Un/Free mobility: Roma migrants in the European Union

ABSTRACT

This special issue showcases work that theorises and critiques the political, economic, legal, and socio-historical (‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’) subordination of the European Roma (so-called ‘Gypsies’), from the specific critical vantage point of Roma migrants living and working within and across the space of the European Union (EU). Enabled primarily through ethnographic research with diverse Roma communities across the heterogeneous geography of ‘Europe’, the contributions to this collection are likewise concerned with the larger politics of mobility as a constitutive feature of the sociopolitical formation of the EU. Foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of Roma living and working outside of their nation-states of ‘origin’ or ostensible citizenship, we seek to elucidate wider inequalities and hierarchies at stake in the ongoing (re-)racialisation of Roma migrants, in particular, and imposed upon migrants, generally. Thus, this special issue situates Roma mobility as a critical vantage point for migration studies in Europe. Furthermore, this volume shifts the focus conventionally directed at the academic objectification of ‘the Roma’ as such, and instead seeks to foreground and underscore questions about ‘Europe’, ‘European’-ness, and EU-ropean citizenship that come into sharper focus through the critical lens of Roma racialisation, marginalisation, securitisation, and criminalisation, and the dynamics of Roma mobility within and across the space of ‘Europe’. In this way, this collection contributes new research and expands critical interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersections of Romani studies, ethnic and racial studies, migration studies, political and urban geography, social anthropology, development studies, postcolonial studies, and European studies.     

The Political Gender Gap in Afghanistan

Women’s empowerment has become a salient issue in nation building in recent times. The need to secure basic human rights may well be at the core of the attention, but development experts appear to have recognized the core role of women in family and community well-being in developing countries and are beginning to tout the importance of women’s empowerment in all the aspects of development policies as reflected in the European Union’s Millennium Development Goals. This study explores political gender differences in Afghanistan, a Muslim country of extensive gender differentiation. The gender disparities we observe are not what one might have expected. Men outperform women only in those specific areas where the prohibitive structural and social limitations placed on women by the larger Afghan society would predict. We contend that these gaps would attenuate as Afghanistan’s nascent democracy deepens and extends more freedoms to Afghan women.     

The change in real interest rate persistence in OECD countries: evidence from modified panel ratio tests

This study examines whether real interest rates exhibit changes in persistence for a panel of Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development countries. The findings show that for long-term real interest rates there are changes in persistence from I(0) to I(1). For short-term real interest rates, the results display the absence of changes in persistence, while under cross-sectional dependence there is only weak evidence of changes in persistence from I(1) to I(0). The evidence of changes in persistence when the direction is considered unknown is even weaker.     

Suicide and the Creative Class

The tenth leading cause of death in the United States in 2009 was suicide. Emile Durkheim demonstrated that suicide can be studied as a social phenomenon. However, sociologists have been oddly silent on the subject in recent years. Research that has been done by sociologists on suicide has examined the role social capital plays in reducing suicide. However, Richard Florida has argued that today communities are not developing around social capital, but instead moving toward his creative capital model. No study has been done examining the association between creative capital and suicide. This analysis examined what developing around a creative capital model means for suicide. The findings demonstrate that there is a positive association between creative capital and suicide. The current analysis should give pause to communities attempting to develop around the creative capital model.     

UNEQUAL RISK: COMBAT OCCUPATIONS IN THE VOLUNTEER MILITARY

This study evaluates the characteristics of the men who served in the volunteer military in combat occupations. It examines whether these characteristics stem from supply-side or demand-side decisions, or reflect class bias. The findings suggest that, on the supply side, men who had greater academic abilities were more likely to go to college, thereby avoiding military service and the possibility of serving in a combat occupation. On the demand side, the armed forces were more likely to exclude men with lower academic abilities but were more likely to assign such men in the military to combat occupations. Net of the impacts of these supply-side and demand-side decisions, men who served in combat occupations still differed from those who did not in terms of their family background. The impact of family background was stronger on entering the military than on being assigned to combat occupations once in the military.     

A methodology for identifying married couples in medicare data: Mortality, morbidity, and health care use among the married elderly

Wedescribe a method for the development of cohorts of up to three quarters of the 14 million married couples aged 65 and over in the United States. The health care experiences, illness histories, and mortality of these identified couples can be assessed longitudinally using Medicare data. We summarize strengths and limitations of using data from Medicare administrative records for the study of marriage, health, and aging. We illustrate the method by demonstrating substantial differences in survival in a cohort of hospice patients as a function of not only the patient's own diagnosis and illness burden but also the patient's spouse's illness burden.     

Much ado about nothing: A comparison of missing data methods and software to fit incomplete data regression models

Missing data are a recurring problem that can cause bias or lead to inefficient analyses. Development of statistical methods to address missingness have been actively pursued in recent years, including imputation, likelihood and weighting approaches. Each approach is more complicated when there are many patterns of missing values, or when both categorical and continuous random variables are involved. Implementations of routines to incorporate observations with incomplete variables in regression models are now widely available. We review these routines in the context of a motivating example from a large health services research dataset. While there are still limitations to the current implementations, and additional efforts are required of the analyst, it is feasible to incorporate partially observed values, and these methods should be utilized in practice.     

Demographic Consequences of the ‘Closing the Gap’ Indigenous Policy in Australia

The demography of Indigenous Australians is distinguished from that of other Australians by relatively high mortality and fertility leading to very different composition by age. This is beginning to change as movement towards a convergence in vital rates is observed. In the meantime, the Australian government has established targets for Indigenous socioeconomic outcomes that simultaneously impact on, and are affected by, the course of demographic change. This paper examines the relationship between these targets and projected Indigenous demographic outcomes that arise from incipient population ageing. The most likely scenario is movement into an indeterminate period of potential demographic dividend. If demand for Indigenous labour expands alongside reductions in age dependency this could provide for dramatic improvement in Indigenous economic circumstances. However, caution is warranted as disparities in adult mortality require long-term solutions and movement into a second phase of demographic transition appears likely to be delayed.     

‘SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGES OF THOUGHT’: EMPIRE'S INSERTS

Scattered throughout Hardt and Negri's Empire are a number of short sections whose manifesto-like energy contrasts with the relatively expository style of the main text. These passages, modeled after the scholie of Spinoza's Ethics, are meant to suggest new ways of thinking about material already presented, to highlight the affective aspect of the material, and to point to hidden connections among different discursive elements. Several of these which did not appear in the published version of Empire for reasons of space are published here for the first time. The matters touched on are as diverse as those in Empire itself: Totality as a philosophical problem, the gender of biopolitical production, the relationship between genocide and the nationstate, the possibility of hope; the paradoxes of unemployment, the function of fear, postmodern prophecy,Hollywood's imperial fantasy, and the paradoxical relationship between being-against and love that has puzzled and fascinated many of Empire's readers.