Transnational Communities

The global ascension of disability human rights has emerged with the onset of global fiscal austerity. Across nearly all Western Liberal Democracies, governments have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, whilst simultaneously, undertaking broad base disability welfare retrenchment that target disability social security regimes. Australia, the UK and Canada, in particular, have progressively implemented more restrictive disability social security eligibility criteria and in turn, many people with disabilities who previously qualified for disability social security no longer qualify. Thus, despite the normalisation of disability rights at the global scale, within the national scale, many people with disabilities are no longer defined as ‘disabled’ and are being shifted onto more precarious social security payments with fewer entitlements. This paper seeks to explore this growing global contradiction drawing upon disability social policy examples from the UK and Australia. It will discuss the tension that exists between the frames of ‘citizenship rights’ and ‘disability human rights’ and how these competing political frames, between the scale of the global and the national, undermine the realisation of ‘rights’ within national disability welfare regimes.

In recent decades constitutional conceptuality has provided the central epistemological framework through which the issue of legitimacy of transnational orders has been addressed. Departing from a reconstruction of four central characteristics of transnational orders related to the concepts of organisational hierarchy, norm production, regimes and authority, the ongoing debate on transnational constitutionalism, and how the question of legitimacy beyond the state is addressed within this debate, is pinned out. Finally dimensions of a context adequate concept of the political is developed in order to provide a basis for evaluating the quest for legitimacy in the transnational realm.

Since the late 1950s John Rex has been at the forefront of British sociology and in particular the sociology of 'race' and ethnicity. His research and books have spawned debate and discussion in the fields of social and political theory, housing studies, education and the experiences of Muslim minorities. This volume charts the nature, direction and significance of John Rex's work in the fields of urban sociology, ethnic relations and multicultural studies. As well as identifying important and persistent points of controversy the book also reveals much common ground and the potential for a multi-faceted approach to the theorisation of 'race' and ethnicity. "Immigration and Race Relations" includes contributions from eminent thinkers from the perspectives of sociology, social anthropology, education, philosophy, political science and cultural studies.

This doctoral contribution borrows from the discursive practices of transnationalism and diaspora in order to articulate the concept of “transnational audiences” in the United States.The project identifies transnational audiences as formed by individuals and families whose lives straddle two national territories. It draws on the traditions of cultural studies and reception analysis as a strategy to explore the relation between media use and novel experiences of migration in a context of contemporary globalization...

In light of continuing trends of globalization, media scholars are increasingly examining and comparing transnational issues. This study argues that although such research is timely and necessary, it requires a more structured approach. By analyzing existing cross-national framing studies, this study exposes gaps in the literature that a new model of approach proposed here could help fill. This transnational comparative framing model provides a framing pool for collecting generic, domestic, and issue-specific frames and proposes a three-dimensional framing matrix as a systematic framing codebook. Discussion of the model centers on its possible application to the analyzed cross-national framing studies to illustrate its ability to provide a more unified approach in this emerging area of research.

The question the authors of this paper raise is what kind of positive emotional attitudes the sustained, fruitful existence of the European Union (EU) takes on the part of its citizens. It is argued that the EU as a polity is an inappropriate object for patriotism. The emotions the authors envisage as constituting the necessary affective basis for the political community are based on developing horizontal relationships among citizens and their relationships to institutions that the EU makes possible.

Why are honour killings and honour-related violence (HRV) so important to understand? What do such crimes represent? And how does HRV fit in with Western views and perceptions of Islam? This distinctively comparative collection examines the concept of HRV against women in general and Muslim women in particular. The issue of HRV has become a sensitive subject in many South Asian and Middle Eastern countries and it has received the growing attention of the media, human rights groups and academics around the globe. However, the issue has yet to receive detailed academic study in the United Kingdom, particularly in terms of both legal and sociological research. This collection sets out the theoretical and ethical parameters of the study of HRV in order to address this intellectual vacuum in a socio-legal context. The key objectives of this book are: to construct, and to develop further, a theory of HRV; to rationalise and characterise the different forms of HRV; to investigate the role of religion, race and class in society within this context, in particular, the role of Islam; to scrutinise the role of the civil/criminal law/justice systems in preventing these crimes; and to inform public policy makers of the potential policies that may be employed in combating HRV.

This article is based on a fieldwork project conducted by the authors in the Muğla region of western Turkey. The region is the locale for a significant level of settlement by British people, within the wider context of settlement by groups of other EU nationals in western Turkey. Based on a series of interviews with British settlers and Turkish locals, it examines the factors which affect the process of legal adaptation of the former group. It identifies and discusses the place of British settlers within the larger Turkish legal order, their integration into Turkish life, and the extent to which different socio-legal disabilities and advantages affect this process. The article also casts some light on the extent to which, given the level of British immigration into the area, Turkish officialdom is prepared for their presence.

This book provides an in depth examination of the ways in which a separatist socio-political movement beginning in Sri Lanka is carried forward, altered, and adapted by the diaspora, and the struggles that are involved in this process. We accomplish this by closely examining several episodes and developments in Sri Lanka and the Canadian Tamil diaspora that, I argue, will be significant for understanding the future of diaspora activism and its transitions in the post-war period.