Evaluating the One-in-Five Statistic: Women’s Risk of Sexual Assault While in College

In 2014, U.S. president Barack Obama announced a White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault, noting that “1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there.” Since then, this one-in-five statistic has permeated public discourse. It is frequently reported, but some commentators have criticized it as exaggerated. Here, we address the question, “What percentage of women are sexually assaulted while in college?” After discussing definitions of sexual assault, we systematically review available data, focusing on studies that used large, representative samples of female undergraduates and multiple behaviorally specific questions. We conclude that one in five is a reasonably accurate average across women and campuses. We also review studies that are inappropriately cited as either supporting or debunking the one-in-five statistic; we explain why they do not adequately address this question. We identify and evaluate several assumptions implicit in the public discourse (e.g., the assumption that college students are at greater risk than nonstudents). Given the empirical support for the one-in-five statistic, we suggest that the controversy occurs because of misunderstandings about studies’ methods and results and because this topic has implications for gender relations, power, and sexuality; this controversy is ultimately about values.     

Perspectives of the National Disability Insurance Scheme: participants’ knowledge and expectations of the scheme

Limited research investigates future participants’ perspectives of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) – Australia’s first national attempt towards self-directed disability service provision. To identify future participants’ perspectives, seventy people with disability in South-East Queensland participated in an interview. Over half the participants demonstrated having little to no knowledge of the NDIS. Participants’ expected that: (i) they would make decisions around organising and paying support and (ii) that their current service provider would provide the support. Participants also indicated that training around budgeting and hiring would be essential to ensure their successfully engagement with the NDIS. The findings are timely and provide a first-hand account of how people with disability intend to engage with self-directed support programs. Findings also imply that targeted information dissemination and participant training and support are necessary to ensure their successful participation within self-directed programs.     

Pathways to the Clinician’s Experience of Empathy in Engaging Single Mothers at Risk for Physical Abuse of their Children

Based upon an analysis of interviews from a qualitative study with twelve agency-based clinical social workers, this paper recounts three “situational pathways” through which these workers were able to experience empathy in the process of engaging low-income single mothers whose presenting picture involved physical aggression toward their symptomatic children who the workers were also seeing for therapy. The paper describes and utilizes self-psychological and intersubjective concepts to understand the therapeutic contexts that may enhance the worker’s potential for experientially understanding the client’s viewpoint. The relevance of the findings for practice and training is discussed.

Young People’s Reactions Change Elderly People’s Generativity and Narratives: The Effects of Intergenerational Interaction on the Elderly

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the young listener’s reaction on the development of generativity and narratives of elderly people. Thirty-four males between the ages of 60 and 82 participated in this experiment in which the listener generations (young/elderly) and listener reactions (empathic/neutral) were controlled. The participants shared and taught their wisdom gained from their past experiences through narratives. Results showed that many elderly people spoke about “lessons from experiences of failure” when there was an empathic reaction from young people, and such narratives were promoted by an increase of generativity. These results suggested the impact of the younger people’s reaction on the elderly people’s psychological development and behavior.     

Servicing the body: placing glasses on the client’s head at the opticians

Various forms of service work rely upon personnel undertaking activities that necessitate close, and in some cases potentially intimate, contact with a client’s body. In this paper, we consider the ways in which opticians place and position glasses on the head of their clients and how they avoid, or at least ameliorate, the problems and sensitivities that might arise in this close encounter with the co-participant. The paper is based on the analysis of a substantial corpus of video-recordings, augmented by field work, undertaken both in UK and Denmark. The analysis draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis and contributes to our understanding of the interactional accomplishment of body work and embodied conduct and to the growing corpus of research concerned with ‘multimodality’ and the social organisation of service encounters.     

Listening for policy change: how the voices of disabled people shaped Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme

Voice has become an important yet ambivalent tool for the recognition of disability. The transformative potential of voice is dependent on a political commitment to listening to disabled people. To focus on listening redirects accountability for social change from disabled people to the ableist norms, institutions and practices that structure which voices can be heard in policy debates. In this paper, I use disability theory on voice and political theory on listening to examine policy documents for the National Disability Insurance Scheme in light of claims made by the disability movement. Although my study finds some evidence of openness in the policy development stage, the scheme falls short of valuing the diverse voices of disabled people as partners in shared dialogue.     

Spivak’s Fantasy of Silence: A Secular Look at Suicide

Gayatri Spivak’s response to the attack of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2011, the event otherwise known as 9/11, was one of many responses that denote the event’s traumatic impact. In psychoanalytic terms, the psychic condition of trauma, identified by Lacan as the encounter with the real, is a shock which the subject initially misses; as such, the subject is compelled to make intelligible what was missed through what Lacan calls ‘fantasy.’ According to Zizek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, the cinematic quality of the planes crashing into the towers, iterating the fantasies of Hollywood disaster films (16), pointed to a haunting in America of some historical trauma that returned in the real of 9/11 (17). Zizek’s reflection on 9/11 as a haunting in cinematic terms, pointing to a confluence of his scholarship and the event, sets a precedent for this paper’s focus on seeing in Spivak’s response to the suicide acts of 9/11 a haunting of the suicide rite of Sati in her earlier scholarship. This paper reviews Spivak’s representation of suicide in “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988) and “Terror: A Speech After 9/11” (2004), noting the non-coincidental echoes between these projects with respect to secularism and silence, affirming this paper’s proposal that in Spivak’s work, a trauma shared by western secular society is evident as a fantasy of silence.     

McDonald’s at the Gym? A Tale of Two Curves®

In this paper I present findings from an ethnographic study of interaction patterns among members and workers in two Curves® franchises in different locations. Curves® International markets rationalized fitness programs for women. Using a mixed methodology of participant observation, staff interviews, and comparison of facilities’ official data, I analyze these patterns in relation to the rules of the Curves® system and the possible factors that contribute to the observable differences across the two facilities. I argue that despite the corporate mandate for rapid and rationalized (McDonaldized) fitness, local Curves® organizational cultures and client preferences may constitute internal resistance to the McDonaldization process.     

Pushkin’s America: A Survey of the Sources

A. S. Pouchkine, comme la plupart des russes éduqués à l’époque, avait certaines préconceptions de la vie en Amérique du Nord. Dans ses écrits de jeunesse on peut trouver certains stéréotypes empruntés soit à des sources littéraires soit à certaines opérettes. Cependant la vérité sur les conditions de vie dans les colonies françaises, espagnoles et anglaises du Nouveau Monde, l’intéressait non moins que leur écho romantique. Il est possible de déterminer assez exactement ce que Pouchkine savait au sujet de l’Amérique et de suivre à travers ses écrits, ses changements d’attitude.

Sa bibliothèque personnelle, cataloguée par Modzalevsky en 1909, nous montre qu’il avait de nombreux ouvrages sur l’histoire, la géographie et les coutumes des Amériques, surtout du nord. On peut aussi tenter d’évaluer ses contacts personnels avec certains officiers de marine et diplomates ayant séjourné au Nouveau Monde. Seule une évaluation solide de l’état exact des connaissances de Pouchkine peut nous permettre de juger correctement ses opinions sur la vie et la littérature des Amériques, que l’on trouve dans ses articles et sa poésie. Ses connaissances des conditions de vie, du commerce, de l’histoire et de la littérature américaines, basées sur les ouvrages de Cooper et de Washington Irving, étaient solides.     

Carl Schmitt’s politics in the age of drone strikes: examining the Schmittian texture of Obama’s enemy

When George Bush declared to his global audience that they were either ‘with us or against us’, he appeared to directly invoke the Schmittian antithesis of friend vs. enemy. Against the historical backdrop of Bush’s war on terror, and the scholarly attention his foreign policy received in relation to Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, this paper examines whether the Obama administration’s targeted killing regime has marked a departure from Schmitt’s paradigms of war and enmity. Focusing specifically upon the rapid increase in use of drone strikes during Barack Obama’s presidency, this paper argues that the production of the enemy’s abstractness and drive for its annihilation together push at the limits of the Schmittian political logic. However, rather than denoting the point at which political relations are unexplainable through a Schmittian lens, this paper proposes that this produced enemy and its treatment in drone ‘warfare’ obfuscates the lines between a complex of Schmittian paradigms.     

The ruler’s game of musical chairs: Shuffling during the reign of Ethiopia’s last emperor

Dictators frequently shuffle their officials to break up potentially threatening cliques within their regimes. Yet, how they go about rearranging their officials is not well understood. Using network analysis and focusing on the last emperor of Ethiopia, this paper offers a systematic analysis of shuffling by tracing the movements of subordinates over the course of thirty four years. The results show that while officials where frequently shuffled, their movements were confined within clusters of different branches. Such circumscribed movements, I argue, represent the mechanism by which dictators reconcile the tradeoff between suppressing potential rivals and encouraging expertise for the proper functioning of the state apparatus.     

Transforming the public sphere: the case of Moscow’s city libraries

ABSTRACT

This article aims to explore the link between civil society and the public sphere in present-day Russia by studying a recent library reform project in Moscow. In 2013, a comprehensive reconstruction of Moscow's network of 448 public libraries was initiated by a group of intellectuals, architects and urbanists. The project team aimed at modernizing Moscow's city libraries by making them more accessible and appealing to the public. The reconstruction gained support from the city administration that sought to strengthen the function of public libraries as cultural and educational institutions and, at the same time, improve the city's image in the eyes of its citizens. The article poses the question of whether this reform has been successful in making Moscow's city libraries more open, accessible and inviting for the public, and whether the reform has contributed to the development of a public sphere in the city by providing new spaces for participation and civic engagement. The article explores the reform process based on interviews with key informants and document analysis. It looks into the project objectives, its implementation process and its legacy. The analysis of the library reform project revealed contradictory results, as the reform did not develop beyond the pilot phase, but was stopped due to fading support from the city administration. Overall, the library reform thus remained an unfinished process. For developing the public sphere, the legacy of the reform project is ambivalent. On the one hand, the project has proved that creating new public spaces in Moscow is possible. On the other hand, it showed that the public sphere remains limited in today's Russia, as civic initiatives cannot develop beyond a cultural niche project. Due to a lack of political support for societal pluralism, a true autonomous public sphere remains beyond reach in present-day Russia.     

Effects of Parental Divorce on Teenage Children’s Risk Behaviors: Incidence and Persistence

It is generally difficult to separate the effects of divorce from selection when analyzing the effects of parental divorce on children’s risk behaviors. We used propensity score matching and longitudinal data methods to estimate the effects of parents’ divorce on their children’s binge drinking, alcohol consumption, tobacco use, marijuana use, and hard drug use. The children were between 12 and 18 years old in the first survey and between 18 and 24 years old in the second survey. Our results suggest that parental divorce significantly increased the probability of risk behaviors in their children. Moreover, many of these adverse impacts persisted over time, especially among teenage girls.     

Negotiating Solidarity: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and the ‘NGO-ization’ of Postcolonial Narrative

This essay examines the relationship between transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and postcolonial disasters as represented in literature. After the 1990s expansion of humanitarian organizations, a wide array of NGO-related literature emerges, including depictions of aid workers in fiction as well as humanitarian-authored narratives. While these texts contain a capacity for self-critique typically lacking in transnational NGO campaign materials, they remain mired in a ‘bureaucratic imagination’, sequestered from supposed beneficiaries. Alongside this literary development is an increasing pressure on postcolonial fiction to align with narrowly defined NGO missions, or what might be called an ‘NGO-ization of postcolonial narrative’. This essay interprets Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People as a vociferous refutation of such humanitarian pressure. Sinha stages the interaction between subaltern survivor and humanitarian benefactor not in terms of heroic salvation or radical rejection but as a conditional and negotiated solidarity. Disaster thus creates an opportunity to reimagine the subaltern-humanitarian relationship.     

The Reinvention of Liveability in Public Places: Interaction Mapping Analysis of Central Nottingham’s Improved Walkability

The reinvention of liveability in public places and its integration with social, environmental, cultural, and economic factors of living can be analyzed in detail in urban studies. This is studied in particular here through evaluation of different factors of quality of life and well-being in urban environments, one of which is the convention for encouraging social experience based on the socioeconomic and socioenvironmental values of the public place. This study will also discuss the relation between quality social environments and the socioeconomic values of public places, and how by enhancing the liveability of a place we can increase public expenditure and sociality of a place. Through interaction mapping analysis, and based on both human geography and urban studies, the study evaluates the implications of spatial change (i.e., temporary uses of a place) and walkability on maximizing the potential of a place and its immediate context. This comparison study then elaborates on socioeconomic benefits of walkability for liveability of public places.     

‘I Know This Scheme is from God:’ Toward a Reconsideration of the Origins of the American Colonization Society

This article revisits the origins of the American Colonization Society, an organization that shaped debates over slavery, race and citizenship in the antebellum USA and yet has until recently been given only marginal attention by historians. In posing again the question of the Society's origins – by asking not what was new about colonization but rather asking why a very old, impractical idea found widespread acceptance when it did – this article argues that by understanding colonization's contradictions as central to its appeal in a transitioning America, we can begin a reevaluation of the Society without whitewashing its many complexities and ambiguities.     

Negative to the extreme: the problematics of the RNIB’s See the Need campaign

This article reports the findings of research about the RNIB’s recent advertising campaign. Under the methodological rubric of Critical Discourse Analysis, two paradigms were applied as research instruments: an advertising aesthetic was used in the primary analysis; and the tripartite model of disability was used in the secondary analysis. This analysis of various texts culminated in the conclusion that the RNIB’s campaign is fundamentally contradictory, in danger of contributing to problematic social attitudes and thus hindering the very people it sets out to help – an issue greatly complicated by the organisational involvement of people registered as blind and partially sighted.     

Children’s conceptions of the word ‘disabled’: a phenomenographic study

The aim of this study was to investigate the qualitative differences in children’s conceptions of the word ‘disabled’. Two hundred and thirty children, aged 7–12 years of age, were instructed to make a drawing of what came into their minds when they heard the word ‘disabled’. A brief written commentary on their drawing was also requested. The drawings and comments showed that the children had a positive attitude towards the word ‘disabled’. They drew and commented that a disability had medical causes, a technical device was a prerequisite for disabled people, a disability had social consequences and that a disabled person needed support. The children also explained that there were obstacles which impaired disabled people’s performance of activities. Access to some environments and being an active part of society was limited for some disabled people.