Black politics and social change in Birmingham,UK: An analysis of recent trends

Over the past two decades the racialization of key aspects of British political life has become apparent both locally and nationally. This article seeks to examine the dynamics of this process by analysing the changing patterns of racial politics in Birmingham, UK. It addresses two main issues. First, the process through which ethnic minorities have mobilized in the context of local politics. Second, the responses of political parties to racial and ethnic questions within Birmingham. At a broader level the article utilizes the case study of Birmingham to illustrate how constructions of race need to be located within particular discursive fields.     

Fundamental and specialized questions on host race formation and speciation – an introduction

Host race formation and speciation are at the core of the enormous insect diversification. Insect–host relationships can take many forms, ranging from parasitic to mutualistic. Despite its long history of study, many questions remain about host race formation and speciation. They are addressed in eight original papers of this special issue, including two review-type articles. In line with the scope of Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata, they include both fundamental and applied studies. They reveal that host race formation and speciation can take many forms and that they are still active topics of entomological research.     

Linking Research to the Practice of Youth Development

The articles in this special issue address some of the challenges of strengthening the links between research and the practice of youth development and identify some approaches that have worked well. Youth development emerged from practice rather than from theory or research. Research that is most useful in the practice of youth development honors that primacy both by exploring questions that are important in practice and by engaging practitioners as partners, not merely as consumers.     

Symbolic ethnicity and Herbert Gans: race,religion, and politics in the twenty-first century

This article attempts to assess some of Herb Gans’s influential contributions, not only in his important paper on symbolic ethnicity, but also his wider discussion of the changing role of race, ethnicity, and religion in American society. In a period spanning more than half a century, he has helped to raise key questions and to suggest avenues of research that have stimulated debates and the re-evaluation of a complex, controversial, and highly dynamic field of social science research and policy.     

Community,mobility and racism in a semi-rural area: Comparing minority experience in East Kent

Much research into community, racism and racialization has been conducted in metropolitan urban settings. It is only recently that race in rural areas has received some attention. A key theme of existing research on race in rural areas has focused on the issue of racial violence. Drawing on interviews with a variety of ethnic minority groups in East Kent the article will focus on broader issues of race and ethnicity in a semi-rural area. The study explores the meaning of race, ethnicity and belonging in the partially rural setting of East Kent, UK. The article will raise issues around the intersection of the regional and global, the problematic notion of “community”, and the fluidity of racialization in a setting in which many ethnic minorities were transitory and mobile. We conclude by highlighting the ways in which community, racism and racialization are embedded in differentiated discourses and processes.     

Minority politics in the Middle East and North Africa: the prospects for transformative change

This special issue explores the prospects for what Jacob Mundy calls ‘transformative minority politics’ in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region – that is, a form of minority politics that strengthens democratic reform in the region, and that helps deepen a culture of human rights and democratic citizenship. The cases examined in the special issue include the Amazigh in North Africa, the Copts in Egypt, the Kurds in Iraq, the Palestinians in Israel, the ‘minoritarian’ regimes in Syria and Bahrain, and the various ethnic minorities in Iran. In this introduction, we try to situate this debate in a larger historical and international context, identifying some of the factors that might help support a new transformative minority politics in the region, while also emphasizing the factors that have inhibited it in the past, and why they remain powerful.     

Responsibility in the life sciences: assessing the role of professional codes

In response to threats from bioweapons, questions are being asked today in some countries about the implications and appropriateness of biological research. Many organizations and governments have suggested that bioscientists adopt what is generally referred to as a "code of conduct" to reduce the security concerns associated with their work. This article examines the potential contribution of such codes. By drawing on past lessons in other areas of professional life, it suggests some key questions, issues, and dilemmas for future consideration. As argued, attempts to establish codes must address demanding questions about their aims and audience--questions whose answers depend on potentially contentious issues regarding arms control, science, ethics, and politics.     

How can social network analysis improve the study of primate behavior?

When living in a group, individuals have to make trade-offs, and compromise, in order to balance the advantages and disadvantages of group life. Strategies that enable individuals to achieve this typically affect inter-individual interactions resulting in nonrandom associations. Studying the patterns of this assortativity using social network analyses can allow us to explore how individual behavior influences what happens at the group, or population level. Understanding the consequences of these interactions at multiple scales may allow us to better understand the fitness implications for individuals. Social network analyses offer the tools to achieve this. This special issue aims to highlight the benefits of social network analysis for the study of primate behaviour, assessing it's suitability for analyzing individual social characteristics as well as group/population patterns. In this introduction to the special issue, we first introduce social network theory, then demonstrate with examples how social networks can influence individual and collective behaviors, and finally conclude with some outstanding questions for future primatological research.     

Left-wing politics,civil society and immigration in Italy: The case of Bologna

Immigration and multiculturalism are important and much debated questions in contemporary Europe. Whereas considerable scholarship has examined how political institutions and Right-wing organizations have responded to these questions, little research has focused on the Left. This article examines the multicultural politics of the latter by considering ethnographically the experience of Bologna, the showcase city of the Italian Left, in the second half of the 1990s. The Left is here examined in terms of ideology, party, public policy and civil society in the context of everyday governance and with special reference to the discourses and practices concerning a group of Rom refugees from the former Yugoslavia. This article argues that the mainstream Italian Left (in its civil societal as well as party and administrative components) is characterized by a politics that fails to “integrate” ethno-cultural recognition with material justice and that, partly because of such failure, contributes little to the “integration” of immigrants.     

Clonal plants: beyond the patterns—ecological and evolutionary dynamics of asexual reproduction

More than 25 years have passed since publication of the first comprehensive multi-authored landmark volume on the population biology and evolution of clonal organisms (Jackson et al. 1985). Since then, no less than eight symposium volumes or special issues have appeared in scientific journals reporting on advances in the field of clonal plant research, indicating that the study of clonal organisms has remained an important topic in ecological research. The three most recent overviews were published in special issues of this journal (Stuefer et al. 2000; Tolvanen et al. 2004; Sammul et al. 2008), and these are now supplemented with a fourth special issue of Evolutionary Ecology. The articles published here reflect some of the most important contributions to a workshop on clonal plant biology held in Leuven (Belgium) in July 2009 and they illustrate some major advances that have been made over the last few years. In the following paragraphs, we first summarize some representative contributions to the current issue, and second, we put forward some personal ideas about promising and underexplored research lines in clonal plant research.     

Racialization and religion: race,culture and difference in the study of antisemitism and Islamophobia

Abstract

It is striking to observe the virtual absence of an established literature on race and racism in the discussion of Islamophobia; something that is only marginally more present in the discussion of antisemitism. This special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies locates the contemporary study of antisemitism and Islamophobia squarely within the fields of race and racism. As such it problematizes the extent to which discussion of the racialization of these minorities remains unrelated to each other, or is explored in distinct silos as a series of internal debates. By harnessing the explanatory power of long-established organizing concepts within the study of race and racism, this special issue makes a historically informed, theoretical and empirical contribution to aligning these analytical pursuits.     

Beyond the sporting boundary: the racial significance of sport through midnight basketball

Abstract

Sport is among the most potent institutions in the production, maintenance and contestation of race in the modern world. The last decade has witnessed a significant increase of sport-based research on the cutting edge of theorizing race and racism in the post-civil rights, post-colonial era. Nonetheless, the study of sport has yet to be seriously engaged by mainstream social scientists. This paper argues that sport scholars need to better demonstrate the powerful, even irreducible racial significance of sport in politics, public policy and popular culture. This argument is illustrated and elaborated with findings from an ongoing, multifaceted research project on midnight basketball in the USA. Key points include: the complexity of racial imagery in and around sport; sport's legitimating functions for racialized neo-liberalism; and the impact of sport and race politics on federal crime policy. Revealed throughout is a more sophisticated understanding of the centrality and complexity of contemporary racial formations.     

Behaviour as a tool in the assessment of animal welfare

A central issue in animal welfare research is how to assess the welfare state of animals objectively and scientifically. I argue that this issue can be approached by asking two key questions: 1) is the animal physically healthy and 2) does the animal have what it wants? Behaviour is used to answer both of these questions. In the assessment of physical health, it can be used for clinical and pre-clinical diagnosis. In the assessment of what animals want, it has a major role through choice and preference testing. It is particularly important that applied ethologists develop methods for assessing welfare in situ--in the places where concern for animal welfare is greatest such as on farms and in zoos.     

Introduction to the special issue: intersectionality and entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

We briefly review the ethnic entrepreneurship paradigm, identifying the problems associated with an approach that emphasizes the salience of one social group, ethnicity, to the exclusion or downplaying of others, such as race, class, and gender. We introduce an intersectional approach to the study of (ethnic) enterprise, reviewing the literature and using the articles in this special issue to demonstrate the utility of this perspective. We close by encouraging the use of this approach in future research.     

Whiteness studies and laypeople's engagements with race and genetics

This paper proposes a research strategy for examining laypeople's thoughts and reflections on innovations in the science of race and genetics. While some sociologists have shown a reluctance to engage in such discussions, this paper argues that social scientists need to take such views seriously. To do this, the paper brings together an anthropological approach to the study of scientific literacy and recent scholarship in the field of Whiteness studies. The combining of these literatures raises a set of interesting and sometimes uncomfortable questions about the ways in which social scientists and research participants contribute to the reproduction of White power and dominance in Western societies.     

Revisiting the crossroads: returning to The Empire Strikes Back

This essay provides a critical reflection on the intellectual and political questions raised by The Empire Strikes Back. It argues that thirty years after the collection helped establish the politics of race at the centre of mainstream scholarly debate; these have now been pushed to the periphery of British sociology. The discussion begins by setting the book against its prevailing political economy, before commenting on the virtue and authenticity in its type of critical scholarship. The essay then moves to spotlight some of the ways in which the collection may be deemed both pioneering and limited, how we might recall the collection today.     

Reproductive/urogenital organ development and molecular genetic cascades: glamorous developmental processes of bodies

At the beginning of the 21st century, developmental biologists together with medical researchers in a wide range of fields are witnessing rapid progress in molecular developmental biology. For example, conditional gene knockout systems are being designed to tackle questions about organogenesis and body plan formation in experimental mouse models and experimental designs include several compound mutant analyses and genome modification strategies. On the other hand, several fields remain relatively unexplored. Molecular mechanisms of sex differentiation are one of the unexplored huge area. Unanswered questions include the molecular genetic cascade of gonad formation, reproductive organ formation, uterus, external genitalia and mammary gland formation, and also the molecular mechanisms of signal transduction, and gene regulation by nuclear hormone receptors. This special thematic review series entitled, "Reproductive/urogenital organ development and molecular genetic cascades: glamorous developmental processes of bodies," covers such a wide range of topics. For this special issue, I have asked active researchers to contribute reviews of these topics which I believe will be useful not only for molecular developmental biologists, but also for researchers in biochemistry and cell biology. It will be my great pleasure if this special thematic issue encourages scientists to study this exciting research field.     

Introduction: Who's at the bottom? Examining claims about racial hierarchy

Why do claims about racial hierarchy matter? The question whether some groups are worse off than others is highly pertinent at a time when there is growing recognition of multiple forms of racisms and racial oppression. It is widely accepted that racial hierarchies are still with us today, and this concept is peppered throughout writings on “race” and racisms, but, what, exactly, are racial hierarchies, how do racial hierarchies continue to matter, and in what ways do they operate? This special issue, which focuses on the USA and Britain, also addresses the following questions: Does the concept of racial hierarchy aid us in illuminating racial inequalities and the differential experiences of groups in Western multi-ethnic societies such as the USA and Britain? What sorts of criteria are used in arguments about the place of groups along racial hierarchies? What are the political implications of claims made about racial hierarchies?     

Developmental plasticity in plants: implications of non-cognitive behavior

There has been a surge of interest in phenotypic plasticity in the last two decades. Most studies, however, are being carried out within relatively narrow disciplinary frameworks. Consequently, researchers differ not only in their scientific agenda; they often use different terminologies and conceptual frameworks even when studying the very same phenomena. The diversity of approaches has often generated parallel bodies of theory on subjects that can be best understood in broader interdisciplinary terms. This special issue points out the differences between the concepts and questions that are characteristic of various approaches. Bridging all gulfs may be impossible and not necessarily desirable, yet, awareness of the varied approaches should be instrumental in promoting interdisciplinary advances. It is the contribution to such awareness that is the major purpose of this special issue, and for this reason it deals with molecular, physiological, ecological and evolutionary approaches to the study of developmental plasticity. So as to focus the discussion, six topics have been selected, ranging from the fundamental essence of developmental plasticity to its implications to ecology and evolution. These topics were considered by scholars who were chosen for the diversity of their research, not only their expertise. Rather than a comprehensive body of theory, the current issue thus seeks the diversity of opinions on the discussed topics. It is hoped that the confrontation, in its original Latin sense, which includes bringing together and discussion, of scholars who are studying these phenomena at very different levels and from different points of view will generate new insights and promote future interdisciplinary research.     

Ecology of plant resprouting: populations to community responses in fire-prone ecosystems

Resprouting has emerged as a key functional trait in plant ecology over the past decade with more than 400 papers published since 2000 (Web of Science). This special issue of Plant Ecology brings together a set of papers that advance our understanding of this functional trait, in the quest for developing a better conceptual framework for predicting community response to disturbance. This special issue highlights current research on all aspects of the effects of fire and other disturbances on plant resprouting behaviour and the importance of the persistence niche in structuring plant communities.