Troubled kids? Locational disadvantage,opportunity structures and social exclusion

ABSTRACT

Young people growing up in poverty often have restricted access to out-of-school enrichment activities that are important for generating the soft skills that support post-school transitions. This paper compares young Australians’ accounts of their opportunity structures – their engagement with enrichment activities, their post-school aspirations, and their knowledge of routes to achieve them – in two suburb types – improver suburbs (close to the median on many indicators) and isolate suburbs (severely disadvantaged on most indicators). While young people in improver suburbs felt able to access facilities and networks in equally or more affluent neighbouring suburbs, young people in isolate suburbs felt excluded from neighbouring suburbs, and experienced more restricted opportunity structures than young people living in improver suburbs, even those who were themselves economically disadvantaged. The paper argues that this geographical experience of exclusion prevents many economically disadvantaged young people from accumulating knowledge and skills valued in post-school settings.     

By the soil divided: The roots of geographical variation in English social conservatism

Using English data, we show that geographical variation in measures of social conservatism in the 19th and 21st centuries is strongly associated with variation in measures of social conservatism in the 17th century. Our statistical model includes a range of 19th-century and 21st-century economic and demographic characteristics, so the inter-temporal persistence in social conservatism is not to be explained by persistence in these characteristics. The association is still present when we fit a model with instrumental variables for the measures of 17th-century social conservatism, which suggests that the association is not a consequence of persistence in unobserved heterogeneity across locations. Rather, there does appear to be some inter-generational transmission of attitudes. A great deal of attention has been paid to the volatility of the British electorate in recent years, but our results show that the continuity in the country's political geography should not be overlooked.     

Commemoration versus Vergangenheitsbewaltigung: Contextualizing Austria's Gedenkjahr 2005

This essay explores the politics of memory in post-1945 Austrianpolitical culture, focusing on the shift between the fiftiethanniversary of the Anschluss and the sixtieth anniversary ofthe end of the Second World War. Postwar Austrian society experienceda particular tension associated with the Nazi past, manifestedin communicative and cultural forms of memory. On the one hand,the support of many for the Third Reich—expressed throughactive or passive complicity—threatened to link Austriawith the perpetrator status reserved for German society. Onthe other, the Allies' Moscow Declaration (1943) created a mythof victimization by Germany that allowed Austrians to avoidconfronting difficult questions concerning the Nazi era. Consequently,discussion of Austrian involvement in National Socialism becamea taboo subject during the initial decades of the Second Republic.The 2005 commemoration is notable insofar as it marked a significantbreak with this taboo. New forms of cultural memory expressedin 2005 are examined here as the culmination of two things:first, criticism from the centre and left of the Austrian politicalspectrum that began during the Waldheim Affair of the mid-1980sand the 1988 commemoration; second, efforts by successive SocialDemocratic chancellors and certain federal party leaders, beginningin the early 1990s, to break the pervasive silence that madeVergangenheitsbewältigung difficult, and to challenge theAustrian right wing's glorification of elements of the Nazipast. This process included the novel step of acknowledgingthe Nazi skeletons in the Social Democratic Party's own cupboard.     

The consequences of internal displacement on civil war violence: Evidence from Syria

How do flows of internally displaced persons (IDPs) affect wartime violence? We argue that government and rebel forces respond to IDP flows in different ways, which condition where and when they employ violence. State responses are driven by the need to identify insurgents and their civilian supporters, and depend on how much information they have about where IDPs are coming from and where they are seeking to resettle. Rebel responses are driven by their need to monitor and control civilian movements, which leads to more violence against civilians in transit areas heavily trafficked by IDPs. Drawing on novel subnational data from Syria, we employ social network analysis to examine migration flow characteristics beyond aggregate IDP inflows and outflows. We find that the greater the local clustering of IDP flows – i.e., the less complex and diverse displacement movements are – the more pro-government combatants are able to detect IDPs’ origins and destinations, and the higher the number of civilian killings. Transit locations, meanwhile, become epicenters of rebel violence against civilians. While scholars have found that more information about civilian behavior causes combatants to employ more selective violence, our results suggest that more information about displacement prompts more collective violence from governments. The findings also indicate that governments respond to IDP flows after movement, whereas rebels respond to IDP flows during movement. This underscores the importance of focusing on how armed groups respond to displacement flows in order to better understand the consequences of population movements in wartime.     

Touchstones of archaeology

European archaeological collections record hundreds of thousands of stone artefacts from the Early Middle Ages described as whetstones. However, traces of non-ferrous metals, including precious metals preserved on a number of such artefacts. Many of the finds served in fact as touchstones – tools to test the quality of a particular metal. These artefacts are concentrated mainly in Vendel and Viking Age and Slavic coastal settlements and trade centres in the Baltic Sea basin, the coast and islands of Northwestern Europe, at Central and Eastern European fortresses and suburbia. Many finds also come from rural settings. In early medieval graves the touchstones join balance scales and weights as a sign of the buried individual’s access to precious metals. Especially the rural finds with traces of precious metal provide a strong reason for a revision of present views on the social stratification of the early medieval society in Europe. Chemical microanalysis allows identifying the composition of the alloys. Besides new perspectives on the fields of the social history and the circulation of precious metals, the method also provides new information for the field of archaeometallurgy.     

The evolving techniques of the social engineering of extraction: Introducing political (re)actions ‘from above’ in large-scale mining and energy projects

Ecological catastrophe and global inequality are pressing, yet socio-ecologically destructive natural resource extraction continues unabated. This special issue explores the strategies and tactics employed by large-scale mining and energy companies to render extraction socio-politically feasible in the face of multi-pronged opposition. Extraction, we contend, does not only need physical engineering, but requires social engineering as well. This entails shaping the behavior of people to ‘manage’ dissent and ‘manufacture’ consent. Situating the social engineering of extraction in key debates in the literature, this special issue introduction traces the evolution of its main technologies and techniques, related to colonialism, wars of decolonization, neoliberalism and the ‘green’ economy, respectively. We conclude by outlining a number of ways to advance research on the social engineering of extraction.     

Real-estate Boom,Commodification and Crises of Social Reproductive Institutions in Rural China

Based on 12 months of ethnographic, interview and archival research in a poor rural county in China, this article argues that three state policies, namely the concentration of rural educational resources in the county seat, the decision to make access to county-seat public schools conditional upon homeownership in school districts, and the (former) one-child policy, have compelled rural households to participate in the real-estate market to meet the reproductive needs of basic education and marriage. The increasing commodification of education and marriage has fuelled a local real-estate boom during the past decade. At the same time, it has put peasant-migrant households under severe economic pressure, forcing them to relocate unpaid female care labour away from the village and to become heavily indebted. These outcomes have had serious repercussions for two other reproductive institutions, leading to a breakdown in intergenerational care and financial support for the elderly, and a sharp decline in the rural birth rate. The Chinese countryside as a social space in which peasant-migrant households were able to reproduce themselves in a relatively non-commodified manner has disappeared.     

“Reckless,cavalier, dismissive,petty and vengeful”?: The impact of municipal constituency change on candidate diversity

The demographic composition of electoral districts has an important influence on the identities of candidates because they affect the political opportunity structures of ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups. The 2018 municipal election in Toronto, Canada provides a unique opportunity to examine how changes to electoral districts impacted the participation of visible minority candidates. At the end of the initial nomination period, the right-wing populist provincial government of Doug Ford reduced the number of city council wards from 47 to 25, which also affected the boundaries of school board districts. Candidates and aspirants then had the opportunity to re-register in the new constituencies. This change constitutes a natural experiment that allows us to isolate the impact of district structure on the relationship between demographics and candidate ethnicity. Using logistic and Poisson regression modeling, we compare the proportion and number of Visible Minority and White candidates before and after consolidation. Contra expectations, we did not find any effect on minority candidates, but show some evidence that consolidation reduced opportunities for Whites. We trace this unexpected finding to the geographic patterns of ethnic settlement.     

To see or to be seen… is that the question? An evaluation of palaeolithic sites’ visual presence and their role in social organization

Visibility is one of the most common features considered when analyzing site location; visual control of a territory is usually considered to be a desirable characteristic for a prehistoric settlement. However, the role that visibility could have played in the perception of sites, as a significant element of palaeolithic landscapes, has been rarely evaluated. Sites can act not only as settlements but as places for population aggregations, social interactions and symbolic activities; in this context, the relevance presence of a site within the landscape could have been an influencing factor in site location preferences. This paper focuses on the visual presence of a set of sites from Late palaeolithic Cantabria (Northern Iberian Peninsula), and evaluates how the way they were perceived could have been related to their role in the social organization of foraging communities.