Abbott’s ‘budget crisis’, CALD women’s loss? Service providers explore the impact of funding cuts

Women have been disproportionately affected by funding cuts to services following the 2008 global financial crisis. Using a feminist intersectional analysis of austerity measures applied to family violence (FV) services in Victoria, Australia, including 11 service provider interviews, we find that: the Australian government drew on global narratives of austerity in constructing a ‘budget crisis’, with subsequent cuts to funds addressing FV; budget cuts negatively impacted services’ abilities to address the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) women; there is a lack of qualified interpreters and multilingual services, and; there are missed opportunities to engage and support young CALD people in FV services. Policy recommendations to support FV services and their abilities to help CALD women and young people are provided.     

Freedom of information and transparency in Scotland: Disclosing persons as things and vice versa (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Contemporary ideals of democratic governance hold that public trust in the workings of public authorities is achieved through measures such as allowing free access to information. Yet 18 months participating in and observing the activities of users of Freedom of Information legislation – introduced in Scotland in 2005 – and civil servants disclosing information under it reveals that public trust and transparency do not always flow from increased access. Treating ‘transparency’, not as a known phenomenon, but as something that emerges in ethnographic observation and analysis, this article moves beyond an idea of transparency as being the simple revelation of an object by a subject, and in doing so challenges the fixed distinction between persons and things on which transparency as it is understood by Freedom of Information legislation appears to rely.     

'Our son Obama': The US presidential election in Western Kenya

Writing from the city of Kisumu located 60 kilometres from the birthplace of Barack Obama's father, the authors describe the Obama-mania gripping Kenya and follow Kenyans' debates, both light-hearted and serious, concerning Obama's kinship ties to Kenya and the expectations these raise. They argue that Kenyan's hopes and fears surrounding the US elections should be understood in the context of the contested December 2007 Kenyan elections and the violence that shook Kenyan society in their aftermath; and they trace some of the faultines of race and class that came to the surface during the hightened emotions surrounding the US election and Obama's victory.     

The interplay between school and home location and its relationship with children’s subjective well-being

ABSTRACT

The aim is to determine the extent to which children’s subjective well-being (SWB) varies according to age, gender and the fact of living in the same context as the school (urban/rural) or not, in representative samples of 8, 10 and 12-year-olds (N?=?3708) in Spain. The existence of a match between schoolchildren’s living context and that of their school was the most common situation for the participants. The results, analysed using linear regression models and analysis of variance (ANOVA) with complex samples, show that a match between home and school context is not associated with statistically different levels of SWB in the three age groups (8, 10 and 12-year-olds) or by gender. Whereas no interactions between age, gender, school context and home location contribute to explaining overall life satisfaction, some do contribute to explaining the modified version of the Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS) used here.     

Defusing Land Disputes? The Politics of Land Certification and Dispute Resolution in Burundi

There is a growing interest in localized land registration, in which user rights are acknowledged and recorded through a community-based procedure, as an alternative to centralized titling to promote secure tenure in sub-Saharan Africa. Localized land registration is expected to reduce land disputes, yet it remains unclear how it impacts disputes in practice. This is an urgent question for war-affected settings that experience sensitive land disputes. This article discusses findings from ethnographic fieldwork in Burundi on pilot projects for land certification. It identifies three ways in which certification feeds into land conflicts rather than preventing or resolving them. First, land certification represents a chance for local people to enter a new round of claim making, as those ignored or disenfranchised in earlier rounds see new opportunities. Second, it offers an avenue for institutional competition between different land-governing institutions. Third, certification provides politicians with openings to interfere in tenure relations and to expand their support base. The authors conclude that these problems are not simply a matter of inadequate policy design. Rather, there are crucial political dimensions to land conflicts and land tenure in Burundi, which means that land registration programmes run the risk of inflaming conflictive property relations in rural communities.     

Views of traditional archaeology

Gordon R. Willey, ed. Archaeological Researches in Retrospect. Cambridge: Winthrop Publishers, 1974. xix + 296 pp. Maps, figures, illustrations, and glossary. $9.95 (cloth), $5.95 (paper).

Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff. A History of American Archaeology. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1974. xix + 252 pp. Illustrations, maps, charts, bibliography, and index. $4.95 (paper).