Geographies of generation: age restrictions in international adoption

International adoption relocates minors, and only minors, from one country to another. The centrality of age to adoptive migration may prevent us from seeing the significance of generation: the prospective parent's age is also examined and evaluated for its relationship to the child's age and what this relationship will mean for the creation of a family. Because international adoption results in children crossing borders to enter new kinship formations, the assumptions under which it operates require closer geographical analysis. Generation, or the age range that separates dependents and their caretakers, is a significant but unstated motivator of international adoption policies and practices. This article argues that a normative and biologized sense of intergenerational difference is embedded in international adoption. The presence of generational ideology in national laws and international norms regarding international adoption demonstrate a broader sense in which policies situate more privileged families as acceptable and others as inadequate. I draw material for this analysis from both legal documents and documents which aim to provide interpretation of those laws, with reference to international adoptions from Peru.     

The geography of transnational adoption: kin and place in globalization

International adoption involves crossing borders; it invokes space and geography as adoptive parents imagine distant countries, as children are moved from one nation to another, and as adoptees and their families return to their countries of origin. The spatiality of belonging and identity – but also of trauma and violence – are central concerns for the people involved and to the operations of their cultural, political, and legal practice. Yet surprisingly, cultural geographers have not yet developed a conceptualization of transnational adoption that theorizes it as a constitutive aspect of geographies of migration, domestic geographies, and geography of childhood. In this issue we seek to set out an agenda for the cultural and political geographies of transnational adoption. We do so by discussing three interrelated themes: the adoption-migration nexus, geographies of relatedness, and the biopolitics of mobility.     

19世纪收继问题研究——以安徽为中心

19世纪安徽社会中收继现象较为普遍,平均14%的家庭发生收继或出继行为,来解决一些家庭的"无后"的问题.从宗族角度讲,收继可以分为族内收继和族外收继两种情形,各需履行不同的收继程序,中上层家庭以族内收继为主,下层家庭则族外收继多于族内收继.国家和宗族对收继的前提、原则和被收继人在新旧家庭中的地位做出种种规定,但制度规范与人们的实际行为间存在着相当的差异.     

The Process of Policy Innovation: Prison Sitings in Rural North Carolina

We gauge the relative impact of economics, demographics, and politics on the decisions of 79 rural North Carolina counties whether to site a prison in the period 1970–2000. The results of this model demonstrate that, contrary to the expectation that counties site prisons in response to economic distress, the demographic characteristics of each county affect the relative likelihood of a prison siting more than its economics does. The influential demographic predictors are those inextricably bound up with development options—the education levels of its citizens—and those that limit its ability to pursue controversial projects—its not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) constituencies—rather than those that measure its racial diversity. Therefore, prison siting is neither a simple story of economic determinism nor one of environmental racism. We use a proportional hazards regression to model this innovation adoption in response to the challenge to select methods that take the potential time dependence of adoptions into account. A duration model is also particularly suitable for cases such as this one for which the innovation adoption is better understood as a process than as an event.     

The adoption of culturally contentious innovations: The case of citizen oversight of police

Cultural contentiousness is defined as an attribute of innovation due to which it encounters resistance because of its incompatibility with hegemonic cultural assumptions. I argue that culturally contentious innovations are likely to be adopted when antecedents have productive symbolic force, i.e., they reveal contradictions between dominant cultural assumptions and the material outcomes of existing institutions or empower social actors to resolve such contradictions. However, antecedents with incapacitative symbolic force tend to obfuscate the above contradictions or decrease social actors’ capacity to resolve them, encouraging the adoption of less contentious innovation. Applying these arguments to citizen oversight agencies (COAs) for the police, I examine the antecedents of contentious (i.e., investigative) as opposed to less contentious (non-investigative) COAs. In support of the above argument, I find that productive antecedents (e.g., a consent decree, an increase in civil rights nonprofits) are associated with adopting investigative COAs. In contrast, incapacitative antecedents (e.g., a Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights, an increase in the violent crime rate) are associated with adopting non-investigative COAs. The findings broadly demonstrate that policy adoption scholars ought to distinguish policies in terms of cultural contentiousness and account for the symbolic force of antecedents. Further theoretical contributions are discussed.     

Looked at and looked over or: I wish I was adopted

Through collaborative narrative writing, in this article, we redeploy the sense of refugeity present in our singular narratives to co-construct a shared space for creative scholarship that becomes a feminist space to belong. Drawing on feminist scholarship and performance theory, narrative collaborations awkwardly embrace our mutual and sometimes contradictory senses of self and identity performance. The co-constructed nature of this article reflects contemporary developments in qualitative research that employ creative arts practice-led methodologies and acknowledge researcher/writers as situated gendered, sexualized, and encultured subjects within particular global and local contexts. This unconventional structure is used here to foreground the intersubjectivity and spatiality from which research and the desire to research arise, and as an experiment in tracing the lines of flight between new identities and new spaces.     

The devil in disguise: action repertoire,visual performance and collective identity of the Autonomous Nationalists

Adopting protest tactics and visual performance of the far left, many neo‐Nazis in Europe, particularly in Germany, have developed a new style. Referencing their political opponents, the far‐left Autonomous Movement, they call themselves the Autonomous Nationalists. Though this new style caused intense conflicts in the beginning, Autonomous Nationalists have gained strong influence in the neo‐Nazi movement. What drives neo‐Nazis to adopt tactics such as ‘black blocs’ and certain symbols and dress of their political enemies? Based on movement's documents, semi‐structured interviews and observing demonstrations, this article uses empirical data to identify central dimensions of the Autonomous Nationalist's action repertoire and visual performance and their impact on the neo‐Nazi movement's collective identity. The analysis of external and internal effects reveals that the shift in public appearance strengthened the movement's mobilization potential, but otherwise decreased ideological internalisation and may increase the turnover of activists.     

跨国领养与跨文化的“家”——以来华领养的美国公民为例

论文通过对跨国领养的出现及其发展与国际政治气候之间是否存在着某种相关性、美国跨国领养家庭如何建构跨文化的＂家＂等问题的分析论述,揭示了美国公民跨国领养的历时性变化的原因及其相关的国际政治大背景以及通过对美国公民来华领养及其连带形成的社会文化现象。认为某种世界性的关怀与视野,已经是美国中产阶级民众价值观中不可或缺的部分;被美国人所领养的数目庞大的中国婴孩,他们当中的绝大部分人在美国中产阶级或者中产阶级以上阶层的家庭中生活,他们将有着与其他的美国华人不同的社会资源与背景;他们对中国和中国社会文化的理解甚至可能会直接在两国关系上发挥影响,日后必将在美国的华人社区中占有一席之地。     

Voluntary Approaches to Environmental Problems: Exploring the Rise of Nontraditional Public Policy

Government reliance on voluntary programs represents a significant shift in public policy: moving from command and control regulations to market based mechanisms. This article explores the determinants of Voluntary Remediation Programs (VRPs) in the American States. During the 1980s and 1990s, 44 states adopted VRPs to facilitate remediation of existing hazardous waste sites. Relying on diffusion of innovation theory, I develop a model of state policy adoption that explores the influence of internal state political and economic factors, as well as testing the influence of regional and top‐down diffusion forces. I utilize a discrete‐time event history approach to test this model. The results indicate that state policymaking is responsive to interest group pressure and the pace of cleanup at hazardous waste sites. Additionally, state policymaking is consistently influenced by the actions of surrounding state governments; the probability of adopting a voluntary program increases if surrounding states have already developed these policies.     

The Determinants of Policy Introduction and Bill Adoption: Examining Minimum Wage Increases in the American States, 1997–2006

Faced with long intervals between federal minimum wage increases in recent years, state legislatures are increasingly likely to take action. Motivated by the relative dearth of empirical work on minimum wages in the American states, this article considered various explanations to determine which factors are associated with legislative efforts to pass wage increases. Taking seriously the view that disagreements over the effects of minimum wage increases enhances the influence of political factors, we drew on the policy adoption and diffusion literature to examine how internal determinants (political and economic variables) and regional diffusion pressures relate to both the introduction and adoption of minimum wage legislation in the American states in the years between the last two federal minimum wage increases (1997–2006). Employing negative binomial regression to analyze annual bill introductions, we found that a number of political variables are related to the consideration of minimum wage increases. However, using event history analysis to examine annual adoptions of minimum wage increases, we found few of the same variables matter. We concluded with a discussion of the empirical results within the context of the broader policy literature and cautioned future scholars to consider seriously whether political factors exert distinct influences at different stages of the policy process.