No need to hear your voice,when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself…’ Discourses on Knowledge and Power in the !Khuiseb Delta on the Namib Coast, 1780–2016 CE

Indigenous pastoralists at Walvis Bay on the Namib Desert coast were drawn into global commerce at the end of the eighteenth century. A hundred years later, they were impoverished and peripheral to colonial settlement, but their resilience and traditional reliance on the endemic !nara melon gave them a unique cultural identity and a way into the informal domestic market. Subaltern and subservient in the past, the Topnaar today are creating a niche in the modern Namibian economy. I present a background historical archaeology and some of the challenges facing the Topnaar through the subjective voices of a number of historical and current stakeholders. There may be parallels between the story of the Topnaar in the Namib and the archaeology of indigenous communities in Australia, the Americas and elsewhere in the world.     

Police unions and use-of-force reforms in American cities

Following the murder of George Floyd, there was widespread debate about the policies that govern the use of force by police, but municipal leaders suggested that police unions kept many of the proposed changes from being adopted. Although there is anecdotal and scholarly evidence that unions frequently oppose policing reform, the limited literature in this area actually offers somewhat mixed conclusions about the relationship between union strength and the success of previous reform efforts. In this study, we draw on Halpin's theory of interest groups as politically adaptive organizations to develop expectations about the behavior of police unions in police governance subsystems. We hypothesize that union attempts to influence policy will correlate positively with reform adoption when the political environment is conducive to victory on that front or makes the cost of opposition too high and negatively when the opposite conditions hold. Analyses of the impact of union campaign contributions on the adoption of use-of-force policies in the 100 largest U.S. cities demonstrate that the nature and direction of union influence are moderated by the political climate of the jurisdiction in which they operate.     

Birthing modernity: spatial discourses of cesarean birth in São Paulo,Brazil

In this article, we explore the ways that spatial discourses inform women’s birth experiences, focusing in particular on urban Brazilian women’s experience of caesarean section. In particular, we draw on interviews conducted in São Paulo with 22 women and five doctors in order to analyse the ways the discourses of modernity, development and nationalism are drawn on and themselves constituted in the way that women narrate their birth experiences. We also explore the meanings that are given to these terms in women’s narrations in order to address the cultural specificity of the way that these discourses play out in the Brazilian context. We argue that spatial referents concretize discourses of modernity, and are employed in mothers’ and doctors’ birth narratives in order to give meaning to birth experiences. In particular, we find that these discourses provide a means of interpreting birth experiences in a positive way and providing spatialized subject positions which confer status and value to both people and places. In exploring these themes, we seek to further understandings of the ways that narratives of place help to frame and give meaning to women’s reproductive lives.     

The global,the ethnic and the gendered war: women and rape in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

The purpose of this study was to illuminate the perspectives of women who experienced sexual violence perpetrated in the warscapes of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Civilians are targeted for rape, loot and pillage yielding deleterious effects on the social fabric and the sustenance the community provides. The article is based on 11 qualitative semistructured interviews and 4 written narratives from women of reproductive age, recruited from organizations providing support post-sexual violation. The study departs from a larger ethnographic project investigating the phenomenon of war-rape. Thematic analysis guided the analysis through the theoretical lenses of structural violence and intersectionality. The women expressed total insecurity and a multitude of losses from bodily integrity, health, loss of family, life course possibilities, livelihoods and a sense of place; a profound dispossession of identity and marginalization. Pregnancies resulting from rape reinforced stigma and burdened the survivor with raising a stigmatized child on the margins of society. Perpetrators of rape were mostly identified as Interhamwe (Rwandan Hutus rebels) who entered Congo after the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Their goal, according to the women, was to spread HIV and impregnate Congolese women, thereby destroying families, communities and society. The women survivors of war-rape described experiences of profound loss in this conflict which has global, ethnic and gendered dimensions. Congo's conflict thus requires critical reflection on how local wars and subsequent human suffering are situated in a matrix of globalization processes, enabled by transnational actors and embedded in structural violence.     

Exploring The Basis For Parental Choice in Public Education

From the perspective of public choice theory, this article explores the relationship between student performance and certain aspects of school organization and operation. Employing multiple regression and analysis of variance techniques, we found that variation in comprehensive student assessment test scores can be explained best by variables such as income, district size, and the extent of classroom crowding. Student performance was lowest in the largest districts. Student performance tended to be better in those school districts with relatively higher incomes, fewer schools, and a lower proportion of oversized classes. These findings confirm the utility of readily available information about public schools as a basis for parental choice and lend support to public choice criticism of large, centralized, educational organizations.     

Gustave Dax and his fight for recognition: an overlooked chapter in the early history of cerebral dominance

The year 1865 was revolutionary in neuroscience. In this year, three papers were published on the topic of cerebral dominance for speech. These papers were authored by Paul Broca, Marc Dax, and Gustave Dax, and they contributed to a priority debate that cannot be easily resolved. Gustave Dax claimed that his long dead father had written a memoir and presented it orally in Montpellier in 1836, thus making him the first person to write about cerebral dominance. He also claimed that he was the second person to write on the subject, the first to support his father's claims, and the first to try to localize the center for speech in just one part the left hemisphere, the middle (temporal) lobe. Paul Broca, however, was now getting much of the credit for these discoveries. To set the record straight, Gustave published several letters. This paper presents translations of Gustave's letters of 1866, 1875, and 1877, as well as the historical note written by Raymond Caizergues in 1879, and recreates the events that triggered the younger Dax's anger.