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We examined the association between racial/ethnic minority segregation and low birth weight (LBW) in Chicago and Toronto communities. While previous work has documented the importance of contextual effects on LBW, these studies have usually been conducted within a single city. We used Pearson correlation coefficients and OLS regression models to examine potential variability in the association between racial/ethnic minority segregation and LBW in Chicago (N = 77 communities) and Toronto (N = 140 communities). Results indicate that racial/ethnic minority segregation, unemployment, and low educational attainment are not associated with LBW in Toronto, while these indicators have strong and significant associations with LBW in Chicago. In a combined model with data from both cities, a 10% increase in minority composition is associated with a 0.5% increase in LBW, controlling for the effects of unemployment and low educational attainment. Stratified models show that this effect is only significant in Chicago, and subsequent models revealed opposite effects for percentage non-Hispanic Black and percentage Hispanic. Future research should consider additional cities for comparative analysis. Such work could test the notion that Chicago and Toronto represent opposite sides of a spectrum, reflecting variability in how social determinants map on to public health outcomes. Future research should also examine the significant heterogeneity observed in highly segregated communities, particularly in Chicago.

This paper re-examines the sociological study of resistance in light of growing interest in the concept of affect. Recent claims that we are witness to an ‘affective turn’ and calls for a ‘new sociological empiricism’ sensitive to affect indicate an emerging paradigm shift in sociology. Yet, mainstream sociological study of resistance tends to have been largely unaffected by this shift. To this end, this paper presents a case for the significance of affect as a lens by which to approach the study of resistance. My claim is not simply that the forms of actions we would normally recognize as resistance have an affective dimension. Rather, it is that the theory of affect broadens ‘resistance’ beyond the purview of the two dominant modes of analysis in sociology; namely, the study of macropolitical forms, on the one hand, and the micropolitics of everyday resistance on the other. This broadened perspective challenges the persistent assumption that ideological forms of power and resistance are the most pertinent to the contemporary world, suggesting that much power and resistance today is of a more affective nature. In making this argument, it is a Deleuzian reading of affect that is pursued, which opens up to a level of analysis beyond the common understanding of affect as emotion. I argue that an affective approach to resistance would pay attention to those barely perceptible transitions in power and mobilizations of bodily potential that operate below the conscious perceptions and subjective emotions of social actors. These affective transitions constitute a new site at which both power and resistance operate.

This paper illustrates how varieties of cosmopolitanism are shaped through a mutually constitutive set of cultural dispositions and institutional practices that emerge at the interstices of global human right norms and local legal practices. Converging pressures of ‘cosmopolitan imperatives’ and the multiplicity of particularized manifestations are co‐evolving in the context of intercrossings during which distinctive cosmopolitanisms are established. This complex relationship of global normative expectations and their local appropriations is elucidated through the dynamic of recursive cosmopolitization. Suggesting that, local problems are resolved with recourse to global prescriptions while local solutions are inscribed in international institutions consolidating the global Human Rights Regime. The Argentinean case carries conceptual and empirical weight as it underscores the recursivity of cosmopolitization by calibrating the tensions of universalism and particularism at the intersection of global, national and regional scales. Argentina is a paradigmatic instantiation for how cosmopolitanism can emanate in the periphery as local problems are globalized. This, in turn, has resulted in the institutionalization of a global Human Rights Regime which exercises normative and political–legal pressures on how states legitimately deal with human rights abuses. It is this cosmopolitan balance, rather than presuppositions of universalistic exogenous pressures or particularistic national exceptions, which is shaping the cultural and political relevance of human rights norms.

While international criminal procedure should be governed by standards of fairness, this does not necessarily imply that fairness demands are to be identical to the ones applicable in domestic proceedings. The context within which international criminal courts and tribunals operate should be taken into account. Whereas domestic criminal courts are usually backed by coercive powers of the state and display comparatively weak libido puniendi, international tribunals, conversely, lack a similar institutional framework but are guided by strong punitive impulses, contingent upon the seriousness of international crimes and international tribunals’ function as ‘moral teachers.’ Against the backdrop of these differences, it is inevitable ‘procedural fairness’ is to be contextually assessed. The need for speedy trials and the ‘exclusionary rule,’ for example, must be weighed against the complexity of cases and the difficulties of obtaining evidence, while the right of the accused to defend himself must be balanced against the consideration that the accused should not use the trial process for propagandistic purposes. At the same time, the author argues, fairness in international criminal proceedings might also require that states, whose nationals are on trial, are allowed to intervene as amicus curiae, as the outcome of the trial might profoundly affect a national sense of guilt.

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in applying the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu in international studies as part of a more general sociological turn observable in both international and European studies. However, different from earlier attempts at deploying Bourdieusian sociology in the context of international law, economics, and politics, most of this new Bourdieu-inspired constructivist political science research only marginally addresses what in many ways was the cardinal point of Bourdieu's work: his attempt at devising a reflexive sociology. This article's basic claim is that the most significant contribution Bourdieusian sociology can make to international (and European) studies is not achieved by adaptation or transplantation of key concepts (field, habitus, and so on) to a set of research objects that remain by and large predefined by other disciplines. Instead, I contend that it is by deploying the underlying sociological practice of Bourdieusian sociology to international objects in terms of conducting a reflexive sociology of the international. To substantiate my claim, I make three more specific arguments. In the first section, I argue for the need for “objectivizing” the research object in terms of “double reflexivity” with respect to both object and researcher. In the second part, I suggest that key Bourdieusian notions are precisely tools for this scientific operation by providing a relational and integrative approach. In the third part, I compare this approach with a cross section of research on international human rights and thereby suggest how it provides a different reading of the international.

This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of transnational commemoration of “Hiroshima.” I also show that nationalization of trauma of “Hiroshima” involved a shift from pity to sympathy in structures of feeling about the event. This historical study suggests that a reiterated problem-solving approach can be efficacious in analyzing how construction of national memory of a traumatic event connects with the recurrent reworking of national identity, on the one hand, and how a theory of cultural trauma can be helpful in exploring a synthesis of psychological and sociological approaches to commemoration of a traumatic event, on the other.

This article examines how international judicial interventions in mass atrocity influence representations of violence. It relies on content analysis of 3,387 articles and opinion pieces in leading newspapers from eight Western countries, compiled into the Darfur Media Dataset, as well as in-depth interviews to assess how media frame violence in the Darfur region of Sudan. Overall, it finds that UN Security Council and International Criminal Court interventions increase representations of mass violence as crime in all countries under investigation, although each country applies the crime frame at a different level. Reporting suffering and categorizing the violence as genocide also varies across countries. Comparative case studies identify country specific structural and cultural forces that appear to account for these differences. Multilevel multivariate analyses confirm the explanatory power of cultural sensitivities and policy practices, while individual- and organization-level factors, such as reporters’ gender and the newspapers’ ideological orientation, also have explanatory power.

Social activists and especially insurgents have created solidary cultures of resistance in conditions of high risk and repression. One such instance is an episode of contention by Irish political prisoners in the late 1970s. The “blanketmen” appropriated and then built a solidary culture within spaces that had been under official control. Their ability to maintain such a collective response was enhanced by an intensifying cycle of protest and violent reprisal, including extreme stripping of their material environment, in which the prisoners gained considerable initiative. This study uses interviews and contemporary writings by prisoners, prison authorities, visitors, and movement activists to examine how the dynamic of protest and repression transformed insurgent prison culture—through material, emotional, and perceptive changes—and the importance of leadership in the transformation. Special attention is given to prisoner activities in appropriated spaces that reinforced the culture of resistance: promoting the Irish language, cultural production, and the production of propaganda.

The ability to decide if, when, and how often to reproduce is a human right and a biomedical and sociopolitical goal. Infertility impinges upon this right by restricting the ability of individuals and couples to meet their reproductive desires. While biomedical interventions to address infertility have proliferated recently, their distribution has been inequitable; inequalities in rates of infertility, infertility-specific distress, and access to reproductive healthcare to address infertility abound. Using a reproductive justice framework, and focusing on the United States, we examine the collection and utilization of the Integrated Fertility Survey Series, the inception and provisions of Title X, and the structural limitations of the private healthcare system. This analysis highlights systematic and linked exclusions of marginalized groups from reproductive health surveillance and the public and private provision of reproductive healthcare, including older, non-white, working class, LGBTQ, geographically remote, less educated, HIV-positive, institutionalized, and disabled individuals. Individuals who are excluded from infertility tracking, services, and treatment—the invisible infertile—are limited in their ability to realize their human right to reproductive health. Utilizing existing resources in public and private clinical spaces may be a useful starting point for addressing these disparities, but a broader commitment to equitable and inclusive surveillance and healthcare provision is also needed.

Two obstacles blocked the incorporation of the rescue of Jews in France into the Resistance movement. The first, which can be traced back to the sources of the social imaginary, had to do with the fear of stirring the old demon of the Jewish problem by referring specifically to the fate awaiting the Jews. The second was inseparable from the meaning attached to the Resistance ever since its inception, which focused on political opposition to Vichy and on the liberation of France and never included rescuing those whose lives were in danger. This double marginalization (from the History of the French people as a whole and from that of the Resistance) survived liberation and gave way to three different historiographies: that of the French Resistance, that of the rescue of the Jews, and that of Jewish resistance. The history of the rescue of the Jews in France should be studied through an integrated perspective that leads to thinking about the Resistance as a whole, organized and unorganized, Jewish and non-Jewish.