Sexual Orientation Discrimination and Its Challenges for Nonprofit Managers

In the wake of the recent New Jersey Supreme Court decision, Dale v. Boy Scouts of America and Monmouth Council Boy Scouts (1999), this article examines the issue of sexual orientation discrimination and the challenges it presents nonprofit managers. Because of regional shifts in public opinion, the enactment of nondiscrimination laws at the state and local level, and now a state Supreme Court interpreting state law to include the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) as a “public accommodation,” nonprofit managers may face a more complex legal and moral environment. It is hoped that this article will challenge nonprofit managers to carefully reexamine their membership and personnel policies with respect to lesbians and gay men and begin preparing their organizations for this cultural change.     

Posting Signs on the Bog: Fixing and Unfixing H.D., Imagiste

This article aims to reassess the modernist poet H.D.'s early poetry and to challenge certain critical readings of the early poetry in relation to H.D.'s expression of self. It argues that H.D.'s Sea Garden should not be dismissed as a false start, as a place where H.D. was trapped in a restrictive imagist aesthetic, but that the dramatic lyric as used in this collection of poetry enabled her to explore her bisexual self in multiple and multiplying (not split) selves, as both in a state of flux and as enduring through time. It examines H.D.'s work alongside other writers such as Tennyson and Woolf, drawing out common metaphorical structures and patterns and suggests that Woolf and H.D. in particular, were producing literary forms and representations which provide a radical challenge to processes of categorization—a challenge to the notion of category itself.     

The sociopolitical origins of the American Legion

The American Legion was one of the most politically consequential organizations in the twentieth-century United States. It was a local bedrock of anti-communism in two post-war red scares and throughout the cold war. It also built a lavish and cross-nationally unique welfare state for American veterans. In this article, I examine the origins of the American Legion and demonstrate that it was organized by rentier capitalists acting in their intraclass and interclass interests. Most importantly, the Legion was an organization that fought the “battle over class” by denying the importance of class as a social concept and proposing “Americanism” as an alternative. I also argue that the Legion’s extreme anti-communism combined with its dedication to welfare provision for American veterans altered the course of American welfare state development.     

A Christian identity for the liberal state?

It seems to be impossible for the liberal state to embrace a Christian identity, because ‘liberalism’ is exactly a device for separating state and religion. Discussing the implications of a recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights, Lautsi v. Italy (2011), I argue that this is not necessarily so. If paired with a liberal commitment to pluralism, a Christian identity might even be more inclusive of minority religions than a narrowly ‘liberal’ state identity, which has been the dominant response in Western Europe to the challenge of immigrant diversity, especially that of Muslim origins.     

Toward Culturally Democratic Citizens: Nongovernmental Organizations and the State

This study investigates the relationships between nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the state. It demonstrates that Colombian state institutions aim to foster “culturally democratic citizens” through decentralization initiatives and participation mechanisms at the local level. The National Culture Plan is an overarching national policy that intends to be a reference for governance and civil society participation looking particularly to the players involved in the provision and consumption of cultural activities for its implementation. It marks a change at the national level as it launches civil society into the formulation of cultural policies and political participation in general. By examining local nongovernmental organizations through document and qualitative analysis, the study identifies four types of nongovernmental organizations that self-identified as working in cultural activities in Bogotá—insiders, yearners, dismissers, and outsiders. These types of NGOs emerged in personal interviews and illustrate that NGO–state relationships vary across the sector. Participation among the nongovernmental sector is uneven despite institutional reforms and initiatives supported by national legislation. This article provides data to add to a growing and innovative body of research necessary for professionals in public policy and nongovernmental management fields.     

Compulsion mechanisms: state-movement dynamics in Buenos Aires

The article reveals and explains the workings of generally ignored mechanism of state–movement interaction proposed by Charles Tilly, namely the compulsion mechanism. Specifically, two types of compulsion mechanisms will be defined: compulsive support and compulsive control. In both types, without using physical repression, the state’s institutions reinforce the movement’s identity while also prompting it to adapt its repertoire of strategies to the state institutions’ requirements. Empirically, this article focuses on the interaction of the assembly movement with the state in the City of Buenos Aires. This movement emerged as a result of the socioeconomic and political crises of 2001–2002 in Argentina. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, the purpose is to unpack how the assembly movement’s identities and strategies were built and how its interaction with the state evolved.     

Policing The Lost: The Emergence of Missing Persons and the Classification of Deviant Absence

In the mid-19 ^th century, increases in global migration and mobility produced a discernable rise in the number of ambiguous absences. This shift, combined with a novel expectation, linked to improved communications technology, that such absences might be resolved engendered the emergence of missing persons as a social category. A demand on the part of families of the missing that the state aid in their location would produce a Bourdieusian classification struggle over how to define and categorize this new mass of absences. At issue would be whether an ambiguously absent individual was merely absent, as a routine component of social life, or whether the individual merited legitimation by the state as a new form of deviant: a "missing" person. Scholars have described the emerging administrative state’s enhanced powers of surveillance and classification and its persistent inclination to render their populations, in James Scott’s phrase, “legible.” Brought to the attention of the state, missing persons represented a body of people who had conspicuously fallen out of official sight. Yet, instead of attempting to fix this omission by gathering additional information on the lost — to, in effect, see the missing — as theories of the state would lead us to expect, the state chose to look away. In the United States, the state, in the form of municipal police departments, resisted classifying absences as cases of missingness and pushed back against families’ requests for aid. Leveraging the inherently ambiguous characteristics of the missing, the state promoted a definition of missing persons that conveniently freed it from the burden of managing an unmanageable population. In this article, drawing from archival data, I challenge prevailing theories of the modern state that emphasize its avidly classificatory nature by offering a case in which legibility was strategically withheld and a population was, in service of state interests, intentionally obscured. Only after the state lost its symbolic monopoly and the category was raced and gendered, becoming, in public discourse, associated with a socially valuable demographic – namely, young, white women – would the state, facing a threat to its legitimacy, deem the missing as worthy of being seen.

     

Responding to Irregular Migration: High Potential of Local Governments in Turkey

This study examines local governments' growing presence in irregular migration management, and discusses how autonomous local responses challenge centralist approaches to the management of this migration. By building on the relevant legal framework, secondary literature and interview notes, the study focuses its attention on irregular migration in Turkey, and uncovers the potential of two local government units – district municipalities and muhtarl?ks – in the response to irregular migration. The study discusses the enablers and the main constraints on these local government units in responding to, and therefore involving themselves in, the management of the phenomenon. As discussed in the study, the main impediment appears to be the country's highly centralized state structure, while there also exist several enablers, such as Turkish Townsmen Law (Hem?ehri Hukuku), the trust relationship with their inhabitants, and their experience of liminality in handling irregular matters and providing social aid to vulnerable, fragile and low‐income residents.     

Between the state and global civil society: non‐official experts and their network in the Asia‐Pacific, 1925–45

This article stresses the need for a more rigorous scrutiny of the power structure in which an expert network produces its ‘expert knowledge’. It defines a pioneering multinational expert network in the Asia‐Pacific region in the interwar years as a prototype of an epistemic community, and examines how far it challenged the state‐centred and North Atlantic‐centred dominant structure of international politics, and became ‘global’. In this article I argue that this particular network largely reinforced the dominant structure. This meant that it remained inter‐national and colonial, and served the interests of the state/empire, neither becoming global nor advancing a universalist cause for the global civil society. The failure owes a lot to historical circumstances. Yet this case study also demonstrates that the structure in which the expert network produced specific knowledge is still dominant and that a constant scrutiny of the role of an expert network remains critical.     

A Modern Day Caesar? Donald Trump and American Caesarism

This article argues that the American political system under Donald Trump is an example of what Antonio Gramsci dubbed “Caesarism,” a situation where a taut balance of warring class forces allows for the emergence of a third force to freeze the antagonism and challenge/usurp established political institutions. To concretise Gramsci's rather abstract formulation and to better illuminate the nature of American Caesarism, this article employs a reading of the Roman poet Lucan's magisterial Civil War. Through a close reading of this text, we can explore the origins of Caesarism and study the efficacy of different means of struggle against it. Lucan thus helps us reinvigorate the concept of Caesarism and apply it in the contemporary American context. In particular, it will be demonstrated that whereas Lucan depicts a progressive form of Caesarism with a qualitatively new state form, the Trump administration embodies a regressive form of Caesarism within an old state form.     

Museums and the visually impaired: the spatial politics of access

Based on a study of 36 museums in London and the South East of England, the paper offers a deconstructive reading of ‘access’ and its spatial practices by analysing their responses to the visually impaired visitor. Within any discursive space we find aporial, non‐discursive moments that introduce ambivalence into an otherwise seemingly ordered and known arrangement. Such forms of presence have been described, amongst other things, under the heading of the figural (Lyotard). In the discursive space of the museum, a space of seeing and conservation, the visually impaired visitor figure tacks its way into the museum as such a figure that we can call (after Mark C. Taylor) an underdetermined not. Through such a figure we can consider the (dis)ordering effects that this ambivalent form of presence can have. The study reveals how such a figure not only introduces a problem of access but is also mobilised by the museum so that access can be addressed as a museum issue. Museums have changed from previously being indifferent to dis/ability needs to now existing in a state of being in‐difference with them. This idea reveals the way in which museums shift the (often haptic) challenge that such a figure makes to the (scopic) signifiers of the museum by responding to them through the less troublesome regimes of what is signified. Access in this case is neither granted nor denied but endlessly deferred.     

Temporality and the modern state

Conclusion Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that as things now stand no state has reached, nor is it soon likely to reach, the point where it can comfortably abandon temporality altogether as a source of legitimacy. Even the most technocratic states today still rely on continuity and the meaning systems of the past in order to extract a measure of allegiance from their constituencies. Though a concern with history and time may not seem as important to state administrators as it once did, the value of temporal rationales nevertheless remains indispensable. This is particularly true in periods of crisis when state managers and ideologues feel compelled to resuscitate powerful memories of the genealogy of the state, or of the state's place in time, in order to strengthen their authority. In cases such as these, a politics of time is invaluable for at least formally authorizing the existence or role of the state in modern society.The political interpretation of the longue durée, then, still remains strongly entrenched. The challenge to it by contemporary capitalism has proven to be a strange one, for capitalism has not really succeeded in meeting the state on its own grounds. It has evaded confrontation by questioning not the shape or structure of a politics of time, but only its importance for the present. Capitalism has done little more than treat the longue durée as irrelevant, which is something different than vigorously contesting it or arguing that its meaning needs to be seriously reconsidered.Yet there have emerged two other, generally unnoticed, challenges to a statist temporality that have been less dismissive. Both are worth mentioning here, since they have political connotations. But both also need more empirical verification before they can be considered potential threats to existing political time-frames.The first of these has been established more theoretically than factually. To some recent observers it has seemed that the widespread diffusion of the state's perspective on duration has by no means guaranteed that this perspective will always be subjectively internalized in ways that best serve the state. Crucial discrepancies can exist between the way formal structures appear to be adopted by a population and the ways in which these structures are actually assimilated, psychologically and practically, by individuals in their daily lives. For instance, a political temporality may be superficially accepted by people, but given a quite different significance, or placed in an entirely different register, than the one intended by the state.Bourdieu, for one, has tried to explain how this happens. He has noticed that it is invariably the policy of modern states to impose a variety of cognitive structures on their citizenry. The purpose is two-fold: to encourage people to think in patterns approved of by the state, and to encourage them to act (on the basis of these patterns) in a manner that best meets the state's needs. A politicized temporal orientation would be an example of such a cognitive structure. If it were accepted as objective rather than, as it in fact is, merely arbitrary, and if it were then reproduced in the minds of individuals, a fit would be established that would help solidify the existing cosmological and political order. People's values and judgments would be regulated, perhaps without them being fully aware of it. Furthermore, as a result of these cognitive structures certain desired practices might follow. By controlling how time is thought about, the state could plausibly affect, in almost imperceptible ways, not only the attitudes people hold, but their incentives and motivations as well.According to Bourdieu, this mainly works. What people internalize is most frequently what they reproduce in their behavior. But sometimes something different occurs. When people pay attention to their actual social practices instead of the objective structures conferred from without, they often reconceptualize and re-work what has been imposed upon them. This is the always present margin of creative freedom that lies within the grasp of all human beings. Individuals and social groups have a perpetual capacity to innovate; they are able, if they choose, to transform what they receive rather than simply repeat it. Even when the temporal classifications of the state are thoroughly known, people still have the leeway to decide when or how to apply them, or whether, in certain cases, to apply them at all. Hence, in Bourdieu's view, there is always room for a self-conscious social praxis to engender heretical readings of statist structures. Heretical readings are ways of appropriating imposed forms instead of merely inculcating them - of subjectively modifying what is given instead of reproducing it. Whenever or wherever such readings are set in motion, the formal taxonomies of time are never as secure as they may seem. In light of this, Bourdieu and others have made it clear that today the taken-for-granted can no longer be automatically equated with the taken-as-legitimate. Michel de Certeau has made a similar point in his discussion of the oppositional practices of everyday life. According to him, the powerless (the vast majority) inhabit frames and structures they did not create and cannot hope to abolish in a single lifetime. But they are able subtly to undermine these frames by means of a whole range of tactics that they in fact put into operation constantly. Hidden away in the interstices of contemporary life are all sorts of resistances, manipulative movements, reconversions, conscious maladaptations, and quasi-invisible ruses and avoidances that serve - on a practical if not a theoretical level - to de-legitimize the dominant structures and interpretations. Certeau has convincingly shown that under-neath even the (apparently) most undisputed political and ideological forms, including those claiming to explain time or duration, there are numerous acts of opposition and contestation working continuously to weaken the grip of the state over society. There is a second way in which a statist time-frame is currently being challenged. Within civil society there are, it now appears evident, supressed or discarded modes of long-term temporality that have survived more or less intact despite the state's war of annihilation against them, and despite the triumph of the state's view of the longue durée during the last two centuries. These traces of traditional and religious time have persisted in fragments of communal life, ethnic groupings, church organizations, and other antiquated rituals or solidarities. No matter how attenuated or submerged these islands of duration may be, they are nevertheless capable of actively shaping people's perceptions of themselves and their world in ways not necessarily compatible with the goals of the state. Moreover, these half-hidden temporal orientations contain - often inadvertantly - a certain subversive weight. By their very nature, they call into question the state's one-dimensional account of historical time. What any state would prefer to have accepted as fixed and natural about the longue durée, these older temporalities undermine or discredit. Sometimes the results are bizzare and unsupportable, as is the case with the various temporal outlooks of today's millenial subcultures (where duration is still calculated in terms of God-ordained epochs and ages succeeding one another on the way toward the apocalypse). Yet at other times these earlier temporalities are worth remembering and perhaps even resuscitating. Some of them may represent a healthy return of the repressed. It is not impossible to think that an alternate view of the past could help activate communities of resistance informed by time perspectives entirely different from those promoted by the modern state. If so, it would not be the first instance in history where opposition to power and a thoroughgoing re-conceptualization of time went hand in hand.

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Practice wisdom in social work: an uncommon sense in the intersubjective encounter

Social work is not, and should not be, a practice of common sense. The author revisited a vast array of literature on practice wisdom in social work and parallel conceptions in cognate disciplines. For better or worse, the idea of practice wisdom has been revitalized in standing against the deprofessionalization of social work. However, its ambiguity in meaning has somehow overridden its reputation. Practice wisdom is intuitive, tacit, and spontaneous in nature. It is an embodied phronesis of experienced practitioners. The author argues that practice wisdom in social work is not only the wisdom of analytical experience, but it is also the wisdom or a quality characterized by courtesy, kindness, consideration, compassion, and benevolence. It is uniquely uncommonsensical and has to be cultivated through the intersubjective encounter between the practitioner and service user.     

Protection studies: Challenging oppression and discrimination

Social work students on qualifying programmes should have abundant opportunities to challenge racism, sexism, disablism and other oppressions in society, that is in the macro environment. Equally they are required to confront oppression in the micro environments of the family home or small institution. One way of achieving this is through integration of the issues into the whole curriculum but also through a specific module devoted to protection studies.

Child and ‘elder’ abuse and the mistreatment of dependent younger adults is at one end of a continuum of oppression with societal discrimination at the other. Oppression, whatever its form, has four essential components: the misuse of power, processes of objectification, the silence of witnesses and the entrapment or accommodation of victims. Social work students who do not fully appreciate the dynamics of the abuse of power, and the perspectives of victims are ill equipped to challenge oppression.

A rationale for a protection studies module is given. The objectives and content of the proposed studies are also suggested. Protection studies, it is argued, are essential because social workers are faced with complex issues of power and control. Those who overlook the need to protect all of society's weakest members can be seen as facilitating abusers in the same way that those who do not embrace anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practices are perpetuating bigotry and injustice.     

Deciphering the modern Janus: societal multiplicity and nation-formation

ABSTRACT

How to theorize the nation’s Janus-like form, its simultaneous modernity and antiquity? This paper provides an original answer to this longstanding question. It argues that nations arise from the interaction of ‘societal multiplicity’ and the expansionist tendency of historical capitalism. The emergence of capitalism super-adds a modern inflection to the inherently relational process of collective identity formation by generating modern sovereignty as an abstract form of rule. Crucially however, just like its emergence, capitalism’s expansion also refracts through societal multiplicity. Non-capitalist societies are therefore pressured into ‘nationalist’ projects of emulative self-preservation in which the nation’s political form (i.e. the sovereign state) is forged before its sociological content (i.e. primitive accumulation). Thus, the original site of this process, France, produced the modular nation-form that unlike Britain’s imperial nationhood could be globalized. The paper therefore shows that IR’s premise of multiplicity may be the key to one of social sciences’ most enduring puzzles.     

‘Waiting for Gojko’: two one-act plays after Goffman

The sociological and anthropological literature dealing with the social and cultural effects of tourism not uncommonly refers to its adverse effects; and among these is a tendency to create and reinforce patterns of deference on the part of the‘host’population towards the foreign‘guests’. The author's personal observations suggest that this expectation is not typically met in the case of Yugoslavia. An informal interactionist analysis of the Yugoslav restaurant industry, based on observation principally in two regions of the country, attempts to indicate why this should be the case. Models of behaviour rooted outside the restaurant itself, governing such factors as the relations between different age groups, and the evaluation of occupational skills, shape interaction within the restaurant, and define the relative statuses of guests and staff. It is also possible to point to ways in which the staff can be seen to exercise a measure of authority within the restaurant, regulating by their corporate authority the patterns of interaction found there. While the article does not challenge the claim that tourist-based development may under certain circumstances generate deferential or obsequious behaviour, it concludes with the demand that such claims be subjected to careful comparative scrutiny, in order to avoid misleading over-generalisation.     

‘Entering the territory of incitement’: oppositionality and Africa South

Africa South was an anti‐apartheid journal edited by Ronald Segal which was published in South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This article explores the historical and political significance of Africa South and considers its implications for an understanding of ‘oppositionality’ in the post‐apartheid present. The central challenge which Africa South offered to its own context was its transnational perspective. Africa South was an important meeting place in the global routes of the developing pan‐African movement. It is also noteworthy for its effort to bring disparate areas of history and experience – both within the African continent and across the African diaspora – into revealing alignment with one another. The principle of conjuncture, I argue, initiated an important analytical move: the opportunity for illuminating comparison, the re‐conceptualisation of an often fragmented political and social landscape and an unusual glimpse of the whole. In tension with this totalising vision is the journal’s generic eclecticism, its flexible political identity and its collaborative construction. In both its unity and its fragmentation, Africa South offers an important point of departure for activist journalism and oppositional intellectual endeavours in the present.     

Transnational land investment web: land grabs,TNCs, and the challenge of global governance

ABSTRACT

Despite international media’s waning attention, research and political debates on global land grabbing have not subsided. We argue the importance of understanding the ‘transnational land investment web’ of corporate and state actors and institutions, which are not always immediately visible. Focusing on transnational corporations (TNCs) based in the European Union (EU), we examine five sets of actors and institutional spheres through which these actors are able to grab lands beyond Europe. It is crucial to understand these not as individual sets of actors or institutions, but as interconnected sets, comprising a web. These are EU-based: (1) Private companies using regular institutional platforms; (2) Finance capital companies; (3) Public–private partnerships; (4) Development Finance Institutions; and (5) Companies using EU policies to gain control of land through the supply chain. One implication of this complex web is that democratic governance in the context of land grabs becomes an even more daunting challenge.     

Freedom,mobility and marginality: an interdisciplinary study of the historical roots of contemporary street youth in urban Brazil

This study is focused on the lives of street youth in urban Brazil through an interdisciplinary and cross-historical approach, providing a conceptual analysis of three different but interconnected sources of knowledge: A historical study of vagrants in the 1800s by [Fraga Filho, Walter. (1996). Mendigos, Moleques e Vadios na Bahia do Século XIX. São Paulo: HUCITEC/EDUFBa], the novel Jubiába by [Amado, Jorge. ([1935] 1984). Jubiába. New York: Avon Books] on the life of a youth on the streets in the 1930s, and empirical material from a current ethnography of boys and young men on the street. This approach facilitates a broader perspective on stability and change regarding the dynamics of street life, allowing cross-historical themes to surface. It reveals how young men on the street challenge socio-spatial and moral boundaries. While their marginal position empowers them and increases their mobility, it also encumbers their trajectories. The conclusion arrived at is that marginality and mobility are closely interlinked, as marginality is not only the cause but also consequence of mobility, and sometimes even the obstruction of it.