When identities collide: masculinity,disability and race

This study is part of a larger project that examined the impact of violently acquired spinal cord injuries (VASCI) on identity among racial and ethnic minority men living in a major American metropolis. Like other individuals who sustain a disabling injury, individuals with a VASCI often struggle with the consequences of the injury vis‐à‐vis redefining their identities and their role in society. For the men in this study the negative association between disability and dependency affected the integration of the injury into their sense of self. The injury and resulting disability violated social understandings of what it means to be a man in their environments. The men noted the injury’s impact on their sense of safety, sexual encounters, body image and choice of intimate partners. Their social context shaped what it meant to be a man, played a role in their injuries and increased the challenges inherent in a life‐changing event.     

An African-American woman with disabilities: the intersection of gender, race and disability

This qualitative study explores the educational experiences of an African‐American adult woman with disabilities. The intersections of gender, race and disability are theorized through the lenses of disability, feminist and critical theory. Specifically, I address the following three questions. What are the experiences of an African‐American woman with disabilities in schools? How might these experiences be theorized? Do these experiences offer new ways of understanding oppression that may contribute to empowering individuals labeled with multiple, intersecting identities?     

Post-1945 international migration: New Zealand,Australia and Canada compared

"New Zealand's immigration policies and trends since 1945 are compared with those of Canada and Australia. For most of this period, Australia has pursued the more expansive immigration policy while Canada and New Zealand have tended to link immigration intakes to fluctuations in labor demand. All three countries initially discriminated against non-European immigrants but gradually moved towards nondiscriminatory policies based on similar selection criteria and means of assessment. New Zealand has traditionally been more cautious than both Canada and Australia in terms of how many immigrants it accepted and from what sources, but it has recently followed the other two in raising immigration targets encouraging migration from nontraditional sources, particularly Asian countries. Historical, global and national factors are drawn upon to explain the degree of convergence between these three societies."     

The making of race in colonial Malaya: Political economy and racial ideology

The conventional interpretation of the race problem in Peninsular Malaysia (Malaya) is founded upon the supposedly inevitable frictions between ethnic communities with sharply divergent cultural traditions. In this view, assimilation between the indigenous Malay population and the descendants of immigrants from China and India was always a remote possibility. In this paper I argue that modern race relations in Peninsular Malaysia, in the sense of impenetrable group boundaries, were a byproduct of British colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prior to 1850, inter-ethnic relations among Asian populations were marked by cultural stereotypes and occasional hostility, but there were also possibilities for inter-ethnic alliances and acculturation. Direct colonial rule brought European racial theory and constructed a social and economic order structured by race. A review of the writing of observers of colonial society provides a crude test of this hypothesis.     

Bringing Disability into the Sociological Frame: a comparison of disability with race, sex, and sexual orientation statuses

Applying a social constructionist perspective, this paper explores the shared characteristics of American constructions of race, sex, sexual orientation, and disability. The discussion considers how each of these statuses is constructed through social processes in which categories of people are (1) named, (2) aggregated and disaggregated, (3) dichotomized and stigmatized, and (4) denied the attributes valued in the culture. The apparent utility of the social constructionist perspective - and its dominance in American sociology - is contrasted with its infrequent application to the study of disability.     

Housing and economic development: The evolution of an idea since 1945

The construction and use of decent housing affects economic development through its impact on employment, savings, investment, and labour productivity. These facts have only recently come to be widely acknowledged. Since 1945, housing experts have articulated three views about the role of housing for economic development. In the early post-war decades most writers viewed housing as a social expenditure and a drag on growth. A minority argued that housing could be an important adjunct to specific development projects, usually in isolated locations. Since the 1970s, housing has increasingly come to be seen as a contributor to growth, not only because house building is a major employer with large multiplier effects but also because housing is seen to have social consequences with diverse economic effects. This historical narrative as to how opinion has changed raises questions as to why it has changed.     

Maps,markets and Merlot: The making of an antipodean wine appellation

Rural places acquire value in different ways and geographers have adopted a range of approaches to understand the way value is created in land and place. This paper analyses the case of the Gimblett Gravels wine district in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. This district has been transformed over the space of 20 years from a peri-urban wasteland to, now, one of the most sought-after and expensive winegrowing areas in the country. In this process of revaluation, several forces were evident. There was an economic–environmental process, by which grape growers and winemakers learned that the district possessed the ability to produce consistent harvests of high quality red grapes and, consequently, land was purchased at ever-increasing rates. There was then a deliberate attempt to ‘construct’ the Gimblett Gravels district in the market place, the result of concerted co-operative action by winegrowers in the district to promote the idea of a Gimblett Gravels terroir in a registered trademark. Finally, we can see that the revaluation of the district has also been related to the wider social acceptance of wine as a fashionable commodity. These processes have occurred in a virtual legislative vacuum in New Zealand regarding the protection and regulation of geographical indicators, though this may soon change. Thus, to understand the value of place, it is argued that we need a multi-faceted approach that incorporates environmental and economic processes alongside political regulation and social construction.     

Bodies ‘locked up’: intersections of disability and race in Australian immigration

Between 2005 and 2006 it came to be known that over 200 people had been wrongfully detained in Australian immigration detention centres, of whom 13 were people with a disability. A review of the subsequent Commonwealth Ombudsman Reports into the wrongful detentions exposed an organizational culture in which othered voices were discredited and disregarded, an over‐willingness to detain a person and a lack of proper oversight of these powers. This paper explores these reports and argues that proper investigation needs to go beyond organizational culture and to look also at historical, social, political and cultural forces shaping Australia’s use of immigration detention. The authors propose that the intersection of disability and race leaves people vulnerable to human rights violations primarily because this is also the intersection of both racial and rational prejudices of the dominant hegemony.     

The Politics of Recognition: Jewish Refugees in Relief Policies and Human Rights Debates, 1945-1950

This essay analyses the place of Jewish survivors in the refugee system established by the West in the aftermath of the Second World War. Departing from the literature of trauma and mourning, this article addresses Holocaust survivors as migrant refugees subjected to international categorisations, relief policies and human rights debates. Between 1945 and 1950, Jewish refugees were recognised as an ideal-type community of victims by western humanitarianism. Recognition entailed symbolic and material entitlements, and eventually rewarded Holocaust survivors with historical, political and territorial vindication. As opposed to other refugee groups who entered the market of international compassion in the 1940s, Jewish refugees were granted full status of political victims.     

Gender,education and training: an international perspective

This article examines the causes and consequences of sex discrimination in education in developing countries and considers whether the available educational structures improve gender equity or reinforce the status quo. After an introduction that distinguishes between "education" and "schooling" and identifies schooling as a means of patriarchal control, the article sketches the growing awareness of gender disparities in education. The next section describes how gender inequality in education leads to low participation of women in the labor market and limits women's access to information and services, to mobility, and to decision-making. The article then reviews the international agenda on promoting female education that has resulted in donor-driven initiatives arising from such events as the 1990 World Conference on Education For All. A look at the benefits of educating women then focuses on the "family welfare" perspective and the acknowledgement of women's full socioeconomic role. After pointing to the slow progress towards gender equity in education, the article discusses barriers to this goal posed by poverty, social conventions, early marriage, violence in schools, and curricular gender stereotyping. The article then considers problems encountered by efforts to provide informal education and training and the fact that educational initiatives are donor-driven and fail to address the causes of the gender gap. It is concluded that governments and donors must transform schools as part of a larger program of socioeconomic reforms designed to improve women's status.     

A post‐genomic surprise. The molecular reinscription of race in science,law and medicine

The completion of the first draft of the Human Genome Map in 2000 was widely heralded as the promise and future of genetics‐based medicines and therapies – so much so that pundits began referring to the new century as ‘The Century of Genetics’. Moreover, definitive assertions about the overwhelming similarities of all humans' DNA (99.9 per cent) by the leaders of the Human Genome Project were trumpeted as the end of racial thinking about racial taxonomies of human genetic differences. But the first decade of the new century brought unwelcomed surprises. First, gene therapies turned out to be far more complicated than any had anticipated – and instead the pharmaceutical industry turned to a focus on drugs that might be ‘related’ to population differences based upon genetic markers. While the language of ‘personalized medicine’ dominated this frame, research on racially and ethnically designated populations differential responsiveness to drugs dominated the empirical work in the field. Ancestry testing and ‘admixture research’ would play an important role in a new kind of molecular reification of racial categories. Moreover, the capacity of the super‐computer to map differences reverberated into personal identification that would affect both the criminal justice system and forensic science, and generate new levels of concern about personal privacy. Social scientists in general, and sociologists in particular, have been caught short by these developments – relying mainly on assertions that racial categories are socially constructed, regionally and historically contingent, and politically arbitrary. While these assertions are true, the imprimatur of scientific legitimacy has shifted the burden, since now ‘admixture research’ can claim that its results get at the ‘reality’ of human differentiation, not the admittedly flawed social constructions of racial categories. Yet what was missing from this framing of the problem: ‘admixture research’ is itself based upon socially constructed categories of race.     

Dutch international migration statistics, 1820-1880: an analysis of linked multinational nominal files

"International migration statistics in the nineteenth century are acknowledged to be deficient and biased, but there are few source-critical studies to determine the extent of underreporting and omissions. This article provides a critical analysis of the statistics of Dutch emigration to North America in the period 1835-1880, based on the method of nominal record-linkage of computer files derived from Netherlands emigration lists and U.S. ship passenger manifests. Published and unpublished official records in the Netherlands, U.S.A. and Canada are used to determine the extent of underreporting, the structural biases in the migration data and the 'true' annual Dutch immigration rate to the United States."