America and Britain in a period of increasing hostility between the two nations.     

How is a sense of well-being and belonging constructed in the accounts of autistic adults?

This small-scale exploratory study sought to develop an understanding of the meaning of well-being and social belonging as represented within the narratives of adults on the autism spectrum. Employing an interpretivist approach facilitated the investigation of potential contributory factors to these lived experiences in order to inform further research regarding both this topic, and service provision for adults on the autism spectrum. The project involved a thematic analysis of issues of the magazine Asperger United (AU). Four broad main themes were identified: meeting personal needs, living with the consequences of an ‘othered’ identity, connection and recognition, and relationships and advocacy. Autistic adults reported many barriers to feeling that they belonged in a number of social spaces and the detrimental effect this had on their wellbeing. Fundamental to positive narratives of wellbeing, were feelings of connection and recognition from others and positive accepting relationships, with autistic-led spaces, particularly the Autscape conference, being frequently cited as of central significance in increasing feelings of wellbeing and belonging. This study has demonstrated a need for less focus on remediation and more on limiting the social isolation of autistic people.     

The future of PR is ‘fantastic’, ‘friendly’ and ‘funny’: Occupational stereotypes and symbolic capital in entry-level job advertisements

Over the past decade, there has been a move towards examining public relations as a socio-cultural practice, acknowledging practitioners as influential communicators who produce and symbolise cultural values through public relations messages. Ideally, a diverse group of professionals would aide in representing a diverse society, but to date, the profession remains female dominated. In this article, it is proposed that practitioners’ own discourse do not only establish what is most valued in the occupation and which habitus suits the practice best, but that the discourse also opens and closes occupational entry for new practitioners thereby contributing to a lack of diversity.This article presents the findings of an indicative thematic content analysis of one of the most common, yet under-research sites of discourse, namely entry-level job advertisements in New Zealand and Australia. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the analysis found that the advertisements placed little to no emphasis on the nature of the work, instead focusing on elements of ‘fit’ whereby new entrants were expected to be charismatic, friendly, and willing to work in an environment that is ‘fun’ and ‘flexible’. In doing so, public relations practitioners tacitly created invisible barriers, a self-limiting occupational culture and furthered existing stereotypes of the ‘perfect’ practitioner.     

Civil Society in ‘Politics’ and ‘Development’ in African Hybrid Regimes: The Kenyan Case

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Civil society in Gramscian conception is an arena of hegemonic contestations and therefore essentially political....