When they call me cripple: a group of South African adolescents with cerebral palsy attending a special needs school talk about being disabled

Central to the experience of disability are social and political forces and discourses which position people in particular ways. Little is known about the experiences of individuals with disabilities living in low-income and middle-income countries. We investigate the lived experience of a group of South African adolescents with cerebral palsy. In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 adolescents with cerebral palsy. Data were analysed using interpretive phenomenological analysis. The participants position themselves between the medical and social models of disability, in a liminal space between ‘normal’ and ‘disabled’, but do not identify with either group. They describe a ‘hierarchy of disability’ and position themselves in-between more serious sensory impairments and less serious emotional and learning disabilities. Being disabled is associated with being taken care of, infantilised and being powerless. Consequently they aspire to achieve independence and autonomy, and face danger, which are seen as signifiers that they are not disabled.     

Young hero Simba defeats old villain Scar: Oedipus wrecks the Lyin’ King

Prior studies of Disney's animated film The Lion King focus on its flattering portrayal of a patriarchical society in which a segment of residents (hyenas) are marginalized. These analyses, however, neglect Oedipal themes and the respectful portrayal of parents that may be key to the film's great popularity.     

Opportunities and challenges for industrial statisticians

The last 20 years have seen significant advances in the use of statistical methodology in industry, with applications in new product design and development, optimization and control of manufacturing processes, and in the service industries. The field of industrial statistics has emerged as an important branch of statistical science that focuses on this application environment. Yet as applications of statistics in industry have expanded, creating many new opportunities for the modern industrial statistician, many new challenges have arisen. Some of these challenges are technical, while others have managerial and organizational aspects. There are also important concerns pertaining to training and education. This presentation focuses on some of these issues, and identifies some potential solutions.     

The influence of nonverbal cues associated with looking behavior on young children's mentalistic attributions

The ability of children to use looking behavior as a cue to guide their mentalistic attributions was assessed. In Experiment 1 video displays were presented in which a protagonist faced one of two potential goals, half of the time standing equidistant from both targets and in the remaining trials standing closer to the target not being faced. Preschoolers consistently based their inferences of another's attention and goal on the direction in which the protagonist was facing. However, in Experiments 2 and 3 preschoolers experienced difficulty in correctly inferring an actor's desired goal when the protagonist's body was oriented in a direction opposite of where she was looking. Under these conditions, only young elementary school children consistently inferred that the protagonist's goal was the target being looked at (Experiment 2). The results from these three studies suggest that an important development occurring in childhood is the ability to consistently distinguish gaze from body orientation when inferring the goals of another. The implications of this development for children's understanding of the mind are discussed.     

Corporate Involvement in Community Affairs*

An extensive monitoring of the Jones and Laughlin (J&L) steel mill in Hennepin, Illinois suggests that absentee-owned corporations have the ability to involve themselves in local community affairs while maintaining an illusion of non-involvement. Three techniques J&L employed to exert influence are described: unilateral actions, cooptation, and intervention. The failure of reputational leadership data to identify corporate influentials is used to suggest both the success J&L had in concealing corporate influence and the inadequacy of the reputational technique for fully identifying power structures in verticalized communities.     

Status Distinctions in Interaction: Social Selection and Exclusion at an Elite Nightclub

Although social status plays a crucial role in the generation and maintenance of social inequalities, how status processes operate in naturalistic social contexts remains less clear. In the following article, I provide a case study of doormen—individuals who simultaneously represent status experts and status judges—at a highly exclusive nightclub to investigate how people draw status distinctions in micro-social settings. Using interview and ethnographic data, I analyze on what bases doormen evaluate the relative worth of patrons and confer the status prize of admission. I find that in making such decisions, doormen drew from a constellation of competence and esteem cues, which were informed by contextually specific status schemas about the relative material, moral, and symbolic worth of particular client groups. Moreover, the ways in which doormen used these cues and schema depended on the identity of the specific patron being evaluated. As such, I argue that processes of interpersonal evaluation and status conferral are contextually specific, culturally embedded, and interpersonally variable. Despite such variations, a patron’s perceived social connections seemed to outweigh other types of cues in admissions decisions. I conclude by discussing these findings in light of both status characteristics theory and Bourdieu’s work on the transubstantiation of capital to suggest that social capital is a powerful status cue that can, under certain conditions, be a more potent source of social distinction and status advantage, or hold a greater conversion value, in systems of stratification than other types of qualities.