Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

If you like preprints, here is one for a paper that maps the climate contrarian blogosphere and conceptualisies hyperlinking as means of signaling what is deemed valuable and legitmate: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/64hwg_v1

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...

New paper by Ang Li (and co-authors Kadir Atalay & Stephen Whelan from the University of Sydney) looks at the effect of house price increases on renters and homeowners fertility intentions and fertility outcomes in Australia.  Housing affordability has been a big issue in Australia for some time and the impact of decreasing affordability has been linked to declining fertility rates. Atalay, Li and Whelan using data from the HILDA survey find that increasing house prices have different effects for homeowners and renters. Here is the abstract:  There is increasing evidence that housing and housing markets impact a variety of behaviors and outcomes. Using a rich panel of Australian microlevel data, we estimated the effect of housing price changes on both fertility intentions and fertility outcomes. The analysis indicates that the likelihood of having a child among homeowners is positively related to an increase in housing wealth. The positive housing wealth effect has t...

This post is a review I wrote of  Salvatore Babones 's book 'The New Authoritarianism'  for Good reads  a couple of years ago. I intended to write an extended post on the book for the blog but never did. So here is the original review: Babones offers an account of a “new authoritarianism”: an illiberal transformation of liberalism from the classical philosophy of individual freedom to a rights-based discourse that ‘empowers’ people on their behalf and removes rights from the realm of democratic contestation. This transformation of liberalism is underpinned by the authority (or rather tyranny in Babones's framing) of a new liberal expert class of professionals and managers that control liberal institutions, nationally and globally, and filter the range of policy options presented to the voting population. This is an intriguing thesis – elements of the argument have an logic that we have heard before. Garrett Hardin suggested that human right framework...

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...

Camperdown Memorial Rest Park, Church St Newtown, Sydney. (14th, June,2017) Alex Page and I are coordinating a Unit for Winter School, the Sociology of Deviance and Difference , and we wrote a brief note for the Unit of Study to convey the ethos and importance of such a topic.  Here it is: A Brief Note From Your Course Coordinators: We would both like to formally welcome you to the Winter School version of Sociology of Deviance and Difference for 2017!  In this intensive unit over the next two and half weeks we – Mathew Toll and Alex Page – will be working with you to unpack the nature of deviance and difference and ask questions like:   what is deviance? Is it socially constructed? And if so, how and why is it constructed in certain ways? Who gets to set the rules? Who gets to label someone a deviant? How is deviance and difference experienced? And, what are the relations of power at play that determine constructions of normalcy? Why this way and ...