Disability Policy and the Media: A Stealth Civil Rights Movement Bypasses the Press and Defies Conventional Wisdom

The Americans with Disabilities Act was pushed through Congress with far less attention from the media than has accompanied other major civil rights bills. This was part of a deliberate and unconventional strategy by disability rights lobbyists who believed that media portrayals of disability were so cliched that journalists would impede, not further, the public's understanding of disability rights issues. Despite the success of the strategy, there is a price to pay for having been a 'stealth' civil rights movement: Now that the law is in place, disabled people face a backlash from Americans who neither understand the ADA nor the need for civil rights protection for disabled people.     

Urban Growth in the 1990s: Is City Living Back?

The 1990s were an unusually good decade for the largest American cities and, in particular, for the cities of the Midwest. However, fundamentally urban growth in the 1990s looked extremely similar to urban growth during prior post–war decades. The growth of cities was determined by three main trends: (1) cities with strong human capital bases grew faster than cities without skills, (2) people moved to warmer, drier places, and (3) cities built around the automobile replaced cities that rely on public transportation. Although the negative impact of population density diminished slightly in the 1990s, there is no real evidence for a return to large, dense cities.     

Citizenship and Belonging in the Rural Fringe: A Case Study of a Hindu Temple in Sydney,Australia

Despite Australian multicultural policy that asserts the right of all citizens to maintain and practice their religion, formal citizenship has not guaranteed the welcome or belonging of migrant religious groups at the neighbourhood scale. This is most starkly reflected in contests over the inclusion of minority religious spaces in the Australian landscape, which increasingly take place in the rural–urban fringe of metropolitan areas. This work examines the controversy over a proposed Hindu temple in metropolitan Sydney and reveals insights into the way that rural–urban fringe space is imagined, understood and experienced by land use planners, residents and temple members. Critical discourse analysis of policy documentation along with interviews reveals that land use planners circumscribe belonging in the landscape through the use of zoning ordinances and design controls, local residents mark the boundaries of white privilege through narratives of heritage and cultural difference and temple members claim rights to citizenship based on assertions of sameness.     

The Linkage of Data Describing Overlapping Geographical Units

Abstract

This article examines advanced ages at death in a historical population in northern Sweden between 1780 and 1900. The source material used is a set of data files from the Demographic Data Base at Umeå University supplemented with the search tool Indiko. The belief that the Sami died at very old ages was tested, and life tables and values of remaining life expectancies at older ages were calculated. The information of the age at death was analysed using a model containing four levels of certainty. The analysis reveals that the Sami did not live to extreme ages. The analysis also reveals large differences between the parishes concerning extreme longevity and correctness of age at death.     

Between Large-N and Small-N Analyses: Historical Comparison of Thirty Insurgency Case Studies

Abstract

The authors study the 30 insurgencies occurring between 1978 and 2008 using four methods crossing the qualitative/quantitative divide. The four approaches are narrative, bivariate comparison, comparative qualitative analysis, and K-medoids clustering. The quantification of qualitative data allows the authors to compare more cases than they could “hold in their heads” under a traditional small-n qualitative approach, improving the quality of the overall narrative and helping to ensure that the quantitative analyses respected the nuance of the detailed case histories. Structured data-mining reduces the dimensionality of possible explanatory factors relative to the available observations to expose patterns in the data in ways more common in large-n studies. The four analytic approaches produced similar and mutually supporting findings, leading to robust conclusions.