Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean : the promise and the challenge.

Item 864-B-1

A reply to Mr. Burke's invective against Mr. Cooper, and Mr. Watt, in the House of commons, on the 30th of April, 1792.

Mode of access: Internet.

“Suffragettes in Satin Shorts”? Gender and Competitive Boxing

This study is an empirical and theoretical contribution to the burgeoning literature on gender and competitive boxing. By using Connell's concepts of labor, power, cathexis, and representation and a combination of content and semiotic analysis, interviews, and observations, we argue that competitive boxing can be studied productively as a paradoxical gender regime that simultaneously enables and constrains how women do gender. On one hand, the sport encourages individual women to display physical aggression when such behavior traditionally has been deemed the antithesis of femininity. Some feminists argue that this form of physical feminism enables women to transcend essentialist discourses that restrict their corporeal power. On the other hand, women boxers in general also encounter resistance to their aspirations. For example, they are still positioned by essentialist discourses about both their bodies and capacity to develop the requisite form of controlled aggression. Strongly gendered links between bodily labor and bodily capital also mean that women have less access to resources than do men and, consequently, fewer opportunities to develop their pugilistic capital. We also maintain that competitive women boxers are implicated in a body project that tends to replicate sporting practices that some feminists and pro-feminists argue are damaging to both men and women.

Women, power and politics

This is major new introduction to women's political involvement and role in the liberal democratic world drawing examples from a wide range of countries to illustrate key common features and divergences. Stevens assesses women's participation and representation in government, parliaments and at the grassroots. Does gender make a difference?

Representing others:translation, ethnography and museum

Cultural anthropology has always been dependent on translation as a textual practice, and it has often used 'translation' as a metaphor to describe ethnography's processes of interpretation and cross-cultural comparison. Questions of intelligibility and representation are central to both translation studies and ethnographic writing - as are the dilemmas of cultural distance or proximity, exoticism or appropriation. Similarly, recent work in museum studies discusses problems of representation that are raised by ethnographic museums as multimedia 'translations'. However, as yet there has been remarkably little interdisciplinary exchange: neither has translation studies kept up with the sophistication of anthropology's investigations of meaning, representation and 'culture' itself, nor have anthropology and museum studies often looked to translation studies for analyses of language difference or concrete methods of tracing translation practices.

Description and critical appraisal of principal components analysis (PCA) methodology applied to pulsed-field gel electrophoresis profiles of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus isolates

Principal components analysis (PCA) has been described for over 50 years; however, it is rarely applied to the analysis of epidemiological data. In this study PCA was critically appraised in its ability to reveal relationships between pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) profiles of methicillin- resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in comparison to the more commonly employed cluster analysis and representation by dendrograms. The PFGE type following SmaI chromosomal digest was determined for 44 multidrug-resistant hospital-acquired methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MR-HA-MRSA) isolates, two multidrug-resistant community-acquired MRSA (MR-CA-MRSA), 50 hospital-acquired MRSA (HA-MRSA) isolates (from the University Hospital Birmingham, NHS Trust, UK) and 34 community-acquired MRSA (CA-MRSA) isolates (from general practitioners in Birmingham, UK). Strain relatedness was determined using Dice band-matching with UPGMA clustering and PCA. The results indicated that PCA revealed relationships between MRSA strains, which were more strongly correlated with known epidemiology, most likely because, unlike cluster analysis, PCA does not have the constraint of generating a hierarchic classification. In addition, PCA provides the opportunity for further analysis to identify key polymorphic bands within complex genotypic profiles, which is not always possible with dendrograms. Here we provide a detailed description of a PCA method for the analysis of PFGE profiles to complement further the epidemiological study of infectious disease. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Plant closures, precariousness and policy responses:revisiting MG Rover 10 years on

With automotive plants being closed in Australia and western Europe, this article reflects on the employment status of ex-MG Rover (MGR) workers following the closure of the Longbridge plant in 2005. In particular, it draws on Standing's typology of labour market insecurity and uses a mixed-methods approach including an analysis of a longitudinal survey of some 200 ex-MGR workers, and in-depth interviews with ex-workers and policy-makers. While the policy response to the closure saw significant successes in terms of the great majority of workers successfully adjusting into re-employment, and with positive findings in terms of re-training and education, the paper finds significant challenges in terms of security of employment, income, job quality and representation at work years after closure. In particular, the paper posits that the general lack of attention to employment security at the macrolevel effectively undermined elements of a positive policy response over the longer run. This in turn suggests longer-term policy measures are required to address aspects of precariousness at work.

Ethnic groups and institutions: A study of institutional engineering in four Central and Eastern European countries

The issue of institutional engineering has gained a renewed interest with the democratic transitions of the Central and Eastern European countries, as for some states it has become a matter of state survival. The four countries examined in the study – Macedonia, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria – exemplify the difficulty in establishing a stable democratic society in the context of the resurgence of national identity. The success of ethnonational minorities in achieving the desired policies affirming or expanding their rights as a group was conditioned upon the cohesion of the minority as well as the permissiveness of state institutions in terms of participation and representation of minority members. The Hungarian minorities in Slovakia and Romania, the Turkish minority in Bulgaria, and the Albanian minority in Macedonia, formed their political organizations to represent their interests. However, in some cases the divergence of strategies or goals between factions of the minority group seriously impeded its ability to obtain the desired concessions from the majority. The difficulty in the pursuit of policies favoring the expansion of minority rights was further exacerbated in some of the cases by the impermissiveness of political institutions. The political parties representing the interest of ethnonational minorities were allowed to participate in elections, although not without suspicions about their intent and even strong opposition from majority groups, but participation in elections and subsequent representation in legislative bodies did not translate into adoption of the desired policies. The ethnonational minorities' inability to effectively influence the decision-making process was the result of the inadequacy of democratic institutions to process these demands and channel them through the normal political process in the absence of majority desire to accommodate them. Despite the promise of democratic institutions to bring about a major overhaul of the policies of forceful assimilation and disregard for minority rights, the four cases analyzed in the study demonstrate that in effect ethnonational minorities continued to be at the mercy of the majority, especially if the minority was unable to position itself as a balancing actor.

"On our way": identities and representations of African women seeking asylum in Ireland

This thesis provides the first explicit Postcolonial study of asylum in the Irish context that integrates Black Feminist analyses of intersectional identity with Postcolonial Feminist theories of representation. African women seeking asylum in the Republic of Ireland were key political instruments used by the state to re-draw racial lines. The study examines how, for a group of African women “On their Way” through asylum, identity and representation work hand in hand to force identities, subaltern spaces and bodies to occupy them. Rich biographical data is gathered through mixed art and drama methods over two intensive participatory research projects conducted in a small Irish city. Data analysis critically examines the poetics (practices that signify) and politics (the powers that govern these practices) and affective economies of global and local NGO visual representations, exposing how they consume, fragment, and appropriate African women’s identities and bodies. Though hypervisible, the women themselves “cannot speak”. The women in the study reported feeling “tired” and “used”. Asking “What work are they doing as they do asylum?” the study finds that black female identities and bodies are forced to perform political, cultural, emotional and material labour on their way through this context of Irish asylum. The author argues that Postcolonial Asylum is a performative encounter that re-scripts colonial race/class/gender discourse through a humanitarian alibi to naturalize European/white supremacy, reinscribe patriarchal power and justify racialised incarceration of bodies seeking asylum in the North. This study takes an interdisciplinary approach that centralizes Black and Postcolonial Feminist theory and innovates Participatory Art-Based Action methodology. Black and Postcolonial feminisms can recognize, theorize and replenish black female political and intellectual agency. Participatory Action research, if grounded in Black feminist epistemology and ethics, can allow participants to “speak back” to what is already said about them in spaces of convivial self-representation.

Análisis Crítico y Complejo de los discursos periodísticos verbovisuales entre Bolivia y Chile en el contexto de la demanda por la soberanía marítima boliviana

Los medios de prensa tienen un rol determinante en la construcción, legitimación y representación de distintas realidades socioculturales, las cuales a su vez generan lineamientos institucionalizados de unas identidades nacionales sobre otras, creando relaciones desiguales en base de prejuicios y estereotipos. Los países vecinos cuentan con historias de unidad y conflictos, pero el tiempo a veces no es suficiente para cerrar viejas heridas, como ocurre con la Guerra del Pacífico (18791883). En este contexto se analizaron las noticias de los medios con mayor injerencia a nivel país: La Razón (Bolivia) y El Mercurio (Chile), donde, por medio de una herramienta metodológica de Análisis Crítico y Complejo del Discurso Verbovisual, se buscó dilucidar los procesos de construcción discursiva de cada Estadonación y confirmar cómo éstos se mantienen a través del tiempo.

Volunteering, social cohesion and race: the German Technical Relief Service

This paper contributes to the debate on whether volunteering influences social cohesion, and argues that issues of race equality should be considered in this discussion. Whilst the German government, like other European states, promotes volunteering as a way of improving social cohesion, discussions on social cohesion in Germany tend not to mention race explicitly, whilst studies on volunteering tend to neglect to explore race at all. When they do, race is simply considered a factor influencing engagement, rather than a structural issue. Employing the example of the German Technical Relief Service for civil defence, the paper explores race relations and representation in Germany, where discussions on race generally remain taboo, drawing on theories of structural racism and whiteness. The paper concludes that it cannot be unproblematically assumed that volunteering leads to social cohesion in an ethnically diverse society if racial inequalities are not addressed.

Pathological anatomy and self-portraiture

Why should an artist look to anatomical or pathological specimens as a reservoir of images with which to facilitate an articulation of his or her own artistic or personal identity? This is the starting point of a reflection on the disappearance of the artist and its transformation into a passive object. As a result, it is also a reflection into the blurring lines between subject and object. On the grounds of the work elaborated by the artist Lisa Temple-Cox and the critical look and comments made by the observer Harcourt, this paper is a first-hand attempt to understand the configuration of the self and the influence of the artistic intervention in the generation and representation of anatomical knowledge, resulting in an exploration into the intertwined processes that create both historical subjects and historical objects.

Ethos and Ideology of Knowledge Organization: Toward Precepts for and Engaged Knowledge Organization Drawing on The Arts and Crafts Movement, Critical Theory, and Žižek

Ethos is the spirit that motivates ideas and practices. When we talk casually about the ethos of a town, state, or country we are describing the fundamental or at least underlying rationale for action, as we see it. Ideology is a way of looking at things.It is the set of ideas that constitute one’s goals, expectations, and actions. In this brief essay I want to create a space where we might talk about the ethos and ideology in knowledge organization from a particular point of view; combining ideas and inspiration from the Arts and Crafts movement of the early Twentieth Century, critical theory in extant knowledge organization work, the work of Slavoj Žižek, and the work of Thich Nhat Hahn on Engaged Buddhism.I will expand more below, but we can say here and now that there are many open questions about ethos and ideology in and of knowledge organization, both its practice and products. Many of them in classification, positioned as they are around identity politics of race, gender, and other marginalized groups, ask the classificationist to be mindful of the choice of terms and relationships between terms. From this work we understand that race and gender requires special consideration, which manifests as a particular concern for the form of representation inside extant schemes. Even with these advances in our understanding there are still other categories about which we must make decisions and take action. For example, there are ethical decisions about fiduciary resource allocation, political decisions about standards adoption, and even broader zeitgeist considerations like the question of Fordist conceptions (Day, 2001; Tennis 2006) of the mechanics of description and representation present in much of today’s practice.Just as taking action in a particular way is an ethical concern, so too is avoiding a lack of action. Scholars in Knowledge Organization have also looked at the absence of what we might call right action in the context of cataloguing and classification. This leads to some problems above, and hints at larger ethical concerns of watching a subtle semantic violence go on without intervention (Bowker and Star, 2001; Bade 2006).The problem is not to act or not act, but how to act or not act in an ethical way, or at least with ethical considerations. The action advocated by an ethical consideration for knowledge organization is an engaged one, and it is here where we can take a nod from contemporary ethical theory advanced by Engaged Buddhism. In this context we can see the manifestation of fourteen precepts that guide ethical action, and warn against lack of action.

Vivencias corporais na escola : uma experiencia com professores de educação infantil e das quatro series iniciais do ensino fundamental

Universidade Estadual de Campinas . Faculdade de Educação Física