bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The College's role in future medical regulation
Authors: Taylor Irving , Clark Dave
Published: January 2007

In July 2006 the chief medical officer (CMO) for England, Sir Liam Donaldson, published his report on the future of medical professional regulation, Good doctors, safer patients. In light of this report, 2007 is likely to mark the start of a process of long-expected change in the regulation of the medical profession. A statement from the government is anticipated shortly, which will set out how they plan to act on the recommendations set out in Good doctors, safer patients.
How would you define 'a good dentist'?
Authors: Pocock Ian
Published: January 2007

Regulation of the healthcare professions has been under scrutiny with the publication of two interrelated reports: Good doctors, safer patients and The Regulation of the Non-Medical Healthcare Professions. The first, a report by the chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, provides a fundamental review of medical regulation in the wake of the Shipman inquiry and other cases which have led to public concern, such as the Bristol Royal Infirmary paediatric surgery case. The second provides a parallel assessment of the regulation of non-medical healthcare professionals.
Current issues on CCHDS
Authors: Altman Keith
Published: January 2007

The Central Committee for Hospital Dental Services (CCHDS) of the British Dental Association (BDA) represents all hospital-based dentists in the UK, including oral and maxillofacial surgeons. CCHDS deals with many matters relevant to hospital dentists. However, the current issues of concern to it are:

> regulation of dental professionals,

> Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), and

> staff and associate specialist (SAS) contract negotiations.
Launching the Specialist Library for Surgery, Theatres and Anaesthesia
Authors: Homer Kate , Bishop Tom
Published: January 2007

On Wednesday 6 December 2006 the National Library for Health (NLH) Specialist Library for Surgery, Theatres and Anaesthesia (http://www.library.nhs.uk/theatres/) celebrated a successful five-month pilot scheme, with an official launch at the new quarters of the Royal College of Anaesthetists (RCoA) in Churchill House, Red Lion Square (London). The event was the culmination of many months of planning and iterative improvements in the design and content of the library, and provided an excellent opportunity for theatre staff from different backgrounds to meet and share ideas.
First College member conquers Everest
Authors: Towell Elaine
Published: January 2007

Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay were first in 1953. Since then, over 2,500 people have followed in their footsteps and on 21 May 2006, Andrew Sutherland became the first British surgeon to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Travelling as the team doctor, Mr Sutherland was part of the EVERESTMAX expedition who recently completed the highest climb on earth, commencing at the Dead Sea in Jordan and ending at the summit of Mount Everest. Mr Sutherland joined the expedition at Everest base camp as the team prepared for their ascent of the challenging north-east ridge.
Microsurgery training courses in Singapore
Authors: Power Dominic , Tan Simon
Published: January 2007

Microsurgical training is essential for those embarking on a career in plastic surgery, maxillofacial surgery or hand surgery. Training courses in the UK are generally oversubscribed with long waiting lists and course fees are now in excess of £1,000 for a five-day basic microsurgery training course. With our meagre study-leave budgets already stretched beyond breaking point, we decided to look for cheaper alternatives. A Singaporean colleague recommended the department of hand and reconstructive microsurgery at the National University Hospital (NUH), Singapore.
NEW START: the UK SLNB training programme – a progress report
Authors: MacNeill Fiona
Published: January 2007

The NEW START sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) training programme, a two-year collaborative project led by the College's Raven Department of Education and Cardiff University, was launched in October 2004. We are now able to provide a preliminary report on this unique multi-professional national surgical training programme.
Africa Revisited
Authors: Ribeiro Bernard
Published: January 2007

Lord Crisp, in his new role as the prime minister's special health adviser, visited Ethiopia among other countries in Africa to assess their healthcare needs. I met to brief him on the College's role in education and training, which is led by the international office in collaboration with the specialist associations (see previous Bulletin articles: April 2006, page 114; June 2006, page 202; and November 2006, page 350). I informed him that we are keen to establish a register of surgeons who would be prepared to work in developing countries to support local training programmes. He asked if we had any strategies for supporting those patients in the poor rural areas who are unable to access care in the cities.
‘Evidence’ and equality in Northern Ireland
Authors: Osborne R.D.
Published: January 2007

English

Policy intervention to secure greater equality between Protestants and Catholics in the Northern Ireland labour market is now 30 years old. In its most recent formulation fair employment policy has involved affirmative action incorporating targets and timetables. This article examines how fair employment has been operationalised, with its emphasis on ‘evidence’. In contrast to this outcome-oriented approach, the more recent ‘mainstreaming equality’ provisions of the 1998 Northern Ireland Act emphasise process issues in policy making. The article concludes by suggesting that the Northern Ireland experience may offer lessons for elsewhere.
From evidence to practice: addressing health inequalities through Sure Start
Authors: Halliday Joyce , Asthana Sheena
Published: January 2007

English

Tackling health inequalities has become a key policy objective in the UK in recent years, with inequalities in early life accorded strategic importance. The Sure Start programme has been central to this strategy. Over time, however, the early recognition given to the evidence base and the interconnected nature of social problems has given way to a more targeted approach, arguably marginalising those aspects that have been key to success. The aim of this article is to explore and explain this shift in focus and to assess the implications for the health inequalities agenda.
The ethics of policy research
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: January 2007

English

Codes of ethics governing research in social science have tended to focus on the rights of participants in research. This focus is too narrow to be an effective guide for ethical policy research. Some typical problems concern the development of organisational research, research in the public domain, and conflicts between the rights of participants and others. Policy research needs to be guided by standards related to professional practice in policy, public accountability and general principles related to the promotion of welfare.
The social construction of the cost of mental illness
Authors: Wolff Nancy
Published: January 2007

English

Economists have given little attention to the social construction of illness and how it undergirds cost-of-illness estimates. Social construction captures the prevailing conceptions of normative behaviour. This article focuses on three of the most influential conceptions: the stigmatisation of mental illness and those who have a mental illness; the punitive attitudes that society holds towards those whose behaviour is deemed deviant; and the linkage of mental illness with productivity. The cost of mental illness is a product of the social norms embedded in the socialisation of the illness and the science underpinning the estimate.
Commissioning research that is used: the experience of the NHS Service Delivery and Organisation Research and Development Programme
Authors: Allen Pauline , Peckham Stephen , Anderson Stuart , Goodwin Nick
Published: January 2007

English

This article discusses the experiences of the NHS Service Delivery and Organisation Research and Development Programme (the SDO) in transferring knowledge from research into practice. In the context of relevant theories, four main difficulties in achieving knowledge transfer are described and two modes of knowledge production are uncovered: one being discipline based, and the other valuing research for its usefulness. In attempting to hold a balance between the two modes, the article shows how the SDO has dealt with the difficulties in knowledge transfer and concludes that a key to successful knowledge transfer is to achieve significant interaction between decision makers and research commissioners at the earliest possible stage.
Evaluating the impact of patient and public involvement initiatives on UK health services: a systematic review
Authors: Daykin Norma , Evans David , Petsoulas Christina , Sayers Adrian
Published: January 2007

English

This article reports on a systematic review of the patient and public involvement (PPI) literature in the UK that was undertaken in 2005 to support an evaluation of the Patient Advice and Liaison Services (PALS) in England. The general PPI literature has been extensively reviewed; here we focus on the relatively small empirically based evaluation literature. The research adopts the framework of realistic evaluation, which identifies contexts, mechanisms and outcomes that lead to favourable and unfavourable outcomes. The question guiding the review is therefore: ‘What context and mechanism factors can be identified from empirical research that will lead to successful PPI outcomes?’.
Designing a social experiment for the UK: how it was done and some lessons learned
Authors: Greenberg David , Poole Lindsey
Published: January 2007

English

The UK's Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) Demonstration is currently evaluating a new strategy for job retention and advancement for disadvantaged workers. This article focuses on the ERA design phase and lessons from that effort. The design phase had a number of unusual features: the location of the core project team performing the design work at the Cabinet Office, rather than at the department initiating the project or the department implementing it; the multidisciplinary core project team; the use of external, including US, consultants; the use of random assignment; and the integration of the evaluation design into the programme design.
Is Psychoanalysis a Poetics of the Body?
Authors: Hoffman Anne Golomb
Published: January 2007

This essay locates writing and literary experience on a spectrum of human activities that engage not only language and text, but also unconscious fantasies of the body. It explores possible contexts in psychoanalytic and literary theory for understanding a reader's experience of textuality in relation to experiences and fantasies of the infantile body. Using Freud's own dream analyses and his work with hysteria, in relation to the theory of infantile sexuality, the essay examines the fluid interchanges between subject and object, text and body that form part of both analytic and literary experience. To illustrate more fully the intersection between psychoanalytic and literary experience, the essay concludes with some thoughts as to the place of the body in the diaries of Alice James and in the late fiction of her novelist brother, Henry James.
Mark Twain's Deformed Conscience
Authors: Kaufman Will
Published: January 2007

This paper offers a Kleinian analysis of Mark Twain's hostile depictions of the human conscience. Following a brief, initial consideration of such writings as Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee, and What Is Man?, the paper focuses on the 1876 short story, "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," a fictionalized adventure in paranoia and manic defense against a persecutory conscience. A close reading establishes that while Twain's narrator displays all the paranoid-schizoid "hallmarks" as described by Melanie Klein (delusional omnipotence, splitting, paranoia, etc.), he also displays the capacity for guilt and remorse that Klein associates with the depressive position. In his retreat from that guilt he lapses into the paranoid-schizoid behavior associated with manic defense, and ultimately realizes the psychotic fantasy that concludes the story: the utter destruction of his conscience. This exegesis provides the first sustained Kleinian interpretation of Mark Twain's fiction.
Crashaw and Abjection: Reading the Unthinkable in His Devotional Verse
Authors: Sabine Maureen (Maureen Alice)
Published: January 2007

Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1980) offers a compelling framework for reading the seventeenth-century baroque poet, Richard Crashaw. Kristeva understands abjection as the horror resulting from the collapse of the psychic borders between what is clean and unclean, inside and outside the control of the body. Both writers draw inspiration from the devotional practices of late medieval women mystics. But whereas Kristeva focuses on the semiotic communication between the preoedipal mother and child, Crashaw's engagement with the language of feminine piety had its source in the library of his Protestant father, William Crashaw, who collected the Catholic literature he would denounce from the pulpit. Abjection was the psychic mechanism that allowed Richard Crashaw to break down his father's distinction between the "clean" Protestant self and the loathed Catholic other still attached, like the Christ child, to the maternal breast of Mary. In the divine epigram, "Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked," Crashaw conflates religion and sex, the sacred and the somatic, through abject images of milk, saliva, blood, semen and their bodily sources—mouth, breast, genitals, and anus—to say yes to the unthinkable.
Stealing Guilt: Freud, Twain, Augustine and the Question of Moral Luck
Authors: Stanovsky Derek
Published: January 2007

This paper re-examines the philosophical debate surrounding the issue of moral luck through the lens of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. The author argues that Freud's writings on moral luck, which have not previously been discussed in this context, provide not only a cogent explanation for the reasons behind the existence of moral luck but also a compelling argument for the constitutive role played by moral luck in the formation of moral agency and moral identity. Freud's own example of a story by Mark Twain, "The First Melon I Ever Stole," is explored in this context and compared to other more typical examples of moral luck as is another example of moral luck having to do with the theft of pears drawn from the writings of St. Augustine.
"Caryatides probantur inter pauca operum": Pliny, Vitruvius, and the Semiotics of the Erechtheion Maidens at Rome
Authors: Lesk Alexandra L
Published: January 2007

Copies of the maidens from the south porch of the Erechtheion on the Athenian Akropolis were employed extensively in Augustan monuments in Rome, most famously in the Forum of Augustus. This paper examines the origins of the conflation of Vitruvius's term "caryatid" and the Erechtheion maidens as well as the semiotics of their employment as part of Augustus's iconographic vocabulary of triumph. By using a contextualized diachronic approach to evidence and adopting Broucke's argument that the copies of the Erechtheion maidens found in 1952 at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli were salvaged from the Domitianic Pantheon mentioned by Pliny as being "caryatids in a class of their own," this problematic conflation of terms can be traced back to the first century A.D.
Augustus, History, and the Landscape of the Law
Authors: Milnor Kristina
Published: January 2007

One way in which Augustus both represented and attempted to effect his vision for the future of Rome was through the "social legislation" that regulated marriage and family life. This paper argues that authors such as Tacitus and Horace, who directly represent the Augustan laws, and Livy, who addresses the same issues in his reconstruction of the debate over the marriage ban in the Twelve Tables, see them as connected to ideological (re)formulations of both space and time. The metaphor of landscape, which is used repeatedly to represent the laws, is thus both an acceptance of and challenge to the terms of the new social landscape that was being drawn in Rome under Augustus.
Augustan Religion and the Reshaping of Roman Memory
Authors: Orlin Eric M
Published: January 2007

This paper argues that the Augustan period witnessed a dramatic reconception of Roman religion—a reconception that played a vital role in the emperor's efforts to create a unified sense of identity that included both Romans and Italians. Instead of a religion of place tied to specific historical developments, both Virgil in the Aeneid and Augustus in his rebuilding of the eighty-two temples emphasized religious practices ordained by a single authoritative figure and connected to pre-Roman Italy. The reconstruction program reshaped Roman memory as well as the physical city, because Roman temples served not only as religious sites, but also as monuments in which Roman memories and Roman history resided. This reordering of Roman topographical and chronological space thus linked Roman identity not to the history of expansionist Rome over the previous 500 years, but rather to Augustan Rome and its fuller inclusiveness of Italy.
Gender, Sex, and the Domestication of the Empire in Art of the Augustan Age
Authors: Ramsby Teresa R , Severy Beth
Published: January 2007

Roman artistic works from the Augustan period begin to use the bodies of women, but also of men and children, to represent the empire as a household with Augustus as its head. Such representations manipulate developing metaphors of family loyalty and paternal control to express the transformative power of Augustus's imperial policies that made former enemies into subjects or cooperative participants in Roman society. The poetry of Ovid reveals the pervasiveness of this imagery and the range of interpretations placed upon it by a member of the elite now subject to an emperor.
Introduction
Authors: Severy Beth
Published: January 2007

Roman artistic works from the Augustan period begin to use the bodies of women, but also of men and children, to represent the empire as a household with Augustus as its head. Such representations manipulate developing metaphors of family loyalty and paternal control to express the transformative power of Augustus's imperial policies that made former enemies into subjects or cooperative participants in Roman society. The poetry of Ovid reveals the pervasiveness of this imagery and the range of interpretations placed upon it by a member of the elite now subject to an emperor.
Socialization and Saying "Cheese!": School Picture Day in Children's Books
Authors: Hoffman Robin
Published: January 2007

This study surveys twelve recent children's books focused on the ritualized event of School Picture Day in American schools; ten were written in the late 1990s and most after 2000. Collectively, they reveal children's preoccupation with loose or missing teeth and bad hair (or haircuts); these recurring themes obliquely address more generalized childhood fears and anxieties about social acceptance and personal appearance. Close readings of these texts and their illustrations further reveal their subservience to adult agendas, and adult anxiety concerned with the documentary power of photography, self-presentation as social performance, and the normalizing functions of American educational institutions.
Melinda's Closet: Trauma and the Queer Subtext of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak
Authors: Latham Don
Published: January 2007

Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak tells the story of teenager Melinda Sorvino's rape, recovery, and eventual coming out as a rape victim. The novel is remarkable in that it reflects the queerness of the strategies Melinda uses to effect her recovery, strategies that, paradoxically, serve both to suppress her voice and to help her recover/discover a voice with which she can speak the truth. Speak is thus a queer novel in that, by presenting a view from the closet, it questions and subverts dominant heterosexist assumptions about gender, identity, and trauma.
Treasure Island and the Romance of the British Civil Service
Authors: Parkes Christopher
Published: January 2007

This article connects Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) to the rise and reform of the British Civil Service in the nineteenth century. It examines how the novel constructs the civil servant as a heroic figure, one that is both technically proficient and physically brave. Jim Hawkins combines the accounting skills of his parents with the courage of the pirates to become the ideal representative of Britain's administrative classes. In imagining its hero as an ideal civil servant, the novel has connections to the recruitment of young readers for the British civil service.
Progressive Era Girl Scouts and the Immigrant: Scouting for Girls (1920) as a Handbook for American Girlhood
Authors: Tedesco Laureen
Published: January 2007

The publications and activities of the Girl Scouts offer a fruitful site for examining shifting notions of female citizenship and American identity. This essay considers the home-making and physical fitness passages of Scouting for Girls (1920) in the context of early twentieth-century maternalist activism and women's efforts to Americanize immigrants. Linking concerns about immigrants' health and cleanliness to a brief interval of Girl Scout Americanization efforts, the essay finds that Girl Scouting empowered middle-class girls to impart the doctrines of municipal housekeeping, scientific mothering, and vigorous good health that middle-class women promoted among in their clubs, colleges, and settlement work.
Chinese American Writers of the Real and the Fake: Authenticity and the Twin Traditions of Life Writing
Authors: Madsen Deborah L
Published: January 2007

The Chinese Exclusion Acts of the late nineteenth century placed severe limitations on the development of Chinese ethnic communities in the United States. The polarization of categories of Chinese Americans gave rise to two distinct traditions of Chinese writing in and about America: a "high," cultural tradition and a "low," working-class tradition. The infamous conflict between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston, whom he accused of being "un-Chinese" and a "fake," can be explained in terms of Chin's privileging of the "low" tradition of Chinese American writing as the "authentic" tradition. Chin accuses Kingston of practising an inauthentic Orientalism inherited from the apologetic autobiographies written in the Chinese American "high" tradition. Here, the Orientalism of foundational autobiographies such as Pardee Lowe's Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) and Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950) is engaged through the concept of "competence" developed in genre theory. Within this context, the use of generic Chinese American autobiographical conventions by Chin and Kingston can be related to the representation of authenticity through particular ethnic discourses. Résumé Les Chinese Exclusion Acts (lois d'exclusion Ã  l'égard des immigrants chinois) de la fin du 19e siècle ont sévèrement limité l'expansion des communautés ethniques chinoises aux é tats-Unis. La polarisation des Sino-américains a donné lieu Ã  deux traditions distinctes dans la littérature chinoise américaine ou sur l'Amérique : l'une plus Â« élevée Â» ou littéraire et l'autre plus Â« populaire Â», typique de la classe ouvrière. Le conflit notoire entre Frank Chin et Maxine Hong Kingston, que le premier accusait d'être un imposteur Â« non Chinois Â», s'explique par le fait que Chin privilégiait la tradition Â« populaire Â» comme la seule littérature sino-américaine Â« authentique Â». Chin accusait Kingston de donner dans un faux orientalisme hérité des autobiographies apologétiques écrites selon les canons de la littérature sino-américaine de type Â« élevé Â». Ici, Â« l'orientalisme Â» d'autobiographies fondamentales telles que Father and Glorious Descendant de Pardee Lowe (1943) et Fifth Chinese Daughter de Jade Snow Wong (1950), se traduit grâce au concept de Â« compétence Â» développé dans le cadre de la théorie des genres. Dans ce contexte, les conventions génériques caractéristiques de l'autobiographie sino-américaine, dont se servent aussi bien Chin que Kingston, sont liées aux représentations d'une authenticité qui passe par des discours ethniques particuliers.
From General's Daughter to Coal Miner's Daughter: Spinning and Counter-Spinning Jessica Lynch
Authors: Tucker Bruce , Walton Priscilla L
Published: January 2007

In March 2003, Iraqi soldiers captured Pfc. Jessica Lynch, and one week later, American soldiers rescued her in a dramatic, filmed operation. From the moment of her capture, both the American government and the media used Lynch's story as a template for narratives that went far beyond the life of an American soldier to engage questions about war, race, gender, and nation. Journalists debated such issues as women in the military and Lynch as a feminist icon and even revisited the Great Society programs of the 1960s to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of government intervention in Appalachia, Lynch's region of origin. The spinning and counter-spinning of Lynch's story moved the traditional captivity narrative into a new form of imperial myth making, obliterating hierarchies of race, gender, and class at home, while setting Lynch in a foreign land where she was threatened by male, Arabic soldiers. This narrative sought to contain political opposition to the war, resolve the systemic blocking of opportunity in Appalachia, and bring Iraq fully into the orbit of American Empire. Résumé En mars 2003, les soldats iraqiens ont capturé la simple soldate Jessica Lynch, et une semaine plus tard celle-ci était libérée par des soldats américains au cours d'une action commando filmée. Ã partir du moment oÃ¹ elle a été faite prisonnière, le gouvernement et les médias américains se sont servis de l'histoire de Lynch comme modèle narratif de récits qui allaient bien au-delÃ  de la vie d'un soldat américain, et soulevaient de graves questions sur la guerre, sur la discrimination raciale et sexuelle, voire sur l'idée même de nation. Les journalistes discutèrent de questions telles que la présence des femmes dans les forces armées, le statut de Lynch comme symbole féministe, et passèrent même en revue les programmes gouvernementaux des années 1960 pour prouver l'inefficacité des interventions gouvernementales dans les Appalaches, région d'origine de la soldate Lynch. La manipulation dans un sens ou dans l'autre de cette histoire a fait passer le récit traditionnel de captivité Ã  une nouvelle forme de mythe qui effaçait les différences raciales, sexuelles et sociales aux États-Unis pour situer Lynch dans un contexte étranger oÃ¹ elle se voyait menacée par des soldats arabes. Cette interprétation narrative visait Ã  contenir l'opposition politique Ã  la guerre, Ã  résoudre les problèmes endémiques qui caractérisent les perspectives d'avenir dans la région des Appalaches et Ã  ramener pleinement l'Iraq dans l'orbite de l'Empire américain.
Becoming Documentary: Edward Curtis's In the Land of the Headhunters and the Politics of Archival Reconstruction
Authors: Wakeham Pauline
Published: January 2007

In 1914, Edward Curtis produced In the Land of the Headhunters, a sensationalistic film that, in the mode of salvage ethnography, sought to erase the traces of colonial contact and reconstruct so-called Native authenticity in the image of white fantasies of primitive alterity. Comparing archival footage of Curtis's original 1914 text with the 1973 reconstruction of this film—the only version currently in widespread circulation—this article argues that the reconstruction engages in a second fantasy of authenticity by attempting to recuperate a highly manipulated melodrama as an ostensibly sober ethnographic document. In so doing, the 1973 version reinscribes the romance underpinning salvage ethnography itself: the fantasy of maintaining detachment and scientific objectivity in the very process of fetishistically recuperating a glimpse of supposedly pure and authentic Native lifeways. Résumé In 1914, Edward Curtis tournait In the Land of the Headhunters (Â«Au pays des chasseurs de têtes Â»), un film sensationnaliste qui, sur le mode de l'ethnographie de sauvetage, visait Ã  effacer les traces des contacts coloniaux et Ã  reconstruire une prétendue authenticité indigène correspondant Ã  l'image que se faisaient les Blancs sur le caractère Â« autre Â» des peuples primitifs. Après avoir comparé certaines séquences d'archives du film original de 1914 avec la reconstruction de ce film réalisée en 1973— seule version actuellement disponible en circulation — cet article soutient que la reconstruction se fonde sur un second fantasme d'authenticité, car il tente de transformer un mélodrame fortement manipulé en un documentaire ethnographique apparemment sobre. Ce faisant, la version de 1973 redonne corps au fantasme qui sous-tend l'ethnographie de sauvetage elle-même : celui de pouvoir rester détaché et maintenir une objectivité scientifique lors d'un processus de récupération quasi fétichiste visant Ã  donner un aperçu de modes de vie indigènes supposés purs et authentiques.
Whiteness and the Performance of Race in American Ballroom Dance
Authors: Bosse Joanna
Published: January 2007

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with predominantly white, middle-class, American ballroom dancers, this article discusses the ballroom as a site where problematic constructions of whiteness and otherness are embodied in performance. Through the genre classifications of "modern" and "Latin," whiteness is made universal and normative while the racial other is made particular and exotic, physical and sexual. The article argues that both dance classifications are manifestations of whiteness, mirrored reflections of one another that help to define whiteness by making invisible what whiteness is and explicitly pronouncing what whiteness is not.
Respectable Ladies and Uncouth Men: The Performative Politics of Class and Gender in the Public Realm of an Italian City
Authors: Guano Emanuela
Published: January 2007

According to the Webster's dictionary, being respectable means being "decent or correct in character or behavior" or being "fit to be seen." In this article, I approach "decent behavior" and "fitness to be seen" as the staple factor in the negotiation and the struggle over the place of women in the streets of an Italian city. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Genoa between 2002 and 2005, this article explores how middle-class women perform a classed and gendered respectability to resist their exclusion from an intensely masculinized public realm.
Américo Paredes: Ballad Scholar (Phillips Barry Lecture, 2004)
Authors: Limón José Eduardo
Published: January 2007

The ballad scholarship of Américo Paredes (1915â1999), principally his book "With His Pistol in His Hand": A Border Ballad and its Hero, has been overlooked as a creative synthesis and expansion of the extant folklore theories and methodologies of its time. This essay closely examines Paredes's book to demonstrate that synthesis and expansion. It also suggests the reasons why it may have been overlooked as a central contribution to ballad scholarship.
How Democracies Emerge: Lessons from Europe
Authors: Berman Sheri
Published: January 2007

Abstract: The best way to understand how stable, well-functioning democracies develop is to analyze the political trajectories such countries have actually taken. The political backstory of most democracies includes struggle, conflict, and even violence. Problems and failures can in retrospect often be seen to be integral parts of the long-term processes through which non-democratic institutions, elites, and cultures were delegitimized and eventually eliminated, and their democratic successors forged. Understanding past cases is a crucial step toward putting today’s democratization and democracy promotion discussions into the proper intellectual and historical context.
How Democracies Emerge: The “Sequencing” Fallacy
Authors: Carothers Thomas
Published: January 2007

Abstract: Concerned by illiberalism and conflict in new democracies, some analysts advocate democratic sequencing—putting off democracy until the rule of law and a well-functioning state are in place. Such a view overestimates the willingness and capability of autocrats to build a strong foundation for democracy and the ability of the United States to influence decisions by other societies about how to proceed with political change. Gradually introducing key components of political competition is a better alternative than putting off democracy altogether in countries where the underlying structural factors point to a difficult democratic path.
The Mexican Standoff: Looking to the Future
Authors: Castañeda Jorge G. , Morales Marco A.
Published: January 2007

Abstract: The aftermath of the 2006 federal election in Mexico has been turbulent, to say the least. We argue that this is the result of conducting an election using 1996 electoral rules and pre-1996 institutions. Based on these results, the future success of Mexican democracy rests, first, upon recognizing the need to couple electoral and institutional reforms that align incentives in a given direction and, second, choosing among alternative institutional arrangements to update institutions accordingly. We set forth an evaluation of electoral rules and institutions, point out some of their main failures, and propose a set of reforms.
The Mexican Standoff: Taught to Protest, Learning to Lose
Authors: Estrada Luis , Poiré Alejandro
Published: January 2007

Abstract: Mexico’s election management system enjoys wide international recognition, and yet seemed unable to stand the test of the razor-thin presidential election in 2006. Using the Mexico 2006 Panel Study , we find that neither credibility in the electoral institutions nor perceptions of the cleanness of elections were strong determinants of political protest. Rather, a combination of long-term trends and short-term effects brought about the demonstrations. From this perspective, Mexico’s postelection mass protest seems less fundamental than apparent, and also less spontaneous. To the extent that the basic issue of improved economic opportunity remains unsolved, it may still be potentially destabilizing in the future.
Revolution Reconsidered
Authors: Fairbanks Charles H
Published: January 2007

In the winter of 2006 Georgians and Ukrainians will be marking the anniversaries of events that they dubbed revolutions. It is surprising that these historic upheavals did not spur any reconsideration of the concept of revolution. Modern liberal democracy emerged when a "right of revolution" began to be widely argued in the 1700s. Over the next two centuries, revolution was a hope always cherished somewhere on the globe. Some of the subsequent revolutions were amazing successes while others turned out to be cruel deceptions. The "color revolutions" in the former Soviet Union give us an opportunity to ask ourselves whether revolutions are in fact dying out, and whether revolution is a good or bad idea.
Pathways from Authoritarianism
Authors: Hadenius Axel , Teorell Jan
Published: January 2007

This paper uses a new typology of authoritarian regimes to explore the extent to which regime type explains the survival (and breakdown) of non-democratic regimes as well as the impact of different types of authoritarian regimes on democratic development. Our results demonstrate that different types of authoritarian regime face different propensities to develop toward democracy. Hence the nature of the authoritarian regime in question deserves to be added to the list of democracy's essential preconditions. One regime type—the limited multiparty system—stands out as the prime stepping stone to democracy. The fact that this regime type has become the most common form of authoritarianism can be seen as a promising sign for the future.
The Case for Presidential Term Limits
Authors: Maltz Gideon
Published: January 2007

Presidential term limits have spread very widely, but the challenge today is that of enforcement. Term limits are an important instrument of democratization in electoral-authoritarian countries: this is not just because they constrain the power of individual leaders, but also because they tend to promote political party alternation, as in Croatia in 2000 and Kenya in 2002, which in turn fosters democratization. The international community can promote presidential term limits compliance through deepening the norm of term limits, using aid conditionality, addressing the incentives of incumbent leaders, and encouraging the entrenchment of term limits in constitutions.
The Perpetual Crises of Democracy
Authors: O'Donnell Guillermo A
Published: January 2007

Democracy is and always will be in some kind of crisis, for it is constantly redirecting its citizens' gaze from a more or less unsatisfactory present toward a future of still unfulfilled possibilities. There is in these crises something that belongs to what is best and most distinctive about democracy. For the crises underline democracy's intrinsic mix of hope and dissatisfaction, its highlighting of a lack that will never be filled. The capacity for hope is the great capacity of democracy, one which under the right circumstances can and should nourish other, more specific capacities that may promote improvements in democratic quality.
Malaysia: Turnover Without Change
Authors: Pepinsky Thomas B
Published: January 2007

Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has replaced Mahathir Mohamad, who ruled the country in an increasingly authoritarian manner from 1981 until 2003. Abdullah has a reputation as a reformer who is personally incorruptible, and midway through his first term in office, Malaysian civil and political liberties have improved marginally. However, the regime's grip on power remains as strong as ever, and the lack of institutional change means that the regime will likely meet any serious challenge to its authority with the heavy-handed tactics characteristic of previous governments.
Candidate Selection: The Choice Before the Choice
Authors: Rahat Gideon
Published: January 2007

The article provides an overview of intra-party candidate selection methods. It explains the significance of candidate selection and presents two main elements that distinguish between candidate selection methods: the inclusiveness of the selectorate and the level of their centralization. After examining the different methods used in several established and new democracies, it outlines their political consequences and suggests a way to design an optimally balanced method. Although methods of candidate selection have received surprisingly little study by political scientists, they merit the attention of students of democracy everywhere.
Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific
Authors: Reilly Ben
Published: January 2007

Political reform across the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in the years following the Asian economic crisis, has seen the emergence of a distinctive regional model of electoral democracy. This move has been facilitated by deliberate strategies of "political engineering" across a diverse array of Northeast Asian, Southeast Asian, and the Pacific Island electoral democracies. Political engineering focuses on the deliberate design of political institutions to achieve specified outcomes. This essay examines how regimes across the Asia-Pacific region have increasingly attempted to engineer their political systems to encourage more predictable elections, aggregative parties, and stable governments.
The Mexican Standoff: The Mobilization of Distrust
Authors: Schedler Andreas
Published: January 2007

Abstract: The 2006 presidential elections pushed Mexico’s fledgling democracy from relative stability into a period of tension and uncertainty. Left-wing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador lost by a razor-thin margin to the conservative Felipe Calderón. He claimed fraud, took his followers to the streets in massive protest, and finally declared himself the “legitimate president” of Mexico. The article examines the contingent and structural sources of the post-electoral dispute. Allegations of vote-rigging were unfounded, yet credible, due to two principal factors: (1) a self-reinforcing spiral of distrust among political actors, and (2) discrete failures by the institutions of electoral governance and dispute settlement that provided easy pretexts for the loser’s discourse of fraud.
Imploding the Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez's How the GarcÃÂ­a Girls Lost Their Accents
Authors: Bess Jennifer
Published: January 2007

In her autobiographically based novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez honors the complexities of Dominican history through her refusal to classify the Garcías clearly as victims or oppressors. Instead, she reveals that the protagonist (her own alter-ego) is simultaneously a casualty of and an heir to the forces of colonialism; Yolanda has inherited what Donaldson has called the Miranda Complex, referring to Prospero's daughter in The Tempest. Unlike Miranda, Alvarez's characters cannot recover the losses that have victimized them and their countrymen in the past; however, their inheritance does offer a means of memorializing the absence of collective history, thus revealing the cost of that loss to victims and perpetrators alike. Alvarez reifies this historical theme through the novel's structure, its gaps and omissions, its pervasive motifs of loss and alienation, and its heteroglossic nature.
Practicing Deconstruction, Again: Blindness, Insight and the Lovely Treachery of Words in D. H. Lawrence's "The Blind Man"
Authors: Clausson Nils
Published: January 2007

At a time when the turn to history and various forms of cultural studies frames the practice of literary studies as a an either/or choice between a cultural/historical criticism of political engagement with issues of race, gender and ethnicity, or a retreat into formalism and aesthetic, we are endanger of losing sight of the most valuable lesson of deconstruction: that whatever else literary critics do we must read texts closely. Taking as it starting point, D. H. Lawrence's aphorism "The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it," this paper offers an analysis of D. H. Lawrence's short story "The Blind Man" to demonstrate that the charges most frequently levelled against deconstruction—that is leads to relativism, anarchy, conservatism, meaninglessness and paralyzing undecidability—are not supported by a deconstructionist reading of Lawrence's story.
"Dancing is Dancing No Matter Who is Doing It": Zora Neale Hurston, Literacy, and Contemporary Writing Pedagogy
Authors: Heard Matthew
Published: January 2007

In the early twentieth-century, Zora Neale Hurston made a name for herself by creating novels, short stories, dramas, and essays that were both critically successful and at the same time true to the dialect and culture of the Southern folk community in which Hurston grew up. In works like Their Eyes Were Watching God, Color Struck, "Spunk," and "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Hurston explores the rhetorical boundaries of race, examining what is stake for subjects who, like Hurston herself, must prove themselves adept at communicating with mainstream audiences without losing the distinctions of their "home cultures." This essay explores Hurston's authorial positioning, ultimately recommending Hurston as a model for study in a composition curriculum, where, by reading Hurston in the context of rhetorical inquiry, students may profitably meet the goals of a "discourse analysis" composition theory and develop better strategies for evaluating and working with the value systems of a diversified society.
The Impure and the Sacred in the Work of Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Authors: Ingram Claudia
Published: January 2007

While prophetic voices echo and Biblical allusions abound in Brigit Pegeen Kelly's astonishing poems, the religious attitude implicit in them is difficult to assess. Sacred doctrine does not appear to subsume the mortal and fictive condition dramatized by their speakers; nor, on the other hand, are the speakers' religious fears and yearnings treated ironically. Kelly's poems stage, instead, a genuinely heterogeneous subjectivity; in them, the Word seems irremediably implicated in the worlds of fiction, flesh, and mortality, audible only in and through the mixed conditions of our speaking. This implicatedness is the source of much of the poems' strange beauty; and, if Julia Kristeva is right about the importance of our acknowledging our own subjective heterogeneity, it is also the source of the poems' ethical effect.
Improvising over the Changes: Improvisation as Intellectual and Aesthetic Practice in the Transitional Poems of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka
Authors: Muyumba Walton
Published: January 2007

In his transitional poems Le Roi Jones/Amiri Baraka theorizes the connections between African American identity and jazz improvisation. These poems were written and published in the 1960s during Jones/Baraka's decade-long shift away from Beat modernism to Black Arts aesthetics. During this transitional period Jones/Baraka's poetry and jazz criticism described blackness and African American musical culture as products of spontaneous and "continual alteration." Jones/Baraka transitional literary and critical writing emphasize African American identity as improvisational and performative rather than metaphysically essentialist. What is at stake in this reconsidering of Jones/Baraka's transitional moment is that we can learn how the poet merged his personal philosophical changes and political desires into literary aesthetic and intellectual theory. While this reading places Jones/Baraka within the complex picture of modern and postmodern American poetry, the essay also illustrates that this reevaluation will change our relationship to Jones/Baraka's Black Arts poetry.
Transcending the "Dust": African American Filmmakers Preserving the "Glimpse Of the Eternal"
Authors: Ogunleye Foluke
Published: January 2007

This paper explores Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust and Zeinabu irene Davis's Mother of the River. Both films utilize materials obtained from oral tradition, which have been preserved through generations of African Americans whose forebears were forcefully carried away from Africa due to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. In these films, we see a reaffirmation of African dignity through a commemoration of African culture and its continuing relevance in the lives of Africans in the Diaspora. The paper examines the stereotype question, and how filmmakers like Julie Dash and Zeinabu irene Davis who belong to the L.A. Rebellion school use their films to combat these stereotypes and engage their viewers in new images.
Ethics and the Lyric: Form, Dialogue, Answerability
Authors: Scanlon Mara
Published: January 2007

The purpose of this essay is double—to counter Mikhail Bakhtin's contention that all poetry is necessarily monologic and therefore unethical (and, in doing so, to challenge also common assumptions about the lyric that presume a singular, personal, unified voice) and to make this claim by employing Bakhtin's own theories of dialogue in reading contemporary African American poet Robert Hayden's lyric "Night, Death, Mississippi." Hayden's powerful lyric about lynching, at once beautiful and horrifying, provides a rich site to trace some strategies of form and style—for example, the use of free indirect discourse, multiple lyric voices, and a modified call-and-response structure—that enable heteroglossic dialogism within the poem itself and also self-consciously evoke and even perform the reader's answerability to and for it, establishing the participation of the lyric in the ethical encounters of dialogue.