‘Recuperando la dignidad humana [Recovering human dignity]’: Shuar mothers speak out on intercultural bilingual education

This paper presents findings from interviews conducted in December 2011, with seven Shuar mothers of children in an intercultural bilingual school in the southern Amazon region of Ecuador. This study had two objectives: (1) to foreground the perspectives of Shuar parents towards intercultural bilingual education (IBE) as implemented in the Shuar pedagogical institute, and (2) to collaborate as an intercultural research team (North American-Shuar) to ensure linguistic and cultural authenticity of data collection, and analysis. As a Shuar mother herself, the co-author shares the same language and culture as the participants, which led to a deeper level of trust and openness in the interviews. Current studies claim that IBE is losing ground, partly because parents want their children schooled in Spanish – the language of power – and see the IBE system as inferior. However, these Shuar mothers expressed a different concern: IBE has been too intertwined with Salesian missions and must become decolonized in order to reflect authentic Shuar cultural values and educational practices.     

Impression Management,Super PACs and the 2012 Republican Primary

Super Political Action Committees (PACs) are new organizations within American politics allowing for unlimited donations to candidate campaigns. Super PACs helped make the 2012 Republican primary the most well‐funded primary in American history. Both candidates and Super PACs spend much of their money on televised campaign ads. My study of the 2012 Republican primary expands existing literature concerning political impression management by examining advertising imagery in the era of Super PACs. I developed a typology of performance types from a qualitative content analysis of television advertisements for both candidates and Super PACs. The significance of Super PACs as they interact and overlap with the images of candidate ads calls for analysis of the changing front stage in the political realm.     

Why Sociology Abandoned Communication

This paper considers the possibility that early sociological interest in the integrative role of mass communication may have been undermined (1) by the short-run study of media “campaigns,” and the declaration that such persuasive efforts have only “limited effect”; (2) by the wrangling over theories of “mass society”; and (3) by a quasi-journalistic emphasis on “media events.” In spite of the theoretical basis for reconciling these traditions, the rift over the academic locus of communications research has not been repaired.     

Domestic Violence, Emotional Competence, and Child Adjustment

This article examined emotion competence in children exposed to domestic violence (DV). It also examined the hypothesis that children's emotional competence mediates relations between DV and children's later difficulties with peers and behavioral adjustment. DV was assessed when children were at the age of five, emotional competence was assessed at the age of 9.5, and peer quality and behavioral adjustment were obtained at the age of 11. Children from homes with greater DV were less aware of their own emotions and more emotionally dysregulated at the age of 9.5. Emotional awareness mediated the relationship between DV at the age of five and children's friendship closeness and internalizing problems at the age of 11. Emotion dysregulation mediated the relationship between DV at the age of five and children's negative peer group interactions, social problems, and internalizing and externalizing problems at the age of 11. Results are discussed in terms of the impact of DV on children's emotional development and the role that different aspects of emotional competence play in children's socio‐emotional adjustment.     

Estimates of the likelihood of extreme returns in international stock markets

This study applies extreme-value theory to daily international stock-market returns to determine (1) whether or not returns follow a heavy-tailed stable distribution, (2) the likelihood of an extreme return, such as a 20% drop in a single day, and (3) whether or not the likelihood of an extreme event has changed since October 1987. Empirical results reject a heavy-tailed stable distribution for returns. Instead, a Student-t distribution or an autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic process is better able to capture the salient features of returns. We find that the likelihood of a large single-day return diff ers widely across markets and, for the G-7 countries, the 1987 stock-market drop appears to be largely an isolated event. A drop of this magnitude, however, is not rare in the case of Hong Kong. Finally, there is only limited evidence that the chance of a large single-day decline is more likely since the October 1987 market drop; however, exceptions include stock markets in Germany, The Netherlands and the UK.     

Was government the solution or the problem? The role of the state in the history of American social policy

This article attempts to resolve a contradiction noted by Charles Tilly between my earlier writings on education and later writings on the welfare state. The earlier work on education was critical of governments’ role in constructing bureaucratic school systems that reinforced inequality; the later work on the welfare state argued for the extension of government social provision. This article shows how the contradiction poses a false dichotomy. It then uses history to show how assessments of governments’ role reflect the political context in which they are written but rest on consistent values and priorities. The article emphasizes, as well, the absence of a counter narrative to the political right’s assertion of government policy failure; the truncated and inappropriate use of “state” in much writing on public policies; and the need for historians of policy to develop means of assessing the success or failure of government policies and programs.