The Mother‐Citizen and the Working Girl: First‐Wave Feminist Citizenship Claims in Canada and Discursive Opportunities for Twenty‐First Century Childcare Policy

L'État providence Canadien est déséquilibré: leader mondial dans certains domaines de l'investissement social—plus particulièrement en soins de santé et enseignement supérieur—il traîne dans d'autres domaines de la dépense d'aide sociale, y compris les politiques de garde d'enfants. Nous constatons qu'aujourd'hui la résistance dans la plupart des régions du Canada à la politique de garde d'enfants universel a des racines historiques profondes. Elle est de fait intégré dans le cadre même du bien‐être social canadien: le contrat de citoyenneté sociale. Nous employons une approche de “bas en haut” sur l'état du bien‐être en nous concentrant sur la façon dont les acteurs collectifs, en particulier, les féministes de la première vague et leurs contemporains au sein des organisations du mouvement ouvrier, ont encadrées et caractérisé la citoyenneté sociale féminine; Nous constatons que l'exclusion de l'adhésion des femmes employées tronque les possibilités discursives par lesquelles des revendications pour des provisions universelles de bien‐être sociale pourraient être apportées. Canada's welfare state is lopsided: while leading the world in some areas of social investment—most notably health care and higher education—it is a laggard in other areas of social welfare spending, including childcare policies. We find that policy resistance to universal childcare in most regions of Canada today has deep historical roots and is, indeed, embedded into the very framework of the Canadian welfare state: the social citizenship contract. We employ a “bottom‐up” perspective on the welfare state focusing on how collective actors, in particular, first‐wave feminists and their contemporaries within labor movement organizations, framed and characterized female social citizenship in ways that excluded employed women from full membership and, in this, truncated discursive opportunities by which claims for universal welfare state provisions could be made.     

Turn-taking patterns in deaf conversation

This paper will focus on the turn-taking patterns of Deaf signers and will compare them with turn-taking patterns found in spoken interaction. Turn-taking in the conversation of hearing people has been the subject of considerable attention, but the way conversation is organised by Deaf conversationalists has received less attention. This paper reports on a small project involving conversational data obtained from two Deaf friendship groups, one all-female and one all-male. Our main aim was to establish whether Deaf interactants orient to a one-at-a-time model of turn-taking, or whether there was any evidence to suggest they can also orient to a more collaborative model. It has been assumed by researchers in the field of Deaf Studies that Deaf interactants orient to a one-at-a-time model since, where the medium of communication is visual rather than sound based, participants can attend to only those sources of talk that they can see. The paper also examines the data to see if there are any gender differences in the way Deaf interactants organise conversation.     

Lessons From Infants: 1960–2000

Our image of the infant as an organism interacting with the environment has changed dramatically in the past 40 years. A new surge of infancy research began in the 1960s and continues unabated today. The view of the infant has been transformed from that of a primarily reflexive organism to a highly competent being, exquisitely sensitive to sensory and perceptual information. Controversy still swirls around the issue of when infants acquire specific knowledge about objects and events. New work is reviewed on how infants and toddlers use knowledge to guide their behavior in challenging situations. Despite the tremendous growth of knowledge about infant development over the past 40 years, it seems that we are on the threshold of even more exciting discoveries.     

Racial differences in high school dropout rates: An analysis of U.S. Metropolitan areas

In this paper, we explore the differences in high school dropout rates among white, black and Hispanic students in 275 U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in 2000. Our analysis focuses on the impact of community and labor market conditions, in hopes of providing insight into the relationship between place and educational outcomes. The explanatory power of our regression models is mixed across racial groups, performing best for whites and Hispanics. Our results also indicate that community factors – most importantly, same-race adult educational attainment in the community, teenage birth rates and residential stability – have a greater impact on dropout rates than labor market factors. Our results suggest that as education reform moves toward broad-based solutions to improve student outcomes including dropout rates, it will be increasingly important to address the structural origins of inequality outside of schools.     

The Beginnings of Tool Use by Infants and Toddlers

Children (aged 9, 14, 19, and 24 months) were encouraged to use tools to achieve a demonstrated goal. Each tool was most efficiently applied when held by the handle with the thumb toward the head of the tool in a radial grip. The tools were presented at midline and oriented to the left and right on alternating trials, so the children who managed to grasp a tool in both orientations with the radial grip demonstrated planning of actions in advance. The tools included a spoon, hairbrush, toy hammer, and magnet; the goals were to feed one's self, feed another, brush one's hair, brush another's hair, hit pegs, and retrieve metal objects. Children were found to use more radial grips with the self‐directed tools (i.e., hairbrush‐to‐self and spoon‐to‐self), indicating that they could plan their actions better when directed toward the self than toward an external goal.     

Accessing Higher Education: The Influence of Cultural and Social Capital on University Choice

Over recent years, sociologists of education have paid increasing attention to the higher education sector. They have highlighted the ways in which, despite the significant expansion in the number of university places available in many countries across the world, access to and choices about higher education continue to be strongly influenced by social class. This article provides an overview of recent literature in this field and explores how scholars have tended to explain this influence by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural and social capital.     

Visual Access and Attention in Two‐Year‐Olds' Event Reasoning and Object Search

Several recent studies have revealed substantial limitations in 2‐year‐olds' ability to search accurately for objects that have undergone unseen movement, even along highly constrained paths. In many of these studies, children observed a ball as it rolled down a track and behind an occluding panel that contained 4 doors. The track had a barrier that was partly visible and could be placed in locations corresponding to the doors. When the ball came to a rest against the barrier and behind the occluder, the child's task was to find the ball by opening the correct door. The search accuracy of 2‐year‐olds has not differed from chance across several variations of this task. This research was conducted to identify the source of 2‐year‐olds' limitation in this domain. Children were granted a full view of the event before the ball was occluded with a door panel. Children's performance was better under this condition, but was still not systematically accurate unless their gaze remained locked onto the correct location. Two‐year‐olds' weak performance in these search tasks appears to be more a consequence of limitations in spatial integration than in their representation of unseen movement.     

Barriers to Training for Disabled Social Work Students

Disabled people wishing to enter Higher Education are confronted with a number of barriers, yet relatively little research has been carried out to identify the level and nature of such obstacles. The short study reported here was designed to examine policy and practice within a number of social work training institutions in Scotland. Interviews were held with disabled students and ex-students, course tutors and practice teachers. Barriers to training are identified in five main areas: first, the disabling physical environment; secondly, problems of typification (whereby global assumptions of impairment are made about individuals); thirdly, failure of equal opportunities policies; fourthly, the practice of treating all students in the same way, resulting in discrimination against a few; and, finally, self-censorship on the part of students. It is argued that the reluctance of some students to 'declare' an impairment is a rational response to the disabling policies pursued, albeit inadvertently, by institutions. The implications of these findings for policy and practice are discussed.     

Accounting for Everyday Incivility: an Australian study

The question of how we live among strangers in daily life is an established concern in contemporary social analysis. A key topic has been the achievements of the individual in rendering daily life among unknown others possible. Yet, questions of residual failure await full development. The study aims to describe the results of an Australian study that examined the significance and meaning of interactional breakdown with strangers in everyday life for the contemporary individual. Focus group methodology is used to describe common threads of understanding that ordinary people have developed around such events in terms of prevalence, reasons and remedies. Noteworthy findings are (i) the use of period and generational kinds of historical thinking in lay reflections on the state of everyday incivility (ii) the materialization of excessive individualism, runaway capitalist values and diminished community as key ideas within lay talk about the generators of everyday incivility, and (iii) the articulation of communitarianism as a preferred panacea to everyday incivility for lay actors.