Pharmaceutical Intimacy: Sex,Death, and Methamphetamine

ABSTRACT

In this article, I draw from ethnographic work conducted among residents of an “in-house” drug and alcohol treatment center in Baltimore, Maryland, to discuss the relationships born of pharmaceutical (ab)use. By looking in close detail at the autobiographical accounts of one man in treatment for addiction to methamphetamine, I attempt to chart the way life and death are at times brought into close proximity, and at others wedged firmly apart, by such things as love and avoidance. My concern is with the ethics of care that emerge through the so-called “small events” in everyday relations; that so often define a life or a relationship as falling under the category “normal” or “pathological.” I ask how such things as the known demands placed on the body by the need to maintain or avoid relations, whether pharmaceutically mediated or not, come to bear on the decision to “let die” or the resurgence of moral worlds. I end by discussing the different aspects of relatedness revealed by the dependencies and alliances formed by the kinship between pharmaceuticals and humans.

In compliance with current ethical research standards, the names of all informants have been changed to assure their anonymity.     

Applying the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model to Micro-Level Analyses of Marital Partner Affect During Couple Conversations: An Exploratory Investigation

For years observational techniques along with other methods have sought to explore the relationships of couple interactional exchanges to marital quality and longevity. However, many of the previous methodological procedures used might be inadequate at capturing the influential micro-dimensional nuances of interpartner couple affective stability and reciprocity. This study explored the dyadic patterns in 23 married couples' continuous affect ratings during two communication episodes. Multilevel modeling was used to assess the structure in the stability of one's own affect and the influence of partner affect over 3-, 6-, and 9-second time lags. Implications regarding the use of nested models to explore patterns of actor and partner effects are discussed.     

Outcharming crime in (D)urban space

This paper is an inquiry into the uses of space and emotions in the governance of urban dangers. Cities have always been affective assemblages, yet the role of both space and affect in the control of urban crime has dramatically changed over the century. What defines spatial urban management today, in Africa and elsewhere, are not the prohibitive, moralising or forcefully exclusionary techniques of the past; instead, the powers of seduction and atmosphere have gained pride of place and given rise to a regime of spatial management through flirty surfaces. Crime, according to security strategists and city makers in the South African city of Durban, can be literally charmed out from particular bubbles of governance. Urban practitioners do not search for the root causes of violent crime somewhere deep in the history of society, but rather in space itself, right at the city's surface. While part of a worldwide trend, this recent fascination with the charming aspects of space has a particularly strong South African dramatic. Governing through handsome space in South Africa is not simply a creation of beautiful illusions against the reality of pervasive violence, but a constant endeavour to re‐draw a troubled spatial history.     

朝鲜核试验的经济学分析

朝鲜核试验的战略意图可以从比较优势理论、边际分析理论与博弈论等研究角度讨论。朝鲜核试验不仅对朝鲜吸引外国资本、接受国际援助、进行对外经济贸易等方面产生影响,而且对周边韩国、中国等国的经济产生影响。研究表明,韩国整体经济并未因朝鲜核试验受大幅影响,金融市场所受负面影响不明显,外资一般持观望态度。对中国而言,朝鲜核试验不利于中国一直竭力营造的良好外部投资环境,对在朝中国资本投资行为产生一定影响。此外,无形中提高了中国的区域军事安全成本。     

Will to love,will to fear: the emotional politics of illegality and citizenship in the campaign against birthright citizenship in the US

Anti-immigration activists argue that the broad inclusivity of the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment is a national security concern that enables criminalized migrant mothers to give birth to citizens who can later harm the US through violence and resource consumption. Seeing this argument as representative of the problem of inclusivity inherent to citizenship in a liberal democracy, this essay asks how the children of undocumented and temporary migrants are constructed as what Mae Ngai calls ‘alien citizens.’ Drawing from Sara Ahmed's affective economy of emotion, I find that affect and emotion figure prominently in how citizens are made ‘alien.’ Specifically love and fear function as pivot points in the anti-birthright citizenship argument, wherein the ‘real citizen’ is ‘willed’ to love and be loved by the nation and to fear the nation's Others. Moreover, the emphasis on national feelings does not evacuate white supremacy or heteronormativity from its imagination of citizenship, but instead displaces these loci of power into feeling and affect. Thus, this essay claims that the birthright citizenship argument illustrates how national love and fear work in tandem to uphold, naturalize, and expand the racial and sexual exclusions inherent to citizenship in a nation-state.     

Environmental affects: NASCAR,place and white American cultural citizenship

Attempts to grapple with the complicated tangle of race and memory are more prominent than ever in the public discourse of the United States. In 2006, public intellectual Henry Louis Gates sought to popularize the search for roots and meaning with his project African American Lives, and in 2007 the black and white descendants of the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case met in New Orleans to discuss the past and present significance of their ancestors’ lives. As the crafting of identities around increasingly fluid notions of ‘race’ proceeds apace, the activities of family historians provide a useful entrée into struggles over race, identity, and collective memory in the United States. The research reported here illustrates how the shared history of the multi-racial descendants of eighteenth and nineteenth century St Domingue/Haiti in Louisiana is encountered in racially distinct ways. Participant observation is used to examine how race is dealt with in the activities of two groups: 1) a mainly European American genealogical society, called the St Domingue Special Interest Group; and 2) the LA Creole cultural and genealogy group, made up primarily of Louisiana creoles of color. Preliminary findings indicate that while the process of engaging in family history research provides an opening for some participants to better understand others across racial and ethnic divides, this kind of cross-racial dialogue was limited by the organization of family history activities into racially distinct social networks. As the popularity of genealogy increases, the findings here point to the need to recognize the public significance of these private histories.     

Time Use and Well-Being in Older Widows: Adaptation and Resilience

Research on widowhood mostly emphasizes negative outcomes, but some studies suggest widows are resilient. This study evaluated the in-depth daily experiences of older widows compared to married women. Participants included 75 widows and 125 married women from the National Study of Daily Experiences II, who completed daily diaries over 8 days. For long-term widows, there were no differences compared to married women in daily and general well-being, and a few differences in time use. Results add to the literature by using daily diary data to illustrate the general resilience of older women many years after the death of a spouse.     

Bangkok flooded: re(assembling) disaster mobility

ABSTRACT

The paper investigates mobility options and practices of irregular migrant workers and international urban refugees during the 2011 flood in Bangkok, Thailand. Contributing to debates on disaster mobility and climate change induced displacement, the paper explores how citizenship and racialized differences unfolded during the flood event and how such differences had (de)mobilising effects for specific subgroups of Bangkok’s irregular population. Drawing on the concepts of assemblage and affect the paper proposes to perceive of race as emergent within concrete interactions between bodies, rather than a pre-given social category or a purely discursive trope. From this perspective the body itself may become a repository to subvert or manipulate racialized perceptions. The paper argues that approaching race as an emerging assemblage helps to shed light both on the demobilising effects race had on people’s mobility as well as on the fleeting moments of generosity and care between people that proliferated alongside such demobilisations.     

A Waif's Progress

This paper draws on a case study of media images of the British model Kate Moss to think through questions of affect, ideology, and pleasure in relation to fashion imagery. The question of whether and to what extent media images affect spectators is central to contemporary feminist media studies. The “turn to affect” has revitalised the debate about the extent to which media images can be held accountable for oppressive effects on the spectator's body image, with affect theory often being pitted “against” feminism in this regard. As Clare Hemmings states, affect theory emphasises how emotions place individual bodies in a circuit of feeling and response, connecting them to one another in ways that are potentially transformative. Through a critical reading of Kate Moss as a highly visible figure of projection, anxiety, and fantasy, I aim to show that whilst affects may be unpredictable, in that some media images become particular objects of attachment and anxiety, they are also mediated and political: that they engage us in intimate relations with ideologies of gender, power, and embodiment.     

CO-LEADERSHIP AND SOLO LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL WORK WITH GROUPS

No abstract available for this article.