What constitutes youth organizing? Exploring the role of conservative contexts in understanding practice

Context shapes how we come to understand activities, possibilities and constraints in youth organizing. Although there is increasing interest in youth organizing, little attention has been paid to the practice of youth organizing within socially conservative contexts, or to how such contexts shape the roles, perspectives, and actions of young people and of adults. Drawing on case examples of youth organizing work in Mississippi and Fresno, California, this article explores the importance of context as a core element in understanding youth activism and considers how a broader framework for understanding youth organizing through diverse contextual lenses can benefit the field.     

‘Let your indulgence set me free’: reflections on an ‘Africanised’ Tempest and its implications for critical practice

A joint production of The Tempest by Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Company and Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre raises questions about the possibilities, and difficulties, of the deliberate ‘Africanisation’ of Shakespeare. I argue that the discursive fields within which ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Africa’ are read carry significations that preclude easy acknowledgement. I consider the interpretative function an unapologetic, celebratory ‘Africa’ performs when it is put in conversation with canonical Shakespeare. Drawing on Terence Hawkes’s notion of ‘presentism’, I argue that in its effects this particular staging gives life both to the partisan discourse of public forgiveness in South Africa and to the powerful figure of ‘Shakespeare’. An African Tempest that engages the discourse of forgiveness allows ‘Shakespeare’ to share in the sociality invoked by ubuntu. Post‐apartheid theatre would do better to resist a post‐Truth and Reconciliation Commission hope of transcendence and an iconic ‘Shakespeare’. However, it may take great boldness to claim the latitude with which to trespass beyond an apparently familiar ‘Africa’ and an uninterrogated ‘Shakespeare’. The cultural legacies of ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Africa’ need to be treated with the kind of unflinching critique of self and society that Edward Said deems central to the work of the humanities.     

Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic

David L. Smith, Richard Strier and David Bevington (eds), The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649 (1995), xvi + 288 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £35.00/$49.95).

John Smail, The Origins of Middle Class Culture. Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660–1780 (1994), xvi + 241 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., $39.95).

Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches. Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1995), xv + 416 (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, $35.00).

Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (1995), ix + 251 (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, hardback $39.95/£25.00).

Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (1995), x + 276 (Polity Press, Cambridge, £45.00, paperback £12.95).

Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (1995), x + 255 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, $34.00/£27.25, paperback $12.95/£10.25).

Christopher Parker (ed.), Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature (1995), xiii + 194 (Scolar Press, Aldershot and Vermont, £39.95).

David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (1995), xii + 186 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, $49.95/£30.00, paperback $14.95).

Hermann Beck, The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia. Conservatives, Bureaucracy and the Social Question 1815–70 (1995), 285 (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, $47.50).

Vivian Bickford‐Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town: Group Identity and Social Practice 1875–1902 (1995), xxiii + 281 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £40.00).

Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (1995), viii + 351 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne, $59.95).

Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (1994), xix + 377 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, $18.95).     

Agenda building effects by 2008 presidential candidates on global media coverage and public opinion

Grounded in first and second level agenda building and agenda setting, the relationships among public relations, global media, and public opinion were explored in the context of the 2008 United States presidential election. Two candidates’ speeches, press releases, and foreign media coverage were analyzed and compared with global public opinion. The results showed that object salience (issue and candidate) relationships were found between public relations messages and global media coverage while affective attribute (tone) salience relationships were partially found among public relations messages, global media, and public opinion.     

Stuck inside the federal-Indian funding relationship: a tale of two evaluations

Two case studies are presented to compare and contrast the challenges encountered when attempting to conduct participatory evaluations (P-Es) with tribal programs that represented two extremes of collaboration between the programs and evaluators. In one case, the P-E was successful because the principals were invested in the program, whereas in the second case, the absence of a shared program vision hampered the ability to adequately evaluate the program. The authors contend that governmental funding agencies have responsibilities to ensure that their expectations are appropriate, the proposed program is feasible, and that technical assistance should be provided before the grant is written, not after it has been funded.     

Childhood sexual abuse severity reconsidered: a factor structure of CSA characteristics

To address the lack of empirically grounded measures of childhood sexual abuse severity, a survey of self-report items was developed following a thorough review of the childhood sexual abuse literature. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted using data collected from a convenience sample of college students that included 275 females and males with a history of childhood sexual abuse. The solution produced seven factors interpreted as the following: (a) less intrusive forms of childhood sexual abuse (e.g., sexual invitations, kissing), (b) more intrusive forms of childhood sexual abuse (e.g., oral sex, intercourse), (c) humiliation/fear, (d) childhood sexual abuse involving photography, (e) familiarity with the perpetrator, (f) physical force/rape, and (g) active digital penetration. Correlations among these factors further suggested the existence of two relatively independent second-order factors, one based on the levels of physical intrusiveness and the other composed of the psychological/emotional factors. While arguably the most common measurement of severity, physical intrusiveness had little association with critical factors such as humiliation, fear, and association with the perpetrator. Consequently, physical intrusiveness appears to be an inadequate stand-alone measure of childhood sexual abuse severity. These results are proposed to lay the groundwork for an improved, more comprehensive measure of childhood sexual abuse severity.     

Aging behind bars:health care for older female inmates

As the numbers of women in prison have increased, so have the number of older women behind bars. These older women present unique problems for institutions trying to meet their health care needs. We report findings from our national pilot study of federal and state prisons for women. Prisons report basic services for physical and mental health care, and most report having hospice services. However, those that house larger percentages or that expect to house larger percentages of older prisoners do not significantly differ in their approaches to assessing and providing health care from their counterparts. By failing to anticipate the increase in older women, prisons may be failing to provide for many of the health needs of this vulnerable population.     

The structural context of family welfare in the regions of Italy

A factor analysis of household-level attributes of welfare reveals three dimensions across the 20 regions of Italy: affluence, nuclear family oriented style of life, and basic consumption. Because the data on which these empirical patterns is based is normatively oriented, these dimensions conform to the definition of social indicators. The three dimensions of regional social structure that resulted from a separate factor analysis of variables selected from the point of view of structural theory were not so interpreted. These three structural dimensions — industrial-urban differentiation, agrarian rigidity, and central government subsidies — predict affluence, family oriented style of life and basic consumption respectively. This unexpectedly symmetrical result can be interpreted in causal or definitional terms.