Two Faces of AIDS in Hong Kong: Culture and the Construction of the `AIDS Celebrity'

Since the first reported case of HIV infection in Hong Kong in 1985, only two HIV-positive individuals in the territory have voluntarily made public their seropositivity: a British dentist named Mike Sinclair, who disclosed his condition to the media in 1992 and died in 1995, and J.J. Chan, a local Chinese disc-jockey, who came forward in 1995 and died just a few months later. When they made their revelations, both became instant media personalities and were invited by the Hong Kong Government to act as spokespeople for AIDS awareness and prevention. Mike Sinclair worked as an education officer for the Hong Kong AIDS Foundation, and J.J. Chan appeared in Government television commercials about AIDS. This article explores how the public identities of these two figures were constructed in the cultural context of Hong Kong where both Eastern and Western values exist side by side and interact. It argues that the construction of `AIDS celebrities' is a kind of `identity project' negotiated among the players involved: the media, the Government, the public, and the person with AIDS (PWA) himself, each bringing to the construction their own `theories' regarding the self and communication. When the players in the construction hold shared assumptions about the nature of the self and the role of communication in enacting it, harmonious discourses arise, but when cultural models among the players differ, contradictory or ambiguous constructions result. The effect of culture on the way `AIDS celebrities' are constructed has implications for the way societies view the issue of AIDS and treat those who have it. It also helps reveal possible sites of difficulty when individuals of different cultures communicate about the issue.

Writing westwards: medieval English literature and its early modern Irish audiences

Quite a few texts from England were translated into Irish in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. The number of these texts was significant enough to suggest that foreign material of this sort enjoyed something of a vogue in late-medieval Ireland. Translated texts include Mandeville’s Travels, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, Fierabras and a selection of saints’ lives. Scholars have paid little attention to the origins and initial readerships of these texts, but still less research has been conducted into their afterlife in early modern Ireland. However, a strikingly high number of these works continued to be read and copied well into the seventeenth century and some, such as the Irish translations of Octavian and William of Palerne, only survive in manuscripts from this later period. This paper takes these translations as a test case to explore the ways in which a cross-period approach to such writing is applicable in Ireland, a country where the renaissance is generally considered to have taken little hold. It considers the extent to which Irish reception of this translated material shifts and evolves in the course of this turbulent period and whether the same factors that contributed to the continued demand for a range of similar texts in England into the seventeenth century are also discernible in the Irish context.

The distributional and nutritional impacts and mitigation potential of emission-based food taxes in the UK

Agriculture and food production are responsible for a substantial proportion of greenhouse gas emissions. An emission based food tax has been proposed as one option to reduce food related emissions. This study introduces a method to measure the impacts of emission based food taxes at a household level which involves the use of data augmentation to account for the fact that the data record purchases and not consumption. The method is applied to determine the distributional and nutritional impacts of an emission based food tax across socio-economic classes in the UK. We find that a tax of £2.841/tCO2e on all foods would reduce food related emissions by 6.3% and a tax on foods with above average levels of emissions would reduce emissions by 4.3%. The tax burden falls disproportionately on households in the lowest socio-economic class because they tend to spend a larger proportion of their food expenditure on emission intensive foods and because they buy cheaper products and therefore experience relatively larger price increases.

Coordination, inclusiveness and wage inequality between median and bottom income workers

What explains cross-national variation in wage inequality? Research in comparative political economy stresses the importance of the welfare state and wage coordination in reducing not only disposable income inequality but also gross earnings inequality. However, the cross-national variation in gross earnings inequality between median and low income workers is at odds with this conventional wisdom: the German coordinated market economy is now more unequal in this type of inequality than the UK, a liberal market economy. To solve this puzzle, I argue that non-inclusive coordination benefits median but not bottom income workers and is as a result associated with higher – rather than lower - wage inequality. I find support for this argument using a large N quantitative analysis of wage inequality in a panel of Western European countries. Results are robust to the inclusion of numerous controls, country fixed effects, and also hold with a sample of OECD countries. Taken together these findings force us to reconsider the relationship between coordination and wage inequality at the bottom of the income distribution.