“You are your only limit”: Appropriations and valorizations of affect in university branding

This article considers the role of affect in university branding in a context of neoliberal higher education, by way of examining the semiotic landscape of the Singapore Management University concourse. Contemporary branding often involves stimulating stakeholder/audience investments of meaning and affect into the brand, thereby appropriating consumers’ affective labour for brand‐building and communications. Adopting a discourse‐analytic approach, I examine how linguistic, visual and spatial modalities are utilized to evoke and semiotize particular affective meanings and orientations in the emplaced discourse within the university's brand space. This discourse, which includes organizational branding discourse as well as more organic student‐generated texts, becomes part of the affective regime, helping to encourage and enjoin what is deemed to be normative affective sensibilities and practices in that context. Consequently, the article also considers the kinds of affective subjectivities that are valorized, and how stakeholder/student‐subjects are interpellated in a context of neoliberal‐oriented higher education.     

Fertility and development: evidence from Brazil

Using microdata from the Brazilian demographic censuses of 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1991, aggregated into 518 consistently defined spatial units called microregions, we estimated fertility and mortality and constructed indicators of development and living conditions in the rural and urban areas of the microregions in each census. We then estimated cross-sectional and fixed-effects models to answer questions about the degree to which changes in these indicators are associated with changes in fertility and whether the relationship between fertility and development shifts through time. We found strong and consistent relationships between the decline in fertility and measurable changes in social and economic circumstances.     

Empirical bayes estimation of demographic schedules for small areas

In this article, we analyze empirical Bayes (EB) methods for estimating small-area rate schedules. We develop EB methods that treat schedules as vectors and use adaptive neighborhoods to keep estimates appropriately local. This method estimates demographic rates for local subpopulations by borrowing strength not only from similar individuals elsewhere but also from other groups in the same area and from regularities in schedules across locations. EB is substantially better than standard methods when rates have strong spatial and age patterns. We illustrate this method with estimates of age-specific fertility schedules for over 3,800 Brazilian municipalities.     

Immigrants’ ages and the structure of stationary populations with below-replacement fertility

A sustained regime of low fertility plus immigration yields an unusual kind of stationary population. The author demonstrates that all stationary populations have a common structure, and that the familiar replacement-level fertility population is the youngest among the many stationary populations corresponding to a particular life table. This finding has important consequences for policy because although fertility increase and immigration are equally effective at halting population decline, immigration is inferior as a means of rejuvenating low-fertility populations. In fact, an immigration-based policy could make a low-fertility population older rather than younger. The paper includes examples using U.S. and West German vital rates.     

Alejandro Galindo: Pioneer Mexican Cineast

Mexican cinema, one of the most active in Latin America, dates from 1896, while sound film recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary there. Among the many prominent Mexican cineasts whose films form a repertoire of solid artistic achievement is Alejandro Galindo. Like many fellow-filmmakers, directors and actors, Galindo did his aoprenticeship in Hollywood, returning to Mexico in 1930 to become one of Mexico's most creative and dynamic practitioners of cinematic art. Carl Mora highlights his accomplishments while placing him in the perspective of the development of the Mexican film industry. For example, during World War II the industry boomed because of the demand in Latin America for authentic Latin American cinema. With this impetus, Mexico (and Alejandro Galindo) enjoyed a decade of growth and popularity. Unlike most other Mexican cineasts, Galindo dealt with the dislocations that a rapidly changing economy and increased urbanization brought to both the workers and the middle class. Mora discusses several of his most important films, amply demonstrating the impact Galindo believed that cinema could have on society. He left a legacy that is admired today by critics and filmmakers.     

Social Services Provided for Physically Abused Children: A Four-Year Follow-Up Study in Sweden

This paper examines contacts that Swedish physically abused children have with the Department of Social Services (DSS) 4 years after a physical abuse incident has been reported to the police. The children’s files have been investigated in an effort to evaluate which child and parent characteristics led DSS to make interventions for the 69 children still in need of assistance, 4 years after the original abuse incident. Intervention by the DSS prior to the reported abuse incident increased the odds 18 times that a child would still receive interventions 4 years after the incident, and the presence of a mentally ill mother increased the odds 11 times.