Violence, bureaucracy and intreccio in Brazil

For Brazil’s ‘violence worker’ street level bureaucrats, violence is woven into everyday practice. But violent influence flows in multiple directions; from the state to society, within the state and its agencies, from violent actors upon state bureaucrats. Real and potential violence defines the bureaucratic regime of truth, alongside the influence of a self-defined organised crime group. Using ethnographic evidence, I show some of the fissures that are wedged open through violence, and demonstrate the ways that violent uncertainty shapes a need for leverage and spheres of trust. This shows the dissonance between bureaucratic form and bureaucratic rationale. What matters is not the relationship between the state and bureaucracy, but the relationship between sovereign power and bureaucracy.Social Science Research Counci

Cost and benefits of rent control in Kumasi, Ghana

Over the past forty years, rent control has been a feature of housing in Ghana. This study focusses on the housing market in Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana. The authors examine the characteristics of the rent control regime in force there, and assess the costs and benefits of rent control, on landlords and on tenants, and its effect on the housing stock. Rent control has been successful in ensuring that housing is very inexpensive for most households, in both absolute terms and in the proportion of income devoted to rent. Thesecontrols have deprived landlords of economic returns on their property, causing them to withdraw stock from renting to use for their own family members and to reduce maintenance. However, rent control is not the only constraint on the housing market, in Kumasi or in Ghana. The paper also describes other supply side and regulatory constraints; such as those affecting land, finance, and choice of building design and materials. A number of options for relaxation/decontrol are studied with the aid of a simple present value model. Along with decontrol of new construction it is recommended that floating up and out of controls over a five year period should be considered, along with policy changes to ensure ready supplies of land, finance, and building materials. Such policies are essential, given that private housing investment provides the great majority of rooms in Ghanaian urban areas.Non Bank Financial Institutions,Banks&Banking Reform,Housing Finance,Housing&Human Habitats,Economic Theory&Research

Jim Allen : radical drama beyond 'days of hope'

Due to a desire to establish television as a serious medium, television drama has often been seen as a forum for writers, with names such as David Mercer, Dennis Potter and Trevor Griffiths identified by critics as the driving force, or auteur, behind the works that bear their names rather than, as in much writing about film, the director. However, while this has been so, there are also many examples of writers whose contribution to television writing has been much less celebrated, often due to their close collaboration with a high-profile director who in many critics’ view remains the most influential contributor to the final piece of work. One practitioner who arguably has failed to get the critical credit he is due is Jim Allen, a writer still perhaps best known for his work with one such high-profile director, Ken Loach

A study of Failure and Non-promotion in the Yakima Elementary Schools

The purpose of this study is to ascertain the incidence of pupil failure and non-promotion of a group of elementary school children. This can be determined by (1) finding the number and percentage of pupils who failed at some point from First Grade through Fifth Grade, and who now are enrolled in the Sixth Grade of the elementary schools of Yakima, Washington, (2) finding the annual rate of failure of this group of children, (3) determining the number of pupil failures the occurred, including a record of failing pupils who failed once, twice, or three or more times, and (4) ascertaining the age distribution of this group

Homicide detectives, police that kill and organized crime in São Paulo, Brazil

Thesis (Ph. D. in Urban and Regional Studies)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 256-277).Policing is widely understood, empirically and theoretically, as a core function of the state. Much of the knowledge presumes that police are the only body that may kill and arbitrate killing, routinely and without retaliation from contesting parties, as a means of establishing and maintaining a legitimate legal order. This dissertation examines an urban circumstance where killing and its regulation is not simply the realm of police. Sio Paulo, Brazil is a city with parallel normative logics of killing. Via ethnographic research with homicide detectives, I examine these two logics: homicides and police killings known as resistencias. Under democratic restructuring, with failing public security and underwritten by historic and spatial inequities inscribed via disparate processes of urbanization and planning, investigations reveal the practice of a 'normal' homicide that is a product of a system of governance in the urban periphery. Killing has become the realm of an organized crime group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). Via a prison-periphery nexus, the PCC determines the moral borderlines of violence in the spaces it controls. In apparent moral contrast, police kill citizens at a rate of roughly one per day. Under the rubric of 'resisting arrest' there is a presumption of guilt for the dead and a presumption of innocence for the shooter. Homicide detectives investigate and arbitrate whether these presumptions are 'appropriate'. When not, a resistencia becomes a homicide and the offending police are arrested on the spot by detectives. I track the 'deservedness' of each logic and find that while the two appear antagonistic, there is often a confluence of imaginaries, coalescing in an implicit and obscured 'killing consensus'. This consensus is consolidated via co-orientation and everyday practices pointing towards mutually understood spatial and moral boundaries of who can be killed, why and where, underpinning a decline in homicides here by more than 75% since 2000. Yet, in a 2012 crisis that consensus was 'killed'. Violence erupted between police and the PCC, rupturing the everyday forms of equilibria that have given this city a false floor of security in recent years. Lastly, I examine how public debate and a modest effort to contribute to it led to contradictory reforms.by Graham Denyer Willis.Ph.D.in Urban and Regional Studie

City of clones: Facsimiles and governance in Sao Paulo, Brazil

São Paulo is a megacity defined by formal and informal patterns of urbanization. Informally urbanized spaces are not absent of state intent, despite appearances. Grassroots-led social and spatial practices for survival, agency and self-governance contribute to the reproduction of urban political order in surprisingly unoriginal and routinely recognizable ways. This article argues that these unexceptional informal practices can be understood as ‘facsimiles’ of their formal institutional originals. Using the example of cloned cars the article shows that the facsimile and the original are the same in form and function. Facsimiles do not exist outside of political authority, but are a byproduct and a component of it. They are indistinguishable in their bureaucratic deployment, recognition and acceptance as part of social and spatial order. This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Sage via https://doi.org/10.1177/001139211665729

Guidelines for the use and reuse of animals for teaching within veterinary medical education programs

Use and reuse of animals for educational purposes could adversely affect animal welfare. Guidelines for quantifying, monitoring and planning the use and reuse of animals have been developed. Within this framework animals are assigned points for usage, with more points being allocated to procedures that may have a greater adverse effect on animal welfare. Usage of individual animals is limited to a maximum of 8 points in a calendar week, 24 points in a month or 60 points within a 16-week study period and any associated examination period. Advantages and disadvantages of the system are discussed while modification is expected as knowledge emerges on the impact of procedures on animal welfare