1,720,986 research outputs found
The Ogress, The Innocent, And The Madman: Narrative and Gender in Child Homicide Trials in New Zealand, 1870-1925
No full textThe murder of a child represents one of the most perplexing and unimaginable of crimes. This thesis, the first legal-historical investigation into child homicide in New Zealand, seeks to uncover some of the ways that people have ‘imagined’ and made sense of this complex crime in the past. The conclusions emerging from this study suggest that nineteenth and early twentieth-century observers of child homicide trials relied heavily on the interpretive power of familiar cultural narratives to convey meaning and achieve composure. Homicides involving children, though often disparate and deeply ambiguous events, were bounded by a narrow yet profoundly influential body of images, characters and representations. This repertoire of narrative conventions was not simply reflective of contemporary attitudes and understandings but worked actively to bolster and crystallise the meanings surrounding disturbing events.
Utilising quantitative and qualitative methodologies, this study draws on a comprehensive dataset of reported child homicide incidents occurring in New Zealand between 1870 and 1925. Select cases from this database are considered as a set of narrative texts using gender as the primary category of analysis. The popular and legal discourses surrounding these incidents are analysed within a post-structuralist theoretical framework to examine the divergent representations of those who were implicated in the suspicious death of a child. The research includes an investigation of criminal data for evidence of quantitative patterning in criminal typologies and sentencing, as well as analysis of textual evidence such as trial transcripts, coronial inquest reports, parliamentary debates, and newspaper reporting and commentary. The findings of this study demonstrate that the discursive constructions of child homicide in nineteenth and early twentieth-century New Zealand were highly gendered. Ultimately, child murder was imagined as an offence perpetrated by mothers. However, the impact of gender on trial proceedings and outcomes was by no means straightforward or clear cut. Cultural understandings of race, class, morality, madness and criminality all fed into the narrative construction of murder events and were shaped and reformed in relation to each other. In unpacking the stories of child murder, this thesis exposes the highly constructed nature of criminal legal discourse within and beyond the courtroom, and provides a historical basis for a more nuanced critique of understandings of child homicide crime in the present
Local Implications of International Human Rights Treaties: The Impact of a CEDAW Right to Public Life in the Republic of Maldives
No full textIn 1979, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) codified women’s rights to equality in both private and public spheres of life, and introduced it as a global norm. It stipulated not only that women should not be discriminated against, but also that women should be equal recipients in the allocation and enjoyment of human rights. To this end, it imposed obligations on States Parties and provided multiple approaches towards achieving women’s equality. In general, the international community has invested over six decades in constructing a ‘global’ system of human rights where consenting sovereign States Parties have agreed on a ‘universal’ standard of rights to be protected and promoted within and beyond their national borders. Despite ‘universal’ commitments to human rights treaties, expressed through ratification, and many times through creating the required national legislation and policy changes, human rights goals are yet to be achieved.
Using a CEDAW right to public life, this thesis examines the two aspects of treaty implementation: integration into domestic norms and enforcement of treaty norms through treaty enforcement mechanisms established by the UN. By illustrating gaps in ‘rights-in-principle’ and ‘rights-in-practice’, this thesis offers an insider's perspective on the tensions between a CEDAW right to public life and the domestic situation in the Republic of Maldives. Rights-in-principle is measured through an analysis of domestic legal instruments, identifying the extent to which CEDAW has been incorporated into legislation, government policy and initiatives. Data for the rights-in-practice measure was collected through semi-structured interviews conducted with purposively selected participants, representing both State and non-State actors. The information gathered through interviews was analysed both manually and using the NVivo-10 Software. The data was then interpreted using the capabilities theory, examining how limited capabilities arising out of gendered practices, cultures and structures affect the successful local implementation of a CEDAW right to public life.
The findings from the rights-in-practice segment of the research demonstrate a highly gendered world, where links between political power and male leadership are seen as natural and women ideally suited to roles either within the domestic sphere or a care-taking role. Participation in public life is also dependent on class (family status), property ownership and resources, and affiliations with political parties. However, the belief in socially distinct roles is a dominant feature within the local, and heavily affects women’s lives and their autonomy. Gender based differences, it is argued, is rooted in deep cultural and religious beliefs and change is often resisted by the local community. It is also anticipated that fast growing religious fundamentalism in the Maldives will significantly impact women’s rights in the near future. Thus, while CEDAW, and its articulation of a right to public life, embodies a framework for substantive equality that aims to entitle, enable and empower women to pursue the CEDAW right to public life, the State has yet to ensure a right to public life, as envisaged by the Convention.
The thesis acknowledges that a CEDAW right to public life has had an impact, but mainly at a formal level, changing domestic law and policy, but has had limited impact on the achievement of equality for women. The situation in the Maldives is further compounded by the nature of the international human rights platform, which is primarily based on State consent, leading to limited intercultural dialogue between CEDAW and its States Parties and little pressure on the States Party, which further cements the status quo. Ad hoc procedures, lack of committed personnel to draft treaty reports, and low level of civil society engagement in the process, also significantly affects effective treaty implementation. Thus, both ‘local struggles’ and the existing structure of the international human rights treaty enforcement mechanisms poses challenges for the pursuit of a CEDAW right to public life.
This thesis is a much-needed exploration of how local cultures appropriate and enact international human rights law, and will be of enormous value to persons working with international human rights particularly in the Maldivian context, and also at the global level. It makes both theoretical and methodological contributions to international human rights law in the area of human rights and treaty compliance
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Race-ing and engendering the nation-state in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Get PDFDuring the past several decades the dynamics of law and policy reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand have prefigured and encapsulated contemporary trends in economic state restructuring, indigenous claims to refigure the nation, and gender struggles for political representation. Successive governments have restructured the economy and the state using radical forms of neo-liberal economic policy with the stated aim of globalizing the economy. Political action on the part of the indigenous Maori people, often led by Maori women, increased and diversified, and included demands for self-determination and redress of historical colonial injustices. In 1997, the conservative National Party’s Jenny Shipley become the country’s first white female Prime Minister, followed in 1999 by the election of a center-left coalition headed by Labour Party leader Helen Clark. This article analyzes the race and gender dynamics of these contemporary trends. First, it argues that policies of state structural adjustment and Maori political claims have converged in commodified settlements of past colonial injustices as corporate deals. These deals are temporary alliances of men across race to silence and erase the demands for self-determination or political power sharing of Maori activists, who are usually Maori women. Second, this article contends that the political instability created by rapid structural adjustment and the change to a Mixed Member Proportional (“MMP”) electoral system converges with white backlash against these settlements to open space for New Zealand’s first two female Prime Ministers. This article also suggests that the election of a second white female Prime Minister in New Zealand may reflect the (temporary) regendering of the role of Prime Minister to the feminine
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Jurisprudence of National Identity ::Kaleidoscopes of Imperialism and Globalisation from Aotearoa New Zealand /
No full text"Presenting a unique blend of historical and contemporary research from a range of interdisciplinary and theoretical analysis, this book examines the intersection of 'race', gender and national identity. Focusing on New Zealand, the book highlights the ways in which shifts in national identity shape and limit legal claims for redress for historical racial injustices internationally. Key features: * Analyzes the identity configurations produced by New Zealand's process of 'settling' colonial injustices and highlights the wider relevance for other groups such as Australian aborigines and Native Americans. * Traces the connections and discontinuities between the free trade imperialism of the mid-19th Century and the Free Trade Globalization of the late 20th Century. * Rich, rigorous interdisciplinarity and use of a range of theoretical perspectives provides insights relevant to legal theorists, feminists and legal scholars internationally."--Provided by publisher
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