Biopolitics of Adoption

From the 1930s through the 1970s, first eugenics and then the Cold War made “overpopulation” a key word in defining the nature and cause of “Third World” poverty, as well as what the form of its solution—development—would be. Defining fertility as the problem simultaneously decentered blame—it was not colonialism or extractive world economic systems that cause poverty in the Global South—and provided a very specific cause and site of intervention: irresponsible, careless mothers and their excessive children. We know this story well; many feminist scholars and activists have made the argument that this discourse, imagined in relationship to the social science unit of the national population, was crucial to the elaboration of twentieth-century biopolitical regimes of post/neo/colonial governance

Transnational

The scholarship of transnational feminisms is organized by arguments about even its most basic terms and ethical orientation. Some scholars write that it is an exciting, positive intervention that replaces a hackneyed and unsustainable notion of international female sameness as “global sisterhood” (i.e., Morgan 1984), restores socialist feminism to its rightful place in feminist thought, re-centers US Third World feminism and internationalist solidarity for decolonization, and draws attention to the often brilliant activism of feminists in the global South focused on issues like food justice and water (Mohanty 1984; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Kaplan and Grewal 1994; Basu 1995; Das Gupta 2006; Swarr and Nagar 2010; Blackwell 2014). Others mistrust it on opposite grounds: it is liberal, Western, white, and through nongovernmental organization (NGOs), private foundations, and even explicit alliance, linked to international organizations (IGOs) such as the World Bank, to globalizing capital, and imperial militaries (Spivak 1996; Alvarez 2000; Fernandes 2013). These two positions, although sometimes opposed to each other, might also both be true: global capitalism and imperial ambition could be the conditions of possibility for transnational feminisms, from below or even alongside (Naples 2002)

Pushing in Silence: Modernizing Puerto Rico and the Medicalization of Childbirth by Isabel M. Córdova (review)

Pushing in Silence came out at a complicated time. With an estimated three thousand deaths from Hurricane María and a highly publicized fight about how to fund Medicaid in Puerto Rico, how do we read a book about how modernization drove women on the island to give birth in hospitals—except as tragedy? It’s possible that the answer is, in part, that it is more important than ever to restore a sense of the island as a complex place with a rich history—as much more than a disaster. This book certainly gives us that

Integrated modeling of advanced optical systems

This poster session paper describes an integrated modeling and analysis capability being developed at JPL under funding provided by the JPL Director's Discretionary Fund and the JPL Control/Structure Interaction Program (CSI). The posters briefly summarize the program capabilities and illustrate them with an example problem. The computer programs developed under this effort will provide an unprecedented capability for integrated modeling and design of high performance optical spacecraft. The engineering disciplines supported include structural dynamics, controls, optics and thermodynamics. Such tools are needed in order to evaluate the end-to-end system performance of spacecraft such as OSI, POINTS, and SMMM. This paper illustrates the proof-of-concept tools that have been developed to establish the technology requirements and demonstrate the new features of integrated modeling and design. The current program also includes implementation of a prototype tool based upon the CAESY environment being developed under the NASA Guidance and Control Research and Technology Computational Controls Program. This prototype will be available late in FY-92. The development plan proposes a major software production effort to fabricate, deliver, support and maintain a national-class tool from FY-93 through FY-95

Reading on the Ropes: A Pilot Study of an Accelerated Remediation Program with Alternative High School Students

High school students must read to learn curriculum, yet few interventions are proven to substantially help close literacy gaps for older students with reading deficits. Students with large literacy deficits particularly benefit from explicit, systematic instruction of interventions emphasizing the structure of language (i.e., phonology, orthography, syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics), aspects of cognition (i.e., problem solving, attention, reasoning, and inferencing), and organization of spoken and written language. A 14-week pilot study of Readable English, a reading intervention using these structured literacy elements, provided embedded interactive orthography to scaffold online grade level content for students at two alternative high schools (N = 25). Students in the treatment group showed significant and meaningful increases in standardized tests of reading accuracy, fluency, and reading comprehension compared to minimal or no gains in the control group. Transfer effects from students using the Readable English markup to reading in standard English were demonstrated. Implications for use as accelerated remediation intervention for older adolescents are discussed

Guatemalans’ Missing Children

No abstract available

Twentieth Century Black and Native Activism Against the Child Taking System: Lessons for the Present

This Article argues that the historical record supports activism that takes the abolition of the child welfare system as its starting point, rather than its reform. It explores the birth of the modern child welfare system in the 1950s as part of the white supremacist effort to punish Black communities that sought desegregation of schools and other public accommodations; and Native communities that fought tribal termination and the taking of indigenous land. Beginning with the “segregation package” of laws passed by the Louisiana state legislature in 1960, the Article shows how cutting so-called “illegitimate” children off the welfare program, called Aid to Dependent Children, (ADC) and placing those whom their mothers could no longer support in foster care was an explicit response to school desegregation. While the National Urban League initially mounted a formidable national and international mutual aid effort, “Operation Feed the Babies,” its ultimate response—appealing to the federal government to reform the welfare and child welfare systems— backfired in disastrous ways. The Eisenhower administration responded by providing federal funds for a program it called ADC-foster care, giving states resources to dramatically expand the foster care system, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Black children in foster homes within a year. Native Tribal nations, in contrast, fought throughout the late 1960s and 70s to get states out of Indian child welfare. After a decade of activism, in 1978, they succeeded in passing the Indian Child Welfare Act, which put American Indian kids under the jurisdiction of tribal courts instead of the states’. Over the next decades, the number of Native children in foster care shrank dramatically. While history rarely offers clear guidance for the present, these two stories strongly suggest the limits of reform for state child welfare systems, and the wisdom of contemporary activists who call for abolition

Technology Transfer and Innovation Policy at Canadian Universities: Opportunities and Social Costs

This project examines the role of universities in transmitting knowledge in the forms of technology transfer mechanisms, intellectual property (IP) agreements and other knowledge diffusion policies