The influence of memory for prior instances on performance in a conflict detection task

In 3 experiments, the authors examined the role of memory for prior instances for making relative judgments in conflict detection. Participants saw pairs of aircraft either repeatedly conflict with each other or pass safely before being tested on new aircraft pairs, which varied in similarity to the training pairs. Performance was influenced by the similarity between aircraft pairs. Detection time was faster when a conflict pair resembled a pair that had repeatedly conflicted. Detection time was slower, and participants missed conflicts, when a conflict pair resembled a pair that had repeatedly passed safely. The findings identify aircraft features that are used as inputs into the memory decision process and provide an indication of the processes involved in the use of memory for prior instances to make relative judgments.

From the medicalisation of dementia to the politics of memory and identity in three Spanish documentary films:Bicicleta, cullera, poma, Las voces de la memoria and Bucarest: la memòria perduda

This paper explores how the concept of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is constructed through Spanish media and documentary films and how it is represented. The article analyses three documentary films and the cultural and social contexts in and from which they emerged: Solé´s Bucarest: la memòria perduda [Bucharest: Memory Lost] (2007), Bosch´s Bicicleta, cullera, poma [Bicycle, Spoon, Apple] (2010) , and Frabra’s Las voces de la memoria [Memory´s Voices] (2011). The three documentary films approach AD from different perspectives, creating well-structured discourses of what AD represents for contemporary Spanish society, from medicalisation of AD to issues of personhood and citizenship. These three films are studied from an interdisciplinary perspective, in an effort to strengthen the links between ageing and dementia studies and cultural studies. Examining documentary film representations of AD from these perspectives enables semiotic analyses beyond the aesthetic perspectives of film studies, and the exploration of the articulation of knowledge and power in discourses about AD in contemporary Spain

Addressing conflict and tolerance through the curriculum

Political, religious and national divisions in Northern Ireland go back many hundreds of years so it is not surprising that the lack of a common national narrative has made the teaching of history in schools difficult. The fact that schools have largely been organized on a denominational basis has added to the challenge. When political violence broke out in the late 1960s many looked to schools to contribute to the promotion of reconciliation and the way history had been taught received significant critical attention. This chapter will outline the evolving nature of the history curriculum and review evidence on the impact of this curriculum on the historical understanding of students and young people. In addition, the chapter will briefly consider other ways in which students engage with historical issues through the teaching of citizenship, and wider family and community influences. Whereas the teaching of history in the past either was largely absent or often took on a partisan character, the development of a statutory curriculum in the 1990s helped promote a more dispassionate, skills-based approach which emphasized critical engagement with evidence and a multiperspectivity. While this represented a significant improvement on what had gone before, evaluation of the impact of this approach has highlighted the need for a consideration of the emotional impact of historical understanding and the need better to connect the lessons of history to contemporary society.

Crises and Crisis Generations: International Conflict and Military Participation in Politics

Why do states facing high levels of international threat sometimes have militaries that are heavily involved in politics and at other times relatively apolitical, professional militaries? I argue that the answer to this puzzle lies in a state's history of 'acute' international crises rather than its 'chronic' threat environment. Major international crises lead to professionalization and de-politicization of militaries in both the short- and long-term. International crises underscore the need for the military to defend the state and highlight military deficiencies in this regard. Accordingly, major international crises lead to military professionalization and withdrawal from politics in order to increase military effectiveness. This effect persists years, and decades, later due to generational shifts in the officer corps. As the "Crisis Generation" of officers become generals, they bring with them a preference for professionalization and de-politicization. They guide the military towards abstention from politics. I test this theory using a new global dataset on military officers in national governing bodies from 1964-2008 and find strong support for the theory. Major international crises lead to two waves of military withdrawal from government, years apart. Further statistical analysis finds that this effect is most strongly felt in the non-security areas of governing, while in some cases, international crises may lead to militaries increasing their involvement in security policy-making. Further, international crises that end poorly for a state — i.e., defeats or stalemates — are found to drive more rapid waves of military withdrawal from government. The statistical analysis is supported by a case illustration of civil-military relations in the People's Republic of China, which demonstrates that the crisis of the Korean War (1950-53) led to two waves of military professionalization and de-politicization, decades apart. The first occurred immediately after the war. The second wave, occurring in the 1980s, involved wholesale military withdrawal from governing bodies, which was made possible by the ascent of the "Crisis Generation" of officers in the military, who had served as junior officers in the Korean War, decades prior.

When the right to be counted doesn’t count : the politics and challenges of researching the health of asylum seekers

A fundamental prerequisite of population health research is the ability to establish an accurate denominator. This in turn requires that every individual in the study population is counted. However, this seemingly simple principle has become a point of conflict between researchers whose aim is to produce evidence of disparities in population health outcomes and governments whose policies promote(intentionally or not) inequalities that are the underlying causes of health disparities. Research into the health of asylum seekers is a case in point. There is a growing body of evidence documenting the adverse affects of recent changes in asylum-seeking legislation, including mandatory detention. However, much of this evidence has been dismissed by some governments as being unsound, biased and unscientific because, it is argued, evidence is derived from small samples or from case studies. Yet, it is the policies of governments that are the key barrier to the conduct of rigorous population health research on asylum seekers. In this paper, the authors discuss the challenges of counting asylum seekers and the limitations of data reported in some industrialized countries. They argue that the lack of accurate statistical data on asylum seekers has been an effective neo-conservative strategy for erasing the health inequalities in this vulnerable population, indeed a strategy that renders invisible this population. They describe some alternative strategies that may be used by researchers to obtain denominator data on hard-to-reach populations such as asylum seekers.

The politics of gang research in New Zealand

Like many other Western jurisdictions over the past sixty years, New Zealand has had to contend with episodes of moral panic regarding the activities of youth gangs. The most recent episode occurred in 2005-2007 and was spurred by a perceived escalation in inter-gang conflict and violence in the Counties Manukau areas within greater Auckland, New Zealand. This particular episode was unique in the New Zealand context for the level of attention given to youth gangs by the government and policy makers. This paper reports on the authors’ experiences of carrying out research on the youth gang situation inCounties Manukauas part of an inter-agency project to develop a response to gang-related violence. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which government officials attempted to mould the research process and findings to suit an already emerging policy framework, predicated on supporting ‘business as usual’, at the expense of research participants calls for great autonomy to develop and delivery appropriate youth services to their communities.

The magic of numbers and the amazing disappearing act : the politics of counting youth homelessness

No-one wants to see young people who are no longer able to stay at home with their parents living in situations that are neither stable nor safe. Most Australians also appreciate that youth homelessness is typically a result of factors beyond the control of young people like poverty, lack of affordable housing, parental divorce or separation, family conflict and violence, sexual abuse, or mental health problems.1 Since the Burdekin Report of 1989 first put the issue on the national agenda, youth homelessness has been a point of some political sensitivity as the numbers of young homeless stayed stubbornly high through the 1990s and into the 2000s.

Conflict and seduction in the public sphere

In a critical but sympathetic reading of Habermas’s work (1984, 1987a, 1987b, 2003), Luke Goode (2005) recently sought to rework his theory of deliberative democracy in an age of mediated and increasingly digital public spheres. Taking a different approach, Alan McKee (2005) challenged the culture- and class-bound strictures of Habermasian rationalism, instead pursuing a more radically pluralist account of postmodern public spheres. The editors of this special section of Media, Culture & Society invited us to discuss our differing approaches to the public sphere. Goode holds that the institutional bases of contemporary public spheres (political parties, educational institutions or public media) remain of critical importance, albeit in the context of a kaleidoscopic array of unofficial and informal micro-publics, both localized and de-territorialized. In contrast, McKee sustains a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ toward the official, hegemonic institutions of the public sphere since they tend to exclude and delegitimize discourses and practices that challenge their polite middle-class norms. McKee’s recent research has focused on sexual cultures, particularly among youth (McKee, 2011). Goode’s recent work has examined new social media spaces, particularly in relation to news and public debate (e.g. Goode, 2009; Goode et al., 2011). Consequently, our discussion turned to a domain which links our interests: after Goode discussed some of his recent research on (in)civility on YouTube as a new media public sphere, McKee challenged him to consider the case of pornographic websites modelled on social media sites.1 He identifies a greater degree of ‘civility’ in these pornographic sibling sites than on YouTube, requiring careful consideration of what constitutes a ‘public sphere’ in contemporary digital culture. Such sites represent an environment that shatters the opposition of public and private interest, affording public engagement on matters of the body, of intimacy, of gender politics, of pleasure and desire – said by many critics to be ruled out of court in Habermasian theory. Such environments also trouble traditional binaries between the cognitive and the affective, and between the performative and the deliberative. In what follows we explore the differences between our approaches in the form of a dialogue. As is often the case, our approaches seemed less at odds after engaging in conversation than may have initially appeared. But important differences of emphasis remain.

Analysing the Sri Lankan conflict using Michael Mann's four-dimensional model of social power

This thesis provides an overview of the Sri Lankan civil war with a view to identifying some of the factors that contributed to the dispute between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. It adopts a multi-causal explanation of the conflict by reference to the theories of social power developed by Michael Mann. The conflict has been variously described as an ethnic or political conflict, or has been characterised as a determined by a number of interacting factors (including colonialism, ethnicity, religion, economy, politics and globalisation). Mann’s four-dimensional model of social power is deployed to analyse the causal relationships, together with their inter-connections, which clarify the origins of the dispute. It argues that Mann’s theoretical framework helps to highlight some of the interconnected elements that contributed to the conflict.

Paradigm shifts : global copyright politics and disability rights

Governments around the world need to take immediate coordinated action to reverse the 'book famine.' Disability rights don't conflict with 'normal exploitation' but copyright owners have been wary about all of the possible solutions to providing greater access. The Marrakesh Treaty promises to level out some of the disparity of access between people in developed and developing nations and remove the need for each jurisdiction to digitise a separate copy of each book. It is one of the only international agreements to mandate positive exceptions and may be the start of a pardigm shift in global copyright politics, made all the more remarkable in the face of heated opposition by global copyright industry representatives. It's not a legal problem, but one of political will. Resistance comes from a conflict with ideology: exceptions should be limited and international law should set only minimum standards.

Death, Destruction and Commemoration : Tracing ritual activities in Finnish Late Iron Age cemeteries (AD 550-1150)

The thesis is connected with death, memory and ancestor commemoration during the Merovingian Period, the Viking Age and the beginning of the Crusade Period (AD 550-1150) in Finland. During this time, cremation was the dominant burial rite. It was not until the end of the Viking Age that inhumation became more common but both cremations and inhumations are performed even at the same sites throughout the time. Three different burial types 1) cremation cemeteries below level ground, 2) inhumation burials and 3) water burials are discussed in five articles. I consider these burial forms from three different viewpoints; collectivity-individuality, visibility-invisibility and cremation-inhumation. The thesis also discusses the topics of memory, memorialisation and monument re-use, which have been neglected subjects in Finnish archaeology until now. Both cremation cemeteries below level ground and inhumation burials have been re-used during their time of usage, and on most occasions are situated in a landscape that is overlaid by other monuments as well. The main questions of the thesis are: What kinds of ritual behaviour can we detect in the burials during the period (AD 550-1150)? How did people perceive the moraine hills that functioned as burial places? What kind of re-use can be detected in the Iron Age cemeteries? Why have ancient sites and artefacts been re-used? This thesis shows that it is possible to claim that both artefact and site re-use is a much more widespread phenomenon than has previously been thought in Finnish archaeology. It is also a conscious and deliberate behaviour that can be related to an ancestor cult and commemoration of the dead. The funerary rituals during this time period show great variation and complex, both regionally and nationally. Not only have the dead been buried using elaborate rituals, they have also been mourned and commemorated in intricate ways that proves that death was not an end product, but the start of something new.

The Politics of Pulp Investment and the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST)

The Politics of Pulp Investment and the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) The paper industry has been moving more heavily to the global South at the beginning of the 21st century. In a number of cases the rural populations of the global South have engaged in increasingly important resistance in their scuffle with the large-scale tree plantation-relying pulp investment model. The resistance had generally not yet managed to slow down Southern industrial tree plantation expansion until 2004. After all, even the MST, perhaps the strongest of the Southern movements, has limited power in comparison to the corporations pushing for plantation expansion. This thesis shows how, even against these odds, depending on the mechanisms of contention and case-specific conflict dynamics, in some cases the movements have managed to slow and even reverse plantation expansion. The thesis is based on extensive field research in the Brazilian countryside. It outlines a new theory of contentious agency promotion, emphasizing its importance in the shaping of corporate resource exploitation. The thesis includes a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of resistance influence on the economic outcomes of all (14) Brazilian large-scale pulp projects between 2004-2008. The central hypothesis of the thesis is that corporate resource exploitation can be slowed down more effectively and likely when the resistance is based on contentious agency. Contentious agency is created by the concatenation of five mutually supporting mechanisms of contention: organizing and politicizing a social movement; heterodox framing of pulp projects; protesting; networking; and embedding whilst maintaining autonomy. The findings suggest that contentious agency can slow or even reverse the expansion of industrial plantations, whereas when contentious agency promotion was inactive, fast or even unchecked plantation expansion was always the outcome. The rule applied to all the assessed 14 pulp conflict cases. The hypothesis gained strong support even in situations where corporate agency promotion was simultaneously active. In previous studies on social movements, there has been a lack of contributions that help us understand the causal mechanisms of contention influencing economic outcomes. The thesis answers to the call by merging a Polanyian analysis of the political economy with the Dynamics of Contention research program and making a case for the impact of contentious agency on capital accumulation. The research concludes that an efficient social movement can utilize mechanisms of contention to promote the potential of activism among its members and influence investment outcomes. Protesting, for example via pioneering land occupations, seemed to be particularly important. Until now, there has been no comprehensive theory on when and how contentious agency can slow down or reverse the expansion of corporate resource exploitation. The original contribution of this research is to provide such a theory, and utilize it to offer an extensive explanation on the conflicts over pulp investment in Brazil, the globalization of the paper industry, and slowing of industrial plantation expansion in the global South.

Democratic Legitimacy and the Politics of Rights : A comparative analysis of the conceptual relationship between democracy and rights in contemporary political theories

Democratic Legitimacy and the Politics of Rights is a research in normative political theory, based on comparative analysis of contemporary democratic theories, classified roughly as conventional liberal, deliberative democratic and radical democratic. Its focus is on the conceptual relationship between alternative sources of democratic legitimacy: democratic inclusion and liberal rights. The relationship between rights and democracy is studied through the following questions: are rights to be seen as external constraints to democracy or as objects of democratic decision making processes? Are individual rights threatened by public participation in politics; do constitutionally protected rights limit the inclusiveness of democratic processes? Are liberal values such as individuality, autonomy and liberty; and democratic values such as equality, inclusion and popular sovereignty mutually conflictual or supportive? Analyzing feminist critique of liberal discourse, the dissertation also raises the question about Enlightenment ideals in current political debates: are the universal norms of liberal democracy inherently dependent on the rationalist grand narratives of modernity and incompatible with the ideal of diversity? Part I of the thesis introduces the sources of democratic legitimacy as presented in the alternative democratic models. Part II analyses how the relationship between rights and democracy is theorized in them. Part III contains arguments by feminists and radical democrats against the tenets of universalist liberal democratic models and responds to that critique by partly endorsing, partly rejecting it. The central argument promoted in the thesis is that while the deconstruction of modern rationalism indicates that rights are political constructions as opposed to externally given moral constraints to politics, this insight does not delegitimize the politics of universal rights as an inherent part of democratic institutions. The research indicates that democracy and universal individual rights are mutually interdependent rather than oppositional; and that democracy is more dependent on an unconditional protection of universal individual rights when it is conceived as inclusive, participatory and plural; as opposed to robust majoritarian rule. The central concepts are: liberalism, democracy, legitimacy, deliberation, inclusion, equality, diversity, conflict, public sphere, rights, individualism, universalism and contextuality. The authors discussed are e.g. John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Iris Young, Chantal Mouffe and Stephen Holmes. The research focuses on contemporary political theory, but the more classical work of John S. Mill, Benjamin Constant, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt is also included.