CREDIT COUNSELING AND CONSUMER CREDIT TRAJECTORIES

Nonprofit credit counseling provides consumers with financial education, individualized financial counseling, and debt restructuring. Despite potential benefits, relatively little is known about its efficacy. This study uses administrative data to assess the relationship between counseling and consumer credit outcomes. We estimate difference‐in‐difference models to analyze credit outcomes for a counseled group relative to a matched comparison group for six quarters after a baseline period. We find evidence of a substantial credit shock around the time of counseling. Post‐treatment, counseling is associated with a persistent reduction in debt even after accounting for bankruptcies, foreclosures, debt charge‐offs, or participation in debt consolidation programs. (JEL D12)     

DIVINATORY DISCOURSE*

Using data from an ethnographic study of tarot divination, occult claims to knowledge are analyzed and interpreted. Attention is focused on the procedures parties to occult divination employ to claim and sustain what they regard as extraordinary knowledge. This view of occult knowledge stands opposed to efforts to discredit occult claims as unscientific or the result of psychosocial conditions like deprivation and marginality. Like knowledge in general, occult knowledge is a product of sociohistorical influences, interactional negotiation, and interpretation. The challenge for sociology therefore is the pursuit of the social interactional and historical processes whereby knowledge and interpretation are accomplished in everyday life.     

EXAMINING MULTICULTURAL COUNSELING COMPETENCE AND RACE-RELATED ATTITUDES AMONG WHITE MARITAL AND FAMILY THERAPISTS

This study investigates the relative contributions of social desirability attitudes, previous number of multicultural counseling courses taken, and racism and White racial identity attitudes together in predicting marital and family therapists' self-reported multicultural counseling competence. Results revealed that, when controlling for social desirability attitudes and the number of multicultural courses taken, racism and White racial identity attitudes in consort accounted for a significant amount of the variance in self-perceived multicultural counseling competence. Implications for marital and family therapy training, practice, and research are discussed.     

TRANSFORMING DISCOURSE INTO PRACTICE: COMPUTERHYSTORIES AND DIGITAL CULTURES AROUND 1984

This paper discusses some theoretical approaches to the question of how culture, technologies and the social interact. These considerations result from the author' research in the genesis of digital cultures in the 1980s. The paper begins by outlining the author' research project, and then continues with a discussion of some of the most influential approaches in the cultural studies of technology.This article then presents a small sample of the author' analysis, which combines narratological and discourse analytical methods with practice-oriented cultural theories, such as those of Pierre Bourdieu, Régis Debray and Bruno Latour.     

谈谈中国书画的“气”

“气韵生动”经晋代谢赫提出,为“六法”品评画艺的标准之首,历代至今也成为书画家创作与欣赏的品评标准之首。笔者认为,其中“气”应泛指书画作品中笔迹、形态所产生的气势、气场、气息、气脉等感觉;“韵”应泛指笔迹、形态所产生的节奏、对比、变化、过渡、平衡、和谐等感觉;“生动”应泛指笔迹、形态所产生的生命感、流淌感、艺术真实感等感觉。书画工作者在实践中是会体会到这些感受的。     

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Dear Women of China,I am interested in one of the articles,published on your website,which introduces the traditional women's dresses in different dynasties in ancient China.The pictures are very nice and eye-catching.     

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Dear Women of China,I love reading your magazine,and I want my library to purchase your magazine on a regular basis.Tina Huynh/United States Dear Tina,Thank you for loving our magazine,the only English-language magazine with the specific purpose of introducing Chinese women to the world.     

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Dear Women of China,After I read the article,Tradition Blooms with Games Bouquets,on your website,I learned the crocheted wool bouquets,made by Li Meili,a 70-year-old Shanghai granny,and her team,would be presented to medalists at the Beijing 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in lieu of the usual fresh flowers.I love this creativity.That is both beautiful and eco-friendly.     

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Dear Women of China,I read the article about porcelain leaf cups(a traditional craft that originated in Ji'an,in East China's Jiangxi Province)on your website,and I enjoyed it very much.I am wondering if you know how someone in the United States or the European Union could purchase one of these beautiful cups.     

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Dear Women of China,I was touched by the article,Physically Impaired Dancers Win Gold at Wheelchair Dance Competition,on your website,which told the story of Wu Tongyu and his partner,Liang Qiaochan.I admire them.Cynthia/China.     

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Dear Women of China,Happy New Year.I hope you are doing well.I recently saw your great magazine for the first time,in Beijing,when I went to the US Embassy.It is really well done.It was a great read while I waited.I am a writer and entrepreneur involved in fashion,education,and sustainability,and I wan ted to reach out and get more information about your publication.I have worked most of my life involved with many women's organizations,and I have recently begun working with a company doing some research on women in business.In addition,I have had the honor of interviewing many amazing women and men from around the world.I look forward to hearing back from you.Thank you so much.     

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Dear Women of China,1 read on your website that villagers in East China's Jiangxi Province celebrated a harvest festival in September 2019.China has so many interesting festivals,and Chinese celebrate them with various activities.They are really interesting.Hathaway/India Dear Women of China,I think you have done a good job in introducing Chinese culture and women to the world.You have informative and in terest ing con tents in your magazine.I hope the layout design will be more vivid and creative in the future.     

ARGUMENTATIVE COMPLEXITY OF ABORTION DISCOURSE

Using integrative complexity theory and its associated codingscheme, this article explores the structure of arguments onabortion articulated by single- and multi-issue "prochoice"and "pro-life" groups between July 1989 (following the SupremeCourt Webster v. Reproductive Health Services opinion) and May1991. A simple random sample of 13 paragraphsized statementsrepresentative of each organization's position was rated bytwo trained coders on a 7-point scale measuring conceptual differentiationand integration. The debate, as a whole, was conducted at alow level of integrative complexity. Contrary to the "rigidityof the Right" hypothesis, both prochoice and pro-life argumentswere characterized by similarly low levels of integrative complexity.Supporting an ideologue hypothesis, the arguments of multi-as opposed to single-issue organizations were more integrativelycomplex.     

PATIENT COUNSELING BY PHARMACISTS:

In the sociological literature and specifically within the field of conversation analysis (CA), the interactions that occur between health professionals and their clients have been the subject of much analytic work. In particular, there are several widely circulated CA studies examining the broad activity of counseling in a health care setting (Silverman 1997; Silverman, Perakyla and Bor 1992; Heritage and Sefi 1992), centring around the distinctions that may be made between advice and information. This paper considers these distinctions in relation to patient counseling by pharmacists and suggests that this may be more fully understood by drawing on the less widely analyzed and distinct activity of instruction as described by Goldberg (1975). The wider implications of adopting a CA approach to research this kind of health-care setting are also discussed.     

VICTIMHOOD,IDENTITY, AND AGENCY IN THE EARLY PHASE OF THE TROUBLES IN NORTHERN IRELAND

This article explores the representation of victimhood in political discourse and the relation between victimhood, identity, and political agency. The empirical material is drawn from the early days of the Northern Ireland conflict and covers the debate on internment that was in operation from August 1971 until December 1975. Both those supporting and those opposing internment drew on images of victimhood—images that were vital in the construction of legitimacy and political agency. First, the rendering of detailed stories of individual suffering and victimhood produced compassion and empathy—features legitimising the different approaches. Second, the construction of victimhood involved mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, creating “we-them” dichotomies, producing “collectives of victimhood,” which in many cases worked as a platform from which political agency could be voiced. And third, the construction of victimhood produced political truths. The victim was given a particular status embodying a particular moral integrity to determine the truths about “what had really happened,” a status that made the victim a vital agent in the political battle for “the hearts and minds.” The article stresses the importance of studying the representation of victimhood within particular historical contexts and demonstrates the complex and ambiguous effects of the representations of victimhood in violent political conflicts. The examination shows that victimhood has both humanising and dehumanising effects and, depending on the contextual framework, victimhood can create confidence, empowerment, and agency, but also disempowerment and passivity.     

EN-COUNTERING THE OTHER DISCOURSE OF CHICANO-MEXICANO DIFFERENCE

In this period in which Mexicans in the borderlands are being constructed as aliens and sources of cheap deportable labour (not makes of intellectual traditions which encourage transnational area studies and theoretical reflections in the US), it is important to remember that not only people but also ideas cross Mexican–American borders. It is doubly important to scrutinize those intellectual movements that cross state-sanctioned borders while restricting social possibilities and movements.

In this article I consciously assume this charge by focusing critical attention on an influential venue of transnational(ist) travel (On the road to Octavio Paz/On the Road to Chicano) within cultural productions that laid the foundation for an ‘alternative’ Chicano studies epistemology and tradition in the early 1970s. Drawing on disparate cultural studies traditions and the deconstructive insights of Chicana feminists and activists, I encounter the patriarchal dynamics, conceptual idioms, political investments (nationalism/familism) and essentialist difference that undergirded this intellectual formation and its construction of Chicana/o identity. In the process I argue that this formation not only rendered the desired form of political exceptionalism, but also served to distance Chicanas/os from the political and intellectual claims of Chicanas, Chicana feminists and other women and people of colour. However, as my concluding section demonstrates, this circulation of theories was – to use the language of Clifford – ‘cut across’, interrupted and contested by other theories in circulation during the same period that offered different claims to representation, different forms of transnational travel, and other possibilities for imagining social political and intellectual relations.     

ENHANCING DISCOURSE ON NEW TECHNOLOGY WITHIN HIGHER EDUCATION

Universities face challenges in creating and nurturing reflective discourse about ICTs within higher education. Constraints to this discourse include time-space compression caused by ICTs, and changing perceptions of the university's role in an information society. In answering these challenges, a call is made for elevating the role of higher education in public knowledge formation. Such a move reduces the constraints of time pressures by valuing discussion and debate and the time required for these activities, and questions authority and credibility gained solely due to practical and discursive technological competency. Thus, the question is not just to explore how communications technologies are shaping our experience of time and space, but to debate how we wish to use technologies and other means to shape and create the time and space in which meaningful human social and political life is possible. Institutions of higher education should both serve as sites for public knowledge formation, and as contributors to such initiatives in civic society.