Critical Experiential Pedagogy: Sociology and the Crisis in Higher Education

Higher education is in crisis, especially in the public sector. Over the past few years, tuition at state universities across the country has increased dramatically, their budgets have been slashed and federal funding for need-based financial aid has been reduced. The results are increased class sizes, fewer course offerings, more adjunct faculty and fewer working-class students at public colleges and universities. In Massachusetts, where we teach, these trends are particularly pronounced. In this paper, we describe “Crisis in Higher Education,” a critical experiential course we offered to raise student awareness about the crisis and to encourage them to work for change on our campus. This course is an example of critical experiential education because it integrates classroom learning with political activism. This article describes the context and rationale for teaching the course, reports on students’ responses to its form and content, and discusses what we learned from this experience.     

Tax Uncertainty and Investment: A Cross-Country Empirical Examination

An empirical examination of uncertain tax policy is crucial to a full understanding of the interplay between taxes and investment, especially given the ambiguities in the limited theoretical literature. This article empirically investigates the impact on investment of volatility in effective tax rates on capital income in a cross-section of the 15 countries of the European Union, the United States, and Japan. Panel regression results suggest that the volatility of effective tax rates on capital income has a significant negative impact on investment per worker, with elasticities ranging from −0.012 to −0.029.     

Collateral damage on the home front: The gulf in America

Combat casualties in the Persian Gulf War among Coalition troops were by all estimates miraculously low. However, the fallout of the war for many groups on the home front may have been more pernicious in the long term than expected or estimated. This paper sketches some of the consequences of the Persian Gulf War for racial and ethnic minorities in the military, the less tangible and visible affects on the young, and the exacerbation of tensions in terms of social distress between the government and the media in the coverage of the campaign in Kuwait.     

Factors in the length of stay of homeless families in temporary accommodation

Data relating to 526 homeless families in temporary accommodation were collected in a study directed mainly to the examination of support networks of a sample of these families. The data, however, have allowed the authors to examine the effects of certain characteristics of these families on the average length of stay in temporary accommodation before they were housed permanently. Log-linear analysis was used to establish the independent effect of various attributes available from the data. In general the feature which seemed to influence the length of stay most was the time of the year when the family was admitted into temporary accommodation followed by the sort of reason the families gave for being homeless at the time of admission. Those who had been illegally evicted tended to take longer to be rehoused whilst those with rental or tenant difficulties took less time to be rehoused. The authors are then able to produce profiles based on this analysis of those families which are likely to stay longest in temporary accommodation as against those likely to stay the shortest time.     

Young Women's Use of a Vaginal Microbicide Surrogate: The Role of Individual and Contextual Factors in Acceptability and Sexual Pleasure

Currently in clinical trials, microbicides have historically been promoted as a woman-controlled (although more recently woman initiated) method of sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention. The contradicition that exists in this rationale is that women's bodies, specifically the genitals, have been constructed as a negotiated space within sexual interactions. This study qualitatively explored the factors influencing 40 young women's use of a vaginal moisturizer (VM), utilized as a microbicide surrogate. The results indicated that use of the VM was dependent upon product characteristics (i.e., the lubricating qualities affect on sexual pleasure, timing of insertion), individual factors (i.e., reproductive health goals, experiences with side effects of existing contraceptive methods), and contextual factors (i.e., social norms). An understanding of these bodily and social issues may be beneficial in designing targeted educational campaigns and effective instructional materials as well as in facilitating positive dialogue around women's bodies and their sexuality.