Pies and essays: women writing through the British 1984–1985 coal miners' strike

During the 1984–1985 British miners' strike and in its immediate aftermath, women activists produced a series of publications involving creative writing, which sought to communicate the strike from their own perspective. The production and sale of publications were a practical activity in support of the strike and in defence of community. We argue that insofar as writing was also a means whereby the women who worked to make sense of themselves in an emergent situation for which there was no precedent, an analysis of such writing offers opportunities for a broader understanding of the strike. Writing enabled the women to affirm their class-based political loyalties while expressing the complexities and contradictions of gender relationships and roles. Writing as a reflexive act contributed to a clarification of those aspects of female lives which they valued, facilitated an expression of their emotional response to their experience of activism and enabled them to articulate a moral-political position within which they worked with ambiguity and contradiction. This article suggests that cultural texts of this type in themselves can only be properly understood in the context of structural and historical relations of power and that the context and conditions of production of writing are particularly pertinent to this process.     

Unintended Consequences in Public Policy: Persons with Psychiatric Disabilities and the Americans with Disabilities Act

This essay explores the occurrence of unintended consequences of public policy, particularly those embodied in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) towards people diagnosed with mental illness. Rights to equal opportunity under the ADA are not inalienable. Two key provisions of the ADA allow employers to abridge those rights. While these provisions sound reasonable on the surface, this paper points out how they disproportionately affect people with psychiatric disabilities. The first provision is the direct threat exclusion, which exempts employers from the requirement to provide reasonable accommodation to a person with disabilities if that person poses a significant risk to the safety of others. Employers can exclude or fire qualified applicants or employees who potentially may pose a direct threat to the health or safety of other individuals in the workplace. The second provision is that employers must only accommodate the known disabilities of an employee or applicant. While these provisions address legitimate concerns, they may be abused and they may distract employers and policymakers from other underlying problems.     

Hobbes et le Républicanisme

Hobbes criticizes the theory of mixed government without presenting this mixed government as republican. For him criticizing republicanism means criticizing the definition of freedom as the participation of citizens in the debate on matters concerning them all. We can find the main points of this criticism in theElements of law natural and politic and in theDe cive. InLeviathan Hobbes summarizes this criticism and makes it more dogmatic, while developing in a new way the idea that in all regimes there is an identity of essence in sovereignty. This idea is at variance with the republican thesis stating a difference of nature between free regimes and those that are not and makes it possible to take the Roman republic or the Athenian democracy as models.