Contesting neoliberalism through critical pedagogy, intersectional reflexivity, and personal narrative: queer tales of academia

In this article, we use personal narrative to explore allies and alliance building between marginalized people working in and through higher education, with an eye toward interrogating the ways in which ideologies of neoliberalism work to maintain hierarchy through the legitimation of othering. Inspired by Conquergood (1985 ), who calls scholars to engage in intimate conversation rather than distanced observation, we offer our embodied experiences as a way to use the personal to reflect on the cultural, social, and political. Our narratives often recount being out of place, moments of incongruence, or our marked otherness. Through the sharing of these narratives, we will demonstrate the possibility for ally building based in affective connections forged through shared queer consciousness, paying particular attention to the ways in which neoliberal ideologies, such as individualism and postracism, may advance and impede such alliances.     

Radiocarbon dating with temporal order constraints

Bayesian methods are now widely used for analysing radiocarbon dates. We find that the non-informative priors in use in the literature generate a bias towards wider date ranges which does not in general reflect substantial prior knowledge. We recommend using a prior in which the distribution of the difference between the earliest and latest dates has a uniform distribution. We show how such priors are derived from a simple physical model of the deposition and observation process. We illustrate this in a case-study, examining the effect that various priors have on the reconstructed dates. Bayes factors are used to help to decide model choice problems.     

Caring Labor and Class Consciousness: The Class Dynamics of Gendered Work

Previous research on class consciousness has not examined the gendered nature of paid labor. Paid caring laborwork that involves the direct provision of care to clients or customers—now comprises 20% of the labor force. This is work that tends to place workers in conflict with the goals of management. The conflict between caring values and exchange values may lead workers to greater levels of class consciousness. I use national survey data to examine whether workers in caring labor occupations are more class conscious than other workers. Results indicate that caring laborers are more likely to be pro–working-class conscious than other workers after controlling for class position, income, education, government and nonprofit sectors, sex, and race. Workers in high intensity caring jobs are especially likely to be class conscious. This suggests that, at crucial points, the logic of caring and the logic of commodification are at odds.     

Onset of Voluntary Communication: Smiling Looks to Mother

Playing infants often direct smiling looks toward social partners. In some cases the smile begins before the look, so it cannot be a response to the sight or behavior of the social partner. In this study we asked whether smiles that anticipate social contact are used by 8‐ to 12‐month‐old infants as voluntary social signals. Eighty infants—20 at each of 8, 9, 10, and 12 months of age—completed 5 tasks. The tasks assessed anticipatory smiling during toy play, means‐end understanding (2 tasks), intentional communication via gesture and vocalizations, and memory for mother's location. Across all ages, anticipatory smiling was strongly predicted by intentional gestural and vocal communication and by means‐end understanding. The findings are discussed in terms of the nature and origins of infants' voluntary communications.     

Bayesian D-optimal supersaturated designs

We introduce a new class of supersaturated designs using Bayesian D-optimality. The designs generated using this approach can have arbitrary sample sizes, can have any number of blocks of any size, and can incorporate categorical factors with more than two levels. In side by side diagnostic comparisons based on the E(s²)$E(s^2)$ criterion for two-level experiments having even sample size, our designs either match or out-perform the best designs published to date. The generality of the method is illustrated with quality improvement experiment with 15 runs and 20 factors in 3 blocks.     

Mediated Political Communication in Australia: leading issues,new evidence

New 2007 survey data on political communication is used to study the relation between commercial and ABC/SBS television consumption and Australian political and civic culture. The first section outlines the demographic characteristics of viewers who rely, respectively, for their news and current affairs, on commercial as compared with public service television. This is followed by a profile of popular views on the concentration of media ownership in Australia. The paper then shows that levels of trust in other people are higher for those who rely on public service television. Similarly, knowledge about basic constitutional facts is shown to be positively related to a preference for public service television news consumption. The same holds for civic engagement. The conclusions imply that Australians generally favour stronger public interest regulation of commercial television broadcasting. The conclusion explains that media regulation in Australia generally lags behind public preferences for a more explicitly democratic regulatory regime.     

Allowing Family to be Family: End-of-Life Care in Veterans Affairs Medical Foster Homes

The Medical Foster Home program is a unique long-term care program coordinated by the Veterans Health Administration. The program pairs Veterans with private, 24-hour a day community-based caregivers who often care for Veterans until the end of life. This qualitative study explored the experiences of care coordination for Medical Foster Home Veterans at the end of life with eight Veterans’ family members, five Medical Foster Home caregivers, and seven Veterans Health Administration Home-Based Primary Care team members. A case study, qualitative content analysis identified these themes addressing care coordination and impact of the Medical Foster Home model on those involved: (a) Medical Foster Home program supports Veterans’ families; (b) Medical Foster Home program supports the caregiver as family; (c) Veterans’ needs are met socially and culturally at the end of life; and (d) the changing needs of Veterans, families, and caregivers at Veterans’ end of life are addressed. Insights into how to best support Medical Foster Home caregivers caring for Veterans at the end of life were gained including the need for more and better respite options and how caregivers are compensated in the month of the Veteran’s death, as well as suggestions to navigate end-of-life care coordination with multiple stakeholders involved.