scholarly journals On the Social Construction of Legal Grievances: Evidence From Colombia and South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (8) ◽  
pp. 1326-1356
Author(s):  
Whitney K. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Access To Health Care ◽  
Legal Mobilization ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
Access To Health ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

Leveraging comparisons within and across cases, this article investigates legal mobilization for social rights in Colombia and South Africa. This kind of rights contestation represents a new phenomenon, in which both ordinary citizens and judicial actors have come to view problems related to access to health care, housing, education, and social security through the lens of the law. Research on legal mobilization has tended toward one-sided examinations of this complex phenomenon, focusing primarily on either legal claims-making or judicial decision-making, and neglecting to fully theorize the relationship between the two. Drawing on an analysis of rights claims and 178 interviews, this article aims to correct these imbalances. In doing so, it offers a generalizable model that accounts for the social construction of legal grievances and the development of judicial receptivity to particular kinds of claims, and explains both the emergence and continuation of legal mobilization for social rights.

Prophets and Profits of Racial Science

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruha Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Precision Medicine ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Racial Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Racial Ethnic

In this response to Terence Keel and John Hartigan’s debate over the social construction of race, I aim to push the discussion beyond the terrain of epistemology and ideology to examine the contested value of racial science in a broader political economy. I build upon Keel’s concern that even science motivated by progressive aims may reproduce racist thinking and Hartigan’s proposition that a critique of racial science cannot rest on the beliefs and intentions of scientists. In examining the value of racial-ethnic classifications in pharmacogenomics and precision medicine, I propose that analysts should attend to the relationship between prophets of racial science (those who produce forecasts about inherent group differences) and profits of racial science (the material-semiotic benefits of such forecasts). Throughout, I draw upon the idiom of speculation—as a narrative, predictive, and financial practice—to explain how the fiction of race is made factual, again and again. 

scholarly journals Spatiotemporal modelling and mapping of cervical cancer incidence among HIV positive women in South Africa: a nationwide study

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dhokotera Tafadzwa ◽  
Riou Julien ◽  
Bartels Lina ◽  
Rohner Eliane ◽  
Chammartin Frederique ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Cervical Cancer ◽  
South African ◽  
Access To Health Care ◽  
Health Facilities ◽  
Hiv Positive ◽  
The South ◽  
Hiv Positive Women ◽  
Access To Health

Abstract Background Disparities in invasive cervical cancer (ICC) incidence exist globally, particularly in HIV positive women who are at elevated risk compared to HIV negative women. We aimed to determine the spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal incidence of ICC and the potential risk factors among HIV positive women in South Africa. Methods We included ICC cases in women diagnosed with HIV from the South African HIV cancer match study during 2004–2014. We used the Thembisa model, a mathematical model of the South African HIV epidemic to estimate women diagnosed with HIV per municipality, age group and calendar year. We fitted Bayesian hierarchical models, using a reparameterization of the Besag-York-Mollié to capture spatial autocorrelation, to estimate the spatiotemporal distribution of ICC incidence among women diagnosed with HIV. We also examined the association of deprivation, access to health (using the number of health facilities per municipality) and urbanicity with ICC incidence. We corrected our estimates to account for ICC case underascertainment, missing data and data errors. Results We included 17,821 ICC cases and demonstrated a decreasing trend in ICC incidence, from 306 to 312 in 2004 and from 160 to 191 in 2014 per 100,000 person-years across all municipalities and corrections. The spatial relative rate (RR) ranged from 0.27 to 4.43 in the model without any covariates. In the model adjusting for covariates, the most affluent municipalities had a RR of 3.18 (95% Credible Interval 1.82, 5.57) compared to the least affluent ones, and municipalities with better access to health care had a RR of 1.52 (1.03, 2.27) compared to municipalities with worse access to health. Conclusions The results show an increased incidence of cervical cancer in affluent municipalities and in those with more health facilities. This is likely driven by better access to health care in more affluent areas. More efforts should be made to ensure equitable access to health services, including mitigating physical barriers, such as transportation to health centres and strengthening of screening programmes.

scholarly journals The social construction of HIV/AIDS

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Goldstein ◽  
H G Pretorius ◽  
A D Stuart
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Full Text ◽  
Aids Epidemic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Hiv Aids

An in-depth look is taken at the specific discourses surrounding the debilitating HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping South Africa and the world. Opsomming Hierdie artikel poog om ‘n indiepte ondersoek te loods na die spesifieke diskoerse rondom die MIV/VIGS epidemie in Suid-Afrika en die wêreld. *Please note: This is a reduced version of the abstract. Please refer to PDF for full text.

scholarly journals Sol T. Plaatje's paremiological quest: a common humanity in cultural diversity

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-165
Author(s):  
Khekheti Makhudu
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Common Humanity ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Having written and compiled from memory, over 700 Setswana proverbs when he was briefly resident in London, around the 1900s, Sol T. Plaatje exhibited unusual ethnographic knowledge and remarkable, creative translation skills in diaspora-like circumstances.  While most literary researchers attest to those achievements, few have been the theories that account sufficiently for Plaatje's multilingual proverb renditions. The view propounded here is that Plaatje's paremiological enterprise was probably never only an exercise of his polyglot abilities. Rather his quest appears to have been to assert the cultural similarities and convergences between African and European people's histories.  His socio-political beliefs propelled deep pride over his Setswana identity and became the driving force for highlighting the human bonds among nations of the North and the South. For Plaatje, seeing the overlaps and equivalences in and through the proverbs of the Dutch, English, French, Germans and the Batswana peoples, firstly validated orality as the bedrock of modern literary expression.  Secondly, the relationship of the two seemed to recapitulate the communicative connections among people and their languages, across time and space. Lastly, the paper makes the point that Plaatje's search for unity in the cultural diversity as exhibited in his 1916 Diane tsa Setswana collection and the 1924 A Sechuana Reader stories, provides instructive lessons that present-day South Africa would ill afford to ignore considering the social cohesion challenges the nation faces.

Reading inquiry through the prism of unemployement

2020 ◽  
pp. 201-216
Author(s):  
Guillaume Heuguet
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Science Inquiry ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

This exploratory text starts from a doctoral-unemployed experience and was triggered by the discussions within a collective of doctoral students on this particularly ambiguous status since it is situated between student, unemployed, worker, self-entrepreneur, citizen-subject of social rights or user-commuter in offices and forms. These discussions motivated the reading and commentary of a heterogeneous set of texts on unemployment, precariousness and the functioning of the institutions of the social state. This article thus focuses on the relationship between knowledge and unemployment, as embodied in the public space, in the relationship with Pôle Emploi, and in the academic literature. It articulates a threefold problematic : what is known and said publicly about unemployment? What can we learn from the very experience of the relationship with an institution like Pôle Emploi? How can these observations contribute to an understanding of social science inquiry and the political role of knowledge fromm precariousness?

Participation as Inclusion and Exclusion: Policing the Boundaries of “Citizenship” in Roma Health Mediation

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-443
Author(s):  
Charlotte Kühlbrandt
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Access To Health Care ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Access To Health ◽  
The Social ◽  
Roma Health ◽  
Governing Institutions ◽  
Improve Access

Participatory health interventions have long been advocated as an approach to help marginalised community members exercise their rights as citizens, including access to health care. More than two decades ago, the Roma health mediation programme was established in Romania as a participatory community health intervention. Mediators are employed specifically to act as intermediaries between ‘Roma patients’ and local authorities or health professionals, with the overall aim to increase trust and improve access to health care. Based on data gathered during a year of ethnographic fieldwork with Roma health mediators in Romania, including participant observation and interviews, this article analyses the social processes by which participatory approaches produce both social inclusion and exclusion. It illustrates how mediators exceeded their remit of health and attempted to discipline communities into forms of neoliberal citizenship. Mediators reframed access to health care not as a right that community members already have, but as a benefit that must be individually ‘earned’ through the fulfilment of neoliberal citizenship. The article argues that far from being an ‘empowering tool’, community participation can extend the power of governing institutions and thereby may in fact contribute to the maintenance of a political status quo that perpetuates the precarisation of marginalised communities.

scholarly journals Economic Development and the“Social Rights Hypothesis”: Regulating Labour Standards in China

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-331
Author(s):  
Mimi ZOU
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Labour Law ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
The Social ◽  
Labour Standards ◽  
Critical Account ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis paper provides a critical account of the various roles that labour-law regulation has played in China’s transition to a market-oriented economy. The analysis aims to contribute new insights to an ongoing debate on the relationship between economic development and legal rules and institutions in China. Discussions of social and labour rights have been on the periphery of a debate that has focused on property and contract rights (the so-called “Rights Hypothesis”). While numerous scholars have sought to debunk the explanatory power of the “Rights Hypothesis” in the case of China, I put forward an alternative “Social Rights Hypothesis.” My proposed hypothesis seeks to explain how labour-law rules and institutions have co-evolved with the emergence of a labour market in China’s economic development. Specifically, labour law has played not only a market-constituting role, but also market-corrective and market-limiting functions.

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