The Globality of Whiteness in Post-Racial Visual Culture

This essay examines the spatial contours of post-racial visual culture. It argues that the ‘post-racial’ names the conditions under which racism operates flexibly within and beyond the logics of the colour line, while routinely disavowing its properly racial character through the symbolic deployment of multicultural humanitarianism. Even as it works through the figure of the ‘post-racial’ to bracket an engagement with the racialized rationale for the ‘nongeneralizability of human value’, the current US racial order has renovated the social structures that shore up whiteness as the privileged form humanity takes. The essay's point of departure is the iconic HOPE poster, produced by Shepard Fairey in 2008. It locates the poster's public display within a visual field subjected to neoliberal processes central to the constitution of a post-racial whiteness. It identifies two key moments in these processes. The first moment abstracts historical practices of materialist antiracism, such that racism becomes visualized as a manifestly individual subjective affair. In the second moment, post-racial visual culture repackages the visual logic of racial reference by displacing anti-black racism into morally benevolent categories suitable for humanitarian intervention, whose additional dematerialization is propped up by its migration to a digital terrain. To make this argument, the essay first offers a genealogy of the HOPE poster as it emerges from street art practices of commodity activism that obscure the structures of racial capitalism. It then treats the poster's central role in the ‘KONY 2012’ campaign, which redeployed this abstraction to recode the power of sight as a privileged form of US humanitarian violence. It concludes by considering the refusals by activists in the Occupy Wall Street movement to countenance a revised HOPE poster, even as the post-racial figure of ‘the protestor’ was lauded in corporate media.     

Thoughts and acts of self-harm,and suicidal ideation,in online gamblers

Gambling problems have been linked to suicidal ideation and enhanced risk of suicide attempts. However, we know very little about the factors associated with either thoughts or acts of self-harm amongst people who gamble. A web-based study of 4125 online gamblers (79% males; mean age 35.5 years), analysed using hierarchical multiple regression, revealed that self-reported non-gambling-related self-harm was negatively related to age and marital status, and positively related to problematic alcohol use. Self-reported acts of self-harm both related and unrelated to gambling were associated with drug misuse. Thoughts and acts of gambling-related self-harm were associated with problem gambling, gambling involvement and parental problem gambling. All types of self-harm were associated with mood disorder symptoms, unemployment and certain gambling motivations. When tailoring assessment and interventions for individuals at risk for gambling-related deliberate self-harm, it is important to recognize that contributory factors may include some that differ from those for deliberate self-harm in general, and that there is potential value in evaluating gambling involvement and motivations, and history of parental gambling.     

Validity,facts, and values sans closure: Reply to Messick,Reckase, Moss,and Zimmerman

Social Indicators Research -     

Crime in Our Cities: A Comparative Study

Crime rates in New South Wales are compared with overseas figures. Comparisons are made between Sydney and eight American and two Canadian cities of similar size. Urban-rural crime rates are studied by relating Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong to the rest of the State. In both rural and urban areas the rates for homicide, sex offences and other offences against the person are relatively low when compared with American rates. The rates for property offences and car theft are similar to those which exist in America and, and in the case of Sydney, exceed the rate of these offences in the two Canadian cities studied.     

Monstrous schoolteachers: women educators in popular cultural texts

From the drooling Mrs Green in the children’s picture book, The Teacher from the Black Lagoon to the best scarer of all time, Dean Hardscrabble from Monsters University, monstrous female teachers leap out from around the corners and under the desks of popular imaginings of school. In this paper, I focus on the figure of the female monster teacher in popular cultural texts and media produced for and/or consumed by North American youth, including picture books, television, film, and other cultural texts. Although these monster teacher narratives are produced for children and youth, they also work as a form of popular pedagogy for adults. The stakes of these representations are many, including the misogynistic representation of women in power as monstrous, the devaluing of teaching as “women’s work” or “child care,” and, the figuring of boys as “in crisis” in relationship to a predominately female workforce. I argue that, the female monster educator in popular cultural texts offers a corporeal curriculum that seeks to discipline the body of the teacher and to obfuscate the radical potential of teachers as professional women.     

Family Cohesion in the Lives of Mexican American and European American Parents

This study investigated similarities and differences in relations between stress and parenting behaviors for 509 Mexican American and European American fathers and mothers in Southern California. Our model posited that family cohesion mediates the relation between stressors and parenting behavior, and we found that family cohesion strongly mediated most of the relations between stress and parenting behaviors. Important ethnic and gender differences were evident. In contrast with other groups, Mexican American fathers reported higher levels of family cohesion when faced with economic pressures. Implications for future research on stress and parenting are discussed.     

Modes of Network Governance: Structure, Management, and Effectiveness

This article examines the governance of organizational networksand the impact of governance on network effectiveness. Threebasic models, or forms, of network governance are developedfocusing on their distinct structural properties. Propositionsare formulated examining conditions for the effectiveness ofeach form. The tensions inherent in each form are then discussed,followed by the role that management may play in addressingthese tensions. Finally, the evolution of governance is explored.     

A Technological Science Perspective for Sociology1

Abstract The traditional positivist model is an inadequate foundation for sociology as a science. The phenomena of society differ from the phenomena assumed by positivism and existing in the world of nature in ways that prevent the successful use of that traditional approach. Agency, the ability to choose among alternatives where the choice makes an important difference, exists in social phenomena but has no counterpart in nature and cannot be dealt with adequately by positivism. A technological science perspective is suggested as an alternative for a science of sociology that can deal with the reality and importance of agency. Eight differences between the traditional perspective and the alternative are sketched. The alternative requires changes in the kind of generalized knowledge produced and the way it is produced, accumulated, and refined. The changes, though seemingly small, would produce a major reconstruction of much of sociology; such changes could result in important progress by the field of sociology.