Constructing Policy Narratives in 140 Characters or Less: The Case of Gun Policy Organizations

This study examines interest groups’ framing of gun policy issues via an analysis of nearly 10,000 tweets by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the National Rifle Association spanning from 2009 to 2014. Utilizing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), I investigate the extent to which interest groups use social media to construct policy narratives. This research shows that much can be conveyed in 140 characters; both gun control and gun rights organizations used Twitter to identify victims, blame “villains,” commend “heroes,” and offer policy solutions. This research sheds light on the politics of gun control by revealing trends over time in groups’ framing and suggests refinements for hypotheses of the NPF. Finally, this work underscores the importance of social media for public policy scholarship.     

Disturbing the data: looking into gender and family size matters with US Evangelical homeschoolers

This qualitative study draws on the theory of feminist physicist Karen Barad to examine how gender matters in Evangelical homeschooling families of various sizes, with an emphasis on large families. The two-phase data collection includes interviews with 18 participants and observations of several participants over one year. We use a Baradian analytic process called diffractive analysis to read the messy borders between the discursive and material for mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, and elements of homeschooling environments. We find that materiality intra-acted with gender in complex and sometimes surprising ways but that gendered possibilities in homeschooling are steeped in the terrains of politics, history, culture, economics, and environment. In addition, we see possibilities for using this method of analysis as a way to more carefully and complexly read data in the micro.     

Exploring the daily geographies of diverse men caregiving for family members with multiple chronic conditions

Within Canada, it has been estimated that almost half of all family, also known as informal, caregivers are now men. However, the contributions and experiences of these caregiver men have received relatively little attention, particularly from geographies of care and caregiving researchers. This analysis hopes to shed light on the unique, yet diverse, experiences of men caregiving for persons with multiple chronic conditions in Canada. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nineteen men caregivers in two provinces of Canada, this analysis aims to explore how social and physical axes of difference shape men’s daily lived geographies when providing care. Our thematic findings reveal that caregiving is experienced by participants at the three scalar levels of the body, the home and the community. Our intersectional analysis reveals that at each scalar level, being a man was not the only variable shaping caregiving experiences. Rather, it was also age, physical capacity, culture, socio-economic status, marital status, housing status, social connectedness, relationship to the care recipient and care recipients’ physical and mental capacity that shaped experiences and meanings of place during the caregiving process. Accounting for this diversity at each scale, our findings point to the unique stresses and challenges experienced. We conclude by emphasizing the significance in acknowledging the diverse challenges that exist for all caregivers in order to inform comprehensive and inclusive social policy that ultimately will produce equitable caregiver supports.     

Epistemological Ignorances and Fighting for the Disappeared: Lessons from Mexico

Social justice struggles across the Americas have, over the last half century, transformed the urban areas of this region into international staging grounds for protesting the global devastation wrought by capitalist exploitation, state terror and social hatred. This paper maintains that there is much to learn for struggles against this triangulation in other parts of the world. In particular, through a discussion of how contemporary activism in Mexico against feminicidio, drug wars and brutal repression draws from a long legacy of protest across the Americas, I seek to illustrate the relevance for other places as people fight a cruel modernity that evolves through terror, profit and hatred. Critical geography has long contributed to exposing these connections and can still deepen its commitments to mapping the landscapes of the growing populations of disappeared and marginalized peoples in Mexico and elsewhere.     

Feelings of distance and proximity: exploring the emotional geographies of men caregiving for family members with multiple chronic conditions

Care exchanges are imbued with emotion, yet few geography of caregiving researchers have explored how emotions shape such experiences. Furthermore, the emotions of caregiver men have been largely overlooked. As such, this secondary analysis aims to geographically explore the emotion discourse of a diverse group of men caregiving for family members with multiple chronic conditions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nineteen men caregivers in Canada, our thematic findings reveal that the men’s discourse portrayed emotions experienced relationally at three levels: Between the caregivers and their own selves, others and the wider community. It was also found that the men commonly expressed their emotional experiences using geographic notions of distance (e.g. feeling far, isolated) and proximity (e.g. feeling close, connected) and that these emotions were further complicated by the participants’ diversity or situated ‘place-in-the-world’. Overall, our findings demonstrate the importance of emotional geographies in caregiver men’s lived realities and how they move between distance and proximity in order to manage their emotions as caregivers. By considering caregiver diversity and the role emotions play in shaping caregiver experiences, programs, services and best practice can become better informed on ways to enhance the provision of more context sensitive and equitable caregiver support.     

The Expansion of Emergency Powers: Social Conflict and the Military in Indonesia

The exercise of emergency powers is always controversial. This article identifies the expansion of the type and scope of emergency powers through legislative reform. It does so by examining the Indonesian Law on Social Conflict 2012, which allows a state of social conflict to be declared at the national, regional or local level in response to social conflict, such as conflict between religious or ethnic communities. The deliberate choice of the term “state of social conflict”, rather than “state of emergency”, is an attempt to obscure the nature of these powers. Analysis of these powers and the debate that has ensued suggests that the law expands the types of situation in which powers usually only reserved for an emergency are used, and by delegating this power to local authorities, the law in effect amounts to the expansion of emergency powers. I suggest that this should lead to renewed focus on meaningful limits and checks on the exercise of power during times of emergency.     

Reflections on the Pedagogy of Archaeological Field Schools within Indigenous Community Archaeology Programmes in Australia

In this paper we investigate the pedagogy of archaeological field schools. Specifically, we explore the combination of tertiary level field schools and Indigenous community (or community-based) archaeology. Using a detailed case study of a rock art field school in Arnhem Land, Australia, we explore the processes and outcomes of combining archaeological field training with the ideas and methods of community archaeology. We discuss the relationship and unique challenges faced by such community archaeology field schools, particularly that of balancing the priorities of competing stakeholders. Our discussion illustrates the complexities of training students to work in an environment where cultural belief systems are still strongly linked to sites and landscapes. While the challenges are numerous, the outcomes, particularly for students, provide an unparalleled educational experience, one that cannot be obtained in any other learning format.     

Longing for Completion: toward an Aesthetics of Work in Suau

Aesthetics is a relatively recent ‘discovery’ for anthropologists, and on the whole has been limited to analyses of art and other forms of material culture. This article asks whether aesthetics might not also be applied to ‘cultural images’, or the forms in which people imagine their relationships to be made manifest. I take as my example gendered working relationships in the Suau region of Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. In Suau the work of men and women is contingent upon, and assessed according to, values which appear at the juncture of particular relational configurations. Work is in fact the medium through which these relationships are made visible and ‘real’ to those who witness it. The forms taken by work refer to a morally freighted domain of values and interpretations, and the appropriate performance of work thus maintains an image of sociality as it is ideally conceived.