Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

This is a journal article that I published in 2024 with Ang Li and Natalia Maystorovich Chulio in Child Protection and Practice . Here is the abstract: Morocco's national lockdown was enforced between March 21st and June 10th 2020 in response to the spread of coronavirus. Restriction of civil space was not fully extended to the judiciary which had to transition to virtual sessions. To prepare for future pandemics and disasters, it is crucial to understand how well court systems across jurisdictions especially in low- and middle-income countries managed to function and protect children's access to justice under the constraints of stay-at-home orders. To investigate the effect of the national lockdown on children's access to justice in Morocco, this study employed interrupted time series analysis of publicly available court filings (N = 77,335) pertaining to child protection from January 1st to December 31st 2020 spanning the pre-lockdown, lockdown, and post-lockdown period...

Society is underpinned by standards and expectations as to what social worlds should resemble and operate. But when the very foundations of that world are rocky and open to misuse and abuse, the society is left in a destabilized position. What remains is the question of how these worlds are tolerated in this destabilized form? Can they continue indefinitely in such a way? This place of discomfort is the abject, that which is contrary to everyday harmony. Often the locus of the abject can be expressed in violence. In the case of the Holocaust the abject impacted the individual Jewish people and the wider community of Germany and the world. The meaning that was derived to spark the violence and the meaning that remains are in stark contrast. Prior to the Holocaust the Jewish people were not abject to their community, but with a little guidance and propaganda they were led to a mass hysteria that the world hopes to never witness again. During Europe’s enlightened period the annihi...