Normative approaches to justice in physical education for pupils with physical disabilities – dilemmas of recognition and redistribution

Seeking social justice in education for pupils with disabilities creates certain dilemmas. A ‘school for all’ means that educators are faced with the dilemma whereby the notion of ‘disability’ is perceived as ought not to matter but where in actual fact it seems to matter very much! This article explores ways out of this general educational dilemma using the context of physical education (PE) for pupils with physical disabilities within the compulsory school as an example. Justice theories of resource distribution and cultural recognition affect educational outcomes, where the demand is for justice and equity. Fraser’s notion of ‘social status’, together with a pluralistic approach to identities where personal experiences are given a place, is used to suggest a solution to the dilemma. It is concluded that a redistribution of economic resources and social recognition is necessary if social justice within PE is to become a reality.     

Sustaining and Developing Women's Trade Union Activism: A Gendered Project?

Against the background of heavy membership decline, the increasing importance of women as a source of members for unions and union efforts to attract women into membership, this paper explores the nature of women's union activism. The focus is on why women stay active in unions. The paper employs Klandermans' model as a framework for examining senior union women's activism. This study suggests that the model is gendered in that women's experiences and perceptions of trade unions are highly gender specific and further that their union activities are underpinned by a feminist paradigm. The women in the study expressed a strong desire to ensure that the union works for women, indicative of the gendered nature of their commitment to the union. They revealed gendered bargaining priorities and thus gendered perceptions of union instrumentality. Their social integration within the union is shown to be highly or partially contingent upon, formal and informal women's support networks.     

Modeling Transition Rates Using Panel Current-Status Data: How Serious is the Bias?

Studies of disability dynamics and active life expectancy often rely on transition rates or probabilities that are estimated using panel survey data in which respondents report on current health or functional status. If respondents are contacted at intervals of one or two years, then relatively short periods of disability or recovery between surveys may be missed. Much published research that uses such data assumes that there are no unrecorded transitions, applying event-history techniques to estimate transition rates. In recent years, a different approach based on embedded Markov chains has received growing use. We assessed the performance of both approaches, using as a criterion their ability to reproduce the parameters of a “true” model based on panel data collected at one-month intervals. Neither of the widely used approaches performs particularly well, and neither is uniformly superior to the other.     

The Social and Psychological Impacts of Gambling in the Cree Communities of Northern Québec

A detailed survey of gambling, addiction and mental health was conducted with randomly selected respondents (n = 506) from four Cree communities of Northern Quebec. The study examined the current patterns of gambling in relation to demographic, social, and psychological factors. Instruments included the Canadian Problem Gambling Index, Addiction Severity Index, Beck Depression Inventory and the computerized Diagnostic Interview Schedule for psychiatric diagnoses. Overall, 69.2 % of the total sample participated in any gambling/gaming activities over the past year; 20.6 % of this group were classified as moderate/high risk gamblers, and 3.2 % were classified in the highest “problem gambling” category. Considering the entire sample, the overall prevalence of problem gambling was 2.2 %. Women were significantly more likely to play bingo (56.6 %) compared to men (35.1 %) and they played more frequently; 20.8 % of women versus 3.8 % of men played once/week or more often. Compared to the no/low risk gamblers, a greater proportion of moderate/high risk gamblers were cigarette smokers (44.8 vs. 56.3 %), they were more likely to meet DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for alcohol dependence (21.2 vs. 46.2 %), and they were more likely to report moderate to severe depressive symptoms in the past month. Risk factors for problem gambling included traumatic life events (physical and emotional abuse), anxiety and depression, as well as drug/alcohol abuse. The high rates of comorbidity between problem gambling, tobacco dependence, substance abuse and other psychological problems demonstrate that gambling among some Cree adults is part of a pattern of high-risk factors for negative long-term health consequences. The results also have implications for treatment, suggesting that interventions for gambling disorders should not focus on gambling alone but rather the constellation of high-risk behaviours that pose a risk to recovery and well-being.     

An invitation to quantum tomography

Summary.  We describe quantum tomography as an inverse statistical problem in which the quantum state of a light beam is the unknown parameter and the data are given by results of measurements performed on identical quantum systems. The state can be represented as an infinite dimensional density matrix or equivalently as a density on the plane called the Wigner function. We present consistency results for pattern function projection estimators and for sieve maximum likelihood estimators for both the density matrix of the quantum state and its Wigner function. We illustrate the performance of the estimators on simulated data. An EM algorithm is proposed for practical implementation. There remain many open problems, e.g. rates of convergence, adaptation and studying other estimators; a main purpose of the paper is to bring these to the attention of the statistical community.     

Muslim Women and Forced Marriages in the UK

Forced marriage (FM) affects numerous communities within the UK and has far-reaching effects for both individuals and the wider society. This paper attempts to address this issue from an Islamic jurisprudence standpoint. While the paper provides a comparative-contrastive account of key discussions between Muslim jurists (fuqahā’) from the four Sunni schools of law regarding coercion (ikrāh) and its effect on the marriage contract, it pays particular attention to the Hanafi school of law’s position and ways in which its jurists’ reasoning dissents from that of the majority of Sunni jurists. This paper collates the pertinent information, focusing on the effect of coercion (ikrāh) and on the pivotal issues of consent (ri?ā) and choice (ikhtyār). It also considers recent UK legislation and established personal status laws in several Muslim countries. We conclude that FM is incompatible with the objectives of Islamic law and has no reliable basis in its sources, highlighting that the function of the guardian (walī) is to protect the interests of the ward, rather than to exercise authority over those under his guardianship. We suggest that victims of FM in the UK should be able to seek annulment via the courts rather than traditional, community-based, non-enforceable mediation.     

The myth of transition: contractualizing disability in the sheltered workshop

This paper investigates notions of transition and independence, as well as the current circumstances that detain countless disabled people in employment endeavors that not only pay meager wages but also cement a lifelong servitude to the workshop. Sheltered workshops exist on the basis and replication of a structure that incarcerates disabled people within vocational-like settings. This paper begins a discussion of the social contract that occurs between the disabled person in the workshop. The workshop is no longer a place of societal liberation that affords the individual the opportunity to learn vocational skills, but rather it has become an institution that creates its own army of workers that will forever be subjected to a life in the workshop because of their disability status.     

Maximum likelihood estimation in generalized broken‐line regression

The author examines the existence, uniqueness, and identifiability of estimators produced by maximum likelihood for a model where the canonical parameter of an exponential family gradually begins to drift from its initial value at an unknown change point. He illustrates these properties with theoretical examples and applies his results to global warming data and failure data for emergency diesel generators.