Making Bengali Brick Lane: claiming and contesting space in East London

Based on a recent empirical project on 'the Bengal diaspora', the paper explores the construction and contestation of meanings around the iconic East London street, Brick Lane. Taking the 2006 protests around the film Brick Lane as its starting point, the paper draws on original interviews conducted in 2008 with a range of Bengali community representatives, to examine the narratives of space, community and belonging that emerge around the idea of Brick Lane as the 'cultural heartland' of the British Bangladeshi community. By exploring the representation, production and contestation of 'social space' through everyday practices, the paper engages with and contests the representation of minority ethnic 'communities' in the context of contemporary multicultural London and examines the process of 'claiming' and 'making' space in East London. In so doing, the paper contributes to a critical tradition that challenges essentialising and pathologizing accounts of ethnic communities and racialized spaces, or that places them outside of broader social and historical processes - redolent, for example, in contemporary discussions about 'parallel lives' or 'the clash of civilizations'. By contrast, this paper views social space as made through movement and narration, with a particular emphasis on the social agency of local Bengali inhabitants and the multiple meanings that emerge from within this 'imagined community'. However, rather than simply stressing the unfinished and processual nature of spatial meanings, the paper insists on the historical, embodied and affective dimensions of such meaning making, and a reckoning with the broader social and political landscape within which such meanings take shape. The focus on Brick Lane provides an empirically rich, geographically and historically located lens through which to explore the complex role of ethnicity as a marker of social space and of spatial practices of resistance and identity. By exploring Bengali Brick Lane through its narratives of past, present and future, these stories attest to the symbolic and emotional importance of such spaces, and to their complex imaginings.     

How a Nonprofitness Orientation Influences Collective Civic Action: The Effects of Civic Engagement and Political Participation

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This research addresses the question of how the institutional frame of “nonprofitness” shapes the civic...     

Mortality, fertility, education and capital accumulation in a simple OLG economy

We develop a simple OLG model to analytically show that aging leads to increased educational efforts through a general equilibrium effect. The mechanism is that scarcity of raw labor increases the return of human relative to physical capital. While a reduction in the birth rate is shown to unambiguously increase educational efforts, increases in the survival rate have ambiguous effects. Falling birth rates also increase capital per worker, but the effects of rising survival rates are again ambiguous. We conclude that our model is a useful laboratory to highlight potentially offsetting effects in models with endogenous education and overlapping generations.     

Pragmatics of Self- and Other-Reference in Young Children

During the first years of life, children come to understand and talk about a self separate from others. This study examined self- and other-reference and communicative intents expressed by children and parents in dyadic interaction at 14, 20 and 32 months. Research questions included whether children's early use of self- and other-reference pronouns occurred for expression of particular communicative intents, how use changed with age, and whether parent and child pragmatic expressions of self and other were similar. Results showed that children's early explicit reference to self tended to take the form of I rather than me/my/mine, and was used primarily in making statements about their intended actions, in making requests or proposals to their parents and in stating propositions about the world around them. Children during this developmental period were only beginning to refer to the present other with the pronoun you and these instances occurred primarily in making requests or proposals. Despite age-related increases in pronominal forms and intents, a small set of intents continued to provide the context for most self- and other-reference pronouns. In the communicative contexts in which they explicitly refer to self and other, children did not appear to exclusively mirror those which were observed in parental speech.     

Young Children's Emotional Attachments to Stories

In the interest of developing a more holistic and integrated understanding of young children's experience of stories, this study describes preschoolers' emotional attachments to stories and the cultural beliefs and practices which surround such attachments. Thirty-two European-American, middle-class families, participated in an interview study of their children's story attachments, and five of these mothers also participated in a short-term, longitudinal diary study. Every child experienced at least two emotional attachments to stories. Children were captivated by stories presented in different media, with many attachments occurring around video stories in addition to books. They expressed their attachments by repeatedly requesting the story, expressing strong feelings, and enacting the story in pretend play. Story attachments were social in two fundamental ways: children created relationships with the characters in their favorite stories, and story attachments emerged in the context of relationships with caregivers whose beliefs and practices supported such attachments.     

Adaptive Estimation of the Integral of Squared Regression Derivatives

A problem of estimating the integral of a squared regression function and of its squared derivatives has been addressed in a number of papers. For the case of a heteroscedastic model where smoothness of the underlying regression function, the design density, and the variance of errors are known, the asymptotically sharp minimax lower bound and a sharp estimator were found in Pastuchova & Khasminski (1989). However, there are apparently no results on the either rate optimal or sharp optimal adaptive, or data-driven, estimation when neither the degree of regression function smoothness nor design density, scale function and distribution of errors are known. After a brief review of main developments in non-parametric estimation of non-linear functionals, we suggest a simple adaptive estimator for the integral of a squared regression function and its derivatives and prove that it is sharp-optimal whenever the estimated derivative is sufficiently smooth.