Allocation under dictatorship : research in Stalin’s archives

We survey recent research on the Soviet economy in the state, party, and military archives of the Stalin era. The archives have provided rich new evidence on the economic arrangements of a command system under a powerful dictator including Stalin’s role in the making of the economic system and economic policy, Stalin’s accumulation objectives and the constraints that limited his power to achieve them, the limits to administrative allocation, the information flows and incentives that governed the behavior of economic managers, the scope and significance of corruption and market-oriented behavior, and the prospects for economic reform

Children's encounters with things: schooling the body

This article draws on work around matter and the material in order to examine how (extra)ordinary “things” are used to (re)produce formulaic and predictable performances within the context of an early years classroom. Using ethnographic data I focus on a series of encounters where oscillations between (in)animate objects and the child work at schooling the body. I also note how the “work” of things constitutes a point of tension where on the one hand they are implicated in discourses of normalization yet simultaneously work at “othering.” The article also argues that despite their coercive propensities children’s relationships with and through material things can open up possibilities for dislocating sedimented pedagogical practices where “something else” becomes possible