Food Security: The Elaboration of Contested Claims to a Consensus Frame*

Abstract This article demonstrates Gamson's claim that behind the apparent agreement implied by “consensus frames” lies considerable dissensus. Ironically, the very potency of consensus frames may generate contested claims to the ownership of a social problem. Food security is a potent consensus frame that has generated at least three distinct collective action frames: food security as hunger; food security as a component of a community's developmental whole; and food security as minimizing risks with respect to an industrialized food system's vulnerability to both “normal accidents” as well as the “intentional accidents” associated with agriterrorism. We show that each collective action frame reflects internal normative variation identified here with Goffman's “keying” concept. These keys suggest power differentials in the endorsement or critique of dominant institutional practices. Each frame and associated keys reflect distinct sets of interests by collective actors, such as demands for substantively different applications of science and technology. The prognostic framing of the community food security movement coincidentally holds potential for reducing not only the accidental risks of productivist agriculture but also the uncertainty induced by the risk of terrorist exploitation of those vulnerabilities. The article explores power differentials and variable levels of oppositional consciousness as mechanisms by which keys generate contentious politics within frames while serving as potential bridges between frames. This contested ownership of food security has implications for the associated movements' and organizations' capacity to influence the structure of the agrifood system as well as the broader socioeconomic organization of rural regions.     

Nonparametric predictive comparison of lifetime data under progressive censoring

In reliability and lifetime testing, comparison of two groups of data is a common problem. It is often attractive, or even necessary, to make a quick and efficient decision in order to save time and costs. This paper presents a nonparametric predictive inference (NPI) approach to compare two groups, say X and Y, when one (or both) is (are) progressively censored. NPI can easily be applied to different types of progressive censoring schemes. NPI is a statistical approach based on few assumptions, with inferences strongly based on data and with uncertainty quantified via lower and upper probabilities. These inferences consider the event that the lifetime of a future unit from Y is greater than the lifetime of a future unit from X.     

Missed opportunity: The NTER and sustainable development outcomes for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory

This article questions why the Labor Government has failed to fundamentally change the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) which it inherited from the Howard government, in the face of evidence which suggests that it is a development intervention unlikely to bring about sustained change. There are two major problems which this article highlights: the coercive and denigrating approach of the NTER, and its failure to address the need for Indigenous governance to drive lasting Indigenous development. Drawing on global research about the reduction of poverty and evidence about the social and economic development of native nations in other settler states, the article suggests that the NTER has been a missed opportunity for Indigenous development. Better policies would have been to address the barriers which Indigenous people identify as blocking their initiatives for development, and to support the essential work of building effective and legitimate community governance to drive development.     

The wages of sweat: A social history perspective on the fight against sweatshops

The social history of the fight against sweatshops casts light on the current movement in favor of corporate social responsibility. But making the head of a chain of subcontractors responsible for seeing to the well-being of those at the end of the chain is not contemporaneous with present-day globalization and North/South relations. Since the 19th century, when the sweatshop system appeared, those who champion the workers have pointed a finger at those who, though they only exercise indirect control, profit from their exploitation. As our historical analysis emphasizes, though in other contexts the issue of poor working conditions sometimes found solutions that (partially) avoided holding the principal liable, what characterizes the anti-sweatshop movement in the context of globalization is its nearly exclusive focus on bringing pressure to bear on the contractor at the head of the chain.     

DEBATE A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

The publication of Jonathan Swift's original Modest Proposal in 1729 caused outrage. His suggestion that, to survive, the Irish poor should make food of their own children (whether ‘stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled… in a fricassee or a ragout’) carried the logic of the government of his day to its brutal extreme. Polite society was not amused. But as the critic David Ward has noted: ‘Swift employs pessimism as a weapon to scourge away the smug credulity of most optimists, just as he employs the language of evil … to make us fear the worst in ourselves. ‘ In this piece Rodney Allen and Ian Hunt of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Flinders University, find inspiration in Swift's pamphlet to make their own contribution to one of the the great debates of our day.     

II. The Conclusions and Recommendations of the Commission on the Social Studies of the American Historical Association

Abstract

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: Modern Business Geography. By Ellsworth Huntington and Sumner W. Cushing. World Book Company, Yonkers-on-Hudson, New York, 1925. viii, 352 pp. $2.00. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: A Smaller Commercial Geography. By G. G. Chisholm and J. H. Birrell. Longmans, Green and Company, New York, 1924. xiv, 302 pp. $1.65. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: High Lights of Geography: North America. By David Starr Jordan and Katherine Dunlop Cather. World Book Company, Yonkers-on-Hudson, New York, 1925. xv, 358 pp. $1.44. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: Human Geography by Grades: Book Three. The World. By James Fairgrieve and Ernest Young. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1925. x, 304 pp. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: First Lessons in Geography. By Philip A. Knowlton. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1924. vi, 257 pp. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: The Story Key to Geographic Names. By O. D. von Engeln and Jane McKelway Urquhart. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1924. xvi, 279 pp. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

The War for Southern Independence, being vol. VI of The History of the United States. By Edward Channing. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1925. 645 pp. $4.75. Reviewed by: B. B. Kendrick

Ethics and Citizenship. By John W. Wayland, Head of the Department of History and Social Science, State Teachers College, Harrisonburg, Va. The McClure Co., Staunton, Va., 1924. 251 pp. $1.85. Reviewed by: H. W. Schneider

History of the 151st Field Artillery. (Minnesota in the World War, Volume I.) By Louis L. Collins. Edited by Wayne E. Stevens. Minnesota War Records Commission, St. Paul, 1924. xxv, 427 pp. Reviewed by: Elbridge Colby

History of the Philippines. By David P. Barrows. The World Book Company, Yonkers, New York, 1924. xiv, 406 pp. $1.60. Reviewed by: Paul V. Shaw