What’s Wrong with the HIPC Initiative and What’s Next?

This article reviews the problems of the enhanced HIPC initiative and outlines possible steps towards a more efficient debt and poverty reduction initiative. After brief comments on the rationale for debt relief, it analyses some key issues related to the HIPC initiative’s aim to achieve debt sustainability, describes other fundamental problems of the HIPC framework, and discusses some less known but still crucial flaws of the initiative. It then proceeds with necessary improvements for an efficient debt reduction programme, possible modifications for a revised HIPC initiative, and some suggestions on how to overcome financing constraints. Apart from being in several respects unfair, the current framework is unlikely to permit a lasting exit from unsustainable debt for many HIPCs, and may lead to a decline in traditional development assistance.     

What’s Wrong With These People? Clinicians’ Views of Clinical Couples

Marriage and family therapy (MFT) faculty and graduate students rated the "typical" or predictable behaviors of husbands or wives coming for therapy using the Georgia Marriage Q-sort. Scores were compared with previously published scores for both "ideal" couples (i.e., showing positive behaviors, attitudes, and problem-solving skills) and a sample of 136 nonclinical, community couples. A review of correlations between MFT raters' scores for clients and the scores for "ideal" or actual community husbands or wives indicated that clinicians have negative views of both clinical husbands and wives. Such negative views of clinical husbands and wives are particularly marked in scores by MFT faculty. MFT students had a similarly negative view of clinical husbands, but such views were not evident for clinical wives. Recommendations for MFT training and implications for future research are discussed.     

Does any mother’s body odor stimulate interest in mother’s face in 4‐month‐old infants?

Little is known about the effects of olfaction on visual processing during infancy. We investigated whether and how an infant's own mother's body odor or another mother's body odor affects 4‐month‐old infants’ looking at their mother's face when it is paired with a stranger's face. In Experiment 1, infants were exposed to their mother's body odor or to a control odor, while in Experiment 2, infants were exposed to a stranger mother's body odor while their visual preferences were recorded. Results revealed that infants looked more at the stranger's female face in presence of the control odor but that they looked more at their mother's face in the context of any mother's body odors. This effect was due to a reduction of looking at the stranger's face. These findings suggest that infants react similarly to the body odor of any mother and add to the growing body of evidence indicating that olfactory stimulation represents a pervasive aspect of infant multisensory perception.     

A useful extension of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework?: emotional capital as a way of understanding mothers’ involvement in their children’s education?

This article utilises the concept of emotional capital in order to explore some of the class and gender processes embedded in parental involvement in education. Drawing on fieldwork from a study of mothers' involvement in their children's primary schooling it examines mothers' emotional engagement with their children's education. Understandings of mothers' involvement in their children's schooling are enhanced by including an analysis of the emotions, both positive and negative, that infuse mothers' activities. The article tentatively concludes that the relationships between educational success, emotional capital and emotional wellbeing, and the extent of overlap and difference between them, could provide new ways of understanding how a range of disadvantages which cross class barriers are being manufactured in the contemporary educational marketplace.     

Supporting Children’s Social and Emotional Well‐being: Does ‘Having a Say’ Matter?

This article argues the importance of ensuring initiatives aimed at improving children’s social and emotional well‐being are based on sound participatory principles. The discussion posits links between the recognition of children, dialogic approaches to participation, changing conceptualisations of children and childhood, and children’s well‐being. It explores these links in light of one particular initiative, Seasons for Growth ( Graham, 1996, 2002 , Seasons for Growth; Loss and Grief Education Program. MacKillop Foundation), an education programme built around emerging evidence that giving children a voice assists them to adapt to family change. The paper concludes with insights into what is involved when we locate notions of ‘having a say’ as a key element in promoting children’s well‐being.© 2010 The Author(s). Journal compilation 2010 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited.     

Why were the 1980s “millenarian”? Style,repertoire, space and authority in South Africa’s black cities

This paper argues that some of the key determinants of the style and repertoire of the South African township revolts of the mid-eighties lie in the changing configurations of race, class and authority within townships over a long period of time. One major and pivotal change in these relationships is identified, and the paper employs ideal-typical constructions of the nature of townships in the two crucial eras concerned: what could broadly be described as the era of "welfare paternalism" and succeeding it after a period of complex change, the equally broadly characterized era of "racial modernism". Though both eras were racist, exploitative, and engendered class and community struggles they differed from one another in important stylistic and spatial ways. This paper suggests that the move from the one era to the other constitutes the move from a mode of "governability" to one of "ungovernability", and highlights the form, repertoire and style of rebellion.     

Cohabitation: Parents Following in Their Children’s Footsteps?*

As cohabitation has risen dramatically in the past few decades among adults of all ages, it is possible that middle-and older-aged parents are “learning” cohabitation from their young adult children. The present study uses this theory as a guiding framework to determine if parents are more likely to cohabit themselves following the start of a young adult child’s cohabitation. Using three waves of the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 275), results show that union formation patterns are influenced by young adult children among parents who are single at their child’s 18th birthday. Parents are less likely to marry than remain single and are much more likely to cohabit than marry if they have a young adult child who cohabits. These results show support for the hypotheses.     

How Does Family Policy ‘Work’? Job Context,Flexibility, and Maternity Leave Policy

Using evidence from Canada and the United States, I review the literature on workplace flexibility and one‐size‐fits‐all federal maternity leave policy as it relates to maternal job context. The literature suggests that job variation is central to accessing work–family policy due to differences in job characteristics, demands, and overriding workplace norms. As a result, the opportunities for and consequences of flexibility and leave vary significantly between high and low wage employment contexts. Accordingly, the evidence suggests that policy development would benefit from taking job context into account.     

A Model for Managed Migration? Re‐Examining Best Practices in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program

This paper situates Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) within the policy and scholarly debates on “best practices” for the management of temporary migration, and examines what makes this programme successful from the perspective of states and employers. Drawing on extensive qualitative and quantitative study of temporary migration in Canada, this article critically examines this seminal temporary migration programme as a “best practice model” from internationally recognized rights‐based approaches to labour migration, and provides some additional best practices for the management of temporary labour migration programmes. This paper examines how the reality of the Canadian SAWP measures up, when the model is evaluated according to internationally recognized best practices and migrant rights regimes. Despite all of the attention to building “best practices” for the management of temporary or managed migration, it appears that Canada has taken steps further away from these and other international frameworks. The analysis reveals that while the Canadian programme involves a number of successful practices, such as the cooperation between origin and destination countries, transparency in the admissions criteria for selection, and access to health care for temporary migrants; the programme does not adhere to the majority of best practices emerging in international forums, such as the recognition of migrants’ qualifications, providing opportunities for skills transfer, avoiding imposing forced savings schemes, and providing paths to permanent residency. This paper argues that as Canada takes significant steps toward the expansion of temporary migration, Canada’s model programme still falls considerably short of being an inspirational model, and instead provides us with little more than an idealized myth.     

What Not to Wear? Girls,Clothing and ‘Showing’ the Body

Consumption practices of children in contemporary Western societies are implicated in the reconstruction of childhood, according to both popular debate and to those academic perspectives stressing the individualisation of identities within the life course of late modern consumer societies. Yet, little is known about the meanings children themselves give to their own consumption. Drawing from an ethnographic study of children aged 6–11 years and their families, the paper presents girls’ constructions of fashion in relation to their own bodies and to those of others. It is shown that although girls may both desire and actually ‘dress up’ in fashionable clothing, they present a range of contingent and contradictory meanings for doing so. For some girls, ‘dressing up’ in certain clothes may be a way of ‘ageing up’ toward feminine adulthood, albeit in restricted contexts and after negotiations between themselves and their parents as to what can be worn and where. Nonetheless, girls in the study also showed anxieties and disapproval of ‘showing the body’ through ‘revealing’ clothing. The article concludes by considering the implication of these findings for debates about gendered childhoods, and intergenerational relations in late modern consumer society.     

How Does High School Extracurricular Participation Predict Bachelor’s Degree Attainment? It is Complicated

This study answered novel questions about the connection between high school extracurricular dosage (number of activities and participation duration) and the attainment of a bachelor’s degree. Using data from the Common Application and the National Student Clearinghouse (N = 311,308), we found that greater extracurricular participation positively predicted bachelor’s degree attainment. However, among students who ultimately earned a bachelor’s degree, participating in more than a moderate number of high school activities (3 or 4) predicted decreasing odds of earning a bachelor’s degree on time (within 4 years). This effect intensified as participation duration increased, such that students who participated in the greatest number of high school activities for the most years were the most likely to delay college graduation.     

Experiencing ‘Illegality’ as a Family? Immigration Enforcement,Social Policies,and Discourses Targeting Mexican Mixed‐Status Families

Mexican mixed‐status families have been front and center in embroiled national debates about the place of undocumented immigrants and their citizen family members in this country. These families face unique obstacles, including possible family fragmentation caused by deportation, challenges to birthright citizenship, and they are often targeted by anti‐immigrant elected officials and political pundits that perpetuate a racialized discourse that casts even citizen children in these families as an abomination of US citizenship. Therefore, “illegality” may be a familial experience that can be endured by citizens and non‐citizens alike. Despite their unique vulnerabilities, researchers know very little about how mixed‐status families experience belonging in the country while managing possible tensions and inequalities shaped by immigration status. In this article, I review the research on punitive immigration enforcement and the scholarship on social policies and discourse targeting mixed‐status families. I conclude by reviewing new directions in sociological research and suggest avenues for research that may examine mixed‐status families' subjectivities, belonging, and negotiations of family relationships.     

Embodying Nationhood? Conceptions of British national identity,citizenship, and Gender in the ‘Veil Affair’

This article reports on a study of mediatised public discourses on nationhood, citizenship, and gender in Britain, and analyses the ways in which these accounts may be utilised in the cultivation of particular kinds of social identities. We distinguish our approach at the outset from other lines of inquiry to report on a macro level exploration of an event in which these value discourses were operative, namely the national the press reaction to the former Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's 2006 comments on the Muslim face-veil or niqab . The article traces and analyses the interactions and intersections of completing but overlapping accounts of nationhood, citizenship, and characterisations of the role of Muslim women. It identifies interdependent clusters of responses that illustrate the ways in which the niqab is a 'contested signifier' in contemporary social and political life, and the ways in which nationhood, citizenship, and gender feature prominently in its signification.     

Is it ‘just hair’ or is it ‘everything’? Embodiment and gender repression in policing

Police department policies often require women to engage in identificatory displays inconsistent with sex category expectations. Compliance, while potentially increasing acceptance within policing, may reflect a loss of agency in aesthetic choices that limits their ability to construct gender in both the professional and personal spheres. Some women may comply without experiencing negative consequences, while others may exhibit tacit or resistant compliance reflecting their loss of agency. Women's differential reactions in response to these policies may help explain how some women become the embodiment of mythic visions associated with the profession. Through greater acceptance related to this adaptation, these women may reinforce the hostile environment experienced by other women within policing thereby propagating the status quo. In‐depth interviews with female officers and background investigators illustrate the impact of one such policy, a restrictive haircut requirement for female recruits. The results reveal that women are split in their reactions to the policy; some women comply willingly and choose to become the embodiment of the symbolic vision of policing. Others struggle with compliance as the loss of agency impacts their embodied selves through silencing their bodies.     

TANF’s 15th Anniversary and the Great Recession: are Low‐Income Mothers Celebrating Upward Economic Mobility?

This article examines the impact of welfare reform for the upward economic mobility of low‐income families at the fifteenth anniversary of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. The reformed policy was based on assumptions about participating families’ morality and encouraged states to move families off welfare through work and marriage without considering whether they were still poor. TANF was also implemented during an economic boom. Today, the US economy is suffering from the effects of the Great Recession, with many fearing a double dip recession. Poverty rates rose during the last 3 years and are currently above 15 percent. For the first time since 1996, the welfare rolls are increasing in many states. Welfare reform’s ‘work first’ approach did not create lasting upward economic mobility for low‐income families. As an alternative, I explore how higher education for welfare mothers will create opportunities for lasting upward mobility, even in times of recession.     

Anyone for Tennis? Social Class Differences in Children’s Responses to National Curriculum Mathematics Testing

Mathematics is a central part of the school curriculum. Alongside studies in the dominant language of a society, success and failure in the discipline play an important role in the distribution of opportunities to children and young people. Until fairly recently, in England and elsewhere, success in primary school mathematics was achieved by demonstrating a capacity to memorise, reproduce and use relatively simple algorithms. However, in recent years, there has been considerable change in primary school mathematics with an increasing stress being laid, at least rhetorically, on understanding, investigation and the application of mathematics in 'realistic' settings. It seems likely that such changes, in so far as they affect the form and content of National Curriculum assessment, will produce changes in who succeeds and who fails, ie in selective processes within schooling.
The paper draws on preliminary results from an ESRC project which is examining National Curriculum assessment in mathematics for 10–11 and 13–14 year-old children in relation to class, gender and 'ability'. The paper examines the ways in which children from different sociocultural backgrounds approach assessment items which embed mathematics in supposedly 'realistic' contexts. Early data from the Key Stage 2 sample of 10–11 year olds will be presented which shows that there does seem to be a social class effect in the response of children to 'realistic' items – one which leads to some working class children failing to demonstrate competences they have. The paper uses quantitative and qualitative methods, relating its findings to Basil Bernstein's account of sociocultural codes – in particular his theorising of the social distribution of recognition and realisation rules for reading educational contexts – and to Bourdieu's theorising of habitus.