School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemThe disposition of the destitute(Council to Homeless Persons, 2019)The final disposition is a term used by people in the funeral industry to refer to the burial or cremation of a dead person. The final disposition is a profoundly important event, not simply a pragmatic or material process, and its significance is expressed through ritualised performances. The disposition and its rituals are shared and communal, involving ceremonies attended by the deceased’s family, friends, and community, whilst less indirectly the disposition is shared by wider social norms and values around the proper treatment of the deceased body. Although the disposition is common to us all, then, it is also a personalised event in which the particularity of the life lived is recognised. Similarly, the place of interment, whether body or ashes, is named and marked to recognise the individual life of the deceased. Places of interment are thus not only identified, but are also accessible to family, friends and community, for the purpose of ongoing visitation and remembrance.
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ItemNo Preview Available‘Death by Twitter’: Understanding false death announcements on social media and the performance of platform cultural capital(University of Illinois Libraries, 2019)In this paper, we analyse false death announcements of public figures on social media and public responses to them. The analysis draws from a range of public sources to collect and categorise the volume of false death announcements on Twitter and undertakes a case study analysis of representative examples. We classify false death announcements according to five overarching types: accidental; misreported; misunderstood; hacked; and hoaxed. We identify patterns of user responses, which cycle through the sharing of the news, to personal grief, to a sense of uncertainty or disbelief. But we also identify more critical and cultural responses to such death announcements in relation to misinformation and the quality of digital news, or cultures of hoax and disinformation on social media. Here we see the performance of online identity through a form that we describe, following Bourdieu as ‘platform cultural capital’.
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ItemA field experiment on community policing and police legitimacy(NATL ACAD SCIENCES, 2019-10-01)Despite decades of declining crime rates, longstanding tensions between police and the public continue to frustrate the formation of cooperative relationships necessary for the function of the police and the provision of public safety. In response, policy makers continue to promote community-oriented policing (COP) and its emphasis on positive, nonenforcement contact with the public as an effective strategy for enhancing public trust and police legitimacy. Prior research designs, however, have not leveraged the random assignment of police-public contact to identify the causal effect of such interactions on individual-level attitudes toward the police. Therefore, the question remains: Do positive, nonenforcement interactions with uniformed patrol officers actually cause meaningful improvements in attitudes toward the police? Here, we report on a randomized field experiment conducted in New Haven, CT, that sheds light on this question and identifies the individual-level consequences of positive, nonenforcement contact between police and the public. Findings indicate that a single instance of positive contact with a uniformed police officer can substantially improve public attitudes toward police, including legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. These effects persisted for up to 21 d and were not limited to individuals inclined to trust and cooperate with the police prior to the intervention. This study demonstrates that positive nonenforcement contact can improve public attitudes toward police and suggests that police departments would benefit from an increased focus on strategies that promote positive police-public interactions.
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ItemPolitical Participation of Islamists in Syria: Examining the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood's Mid-century Democratic Experiment(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2019-01-02)Accompanying increased participation by Islamists in parliaments across the Middle East in the past two decades, there continues to be a debate as to the sincerity of their commitment to democratic values and systems. Scholars have traditionally pursued the issue through the inclusion/moderation model, or through concepts such as ‘post-Islamism’. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, however, represents a rare case for the study of Islam and democracy because its democratic engagement preceded its later period of violent and ideological radicalism by decades. The group contested elections within the first two years of its formation, meaning that its positions on democracy were ‘moderated’ neither by pluralist political pressures nor by the failure of a previous non-democratic ideology. This article therefore examines the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood's performance in Syria's political processes between 1947 and 1963 as a case study of Islamism and democracy, evaluating substantive indicators of democratic engagement, such as electoral practices, pact formation, policy adaptation and approaches to executive government. Using recent interviews with Brotherhood members, memoirs, archival material and newspapers, the article argues that, during this time, while the Brotherhood was not the most effective political actor, it did demonstrate a reasonably diligent commitment to democracy.
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ItemGreat Power-Middle Power Dynamics: The Case of China and Iran(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2019-05-04)Iran is expected to be one of the main beneficiaries of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China and Iran had a track record of cooperation long before the announcement of BRI, developing a highly asymmetric Great Power-Middle Power partnership over the course of three decades. This article asks whether BRI will enable China and Iran to transcend the limitations faced by most Great Power-Middle Power relationships on the basis of Iran’s enhanced strategic economic and geographic value. It is argued that while BRI could benefit from stronger China–Iran ties, Iran’s international posturing has proven a significant hindrance to China, highlighting that entrenched patterns of engagement in Great Power-Middle Power relations are not easily shifted, even in the face of immense economic incentives.
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ItemNew collaborations in old institutional spaces: setting a new research agenda to transform Indigenous-settler relations(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2019-07-03)Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people navigate the social and political order of the Australian settler state in ways that seek to increase their personal freedoms and political autonomy. For some groups this means seeking a firmer place within the social, political and economic life of Australia, and for others it means navigating away, towards a more distant relationship based in the resurgence of Indigenous nationhood. This navigation is composed of multifaceted and multidirectional relations between Indigenous Australians, settler Australians, and the settler state. As a discipline, political science must move beyond the study of settler institutions and begin to engage more comprehensively in research that considers the dynamics and structures of Indigenous-settler relations as a matter of priority.
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ItemThe Limits of the Administration of Memory in Settler Colonial Societies: the Australian Case(SPRINGER, 2019-06)Settler colonial societies provide particular challenges for the instantiation of memory policy since the settler-colonial project was driven by a logic requiring the ‘elimination’ of Indigenous peoples and their time. This very fact challenges the legitimacy of the colonial mission for a better way of life and feeds the tensions at the very core of memory policies in these societies in coming to terms with the past. Focusing on contemporary Australia, this article first examines the challenges inherent to memory policy in settler colonial societies before reviewing three attempts at administering memory for future coexistence. This approach highlights the way public policies of memory can result in formal procedures rather than in historical narratives. This recognition of the ongoing contested nature of the settler colonial project leads to the suggestion for a different, more agonistic orientation to memory policy that is predicated on the persistence of this conflictual dynamic rather than on its resolution.
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ItemWhose politics and which science? Rethinking the discipline in the context of Australian settler colonial relationships(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2019-07-03)In the United Kingdom and America, political scientists are involved in increasingly intense conversations about the implication of the discipline in racial and colonial hierarchies. As a recent volume by Bhambra, Gebrial and Nisancioglu begins, ‘the call to decolonise univeristies across the global north has gained particular traction in recent years’ (2018, 1). In the contemporary ‘post-race’ world, these interventions insist on the importance of naming and challenging ongoing inequalities and role of disciplinary knowledge in maintaining them. In 2016, Kennan Ferguson asked in Perspectives on Politics ‘Why Does Political Studies Hate American Indians?’, and in 2018, two key edited volumes were published: Dismantling Race in Higher Education edited by Arday and Mirza, and the Bhambra, Gebrial and Nisancioglu volume cited above (Decolonising the University). Most recently, Political Studies Review published two articles on the need for and possibilities of decolonising political science pedagogy in the British context of empire and race (Begum and Saina 2019; Emejulu 2019). The chair of the Political Studies Association of the UK responded in the same issue, acknowledging that ‘these two pieces challenge the discipline to be better at inclusivity’ and that ‘this issue is a key concern for political science’ (Wilson 2019, 207). ...
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Item‘The Treaty’s Going to Give the Recognition that this Wasn’t Right' – Optimism and Pessimism in Non-Indigenous Attitudes to Treaties in Australia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2019-11-02)Like other settler-colonial societies, Australia over the last half-century or so has been the site for a lengthy and involved discussion about the need for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to reconstitute the relationship between them, recognising past injustices and forestalling future conflict. Unlike those other countries, however, Australia and its states lack a history of treaties and treaty law to ground that discussion. While the idea of treaty has been highly politicised over time, what such negotiations and agreements might mean in practice—what eventual treaties might do (in terms of recognition and reparation)—remains vague. This lack of certainty enables latent non-Indigenous attitudes to be activated in relation to any proposal for making treaties in Australia. Consequently, considering non-Indigenous attitudes to treaty is an important task as these sub-national initiatives move from discussion and planning to negotiation and implementation. This article begins to address a lacuna in understanding of non-Indigenous attitudes and considers whether these may be a potential, if volatile resource for policy advocates of treaty-making.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableWhy Parental Unemployment Matters for Children’s Educational Attainment: Empirical Evidence from the Netherlands(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2019)This study examines the effect of parents’ unemployment on their children’s subsequent educational attainment. Its theoretical significance lies on its focus to test the mediating role of parents’ changing work ethics during spells of unemployment. Integrating multiple survey and administrative data sources, our estimates are based on a sample of Dutch children (n = 812) who were exposed to their parents’ unemployment during the previous economic crisis in the early 1980s. Our results reveal a direct negative effect between fathers’ unemployment duration and their children’s educational attainment and also an indirect effect through mothers’ changing attitudes towards work. We also find empirical evidence that mothers’ and fathers’ whose views about work become more pessimistic lead to reduced educational attainment among their children.