Virtual Library

Desegregation has been one of the only legally enforceable routes of access and opportunity for millions of school children. Yet even as the nation celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Gary Orfield, Director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, began to attract national attention by identifying and documenting the insidious trend toward the resegregation of our public schools.

This article argues that democratic deepening is shaped by shifting civil society-state relations that can only be understood by disaggregating democratic deepening into its component parts of participation, representation, and stateness. This frame is used to explore the divergent democratic trajectories of Brazil, India, and South Africa. Through the examples of local government transformation and social movement mobilization, I argue that a “project” civil society in Brazil has deepened democracy and transformed the state. In contrast, in South Africa and India civil society is increasingly being subordinated to political society. In South Africa, an active civil society has largely been sidelined as a politically consequential actor (containerization) and in India much of civil society has been fragmented and instrumentalized (involution).

The article contends that the attitudes of the majority population towards the allocation of political rights to out-group populations are distinct from attitudes towards the allocation of social rights. Data obtained from an attitudinal survey administered to a representative sample of Israeli adults show that the level of objection to the allocation of rights to labour migrants in the political sphere is twice as high as that found in the social sphere. Multivariate analysis demonstrates that attitudes towards the granting of political and social rights not only differ in the degree of objection, but are also differentially affected by the social and economic characteristics of the population. Further analysis examines the effect of perceived socio-economic threat, threat to national identity and prejudice on attitudes towards the allocation of rights. This analysis reveals that different mechanisms underlie the formation of attitudes towards the allocation of rights in the political and social arenas. The findings are discussed in light of previous research and theory.

This study documents and explains historical variation in U.S. criminal deportations. Results from time-series analyses suggest that criminal deportations increase during times of rising unemployment, and this effect is partly mediated by an elevated discourse about immigration and labor. An especially strong association between deportations and unemployment emerges from 1941 through 1986, a period in which the federal law enforcement bureaucracy and deportation laws were well established and judges retained substantial discretion. After 1986, changes in criminal deportation rates mirror the trend in incarceration rates. The study connects the burgeoning sociological literatures on immigration and punishment, revealing a historically contingent effect of labor markets on the criminal deportation of noncitizen offenders.

Lesbians, prostitutes, women likely to have sex across racial lines, "brought to the United States for immoral purposes," or "arriving in a state of pregnancy"—national threats, one and all. Since the late nineteenth century, immigrant women’s sexuality has been viewed as a threat to national security, to be contained through strict border-monitoring practices. By scrutinizing this policy, its origins, and its application, Eithne Luibhéid shows how the U.S. border became a site not just for controlling female sexuality but also for contesting, constructing, and renegotiating sexual identity.

Initially targeting Chinese women, immigration control based on sexuality rapidly expanded to encompass every woman who sought entry to the United States. The particular cases Luibhéid examines-efforts to differentiate Chinese prostitutes from wives, the 1920s exclusion of Japanese wives to reduce the Japanese-American birthrate, the deportation of a Mexican woman on charges of lesbianism, the role of rape in mediating women’s border crossings today—challenge conventional accounts that attribute exclusion solely to prejudice or lack of information. This innovative work clearly links sexuality-based immigration exclusion to a dominant nationalism premised on sexual, gender, racial, and class hierarchies.
 

The so-called ‘gay age of consent’ was the most high-profile issue in UK lesbian, gay and bisexual politics during the 1990s. Campaigning for an equal age of consent provoked a series of extended public and parliamentary debates, concluding with the passage of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act (2000).This article analyses these debates to reveal emerging social relationships between heterosexuality and homosexuality. It is argued that age of consent debates witnessed the ascendance of a new ‘hegemony’ supporting ‘equality at 16’, constituted through the interweaving of knowledge-claims generated within the mainstream epistemologies of biomedicine, law, criminology and child welfare.The analysis integrates critical sociological perspectives on these various forms of knowledge, with reference to epistemological transformations occurring in late modernity. Particular attention focuses on claims concerning the age at which the fixity of sexual identities is established. It is argued that the debate’s structure enabled ‘equality at 16’ to be endorsed alongside the persistent operation of rationales of containment in the political mainstream, and hence that legal equality does not imply recognition of the equal value of homosexuality and heterosexuality. The implications are examined for ongoing struggles over sex offences, Section 28, and the social status of same-sex sexualities.

Evidence for Hope makes the case that, yes, human rights work. Critics may counter that the movement is in serious jeopardy or even a questionable byproduct of Western imperialism. They point out that Guantánamo is still open, the Arab Spring protests have been crushed, and governments are cracking down on NGOs everywhere. But respected human rights expert Kathryn Sikkink draws on decades of research and fieldwork to provide a rigorous rebuttal to pessimistic doubts about human rights laws and institutions. She demonstrates that change comes slowly and as the result of struggle, but in the long term, human rights movements have been vastly effective. Attacks on the human rights movement’s credibility are based on the faulty premise that human rights ideas emerged in North America and Europe and were imposed on developing southern nations. Starting in the 1940s, Latin American leaders and activists were actually early advocates for the international protection of human rights. Sikkink shows that activists and scholars disagree about the efficacy of human rights because they use different yardsticks to measure progress. Comparing the present to the past, she shows that genocide and violence against civilians have declined over time, while access to healthcare and education has increased dramatically. Cognitive and news biases contribute to pervasive cynicism, but Sikkink’s investigation into past and current trends indicates that human rights is not in its twilight. Instead, this is a period of vibrant activism that has made impressive improvements in human well-being. Exploring the strategies that have led to real humanitarian gains since the middle of the twentieth century, Evidence for Hope looks at how these essential advances can be supported and sustained for decades to come.

From the Montgomery bus boycott to the Little Rock Nine to the Selma–Montgomery march, thousands of ordinary people who participated in the American civil rights movement; their stories are told in Eyes on the Prize. From leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., to lesser-known figures such as Barbara Rose John and Jim Zwerg, each man and woman made the decision that somethinghad to be done to stop discrimination. These moving accounts and pictures of the first decade of the civil rights movement are a tribute to the people, black and white, who took part in the fight for justice and the struggle they endured.