“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity,Stigma, and the Racial Formation Project

Using interview data from individuals who were frequently asked some version of the question “What are you?” in regards to their race, we apply a deviance perspective to frame these encounters as micro level racial formation projects. Racial formation projects are problematized when one’s race is not readily classifiable. These data suggest that when race is perceptibly ambiguous, stigma is assigned and normativity is enforced through discursive constraint and other means. Racially ambiguous individuals use many forms of resistance to navigate these encounters and make identity claims that either affirm or endanger the normative racial formation order.     

Learning about Teaching in Communities: Lessons for Faculty Development

Abstract. While teaching workshops like those offered by the Wabash Center provide a unique opportunity for scholars to reflect on their teaching, three elements important to the workshops’ success can be effective in institutional settings as well. Certain characteristics of community, conversation stimulated by differences, and appropriate attention to self‐care help create an environment supportive of faculty development throughout a scholar's career.     

Revisionist Koran Hermeneutics in Contemporary Turkish University Theology: Rethinking Islam – Felix Körner

Book reviewed:
Revisionist Koran Hermeneutics in Contemporary Turkish University Theology: Rethinking Islam , Felix Körner, Ergon Verlag 2005 (3-89913-373-0), 230 pp., n/p     

The moderating effects of stimulus valence and arousal on memory suppression

This study examined the separate and combined effects of stimulus valence and arousal on retrieval inhibition. Participants performed Anderson and Green's (2001) memory suppression task with stimuli varying across dimensions of valence and arousal. Memory was tested through free and cued recall as well as speeded recognition. Results showed that both stimulus valence and arousal influenced the extent to which participants successfully inhibited retrieval, but not in the ways anticipated. Specifically, the strongest inhibition effects were for highly arousing, pleasant words. In addition, unpleasant stimuli that were suppressed were better recalled during both cued and free-recall tasks than pleasant stimuli that were suppressed. Across all tests of memory performance, there were no significant differences between the experimental conditions for highly arousing, unpleasant words. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Use of the Group Therapist's Personality Via the Countertransferences

Rather than use the term therapist personality, the author uses an operational definition of countertransference to examine the intersubjective field between group therapist and individual patients, the group, and subgroups. Differentiating between objective and subjective countertransferences, the author traces their sources to the transferences and resistances that arise from individuals, subgroups, and the group-as-a-whole. The transferences, resistances, and their related countertransferences are then integrated with enactments and history to create interventions. The charismatic leader makes no differentiation between the countertransferences and primarily acts on impulse or a rigid system.     

Relationships, communication, and career in the parent-adolescent projects of families with and without challenges

Parent-adolescent joint actions that address the adolescent’s future were examined for their connection to the parent-adolescent relationship and communication goals and the steps taken to reach those goals. Nineteen parent-adolescent dyads, from families with and without family challenges such as chronic illness, unemployment, or divorce, identified a joint project that represented of goal-directed actions undertaken by the parents and adolescent together. Each dyad’s project was followed for a six-month period and data analyzed using the action-project method. Three groups of projects pertinent to career, the parent-adolescent relationship and communication emerged from the data: projects that were wholly concerned with the parent-adolescent relationship, projects that shifted from career development goals and actions to explicit relationship goals and actions, and projects in which parent-adolescent communication was used as a means to facilitate career and other developmental goals. The family challenges were evident in the construction of these projects as goals, ways to steer the projects, or reflected in the meaning attached to them.     

The Love that Binds: Transnational Relationships in Sex Work

The maintenance of long-term relationships between sex workers and their clients involves the management and balance of intimacy and a business relationship and requires both parties to constantly negotiate their roles and expectations. In this study, I focus on how they interpret these relationships. The data used are from in-depth interviews and participant observation collected from August 2004 through August 2007. I identify three factors affecting these relationships: distance apart, affairs and social bond. While older lovers yield a certain amount of control and power over their younger partners, the latter can convert older lovers’ emotional attachment, sense of responsibility, familial involvement, and sense of pride to currencies used to increase their bargaining power.     

Biological perspectives on the effects of early psychosocial experience

There is much current interest in how adverse experiences early in life might affect certain elements of physiological, behavioral, and psychological functioning across the lifespan. Recent conceptual frameworks for studying the effects of early experience have involved constructs such as experience-expectant, experience-dependent, and experience-adaptive plasticity. The latter construct is related to comparative models of developmental programming which posit the persistence of biological adjustments to the early caregiving environment. We briefly review such models and their translational implications. We then turn to human development and focus on the effects of large changes in children’s life courses as tests of hypotheses related to early experience effects. In particular, the effect of early institutionalization on children’s brain and behavioral development after changes to adoptive families or foster care is used as an example of a research area in which programming hypotheses have been proposed.     

The Processing of Coreference for Reduced Expressions in Discourse Integration

Three reading-time experiments in Chinese are reported that test contrasting views of how pronominal coreference is achieved. On the one hand, studies of reading time and eye tracking suggest that reduced expressions, such as the pronoun he, serve as critical links to integrate separate utterances into a coherent model of discourse. On the other hand, probe-word recognition studies indicate that full anaphoric expressions, such as a repeated name, are more readily interpreted than reduced expressions due to their rich lexical information, which provides effective cues to match the representation of the appropriate referent in memory. The results indicate that the ease of integrating the critical referent into a model of discourse is a function of the congruence of lexical, semantic, and discourse features conveyed by a syntactically prominent reduced expression within linguistic input. This pattern supports the view that a reduced expression is interpreted on-line and indeed plays a critical role in promoting discourse coherence by facilitating the semantic integration of separate utterances.