‘To favor the side of freedom’: judicial opinions and the law of slavery

This essay uses the appellate judicial opinions in more than 800 suits for freedom from across the United States to analyze the additional commentary antebellum judges included when issuing their decisions. Judges used arguments that mirrored broader debates between abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates, while also upholding the central importance of the rule of law. In doing so, they sought to defend the judicial system from the many challenges brought by African Americans and other anti-slavery activists. Regardless of their own individual beliefs about slavery, judges often chose to frame their written opinions around appeals to morality. The use of moral arguments allowed judges to anticipate the positions of African Americans and their supporters and then render these ideas irrelevant in the face of positive laws supporting slavery. The decisions they made had real consequences for future legal pathways to freedom, and the ways judges chose to structure their decisions reveal both awareness and anxiety over the power of judicial challenges to the institution of slavery.     

“They love death as we love life”: The “Muslim Question” and the biopolitics of replacement

This article approaches the analytic of the “Muslim Question” through the prism of the discursive and conspiratorial use of demographics as an alleged threat to Europe. It argues that concerns about “Muslim demographics” within Europe have been entertained, mobilized, and deployed to not only construct Muslims as problems and dangers to the present and future of Europe, but also as calls to revive eugenic policies within the frame of biopower. The article begins by sketching the contours of the contemporary “Muslim Question” and proceeds with a critical engagement with the literature positing a deliberate and combative strategy by “Muslims” centered on birth rates—seen by these authors as a tactical warfare—to allegedly replace European “native” populations. The analysis continues by focusing on two images juxtaposing life and death as imagined within the replacement discourse, and that capture that discourse in powerful albeit disturbing ways. Finally, the article proposes reading the population replacement discourse as a deployment of biopolitics and one of its many techniques, namely, eugenics.     

Joining forces: the benefits of integrating schools and community providers

Reforms aimed at expanding learning for low-income children must do more than add hours and days to the school year; they must push beyond the traditional boundaries of school-based learning and find ways to maximize and integrate the assets that cities, districts, and communities can offer. This article reviews research on how schools are using extended learning time to promote student engagement and achievement. A key finding is that successful efforts use partnerships with outside organizations to provide academic support and enrichment activities that build students' skills and connections with an expanded network of supportive adults. The challenge is to ensure that these partnerships are not mere add-ons, designed only to plug extracurricular holes and seen as peripheral to the core academic work of schools. They must be part of a larger system that integrates in-school and out-of-school learning and improves outcomes for youth.     

‘Disability is not a word we use’: Social workers' professional judgements about support for disabled young people leaving care

Disabled young people leaving care often experience a more complex transition to adulthood than other youths. Still, policy and services can fail to recognize the intersection between a young person's care experiences and disability. Drawing on data from a qualitative interview study with 14 social workers who work with aftercare in the Norwegian child welfare services, we investigate social workers' professional judgements about support for this subgroup of the leaving care population. Our analysis uses the theoretical construct of institutional logics and shows that social workers did not include concepts of disability in their judgements about support for these young people. Instead, the social workers' considerations were guided by three other organizing principles: a ‘medical logic’, an ‘activation logic’ and an ‘aftercare logic’. We discuss these findings in light of critical disability studies and argue for a more nuanced understanding of disability in social work practice with care leavers. Highlighting disability rights and going beyond diagnosis and categorisations of disabled people can challenge a medical model approach to service provision.     

Chains and networks,territories and scales: towards a relational framework for analysing the global economy

A vast and continually expanding literature on economic globalization continues to generate a miasma of conflicting viewpoints and alternative discourses. This article argues that any understanding of the global economy must be sensitive to four considerations: (a) conceptual categories and labels carry with them the discursive power to shape material processes; (b) multiple scales of analysis must be incorporated in recognition of the contemporary ‘relativization of scale’; (c) no single institutional or organizational locus of analysis should be privileged; and (d) extrapolations from specific case studies and instances must be treated with caution, but this should not preclude the option of discussing the global economy, and power relations within it, as a structural whole. This paper advocates a network methodology as a potential framework to incorporate these concerns. Such a methodology requires us to identify actors in networks, their ongoing relations and the structural outcomes of these relations. Networks thus become the foundational unit of analysis for our understanding of the global economy, rather than individuals, firms or nation states. In presenting this argument we critically examine two examples of network methodology that have been used to provide frameworks for analysing the global economy: global commodity chains and actor‐network theory. We suggest that while they fall short of fulfilling the promise of a network methodology in some respects, they do provide indications of the utility of such a methodology as a basis for understanding the global economy.     

Environmental Risk, Precaution, and Scientific Rationality in the Context of WTO/NAFTA Trade Rules

This article considers the role of scientific rationality in understanding statements of risk produced by a scientific community. An argument is advanced that, while scientific rationality does impose constraints on valid scientific justifications for restrictions on products and practices, it also provides flexibility in the judgments needed to both develop and apply characterizations of risk. The implications of this flexibility for the understanding of risk estimates in WTO and NAFTA deliberations are explored, with the goal of finding an intermediate ground between the view that science unambiguously justifies or rejects a policy, and the view that science is yet another cultural tool that can be manipulated in support of any decision. The result is a proposal for a dialogical view of scientific rationality in which risk estimates are depicted as confidence distributions that follow from a structured dialogue of scientific panels focused on judgments of evidence, evidential reasoning, and epistemic analysis.     

Corporate Leadership: Reflections of a CEO and CEO Advisor

This article reviews the careers of five successful CEOs to identify three core ingredients behind the effective management of large corporate groups. From nearly 40 years experience as a CEO and a consultant to CEOs, the author distinguishes culling standards of performance, values and design that motivate people and appropriate and positive growth paths as three ingredients most likely to increase the chances of success for corporate leaders. The paper also analyses two examples of significant failure and suggests modifications to the messages of three leading business academics.     

Secondary power source: High school students as participatory researchers

Conditions that foster and hinder participatory research are examined, using examples from one such research project aimed at dropout reduction undertaken with students in a “last chance” high school. Student researchers sometimes used racial, gender, and social class differences to gain power and display undemocratic behavior within the group. Dilemmas arose as small-scale actions were implemented that seemed to threaten the power and authority of teachers and administrators both within the alternative school and the traditional high schools that fed into it. The limits to extending democracy to students through research are identified, drawing upon recent theoretical work on feminist pedagogy and participatory research. The conclusion is that youths need to be taken seriously as knowers and potential agents of change and that adults who want to work with adolescent researchers need to model democratic teaching and leadership.     

Latin American Productivity from 1990 to 1998 in the Mexican Journal of Psychology

Published uninterruptedly since 1984, the Mexican Journal of Psychology (MJP) has been recognized as one of the most important periodicals in Spanish-language psychology. After coping with financial impediments and a lack of scientific contributions, the significance of the MJP emerged. The journal remains vital in the development of Latin American psychology. It is today recognized as having the highest impact of all Latin American psychology journals as well as having the second highest impact of all psychology journals in the Spanish language. The goal of the present study was to review the profiles of the MJP from 1990 to 1998 by using a bibliometric classification procedure. Four indicators were employed in the present analysis of the articles including measurement techniques, methodology, field of psychology, and main results.