Generation,resistance, and survival: African-American children and the Southampton Rebellion of 1831

The Southampton Rebellion of 1831, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, stands as the most famous slave rebellion in American History. Historians have studied the rebellion extensively often focusing on Turner’s biography, the incident’s violent sequence of events, and the wide social, cultural, and political impact of the rebellion. The most recent scholarship on the Southampton Rebellion focuses on the wider community that produced the violent event that resulted in the death of nearly 60 whites and an uncountable number of people of color. African-American children made up a significant demographic in antebellum Southampton. They were present everywhere, just as children were present in most antebellum communities. Yet their appearances in the trial records associated with the Southampton Rebellion are all but unstudied. The Southampton Rebellion was not the result of Nat Turner’s singular genius focused on immediate results. It was a rebellion constituted in the community with future liberation in mind. Children, the literal embodiment of slavery’s future, then were necessarily included and involved. This article engages the extensive court documents associated with the Southampton Rebellion’s aftermath to investigate the possible role of children in the rebellion and their significance to the resistance of enslaved communities.     

Disability activisms: social model stalwarts and biological citizens

The Disabled People’s Movement (DPM) in the UK rejects the view that disability is an illness. For the DPM it is the social processes of discrimination and oppression that create the material circumstances out of which solidarity and politicisation arise. The DPM has also been shy about impairment, arguing that it is generally irrelevant to the issue of disability and that a clear distinction between impairment and disability is necessary if disability is to be understood as a basis for identity politics. The biological citizens that support embodied health movements use impairment, genetic status, biomedical diagnosis and classification as calling cards that signal their claims to identity. Whilst the DPM has challenged medical hegemony and scientific ideas, many ‘biosocial’ groups embrace the specialised medical and scientific knowledge associated with their ‘condition’, particularly where it might be used to enhance their claims to citizenship. This paper argues that disability activism in the UK is bifurcating. It addresses the difference in perspective and action between the ‘social model stalwarts’ of the DPM and biological citizens that organise politically around particular diagnostic labels.     

Propensity of Canada's Foreign‐born to Claim Unemployment Insurance Benefits

This article examines the relationship between claiming unemployment insurance benefits in Canada and the immigrant class under which immigrants were admitted (namely skilled workers, assisted relatives, family class, refugees), using a new data set that combines income tax and immigration records. Claims rates (or the proportion of immigrants who claimed unemployment insurance benefits) are calculated for each immigrant landing class for the cohorts of immigrants who landed in 1980, 1985 and 1989; for each cohort, annual claims rates are presented from the year after landing to 1995. The claims rates indicate that there are significant differences among the different immigrant landing classes: those admitted as skilled workers have relatively low claims rates, those in the family class or assisted relatives have higher rates, and refugees have the highest rates. For all immigrant landing classes, claims rates rise rapidly during the two or three years after arrival in Canada, but decline thereafter for all classes. Differences in claims rates on unemployment insurance benefits remain across the immigrant landing classes after general economic conditions and some characteristics of the immigrants are controlled.     

A permutation procedure for testing the equality of pattern hypotheses across groups involving correlation or covariance matrices

This paper describes a permutation procedure to test for the equality of selected elements of a covariance or correlation matrix across groups. It involves either centring or standardising each variable within each group before randomly permuting observations between groups. Since the assumption of exchangeability of observations between groups does not strictly hold following such transformations, Monte Carlo simulations were used to compare expected and empirical rejection levels as a function of group size, the number of groups and distribution type (Normal, mixtures of Normals and Gamma with various values of the shape parameter). The Monte Carlo study showed that the estimated probability levels are close to those that would be obtained with an exact test except at very small sample sizes (5 or 10 observations per group). The test appears robust against non-normal data, different numbers of groups or variables per group and unequal sample sizes per group. Power was increased with increasing sample size, effect size and the number of elements in the matrix and power was decreased with increasingly unequal numbers of observations per group.     

Increases in childlessness in New Zealand

New Zealand’s fertility fell below the theoretical replacement level (2.1 births per woman) for the first time in recorded history in 1978. It has hovered at or below replacement level ever since. The result, an impression of relative stability, belies changes taking place. Data from the 1981, 1996 and 2006 censuses show a pattern of delayed childbearing and increased childlessness. In a little over 30 years, childlessness has shifted from being almost entirely a consequence of a couple’s infecundity to being as frequently a result of a woman’s life choices. The steady rises in childlessness recorded by successive cohorts suggest that childlessness is already having a significant effect on New Zealand fertility. Patterns in characteristics of those women choosing not to start families, as well as subtle differences in these patterns between New Zealand and other developed nations, suggest that there is a significant potential for childlessness to cause a more dramatic shift in New Zealand’s total fertility rate. This analysis examines growth in childlessness in relation to marital status, country of birth, ethnicity, regional and urban differentials, religion, and educational attainment of women who were childless at the 1981, 1996 and 2006 censuses.

A Comprehensive Action Plan Information System: A Tool for Tracking and Mapping Quality of Life Action Implementation and Planning

Since its inception, the Community-University Institute for Social Research (CUISR) has been involved in a participatory process aimed at understanding the quality of life in Saskatoon. Informed by the results of Quality of Life (QoL) survey in 2001 and by a list of QoL action priorities from a community forum, the CUISR QoL module set out to survey community work on QoL action planning and implementation. In collaboration with a steering committee of community-based professionals, CUISR developed a methodology for managing and analyzing QoL initiatives related to community action implementation and planning. The Community Action Plan Information System (CAPIS) is the result of this process. CAPIS is a compendium, an analysis, and a purposive contextualization of QoL actions and recommendations from collaborative action plan documents, focused on the Saskatoon community. This paper provides a detailed examination of the concept and components of the Comprehensive Action Plan Information System (CAPIS), as well as the process and outcomes of a sampling of the QoL statement analysis and mapping project. The paper concludes by projecting how the CAPIS could evolve into a fully operational QoL strategic action plan and gap indicator, providing the foundation for a knowledge based, informed, reporting mechanism on the state and evolution of QoL action and policy.

Not more learning logs! A research based perspective on teaching reflective learning within HR professional education

The challenges of teaching reflective learning, whilst not peculiar to the HR profession, assume a poignancy given HR's claim to be the natural custodians of ‘all things learning’. The paper discusses the impact of attempts to enhance the reflective learning curriculum within one professional HR programme. Tensions in terms of the positioning of reflective learning within a predominantly functionalist management curriculum can, in part, be ameliorated. Developing a capability amongst students for reflective dialogue and careful construction of assessment work, for example, can enhance engagement with reflective learning rather than simply ‘knowing’ about it. More problematic is impact beyond the classroom. Research revealed ambivalence in respect of transfer and significance beyond the specifics of the professional programme. HR graduates need a capability that extends beyond individual reflective learning and into creating and supporting reflective learning in organizations. Herein lies the distinctive and fundamental challenge facing tutors of reflective learning within HR professional education.     

Desertification ... in perspective

Desertification remains high on the international agenda of critical environmental problems as the decade of the '80's draws to a close. The fact that this subject has attracted renewed high level attention over the past year is a source of considerable encouragement. The "bad news" is that such recognition reflects the failure of the international community to address the desertification problem in a meaningful way over two decades—this despite the considerable enthusiasm, detailed planning and extensive commitments of governments, international bodies and the private sector.While lack of adequate funding is often implicated, reasons for the woeful performance are found elsewhere: an initial underestimation of the depth and tenacity of the problem; the continuing absence of agreement on the dimensions and key indicators of desertification, prerequisites for measuring trends and progress; the erosion of public confidence and government support through failure to publicize and build on the few successes; and widespread civil unrest in many of the affected countries which has thwarted meaningful antidesertification efforts.Prospects for the 1990's depend upon new commitments and follow-through both by governments of affected nations and by the development assistance community. The former must provide a more favorable political and social context for success. This means tackling more aggressively problems of population growth, land tenure, and civil disruption. The donor community, for its part, must overcome the scattering of its intellectual, technological and financial resources, and rebuild its own and others' confidence by demonstrating that the resource base can indeed be stabilized and enhanced at a meaningful scale. Recognition of and commitment to the long-term requirements of antidesertification campaigns are also required of all parties.This paper was prepared for the symposium, Review of the 1977–87 Decade of Action to Combat Desertification, under the authority and sponsorship of the American Association for the Advancement of ScienceCommittee on Arid Lands. The views expressed are solely those of the author and not those of the OECD and/or its Member countries.     

Prisons and Panopticons

This article concerns a number of aspects of the history of social policy during the nineteenth century. In particular it argues that the five stage model of development proposed by Dr Oliver MacDonagh in 1958 has been somewhat too peremptorily dismissed by historians, and it uses the prison system between 1777 and 1877 as a test of each stage of the model as far as this part of the social administrative system is concerned.
In addition MacDonagh's views on the part of Jeremy Bentham in the changes which occurred in social policy in the nineteenth century were also said to be invalid and thus an attempt is made to illuminate further Bentham's role in prison reform.
The article therefore sets out to test MacDonagh's thesis in one particular area of development and suggests that as far as prisons are concerned it throws a good deal of light upon the processes of change which occurred.     

WHAT ARE THE SOCIAL COSTS OF GAMBLING?: THE CASE OF THE QUEENSLAND MACHINE GAMING INDUSTRY

Gambling has frequently been blamed for contributing to a range of social and economic problems for players and their families. The introduction of gaming machines (more commonly referred to as “poker machines” or “pokies”) to clubs and hotels in Queensland in 1992 attracted such criticism. This paper presents data from a survey conducted in Brisbane in May 1994, funded by the Department of Family Services and Aboriginal and Islander Affairs, which seeks to assess the characteristics of gaming machine players and to evaluate the extent to which players and their families seem disproportionately likely to experience social and economic difficulties. The survey led to a number of noteworthy findings, many of which challenge conventional stereotypes concerning the characteristics of players and the consequences of their playing. Firstly, men, the young and those in employment are disproportionately likely to be players. Secondly, playing is spread evenly across different occupations and levels of educational achievement. Thirdly, most players appear not to play very often or spend very large amounts of money. Fourthly, while there is evidence that money is being diverted from necessities to machine gaming, there is virtually no evidence of an association between machine playing and economic hardship.