Three-generation mobility in the United States, 1850-1940: the role of maternal and paternal grandparents

This paper estimates intergenerational elasticities across three generations in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploring how maternal and paternal grandfathers predict the economic status of their grandsons and granddaughters. We document that the relationship between the income of grandparents and grandchildren differs by gender. The socio-economic status of grandsons is more strongly associated with the status of paternal grandfathers than maternal grandfathers. The status of maternal grandfathers is more strongly correlated with the status of granddaughters than grandsons, while the opposite is true for paternal grandfathers. We argue that the findings can be rationalized by a model of gender-specific intergenerational transmission of traits and imperfect assortative mating.Accepted manuscrip

Marriage, migration and work: three essays on mobility in the United States, 1850-1930

This dissertation studies three forms of mobility in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first chapter uses newly collected data from Union Army widows' pension files to isolate the causal effect of women's income on their decisions about marriage. Making use of exogenous variation in the processing time of pension applications, I show that receiving a pension caused widows to remarry at a significantly slower rate. This suggests that women's income directly influenced marital outcomes, largely by making women more selective in the marriage market. The second chapter explores the extent to which nineteenth century internal migrants in the United States were motivated by the possibility of upward occupational mobility. Drawing on the literature on contemporary migrant selection and sorting, I argue that workers with greater potential for occupational upgrading should have selected themselves out of counties with low skill premiums and sorted themselves into counties with high skill premiums. Using linked data from the U.S. Census and county-level wage data, I present results consistent with this argument. The third chapter of the dissertation (co-authored with Claudia Olivetti and Daniele Paserman) examines intergenerational income mobility across three generations between 1850 and 1930. Making use of the socioeconomic content of names, pseudo-panels of three generations are created by grouping samples of individuals by first name. Using G1, G2, and G3 to index generations one two and three, respectively, we find a significant correlation between G1 and G3, controlling for G2. We also find differences in this correlation by gender, suggesting that the process by which income was transferred from fathers to daughters was not the same as the process by which it was transferred from fathers to sons

Jackson's Parrot: Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language

This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1007/s10912-015-9375-zThis article explores the relationship between automatic and involuntary language in the work of Samuel Beckett and late nineteenth-century neurological conceptions of language that emerged from aphasiology. Using the work of John Hughlings Jackson alongside contemporary neuroscientific research, we explore the significance of the lexical and affective symmetries between Beckett’s compulsive and profoundly embodied language and aphasic speech automatisms. The interdisciplinary work in this article explores the paradox of how and why Beckett was able to search out a longed-for language of feeling that might disarticulate the classical bond between the language, intention, rationality and the human, in forms of expression that seem automatic and 'readymade'

Containment, delay, mitigation: waiting and care in the time of a pandemic

In this paper we take up three terms – containment, delay, mitigation – that have been used by the UK Government to describe their phased response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the terms refer to a political and public health strategy – contain the virus, flatten the peak of the epidemic, mitigate its effects – we offer a psychosocial reading that draws attention to the relation between time and care embedded in each term. We do so to call for the development of a form of care-ful attention under conditions that tend to prompt action rather than reflection, closing down time for thinking. Using Adriana Cavarero’s notion of ‘horrorism’, in which violence is enacted at precisely the point that care is most needed, we discuss the ever-present possibility of failures within acts of care. We argue that dwelling in the temporality of delay can be understood as an act of care if delaying allows us to pay care-ful attention to violence. We then circle back to a point in twentieth-century history – World War II – that was also concerned with an existential threat requiring a response from a whole population. Our purpose is not to invoke a fantasised narrative of ‘Blitz spirit’, but to suggest that the British psychoanalytic tradition born of that moment offers resources for understanding how to keep thinking while ‘under fire’ through containing unbearable anxiety and the capacity for violence in the intersubjective space and time between people. In conditions of lockdown and what will be a long and drawn-out ‘after life’ of COVID-19, this commitment to thinking in and with delay and containment might help to inhabit this time of waiting – waiting that is the management and mitigation of a future threat, but also a time of care in and for the present

Chapter 5 Depressing time

The Time of Anthropology provides a series of compelling anthropological case studies that explore the different temporalities at play in the scientific discourses, governmental techniques and policy practices through which modern life is shaped. Together they constitute a novel analysis of contemporary chronopolitics. The contributions focus on state power, citizenship, and ecologies of time to reveal the scalar properties of chronopolitics as it shifts between everyday lived realities and the macro-institutional work of nation states. The collection charts important new directions for chronopolitical thinking in the future of anthropological research

Chapter 5 Depressing time

The Time of Anthropology provides a series of compelling anthropological case studies that explore the different temporalities at play in the scientific discourses, governmental techniques and policy practices through which modern life is shaped. Together they constitute a novel analysis of contemporary chronopolitics. The contributions focus on state power, citizenship, and ecologies of time to reveal the scalar properties of chronopolitics as it shifts between everyday lived realities and the macro-institutional work of nation states. The collection charts important new directions for chronopolitical thinking in the future of anthropological research

Introduction - Beckett, Medicine and the Brain

When Samuel Beckett’s library was opened up to scholars, it gave some sense of the extraordinary amount of material that had been funnelled into the development of a writer so famed for his minimalism. Alongside an extensive array of books that spoke to his literary interests, there were texts suggestive of medical and scientific concerns, a number of dictionaries and the eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some sections of the encyclopaedia were clearly marked by Beckett, and there is a folded page that suggests an entry over which he may have lingered: “Brain”. Beckett did dog-ear pages in books that interested him though there is no way of knowing definitively if he was the one who pressed down this page; still, Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon note, somewhat conservatively, that “Brain” “could conceivably have interested Beckett” (2013, 193). Indeed, as this issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities demonstrates, the brain and its functioning was of abiding, particular interest to Beckett. Scholars now know that Beckett took extensive notes (held in Trinity College Dublin) on contemporary psychology and psychoanalysis in the 1930s; he also read medical text books and the neurological conditions they detailed with more attention than one would expect from a casually interested amateur. But then, there was nothing casual about Beckett’s anatomising of the mind and body in his work. From the 1930s, when he began to write creatively in a sustained fashion, until the final parched utterances of the 1980s, the tensely discordant relationship between mind and body and the functioning of the brain – the site where mind and body are most insistently implicated – remain key thematic interests for Beckett and produce an extraordinary push and pull on the form of his texts. It is certainly hard to think of a non-medically-trained writer who has returned more insistently to the phenomenological experience of disorder and the technical language of neurological and psychological dysfunction. Equally, it is hard to think of another writer who has a stronger sense of the potential of disorder and dysfunction to scuff up the window of internal representation that, in health, can render our experience so smoothly continuous, so transparent, that one only looks through it rather than at it. Like scratches on a pane of glass, Beckett’s articulations of disorder and disease work to denude experience of its occulting clarity, as they render grittily explicit the uncomfortable disjunctions between idea and expression, mind and body, free will and automaticity, continuity and rupture, endurance and senescence that are as much a part of human experience as the evenness of wellbeing

Bulimic Beckett: food for thought and the archive of analysis

This is the accepted version of the following article: Salisbury, L. (2011), Bulimic Beckett: food for thought and the archive of analysis. Critical Quarterly, 53(3): 60–80., which has been published in final form at doi:10.1111/j.1467-8705.2011.02005.x© 2011, Wiley-BlackwellCritics have noted a mode in Samuel Beckett's writing that can be characterised as the urge to purge. Obsessed with figuring language as both vomit and shit in the guts of an oral/anal textual system, many of his texts are constructed by an oscillation between force-feeding and the compulsive evacuations of emetic and enema. This article suggests that Beckett's persistent textual questioning of what it means to take in and process material from outside the self can usefully be understood in relation to psychoanalytic interpretations of eating disorders; it also suggests that it can be read alongside Beckett's desperate turn to psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the 1930s. Plagued by difficulties with ingestion and digestion (among other symptoms), Beckett sought treatment from Wilfred Bion – the man who would later become one of the most famous British psychoanalysts. Beckett spat out and abandoned the therapy relatively quickly; nevertheless, after his time with Bion there is a sense that the textual evacuations enacted in an uncontrolled fashion in the earlier writing could now be ruminated on, raised to the level of form, and consequently contained. Perhaps coincidentally, the later Bion insisted that what analysis offered, in the face of the patient's frantic desire to ingest and master the world by splitting off and evacuating parts of themselves, was a container – a container for thinking. He insisted that this capacity for thinking should be understood as a form of ‘digestion’ that might bear external material long enough for it to be used rather than purged. Quite properly, Bion never gave details of his therapeutic work with Beckett and there is no accessible archive of clinical material on Beckett's case. This article suggests, however, that an archive of Beckett's analysis can be found in his corpus – in the words and writing he used as food for thought

Development of Fetal Movement Between 26 and 36 Weeks’ Gestation in Response to Vibroacoustic Stimulation

BACKGROUND: Ultrasound observation of fetal movement has documented general trends in motor development and fetal age when motor response to stimulation is observed. Evaluation of fetal movement quality, in addition to specific motor activity, may improve documentation of motor development and highlight specific motor responses to stimulation. AIM: The aim of this investigation was to assess fetal movement at 26 and 36-weeks gestation during three conditions (baseline, immediate response to vibro-acoustic stimulation (VAS), and post-response). DESIGN: A prospective, longitudinal design was utilized. SUBJECTS: Twelve normally developing fetuses, eight females and four males, were examined with continuous ultrasound imaging. OUTCOME MEASURES: The fetal neurobehavioral coding system (FENS) was used to evaluate the quality of motor activity during 10-s epochs over the three conditions. RESULTS: Seventy-five percent of the fetuses at the 26-week assessment and 100% of the fetuses at the 36-week assessment responded with movement immediately following stimulation. Significant differences in head, fetal breathing, general, limb, and mouthing movements were detected between the 26 and 36-week assessments. Movement differences between conditions were detected in head, fetal breathing, limb, and mouthing movements. CONCLUSION: Smoother and more complex movement was observed with fetal maturation. Following VAS stimulation, an immediate increase of large, jerky movements suggests instability in fetal capabilities. Fetal movement quality changes over gestation may reflect sensorimotor synaptogenesis in the central nervous system, while observation of immature movement patterns following VAS stimulation may reflect movement pattern instability