Independent Child Migration and Education in Ghana

Drawing on interviews with young migrants who have moved from rural, farming households in northeastern Ghana to rural and urban households in central and southern Ghana, this article explores the inter‐connections between children's migration and children's access to formal and non‐formal education. In contrast to the positive light in which education is usually presented, the findings of the research suggest a more ambiguous and complex picture, and illuminate both positive and negative aspects of the linkages between education and children's independent migration.     

Questions about Migration in the Program of the 1970 Census

The formulation of the questions about migration in the proposed 1970 census is discussed. The original formulation asked for the place of residence at the time of the 1959 census. The author recommends, instead, a question eliciting the length of residence in the particular place and, if less than one year, the place of previous residence. The dispute was ultimately resolved by a compromise formulation that would elicit the previous place of residence if the person moved within the previous two years. A question about the reason for the migration was also added.     

Rural–Urban Migration and Gender Disparities in Child Healthcare in China and India

This article assesses the impact of rural–urban migration on gender disparities in children's access to healthcare in China and India. Much research has shown widespread discrimination against girl children in both countries, including in health investments, contributing to the well‐known problem of Asia's ‘missing’ women. Much less clear is the impact of the massive rural–urban migration now occurring in China and India on discrimination against daughters. Migration is usually thought to have a positive effect on child health, because of improved access to healthcare facilities, but this is not necessarily equally beneficial for both sons and daughters. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork with rural migrant families in Shenzhen (China) and Mumbai (India), this article argues that where migration improves access to healthcare, it may increase rather than decrease the gender gap in treatment of child illness in the short term, as resources are concentrated on the treatment of sons. Furthermore, it is not the case that rural–urban migration necessarily leads to better access to healthcare even for sons: some forms of migration may actually have an overall negative effect on child health outcomes. For these two reasons, development strategies focusing on large‐scale rural–urban migration should not be seen as a short‐term solution to problems of gender inequity in child health.     

Catholic Child Migration Schemes from the United Kingdom to Australia: Systemic Failures and Religious Legitimation

Between 1938 and 1956, an estimated 1,147 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia through child migration initiatives delivered by Catholic organisations. Whilst experiences of child migrants varied, there has been a growing public recognition over the past thirty years of the trauma experienced by many. Although the suffering of child migrants occurred in the context of wider policy failures, this article argues that there was a particular pattern of systemic failures characteristic of these Catholic schemes. After providing an overview of the complex organisational structure through which Catholic child migration operated, the article identifies six systemic failures in this work relating both to organisational processes and the institutional conditions to which child migrants were sent. It goes on to argue that these occurred in a framework of religious legitimation which emphasised the unique role of the church as a mediator of salvation, the need to safeguard children's faith, the child as a member of a corporate body more than as an individual and the relative moral authority of the church over secular institutions. Within this framework, these systemic failures were either unrecognised or seen as tolerable in the context of wider organisational and theological priorities.     

Historicising Agency

Why has ‘agency’ been such a tenacious concept in historical scholarship on women and gender, and what have been the consequences on this tenacity? This essay tackles these questions and proposes, through a brief examination of the history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond, how agency might be pushed in more surprising, more analytically productive directions. Too often agency slips from being a conceptual tool or starting point to a concluding argument. For example, in my subfield of African women's and gender history, statements like ‘African women had agency’ can stand as the impoverished punch lines of empirically rich studies. Consideration of Walter Johnson's 2003 essay ‘On Agency’ highlights the intellectual and political imperatives of 1970s Marxist and feminist social history that placed agency at centre stage. This essay examines why, more than a decade after Johnson's critique, agency endures as a ‘safety’ argument for reasons related to representational politics, research methodologies and the circumscribed imagination of intellectual gatekeepers. It argues that we should move beyond agency as argument by attending to the multiple concerns and desires – some intentional, others not – that animate human actions, including contentious gendered practices, and by examining how different historical actors have themselves understood agency. Agency has a history. By acknowledging and tracing that history, we will be better able to discern the usefulness and limits of agency for our own analyses.     

Disaggregate Migration Behavior and the Volume of Interregional Migration

Nested multinomial logit models are used to investigate migration behavior during the 1971–74 period for a large sample of the population of Ecuador. The nested form of the model makes it possible to test hypotheses about the importance of destination characteristics in conditioning the odds for out-migration. Our empirical results indicate that the odds for migration from each origin are conditioned by the expected utilities of the available set of destinations, as well as characteristics of the origins and the personal characteristics of potential migrants. The association between destination characteristics and the frequency of out-migration allows the total volumes of migration to be adjusted to interregional differences in place-specific utilities.     

巴黎通信社始末

论文对巴黎通信社的创立及其运作情况进行了考述。巴黎通信社适逢1919年巴黎和会的召开应运诞生。它最先发回了中国代表团在山东问题上交涉失败的消息,成为引发五四运动的源头之一。巴黎和会结束后,它继续向国内媒体供稿,注重介绍欧洲社会主义运动和苏俄现状,对留法勤工俭学运动也作了持续的报道。少年中国学会曾计划在巴黎通信社的基础上建立一个国际通讯网,但因条件不足而未能实现。     

Litigating Agency Change

A study of Forest Service-related litigation and administrative appeals was undertaken to examine their potential roles in effecting change within the Forest Service. The frequency of federal lawsuit decisions involving the Forest Service increased markedly between 1971 and 1993, indicating a dramatic increase in the use of litigation as a tool to force change within the agency, particularly in the Ninth Circuit. Administrative appeals followed a similar increasing trend. An examination of the instigators and purposes of lawsuits found that litigation is used most frequently by environmentalists and most often to block commodity production activities by the agency. Although the agency wins the majority of suits in which it is involved, litigants who initiated lawsuits to stop commodity production activities had higher success rates than litigants seeking to challenge additional environmental measures or to promote commodity production by the agency. A qualitative examination of five National Forest Management Act lawsuit case studies concluded that when litigants are successful in legal challenges against the agency, the court decision often results in substantive on-the-ground changes in management, thereby providing an incentive for additional use of litigation as a means to alter agency actions. These results indicate that the courts and administrative appeals process likely have been significant factors in catalyzing change within the Forest Service.     

Power and Agency in Antebellum Slavery

This essay synthesizes conclusions about the agency of enslaved people drawn from three books by William Dusinberre: Them Dark Days; Slavemaster President; and Strategies for Survival.     

The Pattern of Migration With Variable Migration Cost

In this paper the role of migrant networks in determining patterns of out-migration is examined. Conditions under which migration equilibrium may permit multiple steady states are identified. The analysis discusses instances where migration generates its own demand and explains differences in migration propensities across potential sources of out-migration.     

Agency Characteristics and the Use of Executive Orders

Past scholarship has offered varying explanations for why presidents choose to use executive orders. However, to this point, much of what we know of unilateral powers does not adequately address the role the bureaucracy plays in the president's decision. This research seeks to account for bureaucratic factors as a strategic presidential consideration in the employment of such directives. I classify executive orders from 1989–2012 based on which agency or agencies they apply to, and consider the importance of various characteristics (e.g. agency ideology, level of centralization, politicization, etc.) in determining which organs of the bureaucracy presidents will direct executive orders to generally. The results provide evidence that the White House directs fewer executive orders to agencies that have a politically independent leadership structure, and this result holds across a variety of measures judging an order's impact. The results demonstrate that the type of directive is crucial in determining a president's strategic decision to use executive orders, in line with previous research, and that agency centralization is one crucial component of this strategic calculation.     

Ohitorisama,Singlehood and Agency in Japan

Abstract:

Postwar Japanese society has experienced significant demographic shifts. Of particular note are trends in marriage delay, increased divorce, increased rates of lifelong singlehood and an increased proportion of life spent unmarried. In this context, singlehood is increasingly experienced by women, for at least some period in their adult lives. Nonetheless, while greater numbers of Japanese are living as singles for a greater portion of their lives, marriage and childbearing remain key markers of contemporary Japanese womanhood. Living outside marriage – as a single, divorced or widowed person – suggests divergence from the ideal, even if it is just an unavoidable temporary state. This paper explores singlehood as a contested space of ideals and practices, and presents the notion of ohitorisama as one model of contemporary female singlehood.     

Agency in the Discursive Condition

This article claims that postmodernity necessarily, and perhaps opportunely, undermines the bases upon which political democracy traditionally has rested; and that therefore some significant work must be done in order to redefine, restore, or otherwise reconfigure democratic values and institutions for a changed cultural condition. This situation presents the opportunity to explore the new options, positive openings, and discursive opportunities that postmodernity presents for political practice; for this the problem of agency provides a focal issue.
The practices of postmodernity, taken together, represent substantial challenges, not just to this or that cherished habit, but to modernity itself and all its corollaries, including its inventions of objectivity, of "the individual" (miserable treasure), and of all the related values (project, capital, consensus and, above all, neutrality) which still underwrite so much of what we do as citizens, consumers, and professionals not to mention as more private persons, parents, and partners. Fortunately, postmodernity does not demolish all our most cherished beliefs, values, and practices; but it does require recognition of how those beliefs, values, and practices actually function and of what alternatives they suppress.