Not Seeing Like a State: Mandated Reporting, State-Adjacent Actors and the Production of Illegible Subjects

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max A Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Young People ◽  
The State ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Mandated Reporting ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Violence Prevention Programs ◽  
Policy Mechanisms ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Previous Scholarship

Abstract Previous scholarship has described how the state “sees” subjects and is itself seen, but has not adequately considered the unfolding interactional dynamics through which subjects become legible or not. This article devises an analytical approach to the micro-dynamics of legibility. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data from violence prevention programs in Los Angeles high schools, the author examines the street-level enactment of third-party mandated reporting, which tasks state-adjacent actors with reporting when a student discloses harm. While the delegation of reporting broadens the state’s horizon of visibility, it also disrupts taken for granted mechanisms of state legibility and perception. This study maps a sequence of micro-level dynamics through which illegible subjects are produced. First, third-party mandated reporters distanced themselves from the visible marks of the state in interactions with young people and presented themselves using markers of interpersonal connection. Second, students applied pre-existing situational definitions of interactions with non-state adults, opening up space for accounts of harm to emerge. Finally, facilitators produced illegibility as they discouraged young people from engagement with the state and trained them in interactional strategies of vagueness and de-personalization to make their harm illegible to policy mechanisms.

‘Urfi marriage, an Egyptian Version of Cohabitation?

1970 ◽  
pp. 64-69
Author(s):  
Ikran Eum
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Young People ◽  
The State ◽  
Sexual Desires ◽  
Lower Social Class ◽  
State Pension

In Egypt, the term ‘urfi2 in relation to marriage means literally “customary” marriage, something that has always existed in Egypt but nowadays tends mostly to be secretly practiced among young people. Traditionally, according to Abaza,3 ‘urfi marriage took place not only for practical purposes (such as enabling widows to remarry while keeping the state pension of their deceased husbands), but also as a way of matchmaking across classes (since men from the upper classes use ‘urfi marriage as a way of marrying a second wife from a lower social class). In this way a man could satisfy his sexual desires while retaining his honor by preserving his marriage to the first wife and his position in the community to which he belonged, and keeping his second marriage secret.

Lifting the Veil

2014 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-55
Author(s):  
Scott Pittman
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
State Government ◽  
The State ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
National Archives ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Hiring And Firing ◽  
And Control ◽  
California Schools

The story of anti-communism in California schools is a tale well and often told. But few scholars have appreciated the important role played by private surveillance networks. This article examines how privately funded and run investigations shaped the state government’s pursuit of leftist educators. The previously-secret papers of Major General Ralph H. Van Deman, which were opened to researchers at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., only a few years ago, show that the general operated a private spy network out of San Diego and fed information to military, federal, and state government agencies. Moreover, he taught the state government’s chief anti-communist bureaucrat, Richard E. Combs, how to recruit informants and monitor and control subversives. The case of the suspicious death of one University of California, Los Angeles student – a student that the anti-communists claimed had been “scared to death” by the Reds – shows the extent of the collaboration between Combs and Van Deman. It further illustrates how they conspired to promote fear of communism, influence hiring and firing of University of California faculty, and punish those educators who did not support their project. Although it was rarely successful, Combs’ and Van Deman’s coordinated campaign reveals a story of public-private anticommunist collaboration in California that has been largely forgotten. Because Van Deman’s files are now finally open to researchers, Californians can gain a much more complete understanding of their state bureaucracy’s role in the Red Scare purges of California educators.

Unification and Its Discontents

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School District ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The State ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
City Schools

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”

Twenty-Five Years after Sa-I-Gu: Multiracial Politics in Times of Crisis

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Chang ◽  
Daniel Martinez HoSang ◽  
Soya Jung ◽  
Chandan Reddy ◽  
Alex Tom
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Critical Consciousness ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The State ◽  
Racial Capitalism

We chose to frame this conversation in terms of crisis: not only the state of permanent crisis created by racial capitalism and settler colonialism but also specific flashpoints like Sa-I-Gu [the Korean term for the April 1992 uprising in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating]. We want to look at the conditions surrounding these flashpoints and the responses to them that then shaped race consciousness and politics subsequently. Today we have no shortage of crisis, no shortage of flashpoints. And yet there is hope. Perhaps more than at any other time in my lifetime, there are opportunities to shift mass culture, at the very least to popularize and normalize a slightly more critical consciousness. So now I want to turn to my friends here to talk about crisis and multiracial politics. We’ll start with Sa-I-Gu and work forward to this moment and also to future possibilities.

EDUCATING YOUNG PEOPLE IN PRESERVING THE MEMORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-88
Author(s):  
Davlatbek Qudratov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Educational Activities ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
Military Mobilization ◽  
Second World

The article analyzes the state of schools and education in General during the Second World war. The slogan "Everything for the front, everything for victory!" defined the goal not only of all military mobilization activities of the Soviet state, but also became the center of all organizational, ideological, cultural and educational activities of the party and state bodies of Uzbekistan.

ELECTION SYSTEM OF THE REPUBLIC OF KAZAKHSTAN

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daria Kozlova
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
The State ◽  
Participation Rates ◽  
High Participation ◽  
Election System ◽  
The Republic

This article discusses the general characteristics of the electoral system of Kazakhstan by the example of elections of the President of the Republic, the Senate of the Parliament of Kazakhstan and deputies of the Mazhilis. The features of dividing this system into majority and proportional are also disclosed. The article analyzes the features of the appointment and conduct of elections and the principles on which they are based. It is also shown how the active activity of the state in the field of legal education of young people and their familiarization with the electoral system affects the high participation rates of citizens in elections.

Privity: Rights, Standing, and the Road Not Taken

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Liau
Keyword(s):  
Third Party ◽  
The Road ◽  
Distinct Concept ◽  
Contractual Rights ◽  
Opening Up

Abstract Privity is generally understood as a rule comprising a burdens limb and a more controversial benefits or ‘rights’ limb. This rendition of privity is too simplistic. Privity has multiple aspects, but its underlying complexity has been obscured by an overwhelming focus on ‘rights’, explaining in part the persistent unclarity plaguing the area. In this article, I argue that an elision of concepts has hampered our understanding of privity and its reform. The literature on contractual rights to performance and secondary rights to damages for their breach is legion. By contrast, standing, as a separate and distinct concept, has been overlooked. These are concepts that need to be more clearly differentiated. While not a panacea to resolve all issues, it is a necessary step to a firmer handle over the distinct issues at stake, and to opening up a novel angle to privity reform—third-party standing—the road not taken.

scholarly journals School and Shaping Students’ Identities: A Report on the Studies into Youth in the Silesian Voivodeship

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Alina Szczurek-Boruta
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Young People ◽  
Social Resources ◽  
The State ◽  
Educational Activities ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
School Year ◽  
Social And Economic Development ◽  
Two Stages

The identity of young people, and the state of a school’s fulfilment of its tasks, as presented in the article, are based on the results of the author’s own field explorations carried out in the school year 2003/2004 and repeated in the same territory of the Silesian Voivodeship in the zone of intensive social and economic development in 2016/2017. The results of the research conducted have shown that schools brought young people with different personal and social resources, and living in different historical and socio-cultural contexts, to a similar value of identity capital. The study, conducted in two stages with an interval of 13 years, has revealed the greatest shifts in the following areas: extension of the range of interactions (change 13.2%); ambivalence (change 8.1%); revitalization (change 7.7%); and ethos (change 6.8%). The least change occurred in the provision of offers of identification (1.7% change). A slight decline was noted in the extension of the developmental moratorium (1.5% change). The identified, described and empirically verified tasks of a school form a specific map of educational activities, which can be successfully used as a matrix to describe and interpret a school’s participation in the shaping of young people’s identities.

Perrinites (Cephalopoda, Ammonoidea) in the Lower Permian of California: Paleontological Notes

1986 ◽  
Vol 60 (5) ◽  
pp. 1133-1133
Author(s):  
Edward C. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
First Record ◽  
The State ◽  
Coarse Grained ◽  
Lower Permian ◽  
Invertebrate Paleontology ◽  
Important Addition ◽  
Shasta County

A specimen of the ammonoid Perrinites Böse, 1919, was collected from the McCloud Limestone east of the summit of Tombstone Mountain, Shasta County, California. This is the first record of the genus in California, an important addition to the meager Permian cephalopod fauna of the state previously reported by Miller, Furnish, and Clark (1957) and Wilson (1984). It was found 1,100 feet (335 m) above the base of the formation in a coarse-grained limestone (Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, Invertebrate Paleontology Section locality 6184) within fusulinid zone H of Skinner and Wilde (1965), considered to be late early or early middle Leonardian in age.

Behind the Popular Narrative: Negotiating Life and Political Engagement in Conflicted Kashmir

2021 ◽  
pp. 232102302110430
Author(s):  
Wahid Ahmad Dar
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The State ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
Political Actions

The article focuses on the subaltern system of micro appropriations or Jugaads used by young Kashmiris to survive within precarious situations inflicted due to armed conflict. More particularly, it argues that such Jugaads are invoked by the subaltern consciousness of Tehreeq-e-Azadi, which offers space for not just the negotiation with the state but also the creative improvisation of daily political actions. It is illustrated that young people’s political participation is entangled with the attempts to overcome the uncertainty around their lives, thereby offering them pragmatic solutions in advancing their interests. It is further elaborated that the existing polarization between separatism and mainstream is obscure at the experiential level, living within precarious situations has taught young people to silently craft possibilities of a good life without looking confrontational to either side. The article argues that localized forms of engagement are crucial for a comprehensive understanding of how modern states operate.

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