The Friends and Family Plan: Contact with Gays and Support for Gay Rights

According to both the contact hypothesis and gay rights advocates, coming out to straight friends and family members should increase acceptance of homosexuality and support for gay rights. If lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals (LGBs) come out primarily to people they expect to be accepting, however, the repeated finding that people who know LGBs are more likely to support gay rights could be overstating the impact of coming out. Using individual‐level data from 27 national surveys, I find that similar variables predict both knowing LGBs and supporting gay rights, but in different ways. Even after controlling for those demographic, religious, and political variables—and sometimes also for beliefs about whether some people are born gay and whether homosexuality is immoral—people who know LGBs are much more likely to support gay rights. The effect holds for every issue, in every year, for every type of relationship, and for every demographic, religious, and political subgroup.     

Viewing animal bodies: truths,practical aesthetics and ethical considerability in UK livestock breeding

This paper focuses on the production of aesthetic ‘truths’ in UK livestock breeding, drawing on detailed qualitative research with breeders and breed societies. It extends emerging interest in the aesthetic in human geographical research, examining how aesthetic judgements about non-human animals depend, in part, on the agency of the animal and their inter-subjective relations with humans in specific places. Aesthetic evaluation further produces implicit judgements about animals' ethical considerability, at the same time obscuring the effects of such judgements on their framing and treatment. Aesthetic evaluation is thus related to sets of material and ethical interests. The paper develops a more-than-human reading of Foucault's biopower, which explores how truths about visual evaluations of animals become established. Two empirical perspectives explore, first, a ‘relational practical aesthetic’ for evaluating beef cattle and sheep, exploring the implications of the aesthetic framing of specific animals and, second, the tensions involved in looking at animals when different aesthetic truths conflict and when traditions of aesthetic evaluation encounter genetic modes of evaluation. The paper concludes by discussing the ethical implications of ongoing transformations of evaluative modes in livestock breeding, suggesting that shifts away from inter-subjective modes of aesthetic evaluation further diminish the ethical status of animals.     

REVIEW ESSAY: THE FRAGILITY OF CHILDHOOD: GABRIELLE ROY'S CES ENFANTS DE MA VIE

Both Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence have named L.M. Montgomery’s work— particularly her books about Emily—as childhood readings that are central to their development as writers. This essay explores how Montgomery’s three books about Emily—Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, and Emily’s Quest—provide a persisting imaginary that The Diviners by Laurence and Who Do You Think You Are? by Munro reflect.     

Statistical Network Analysis for Analyzing Policy Networks

To analyze social network data using standard statistical approaches is to risk incorrect inference. The dependencies among observations implied in a network conceptualization undermine standard assumptions of the usual general linear models. One of the most quickly expanding areas of social and policy network methodology is the development of statistical modeling approaches that can accommodate such dependent data. In this article, we review three network statistical methods commonly used in the current literature: quadratic assignment procedures, exponential random graph models (ERGMs), and stochastic actor‐oriented models. We focus most attention on ERGMs by providing an illustrative example of a model for a strategic information network within a local government. We draw inferences about the structural role played by individuals recognized as key innovators and conclude that such an approach has much to offer in analyzing the policy process.