Securing a Sustainable Future for Children and Young People

This article outlines why sustainable development matters for children and young people, and explores the relevant policy context in England and the UK. It asks whether enough is being carried out by central government to secure a more sustainable future for, and with, today’s children. More is needed at the national policy level to: embed sustainable living principles within a range of policy frameworks affecting children and young people; provide a clear strategy for empowering children and young people to lead change and take action on climate change and environmental issues; and address the impact of environmental degradation on disadvantaged groups of children and young people.     

Tribute to Jean-Yves Jaffray

Tribute to Jean-Yves Jaffray by the French Group of Decision Theory.     

Can ‘art Professions’ Be Bourdieuean Fields Of Cultural Production? The Case Of The Architecture Competition

The difference between ‘artistic and literary fields’ and universes such as architecture usually recognized as ‘art professions’ but which enjoy a far lesser ‘degree of autonomy’ than such fields seemingly constitutes an obstacle to the broader application of the notion of a ‘field of cultural production’ sought by Bourdieu in his Rules of Art. The author of this paper overcomes this obstacle by employing his notion of the ‘field effect’, with the architecture competition serving as the test case. Following Bourdieu, the author replaces the notion of profession with that of the field, for the former is a representation fostered by professional groups themselves. Architecture is a field, but, because architects require clients to construct and realize their works, one unlike the artistic and literary fields, which are markets of symbolic goods where ‘distinterest’ reigns and an autonomy unthinkable elsewhere is enjoyed. However, much like artists and unlike any other ‘professionals’, architects enter competitions, suggesting that this practice is an analytically relevant indicator of the field effect. After defining several of the elements of Bourdieu's relational conceptual matrix (field, illusio, collusion, doxa and space of possibles) and demonstrating that the Baptistery competition in Florence (1401) conforms to Bourdieu's historical beginning point for the process of 'autonomization' of artistic production, I examine a number of competitions from 1401 to 1989 (Berlin Jewish Museum) along with the general properties of competitions (structure and organization, publication and exhibition of results, competitors' economically irrational behaviour, practices of designers and jurors and the associated universe of beliefs), analysing them as those of an artistic field. It is concluded that when architects enter competitions, architecture, at least provisionally resembles an artistic field, for there is a field effect shown by a high degree autonomy, disinterest and the creation of an upside-down world.     

Homosexuality as Practice and the Social Implications of Representation

ABSTRACT

What tends to be represented when talking about homosexuals is not the diversity of people who have sex with others of the same sex-gender, but a kind of group or a defined collective with some identifiable characteristics and specific identities: a collection of others, a historically oppressed minority, a community. As a result, not all people who practice homosexuality are included in the representations of homosexuals, nor do all included in these conform to the images projected onto them. This involves a series of social and political consequences, related to the reproduction of hegemonic gender and power structures. Therefore, I question the use of these representations in social sciences and propose to consider, as the analysis element, sexual practices and not the identities and categorizations created around them, showing the power relations that exist between them.     

The role of acculturative stress and cultural backgrounds in migrants with pathological gambling

The objective of the present study was to differentiate specific migration-related factors that can account for an increased vulnerability to pathological gambling (PG) among migrants in Germany. One hundred and six gamblers (61 migrants, 45 Germans) with varying degrees of gambling problems participated in the study. We analysed (1) differences between migrants and Germans regarding gambling patterns, severity of gambling problems, motivation and craving; influence of (2) acculturative stress; (3) acceptance and popularity of gambling in the culture of origin on gambling problems; (4) differences between migrants and Germans regarding family gambling and peer gambling; and (5) differences in religiosity and its influence on gambling problems. Results suggest no differences between migrants and Germans regarding gambling patterns and the severity of gambling problems. However, findings indicate that migrants have higher motivation and craving to gamble. Findings further suggest that acculturative stress is associated with more severe gambling problems. In contrast, acceptance and popularity of gambling in the country of origin was not a significant predictor of gambling problems. At the same time, family gambling and peer gambling was significantly more prevalent among migrants, constituting an additional risk factor in the present sample. On the other hand, migrants in the sample benefit more often from a protective influence of religiosity.     

Post-Separation Conflict Trajectories: A Longitudinal Study

Although previous studies have shown that parental separation and parental conflict contribute independently to the adaptation difficulties of young people, there is, as of yet, no precise portrait of how post-separation conflicts evolve. Indeed, some fundamental questions remain unanswered: (1) Do parents who experience few conflicts during their break-up continue to enjoy a harmonious relationship afterward? (2) When parents have a conflictual relationship in the first years after separating, do problems eventually subside? (3) Are a family's characteristics associated with the way a post-separation conflict evolves? The present, exploratory study attempts to provide some answers to these three questions. The sample was composed of 123 boys and girls from 8 to 11 years old. The children and their parents were interviewed on two separate occasions at a 1-year interval. The first interview (time 1) took place 2.5 years after the separation on average. The children were notably asked to give their perception of the parental conflict. Four post-separation conflict trajectories were brought to light. Analysis also targeted three more-specific variables that distinguished these conflict trajectories, namely family income, quality of the relationship with the mother, and the degree of agreement at the time of separation.     

Private property and the problem of the miraculous: the kramats and the city of Cape Town

This paper seeks to explore the place of kramats the graves of Muslim saints or Auliyah – in the landscape of contemporary Cape Town. The kramat sites have been proclaimed as heritage sites because of their importance as tangible signs of Islam at the Cape. At the same time, the process of the kramats becoming heritage sites has contained moments of intense, often sensational, public contestation. Offering a reading of the discourses surrounding two contested kramats in Cape Town, this paper explores the way kramats mark out a miraculous space in the prosaic modern city and introduce into the post-apartheid evaluation of heritage, alternative conceptions of space and notions of temporality. They are sites of impossibility where, it is claimed, the laws of nature themselves are interrupted to mark the intangible particularities of the site. This paper explores what happens when this miraculous space is subject to the demands of private property and municipal law and the conflicts that arise from this collision of different conceptual and experiential modalities. It considers the effects of the entanglement of legend and history that result from the production of these sites as heritage in a market-driven economy.     

Family Benefits and Fertility: An Econometric Analysis

A population's growth potential is significantly underestimated by conventional calculations of population momentum which assume an immediate drop to replacement level fertility. Here we assume that the growth rate of births linearly declines to zero over a specified time interval, and find simple and intuitively meaningful expressions for the size of the ultimate birth cohort and the resultant population momentum. In particular, we find that the increase in the number of births over the transition is equal to growth at the initial rate for half the time needed to attain a constant birth level. Thus our formula readily calculates the growth potential of a population under a gradual approach to stationarity without the need for a numerical projection. Calculations for actual and hypothetical populations are presented to show the demographic impact of such gradual approaches to zero growth.