A Model of Lottery Participation

With the spread of state–sponsored lotteries to all but 17 states, it is important to understand the circumstances and perspectives of those who contribute to lottery revenues. A multivariate model of percent of income spent on lottery tickets indicates that participation is a declining function of income and education, and that it is higher among black, male, and older respondents. In addition, participation is affected by the social context of the respondent and the respondent's attitudes regarding the lottery as enjoyable and an escape. Attitudes favorable to lottery play are concentrated disproportionately among less advantaged groups, particularly the least educated.     

A Unique Event in Iran–Soviet Economic Relations: The 1935 Iranian Trade Delegation to the USSR

The Iranian trade delegation’s visit to the USSR in April–May 1935 was an event of global significance, underscored by its extensive coverage in the international press. Marking the culmination of a new turn in the Soviet Union’s policy approaches towards Iran with respect to bilateral economic relations, this event is also considered in view of earlier incidents involving Iranian merchants who had boycotted Soviet trade organizations. Along with these political developments, the perspectives of Iranian government officials on foreign trade and industrialization are analyzed within the context of the increasing expansion, centralization, and bureaucratization of Iran’s national economy during the 1930s.     

Migrant mothers and the geographies of belonging

Much academic research on migrant mothers focuses on mothers who are separated from their children, often through their integration into global care chains, or on mothers within the context of family migration. This paper argues that co-resident migrant mothers' experiences provide an important window on the complexities of the migration experience. Using a specific case study of Ireland, and drawing from a broader longitudinal research project that focuses on recent migrants, the paper explores migrant mothers' understandings and experiences of belonging and not-belonging. We argue that structural obstacles and cultural understanding of care actively conspire to undermine migrant mothers' potential to develop place-belongingness. Interviewees' discussions of their status as full-time mothers were often framed through images of ideal motherhood, but equally highlighted how the absence of affordable childcare and family members isolates them and prevents them from creating a sense of belonging outside of the process of mothering and the home.     

Beyond ‘Crisis’ in Understanding Gender Transformation

Since the late 1980s, historians have described certain eras as marked by ‘crisis’ in the production of gender norms. At the outset, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ proved useful for understanding changes in normative cultural systems. The rhetorical trope of crisis distinguished key turning points in the construction of gender and helped to shape a coherent narrative centred on moments of breakdown and reconstruction. Unfortunately, however, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ has now outlived its usefulness; it has lost its analytic purchase. This article reviews the notion in modern, American and European historiography, then critiques its usefulness as an analytic concept. ‘Gender crisis’ has been overworked to the point of semantic collapse. It has been so reified as to foreshorten analysis, and it conceptualises masculinity as a fixed set of essentialised norms. Finally, ‘gender crisis’ describes subjectivity and its relation to normative systems in overly binary and mechanistic terms. Using the case study of postwar French masculinity, the author proposes the alternative concept of ‘gender damage’ as a way to understand periods of transformation in gender. The term ‘gender damage’ moves beyond a mechanistic notion of interaction with normative systems in order to incorporate such emotions as frustration, humiliation and confusion in our thinking of human subjectivity. In addition, the term forces us to specify exactly which gender norms are being reconfigured in some way. ‘Damage’ is by nature specific and local because it does not totalise catastrophe in the same way as does ‘crisis’.