DRUG POLICY IN THE TIME OF AIDS:

In 1985, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded an ethnographic research project in San Francisco to study the needle sharing behavior of injection drug users (IDUs). The goal of the research was to develop a strategy to slow the spread of HIV among this hidden and hard to reach population of drug users and their sexual partners. This small-scale project grew into a model intervention in which bleach, condoms, and street-based education by outreach workers were employed to inform IDUs of the risk of AIDS and of methods for protecting themselves. The "reach and teach bleach" model was adopted by NIDA and implemented in a number of American cities. This study describes the development of the model intervention, the adoption of the model by NIDA as part of its National AIDS Demonstration Research (NADR) project, and the political circumstances under which the city of San Francisco applied for the NADR grant. Drawing on Social Worlds/Arena theory, and based on extensive interviews and participant observation, a sociohistorical analysis examines the initial development, implementation, and disintegration of the model outreach project and the impact of the program on drug policy in the city of San Francisco.     

Considering women's experience

Conclusion All views of power, as Lukes points out, are both contested and ideological. The view I present here was developed through efforts to construct a theory of power grounded in the central themes of feminist research, especially its focus on the social construction of reality. The most salient realities addressed in this context are the ethics and social structure of obligation, relationship, and care, especially as these affect differential identities, social rankings, and asymmetries in power. These inequalities are socially constructed. They stabilize power contests of the past in prescribed relationships of the present.Though power differentials between women and men have a long history, the particular configuration we find in the contemporary United States was shaped in large part through the social and ideological transformations of the nineteenth century, when market relationships, economic and social, were ascendant. Exaggerations of that transformation, which presume older social orders were overtaken by a new order modelled on the market, are not only analyses but ideologies as well. They serve the market and those men whose success is focused there; but they render invisible much of women's experience. The theory presented here proposes a tripartite approach as a corrective to single-order market-based theories. I argue that power has different characteristics in the three orders.Briefly, power in the exchange order is individualistic and competitive. Power in the placing order is derived by incumbents from the social places they fill. Here is where the definition of social types critically structures power differentials and where care, service, and deference are made obligatory. Power in the pooling order is collective, the capacity of a multitude to act as one.This examination of power in its three guises suggests some avenues that syntheses of theories of power might take. For example, conceptions of power that stress its competitive and oppositional aspects focus on the exchange order, while conceptions that stress the communal aspects of power focus on the pooling order and its capacity to generate power through consensus. In addition, the several discussions of resources for power tend to combine resources generated and used in all three orders. Much analytical clarity might be gained by separating out the different ways in which resources are generated, used, and transferred from one social order to another. Finally, several implications that can only be suggested here follow from this view of power. Because it focuses attention on the placing order, a sector generally neglected in sociology, it can make us attentive to the powers of the weak and the claims of future generations on current ones. Because those claims are made most heavily against women, they account in large part for women's higher rates of poverty and their disadvantages against men in the world of exchange. But, more important, because this social order is neglected in practice as well as in theory, its powers, especially its powers of social control, are eroding, leaving the claims of those who need care to go unheeded. The growing isolation of the elderly is one case in point. Poverty rates among children, which are fast approaching the one-quarter mark in the United States, present another.These can be interpreted at least partly as the society's increasing incapacity to enforce obligations of protection and care. More than the other two social orders, the placing order answers a society's need for a succession of generations by empowering the young, the infirm, and the aged with claims. In the nineteenth century, societies solved the problems of disintegration in the placing sector associated with an ascendant market by assigning claims for care almost exclusively to women, backing up those claims with powerful normative sanctions, and leaving men free to compete in the market. Now that the sanctions have lost their sting and the market is attracting women, too, a reallocation of claims amounting to a restructuring of the placing sector - especially its service ranks - is necessary.If the market with its freedoms was the major social accomplishment of the nineteenth century, an egalitarian redistribution of obligations and responsibilities might be the twentieth century's answer to contemporary difficulties in caring. There are other possibilities. One is a further weakening of the claims that succor the weak, with disastrous results for future generations. Another is the imposition of claims upon some new group - biologically adult but socially stunted by definition, as women have been. Currently the women's movement and its counter movement are struggling to determine the future construction of reality.     

Children’s Sex and the Happiness of Parents

Demographers are interested in sex preferences for children because they can skew sex ratios and influence population-level fertility, parenting behavior, and family outcomes. Based on parity progression ratios, in most European countries, there are no sex preferences for a first child, but a strong preference for mixed-sex children. We hypothesize that mixed-sex preferences also influence parental happiness. Parents’ disappointment with a second child of the same sex as the first could have negative effects for parents and children. We use longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Study to examine parental happiness by the children’s sex and analyze whether these effects differ by parent’s sex, age, nativity, and educational attainment. The results are only partially consistent with predictions from parity progression ratios. As expected, parental happiness does not depend on the sex of the first child. We find weak evidence suggesting that two boys decrease happiness, but the findings are not consistent across German and British data or across subpopulations. Moreover, two girls do not reduce happiness. Although sex preferences influence fertility, they appear to have little impact on happiness, perhaps because of unobserved positive factors associated with having same-sex children.     

Learning to Leave: Problems of Graduating Clinical Observations and Strategies

Abstract

Like other moments of significant transition and separation, graduating from college involves a complex set of feelings and behaviors. Stress can be associated with various steps in this process, including identifying and completing tasks, anticipating change, participating in ceremony, and moving on. Common presenting problems and counseling strategies are described so that health workers can understand these dynamics within their developmental context for young adults. Leaving can be a skill some students need to acknowledge and learn, so that they can continue to grow.     

Looking at discipline,looking at labour: photographic representations of Indian boarding schools

Native American children were subjected to a rigidly enforced regime of acculturation in a federally funded system of Indian boarding schools. This paper explores the peculiar iconography of photographs of these Indian schools, hundreds of which can now be found in Internet archives. The advent of searchable photograph archives on the Internet makes possible new forms of visual ethnography analogous to a kind of archeology. Photographs can be examined and meanings imputed based on documentary evidence and theoretical understandings. First, a brief introduction to Indian schools will be provided. Then I will examine four documentary projects, each of which had its own representational agenda: first, Richard Pratt's use of photographs as a propaganda-of-the-image to garner support for Carlisle and other Indian schools; second, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) documentation efforts that included panorama photographs and a collection of shots from the Pacific Northwest by Ferdinand Brady that emphasize labour; third, Frances Benjamin Johnston's photographs representing Indian schooling as progressive education; and finally a recently discovered album of vernacular photographs from the Sacaton school in Arizona. The goal will be to describe the ‘circumstances and milieus' in which the photographs were made. In the conclusion I will turn to issues of sociological theory and meaning.     

A global perspective on happiness and fertility

The literature on fertility and happiness has neglected comparative analysis. We investigate the fertility/happiness association using data from the world values surveys for 86 countries. We find that, globally, happiness decreases with the number of children. This association, however, is strongly modified by individual and contextual factors. Most importantly, we find that the association between happiness and fertility evolves from negative to neutral to positive above age 40, and is strongest among those who are likely to benefit most from upward intergenerational transfers. In addition, analyses by welfare regime show that the negative fertility/ happiness association for younger adults is weakest in countries with high public support for families, and the positive association above age 40 is strongest in countries where old-age support depends mostly on the family. Overall these results suggest that children are a long-term investment in well-being, and highlight the importance of the life-cycle stage and contextual factors in explaining the happiness/fertility association.