Empirical Critique Research Articles

Challenging the use of the overall adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) score: Comparing total ACEs, maltreatment, and household dysfunction on mental health problems among White, African American, and Native American women under correctional control.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been consistently linked to mental health problems. There have been recent conceptual and empirical critiques that suggest maltreatment and household dysfunction to not be combined to create a composite ACE score. Women in correctional custody demonstrate disproportionately high ACE levels and greater mental health problems as to racial minorities. The present study compared the effects of varying operationalizations of the ACEs measure on women's mental health stratified across race using a sample of White, African American, and Native American women in correctional custody in Oklahoma. The cross-sectional study administered a paper-and-pencil survey to 494 women. Structural equation modeling was used to test hypotheses. Maltreatment was a significant predictor of women's mental health across all racial groups but demonstrated the strongest effect among African American inmates. Household dysfunction was not a significant predictor of mental health for any racial group. When comparing the maltreatment-only model to the maltreatment and household dysfunction model, and the overall ACE score model, there was little explained variance lost. These findings indicate that maltreatment demonstrates unique associations with women's mental health and may be the driving force behind the relationship between ACEs and adult mental health among women within correctional custody. Researchers are advised to not use the overall ACE score and instead break down the measure into the maltreatment and household dysfunction subscales. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The 'Histoire des Deux Indes'

This article proposes an interpretation of the Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770) within the intellectual context of Enlightenment historiography. The first section describes the book, its contents, editions, authorship, and censorship. The second section provides a critical synthesis of the history of historiography on the work. The third section proposes an interpretation of the Histoire as an enlightened critique of colonialism and empire. A brief conclusion situates the book within a specific definition of the Enlightenment that accounts for its contradictions rather than attempting to overcome them.

The Dirty Work of Empire: Imperialist Deep Time in Poe’s “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”

Abstract: This essay studies Poe’s story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844), which depicts “Bedloe,” a man from a past imperial struggle in India participating in a present imperial struggle in the United States through a time-lapse narrative. I argue that Poe, here, prefigures the “white man’s burden” critique of empire—the view that empire most harms the white men who are its instruments. In making this claim, Poe both reifies the racial category of whiteness and advances a critique of US expansionist politics. Thus, I read Poe’s story as a critique of empire and a defense of imperial instruments.

An empirical critique of the low income low energy efficiency approach to measuring fuel poverty

Fuel poverty is a complex socioenvironmental issue of increasing global significance. In England, fuel poverty is assessed via the Low Income Low Energy Efficiency (LILEE) indicator, yet concerns exist regarding the efficacy of this metric given its omission of households based on Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) ratings, rather than the ability of occupants to afford energy. To assess the potential shortcomings of the LILEE metric, we perform quantitative analyses of fuel poverty and energy security in London, UK. A spatial analysis of London exposes discrepancies between deprivation and expected fuel poverty incidence, demonstrating that a significant proportion of households are currently classed as “not fuel poor” (4.4% of the city's stock, around 171,091 households) but remain likely to be energy insecure. Subsequently, we analyse primary survey data (n = 2886) collected in London using a Random Parameters Ordered Probit modelling framework. 28.2% of respondents were energy insecure, which is 145% higher than the LILEE estimate for London. Surprisingly, no significant variation in energy insecurity rates was found between the most and least efficient homes surveyed. Model estimation results reveal the key characteristics of respondents impacting energy security in London. Our results can be used to inform a new or amended approach to measuring fuel poverty in England.

The moral, the political and social licence in digitally‐driven family policy and intervention: Parents negotiating experiential knowledge and ‘other’ families

AbstractThe article provides a conceptually informed empirical critique of the pursuit of social licence as a warrant for data linkage and predictive analytics in the field of family policy intervention. It draws on research focusing on parental views of digitally‐driven family governance in the United Kingdom. We identify the notion of consensus that undergirds the concept of social licence that acts to obscure inequalities and silence conflict, and to reframe digital surveillance and prediction as a moral rather than political issue. Using focus group and individual interview material, we show how parents assert professional or lay experiential knowledges in making judgements about the legitimacy of and trust in operational data technologies, involving struggles between positionings as parents like ‘us’ and ‘other’ parents. We demonstrate how parents have different leverages from these unequal and morally charged social locations. Inevitably, the application of social licence in the domain of digital family policy and intervention is fractured by entrenched social divisions and inequalities.

Adam Smith’s Case against the British Empire

The paper articulates Adam Smith’s claim that the British Empire was inimical to Great Britain’s interest. It is argued against Smith that, given the structure of global trade prior to the Industrial Revolution, the mercantilist restrictions on trade and capital movement characterising the British Empire probably increased Britain’s national income. But it is also argued, in agreement with Smith, that the military costs of enforcing these restrictions outweighed any benefit. Smith’s ‘cost of enforcement case’ against the Empire resonated strongly in liberal critiques of Empire in the century after Smith. At the same time, Imperial Federationists of the early twentieth century used Smith’s proposal of a political union in place of the Empire to validate mercantilist sentiments which Smith deplored. Smith’s case against the Empire is of mixed value and had conflicting impacts on its readers.

Mobilizing Great War Literature: Rereading the English Canon through Mulk Raj Anand's Across the Black Waters

Abstract: While Great War scholars have recently recovered colonial texts, they seldom use those texts to reassess the English Great War canon. Mulk Raj Anand's depiction of Indian experience in Across the Black Waters highlights the imperial dimensions of English texts from the Great War. The novel depicts Indian soldiers first as travelers through Europe before narrating their experiences of displacement in the horrors of the trenches. This shift calls attention to the English canon's depictions of soldiers' mobility, which similarly shift from travel in initial military mobilization to displacement in the violence of warfare. Across the Black Waters rewrites this characteristic shift to reveal its imperial significance, ultimately transforming the English Great War canon's typical disillusionment with Britain into a critique of empire. Anand's novel invites us to recenter the imperial position in Great War literature: all English narratives are narratives of empire, and Britain at war is always imperial.

Emanuel Swedenborg's Conjugial Love and the Erotic Politics of William Blake's Epics

ABSTRACT This article argues that Blake draws upon and revises aspects of Swedenborg's theology, especially the concept of “conjugial love,” to construct an erotic universe that objects to the regressive politics of his age. Situating Milton and Jerusalem in the epic revival of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the article argues that Blake's incorporation and revision of Swedenborgian ideas help him to challenge some forms of misogynistic, militaristic politics that writers of Blake's day were supporting with appeals to the classical and Miltonic epic traditions. While many Romantic-era writers call upon these traditions to endorse patriarchal oppression, Blake's deployment of both Swedenborgian concepts and epic tropes allows him to launch a trenchant critique of empire. He revises Swedenborg to extend Milton's critique of classical epic and, through it, the politics advocated by many of the period's epic writings. He does so in part by reworking Swedenborg's doctrines into a vision of eroticism that explodes the hierarchical, misogynistic, chaste conception of sexuality underlying the warrior ethos promoted by the worst aspects of the Romantic-era epic revival.

Real abstractions: Markets, moralities, and social segmentation in modern India

AbstractThis introduction begins with a brief overview of the three major factors shaping economic life and exchange in India, as laid out by contributions in the edited volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India: embedded exchange, contested jurisdiction, and pliable markets. The overarching logic of all the contributions is that markets in India must be understood as path dependent, that is, expressing a historical trajectory and specific, and changing, political and moral regimes. The remainder of this introduction discusses the origins of the distinction between ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ in the nationalist critiques of empire and how these critiques have led to a widespread moral ambivalence vis-à-vis the commercialization of everyday life in India that persists today across the political spectrum.

Narrating Economic History and the History of Economic Thought in Urdu

Abstract Muḥammad Ilyās Barnī’s (1890–1959) ʿIlm ul-Maʿīshat (The Principles of Economics) is an economics textbook that was published in Aligarh in 1917 and claimed to be the first book of economics in Urdu. In the chapter selected for translation here, Barnī narrates the history of India’s trade relationship with Europe, showing how European colonialism exploited Indian industry and gradually placed it in a position of economic subordination. The accompanying introduction to the translation provides a brief overview of Barnī’s life and works, placing the book in the context of his writings on Islam, ethics, and economics. It also situates the book in the larger context of Indian economic thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly within debates on poverty, protectionism, and Indian trade. Ultimately, the introduction argues that the study of economic thought and economic history in Urdu reveals a key facet of early twentieth-century language politics in India by highlighting the project of making Urdu a language of social scientific modernity, while also pointing to the development of a vernacular economic critique of empire that became increasingly influential in colonial politics at the turn of the century.

You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul by Richard A. Horsley

Reviewed by: You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul by Richard A. Horsley Clair Mesick richard a. horsley, You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2021). Pp. 236. $29. In You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them, Richard Horsley argues that Jesus and Paul have been misunderstood as merely "religious" figures. Instead, both are deeply embedded in their economic and political contexts and work toward the creation of an alternative economic model in opposition to Roman oppression. The book is divided into four parts: an introduction on methodology; analysis of Jesus's mission; analysis of Paul's project; and, finally, several chapters sketching out what both can offer a modern era dominated by global capitalism. Horsley's introduction is methodological, identifying and deconstructing assumptions that have governed much of the field of biblical studies. For instance, while biblical studies has operated with a post-French-Revolution division of religion, politics, and economics, H. argues that the biblical texts themselves contain no distinction among the three. Likewise, H. breaks down "print-cultural" assumptions, clarifying that biblical "texts" were received more through oral communication and performance than the dissemination of physical writings. H. follows this introduction with a chapter that surveys the biblical corpus on justice: some texts call for radical economic justice (Amos, Isaiah); many merely call for reforming existing economic structures (Deuteronomy); and a few even provide divine justification for exploitative economic systems (2 Samuel). Horsley dedicates the next four chapters to Jesus. His key argument—starting from the requests in the Lord's Prayer to "give us this day our daily bread" and "forgive our debts"—is that Jesus's proclamation of the kingdom of God is about economic subsistence through mutual aid rather than religious wisdom or apocalyptic prediction. H. situates Jesus's proclamation within a background of exploitation, taxation, and economic pressures on the Jewish people under priestly and political leaders (chap. 3). In that light, Jesus's ministry appears less a matter of an otherworldly kingdom of God than a renewal of the covenant community through social-economic solidarity (chap. 4). Likewise, Jesus's rejection of the priestly leaders, scribes, and Pharisees ought to be understood not as opposition to Judaism but as a condemnation of the temple-state's exploitation and economic extraction from the people (chap. 5). The sixth through eighth chapters treat Paul's alternative communities in the Roman Empire. In one of the most incisive chapters of the book, H. argues that both economic and sociological studies of the NT have been riddled with methodological problems (chap. 6). Economic scholarship has imported capitalist assumptions into its study of the Roman Empire, but H. makes the case that ancient Rome was no true market economy but rather a [End Page 358] political economy ruled by the demands and coercion of the empire. Likewise, prior sociological research—influenced by anti-Marxist sociological models in the 1970s—presented Roman society as a coherent system in which different socioeconomic roles and occupations all fit into a cohesive whole. The reality, however, was far more governed by inequality, poverty, and the exploitation of the many by an extremely wealthy few. Building on this foundation, H.'s next chapters present the early Christ movement as an alternative to the domination and exploitation of the Roman imperial order, turning first to Acts (chap, 7) and then to economic solidarity in the letters of Paul (chap, 8). Horsley's final section addresses contemporary implications. This section frames global capitalism as a new form of empire, the Bible as a tool of empire, and the field of biblical studies as complicit in empire (chap. 9). H. contrasts this with the biblical texts themselves. He traces the critique of empire and the call to political-economic-religious solidarity through the Hebrew Bible (chap. 10) and NT (chap. 11) and concludes in the latter half of chap. 11 with a call to create alternative communities in resistance to the empire of global capitalism. Not all will agree with the interpretive decisions that H. makes. One example is the use of Acts...

The Virtuous City of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ: A Medieval Islamic Reflection on Worldliness and Communal Division

ABSTRACT The present article examines the utopian and theological politics of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Brethren of Purity). I focus on the Ikhwān’s elusive “virtuous city,” a harmonious and righteous community situated on a wondrous island, where residents work in unison toward salvation by deferring to one creed. This city’s imagery is intimately tied to principal theological dimensions of their work. Through the virtuous city, the Ikhwān utilize the imagery of estrangement to elucidate their theological position on the soul’s imprisonment in the body. But there is another, subtler dimension to their utopianism. I argue that the Ikhwānian utopia serves as a juxtaposition to their Muslim society, which they thought was afflicted by credal divisions. Accordingly, their utopia seamlessly weaves together a synthetic narrative about eschatology (i.e., the afterlife) and an empirical critique of their contemporary society. Additionally, this paper contributes to the development of scholarship on medieval Islamic utopianism.

The State at Play: Iain M. Banks’s Gaming Galactic Empires

This article sets out to explore the dynamics of play in three selected science-fiction novels by the contemporary Scottish author Iain M. Banks. Drawing on the typology of literary play designed by the German theoretician Wolfgang Iser, the article focuses particularly on Banks’s second novel from the Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), concentrating on the ludic dynamics that inform and form these texts in narrative, discursive and thematic terms. Highlighting the author’s complex conceptual critique of empire and civilisation and their contested relationship with the individual, the article is especially interested in uncovering the intricacies of power paradigms in the context of Banks’s bespoke, ever-ambivalent vision of a cosmic utopia and its counterparts, where the interconnectedness of being and playing is performed on key levels.

"Martial Law Travels": Gothic Internationalism and Irish Nationalist Newspapers

Abstract: In the nineteenth century, Irish newspaper culture became more experimental in nature. The form of Irish nationalist newspapers as an assemblage of various registers and genres embodied the politics of Irish nationalism and anti-colonialism in the period. These media innovations, as well as the forms of writing disseminated, transformed again during the Great Famine in Ireland (1846–51). During and after the Famine, the gothic was mobilized in newspaper columns, often in service of producing critiques of empire. Examining Irish newspaper writing on famine in India and on the Morant Bay Rebellion, this essay argues that engagement with the gothic in the anti-colonialist press in Victorian Ireland allowed for the emergence of powerful and distinctly internationalist critiques of colonial capitalism and its violent apparatuses.

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

The Rules of Attraction: An Empirical Critique of Pseudoscientific Theories about Sex in the Manosphere

Academic research is dedicating growing attention to the phenomenon known as the manosphere, where genders and (hetero)sexual relations are explained according to the so-called Red Pill philosophy and LMS theory. In this article, we critically analyze these theories and their pseudoscientific assumptions using a Bourdieusian framework, and we analyze the empirical effects they have in the Incel and Red Pill Italian communities through the example of the “Aranzulla case”. By exploring the “Redpiller” blog and two Incel forums (“Forum of the uglies” and “Forum of the Incel”), we found that, on one hand, the Red Pill and LMS theories are strongly contradictory in themselves because, even if they combine socio-economic and biological theories to explain sexual relations, they assume a fixed vision of gender based on (supposedly) natural inclinations. On the other hand, our results show that these theories promote misogynistic content blaming women for men’s unsatisfaction, but they actually unveil intragender dynamics. Indeed, they produce tensions inside the manosphere, by creating hierarchies of masculinities, and around the possibility of escaping the biological destiny linked to the Incel condition.

Domestic fear beyond traumatic terror: understanding mothers’ everyday experiences of recurring fear in the context of domestic violence

This article offers an empirical critique of trauma-informed fear models by documenting how mothers experienced repetitive fear of domestic violence in France. I challenge the reduction of victims’ responses to traumatic ‘terror’ and suggest that the neurological fear models which circulate in training and advocacy discourses fail to acknowledge the domestic setting and the resources on which they draw to respond to fear. Analysing ethnographic data, the article adopts a structural theory of emotion and domestic violence. I draw on Jack Barbalet’s notion of fear containment and rework his model by applying it to non-elite and individual mothers through what I call ‘instrumental’ counterchallenge and submissiveness. I show that their fear practices are combined with fear containment. The article analyses fear as an occasion for knowledge acquisition and an auxiliary for instrumental action. The article highlights the hidden fear responses that go unnoticed when analysis prominently relies on neurological trauma: mothers act on their fears to confirm or overrule fearful anticipations and they experience fear as an occasion for knowledge acquisition to guide future action.

Milton Friedman and the Road to Monetarism: A Review Essay

Milton Friedman and the Road to Monetarism: A Review Essay

Rehashed Liberalism, the Accusation of Radical Purity, and the Alibi of the “Personal”

Rehashed Liberalism, the Accusation of Radical Purity, and the Alibi of the “Personal”