Power, Sect and State

Review of A. Maria A. Kastrinou, Power, Sect and State in Syria: The Politics of Marriage and Identity amongst the Druze. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016

Implementation of Funding for the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP): A Personal Recollection

The SOEP success story was not conceivable at its inception. SOEP's institutionalization is therefore a lesson demonstrating that it is not always possible to say - as is so often required of research proposals today - how a project will develop before it has even begun, and what significance it may one day have. Or, even worse, to show "how a research project will pay off".SOEP, German Research Foundation (DFG), Microanalytical Foundations of Social Policy

Soft X-ray reflectivity: from quasi-perfect mirrors to accelerator walls

Reflection of light from surfaces is a very common, but complex phenomenon not only in science and technology, but in every day life. The underlying basic optical principles have been developed within the last five centuries using visible light available from the sun or other laboratory light sources. X-rays were detected in 1895, and the full potential of soft- and hard-x ray radiation as a probe for the electronic and geometric properties of matter, for material analysis and its characterisation is available only since the advent of synchrotron radiation sources some 50 years ago. On the other hand high-brilliance and high power synchrotron radiation of present-days 3rd and 4th generation light sources is not always beneficial. Highenergy machines and accelerator-based light sources can suffer from a serious performance drop or limitations due to interaction of the synchrotron radiation with the accelerator walls, thus producing clouds of photoelectrons (e-cloud) which in turn interact with the accelerated beam. Thus the suitable choice of accelerator materials and their surface coating, which determines the x-ray optical behaviour is of utmost importance to achieve ultimate emittance. Basic optical principles and examples on reflectivity for selected materials are given here.Comment: 11 pages, contribution to the Joint INFN-CERN-EuCARD-AccNet Workshop on Electron-Cloud Effects: ECLOUD'12; 5-9 Jun 2012, La Biodola, Isola d'Elba, Italy; CERN Yellow Report CERN-2013-002, pp.105-11

'It used to be forbidden' : Kurdish women and the limits of gaining voice

Women’s rights and human rights projects in Turkey and elsewhere routinely construe and celebrate subaltern voice as an index of individual and collective empowerment. Through an ethnographic study of Kurdish women singers’ (dengbêjs) efforts to engage in their storytelling art in Turkey, this article questions the equation between “raising one’s voice” and having agency. It investigates two concrete instances in 2012, in Istanbul and Van, where Kurdish women publicly raised their voices. It shows that public audibility does not necessarily translate into agency, because these spaces, like most, discipline voices ideologically and sonically. Audibility is not a neutral achievement but an ideologically structured terrain that shapes voices and regulates whether and how they are heard and recognized. Voices routinely have ambiguous and even contradictory effects once they become audible in public. It is not simply a matter of “having voice” or “being silenced.

"Geco" and its potential for real estate research: Evidence from the US housing market

Over the past few years, Google econometrics (Geco) turns out to be a powerful tool for research based on individuals rational. Following the seminal work of Ginsberg et al. (2009), this is the second academic journal contribution to be based on search query data from Google Insights for Search (I4S). Existing information on the Home Buying Process is embedded into existing literature on the price-volume relationship in the housing market. The main findings are: I4S subcategories yield inferences about prices and transactions in the near future. While the “Real Estate Agency” subcategory serves as a very robust indicator of transaction volume, "Home Financing" provides interesting insights into the corresponding financing decisions. Therefore, this study contributes towards improving the infor-mational efficiency of a relatively imperfect market and is addressed to policy makers as well as real estate professionals.

Troubled terrain : lines of allegiance and political belonging in Northern Kurdistan

Northern Kurdistan constitutes a politically highly polarized place. Decades of armed conflict accompanied by assimilationist government and violent displacement have unsettled, transformed and deeply divided Kurdish society. On the troubled terrain of Kurdish politics, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and associated organisations have established a position of hegemony within a polarized world that pits the Turkish state against Kurdish resistance, ‘collaborating’ village guards against ‘honourable’ Kurdish patriots. As a result, questions of loyalty and allegiance occupy paramount significance in everyday interactions in today’s Northern Kurdistan. This paper investigates some of the consequences, difficulties and dilemmas that such polarization entails for ethnographic fieldwork. Based on 17 months of fieldwork experience in the region of Van (2011/12), I argue that the polarized political context puts high pressure on individuals to position themselves in relation to dominant political players. Researchers are not exempt from such pressures, and inevitably find themselves drawn into existing webs of allegiance. Arguing that there is no neutral position from which to carry out research, the paper advocates tracing the boundaries that demarcate spaces of loyalty as a methodology for reckoning with the politicization of everyday life. It outlines how political identities are formed and authority is constituted through the performative enactment, maintenance and negotiation of such boundaries