Chinatown 2.0: the difficult flowering of an ethnically themed shopping area

Right in Amsterdam’s picturesque Canal Zone, on and around Zeedijk, Chinese entrepreneurs have carved out a presence in what seems like the local Chinatown. The businessmen have been targeting Asian and non-Asian customers by offering products that – to an extent – can be associated with Asia, China in particular. Since the early 1990s, individual entrepreneurs and their business organisations have campaigned for official acknowledgement of Zeedijk as an ethnic-only district and for governmental support of the enhancement of Chineseness. Following Hackworth and Rekers. [(2005). “Ethnic Packaging and Gentrification. The Case of Four Neighborhoods in Toronto.” Urban Affairs Review 41 (2): 211–236], we argue that this case challenges traditional understandings of ethnic commercial landscapes. In sharp contrast to the current orthodoxy, which would conceive the proliferation of such an ‘ethnic enclave’ as part of a larger process of assimilation, we have approached Amsterdam’s Chinatown first and foremost as a themed economic space: Chinese and other entrepreneurs compete for a share of the market and in doing also for the right to claim the identity of the area. What is the historical development of the Zeedijk area, how did Chinese entrepreneurs and their associations try to boost Chinatown and negotiate public Chineseness, and how did governmental and non-governmental institutional actors respond to those attempts?     

Oral health among student veterans: Effects on mental and physical health

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore differences in oral health among students by military service status in postsecondary settings. Participants: Secondary data were obtained from the American College Health Association’s 2011–2014 National College Health Assessment II. Method: Demographic characteristics of the study sample were explored by calculating frequencies and percentages by military service status. Research questions were explored with maximum likelihood multiple logistic regression. Results: Service member and veteran students are at greater risk for neglecting health behaviors associated with positive oral health, including that they were less likely to get dental exams and that those who deployed in the past were the least likely to be practicing good oral health. Conclusions: The results suggest that improving oral health will contribute to improving health and mental health outcomes in this population, and provide important information for health specialists working with service members and veterans on college campuses.     

Reconciling care and justice in contesting social harm through performance and arts practice with looked after children and care leavers

The proportion of young people taken into the care of the state has increased recently and there is evidence that this social group suffer negative long‐term outcomes that might be conceptualised by the emergent criminological category of ‘social harm’. Debates in social work around an ethics of care and justice offer different ways of thinking about responding to social harm. This paper reports findings from an innovative arts‐based intervention with Looked After Children and young people and concludes that holding these competing value sets in creative tension is central to the success of the programme in helping young people to cope with and contest social harm.     

Another economy: towards a cultural dialectics between energy and society

The looming oil crisis, pollution, and climate change have pushed governments, corporations, and individuals to think of new policies, new objects/products and new manners to market them – usually under the label of “green economy” (or the shifting towards a sustainable economy).

The changes that are on the way as a result of the envisaged “green revolution” need a broad vision that couples the economy of energetic techniques with the related socio-cultural economy that is induced by, and at the same time reciprocally influences, the mere technical transformations.

Based on previous analysis of theories of socio-technological change and putting at its center the concept of subjectivation in social sciences, this article proposes a theoretical understanding of cultural shifts and their relationship with changes in the practices of production, transfer and use of energy.

First part presents a schema of subjectivation in triangulation, that links the biological level with the material culture and with the representational realm of normativities in our society. It will be developed through the example of electric vehicle as metaphor of the energetic transition. Through this understanding, second part deals with the modeling of the three items as a processual energetic system by using the concepts of surplus and expenditure. Within this frame, we show how disruptions in one of the poles of this model influences the others and bring about changes in the entire Anthropo-Social level. Third part proposes possible types of emerging subjectivities and advances the idea of extending the realm of consciousness to the energetic transfers and their potentiality.     

Global product development projects: measuring performance and monitoring the risks

Abstract

This article investigates the development and application of key performance indicators for global product development. Two in-depth, longitudinal case studies with multinational Danish manufacturing companies were conducted, and highlight how key performance indicators, typically used for collocated, cross-functional product development, do not provide the predictive insight required to avoid the additional risks encountered in the global product development environment. Grounded in the case study results and building on established methodologies in performance measurement literature, a framework was developed and validated in two additional Danish companies to support project managers to develop: preventive indicators, which support the avoidance of identified risks, and outcome indicators, which support the measurement towards the attainment of project objectives. The study is unique as it is one of the very few longitudinal studies of engineering design activities in a global context, providing the in-depth contextual understanding towards key risks and their influence on performance; an important step to support researchers and practitioners with the development of preventive measures.     

Foreign-born and native-born migration in the U.S.: evidence from linked IRS administrative and census survey records

Journal of Population Research - This paper details efforts to link administrative records from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to American Community Survey (ACS) and 2010 Census microdata for...     

Model-based clustering with sparse covariance matrices

Statistics and Computing - Finite Gaussian mixture models are widely used for model-based clustering of continuous data. Nevertheless, since the number of model parameters scales quadratically with...     

When women veterans return: The role of postsecondary education in transition in their civilian lives

Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess the current state of postsecondary educational settings’ outreach to military women who become students postservice. Participants: Data for the present cross-sectional study were obtained from the American College Health Association’s (ACHA) 2011–2014 National College Health Assessment II (NCHA). Methods: Demographic characteristics of the study sample were explored by calculating frequencies and percentages by military service status. Research questions were explored with Fisher’s exact test, maximum likelihood multiple logistic regression, as appropriate. Results: Women service member and veteran students received health information from their university/college less often than women students with no military experience on the following topics: alcohol and other drug use, depression and anxiety, sexual assault and relationship violence prevention, and stress reduction. Conclusions: The findings of this research identified clear gaps in service provision for women student veterans on college campuses and provided some possible models for intervention development.     

Sixty years of change in Tibetan fertility: An assessment

Existing knowledge of Tibetan historical population development is mostly based on ‘best-guess’ estimates and is heavily politicized. Using census data, I reconstruct the development of Tibetan fertility in China since the 1940s, with the objective of providing an independent assessment that can be used as benchmark for future studies and debates on Tibetan demography. Following major social and economic transformations starting in the 1950s, Tibetan fertility unexpectedly increased from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. As noted in several existing studies, Tibetan fertility in China then declined swiftly from the early 1980s onwards and has now reached values close to replacement level. Focusing on the 1950–70 period, I examine factors that contributed to shaping the Tibetan fertility increase in more detail. This confirms that changes in nuptiality and disease-related infertility both played a role in pushing up fertility rates among Tibetan women in China.