“If They Notice I’m Mexican”: Narratives of Perceived Discrimination from Individuals Who Crossed the U.S.-Mexico Border at Ports of Entry

ABSTRACT

Understanding individuals’ encounters with Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the largest law enforcement agency in the United States, is an important theoretical and policy-relevant issue. Travelers entering the U.S. through ports of entry may generalize their experiences with border officials to local law enforcement, and thus, negative experiences at ports of entry may reduce travelers’ willingness to cooperate with police and report victimization. Existing studies, however, have primarily examined unauthorized border crossings rather than travelers’ port of entry experiences. This study uses grounded theory and qualitative data to explore the perceptions and experiences of 191 young adults who discussed how individuals are treated when crossing the U.S.-Mexico border at land ports of entry. Findings show that participants reported perceptions and experiences of discrimination based on physical appearances, language differences, and nationality. Participants also described border officials engaging in routine law enforcement behaviors, including poor policing practices.     

Therapist attentiveness and negative capability in dialogical family meetings for psychosis

Jaakko Seikkula (2008) has pointed towards the importance of practitioners working in the present moment in dialogical therapy. Extrapolating from Seikkula's work, this article considers the significance of the qualities of therapist attentiveness, generosity and negative capability in dialogical family meetings for psychosis. It is proposed that these qualities are of particular importance when family meetings occur in crisis situations, as when under pressure practitioners can easily be drawn into prematurely interventionist stances that may unintentionally promote chronicity for the person experiencing psychosis. The value of co‐working arrangements in enabling practitioners to maintain attentiveness and negative capability in this work is also considered.     

Relative importance of perceptual and mnemonic variance in human temporal bisection

We investigated the relative contributions of perception and reference memory to behavioural variability in a temporal discrimination with human subjects. We used two temporal bisection tasks. In both tasks each trial consisted of a sequential presentation of three intervals, two standards, and a probe, and subjects were asked to judge the similarity of each probe against the two standards. In a "single bisection", the standards' duration was constant across trials. In a "roving bisection", the two standards were trial unique. We compared our results with the predictions from a model related to Scalar Expectancy Theory, with the added assumption that the decision process minimizes the expected number of errors given the information available. The model shows that if errors in reference memory were dominant the psychometric function should be identical for single and roving tasks, and if perceptual errors were dominant the psychometric function should be steeper for the single than for the roving bisection. As we found that psychometric functions were steeper for the single than for the roving tasks, we concluded that perceptual errors are dominant.     

Special Treatment? Flexibilities in the Politics of Regenerative Medicine’s Gatekeeping Regimes in the UK

ABSTRACT

Emerging flexibilities are apparent in gatekeeping regimes applicable to regenerative medicine products, raising issues about the extent to which and forms in which such flexibilities might promote emerging products as a sector warranting special treatment, in the context of recent policy developments in the UK and wider European Union. Concepts of ‘gatekeeping’, ‘gatekeeping regimes’ and ‘gateways’ can point to the ways in which regulatory institutions, health technology assessment organisations, and national planners and purchasers of health services together define and control entry to the medical product marketplace and the adoption of products into the public health-care system. Flexibilities in existing regimes and new gateways are a way of maintaining ‘connection’ between gatekeeping regimes and technoscientific innovation in order to steer innovation pathways. The gateways concept has affinity with that of Callon’s ‘obligatory passage points’. A wide set of recent policy documents show that the measures promoted exhibit a range of alternative gateways that are being constructed around central, legal, restrictive gatekeeping regimes. However, it would be easy to overestimate the significance of these developments as relaxations that would favour innovative producers and their products on a large scale with wide public health impacts. The concepts of gatekeeping regimes and gateways enable understanding of hybrid developments of exceptions and exemptions to dominant regimes which bridge across the arenas of market regulation, health technology assessment and health-care system planning. These arenas are being drawn closer together as a means of politically managing stakeholders’ aims in the UK, EU and other innovating biomedical health systems globally.     

The Scandinavian Suicide Phenomenon—Myth or Reality?

ABSTRACT: This paper reexamines the “Scandinavian Suicide Phenomenon,” the observation that reported suicides are typically high in Denmark and Sweden and typically low in Norway even though these three countries seem otherwise similar. It has been suggested that in Norway more suicides are reported as accidental death or as death due to unknown causes. This paper explores this possibility by means of a detailed examination of causes of death. Nine other countries are included in the comparisons to facilitate interpretation of the findings. It was found that there were significantly higher rates of accidental and unclassified deaths in Norway than in Denmark or Sweden; if it is assumed that many of these are suicide, this could account for the reported differences in suicide rates.