Who's invited to the (political) party: race and party politics in the USA

ABSTRACT

From the political behemoths of the Democratic and Republican Parties, to the Civil Rights Era racially progressive Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and reactionary American Independent Party, to the contemporary third party Green and Libertarian Parties, party politics in the USA has a long and storied relationship to the reproduction and contestation of racial domination. Recent works illuminate the strategic use of racial discourse by major party political elites, their deployment of racialized political platforms, and the relationship of these phenomena to power dynamics and racial interests but have yet to fully move beyond the two-party system and engage with innovations in political and cultural sociology. We outline openings for an empirically-grounded sociology of political parties that would reveal the micro- and meso-level features of racialized party politics and the operations of discursive and performative power within both major and minor political parties.     

Protesting headscarf ban: a path to becoming more French? A case study of ‘Mamans toutes égales’ and ‘Sorties scolaires avec nous’

Muslim protests of French headscarf policies might be expected to signify and reinforce a desire to remain apart from mainstream society. This case study of a group of Muslim mothers protesting the 2012 ‘Chatel circular’ finds the opposite. The protest reflects a positive attachment to French identity, culture and values and, in many ways, takes the form of a feminist movement. The study is based on semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observation with ‘Mamans toutes égales’ and ‘Sorties scolaires avec nous’, the two main protesting groups, and others in their political environment. It describes the history of the movement, the characteristics of the activists, their attitudes towards religion, gender, and French society, and explains how the experience of protest has affected their integration into French society. It suggests policies of exclusion, such as headscarf bans, can affect processes of both inclusion and exclusion.     

Wild-ing the Ethnography of Conservation: Writing Nature’s Value and Agency In

When reading ethnographic literature on nature conservation, one may wonder: where has nature gone? Social anthropologists have written nuanced ethnographies of how the environmental projects of governments and transnational NGOs encounter, dispossess, clash culturally with, and try to govern native people across the world. Yet, these diverse ethnographies often say little about what motivates those encounters firstly: local and global nature, especially wildlife, plants, and the planet’s ecological crisis. Thus, this paper seeks ways how ethnographic writing on conservation practice could better reflect that the planet’s many self-willed, struggling, and valued non-humans, too, enter conservation’s encounters. To find paths toward such a ‘wild-ing’ of ethnography, the paper locates and reviews disparate materials from across the social-anthropological literature on biodiversity conservation. The review is structured through three questions: How does and could the ethnography of conservation represent nature’s value? How can it show that animals, plants, and other nature make and meet worlds? How can it incorporate natural science data about non-human worlds and ecological crisis? Altogether, we understand nature conservation clearer through the interdisciplinary and more-than-human ethnography of world-making encounters. Such wilder ethnography may also better connect people’s suffering and nature’s vanishing – as problems both for anthropology and conservation science.     

Medical Need,Equality, and Uncertainty

Many hold that distributing healthcare according to medical need is a requirement of equality. Most egalitarians believe, however, that people ought to be equal on the whole, by some overall measure of well‐being or life‐prospects; it would be a massive coincidence if distributing healthcare according to medical need turned out to be an effective way of promoting equality overall. I argue that distributing healthcare according to medical need is important for reducing individuals' uncertainty surrounding their future medical needs. In other words, distributing healthcare according to medical need is a natural feature of healthcare insurance; it is about indemnity, not equality.     

Legitimizing the shameful: end-of-life ethics and the political economy of death

This paper explores one of the most politically sensitive and intellectually neglected issues in bioethics--the interface between the history of contemporary end-of-life ethics and the economics of life and death. It suggests that contrary to general belief, economic impulses have increasingly become part of the conditions in which contemporary end-of-life ethics continues to evolve. Although this conclusion does not refute the philosophical justifications provided by the ethics for itself, it may cast new light upon its social role.     

Cluster randomization and political philosophy

In this paper, I will argue that, while the ethical issues raised by cluster randomization can be challenging, they are not new. My thesis divides neatly into two parts. In the first, easier part I argue that many of the ethical challenges posed by cluster randomized human subjects research are clearly present in other types of human subjects research, and so are not novel. In the second, more difficult part I discuss the thorniest ethical challenge for cluster randomized research--cases where consent is genuinely impractical to obtain. I argue that once again these cases require no new analytic insight; instead, we should look to political philosophy for guidance. In other words, the most serious ethical problem that arises in cluster randomized research also arises in political philosophy.     

Rethinking Irrigation Efficiency: Chain Irrigation in Northwestern Spain

In recent decades, approaches to evaluating irrigation efficiency have undergone a radical reevaluation. Classical models considered drainage water “lost” to irrigation by flowing out of the system. The recognition that drainage water can remain in the system and become available for use by downstream irrigators has forced the reassessment. Irrigation may be relatively inefficient at the irrigation system and field levels but quite efficient at the basin level. The implications for small-scale, gravity-flow canal systems managed by farmers, which constitute 85% of the world's irrigated area, are significant. These implications are explored in an historic and ethnographic analysis of the chain irrigation system of the Orbigo valley of northwestern Spain. This system of drainage and reuse helps to account for high and sustained agricultural productivity by farmers in the region over several centuries. The property rights institutions devised by farmers to manage this system are discussed and its internal organization compared with south Asian cascade irrigation.This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DBBS 9122134.

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公立医院医疗政策性亏损财政补偿方式研究

从区域政府财政投入角度出发,结合理论和实际情况进行分析,确立公立医院医疗政策性亏损补偿的分类测算、相对效率、投入——产出最优及动态性4个原则,并提出融合了相应激励制约机制指标体系在内的测算方法。     

THE FUTURE OF BIOETHICS: THREE DOGMAS AND A CUP OF HEMLOCK

In this paper I argue that bioethics is in crisis and that it will not have a future unless it begins to embrace a more Socratic approach to its leading assumptions. The absence of a critical and sceptical spirit has resulted in little more than a dominant ideology. I focus on three key issues. First, that too often bioethics collapses into medical ethics. Second, that medical ethics itself is beset by a lack of self‐reflection that I characterize here as a commitment to three dogmas. Third, I offer a more positive perspective by suggesting how bioethics may benefit from looking towards public health ethics as a new source of inspiration and direction.