Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The recent upsurge in developmental studies can be traced to the publication of the 1986 National Academy of Science Report (Blumstein et al. 1986) and the heated debate surrounding it (e.g. Gottfredson & Hirshi 1986, 1988). The key point of that contention lies in the interpretation of the age-crime curve. For Gottfredson and Hirshi, the decline in the age-crime curve in early adulthood reflects decreasing individual offending frequency (λ) after the peak. Blumstein et al. claim that the decline in the aggregate age-crime curve can also be attributable to the termination of criminal careers, and the average value of λ could stay constant (or even increase with age) for those offenders who remain active after that peak. This debate comes down to an empirical question, but surprisingly this question has faded from the criminological literature. The aim of this paper is to bring back this twenty year old classic empirical research question back on the agenda of criminology. Using data from the Criminal Career and Life Course Study (CCLS) - including information on criminal convictions over 60 years of almost 5000 persons convicted in the Netherlands - and applying recently developed Two-Part Growth Mixture Models - that distinguish explicitly between participation and frequency - the paper provides some empirical evidence to the classic debate on the age-graded participation and frequency.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: I examine the concept of redefinition in Affect Control Theory. When strange, “deflecting” events are witnessed and no opportunity to act is available to alter them, people must recast one or another event component: the Actor, the Behavior or the Object. However, affect control theory has no current formulation of this process. To further the analysis, I introduce the concepts of element deflections and component deflections. I present a deflection-based hypothesis, consistent with affect control theory logic, that predicts under what conditions each of the event components will be redefined. I then test this hypothesis, but find it not to be a good predictor of redefinition behavior. Finally, I consider other explanations and suggest implications for the findings of this study.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Through textual analysis of a new fitness magazine for pregnant women and new mothers, we analyze how fitness discourse and practices constitute a contemporary consumptive, corporeal cult of “true” womanhood. We analyze all available issues of Shape Fit Pregnancy from its inception in 1997 through 2002. First, we highlight how fitness discourse defines a necessary third shift of fitness for pregnant women and new mothers termed “getting your body back.” Meeting the rigors of motherhood now requires a disciplining, normalizing, and consumptive third shift of fitness. Second, findings uncover how the second shift of household labor and child care within the private realm is reinforced as women’s work and is structured as necessarily intertwined with a new “third shift” of bodily management. Third, we analyze the specific way in which fitness discourse simultaneously merges the second shift of household labor and child care with the third shift of consumption and fitness, reifying a postmodern merger of time and space. The paper closes on a discussion of how, within such a merger, consumption, family values, traditional gender politics, and bodily surveillance are seamlessly woven together to constitute the politics of a fit, “liberatory” contemporary cult of true womanhood that masks global and domestic racialized, classed, sexualized, gendered inequities.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Paper uses HAMLET as a focus on political leadership, focusing on the players and Polonius's admonition: "To thine own self be true/And it must follow as night the day/Thou canst not then be false to any man."