The Orthodox Church in revolutionary Cheliabinsk: reform,counter-reform,and popular revolution in 1917

In 1917 the Cheliabinsk Vicariate, like the Church in most areas in the Russian empire, declined to support the autocracy, welcomed the February Revolution, endorsed the Provisional Government, and envisioned a broad set of reforms that even included a greater role for the laity in Church governance. The key agent for reform in Cheliabinsk – as in other dioceses – was the Assembly of Clergy and Laity, the focus of this study. Although the Assembly did adopt a radical and ostensibly popular social and administrative program, the vicariate encountered growing lay disenchantment – because of its support for an unpopular war, because of a caveat deferring social reform, but also because of the Church’s reluctance to give parishioners full power over the parish. The intensifying crises of 1917 heightened expectations for reform, and the disintegration of authority in Cheliabinsk and within the Church itself widened the chasm between the Church and parishioners. In response, diocesan authorities supported conservative measures, which deferred reform, in an attempt to re-establish order, while parishioners – frustrated by the pace of reform and the Church’s wavering support of it – led a revolution against diocesan authority aimed at making the Church subservient to their own agendas.     

Who is leading the campaign charts? Comparing individual popularity on old and new media

Attention in the mass media is seen as crucial for electoral success. However, most ordinary candidates hardly get any attention in the news. With social media outlets becoming ever more popular, the question is whether the overall asymmetry in attention for candidates still holds today. Do candidates who dominate the traditional media during the campaign also dominate the social media? Or can candidates make up for a lack of mass media coverage by attracting attention on these new media platforms? This paper aims to answer these questions by pairing Twitter activity and Twitter popularity with newspaper attention for a large number of individual candidates in the 2014 Belgian election campaign. We expand the normalization versus equalization debate by not only looking at how much a new medium is used, but also at its success in terms of popularity and audience reach. Our findings show that the two platforms are indeed related, mainly because a small political elite dominates both old and new media. Twitter popularity and Twitter activity (albeit to a lesser extent) are higher among powerful politicians. We elaborate on why these findings are so much in line with the normalization hypothesis.     

‘Power Differences’ and ‘the Power of Difference’: The Dominance of Secularism as Ontological Injustice

Abstract

Recent religious studies and international relations scholarship has highlighted secularism as a critical element in dominant modes of identity, power, and exclusion in global politics. Yet, the implications of these insights for global justice theory and practice have rarely been considered. This article suggests that the current dominance of secularism within global justice theory and practice risks undermining the global justice project. Specifically, I argue that secularism’s dominance constitutes an ontological injustice, where both alternative non-secular visions of the world and visions of alternative non-secular worlds are subordinated to secular ontologies. However, this argument raises a crucial question: if, despite secularism’s claim to neutrality and universality, the dominance of secular ontologies contributes to rather than ameliorates injustice, the question that remains is: what are the alternatives? The article concludes by exploring some preliminary responses to this question.     

Rethinking the Individualized Education Plan process: voices from the other side of the table

Parent involvement in the process of creating an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) is authorized under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a federal law in the United States that ensures children with disabilities have the opportunity to receive a free appropriate public education alongside their peers without disabilities in the least restrictive environment. Yet much research has shown that parents often feel like outsiders during the process. To understand parent perspectives about how educators might help make the IEP process more collaborative and inclusive, this study collected qualitative data from 35 parents of students with disabilities who have worked to develop an IEP with a school team. Our findings provide insight into parent experiences and evidence that parents have many suggestions for how educators can improve the IEP process. In our discussion section, we provide educators with strategies to address parent suggestions.     

Patterns of Nonverbal Behavior Associated with Truth and Deception: Illustrations from Three Experiments

The digital age has brought with it new and powerful computer-based methods of analyzing heretofore elusive patterns of nonverbal behavior. C-BAS (Meservy 2010) is a computer-assisted behavioral observation tool for identifying and tracking nonverbal behaviors from video. THEME (Magnusson, The hidden structure of interaction: from neurons to culture patterns, IOS Press, Amsterdam, pp 4–22, 2005) is a software program that discovers patterns among discrete events in time-ordered data. Together, these tools enable more precise measurement and analysis of nonverbal behavioral dynamics. Applications to three corpora derived from interpersonal deception experiments reveal unique nonverbal patterns that distinguish deceptive from nondeceptive interactions. The first and second experiments produced serial, hierarchically related patterns of behaviors that differed in length and complexity between truthful and deceptive participants during interviews about a theft and cheating, respectively. The third experiment produced differential patterns by and among group members completing a task. Deceivers were inclined toward strategic initiations and interactional control, whereas suspicious group members adopted a more passive, possibly watchful stance. Discovery of these patterns challenges the prevailing view that nonverbal behaviors are too faint and inconsistent to identify deceptive communication. Results have numerous implications regarding the following: the development of new measurement tools locating significant effects of nonverbal behaviors, support for theory that coherent and repetitive relationships exist within and among interactants’ communication, demonstration of the role of nonverbal behaviors in deceptive communication and the dynamic and strategic nature of deception.     

The impact of children on a parent's risk of suicide following death of a spouse, Belgium 1991-96

Since Durkheim's work on suicide, the family has widely been seen as providing partial protection against the development of tendencies to suicide. This study assesses the impact of parenthood (both number of children and age of youngest child) on suicide following the death of a spouse. Using data for Belgium in the 5 years following the 1991 census, the study adopts a nested case-control design with information on 3,800 suicides and 75,673 matched controls. The analysis takes into account several social-economic variables. The findings show that the impact of children on the elevated suicide levels found among widows and widowers relative to the still married can be positive or negative, and differs by both age and sex of the parent, age of the child or children, and time since bereavement.     

The International Child Poverty Gap: Does Demography Matter?

According to the Luxembourg Income Study data, the U.S. child poverty rate is the second highest among 15 high-income nations. The present work reveals that 55% of all American children living in a household headed by a single female with no other adult present live in poverty-the highest rate for any of the five living arrangements in the 15 countries examined in this study. While previous analyses have focused on market forces and governmental redistribution across households, we question the contribution of demographic factors that place children in family structures with different poverty risks relative to other factors such as differential market opportunities and governmental benefits for adults caring for children in various living arrangements. Applying a classic demographic decomposition technique to the overall poverty gap, we find that the distributional effect of demographic behavior contributes little to the U.S. poverty gap with other nations (and none with respect to the United Kingdom). Overall differences in labor markets and welfare schemes best explain the U.S. child poverty gap, although for some countries, the gap is accentuated by the gradient of governmental transfers, and for most countries, by the gradient of market earnings across living arrangements.     

Impact of low fertility and early age at sterilisation on women’s formal education and skill development in South India

This paper examines the impact of low fertility and early age at sterilisation on women’s formal education and skill development in South India. Multilevel ordered-logit modelling of pseudo-cohort data re-organised from the three rounds of National Family Health Survey, and thematic analysis of qualitative data collected from Tamil Nadu and Kerala states showed no evidence of women’s resumption of formal education or uptake of skill development training in the post-sterilisation and post-childcare period. While resuming formal education in the post-sterilisation and post-childcare period is harder to achieve for various individual, household, community and policy reasons, there is greater preparedness and support for women to undertake skill development training. As low fertility and early age at sterilisation are widely regarded as the emerging reproductive norm in India, post-sterilisation and -childcare women will be a significant population group both in number and in proportional terms. No government policies or programs have so far recognised this group. India’s new government should consider targeted skill development programs for post-sterilisation and -childcare women appropriate to their social, economic and educational levels. An important contribution of the family planning program, particularly female sterilisation, for the economic and social development of the family and the wider society will otherwise be lost.     

‘King's inheritors': understanding the ethnic discourse on the Rajbanshi as an indigenous community

The rise of ethnic struggles in various parts of the world, particularly in the post-colonial period, is an intriguing phenomenon. Having the consciousness of primordial origins, indigenous communities have pursued ethnic mobilizations along different lines in order to achieve the goals of social and economic uplift. This paper focuses on the Rajbanshi, one such community living in northeast India, as they offer an opportunity to study history and ethnic identity formation as the dynamics behind their current situation. From the standpoint of applied anthropology, processes of social change and activism intended to improve the lot of Rajbanshi communities are evaluated. Given their obscure origins, cultural diversity and divided political struggle, the Rajbanshi are far from achieving their goal of pursuing better lives. Strategies of Sanskritization and ‘sons-of-the-soil’ indigeneity have not reaped the desired results in terms of social and economic development. Furthermore, discourses rooted in immigrant-aboriginal binaries and theoretical dichotomies of primordialism–constructivism fail to make sense of this community's experience and are not helpful in guiding them toward meaningful and fruitful political and social change.