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US military contracting has been plagued by systematic corruption, fraud, and waste during both times of peace and war. These outcomes result from the inherent features of the US military sector which incentivize unproductive entrepreneurship. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Drawing on the insights of Baumol (1990) as their base theoretical framework, the authors explore how the industrial organization of the US military sector creates incentives for unproductive entrepreneurship. Evidence from US government reports regarding US efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq is provided to illustrate the central claims.

The military sector is characterized by an entangled network of government bureaus and private firms whose existence is dependent on continued government spending. These realities, coupled with a dysfunctional procurement processes, reward unproductive behaviors during peacetime. During wartime these incentives are intensified, as significant emergency resources are injected into an already defective contracting system. The recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate these dynamics.

The authors make three main contributions. First, contrary to common treatments by economists, much military spending fails to meet the definition of a public good. Second, waste, fraud, and abuse in military contracting is a result of rules and the incentives those rules create. Third, the only way to change the situation is to change the overarching rules governing the people operating in the military sector.

This study explores the value of sports films for engaging youth in issues related to patriotism, justice, equity and liberty. The authors analyze how two sports films, 42 and Battle of the Sexes, have pedagogical potential and value in secondary social studies methods classes, as well as what criteria educators might use when selecting films (and television series) for classroom use.

Using content analysis, the authors respond to the following questions: (1) What critical themes related to civic education surface in the sports films 42 and Battle of the Sexes? and (2) What framework might guide the use of selecting sports films and sports film clips for educators' civic educational use?

Five themes surfaced in the films 42 and Battle of the Sexes: economics as a force for social change; racism and anti-Blackness, athletes as more than athletes, resisting oppression, and sexism and homophobia. Instruction related to these themes has the potential to engage students in critical, awareness-based approaches to civic education.

Sports films show promise for engaging youth due to their interests in the medium of film and in sports, both as participants and spectators. Across the world, athletes face questions and issues related to patriotism, justice, equity and liberty on courts, fields, tracks and rinks, These questions and issues are deeply embedded in civic education. This study is among the first of its kind to explore the pedagogical potential of sports films.

Communities are critical sites for studying the politics of inequality within neoliberal capitalism. We illustrate this by providing regional case studies of the enactments and outcomes of three types of neoliberal policies in the United States: (1) cutbacks in family planning policies, (2) municipal underbounding and failures to provide public infrastructure within unincorporated communities, and (3) “tough on crime” policies leading to mass incarceration. Building on insights from intersectional feminist theory and using evidence from in-depth interviews from three Southwestern communities, we argue that neoliberal capitalism is compounding intersecting inequalities affecting women of color. In particular, we claim that neoliberal policies at the local and state levels are compromising the reproductive autonomy and public health of women of color and creating new challenges for their family care work.

The purpose of this paper is to encourage librarians to teach digital archiving practices to journalists as a way of giving journalists the skills they need to save their work for future use and to facilitate the preservation of journalism for posterity.

The author has reviewed the personal digital archiving literature and analyzed how it might be specifically tailored to the unique needs of journalists.

Daily journalism has traditionally been preserved by libraries in the form of newspapers and magazines housed in library periodicals departments. Now that nearly all journalism is published online and libraries generally only have access via temporary subscriptions, libraries are prevented from doing any kind of traditional preservation work (e.g. storing copies locally). In the future, this lack of local preservation may lead to a shortage of early twenty-first century primary source material for historians.

The needs of journalists do vary greatly based on the nature and format of their work and its publication venue, making it difficult to offer a single set of standards or recommendations.

While personal digital archiving advocates have generally interpreted the word “personal” to be synonymous with “private,” this paper points to the need to expand the concept to include professional activities, particularly in light of the prevalence of telecommuting and freelance work arrangements, and the lack of support and training received by remote workers and independent contractors.

In this chapter, we examine how the schooling experiences of disabled children have changed during COVID-19, how families' engagement, advocacy and support of their children have shifted during the pandemic, and how race, class, and other axes of inequality shape these processes.

We used a semi-structured interview protocol with families of disabled children, asking them about their experiences with their children's schools before and during the pandemic. We analyzed the interview data using “flexible coding” and the constant comparative method.

COVID-19 has had wide-reaching effects on disabled children's schooling experiences, yet these effects varied, particularly at the intersections of disability with race, class, linguistic status, and gender. Remote learning and other pandemic-related changes to schools exacerbated extant inequalities in children's educational experiences, as well as in families' ability to effectively advocate for their children in school.

This research provides important information about how the pandemic has exacerbated inequality at the intersection of disability, race, and other axes of inequality. Moreover, it provides a lens to examine ableism and other systems of oppression in schools. The findings have crucial policy implications, pointing to the necessity of equitably allocated, high quality, inclusive educational services for disabled students, as well as to the need for special education policy that does not rely on individual family advocacy to allocate appropriate services.

Drawing on 61 interviews with Mexican immigrants and ethnographic participant observation conducted over three years, I compare social movement organizing in two cities in one California County: one more progressive and the other more repressive. I profile two campaigns waged by Mexican immigrants and their allies in response to two threats posed by police: (1) car impoundments of undocumented, unlicensed drivers’ vehicles and (2) police killings. As political process theory was extended to authoritarian settings, scholars have demonstrated that both growing political opportunity and threat stimulate mobilization. Building on this trend in the literature, this study’s contribution lies in its specification of the relationship among political opportunities, threat, and mobilization tactics. I argue increasing local political opportunity gives rise to more collaborative protest tactics, while relatively more threatening environments yield more confrontational tactics. Because opportunity and threat are not objectively assessed, nor do they automatically inspire protest, I also consider the role of state targets, formalized SMOs, and the influence of coalition partners on tactics. Ethnographic methods are particularly useful for understanding the way organizers and activists, from within organizations that favor distinct tactical repertoires, perceive and attribute threat and opportunity, shedding light on the micro- and meso-level dynamics that shape the social form of mobilization.

From the point of view of reference service, the crucial fact about my desert island is that I am its sole human resident: I am therefore the sole potential recipient of any service I may manage to create, hence the sole subject of whatever user study seems called for. One Finding of the latter being, by the way, that I can meet my life‐survival needs simply by exploiting, thoughtlessly and effortlessly, my island's resources. Its climate is mild, it harbors nothing immediately or remotely dangerous to me, and it offers me a never failing and perfectly balanced diet.