A Right to Exist: A Palestinian speaks

This paper links theory with practice. It discusses original video footage of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories, filmed by an all-woman crew of Western film-makers and Palestinians, which aims to challenge mainstream Orientalist discourses. The footage was shot in and around Al Aroub refugee camp in the West Bank and distributed through a variety of exhibition platforms. Western representations of Arabs are normally framed in a manner that allows little sympathy and/or understanding of their plight. Research has also shown a lack of knowledge in the West about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Focusing on “ordinary and everyday” aspects of Palestinian life, rendered often “extraordinary” by the circumstances of occupation, the footage attempts to draw connections and similarities for a Western audience and to illustrate that Palestinian daily lives are not “played out” only in opposition to the Israeli regime. The paper explores methods of enabling access to Palestinian voices in their own terms, while eliciting the empathy of audiences more accustomed to dramatised and stereotyped images of Palestinian life in Western news and current affairs footage.     

How do placements in kinship care compare with those in non‐kin foster care: placement patterns,progress and outcomes?

As the use of kinship care is set to rise in England, it is important that policy and practice developments are based on firm evidence about kin placement outcomes and how these compare with those in stranger foster care. The research reported in this paper was based on case file reviews of 270 children, half in kin placements and half in stranger foster care, and on interviews with a sub-sample of 32 kin carers, social workers, children and parents. Kin carers were found to be significantly more disadvantaged than stranger foster carers: more kin carers were lone carers, with health problems, living in overcrowded conditions and had financial difficulties. The children, in contrast, were remarkably similar in the two kinds of placement. The main differences between the children in the two settings are examined in the paper. The children's progress and outcomes in terms of placement quality and disruption were very similar in the two settings, but kin placements lasted longer, mainly because fewer were planned as interim placements. However, because kin carers persisted with very challenging children and yet received fewer services than stranger foster carers, they were more often under strain. The implications for policy and practice are examined.     

Daily Variation in Paternal Engagement and Negative Mood: Implications for Emotionally Supportive and Conflictual Interactions

This study used an ecological perspective to examine how daily variation in the time fathers spend in child‐care activities was related to emotionally supportive or conflictual father‐child interactions and whether fathers' negative mood moderated these associations. Data for the present analyses were from 2 daily diary studies. Both studies asked fathers to report about their daily experiences with their children, including how much time they spent with them and whether or not they had any supportive interactions or conflictual interactions. The first study used daily self‐report questionnaires from a sample of fathers in rural upstate New York, and the second study used daily telephone interviews from a national sample of fathers. Results from a series of hierarchical linear models showed that fathers were more likely to have supportive and conflictual interactions on days when they spent more time engaged in child‐care activities. The association between time with children and conflictual interactions was greater on days when fathers were in a negative mood. Negative mood did not moderate the association between time with children and emotionally supportive interactions. The findings from this study suggest that when fathers spend more time with their children they are more likely to engage in supportive interactions, regardless of negative mood.     

Dancing Bodies: Moving Beyond Marxian Views of Human Activity Relations and Consciousness

Human action has generally appeared to the sociologist as instrumental action, movement conceptualized and valued in terms of its utility, with the actor defined in terms of agency within rationalized social systems (Bryan Turner, 1991). Dance provides a way of seeing that conditions for human existence cannot be reduced to socio-economic relations and forms. Drawing on my ethnographic study of a dance improvisation group, I explore some of the ways in which innovative action resists the productive and textual relations that turn bodies into objects of social control in the capitalist world-order, and creates relations that enable 'free' action and liberated subjectivities. Innovations disrupt the pre-existing frames of reference, physical and linguistic, that position the subject in the world of work, and establish an unlimited and undetermined time-space for experiencing 'something new'. In this case the something new is an opportunity to create oneself anew through choices that are made moving 'free' from the constraints of practical activity. Within the intersubjective life-world established through innovative action a space is created for individuation and empowerment. Although these conditions for existence are episodically produced and contingent, they begin and end with the dancing, the relations are self-affirming rather than self-alienating. Dance improvisation experience provides a sociological context for presenting human activity as a contested category in sociological theory, and it raises some important questions about what it means to be human in the world.     

Policing Urban America: A New Look at the Politics of Agency Size*

Objectives. This article analyzes competing explanations for variation in the relative size of contemporary police forces in larger U.S. cities. The featured explanation is conflict theory, which previously provided much evidence for a racial threat thesis but limited evidence that racial insurgency affected police mobilization in the 1960s and 1970s. Methods. The study sample consists of the 66 cities with a population of at least 250,000 in 2000. Aggregate data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Congressional Quarterly's America Votes, and the U.S. Census Bureau are combined with a content analysis using the Lexis‐Nexis regional news database to generate the data set. OLS regression modeling is applied to the analysis of this cross‐sectional data set. Results. This analysis shows that the size of contemporary police forces is substantially shaped not only by the legacy of the 1960–1970 wave of racial unrest in the United States, but also by reaction to racial disorders in the 1980s and 1990s and by the prevalence of racial minorities in the current population. Conclusions. Police departments' relative force size in 2000 is not only a result of incremental growth from the size attained by 1980, but also is dramatically shaped by whether the city experienced a race riot from 1980–2000 and, to a lesser extent, the size of the minority population and the violent crime rate. City wealth is a less robust indicator; and there is no evidence that either community ideology or the degree of uptake of community policing matters.     

伊朗的仪式与革命

本文开宗明义地宣称:仪式和象征并非纯粹由情绪构成,它们具有相应的意识形态,如果说前两者是不可证伪的,难以推论的,则后者是可以争议、批评和证伪的。格尔兹、特纳、布洛克与拉帕波特等人分析仪式时所犯的严重错误就在于忽视了这一点,从而他们过分强调人类经验中的情绪部分和通过仪式操纵人们情绪的随意程度,低估了人类的智力。因此,在方法论上应该把宗教象征作为一个二维运动来讨论,注意意识形态与现实的距离,以及情绪和理性互为表里的关系和互相影响。带着这个理论框架,作者以1978年伊朗人民推翻国王的运动为背景。但她不是分析这场革命,而是分析运动过程中的宗教象征和意识形态的关系。作者还原了宗教象征的二元结构。认为宗教象征不是浑然一体的,而是叠加的两部分,逻辑上可以剥离。据此观察经济政治的变化对意识形态的影响,并推动意识形态影响去仪式符号,以及仪式对意识形态的维护,最终说明仪式能够对社会变迁和政治变迁起到极其重要的作用。     

Preventing the Importation of Illicit Nuclear Materials in Shipping Containers

We develop a mathematical model to find the optimal inspection strategy for detecting a nuclear weapon (or nuclear material to make a weapon) from being smuggled into the United States in a shipping container, subject to constraints of port congestion and an overall budget. We consider an 11-layer security system consisting of shipper certification, container seals, and a targeting software system, followed by passive (neutron and gamma), active (gamma radiography), and manual testing at overseas and domestic ports. Currently implemented policies achieve a low detection probability, and improved security requires passive and active testing of trusted containers and manually opening containers that cannot be penetrated by radiography. The annual cost of achieving a high detection probability of a plutonium weapon using existing equipment in traditional ways is roughly several billion dollars if testing is done domestically, and is approximately five times higher if testing is performed overseas. Our results suggest that employing high-energy x-ray radiography and elongating the passive neutron tests at overseas ports may provide significant cost savings, and several developing technologies, radiation sensors inside containers and tamper-resistant electronic seals, should be pursued aggressively. Further effort is critically needed to develop a practical neutron interrogation scheme that reliably detects moderately shielded, highly enriched uranium.