“Settlers” and Zimbabwe: Politics,Memory, and the Anthropology of Commercial Farms During a Time of Crisis

This article examines the contested politics surrounding the participation of white farmers in the national public sphere in Zimbabwe. It examines how farm workers have acted as an “interior frontier” to white farmers and how this has helped to shape the public identification of white farmers in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. In so doing, the differential use of the term settlers and the memory of colonialism within the current violence surrounding land reform and democratization are analyzed. Through addressing some of the engagements with this ambiguous identification of white farmers, the politics of analysing “settlers” within anthropology and postcolonial studies is raised.     

HIV Transmission Risk at a Gay Bathhouse

Previous research found up to 14% of men who go to bathhouses engage in unprotected anal intercourse (UAI) and tend to have multiple sexual partners during their bathhouse visit, thus appearing to support concerns that such venues could foster acute outbreaks of new HIV infections. We conducted a two-stage probability sample of men exiting a gay bathhouse, and focused our analysis on whether the partnering patterns of the men who engaged in UAI present such a risk. Among patrons who had oral or anal sex during their visit (n = 758), 16.7% were HIV+, and 13.9% engaged in UAI. Although men had multiple sex partners during a visit, they had UAI with only one of those partners, on average, and withdrawal prior to ejaculation occurred in the vast majority of UAI incidences. Thus, the risk of sexual transmission of HIV during the bathhouse visit was typically within isolated dyads rather than patterns of multiple sexual encounters that might put many men at risk during a single visit, and men who did engage in UAI tended to withdraw prior to ejaculation, potentially mitigating the risk of HIV transmission.     

Reflections on Designing and Teaching a Social Work Research Course for Distance and On-Campus Students

Social work educators are increasingly challenged to train future social workers who can both value research and believe in themselves as capable researchers. One way to achieve this is the teaching of a specific social work research course at a basic qualification level. At Otago University, such a course was introduced in late 2005, and early 2006, for both on-campus and distance (off-campus) students. This Ideas in Action piece reveals the thinking behind and strategies used to help future social workers overcome their reluctance about social work research and enable them to take practice-related research skills into their future work.     

Analysis and Approximation of a JIT Production Line: A Comment

A recent Decision Sciences article by Jordan [9] presented a Markov-chain model of a just-in-time (JIT) production line. This model was used to estimate average inventories and production rates to find the optimal number of kanbans. Results for expected production rate were found to be consistently lower than those obtained by Huang, Rees, and Taylor [8] in a previous Decision Sciences article. Jordan attributed this unexpected outcome to some procedural problems in Huang et al.'s simulation methodology. In this paper, Markov-numerical analysis is used to compare the performance of Jordan's and Huang et al.'s methods of production control. Simulation analysis is then used to determine the effects of finite withdrawal cycle times. Results show that, for equal numbers of kanbans, Huang et al.'s two-card method of production control provides substantially greater expected production rates than Jordan's method. These results suggest that the Jordan model should not be applied to the problem of setting kanban numbers on manual JIT lines. Finally, we comment on the efficiency of Jordan's iterative method to obtain performance measures of tandem queues.