Culture and Legal Policy Punctuation in the Supreme Court's Gender Discrimination Cases

For the most part, punctuated equilibrium scholarship has ignored the legal policy change generated by the Supreme Court. In this study, I address this gap though an examination of the Court's equal protection and gender cases from the 1970s. My case study here has two aims. First, I offer an adaptation of the jurisprudential regimes framework as a device for framing and identifying legal policy punctuations. After identifying Reed v. Reed (1971) as the cut point of such a regime, I then use Reed and its progeny to illustrate the promise of culture in explaining stasis and change, specifically focusing on the concepts of cultural cognition and cultural surprise.     

Children,social capital and health: increasing the well‐being of young people in rural Wales

This paper explores the usefulness of employing the concept of social capital within a research project investigating the best ways of meeting the health and well‐being needs of young people living in rural Wales. The first part of the paper provides an overview of some of the current research exploring the relationship between social capital, health and young people. The second part provides an overview of findings from an action research project to illustrate how social capital is conceived and applied in this context. It concludes by stating that children and young people do actively generate, draw upon and negotiate their own social capital, and that this is an under‐utilised resource in terms of promoting health and well‐being.     

Collaborative Watershed Management: A View from the Grassroots

To date, research on collaborative watershed management has paid scant attention to the role of grassroots stakeholders, who are the people that actually use natural resources. This article argues cooperation from grassroots stakeholders is necessary for the success of collaborative management, and outlines three theoretical perspectives to explain cooperation. The validity of these theoretical perspectives is tested using a survey of farmer participation in the Suwannee River Partnership in Florida. The findings suggest farmers' perceptions of policy effectiveness are largely driven by economic considerations, whereas participation in collaborative management is linked to social capital.     

Strategies for Teaching Maritime Archaeology in the Twenty First Century

Maritime archaeology is a multi-faceted discipline that requires both theoretical learning and practical skills training. In the past most universities have approached the teaching of maritime archaeology as a full-time on-campus activity designed for ‘traditional’ graduate students; primarily those in their early twenties who have recently come from full-time undergraduate study and who are able to study on-campus. The needs of mature-age and other students who work and live in different places (or countries) and therefore cannot attend lectures on a regular basis (or at all) have largely been ignored. This paper provides a case study in the teaching of maritime archaeology from Australia that, in addition to ‘traditional’ on-campus teaching, includes four main components: (1) learning field methods through field schools; (2) skills training through the AIMA/NAS avocational training program; (3) distance learning topics available through CD-ROM and using the Internet; and (4) practicums, internships and fellowships. The author argues that programs to teach maritime archaeology in the twenty first century need to be flexible and to address the diverse needs of students who do not fit the ‘traditional’ model. This involves collaborative partnerships with other universities as well as government underwater cultural heritage management agencies and museums, primarily through field schools, practicums and internships.