Border Scans: Sovereignty,Surveillance and the Customs Service in Ghana

This article explores the relationship between surveillance techniques and the production of sovereign statehood in an effort to track the day-to-day practices through which state authority is constituted in the context of globalization. This article explicitly probes the processes through which new forms of sovereignty come into being within the life of the state. It takes as its point of departure the operations of Ghana's Customs Service, a body charged with policing the nation's frontiers and collecting the bulk of state revenue. Contrasting the work of a multinational firm contracted by the government of Ghana to carry out Customs duties and the conventional roles of Ghanaian Customs officers, this article examines the ways in which the manifold technologies of neo-liberalism (from contractual forms and modes of accountability, to the apparatuses of surveillance) redefine the capacities, authority, and imagination of both state and self, held by state agents. Here we see a sovereignty that is increasingly derived outside of the state even as the play of sovereign power is intensified and deeply diffused within it.     

Separable Attentional Predictors of Language Outcome

The aim of this study was to examine the combined influences of infants' attention and use of social cues in the prediction of their language outcomes. This longitudinal study measured infants' visual attention on a distractibility task (11 months), joint attention (14 months), and language outcomes (word–object association, 14 months; MBCDI vocabulary size and multi‐word productions at 18 months of age). Path analyses were conducted for two different language outcomes. The analysis for vocabulary revealed unique direct prediction from infants' visual attention on a distractibility task (i.e., maintaining attention to a target event in the presence of competing events) and joint attention (i.e., more frequent response to tester's bids for attention) for larger vocabulary size at outcome; this model accounted for 48% of variance in vocabulary, after controlling for baseline communication status (assessed at 11 months). The analysis for multi‐word productions yielded direct effects for infants' distractibility, but not joint attention; this model accounted for 45% of variance in multi‐word productions, again after controlling for baseline communication status. Indirect effects were not significant in either model. Results are discussed in light of the unique predictive role of attentional factors and social/attention cues for emerging language.     

FROM FOSTER CARE TO FOSTERING CARE: The Need for Community

Using an interpretive ethnographic framework, we investigate how being in a caring community benefits foster children and their families during a time of crisis. Through (re)telling the stories of the untimely death of Carl Connor, a parent of four foster children, we examine the community of Hope Meadows as the site where the activities of caring occurred. Care as a set of relational and moral practices is presented, and we describe how care is facilitated by the purpose as well as the physical and social dimensions of Hope Meadows. The stories of Carl Connor's death provide a foundation for a gendered theory of moral community.     

Bootstrap adjustments for empirical bayes interval estimates of small-area proportions

Empirical Bayes approaches have often been applied to the problem of estimating small-area parameters. As a compromise between synthetic and direct survey estimators, an estimator based on an empirical Bayes procedure is not subject to the large bias that is sometimes associated with a synthetic estimator, nor is it as variable as a direct survey estimator. Although the point estimates perform very well, naïve empirical Bayes confidence intervals tend to be too short to attain the desired coverage probability, since they fail to incorporate the uncertainty which results from having to estimate the prior distribution. Several alternative methodologies for interval estimation which correct for the deficiencies associated with the naïve approach have been suggested. Laird and Louis (1987) proposed three types of bootstrap for correcting naïve empirical Bayes confidence intervals. Calling the methodology of Laird and Louis (1987) an unconditional bias-corrected naïve approach, Carlin and Gelfand (1991) suggested a modification to the Type III parametric bootstrap which corrects for bias in the naïve intervals by conditioning on the data. Here we empirically evaluate the Type II and Type III bootstrap proposed by Laird and Louis, as well as the modification suggested by Carlin and Gelfand (1991), with the objective of examining coverage properties of empirical Bayes confidence intervals for small-area proportions.     

INTERGENERATIONAL FAMILY LITERACY: WORKING TOGETHER

This paper brings intergenerational family literacy programs to the attention of both an education and a social welfare readership. It describes how they benefit both children of parents with unmet literacy needs and the parents themselves. The paper presents results, from a Department of Employment. Education and Training national study, which show an important overlap between adult literacy teachers and family support workers in their interests in their clients, and argues for the need for cross-sectoral cooperation. Australian examples of such cooperation are provided and a scheme is proposed linking a number of government agencies to provide intergenerational family literacy programs offering a suite of needed services.     

Gender Inequality in Nonmetropolitan and Metropolitan Areas1

Abstract Nonmetropolitan-metropolitan differences in the United States are large and growing, but we know relatively little about how they interact with gender differences. Using data from the CPS, the Census PUMS, and the GSS, we find nonmetropolitan and metropolitan areas are quite similar in the gender gap in earnings and in rates of married women's labor force participation. Occupational sex segregation is higher and some gender attitudes are a few percentage points less egalitarian in nonmetropolitan areas. Each of these dimensions of gender stratification has been declining over the last two decades and the declines are roughly similar in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan areas. Variations in gender stratification have been greater over time than across place. Thus, while both place and gender are important dimensions of stratification, there appears to have been little interaction between the two.     

Negotiating postcolonial Eurasian identities and national belonging in global-city Singapore

ABSTRACT

A racial classification regime, partly derived from colonial race categories that solidified during the British Empire, remains a key governance strategy in postcolonial Singapore, sorting citizens into the categories of Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (CMIO). This racial grid continues to be a simplification of the actual complexity of lived identities and experiences, particularly for people of mixed descent. In this context, we explore the contemporary meanings and resonances of racial identity and national belonging as negotiated among members of a historic mixed-descent community – the Eurasians – in the context of a nation-state built on an institutionally fixed racial template. As a community, Eurasians are commonly attributed to the presence and mixing of especially Dutch, Portuguese and British – but also other Europeans – with an equally variegated palette of Asian cultures, since the 16th century. Based on 30 biographical interviews with self- identified Eurasians of two generations, this paper examines how individual and collective narratives of ‘old’ hybrid identities are changing in relation to the emergence of potentially new hierarchies of racial belonging with the arrival of new migration and the rise of international marriage in globalizing times. Given the lived reality of an expanding range of ‘race’ identities of different permutations and combinations, the politics of choice is played out between countervailing forces which draw racialized boundaries around the community more tightly on the one hand, and liberalize claims to racial and national belonging on the basis of self-identification on the other.     

Race Lessons in Black and White: How White Adoptive Parents Socialize Black Adoptees in Predominately White Communities

This article examines the approaches, strategies, and perspectives that White adoptive parents use to teach their adopted Black children about coping with race-based discrimination and the development of a positive racial identity. Using qualitative methods and the theoretical construct of White racial framing, the authors identify and critically analyze themes in the parents' race lessons. The central aim of this article is to uncover how these race lessons position family members to either challenge or perpetuate historical, racial inequities and mistreatment faced by African Americans and other communities of color within US society.     

Relating Individual Control, Social Understanding, and Gender to Child–Friend Interaction: A Relationships Perspective

According to a relationships perspective, it is critical to consider how the individual behaviors and characteristics of both partners shape their social interaction. Adopting a relationships approach to the investigation of children's friendships, we examined how preschool children's and their friends’ controlling behaviors, social understanding, and gender were related to their dyadic interaction. Child–friend dyads (n = 49) were videotaped in two laboratory play sessions (free play and sharing task), and child interviews assessed understanding of emotions and false beliefs. Both children's indirect control was associated with coordinated play during the free play session, and both children's direct control was associated with conflict during the sharing task. Moreover, dyadic interaction varied as a function of study children's social understanding, friends’ social understanding, and play session. An interaction between gender composition and play session also emerged for dyadic conflict. Multiple regression analyses suggested that study children's controlling behaviors accounted for associations between dyadic interaction and more ‘distal’ individual factors (i.e., social understanding, gender). The findings underscore the need to examine how both children's individual competencies are related to the quality of their dyadic interaction and illuminate how the associations between individual factors and dyadic interaction are moderated by the interactive context.