Party on wheels: mobile party spaces in the Norwegian high school graduation celebration

Research on partying and nightlife often emphasizes commercial control while overlooking participants’ creativity and agency. Due to their age, appearance and transgressive partying, participants in the Norwegian high school graduation celebration have limited access to bars and pubs in the ordinary night‐time economy. To create alternative party spaces under their own control they utilize the spatial opportunities offered by automobility. Groups of students get together many years in advance and buy old buses which they refurbish to become rolling nightclubs that enable them to ‘transcend space’ through partying while on the move. These mobile party spaces provide a material and symbolic centre of communion and a tight space for physical assembly that enhances the production of intense positive emotions. In a cat‐and‐mouse game with the police, the buses provide a sense of nomadic autonomy, and enable participants to drink heavily for days on end. The study examines how youth may creatively zone their own party spaces within the context of automobility and how these mobile spaces again shape the partying that goes on within them. While this party practice opens up for autonomy, creativity and social transgressions reminiscent of liminal phases or carnivals, at a deeper level participants clearly reproduce class‐based differences and exaggerate conventional practices and symbols.     

The impact of remittances from Canada's seasonal workers programme on Mexican farms

Based on a survey of participants in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, the authors’ three‐stage least squares estimation of a simultaneous equation model finds that migrants’ remittances enhance on‐farm investments in Mexico, which, in turn, increase farm income. Remittances are also found to have a positive influence on non‐farm income in Mexico, by giving respondents the possibility of starting a new business and diversifying their investments. These results support the hypothesis underlying the “new economics of labour migration” that remittances contribute to economic development by relaxing the credit constraint on the investment function of family farms.     

Academic Civic Mindedness and Model Citizenship in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme

This study uses interview and survey methods to describe the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme's (DP) development of students' “academic civic mindedness” and “model citizenship” at four public schools in California. Results indicate that the DP pedagogy enables students to develop many of the skills that are necessary for civic advocacy and that the DP places a strong emphasis on students' knowledge of issues related to public policy. The DP develops students' citizenship through promoting their awareness of political and social issues and required active engagement with a local or global issue. Most IB students and teachers feel that the DP develops students' academic civic mindedness and model citizenship to a considerably greater extent than other curricular alternatives. Finally, teachers feel that the strongest limitation to their prioritization of students' citizenship development is their lack of clarity on how to frame the civic implications of what they teach.     

The social investment approach as a field of job creation. From the ‘recalibration’ to a resurgent trade-off between employment growth and low wage (white) jobs. A comparison between Germany and Italy

The social investment approach emerged as a new welfare paradigm, aimed at reconciling the traditional functions of the welfare supply with a productive social agenda, designed at preparing people to confront the ‘new social risks’, whether they be related to the problem of balancing paid work and family responsibilities, upgrading the skills, preventing inequalities and promoting the availability of in-kind services. In order to achieve these objectives, especially those related to care needs and work-life balance, the adoption of social investment-based strategies necessarily implies an expansion of the jobs related to health and social care services. In more recent years, many studies have analysed the limitations of the social investment policies because of their different redistributive impacts on social groups. Several studies have found a higher use of these policies for high-income families. Another source of criticism on social investment is that spending on these policies would seem to crowd out more traditional passive social expenditures. In this article, we examine another question related to the widespread of this approach: what are the effects of the social investment policies in terms of direct job creation? In fact, one of the more controversial issues, related to social investment policies, is their direct contribution to the labour market in terms of both quantity and quality of work within welfare services. The article analyses these issues focusing on Germany and Italy, two countries that represent not only two different care regimes but also two distinct models regarding job creation strategies in the care sector. In doing so, particular attention will be paid to long-term care policies, as they represent one of the pivotal areas of the social investment approach, both in terms of social services, to address new social risks, and new jobs related to welfare services     

The impacts of the food,fuel and financial crises on poor and vulnerable households in Nigeria: A retrospective approach to research inquiry

This article examines the impacts of the financial, food and fuel crises on poor and vulnerable households in two states of Nigeria: Lagos and Kano. It uses retrospective household‐level data to analyze the impacts of induced price variability on household welfare. The results indicate that aggregate shocks have significant adverse effects on household consumption, schooling and child labour decisions, with a degree of impact heterogeneity across regions and rural and urban areas of the country. We find that the coping strategies adopted by the poor to deal with the short‐term effects of the crises can lock households in a low‐income equilibrium or poverty trap. Provided that covariate shocks exacerbate these effects, they become central for policy design.     

Collective action,mobility, and shared struggles: how the so-called model minority can come to deny the myth

The model minority remains one of the most durable images assigned to immigrant groups despite ample critiques of it. Those persons considered to be a model minority often promulgate the myth themselves. Common arguments against the stereotype do not effectively speak to these people. In this article I demonstrate the disconnect between the critiques of the stereotype and the views of Indian American professionals, a group widely considered to be a model minority. I then offer an alternative approach to dismantling the stereotype that can resonate more with those invested in it. This approach highlights groups’ history of collective action in response to racialised and class obstacles. Three case studies illustrate this approach: study of Indian American motel owners, of physicians, and of taxi drivers. Taxi drivers are thought to be on the opposite end of the model minority binary than doctors and successful motel owners. The case studies highlight the grassroots activism shared by all three groups.     

Blowing the Same Trumpet? Pluralist Protest in Burkina Faso

Protesters employed a great variety of organizational forms in the cycles of popular contention that rocked the West African country of Burkina Faso from early 2011 through the overthrow of President Blaise Compaoré in October 2014. While some actions appeared largely leaderless and unstructured, others were clearly better organized and under some central direction. The organizations ranged from very local and loosely linked networks of student and community activists to professional national structures, such as union federations and political parties. The latter may have been better at articulating grievances and directly confronting state power and policies. But the former exhibited considerable tenacity and could more quickly draw in wider sectors of the population. Activists did not necessarily see one form as superior to the other; they had different strengths and weaknesses, depending on the particular conjuncture and goal. The big challenge, many agreed, was how to better coordinate their struggles.     

Pathways from Casual Employment to Economic Security: the Australian Experience

Casual employment is extensive and has been increasing for more than two decades in Australia. The concept of casual employment used in the Australian context is unusual, but it is directly linked to benefit and rights exclusion within the regulatory framework governing employment. The expansion in casual employment has spread across all sectors, industries and occupations. Casual employment is associated with various forms of insecurity including income and employment insecurity. There are a number of ways in which the insecurity associated with casual employment could be reduced.

Role of Parental Education in Schooling and Child Labour Decision: Urban India in the Last Decade

This paper uses household level data from National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) of India, the 55th (1999–2000) and the 61st (2004–05) rounds, to show that even with a significant wage incentive for schooling of urban children, the school drop out rate and child labour incidence are not small over this period. The parents’ level of education plays an important role in reducing this tendency; thus establishing the linkage between social and human capital outcomes in the family. We also look at the incidence of harmful and manual occupations among the child labour. Mother’s education appears as the more important factor in the recent round in curbing the manual work incidences; supporting earlier findings that women’s empowerment (one important indicator of which would be female educational level) is indeed becoming instrumental in increasing parental awareness. Using a pooled data set, we have also analysed the changes in the impact of parental education on these decisions between 1999–2000 and 2004–05.