Generational Conflict Research Articles

The Political Morphology of Drainage—How Gully Formation Links to State Formation in the Choke Mountains of Ethiopia

To understand why soil erosion is persistent despite three decades of massive investments in soil conservation, this paper explores how drainage and soil conservation change a hill slope in the Choke Mountains. By paying close attention to the practices that reshape the hill, we account for the active roles of people and material flows in shaping their identities, forms, and power relations. Social relations can be read in the landscape as their material outcomes are literally scoured into the hill slope. Such a material reading of Ethiopia's “developmental state” reveals three issues: First, drainage and soil conservation practices are configured by particular historical regimes of land distribution and rent appropriation. Second, the power of the Ethiopian government's model of the developmental state derives from the exploitation of this configuration by a new coalition of landholders and government officials. Government officials mobilize landholders to construct terraces in exchange for government support in conflicts over land and input distribution. When the terraces create obstructions that can trigger flooding, landowners convert them into drains and divert drainage flows to plots sharecropped by landless families. Consequently, the yearly mobilization for terrace construction does not halt soil erosion but further aggravates it. This continues because the performance of this yearly ritual affirms the authority of landholders and government agents. Third, landless families which fail to live up to the model of the “farmer interested in soil conservation” have created a competing “trader model” with its own institutions. The denial of their non-farmer identities by landholders and officials fuels generational conflicts over drainage which deepen the fractures in the hill and pose a challenge to government authority. Land degradation thus embodies both the powers and the limits of the developmental state.

Genealogie als intertextuelles Spiel

AbstractIn Book 1 of theArgonautica, Apollonios Rhodios counts out the names of 55 heroes who set off to win the Golden Fleece. All the heroes are given genealogical details that often contribute to their characterisation. Only Admetus’ γενεή is passed over in silence by the catalogue. This was noted already by H. Fränkel, who suspected a lacuna in the text. However, there is another solution to the problem. The distinctive relationship of Admetus to his parents is detailed nowhere more clearly and drastically than in Euripides’Alcestis. In what is perhaps the most bitter agon in Greek tragedy, the father and son quarrel so severely that Admetus throws his parents out of the house and from then on wishes not to be regarded as their son. Apollonios assumes a knowledge of this famous quarrel among his readers or hearers, and he shows the sad consequences of this unreconciled generational conflict by breaking the convention of filiation and silently calling to mind the unresolved problems of theAlcestis.

Convict shame to convict chic: Intergenerational memory and family histories

This article highlights the significance of family history research for memory studies. It provides an overview of the economic and cultural impact of this popular practice as well as a survey of the interdisciplinary field of research emerging around questions of genealogy and identity. It then develops a framework for engaging with the intergenerational, socially responsive memory work of family historians drawing from Paul Connerton’s typography of forgetting, Maurice Halbwach’s theory of social memory and Karl Mannheim’s notion of generations. The article grounds this framework with a case study about generational conflicts in Australian family histories, specifically around the shifting status of the convict ancestor, from a figure of secrecy and shame to one of pride and intrigue. I argue that family history research reveals the process by which generations have shaped memory, editing ‘the family narrative’ in response to changing social ideas about which kinds of identities and families hold value and promise. The names and dates on family trees therefore tell the stories not just of a discrete set of individuals but also of how social, national and generational interests interlink to produce the narratives we live by in both intimate and public spheres.

Understanding Why Scholars Hold Different Views on the Influences of Video Games on Public Health

Despite decades of research, no scholarly consensus has been achieved regarding the potential impact of video games on youth aggression or other public health concerns. In recent years, hypotheses have been raised that scholarly opinions on video games may resemble past moral panics, with attitudes reflective of generational conflicts. These hypotheses are tested in a sample of 175 criminologists, psychologists and media scholars, examining both overall negative attitudes about video games and perceived linkages with youth assaults specifically. Results reflected continued lack of scholarly consensus on the issue of video game influences with only 15.3% of scholars endorsing the view the violent video games contribute to youth assaults. As hypothesized, older scholars endorsed more negative views of video games generally, although this appeared to be related to experience with games rather than age per se. Scholars with more negative attitudes toward youth themselves were also more negative about games. Criminologists and media scholars were more skeptical of violent video games contributing to youth assaults than were psychologists. These results are discussed in relation to Moral Panic Theory.

Teaching Millennials and Generation Z: Bridging the Generational Divide.

Most undergraduate students today are part of the millennial generation. However, the next wave of students-Generation Z-are just beginning to enter universities. Although these groups share many similarities, they each have unique characteristics that create challenges in the classroom. Incorporating technology, engaging students with adaptive learning activities, and understanding basic generational differences are ways to limit the effects of generational conflict while keeping both millennials and Generation Z students engaged in learning. It is important to understand basic differences and distinctions across generations for developing pedagogy that reaches these unique student populations.

Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship by Robert Bussel

Reviewed by: Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship by Robert Bussel Max Krochmal Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship. By Robert Bussel. The Working Class in American History. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 244. Paper, $32.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08104-0; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03949-2.) In Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship, Robert Bussel uses a joint biography of two union leaders to explore the role of organized labor in the larger communities that surround them. The two protagonists, one white, one black, both hailed from working-class families in coal country, and both wound their ways through the non-communist Left of the 1930s and 1940s before landing together in Teamsters Local 688 in St. Louis. Bussel follows the two organizers as they dug in deep in their adopted local union and city, the white Harold Gibbons as the organization’s head and the black Ernest Calloway as his right-hand man. Together, the two nonsectarian socialists developed the concept of “total person unionism,” which held that gaining power at the workplace through collective bargaining was not sufficient to protect the interests of ordinary working people (p. 5). Gibbons and Calloway instead sought to engage workers when they were away from the factories, warehouses, retailers, and taxi and transportation firms that employed them. Doing so would allow the Teamsters to build power and bargain collectively in the community writ large, not just in electoral politics but also in a broad [End Page 227] range of local decision-making arenas. In the process, the union would protect its members and the larger working class and, more important, transform ordinary workers trained in deference to managerial and political elites into full-fledged citizens. The duo proved remarkably successful in reaching this broad, democratic vision. In 1957, Bussel contends, the union led the charge in defeating a proposed amendment to the city charter that would have shielded downtown developers and their political allies from the messiness of participatory, ward-based politics. The Teamsters achieved victory in partnership with the local branch of the NAACP, of which Calloway was also a frequent officer. Indeed, fighting racism represented an integral part of Gibbons’s vision of total person unionism. As union chief, Gibbons pushed white rank-and-file members to understand the importance of creating a democracy that included all people. Throughout the 1960s this egalitarian stance translated into a series of largely successful local campaigns. Yet Bussel cautions that the duo’s success in modeling total person unionism ultimately fell short. Technological innovation undermined Teamster jobs, while white flight undermined their vision of community organizing. More important, Gibbons became embroiled in the national Teamsters union’s corruption scandals and then faced a counterinsurgency among members in Local 688 who claimed that his desire to build community and electoral power came at the expense of concerns on the shop floor. Gibbons’s disavowal of the Vietnam War only added fuel to the fire, ending in his removal from the union’s presidency. Meanwhile, Calloway increasingly lost traction in the city’s civil rights movement after a series of ideological, tactical, and generational conflicts with dissident members of the NAACP and of the Congress of Racial Equality. Bussel connects the two activists’ demise by arguing that both suffered when they strayed too far from the democratic principles that had animated their earlier organizing efforts. They lost touch with their respective members, dooming their more innovative campaigns and eventually their own leadership careers. Overall the book is a captivating must-read for historians of postwar labor and civil rights movements as well as for present-day union officials and community organizers. My only quibble is that I would have liked more sustained engagement with the recent, well-regarded books on urban and civil rights history in St. Louis by historians Colin Gordon and Clarence Lang, both of which focus closely on labor, the working class, race, and politics in the very same communities. While Bussel ably recovers Gibbons and Calloway from obscurity...

Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900–1950 by Paul Ginsborg

Reviewed by: Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900–1950 by Paul Ginsborg Sara Sewell Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900–1950. By Paul Ginsborg. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 520. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0300112115. Family Politics examines family life and politics in Bolshevik Russia, the Turkish Republic, Fascist Italy, the Spanish Republic, Francoist Spain, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. Weaving together family theory, legislation, social conditions, gender relations, daily life, and cultural production, Ginsborg cogently demonstrates how each nation-state sought a revolution in family life. At its most compelling, Family Politics recounts the lives of families torn apart during periods of extreme violence and describes the impact of this violence on both the large scale, which resulted in seismic demographic shifts, and at the personal level where individual families struggled amid devastating loss. Ginsborg recognizes that these "great tyrant regimes" collapsed "the private into the public," restructuring "civil society to serve the state" (68). While acknowledging the invasive nature of dictatorial states, Ginsborg simultaneously challenges totalitarian approaches that downplay private life. As he contends, totalitarian approaches overlook "that layer of social activity which, even in dictatorship, lies between the individual and the state, and which has its lynchpin in the family" (437). By contrast, Ginsborg integrates family narratives into the "social and political life of a nationstate" to show that "families are not simply on the receiving end of political power but are themselves actors in the historical process" (xviii), even under dictatorships. In the years following World War I, when political experimentation was rife, debates about the family emerged as never before. Ginsborg devotes significant attention to the theoretical underpinnings of each regime's family ideology, from Alexandra Kollontai's reconceptualization of the family within the collective to Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp's advocacy of a familial "nest" as the kernel of national organization. Ginsborg also demonstrates how each regime attempted to put its theories into practice to revolutionize daily life. Comparing five countries through revolution, dictatorship, and war, Ginsborg points out that all of these states advanced family stability as a key ingredient to their "New Orders." His approach produces fascinating bedfellows. For example, both Revolutionary Russia and Kemalist Turkey promulgated family laws that were decidedly secular, undercutting religious authorities. Spain's anarchosyndicalist [End Page 659] Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) supported eugenic practices that echoed Nazi racial theory. And both the Nazi and Soviet idealization of youth as a national regenerative force incited generational conflict within families, leading to children denouncing their parents. Despite efforts to instrumentalize families, these regimes did not always realize success in the realm of family policy due to contradictory state policies. For example, while both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany enjoyed tremendous success at enlisting citizens in mass national organizations, these organizations simultaneously undermined family relations, drawing individuals out of the family. Sometimes the policies of these regimes destroyed families altogether. Despite the Francoist government's 1938 law that characterized the family as "the natural nucleus and foundation of society … endowed with inalienable rights" (305), famine ravaged working-class families in the early 1940s due largely to state actions. Similarly, the Bolsheviks contributed to conditions that ruined families during the Civil War, so that by 1922 orphan children totaled at least four million. For Ginsborg, the regimes' uneven records on family policy highlight the limitations of nation-states to infiltrate private life. Even under dictatorships, families drew boundaries between the public and private. In Fascist Italy, for instance, Mussolini's desire to grow the population was met with resistance by ordinary Italians. Similarly, in Kemalist Turkey peasant families, adhering to traditional religious practices, refused to register marriages with the state. While there is much to applaud about Family Politics, its analysis largely stops short of examining politics within families. Ginsborg often brings his readers to the cusp of family politics, halting just at the moment when the reader senses that the real drama is about to unfold. For instance, we learn that Kollontai periodically abandoned her family, but her husband is rendered silent, a background character to revolutionary drama. In addition, Ginsborg explains that Joseph Goebbels had a...

The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South. by Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego

Reviewed by: The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South. by Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego Michael W. Fitzgerald (bio) The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South. By Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp. 233. Cloth, $49.50.) Let's accentuate the positive. This is a nuanced work reflecting on black congressmen during Reconstruction and its aftermath. Through an appreciative examination of six leaders, Dinnella-Borrego shows that they disagreed on a lot. But having determined to provide a deromanticized version of what these beleaguered legislators could accomplish, the author could have gone farther. These six congressmen were relatively prominent. They were James Rapier of Alabama, Josiah Walls of Florida, John Roy Lynch of Mississippi, Robert Smalls of South Carolina, John Mercer Langston of Virginia, and George White of North Carolina. They seem a plausible cross-section of the postwar era's twenty black House members. Still, the author never explains why he chose these individuals, beyond the existence of relatively ample evidence, three of them having written autobiographies. The tone is upbeat, with the author twice framing the study as an antecedent to the age of Obama. The author dissents from scholars such as Thomas Holt and Steven Hahn who see these leaders as elitists, locked into a political structure that diminished their ability to speak for the impoverished masses. "This critique is largely unjustified," Dinnella-Borrego concludes (6). The author emphasizes the relationship between these leaders and their grassroots constituency, rather than the machinations of Washington power politics. He also demonstrates quite tangibly that black congressmen were not monolithic, that especially after Redemption they differed on issue after issue as the wider political climate chilled. In general, this study approaches black officeholders with an appreciation of the practical constraints under which they operated. They were locked as junior partners in an interracial Republican Party, but they were not sellouts: "they did their jobs well" and their constituents took pride in them. Though they favored negotiation and compromise in their congressional roles, they also "functioned as national spokesmen for all African Americans" (216). This nuanced emphasis makes Dinnella-Borrego helpfully attentive to real-world constraints. In particular, he highlights the generational conflict between the older Republican officeholders and the younger generation of unelected black activists, like Ida Wells and T. Thomas Fortune, who saw themselves as protest leaders per se. And because this study extends beyond the normal Redemption endpoint of 1877, it enables exploration of the fluid political alignments of the 1880s and 1890s, as agrarian movements challenged the two-party order. This [End Page 341] is complicated political terrain, marked by apparent opportunistic shifts, and it is refreshing to see a knowledgeable take on how African American leaders responded. As should be evident, this book has much to recommend it. The discussion of what black congressmen actually did, and what the institutional constraints were, is refreshingly concrete. That said, having determined on a realist defense of these legislators, the author could have pursued that line more consistently. Dinnella-Borrego notes in his introduction that his subjects fought "for patronage and other government improvements," but he seldom recurs to the topic of government jobs again, once mentioning it in the context of corruption (6). This oversight understates the centrality of patronage, an abiding practical obsession of Reconstruction politics; patronage provided a tangible civil rights demand that tied black activists to the political structure. Nor does the author talk much about the related Reconstruction factional divisions—the Radical-versus-moderate conflicts—that facilitated black leaders' rise to elective office. One might expect discussion of the quadrennial presidential nomination process, which enabled black Republicans to maintain some modest bargaining power even after their party had abandoned Reconstruction. And the opposition Democrats did not "unwittingly" promote black officeholding through racial gerrymandering; they consciously did it to maintain control elsewhere and to hold their restive agrarian constituency in line (151). The book would have profited from a review of the published Ulysses S. Grant papers, especially since the congressmen Dinnella-Borrego examines so often acted as loyal foot soldiers for Republican administration policy. Given the Gilded Age context, and the Republicans...

Introduction

Introduction Sara Freeman Theatre History Studies is an annual journal. We print one issue per year, and we assemble it almost a year in advance. I write this introduction in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election and I find it hard to project what commentary might be the most applicable in the fall of 2017. The scholarship in this issue resonates with several developments that dominate the global political sphere, such as upheaval in conservative and liberal social positions and tactics, ongoing debates about national identity, new contours of generational conflict, upsurges in student activism, and resistance to or embrace of change, in any format. Laura Ferdinand Feldmeyer's documentation and analysis about a key line of dialogue in the play adaptation of Peter Pan—"to die will be an awfully big adventure"—unfolds J. M. Barrie's history of writing war propaganda during World War I and his change of heart about the project of war in relationship to the Western cultural imaginary about masculinity and adventure. Feldmeyer tracks how the line was included or excluded from performances of the play and the treatment of the line both onstage and off while investigating the great generational divide operative in both the experiences of the Great War and its aftermath. Attending to that divide transforms Peter Pan from a delightful, uplifting piece of theatre to an elegiac one. That unsettled, simultaneously childish and mournful status of Peter Pan is still reflected in contemporary theatre made in adaptational dialogue with Barrie's tale, including Peter and the Starcatcher, Sarah Ruhl's 2016 play For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, and Sally Cookson's production of Peter Pan appearing at the Bristol Old Vic and the National Theatre in London across the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017. It is still unclear, in the wake of a UK vote to "Brexit" the European Union and of the election of [End Page 1] Donald Trump to the US presidency, what masculinity means and if our societies are willing to grow up. Feldmeyer begins her article by considering a 1922 address Barrie gave to students at St. Andrew's University about youth and age. La Donna Forsgren's Schanke Award-winning paper from the 2016 Mid-America Theatre Conference also takes college campuses as the loci of its analysis and makes a diachronic link between black student activism in the 1960s and the 2010s, especially as such activism used performative demonstrations at Northwestern in 1968 and the University of Missouri (Mizzou) in 2015. In doing so, Forsgren also recovers the history of Black Folks's Theatre at Northwestern University, which was formed as the artistic branch of For Members Only, the Northwestern black student union founded in the wake of 1968 campus protests. Forsgren connects Black Folks's Theatre to the Black Arts Movement, strengthening our theatre-historical sense of how the artistic branches of social movements participate to bring about institutional change. Julie Jackson's article explicating the practices of "Chicago-style theatre" and what the phrase denotes about acting technique, approach to staging, or audience experience follows not only how theatre interacts with institutional change but also how insurgent theatres become institutions. Her history of the Chicago theatre as "not just rock 'n' roll" gives new depth of understanding to the style characteristic of the artist-operated ensemble theatres that define Chicago's scene. At once a close reading of press discourse about Chicago theatre, a personal history drawn from four decades of watching and making theatre in Chicago, and a cataloging of key companies in Chicago theatre beyond the highly mythologized Step-penwolf, Jackson's scholarship provides a sophisticated analysis of the dynamics of realism and artifice at work in Chicago theatre aesthetics. Likewise, Gabrielle Houle wrestles with "style"—a combination of realism and artifice in performance techniques—while revealing the struggles with mask work experienced by twentieth-century commedia dell'arte star Marcello Moretti. Houle's masterful set of propositions about the challenges a mask presents a performer and her materialist attention to the role of mask-makers and mask-making techniques in helping performers reclaim the mask culminates with insight about the role...

Rights and responsibilities in rural South Africa: implications for gender, generation, and personhood

In the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa, contests over the meaning and merit of human rights feature prominently in intergenerational and intergendered conflicts. In this article I identify and analyse a tension between amalungelo (a socially embedded and relational form of rights) and irhayti (a Xhosaization of the English ‘[human] right’) as a means of exploring the interpersonal tensions that arise through the production and contestation of the subject positions that human rights set in motion. Using the examples of elders’ complaints of neglect, and of young men's accusations of human rights violations on the part of women, I ground this investigation in men's and elders’ explanations of how human rights enable morally reprehensible actions, and are implicated in what they perceive to be a climate of interpersonal neglect. In analysing these claims, I show that gendered and generational conflict in this region is grounded in uncertainty about the content of gendered and generational subject positions themselves, and speaks to the relative moral value of autonomous versus relational forms of personhood. Moreover, I show that where inequality and interdependence are intrinsic to the ways in which gendered and generational subject positions are constituted and understood, human rights serve both to destabilize the content of these subject positions in ways that render appropriate gendered and generational sociality unclear, and also to bring into question the relative moral value of autonomous versus more relational forms of personhood.

The Unconscious of the City: Conflicts in the Diaspora Community and Multicultural Education in Brick Lane

The age of migration and travel brought about various types of diaspora communities worldwide. Diasporas have been thought to easily adjust to and be assimilated into a new culture as cultural translators, while their communities can be spaces where new hybrid identities are created. Nowadays diaspora writers tend to return to the idea of territoriality instead of transnational migration and travel, and give more weight to the space where the immigrants have settled. Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) focuses on the space and the specific geography of a Bangladeshi diaspora community located in the East End of London. London has had two faces: progress and regression, and there have always been hidden, isolated, and poverty-stricken ghettos in London, where immigrants from the former colonies of the British Empire flooded in. And these underprivileged immigrants have been trapped inside these ghettoes and repressed into the Unconscious of the City, which someday might erupt. Ali represents the Brick Lane diaspora community as one such group of immigrants and makes it a geographical and psychological space, using Nazneen as a center of consciousness. Ali tells about the migration and settlement of the first generation, and the identity and belonging of the second generation. Chanu tries to move up the social ladder through education, but fails. Karim, who was born in England, fights against white racism while searching for identity lost in the encounter between two cultures. Ali uses the year of 2001 as the background of this novel to show that the immigrants in Brick Lane suffer from disappointment, frustration, drug addiction, gangs, identity conflict, generational conflict among themselves, as well as hypocrisy, indifference, racism, hate crime, and Islamophobia from white people. Brick Lane represents the space of the Unconscious of the City. Ali filters this sensitive story through Nazneen’s innocent and compassionate perspective. Within Nazneen’s story, Ali warns cautiously about the possible imminent explosion of the Unconscious of the City.

«Haz el amor, no la guerra». Experiencias de vida comunitaria como laboratorios de educación para la paz en Italia

The 1960s and 70s in Italy marked a moment of great discontinuity, change and generational conflict. In these years of student protests, original and alternative lifestyles came to light: young people wanted to personally engage in a concrete and real experience of peace, brotherhood and sharing property (and in some cases also personal affections), breaking out of the roles imposed by the bourgeois family. The pacifism of these first Italian «communes» eclectically mixed the American dream with Eastern spirituality; rebellion and drug use with Marxist ideologies stemming from various sources. The result was a substantially minority (but not fleeting) movement which had ties both with its nineteenth-century predecessors (of both religious and socialist origin) and with some subsequent interesting twentieth-century experiences, up to the present day.The communitarian ideal took shape in some experiences which became increasingly interconnected, and so went on to form an international movement. While, in terms of numbers, the people choosing to live in communitarian form (also in the recent eco-villages or cohousing) were few, their way of thinking started to be shared by increasingly broad swathes of the population, with evident effects on lifestyles (such as buying organic foods) and forms of education. In particular, think of their refusal to do military service, openness towards Eastern spirituality, vegetarianism, their ecological vision, fight against vivisection and for animal rights, and so-called critical consumption. In Italy, the latter aspect developed above all thanks to Francesco Gesualdi, a pupil of Don Milani who pursued the ideal of a peace that was never detached from justice: with his activity and writings he made consumers responsible, engaging them in a form of non-violent protest against the waste and violence of the economic world.Unfortunately, we must not forget that not all the promises of brotherhood and communitarian joy were fulfilled. Some communities, in the secrecy of their isolated world, practised forms of coercion and violence, even against children. These cases, some of which have been subject to criminal investigations by the judiciary, show how the danger is not to be found in the drugs or the feared sexual promiscuity of the outset, but in the very character itself of small communities, by definition different from the rest of the social body and purposefully, physically separate. Such that, paradoxically, in these communities’ history, violence and peace interweave.

Dressing for the Culture Wars: Style and the Politics of Self-Presentation in the 1960s and 1970s

Often regarded as frivolous and superficial, fashion under certain circumstances performs an important social role by providing symbols that represent social tensions and conflicts. Betty Luther Hillman argues that fashion and style create a nonverbal discourse based on individual choices. During the 1960s, a period of rapid social change in American society, dress and hairstyles embodied these changes, and television disseminated them to the entire population. Social activists used personal appearance as a way of expressing “their disagreement with and alienation from American culture” (p. xviii). Other Americans interpreted this behavior as “signs of the demise of the gender, sexual, racial and middle-class traditions of ‘respectability’ they held dear” (p. xx). Based on documentary sources such as newspapers, magazine articles and advertisements, periodicals, papers of social movement organizations, court cases, photographs, and memoirs, the book shows how shifting styles of self-presentation played an important role in politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Hillman focuses her analysis on several social groups whose members changed their dress and hairstyles in the 1960s. Young, white, middle-class American men developed hair and clothing styles that led to generational conflicts. Black power activists adopted hair styles and African-heritage clothing which, in turn, influenced New Left and hippie countercultural activists protesting the Vietnam War. These movements produced a conservative backlash. Feminist and gay liberation movements used dress and hairstyles to challenge male and female gender distinctions. Hillman explores the social significance of unisex styles in the 1970s and changing media reactions to them.

Population Ageing, the Intergenerational Conflict, and Active Ageing Policies – a Multilevel Study of 27 European Countries

In the scientific and the public debate demographic ageing is sometimes perceived as an unstoppable “grey tide” which will inevitably lead to a conflict between the old and young generation. In this paper we empirically evaluate whether we find any evidence for an intergenerational conflict in Europe and which factors might influence its severity. In particular, we answer the following questions. (1) Is there a conflict between the interests of the younger and the older generation? (2) Does the strength of the conflict increase with population ageing? And finally, (3) can a policy of Active Ageing, i.e. better integrating older generations into society, moderate the conflict? We answer these questions in a comparative study of 27 European countries using data from the Eurobarometer 2009. Our results show a moderate conflict between generations. Compared to spending preferences of the younger generation, older people are more likely to support increased spending for old age at the expense of educational spending. Contrary to expectation, generational conflict does not increase with population ageing. Linking country differences in the strength of the generational conflict to the degree of population ageing with multilevel regression techniques we do not find any evidence that the conflict is increasing In a final step of our analysis we evaluate the potential of generational policies - measured with the Active Aging Index - to mitigate the generational conflict. Intergenerational conflict is weaker when older people actively participate in the political life and are visible in society, suggesting Active Aging policies as a means to mitigate intergenerational conflict.

Editor’s introduction to the special section: Feminism and psychoanalysis: Conversations across generations

I introduce four papers first presented at the 2014 APCS conference in a panel on psychoanalysis and feminism. Featuring feminists from different generations, these papers take up some generational conflicts within feminism and discuss what psychoanalysis offers and fails to offer to feminist analysis and activism. They caution against feminist tendencies toward moralism and toward universalizing positions of privilege. The authors engage as well with what their encounters with other generations have taught them and with what they want to pass on.

A Novel of Forgetting Magda Szabó: Mózes egy, huszonkettő [Moses, Book I:22], the ultimate Kádárist novel

The article focuses on the novel of acclaimed Hungarian writer, Magda Szabó, Mózes egy, huszonkettő (Moses Book I:22). It argues that the novel, published in 1967, can be regarded as the “ultimate Kádárist novel” in which the young generation rejects its ancestors’ clinging to memory and remembrance and in this they perfectly conform to the foundations of Kádár’s post-1956 regime. The article explains why and how this forgetting should be understood in the era and how it manifested itself in the population. A close reading of the novel illustrates how this desire to forget, or at least the rejection of historical memory reflects in the generational conflict. T the same time, through the analysis of this novel and the mention of a few other books by Szabó, the article also hopes call into question the writer’s frequent utterances of having been among those the regime did not appreciate, even persecuted. Quotations from the author, as well as from the criticism of the novel hope to offer a more nuanced understanding of this writer and offer venues for firther studies about her.

Book Review: Jennie Bristow, Baby Boomers and Generational Conflict

Book Review: Jennie Bristow, Baby Boomers and Generational Conflict. London: Palgrave, 2015. ISBN: 978-1137454737 (Hardback). 212 Pages. $95.[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2016 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]No generation arouses more ire or invective than Baby Boomers. Barack Obama (b. 1961), either a very late Boomer or very early Gen Xer, based his campaign in 2008 on transcending Boomer conflict; eight years earlier, George W. Bush ran on basis of calling his own Boomer generation to accountability, responsibility, and greatness. In 2016, Bernie Sanders, too old by a few years to be a Boomer himself, became champion of Millennials-some of them too young to even have Boomers as parents-by criticizing compromises made by Hillary Clinton and her husband in 1990s as emblems of Boomer cultural transformation and personal liberation (3) corroded by complacency and corruption.Indeed, in US Clintons have become so representative of Boomer generation that one's feelings about one are irretrievably colored by one's feelings about other. Thus it is salutary that Jennie Bristow's informative and thought-provoking study is written by a scholar based in UK and is largely premised on data from UK public sphere. This helps a global audience see what is at stake more clearly without distraction of ephemeral and parochial US concerns. Bristow makes clear from beginning that she is determined to read beyond publicsphere stereotypes of Boomers' significance. She decries a deliberate strategy to articulate (and indeed foment) a conflict between (5) on part of prominent political, media, and corporate actors, and wonders what is at bottom of all this. Is it that Boomers were felt to be so and entitled in Bristow's words degenerate hedonists (3) that they have now become scapegoated?Sagaciously, Bristow goes back into of very idea of generations, whose modern incarnation begins in Germany with sociologist Karl Mannheim. Mannhiem, according to Bristow, was interested in generations as a mode of understanding way in which knowledge is transferred across time and space. Mannheim rejected merely demographic ideas of generation proffered by positivism, which was only interested in mechanistic variables such as birth rate, for a broader, more heuristic and affective idea of parituclar moral values of a of people. He avoided, though, an excessive introversion of purely qualitative (33). Bristow then goes on to discuss Jose Ortega y Gasset and later US historian of generations Robert Wohl, noting that for both thinkers, a generational consciousness was linked with onset of modernity. In twentieth century, when society itself seemed in crisis and every generation seemed radically changed (34), human identity itself seemed variable, generationally inflected.The Baby Boomers, at least in US and UK, grew up in a world that had seemed to dodge crises of modernism, when as UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan boasted in 1959, You've never had it so good. When first recognized by society, they were identified as by their youth and good fortune. Bristow quotes British historian Dominic Sandbrook, who has written superbly of this era in British history, and who called Boomers the luckiest people in history (90). Yet Bristow goes on to say that this privileged cohort (91) in fact was an amalgam of people from many class, social, and ethnic backgrounds. There is thus an illusory cohesiveness to generations, for all force of shared experience and existential conditions. …

Conflict resolution styles and personality

Purpose– Conflict in the workplace creates a challenge for many of present day managers. The purpose of this paper is to explore the moderating effect of generations X and Y on the relationship between personality and conflict handling styles.Design/methodology/approach– The study is conducted using a sample of 199 employees working in the electronic retail sector in a non-Western culture. The five-factor model of personality traits is used to measure personality, while conflict styles are measured using Rahim’s Organizational Conflict Inventory II.Findings– Results indicate that generations X and Y moderate the relationship between specific personality traits and conflict handling styles.Research limitations/implications– This study investigated the moderating effect of generations X and Y on a sample of employees within the electronic retail service sector in Lebanon. It is recommended that future research examine such a relationship in other sectors and cultures for generalizability. Since generation Z (born in the late 1990s) will soon be entering the job market, further studies should include this cohort when investigating the relationships. Finally, for a deeper understanding of the relationship, it is advisable to use both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods.Practical implications– The understanding of what influences an individual’s choice regarding his/her choice of conflict resolution styles is of great use to supervisors in general and human resource managers in particular. This will assist in developing training programs that help employees acquire the appropriate skills necessary to control their impulses in a conflict situation. Training should comprise conflict resolution and communication skills that could help bridge the gap between generations. Effectively managing generational conflict in the workplace can positively contribute to the level and frequency of future conflicts, which in turn, can lead to favorable organizational outcomes.Originality/value– Earlier research that examined the relationship between personality and conflict management styles have found varying results ranging from weak to strong relationships. The understanding of what influences an individual’s choice of which management style he/she chooses is of great use for managers in general and human resource managers in particular. This study showed that the inconsistency could be the result of some factors that moderate this relationship. The age of individuals contributes to the strength or the weakness of the various relationships between personality and conflict handling styles. Findings suggest that generations X and Y do not moderate the relationships among the personality traits and the dominating and obliging conflict styles. They do, however, have varying moderating effects on the relationships between specific personality traits and the integrating, avoiding, and compromising styles.

Algunos apuntes sobre cuchillo de palo de renate costa. Un ejercicio de memoria de la homofobia y los traumas de la dictadura de Stroessner

Hacer un documental sobre el periodo histórico de un país como Paraguaybajo la dictadura de Stroessner, enunciado en primera persona y centrado en una investigación familiar y personal, puede parecer –en un principio- una tarea mal enunciada. Este artículo sobre el documental Cuchilo de Palo de la directora Renate Costa aborda cómo el documental performativo o poético puede ser una herramienta de gran eficacia para activar la memoria histórica de un periodo tan trau- mático como este. Se analizará cómo par- tiendo de motivaciones e inquietudes perso- nales este ejercicio documental va trazando un retrato punzante y certero sobre el silencio y el miedo internalizado mediante el terror de la dictadura y sus diversos instrumentos disciplinarios, así como sobre la cruenta re- presión de la homosexualidad y el arraigo de una virulenta homofobia en la sociedad del país. Se intentará desentrañar cómo a tra- vés de fotografías, documentos, entrevistas y testimonios orales la directora edita un texto fílmico en el que a partir de lo micro se llega al macrorrelato. De los conflictos familiares se pasa a los generacionales y los problemas de fractura y reconciliación de la sociedad del país después de los traumas de la dictadura. Es aquí donde podemos establecer una cone- xión entre el montaje fílmico y la edición –que es el núcleo de trabajo de la revista que reco- ge este artículo- como constructoras de rela- tos y generadoras de conocimiento."

La representación de la mujer en el contexto familiar de la ficción televisiva española

The rise of television drama in the late nineties challenged comedy as the most popular and resilient genre of fiction. The diversity of themes and growing complexity of new narratives have relegated family representations –key to comedy’s success- to contextualize sentimental and sexual relationships and, to a lesser extent, the work sphere of female characters. This article analyses the context and family relations of 709 female characters represented, with varying degrees of importance, in 84 programs of Spanish television fiction (series, serials, TV movies, miniseries and sketches) premiered in 2012 and 2013. The approach combines quantitative (SPSS coding) and qualitative (socio-semiotics and script theory) methods. The analysis reveals that Spanish television fiction offers a complex picture of family relationships, which mixes clichés and stereotypes, while trying to capture reality. Generational conflicts are the most common misunderstandings in everyday representations of female characters, although most of the women generally have the support of their families to address problems and difficulties of their exciting fictional experiences.