Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: American mothers of preschoolers are increasingly more likely to work (Casper 1997). While many studies have examined the effect of family care-giving responsibilities on maternal workforce participation, this literature has not fully addressed the trade-offs for parents of children with disability. Mothers of these children may face greater care-giving tasks, making them more likely to stay out of the paid labor market. At the same time, these families face increased financial burdens, encouraging labor force participation.

This paper will explore whether mothers have different workforce participation trajectories after the birth of a child with or without disability. The following analyses examine differences in the rate at which mothers re-enter the labor force after the birth of a child, as well as their exit from paid employment after a birth. Matched records from the 1993 National Health Interview Survey and the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth provide a unique opportunity to investigate the effects of child disability on the workforce participation of mothers using event history techniques.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: For ten years, the game of Lotto has been advertised in commercials in Norway. The 24 films show that people who have become millionaires by winning, do not pick up on upper class lifestyles, but rather spend their money to make some personal, individualistic dreams come true. These commercials have been successful in many dimensions. They contributed in detaching the Lotto game from the spheres of gambling, sin and danger, and constructed instead Lotto as innocent fun and excitement for ordinary people. The number of Lotto players increased significantly through the 90’s. The Lotto commercials have played an active role in installing the concept of a Lotto millionaire in Norwegian language. This concept is now in use in the press and among politicians, as indicated in the Norwegian election debates in the fall of 2003. Lotto commercials have also been successful in competitions and have won prices at festivals in Norway as well as abroad.
This paper examines the Lotto commercials as expressions of popular culture. It discusses what constitutes advertising as popular culture, and argues that differences between commercials and other audiovisual texts like sitcoms, soap operas and films are diminishing. Successful commercials address their viewers like ordinary popular culture expressions do: they seek to be consumed with pleasure. Propaganda elements and overt efforts of persuasion are toned down. The viewers are given an entertaining story, open, compared to ordinary propaganda. Audiences have more room than in traditional commercials to construct meaning and experience pleasure in their own way.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: The paper looks at the broadcasts of various Israeli radio stations on Israel's Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism (MDHH), between the years 1993-2004. During that era Israel's media map changed drastically with the introduction of a multitude of electronic commercial media outlets, such as Israel's first commercial television channels and 14 local commercial radio stations. The paper contributes to the existing body of collective memory research by focusing on the ways by which the radio, a relatively less-investigated medium, figures within the process of constructing collective recollections. Correspondingly, the paper also investigates the influence of the tensions between commercial vs. public broadcasting and national vs. local broadcasting on the shaping of social memory.
We operationalized our general research question via a categorization of the 16,652 popular songs broadcasted on MDHH by 16 public and commercial radio stations and an analysis of the spoken texts that contextualized the presentation of the songs. The findings lists the 15 popular Hebrew songs most frequently aired on MDHH by a large majority of stations and explores the sources of their "authority" as signifiers of this traumatic memory. Correspondingly, the paper probes the different repertoires of some local stations (airing non-Israeli songs) and the implications of such musical choices.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the last decades, the international policy debate has devoted increased attention to the possibilities of preventing local conflicts from escalating to war, regional conflagration and international crises. A series of armed conflicts resulting in major human disasters and even genocide have pointed to the urgency of effective prevention. Previous research has largely relied on inferences from particular cases of conflict prevention. We believe that this research design makes conclusions difficult to sustain because we do not know whether cases where preventive measures were taken differ from cases without preventive measures ending in the same outcome. In this paper we test whether the case specific insights found in previous research hold across a large number of escalating conflicts, some of which were subject to prevention efforts and some of which were not. Building on a new dataset on preventive measures we investigate which preventive measures by third parties are likely to reduce the likelihood of a serious dispute escalating to war.To avoid problems with bias due to case selection we model the onset of escalation and the outcome of the escalation process jointly using a censored probit model. In this way we can observe the effects of preventive measures taken during the escalation process, while controlling for the direct and indirect effects on the final outcome of the factors generating the escalation process. We include all low intensity conflict (i.e. 25-999 battle related deaths) years for the period 1993-2004 as well as the first inactive or high intensity (i.e. ≥ 1000 battle related deaths) year following these years. The dataset is based on the Uppsala Conflict Data Program?s (UCDP)list of armed conflicts. The dataset covers nine different types of preventive measures (direct-, mediated-, bilateral and other talks; arbitration, good office, peacekeeping, permanent observers, fact-finding) in 66 conflicts in 54 countries.