Unregulated Desires: Anomie, the “Rainbow Underclass” and Second-generation Alevi Kurdish Gangs in London

This article offers a case study of the adaptation strategies of a section of second-generation young male Alevi Kurds in London and the social conditions which make some of them more prone to join gangs and to reject mainstream institutions in their search for instant material rewards. It is instructive to use Durkheim’s analysis of society’s integrative and regulative functions and particularly his concept of anomie to understand a situation where the legitimate means in the pursuit of material wealth and comfort are out of balance with the demand, calling into question the legitimacy of the institutions which provide these functions. Those who cannot compete through existing institutions are more likely to seek alternative means to achieve these ends. Durkheim identified youth as more vulnerable to such unregulated desires and I argue that his approach offers valuable insights into the anomic pressures confronting second-generation migrant young men in particular

Feynman-Schwinger Representation method for bound states

In nuclear and particle physics one is often faced with problems where perturbation theory is not applicable. An example of this is the description of bound states. Therefore, an exact solution of field theory to all orders is an unavoidable and interesting problem. Path integrals provide a framework for exact solutions in field theory. In this talk I will present an economical method of evaluating path integrals using the Feynman-Schwinger representation (FSR).Comment: Invited talk, to be published in the proceedings of 17th European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, Evora, Portugal, 11-16 Sep 200