Search results

The narrative of The Americans weaves together a spy thriller and a family drama, though it drives home the inseparability of the political and the personal through the lives of the central characters, Philip and Elizabeth, a couple whose marriage is a cover for their work as Soviet spies. This chapter provides a queer reading of their marriage, drawing from the real history of the Cold War politics of sexuality that associated American values with the hetero- and gender normative, white, and middle-class nuclear family. In contrast, the Soviet Union was understood to have disrupted this natural order by installing the state as an overbearing patriarch. Philip and Elizabeth’s fictional cover as a nuclear family requires them to perform American marriage, family, and selfhood. In doing so, they reflect the centrality of the family in America’s Cold War self-image in which the family serves as the anchor of the American order, enabling economic and political self-sufficiency. Their performance of the family challenges our ability to differentiate between real, authentic family that can serve as the legitimate source of social reproduction and between the counterfeit, fake family that disrupts the social order. The queer family, refusing to be placed beyond realm of the political by the moral language of family values, subverts our ability to distinguish between genres since the family drama is already a political thriller.

This study explores the influence individual characteristics identified in prior research have on ethical choice in a financial reporting task. An action-based, multi-metric dependent variable is developed to measure ethical reporting choice. Intermediate accounting students participate in the task as part of a curricular assignment in a revenue recognition module. Results demonstrate that several, but not all, individual characteristics found in prior research do influence accounting students’ ethical revenue recognition choices. Specifically, the external locus-of-control, idealism, consequentialist, and Machiavellian characteristics are found to influence ethical reporting choice.

Research suggests that parentally bereaved children are likely to experience lower academic success and may need long-term support through tertiary education. Gender matters — boys bereaved of fathers and girls bereaved of mothers are at increased risk. Boys also exhibit higher levels of emotional and behavioural issues following bereavement. Age is another factor and exam results of children bereaved before the age of five or at twelve are significantly more affected than those bereaved at other ages. Circumstances affecting these achievements concern the relationship between the child’s emotional state and how it plays out in behaviour and motivation in school.

Significantly, Freddie Pargetter, the subject of the chapter, has a twin sister, Lily. The twins had just turned 12 when their father was killed. Comparing the twins’ General Certificate of Education (GCSE) results fits the research patterns — Lily managed well and Freddie did not. Freddie recognises that the academic environment of Felpersham Cathedral School did not support him well and chooses Borchester FE College to continue his studies. This choice raises controversy in the family, indicative of well-rehearsed, real-world educational arguments. Social media responses to other Archers plot lines reveal the extent of how educational issues in the programme resonate with listeners.

This chapter examines cultural value creation through the 24 Carrot Gardens Project. Initiated by artist and curator Kirsha Kaechele of the Museum of Old and New Art, the vision of 24 Carrot Gardens is to ‘sow seeds of lifelong learning’ in the areas of health, well-being and sustainability across school communities in Tasmania, Australia. What has eventuated over its five years is a complex relationship between the artful ‘gold standard’ delivered by professional artists and a contemporary art museum with an integrated teaching and site-based learning across the arts and sciences. Designed in response to the local environmental, cultural and socio-economic context, 24 Carrot Gardens has contributed to a growing sense of community engagement, interdisciplinary learning and a strong foundation of networked donor investment. With these multilayered interests across a diversity of stakeholders and partnerships, many competing systems of value are at play, with the potential to contribute a new value creation. Firsthand accounts of project contributors are situated amongst the scholarly literature to produce an examination of value exchange and creation including the cultural values identified in 24 Carrot Gardens: artistic and creative, economic and industrial and education and environmental. Following this interrogation of the expressed values in this case study, we offer a foundation for a new framework for understanding local cultural value.

Laws geared toward regulating the employment relationship cling to traditional definitions of workplaces, neglecting the domain of the home and those who work there. Domestic workers, a population of largely immigrant women of color, have performed labor inside of New York City's homes for centuries and yet have consistently been denied coverage under labor law protections at both the state and federal level. This article traces out the exclusions of domestic workers historically and then turn to a particular piece of legislation – the 2010 New York Domestic Worker Bill of Rights – which was the first law of its kind to regulate the household as a site of labor, therefore disrupting that long-standing pattern. However, the law falls short in granting basic worker protections to this particular group. Drawing from 52 in-depth interviews and analysis of legislative documents, The author argues that the problematics of the law can be understood by recognizing its embeddedness, or rather the broader political, legal, historical, and social ecology within which the law is embedded, which inhibited in a number of important ways the law's ability to work. This article shows how this plays out through the law obscuring the specificity of where this labor is performed – the home – as well as the demographic makeup of the immigrant women of color – the whom – performing it. Using the case study of domestic workers' recent inclusion into labor law coverage, this article urges a closer scrutiny of and attention to the changing nature of inequality, race, and gender present in employment relationships within the private household as well as found more generally throughout the low-wage sector.