Over‐indebtedness and microcredit in Cambodia: Moving beyond borrower‐centric frames

Over the past two decades, Cambodia has experienced an unprecedented credit boom, a growth in lending so rapid that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) referred to it as “one of the fastest financial deepening episodes by historical cross‐cultural standards” (IMF, 2016, p. 4). This deepening has been driven by the expansion of microcredit. In tandem, over‐indebtedness has increased among microcredit borrowers, and debt has become a significant political and economic concern. This article explores how over‐indebtedness is understood and explained by stakeholders across microcredit value chains. To do so, we draw on interviews with microfinance institution (MFI) executives, investors, branch managers, partners, financial literacy trainers, loan officers and borrowers in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. We find that across the sector, dominant framings of over‐indebtedness privilege borrower‐centric explanations, while discounting the structural drivers of excessive lending and borrowing. As a consequence, current efforts to limit over‐indebtedness are unlikely to produce the kinds of solutions that are most needed to reduce the debt stress among borrowers. These arguments have implications across the Global South, particularly for contexts where microfinance is rapidly expanding.     

Bioecological Implications of Narrative Exposure Therapy in Low‐Resource Settings: Individual,Family, Community,and Socio‐Political Contexts

Traumatic stress can have detrimental effects on individuals, families, and communities. Narrative exposure therapy (NET) is an evidence‐based intervention for decreasing individuals’ post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and has been tested in some of the most challenging contexts, such as in post‐conflict refugee camps. Although the focus of NET is on reducing individual PTSD symptoms, the impact of NET can be seen beyond the individual level. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the ecological implications of using NET with trauma‐affected populations in low‐resource settings. We describe the implications of NET at the family, community, and sociopolitical levels using several case examples. Finally, we outline limitations and future directions for improving the delivery of NET in settings with limited resources.     

On a control chart for the Gini index with simulations

In this work we suggest the use of the Gini index on control charts. The asymptotic properties of Gini index are presented and the control charts based on appropriate confidence intervals are constructed. The suitability of the proposed charts are investigated by means of extensive simulations.     

‘The Tortoise under the couch’: an African woman’s reflections on negotiating insider- outsider positionalities and issues of serendipity on conducting a qualitative research project in Cape Town,South Africa§

Issues of positionality of Black African researchers researching African issues is seldom discussed in methodological literature. In this article, I reflect from an African perspective on issues of insider/outsider positionalities and of serendipity and unexpectedness during my fieldwork which are areas often dominated by writing from the global north and by writers and researchers who do not identify as African people of color and hope that my article will contribute to fill this gap. I share my background, identity, gender and age, and how these might have influenced my approach and interpretation during the process. My qualitative study explored perspectives and subjective experiences of Xhosa speaking adults with epilepsy and their carers in an urban Black township in Cape Town, South Africa. I conclude with the tortoise metaphor to show the cultural relevance thereof, the importance of curiosity and of embracing events of unexpectedness in fieldwork.     

Blood,Sweat, and Tears: Navigating Creepy versus Cool in Wearable Biotech

ABSTRACT

This paper considers how personal data protections figure into the design process of wearable technology. The data question is becoming especially important in the face of recent innovations in biotechnology that capitalize on the new fungibility of biology and electronics, in which new biotech wearables capitalize on the ability to analyze and track changes in blood, sweat, and tears. Interviews and participant observation with wearable tech designers, data scientists, fashion tech entrepreneurs, and select experts in cybersecurity and intellectual property law, reveal a range of approaches to data protection in design within the culture where wearables are beginning to merge with biotech. While a few respondents were extremely vigilant about protecting consumer’s privacy, the majority felt that when consumers ‘opt in’ to data sharing, they should be cognizant of the risks. From their perspective, it is not necessarily the producer’s responsibility to protect user's personal data. These attitudes present a problematic logic, which leaves users vulnerable to data exploitation. The paper concludes by arguing that this laissez-faire culture is the environment in which wearable biotech is being developed and will be deployed. This emerging technology raises issues about bodies, data, and ownership in crucial need of analysis and critique to push its move into the mainstream toward more equitable and inclusive ends.     

The privacy paradox: how market privacy facilitates government surveillance

Although most surveillance studies scholars assume privacy is antithetical to surveillance, critics have recently warned that privacy-based criticisms may facilitate surveillance. That being said, we do not yet have data that show whether privacy claims were used in the past to legitimate government surveillance. This paper addresses that gap by analyzing claims made over one of the U.S.’s most controversial surveillance issues: government control over encryption technologies. A review of Congressional hearings and statements on the Congressional Record (n?=?112) reveals that from 1993 to 1999, public debates were dominated by a market liberalization discourse in which participants supported loosening encryption controls as a way to protect privacy from criminal intrusions in market transactions. Also playing a role was a strong skepticism toward government power and a preference for markets as managers of crime prevention. Challenged by these critiques, lawmakers withdrew regulatory proposals and spent the following decade working quietly with private firms to ensure law enforcement surveillance capability. These findings show the expansion of privacy for consumers and entrepreneurs has in fact been used to achieve the contraction of privacy from law enforcement and intelligence agencies.     

From smiling to smirking? 3D printing,upgrading and the restructuring of global value chains

3D printing (3DP) has been heralded as a revolutionary technology that can alter the way production is organized across time and space – with important redistributive effects on geography and size of production activities. In this article, we examine the impacts that a widespread adoption of 3DP could have on restructuring, upgrading and distributing value added along manufacturing global value chains (GVC) – with brief examples from the aerospace and automotive industries. We highlight two possible scenarios for GVCs – a complementarity scenario of 3DP and traditional manufacturing overlapping, which would reproduce power relations in GVCs and the current distribution of value added in a ‘smiling curve’; and a substitution scenario of 3DP partly or fully superseding traditional manufacturing, which would have more transformational effects in terms of ‘rebundling’ activities, regionalizing or localizing GVCs, and flattening the smiling curve into a ‘smirk’.     

Are children better witnesses than adolescents? Developmental trends in different false memory paradigms

Abstract

The current study compared older children’s (11/12-year-olds) and adolescents’ (14/15-year-olds) vulnerability to false memory creation using two different methods (i.e., the Deese/Roediger-McDermott [DRM] and memory conformity paradigms) involving neutral and negative stimuli. In line with previous research, a developmental reversal effect was found for the DRM paradigm, which means that when employing this method children displayed lower false memory levels than adolescents. However, when using the memory conformity paradigm, the opposite pattern was found, with adolescents forming fewer false memories than children. This indicates that in a co-witness context, adolescents are less prone to memory errors than children. The emotional valence of the stimuli used in both paradigms did not notably affect the production of false memories. There was no statistically significant correlation between false memories as measured by the DRM and the memory conformity paradigms. Altogether, the current study indicates that there is no single type of false memory as different experimental paradigms evoke different types of erroneous recollections. Additionally, our study corroborates past findings in the literature concerning the issue of developmental reversal, strengthening the idea that under certain circumstances children might indeed be better witnesses than adolescents.     

Defending the Family,Defending the Faith: An Analysis of The Family: A Proclamation to the World,Religious Identity,and the Politics of Same-Sex Marriage in a Mormon Community

In this article, we apply Peter Berger's theory of religion as a social construct to learn how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church) advances a heteronormative view of family relationships in the United States using a document titled The Family: A Proclamation to the World. Furthermore, applying cultural studies theory, we examine how believing Mormons negotiate the tension that arises when their secular values compete with those expressed by Church leaders. We argue that, although the Proclamation addresses a number of issues, the Church offers a closed text that emphasizes war narratives in which same-sex marriage is portrayed as a threat to LDS identity and the heteronormative family. This closed text is further legitimized by emphasis on the authority of Church leaders as oracles of God. The study participants largely accept the dominant narrative, and those who reject it, do so with some trepidation.