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Extant major approaches to states and revolutions privilege the role of state practices and the character of war-making in shaping modern state-making in the Third World. Bringing the role of ideology into this analytical landscape of state-making, this paper advances an alternative claim that ideological practices shape modern state structures and practices as well as the dynamics of political contention between the state and the revolutions. First, I argue that that intra-movement ideological dynamics within the nationalist movement can have a profound impact on the structure and practices of the state. Using the writings of the party leaders, memoirs and official publications of the Burmese communist party, I maintain that subtle and specific ideological differences amongst the Burmese leftist movements generated organizational splits and internecine conflicts in the nationalist struggle, which exerted profound influences on the structures and practices of the Burmese state Secondly, relative ideological positions of the state and the revolutionary movements play an important role in shaping the dynamics of contention between the state and revolution. For example, an intimate web of ideological affinity between the nascent Burmese state and the Burmese leftist movements shaped the context and content of political contention between the state and these movements in the post-colonial Burma. To address these issues empirically, the first part of the paper examines the formation and cementation of organizational linkages amongst Burmese leftist nationalists during the anti-colonial struggle. The second part of the paper addresses specific and subtle ways in which ideological character and practices of the Burmese state and the Burmese Communist party shaped state practices and state structures in modern Burma as well as the dynamics of political contention between the state and the revolutionary movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labov's ingenuity in devising methods for collecting and analysing 'the language used by ordinary people in their everyday affairs' (1972: 69) is unmatched. This paper considers the goals and underlying questions shaping the methods that Labov innovated for (1) collecting quantities of everyday speech, (2) approaching variation in language use scientifically, and (3) thinking interdisciplinarily. The first includes the sociolinguistic interview, and other activities focused directly on forms, and critiques of Labov's methods. The second includes quantitative methods and raises some broader issues around triangulation. The third includes the complementary use of attitudes and perception data with production data. It concludes by suggesting that Labov's body of work has also contributed to the creation of a distinct, sociolinguistic community of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aboriginal Australian public intellectual Noel Pearson has gained prominence and influence for his brand of policy reform in Indigenous affairs by drawing upon the capabilities approach. This article challenges the coherence of Pearson's position, arguing that his unrelenting focus on personal responsibility leads him to conflate different elements within capabilities thinking. Pearson 1) mistakes social capabilities (to which people are entitled) for human potential to be unfolded, and 2) casts and prescribes personal responsibility as a type of latent capability. The latter a) inverts the capabilities approach wherein phenomena such as personal responsibility arise as an effect of the realization of latent capabilities rather than serving as latent capabilities themselves, and b) is at odds with the liberal basis of the capabilities approach that rejects imposing 'good' ways of life on people. This is illustrated through reference to Pearson's advocacy of Direct Instruction teaching and engagement with the 'real economy'. The paper recognizes Pearson's contribution to the policy debate and that the problems he highlights are real, but argues that the remedial approaches adopted are problematic, including in terms of Pearson's stated stance against assimilationist policy agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Return migration and migrant transnationalism are key phenomena in research on international migration. Here we examine how the two are connected. The article introduces a special section and draws partly upon this selection of papers and partly upon the broader literature. First, we argue that there is often a blurred boundary between mobility as a transnational practice, for instance in the form of return visits, and purportedly permanent or long-term return migration. Second, we examine the effects of transnationalism on return migration intentions and experiences. Third, we explore how migration trajectories, involving various forms of 'return' moves, create different forms of transnationalism. Examples include the 'reverse transnational' practices of returnees and the 'residual transnationalism' of migrants who have had an unsuccessful return experience and decided to settle permanently abroad. We end by considering how both return migration and transnationalism exist in the interplay between the personal and the social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late 1960s a powerful myth developed in the United States that Vietnam veterans were spat on when they returned home. A parallel myth survives in Australia with widespread claims that paint or even blood was routinely thrown at returning soldiers. In a 1966 incident, red paint was thrown on Lieutenant Colonel Alex V. Preece as he led the First Battalion through Sydney. The Australian myth remains central to perceptions of Australian Vietnam veterans as despised outsiders and feeds into contemporary demands that Australians support their soldiers and the wars in which they are involved. This paper explores connections between cultural politics in the Unites States and Australia, particularly as they pertain to the contentious legacies of the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years cities around the world have undergone mass slum clearances for redevelopment. This study of Mumbai offers an alternative interpretation of urban capital accumulation by investigating the differentiated political subjectivities of displaced slum residents. I argue that Mumbai's redevelopment entails not uniform class-based dispossessions but a process of accumulation by differentiated displacement whereby uneven displacement politics are central to the social production of land markets. Two ethnographic cases reveal that groups negotiate redevelopment in contradictory ways, supporting or contesting projects in varying moments. Redevelopmental subjectivities are influenced at key conjunctures by market-oriented resettlement, ideologies of belonging, desires for improved housing, and participation in non-governmental groups. This articulated assemblage of power-laden practices reflects and reworks class, gender, and ethno-religious relations, profoundly shaping evictees' experience and political engagement. The paper concludes that focusing on differentiated subjectivities may usefully guide both analysis and social justice practice aimed at countering dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Now that most UK universities have increased their tuition fees to £9,000 a year and are implementing new Access Agreements as required by the Office for Fair Access, it has never been more important to examine the extent of fair access to UK higher education and to more prestigious UK universities in particular. This paper uses Universities and Colleges Admissions Service ( UCAS) data for the period 1996 to 2006 to explore the extent of fair access to prestigious Russell Group universities, where 'fair' is taken to mean equal rates of making applications to and receiving offers of admission from these universities on the part of those who are equally qualified to enter them. The empirical findings show that access to Russell Group universities is far from fair in this sense and that little changed following the introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and their initial increase to £3,000 a year in 2006. Throughout this period, UCAS applicants from lower class backgrounds and from state schools remained much less likely to apply to Russell Group universities than their comparably qualified counterparts from higher class backgrounds and private schools, while Russell Group applicants from state schools and from Black and Asian ethnic backgrounds remained much less likely to receive offers of admission from Russell Group universities in comparison with their equivalently qualified peers from private schools and the White ethnic group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the experiences of one particular group of immigrants to Ireland -- the parents of Irish citizen children, whose residency is dependent on an ongoing, renewable form of residential status called IBC/05. This residency status was instituted in response to the constitutional changes that arose in the aftermath of Ireland's 2004 citizenship referendum. While this status category is valued in the short-term, we contend that immigrants whose residence in Ireland is dependent on this status are effectively living in-between their countries of origin and Ireland as a result of legislative specificities that separate their families and create an air of uncertainty about the continuance of the status category in the longer term. Immigrants with IBC/05 status operate across a number of transnational familial fields. Transnational economic fields are reinforced by immigrants' need to finance the lives of family members still resident in their country of origin but a range of hybridised personal and familial identity spaces are created outside this economic pattern and the experience of life in Ireland is anchored in the imaginaries that spring from such transnationalised experiences. Importantly, however, we find that this transnationalism is not operationalised 'from below' in this instance but 'from above' by the Irish state through the emphasis it places on this form of long-term temporary residency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The archaeological contribution to materiality has to date been less widely appreciated by practitioners outside the subdiscipline. This chapter argues that this is in part due to the identification of archaeological materiality with things, objects, or material culture, deriving from the twentieth-century history of Americanist archaeology in particular. While archaeologists have made important contributions to debates about the agency of objects, object biographies, and critiques of object/subject dichotomies, there are specific perspectives that archaeology could contribute that derive from the nature of archaeological sites as places consisting of material traces. This article examines in depth the concept of trace as it is used in broader social theory, and as it is instantiated in archaeological materialities. It is argued that for materialities of everyday life, in particular, traces have been the most effective kinds of materialities explored by archaeologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]