The choosy reaper

This article considers the nature and significance of public opinion about crime in the eighteenth century. Existing research suggests that a combination of increasing crime and the growth of printed literature about crime led to public anxieties which contributed to important changes in judicial and penal policy. The prominent role accorded to the media in these arguments has led some historians to adopt the concept of the moral panic to encapsulate this phenomenon. But this article argues that the impact of such panics on policy was limited, and we need to examine the issue of ‘panic’, and public opinion more generally, from the point of view of the participants, the public who were supposedly rendered anxious by the widespread negative reporting of crime in print. Based on extensive research into diaries and correspondence, the article presents new evidence about Londoners’ actual experiences of crime, what they read about it, and their responses to such reports, during periods of both the presence and absence of supposed moral panics. It suggests that actual experiences of crime were relatively rare, and that Londoners relied primarily on printed sources for their information about crime. Since those representations were actually very diverse, and were often read sceptically, public opinion was resistant to the efforts of ‘moral entrepreneurs’ to induce anxiety. Attitudes were shaped by a complex combination of printed representations, oral discussions, and personal experiences, all reflected through the prism of individual personalities. Consequently, neither individual experiences of crime, nor print culture, created sufficiently strong support for policy changes. Instead, Londoners focused on their ability to shape judicial outcomes through the exercise of discretion when dealing with individual criminals. There are reasons to believe that this individualised approach to crime changed in the nineteenth century, with the adoption of the idea of a ‘criminal class’

This paper examines marriage fraud to bypass immigration restrictions. It assesses media representations of marriage fraud for the purpose of immigration in Canada and Germany between 2000-2019. Paper marriages refer to a marriage which is not bonafide but is done to get residency status in a country by at least one of the partners. In this study, I will examine the media’s role as an agency that both shapes and reflect public opinion on this issue. I am interested in understanding what led to the rise of the discourse of paper marriages? Is this an attempt to bypass tightening of immigration rules, or is it because of the rising tide of xenophobia and distrust to foreigners? I will also examine two competing perspectives on paper marriages. The first approach looks negatively and sees paper marriages as a form of deceit or fraud. The other, takes a more compassionate perspective and sees it as an attempt to help others gain residency status. I will examine the role of the media as a moral entrepreneur in creating “moral panic” about immigration fraud. Keywords: Paper marriages, marriage migration, marriages of convenience, marriage fraud, moral panic, moral entrepreneurs, opinion leaders.

The internal contact nonlinear characteristics caused by the quasi-static properties of high-speed ball bearing is taken as a breakthrough point. Based on the L-P fatigue life theory, the bearing parameters and the preload load are used as the constraint variables to establish an overall bearing life extension model. Then, combined with the influence of geometric parameters on the osculation, the influence mechanism between spin-to-roll ratio and the life of the bearing are studied under the individual variation of the geometric parameters. Finally, the variation law of the bearing life, frictional heat generation and spin-to-roll ratio under the coupling changes of various parameters, and the priority of each parameter on the bearing life sensitivity, are investigated. The results show that the bearing life could be prolonged when the initial contact angle and the number of rolling elements increase but the inner and outer raceway curvature radius coefficients of the bearing and the preload force reduce. And the priority order of each parameter to bearing life sensitivity is as follows: the inner and outer raceway curvature radius coefficients shows the strongest influence on the bearing life, followed by the number of balls, and then the initial contact angle. This research provides a reliable theoretical basis for the design of high-speed ball bearings and life extension technology.

Emerging life extension technologies, as well as some already existing biomedical interventions to prevent ageing-related pathological processes, have significant potential to alleviate the burden of disease in the aging world. However, promoting these technologies requires research in public opinion and the use of marketing techniques. We studied social attitudes towards life extension technologies and geroprotective medicine use with 3 focus groups. The total sample included 18 people with university degrees, 25-70 years old, and living in Moscow (Russia). The tested messages were obtained in advance by the survey of 30 experts in gerontology. The focus group participants got most convinced with the messages that aging prevention is a way to live longer and healthier lives. Despite the concerns of the experts, the idea that aging is a disease convinces considerable share of the informants when the scientific evidences of the connection between aging processes and aging-related health damage are provided. Research details in general made the human life extension feasibility more convincing. Introducing new agendas into discussion (pensions, overpopulation, etc.) turned out to be counterproductive due to new counterarguments emerging in the group discussions. The idea of radical life extension (i.e. reaching lifespan of 200+ years) was perceived skeptically. Some skepticism was attributed to mistrust and disappointment in the modern healthcare system in general. Gene therapies were perceived with caution. The word «geroprotector» is not well known even to the educated general public.

Single-cell species harbor ancestral structural homologs of caspase proteases, although the evolutionary benefit of such apoptosis-related proteins in unicellular organisms is unclear. Here, we found that the yeast metacaspase Mca1 is recruited to the insoluble protein deposit (IPOD) and juxtanuclear quality-control compartment (JUNQ) during aging and proteostatic stress. Elevating MCA1 expression counteracted accumulation of unfolded proteins and aggregates and extended life span in a heat shock protein Hsp104 disaggregase- and proteasome-dependent manner. Consistent with a role in protein quality control, genetic interaction analysis revealed that MCA1 buffers against deficiencies in the Hsp40 chaperone YDJ1 in a caspase cysteine-dependent manner. Life-span extension and aggregate management by Mca1 was only partly dependent on its conserved catalytic cysteine, which suggests that Mca1 harbors both caspase-dependent and independent functions related to life-span control.

Mapping a moral panic: News media narratives and medical expertise in public debates on safer supply, diversion, and youth drug use in Canada

A revolution has been taking place in understanding how the goals of improving health and “adding life to years” might be accomplished. These insights have led to new theories and ideas relevant to explaining contemporary features of morbidity and mortality in aging populations. Chapter 4 (The ‘New Era’ in Health) presents an assessment of these developments especially in relation to the current stage of the epidemiologic transition and aspects of survival and health most important in the study of aging – such as the extension of life and longer survival through ages at greatest risk of frailty and disabling diseases. Issues of particular concern are: (i) the roles of individual and societal responsibility in the occurrence of health risks; (ii) the importance of lifestyle choices and social inequality as concerns for health policies; and (iii) and the nature of the leading causes of lost years of healthy life. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the prevalence of premature mortality and health risks in selected national populations. This leads into Chap. 5 which compares societies in terms of indicators of population health.

Modifying Our Genes: Theology, Science and “Playing God”

Reviewed by: Race Trouble: race, identity and inequality in post-apartheid South Africa Rob Pattman (bio) Kevin Durrheim, Xoliswa Mtose and Lindsay Brown (2010) Race Trouble: race, identity and inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Race Trouble is a troubling book for activists, academics and teachers in South Africa committed to anti-racist politics. For it questions the efficacy and usefulness of the very category ‘racist’ as a critical and analytic tool for making sense of particular social practices, identifications and relations in post- apartheid South Africa. While ‘racism’ as a concept served as a necessary rallying point for mobilising opposition to apartheid, the authors argue that it is no longer relevant or appropriate in the post-apartheid era because, with the emergence of a predominantly black democratically elected government and a rapidly growing black middle class, race/power relations and divisions are much less clear cut. This is not to say that racism is a dying idea 17 years into democracy. In spite of a growing black middle class, there are still massive racial inequalities and, while segregation is no longer prescribed, living and recreational spaces are still racialised. Furthermore the memory of apartheid racism lives on. How do the material and cultural legacies of apartheid influence and affect social relations and identifications in a new society where people of different races must co-exist and interact and where they are expected not to be racist? This is a central question in Race Trouble which focuses on the proliferation of concerns about and accusations of racism which make race a constantly troubling preoccupation in the post-apartheid era. [End Page 163] The book ‘aims to understand how race and racism are reproduced in the post-apartheid context’ and advocates a research approach which explores how people construct, justify, explain, account for and make sense of their lives in a ‘troubling’ context in which race operates as an ever-present, if unstated, backdrop. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, the authors argue for research which makes performativity the central focus of concern, which questions the routine ways people present themselves and negotiate relationships in a context in which social inequalities, living, working and recreational spaces are still racialised and which investigates the kinds of subjectivities people inhabit and which are produced by these practices. They provide rich examples from their own research and observations which illustrate the kinds of methodological, conceptual and analytic approaches they advocate, and this makes the book particularly engaging and insightful. They draw, for example, on observations of beaches where contact ‘between races’ is ‘kept to a minimum’ with white people moving away, as black people fill the beach, as the day progresses, and venture towards the places where white are located. These, they argue, are patterns of behaviour, structured by the legacy of apartheid, which produce new racialised subjectivities and troubling relations. Conversations with white and black beachgoers revealed how race came to operate in troubling ways as a source of identification and difference, with blacks attributing the movements of whites to ‘racism’ and whites complaining about blacks ‘crowding them out’. The movement of black people into what were and, in many cases still are defined as white spaces, such as formerly white schools or particular suburbsis, the authors argue, a feature of the post-apartheid era, which reflects continuing white privilege. But rather than drawing on concepts of racism to explain how, on an ideological level, such dynamics are maintained, the book focuses on the complex ways people negotiate their identities in such a troubling context. One could argue, as many commentators do, that social class has become the source of division and inequality in the post-apartheid era, and that race is troubling only because it is discursively produced by, among many others, the authors of this book. Why did the authors look only at race and not class when examining beach movements and explanations and rationalisations of these? Do, for example, middle class black people on the beach withdraw from less affluent blacks who they perceive as encroaching on their space? But even if class is no longer tied to race, class relations, the authors...

Street Level Bureaucrats’ (SLBs) contribution to social inequality was proposed to be best assessed by combining three analytical approaches: Discretion, Positioning, and Reproduction. Such a triple analytical framework may be required for understanding SLBs’ responses to Economic Abuse (EA) in Israel where formal law has not addressed EA while the prevalent welfare orientation denies the material resources required in responding to EA. Applying the triple framework in analyzing fifty-three interviews conducted with Israeli SLBs operating in state welfare organizations reveals the extent to which each analytical component is open for SLBs’ moral entrepreneurship, generating a sense of appropriate professional treatment. It develops a critical discussion of the conditions under which applying the triple framework of discretion, positioning, and reproduction is conducive.

This article examines Excited Delirium, a controversial medical explanation offered as an explanation for a variety of in-custody deaths. It appears to fit all essential criteria to incite a moral panic, featuring a powerful moral entrepreneur playing off of well-established fears of drugs use and psychosis, with a classic folk devil in the form of young men of color. Yet Excited Delirium has failed to provoke a widespread response, raising the question of how a phenomenon that meets all the classic criteria can fail to incite a moral panic. I argue this stems from the entrepreneurs involved failing to present themselves as sufficiently moral, their campaign to medicalize the phenomenon meeting an unreceptive medical field, and their broad conception of Excited Delirium too easily facilitating strong counter-narratives. This study uses Excited Delirium as a negative case to demonstrate several important factors to consider in the development of moral panics.

Recent attention to men’s decreasing levels of participation in higher education (HE) has produced overly simplistic analyses that men are the new disadvantaged sex and the “feminization thesis” (Leathwood & Read, 2009, p. 20). Men are often homogenized as a group, posing them in a battle of the sexes and ignoring the complex ways that masculinity intersects with other social differences, including age, class, ethnicity, race, and sexuality. Despite the moral panic that has emerged in many countries about men’s HE participation rates compared to women’s, there has been a dearth of research that explores the relationship between formations of masculinity and HE pedagogies. However, some research has drawn attention to the important interconnections between formations of masculinity and other social, generational and cultural differences and inequalities, which profoundly shape men’s dispositions to and experiences of learning and teaching (Archer, 2003; Burke, 2006; HEA, 2008). This paper explores the complex formations of masculinity at play in students’ and academics’ accounts of pedagogical experiences, relations and practices, drawing on a major qualitative research project concerning gender and higher education pedagogies, funded by the UK’s Higher Education Academy. Pedagogies are conceptualised in this paper as constitutive of gendered formations through the discursive practices and regimes of truth at play in particular pedagogic and disciplinary spaces. The article shows that pedagogies do not simply reflect the gendered identities of academics and students but that pedagogies themselves are gendered, intimately bound up with historical and masculinised ways of being and doing within higher education.

As biotechnologies emerge that halt or slow aging, what significance will these have for pregnancy? I argue in favor of life extension technologies based on their benefit for cis-gendered women who wish to become pregnant. After age 27, fertility decreases, and risks associated with pregnancies increase. At the same time, women’s twenties and thirties are often key years in their working life. If aging is stopped or slowed, women can delay pregnancy past those years. Though Martin Luther may seem an unlikely resource for theological reflection on this issue, his biblical commentaries on pregnancy lend support for these technologies. Luther emphasized how the pregnant Mary, though of lowly status, was essential to the embodiment of God and a testament to the blessings God may visit upon anyone. Luther also emphasized how Eve and other pregnant women help advance God’s promise to sustain God’s creation of humankind. I acknowledge that lengthening the window of fertility could exacerbate overpopulation on the Earth but show that solutions typically advanced, such as John K. Davis’ “Forced Choice” proposal, almost always rely on controlling women’s bodily autonomy and must be rejected. I also show that fears of a Malthusian crisis are likely not only overblown but incorrect given predicted declines in fertility rates.

This chapter is concerned with the weaponisation of white identity as a form of resistance to social change. Taking the example of South Africa, it shows how the contemporary rise of white supremacist politics is not restricted to the global north. Focusing on two thematically related examples, it argues that whiteness in South Africa is often presented as a form of extraordinary victimhood. First, historical and contemporary moral panics around white poverty rest on the assumption that poverty is not normal for whites, that they have been forced into an unnatural position and that they must be rescued from it. Second, paranoid myths of white genocide rewrite the endemic violence that affects all South Africans as evidence of a planned conspiracy designed to remove whites from the country. In foregrounding situations in which white people feel or are threatened, to the exclusion of all other conditions of poverty and violence in the country, the moral entrepreneurs who drive these narratives support a white supremacist ideological project that ascribes different values to white and to other lives. These claims of victimhood, of minority status, of oppression and of exceptionality activate powerful currents of white fear that have long been utilised for ideological purposes.

Twenty years have elapsed since the field introduction of the first solid dielectric enhancement technology. During those twenty years, this technology has proven itself as an important tool to enhance the reliability of aging infrastructure. Incremental improvements during those twenty years have aided in the widespread commercial acceptance of the technology on at least four continents. There are some concerns with the current technology, which has been utilized by over 150 utilities worldwide. These include: (1) A higher than desirable post-injection failure profile, due to the slow permeation of the fluid into the dielectric and the resulting slow increase in dielectric performance after injection of approximately 0.5% per day, (2) a limited cable life extension of 10-20 years as suggested by, (3) safety and operational issues related to the low flash point (-5.5 /spl deg/C), and (4) the corrosion of aluminum conductors that occasionally results in failure of treated cables caused by high concentrations of methanol by-product of the most widely-used treatment fluids. A novel approach, which includes new installation methods and new materials to extend the life of power cables, is described. Theory and experiments are discussed which demonstrate that the new approach addresses all of the current shortcomings associated with the first generation technology. In comparison to the technology employed over the last two decades, the new technology provides: (1) More rapid short-term reliability the post-injection dielectric performance improvement slope is greater than an order of magnitude steeper, (2) longer rejuvenated cable life approaching the 40 year expected life for the highest performance modern cable designs, (3) an inherently safer installation, including lower flammability fluids, which have flash points in excess of 65 /spl deg/C, and an injection paradigm, which dramatically reduces the likelihood of electrical contact, and (4) compatibility with all aluminum alloy and copper alloy conductors.