'White Men are Liars' - another look at Aboriginal-Western interactions

Aboriginal Australia has been in the national press lately fortragic reasons. Family violence, substance abuse, unemployment,poor health, appalling living conditions, hopelessness –the statistics and stories tell a terrible tale of life in someremote area communities. Although they do not describe all Indigenouscommunities, they are a reality for a sufficiently large numberto require a radical rethink of policies designed to promoteIndigenous rights and prosperity. They exist despite structuralreforms previously achieved and believed to rectify the wrongsof the past, such as land rights, government financial support,educational     

School performance, academic aspirations, and drug use among children and adolescents

The relationship between drug use, school performance, and academic aspirations among 446 Anglo and Hispanic youths, age nine to seventeen, is explored. Two groups of subjects--current substance users and non-users--were interviewed. Subjects in each comparison group were similar in age, ethnicity, and gender. Overall results, consistent with prior research, indicate a significant relationship between current school performance, future educational aspirations, and drug use. No difference was noted between substance use groups on indicators of general interest in school work or probability of dropping out of school. Important differences in response patterns occurring with age, ethnicity, and gender were found.     

Dancing Ourselves to Death: The Subject of Emma Goldman's Nietzschean Anarchism

Abstract

This article draws together two lively and provocative radical theorists, Emma Goldman and Friedrich Nietzsche, and suggests that a reading at their intersections can inspire political thought, action, and resistance in particular ways. The argument is framed through and productive of a particular archetype which emerges from a reading of these thinkers, that of The Dancer. Both Goldman and Nietzsche have been noted for their affect-laden reflections on dance, as an image of the subject which evades capture within the frameworks of discipline, morality, and ressentiment and which instead commits to a ceaseless and creative insurrection of- and- against the self. Here, I argue that through this image of The Dancer we can conceptualise a form of critical or anarchic subjectivity which can provocatively interpret and inspire radical political action. In the article I look at some of the ways in which dance has formed an important component of radical politics. However I also argue that dance as understood in the terms established through Goldman and Nietzsche moves beyond corporeal performance, indicating a more general ethos of the subject, one of perpetual movement, creativity, and auto-insurrection. I also reflect on the difficulties involved in the idea of ‘self-creation’; as we can see from the more problematic dimensions of Goldman's thought, creation is an ethically and ontologically ambiguous concept which, when affirmed too easily, can serve to mask the subtleties by which relations of domination persist. With this in mind, the article goes on to discuss what it might mean to ‘dance to death’, to negotiate the burden of transvaluation, limitless responsibility, and perpetual struggle which these two thinkers evoke, in the service of a creative and limitless radical political praxis.     

Same-Gender Sexual Partnering: A Re-Analysis of Trend Data

Numerous studies have been carried out to estimate the prevalence of same-gender sexual behavior. Among studies conducted in recent years, few confirm the commonly quoted figure of 10%. Yet several studies in the early 2000s indicated that the prevalence of same-gender sex may be increasing, especially among women. This article reexamines the trends identified in previous research by using General Social Survey data from 1988 to 2010 and by focusing on multiple measures of same-gender sex over time. Results indicate that for both women and men the likelihood of having had a same-gender sexual partner since age 18 continued to increase through the 2000s, but that the likelihood of having had a same-gender sexual partner in both the past year and in the past five years leveled off for women and reversed for men. Results also indicate that the percentage of people reporting a pattern of predominantly same-gender sexual behavior has neither increased nor decreased over time. A similar result was found among persons who reported being in a same-gender sexual relationship. Overall, results paint a more complex picture than prior studies in characterizing trends in same-gender sexual behavior.     

Police interviews with vulnerable people alleging sexual assault: Probing inconsistency and questioning conduct

Reporting sexual assault to the authorities is fraught with difficulties, and these are compounded when the complainant is hindered by an intellectual disability (ID). In a study of 19 U.K. police interviews with complainants with ID alleging sexual assault and rape, we found that most interviewing officers on occasion pursued lines of questioning which not only probed inconsistencies (which is mandated by their guidelines), but implicitly questioned complainants’ conduct (which is not). We detail two main conversational practices which imply disbelief and disapproval of the complainants’ accounts and behaviour, and whose pragmatic entailments may pose problems for complainants with ID. Such practices probably emerge from interviewers’ foreshadowing of the challenges likely to be made in court by defence counsel. As a policy recommendation, we suggest providing early explanation for the motivation for such questioning, and avoiding certain question formats (especially how come you did X? and why didn't you do Y?).     

Breaking the code of the street: extending Elijah Anderson's encryption of violent street governance to retaliation in Scotland

The ‘code of the street’ is a theoretical framework concerning violent interaction. Its enactment on the street can be seen as illustrating a hegemonic masculinity. The typical setting where the code is pervasive is in disadvantaged urban communities. Those in thrall to the code's localised retaliatory edicts are usually young working-class males. Understandably, given the code's origins in the US ghetto, it is a US criminological research tradition which has stimulated the terms of this framework. Although European scholars have pursued theorising violence by recourse to the code, Scotland has not been studied, and the qualitative study reported here aims to remedy this. Based on these data, a behavioural code is evident in Scotland sharing characteristics with Anderson's original contribution, despite differences in terms of chronology and cultural setting. The study contributes to our knowledge of the life histories and personal theorisations of young offenders whose trajectories are arguably entrapped by forms of retaliatory justice and performances of a ‘protest’ type of marginalised masculinity.     

The end of the asylum (town): community responses to the depopulation and closure of the Saskatchewan Hospital, Weyburn

Never is the fraught relationship between the state-run custodial mental hospital and its host community clearer than during the period of rapid deinstitutionalization, when communities, facing the closure of their mental health facilities, inserted themselves into debates about the proper configuration of the mental health care system. Using the case of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, site in the 1960s of one of Canada's earliest and most radical experiments in rapid institutional depopulation, this article explores the government of Saskatchewan's management of the conflict between the latent functions of the old-line mental hospital as a community institution, an employer, and a generator of economic activity with its manifest function as a site of care made obsolete by the shift to community models of care.     

Verbal and Nonverbal Dynamics of Privacy, Secrecy, and Deceit

We discuss the ways in which deception can be used to protect privacy, as well as the ways in which claims to privacy can provide the latitude to lie. In their attempts to maintain their own privacy and their secrets, people can be assisted by others who overlook their lies. Habits of honoring other people's verbal and nonverbal claims about themselves, even when they are not totally convincing, and expectations of similar indulgences from others can keep interactions from getting derailed by small interpersonal bumps. But they also enable exploitation in the form of frauds and scams .     

Inter-agency Information Sharing in Health and Social Care Services: The Role of Professional Culture

This article uses a literature review to examine the ways inwhich professional culture might shape inter-organizationalexchange of personal information in a health and social carecontext. The aim is to explore a simplified model of possibleinformation-sharing behaviours (‘ideal’, ‘over-open’,‘over-cautious’ and ‘chaotic’) and tosuggest that patterns of information sharing may be influencedby a number of factors. It is proposed that these factors includenot only inter-professional differences in the approach takento information sharing but also the ways in which the professionsinterrelate.