Educated Young Men Research Articles

A Feminist Generation in Iran?

Numerous observers have noted that a feminist generation of educated young women appears to be emerging in Iran, despite the anti-feminist discourse of the Iranian government. Evidence from three surveys conducted in 2000–2003 confirms and complicates these observations. Educated young women are significantly more likely to espouse feminist attitudes of various sorts than other Iranians, including educated young men. In addition, educated young women are significantly more likely to work outside the home, marry later, give birth later, have fewer children, and have more egalitarian marriages than other Iranian women. However, surprising proportions of older Iranians also espouse feminist attitudes, and a majority of respondents in one nationally representative sample of urban Iranians identify themselves as proponents of women's rights.

`Generation Nowhere': rethinking youth through the lens of unemployed young men

Rising unemployment among educated young men is a key feature of neoliberal economic change. This paper reviews recent research on the strategies of educated unemployed young men in the global south to stress the importance of class, politics and environmental transformation for an understanding of contemporary youth geographies. Transnational reflection on the lives of educated unemployed young men provides an example of how human geographers might combine political economic analysis with recent theorizations of subjectivity formation and fluid identities.

Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi i belymi (1917-1920) by Oleg V. Budnitskii (review)

i68 SEER, 86, I, 2008 military schools. The private soldiers mostly joined up in September 1914 when therewas inFinland a passing feeling of sympathy towardsRussia. They were predominantly young urban labourers with a low level of education. Their enlistmentwas often a reaction to a decline in employment opportuni ties at the start of the war. Few Finns volunteered to serve in the ranks in 1915 and practically none after that.On the other hand the better educated young men who sought to become officers joined throughout the war, albeit in diminishing numbers. Hoppu claims that rather than joining the army out of loyalty toRussia theywere seeking a career, even for the ultimate benefit of Finland. This isplausible. The wartime training courses of around fourmonths for infantryand cavalry officershad the advantage of being significantly short er than the two-year peacetime courses. The numbers at military schools would have been higher had Finns possessed a better knowledge ofRussian. The Finnish private soldiers also had problems with theRussian language. They mostly undertook their brief training (between one and threemonths) in and around Petrograd and a significantnumber served in thePreobrazhen skiiGuards Regiment. Infantry service, poor training, lack of Russian and participation in heavy fighting caused high casualties. Nearly a third of the private soldiers were killed during thewar. Of thewartime officers only 6.5 per cent were killed, although it ishard to believe that, as Hoppu claims, this relatively low casualty ratewas due to a calculated avoidance of danger. High explosive ishard to avoid. The book also examines the volunteers' participation in the Finnish Civil War, inwhich 113 soldiers served on theRed side, where some were useful instructors.Almost as many served on the White side, including over seventy officers, although the hostile reception officersmet from theJ?gers and men of the White army often precluded their effectiveuse. Some officers remained in the army after thewar and the fewwho avoided bein^ purged in thewitch hunt against 'Russian' officers in the ro,20s had successful careers. The extensive sources used by Hoppu include Finnish central, local and parish records, which provide information about casualties, as well as some Russian regimental archives. Unfortunately, few contemporary letters survive to supplement the official documents. Nevertheless, this is a successful book which not only fulfilsitsaims in relation to the background and service of the volunteers but also throws light on theworkings of theRussian army during World War One and the fate of prisoners ofwar. As Hoppu comments, the service of the volunteers inRussia was long a painful subject inFinland. They deserve their rescue from oblivion. The book has a summary inEnglish. Berkhamsted J. E. O. Screen Budnitskii, Oleg V. Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymii belymi(igiy-ig2o). Rosspen, Moscow, 2005. 548 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. Price unknown. The Soviet era was a time of profoundly mixed fortunes for the Jews of Russia. Soviet Jewish history began so disastrously that it has even been REVIEWS 169 described as a rehearsal for theHolocaust. First came the geographical splin tering of the community, as territories which included large numbers ofJews were ceded to the successor states of Eastern Europe ? Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and, above all, Poland. In these countries, while essentially excluded from any significant political role, Jewish cultural lifeflourished, despite the widespread and often intense antisemitism tolerated by these new and osten sibly democratic regimes. Inside Soviet Russia, however, theJews faced an even more uncertain future. Widely perceived as the natural allies of the Bolsheviks, from the 1920s through the 1960sJews advanced up the political, scientific, economic and cultural hierarchies to emerge as the manifestly suc cessful Soviet Jewish intelligentsia, and yet their institutionsand theireconomy were devastated, as theCivil War rehearsed the first phase of class war against all forms of 'bourgeois' activity.The worst effects were felt inUkraine, where pogroms carried out by armed forces of different stripes resulted in between 60,000 to 200,000 Jewish deaths, and as many as one million lives ruined, along with theJewish economy of the region. It comes as no surprise to learn thatJewish commissars were prominent in theRed onslaught on Jewish local self-government, religious and educational institutions, and Zionist organiza tions. Even theJewish socialist parties allied to the new regime...

Historian unohtamat. Suomalaiset vapaaehtoiset Venäjän armeijassa I. maailmansodassa 1914-1918 by Tuomas Hoppu (review)

REVIEWS 167 crimes and criminals, and many scholars will now want to know more about their etymology: maravikhery, domushniki, golubiatnikiand tsiperito name but a few. Tales ofOld Odessa is a valuable contribution to our knowledge about the middle of Russian society at the end of the tsarist period. It shows how important that segmentwhich identifiedneither with the nobility nor with the peasantry and theworkers had become, and it replays many of the defini tional and terminological imperfections that bedevil students of emergent social groups. Sylvester is rightwhen she occasionally emphasizes the fluidity of distinctions between intelligentnyi and meshchanskii. They had greater potency as adjectival descriptors rather than nounal classifications: one man's intelligent was another man's meshchanin. Not enough ismade, however, of the unity that existed between the constituent parts ofOdessa's middling sorts,which appear in Sylvester's analysis to be only ever at one another's throats. More often than not, the visceral anti-petty-bourgeois outbursts of intelligenty against meshchane were actually proof of the anxiety one group feltabout its similarity to the other. London Timothy Phillips Hoppu, Tuomas. Historian unohtamat. Suomalaiset vapaaehtoiset Ven?j?n armeijassa i. maailmansodassa igi4~igi8. Bibliotheca Hist?rica, ioo. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, Helsinki, 2005. 361 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Appendixes. Indexes. 32.00 (paperback). During World War I Finns were not compelled to serve in theRussian army although Finland formed part of theRussian Empire. The policy of russifica tion in Finland had put an end to the Finnish army and military servicewas replaced by a tax. However, some Finns continued to serve as regular officers in theRussian army and navy and duringWorld War One Finns volunteered to serve in both the Russian and German armies. The clandestine movement of volunteers to Germany was prompted by opposition to russification mea sures inFinland and the desire to obtain military training in order to fight for Finland's independence. These volunteers, who were formed into the 27th Royal Prussian J?ger Battalion, returned to Finland after its declaration of independence inDecember 1917.The J?gers fought on the victorious White or government side in the Finnish Civil War of 1918.The course of history thus changed theJ?gers from traitors in law into national heroes. On the other hand the volunteers who had joined theRussian army, and fought for their lawful sovereign, became stigmatized as near traitors to Finland. Much has been written about the J?gers but until the publication of Tuomas Hoppu's thesis the volunteers inRussia have remained, in thewords of his title, 'The Forgotten ofHistory'. Hoppu's aim is to describe the background of the volunteers and their activity in theRussian army. They fell into two groups: thosewho served in the ranks and those who entered military schools to train as officers. In all some 1,100 Finns expressed interest in volunteering but only about 600 actu ally served in the Russian army, some 500 in the ranks and 130 who attended i68 SEER, 86, I, 2008 military schools. The private soldiers mostly joined up in September 1914 when therewas inFinland a passing feeling of sympathy towardsRussia. They were predominantly young urban labourers with a low level of education. Their enlistmentwas often a reaction to a decline in employment opportuni ties at the start of the war. Few Finns volunteered to serve in the ranks in 1915 and practically none after that.On the other hand the better educated young men who sought to become officers joined throughout the war, albeit in diminishing numbers. Hoppu claims that rather than joining the army out of loyalty toRussia theywere seeking a career, even for the ultimate benefit of Finland. This isplausible. The wartime training courses of around fourmonths for infantryand cavalry officershad the advantage of being significantly short er than the two-year peacetime courses. The numbers at military schools would have been higher had Finns possessed a better knowledge ofRussian. The Finnish private soldiers also had problems with theRussian language. They mostly undertook their brief training (between one and threemonths) in and around Petrograd and a significantnumber served in thePreobrazhen skiiGuards Regiment. Infantry service, poor training, lack of Russian and participation in heavy fighting caused high casualties. Nearly...

Body image and weight control in young adults: international comparisons in university students from 22 countries

Young women in the United States and Western Europe are notoriously concerned about weight but less is known about attitudes to weight in other regions of the world. This study explores the associations between body mass index (BMI), weight perceptions, and attempts to lose weight in male and female university students from 22 countries. Data were collected from 18,512 university students, using standardised methods, as part of the International Health Behaviour Survey. Measures included weight, height, perception of overweight, and weight loss status. BMI was calculated from weight and height, but was categorised into gender and country-standardised deciles rather than the conventional weight categories in response to the inaccuracy of self-reports. Perceived overweight and weight loss status were plotted against country-standardised BMI deciles. The 22 countries were grouped into five geopolitical/economic areas for regional analyses: North-Western Europe and the USA, Central and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, Pacific Asia, South America. Perceived overweight compared across the five regions. Perceived overweight increased systematically across BMI deciles in all countries. More women than men felt overweight at any decile. Women had low levels of perceived overweight in the lowest decile but rates rapidly increased to 50% by the 5th decile. Men, even in the highest deciles, were less aware that they are overweight and few of them were trying to lose weight. Women had a faster rise of weight loss attempts over the BMI deciles but nevertheless the proportion trying to lose in the highest decile did not exceed 75%. Perceived overweight profiles across BMI deciles were similar across all regions, suggesting that perceptions of overweight derive from local comparisons. The patterning for trying to lose weight was more diverse, with men and women from Asian countries showing higher levels of trying to lose weight at all deciles. This study shows the international consistency in perceptions of overweight in educated young men and women across diverse regions of the world. It confirms the patterning of women's overestimation of weight at lower BMI deciles and men's underestimation of weight at the higher deciles. Perceptions of overweight and attempts to lose weight were highest in the group of Asian countries where body weights are generally low, suggesting that local culture and norms could moderate attitudes to weight.

“A Useless Thing!” or “Nectar of the Gods?” The Cultural Production of Education and Young Men's Struggles for Respect in Liberalizing North India

Drawing on fourteen months' ethnographic field research in western Uttar Pradesh among educated Dalit (ex-untouchable) and Muslim young men, this article uncovers a crisis in educated people's access to salaried employment in rural north India. Against the grain of other studies of youth underemployment in postcolonial settings, we argue that educated Muslim and Dalit young men have reacted to their exclusion from secure white-collar occupations by embracing education as a form of embodied cultural distinction rather than seeking out “traditional,”“indigenous,” or “village-based” identities. Young men elaborate on education's value with reference to a system of differences between moral, civilized, developed “educated” people and immoral, savage, underdeveloped “illiterates.” Education has become a type of discursive “scaffold” upon which people display their ideas about morality, development, and respect. These narratives are compromised and contested and highlight differences in the ability of Muslim and Dalit young men to maintain an image of themselves as educated people. The extraordinary durability of local ideas of development (vikās) in the face of poor occupational outcomes and local variations in young people's ability to maintain development identities point to the importance of the cultural production of education as a field for comparative geographical enquiry.

Dignifying Death: the Politics of Burial in Bulawayo

AbstractThere has recently been much more recognition of the African role in the making of the colonial cities of southern Africa. Nevertheless, many kinds of action have still seemed to be impossible for Africans living in tightly controlled municipal townships. Among these is the political and symbolic management of death. While literature on West African towns celebrates 'mausoleum politics' and the struggle over the burial of dead men under the floors of their houses, in colonial Southern African cities it has been assumed that Africans had no choice but to accept the constraining rules of drab municipal cemeteries. Similarly, the initiative and agency, which we know rural Africans in Southern Africa to have exercised in their encounters with mission Christianity, have been much less documented in the towns. In short, it has been assumed that the Southern African town—and particularly the black townships—represented colonial control at its most intense and oppressive, allowing little room for symbolic or practical autonomy whether in social life, politics or religion. This article tests such presuppositions in relation to Southern Rhodesia's second largest town, and major industrial centre, Bulawayo. It argues that from the late 1890s there has always been a black Bulawayo, expressed first in the absence of municipal or state control of the Location and expressed later by the emergence of varying influential men and women there with the capacity to take cultural and symbolic initiatives, perhaps especially in the sphere of death, burial and commemoration. It discusses the successful performance of rites to 'bring back the spirit' a year after death despite missionary and municipal prohibitions; it discusses the role of the innumerable Burial Societies in colonial Bulawayo; it discusses the efforts of educated young men to erect memorials for African kings and chiefs; it discusses the varying focus of three types of African urban Christianity—missionfounded churches, 'Ethiopianist' independent churches and Apostolic prophetic churches—on rituals of death. By so doing it opens up many questions about the social, political, cultural and religious life of an African Location in colonial southern Africa.

Political Partisanship, Voting Abstention and Higher Education: Changing Preferences in a British Youth Cohort in the 1990s

This paper focuses on the relationship between education and political partisanship, using the British Household Panel Study (1991–1999). It is known that partisanship has been falling in Britain since the mid–1950s. However, voting abstention rose only gradually until the June 2001 election where the turnout (at 59 per cent) was the lowest since 1918. Partisanship also fell sharply during the 1990s. Although social class and education are associated with turnout in the USA, no relationship has been reported in the UK, and voting seems to have been perceived as a citizen duty. However, in the light of recent changes in voting patterns and educational participation, this paper investigates the role of education, contextualising education effects in social class and gender effects. The preferences of young people are observed in their late teens, before entering the labour market or higher education, and are compared with those of the same young people in their early 20s, after completing higher education courses or gaining labour market experience. The BHPS yielded a sample of about 500 young people with the required data over the time period. It was hypothesised that dissatisfaction with government performance would take different forms for the more and the less educated, with the more educated shifting preferences to minority parties while the less educated shift preferences to voting abstention. The hypothesis was confirmed for young men. Endorsement of abstention was very high for adolescent women who also seemed to be more influenced by their family’s social class. However, by early adulthood a lower proportion of young women endorsed abstention than young men. Strong effects of education were still found with more highly educated young women (as with more highly educated young men) being more likely to have party preferences.

Impact of a 10-year nation-wide alcohol campaign on knowledge of sensible drinking limits in Denmark.

In Great Britain and in Denmark, strong efforts have been made to influence knowledge on upper threshold for hazardous drinking. In Denmark, a campaign has been repeated every week 40 from 1990 to 2000 with information on the sensible drinking limits of 21 drinks per week for men and 14 drinks per week for women. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of this ongoing campaign on the level of knowledge of sensible drinking limits for men and women. Random representative samples of 1030 adult Danes were telephone interviewed each year during 1994-1999. Our main finding was that the level of knowledge of sensible drinking limits for own sex increased in all subsets of the population throughout the period. However, at the end of the study period (1999) a total of 80% of highly educated young (18-25 years) men knew sensible drinking limits for own sex, while only 35% of uneducated older (more than 65 years) men had knowledge on sensible drinking limits. The proportions were similar among women. Subjects admitting an intake higher than sensible for own sex, i.e. 21 and 14 drinks per week, respectively, had the highest knowledge of these drinking limits. We conclude that public health campaigns, such as the sensible drinking limit campaign, certainly has an impact on level of awareness in the general population. Furthermore, those drinking more than 21 and 14 drinks per week, respectively, are reached by these campaigns.

The 5-year clinical course of high-functioning men with DSM-IV alcohol abuse or dependence.

One goal of diagnostic criteria is to predict the course of clinically relevant future problems. This study evaluated the ability of the DSM-IV categories of alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence to predict the onset and cessation of the 11 DSM-IV abuse/dependence criterion items. The DSM-IV categorical approach was used to determine alcohol diagnoses for 435 highly educated young adult men, who constituted 97.3% of the 447 men appropriate for this study. Structured face-to-face follow-up interviews were administered 5 years later. At the beginning of the study, 14.5% (N=63) of the subjects were alcohol dependent, 18.2% (N=79) reported alcohol abuse, and 67.4% (N=293) carried no alcohol diagnosis. Across these three diagnostic groups, 68.3%, 46.8%, and 15.4%, respectively, experienced at least one of the 11 DSM-IV abuse/dependence criterion items over the next 5 years. Only 11.4% of those who reported alcohol abuse went on to develop alcohol dependence. In addition to their diagnosis, characteristics that predicted subsequent problems with alcohol included a family history of alcoholism, higher levels of alcohol intake and a greater number of alcohol problems in the 10 years preceding the diagnosis, and a history of drug use. Even in this highly educated and high-functioning group of men, alcohol abuse and dependence predicted the onset and cessation of alcohol-related problems.

The Silent Man's Voice in "The Statue of Liberty"

The Silent Man’s Voice in “The Statue of Liberty” Claude Julien (bio) “Stories are like onions. You peel one skin and another grins up at you.” John Edgar Wideman, Fatheralong (61) “The Statue of Liberty” is a programmatic title. Give the reader only that to go by and an icon of America’s self-congratulation may offer itself. Add the author’s name or, if you are first approaching his work, his picture on the back cover and that initial program may be redirected into the consciousness that the statue’s torch also casts shadows onto this ideal world, perhaps, to some extent, points them out. But such a program is only in the mind, and a different strain rises from the page as the story creates its own path away from prefabricated guesses. Put in a few words, “The Statue of Liberty” deals with American fantasies of interracial sex. John Wideman does not treat this theme in the hilarious manner of Cecil D. Brown’s The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. Nor is there any sardonic signifying such as in Hal Bennett’s Lord of the Dark Places or Melvin Van Peebles’ film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Those fictions bear the stamp of the Blaxploitation era. “The Statue of Liberty” is more intemporal. There is humor in it but contained by the grave and sedate tone it assumes to present its concern for the black man’s status. This essay will try to delve into the textual strategy of a story that opens like a bland narration and builds its way to an unwritten question, yet one repeated three times (perhaps once for each shadow of a character) in the shape of the “Y” pattern the three chairs have been disposed in on the unfinished patio. The Statue of Liberty is an infrequent visitor in John Wideman’s fiction. However, it does come up in Philadelphia Fire as “the bitch wit the torch” (80) and much more signally in a passage of Hurry Home 1 that must be brought up here if only because it happens to associate the statue with sex. Cecil Braithwaite’s departure for Europe tests the reader’s need to cast anchor in the referential world while a merciless poetic logic sweeps his mind out to sea, the way Cecil is put afloat when the land leaves the ship. The young traveler’s qualms (“do all journeys commence with such questioning, such tumult and confusion”), the text’s teeming “formless profusion” and the taunting “significance to be deciphered” come together in a passage that globally offers itself as a trope for Cecil’s existential anguish. The text erases punctuation, plays upon the signified and the signifier, jumbles the metaphorical and the metonymic, blurs the [End Page 740] realistic bearings that stabilize reading such as when “Handle with care, with fragility. Made in Japan. Maid in Germany. Union maid” leads, through an allusion to Wallace Stevens twenty lines or so further down, to “the tall lady with an upraised ice cream cone toasting the emperor.” Hurry Home’s derision of the symbolic torch lighting the way to the gate of freedom happens to be ushered in by the embrace, the passionate-sex-on-the-deck-before-departure (but who knows, as the liner already is on its way to the open sea?) of an anonymous couple. Cecil is confused, out of place, whatever he may think to the contrary. He is an educated young man whose head has been crammed full of literary knowledge (even some Old English) not necessarily relevant to the life opening before him as a black lawyer. T.S. Eliot’s foggy dangerous world of “The Dry Salvages” is present through the tolling harbor buoys defining the navigable channel. But so is Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” through the allusion to geological times. As Jacqueline Berben suggests in her unpublished dissertation (221–23), there are other leads to grasp at to reconstruct the racial overtones Cecil’s existential anguish carries. The rusty knell of the buoys doubles into bell boys, and the horn’s shriek “Bee Ohh” suggests B.O., the 1950s body odor advertisement for...

Level of self-concepts in educated unemployed young men in India: An empirical analysis

Four hundred educated young men, equally divided into: (1) technically educated unemployed, (2) non-technically educated unemployed, (3) technically educated employed, and (4) non-technically educated employed, were administered a modified version of the 28-item Semantic Differential Scale of Self-Evaluation (Singh, 1990a). This was done in order to have a comparative account of the level of private and social self-concepts including social conflict (Index of Social Conflict = Discrepancy between Mean Scores of Private and Social Self-concepts) in them. The non-technically educated unemployed, followed by technically educated ones, had considerably less positive, though moderate, level of private and social self-concepts in them as compared to their employed counterparts. Further, the non-technically employed ones, experienced less social conflict than all other groups. In addition, the results showed that the unemployed, in general, as compared to the employed, rated themselves relatively low, though moderate, on nearly all the attributes measuring private and social self-concepts. However, some of the attributes used in both measures had higher scores in the unemployed groups.

Attitudes of Educated Young Adults toward Child Rearing

The present study was designed to determine whether or not differences existed between educated young men ( n = 30) and women ( n = 46) in attitudes related to child rearing. Each ranked 50 behavior items for degree of concern using a Q-sort approach. Some differences between the two groups were found, although none was statistically significant.