How Housing, Employment, and Legal Precarity Affect the Sleep of Migrant Workers: A Mixed-Methods Study

In the United States, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity, causing significant damage to communities, infrastructure, and human life. Migrant workers form part of a growing occupational group that rebuilds in the aftermath of natural disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes. The work these migrant workers perform is essential but also unstable, exploitative, and dangerous, which stresses their health and well-being. This study focuses on the health and well-being of migrant roofers, a precarious occupational group who restores communities and helps the U.S. population adjust to a climate-changed world. Using surveys (n = 365) and in-depth interviews (n = 58) from a convenience sample of migrant roofers, we examine how precarity in terms of employment, housing, and legal status affect the sleep outcomes of these workers, who derive their income from an industry where instability is the norm, live in substandard and irregular housing, and lack workplace protections given their legal status.

Environment Degradation, Health Threats, and Legality at the Artisanal Small-Scale Gold Mining Sites in Indonesia

Artisanal Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) activities, despite offering numerous economic incentives, inflict negative impacts on the environment and public health due to the use of mercury or cyanide. This study aims to compare three ASGM locations in Indonesia in terms of environmental impacts and potential health problems in the community. As part of this research, field surveys at three ASGM illegal locations with different conditions, observations, literature studies, and interviews with the community and stakeholders were conducted. At each of the survey sites, the potential threat to public health due to the use of mercury was determined to be high. Additionally, many of the environmental impacts detected were deemed to have reached a high-alert stage, in some cases even posing a level of extreme danger. Based on these results, it has become clear that a form of mining management which reduces the negative impacts on the surrounding environment and community health is needed. The suggestions put forward in this paper, including the call for greater control of ASGM, may also be applied in other developing countries which suffer from similar problems and conditions.

What is the relationship between contraceptive services and knowledge of abortion availability and legality? Evidence from a national sample of women and facilities in Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, abortions are legal for minors and for rape, incest, foetal impairment or maternal disability. Knowledge of abortion legality and availability is low, and little effort has been made to disseminate this information for fear of invoking anti-abortion sentiment; instead, systems rely on health providers as information gatekeepers. This study explores how exposure to and interaction with family planning service delivery environment, specifically (1) availability of contraceptive and facility-based abortion services within 5 km of one's residence and (2) contact with a health provider in the past 12 months, relate to women's knowledge of the legality of accessing abortion services and of where to access facility-based abortion services. We used data from a nationally representative sample of 8719 women in Ethiopia and a linked health facility survey of 799 health facilities. Our outcome of interest was a categorical variable indicating if a woman had (1) knowledge of at least one legal ground for abortion, (2) knowledge of where to access abortion services, (3) knowledge of both or (4) knowledge of neither. We conducted multilevel, multinomial logistic regressions, stratified by residence. Approximately 60% of women had no knowledge of either a legal ground for abortion or a place to access services. Women who visited a health provider or who were visited by a health worker in the past 12 months were significantly more likely to know about abortion legality and availability. There were no differences based on whether women lived within 5 km of a facility that offered contraception and abortion services. We find that health workers are likely valuable sources of information; however, progress to disseminate information may be slowed if it relies on uptake of services and limited outreach. Efforts to train providers on legality and availability are critical, as is additional research on knowledge dissemination pathways.

Legal Positivism's Internal Morality

This article examines the jurisprudential arguments elaborated in David Dyzenhaus's The Long Arc of Legality. In particular, it looks into the main claim of the book: that the fact of 'very unjust laws' is central to illuminating the idea of law's authority, the elaboration of which Dyzenhaus takes to be the purpose of legal theory. The article analyses Dyzenhaus's own normative proposal in this matter, which consists of a version of legal positivism committed to Lon Fuller's principles of the internal morality of law, with the corollary of a conception of the judicial role as bound to a duty to apply these internal principles of legality when exercising their main function. While I cast some doubts on the feasibility of constructing the judge's function that way, in the end I celebrate Dyzenhaus's attempt at refining legal positivism's identity, especially in light of the ongoing debate with contemporary anti-positivism.

Analysis of the concept of informal economy through 102 definitions: legality or necessity

The processes of informal economy are well established, but the same cannot be said of their conceptual treatment in the academic literature. They constitute complex phenomena that cut across sectors and disciplines and give rise to other elements that simultaneously reject and encourage them. For many formal stakeholders in the economy, they are an enemy to be beaten; for the authorities, informal activity is seen as a loss of revenue for the state coffers; for the Sustainable Development Goals, by implicitly recognizing them in goal 8, they constitute a paradigm shift.  Meanwhile, the reality for those involved in the informal economy is that it is a way of life and not a mere choice, one that leads to the most social of all economies: that of necessity. There is no consensus among academics on informality and its ramifications, hence the need to analyze the processes of informal economy from its theoretical construction with the purpose of discovering its range and depth, as well as its interrelationships and theoretical implications. To achieve this, 102 definitions of informal economy were analyzed by identifying and deconstructing their dimensions and performing a frequency count of their citation in Google Scholar. This analysis demonstrated the lack of cultural elements in the definitions, which are the true underlying cause of the phenomenon, and the over-prominence afforded to legal dimensions.

Passage of abortion ban and women's accurate understanding of abortion legality

BACKGROUND

Legislative and judicial procedures related to banning abortion after 6 weeks of gestation in Ohio occurred from November 2018 to July 2019. These activities could have increased the belief that abortion has become illegal even though the 6-week abortion ban has never been in effect to date.

OBJECTIVE

We sought to determine the prevalence and correlates of holding the belief that abortion is illegal in Ohio and to evaluate whether this belief increased over the time in which the 6-week abortion ban was introduced, passed twice, and then blocked in Ohio.

STUDY DESIGN

We analyzed data from the first wave of the Ohio Survey of Women, a population-based survey of adult, reproductive-aged Ohioan women conducted from October 2018 to June 2019. During each of the 8 survey months, a median of 240 women (range, 70-761) completed the survey, including the survey question "Based on what you know or have heard, is it legal to get an abortion in your state?" We used multivariable logistic regression to assess the prevalence and correlates of believing that abortion is illegal in the state of Ohio. In addition, we used multinomial logistic regression to evaluate whether this belief increased over the interval during which women completed the survey, which roughly corresponded to the interval marked by legislative and judicial activities surrounding the 6-week abortion ban.

RESULTS

Most of the 2359 participants understood that abortion is legal in the state of Ohio (64.0%) with the remainder believing it to be illegal (9.8%) or being unsure (26.2%). Correlates of believing abortion to be illegal included younger age, lower socioeconomic status, never married or married status, and Black, non-Hispanic race and ethnicity. Being unsure about legality did not change over time; however, the proportion of women who believed that abortion is illegal increased from the first month (4.5%) to the last month (15.9%) of the study period. Each additional study month was associated with a 17% increase in the odds of believing abortion to be illegal, in both unadjusted and adjusted models (odds ratio, 1.17; 95% confidence interval, 1.08-1.27).

CONCLUSION

Attempts to restrict abortion access could contribute to women mistakenly believing that abortion is illegal despite it being unsuccessful.

How Did Chinese Government Implement Unconventional Measures Against COVID-19 Pneumonia

In recent years, respiratory infectious diseases had continued to attack China, the recent outbreak of COVID-19 pneumonia had attracted worldwide attention. Through studying the literature, interpreting official documents, analyzing medical and social management data, we summarized and compared some powerful measures taken by the Chinese government, such as declaring emergency state, blocking down the epidemic center, prohibiting crowd gathering activities, forcing residents to wear masks, and mobilizing medical staff and products. We found that these unconventional measures, on the one hand, controlled the spread of the epidemic in China, and on the other hand, exposed some of China’s shortcomings in biosafety, food safety, public health input, and emergency system construction. This paper also recommends that other countries should take strict isolation measures as early as possible when fighting COVID-19 epidemics, and also mobilize citizens to strengthen self-protection.

Luisa's Ghosts: Haunted Legality and Collective Expressions of Pain

Feminist health care providers have debated the efficacy of the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico City. Luisa, a counselor in a private clinic, suggested that while the law has expanded the visibility of, and access to safe abortion, it has also called forth "other ghosts." In this article, I take Luisa's critical perspective as a starting point for examining ongoing criminalization and moral stigma as forms of haunting that arise in the wake of the Mexico City abortion policy. Drawing on ethnographic research, I explore how Luisa's ghosts materialize in the embodied- affective relations between patients in new legal clinics. Women who attend public clinics negotiate moral stigma along with religious and familial pressures in the ways they suffer, as well as normalize abortion as a painful experience. Rather than approach pain as purely a sign of victimization, I suggest that its expression constitutes an effervescent collectivity between women in the clinic, making explicit, while at the same time dissipating, an intractable moral-affective knot that might otherwise be ignored.

The moral economy of austerity: analysing UK welfare reform

This paper notes the contemporary emergence of 'morality' in both sociological argument and political rhetoric, and analyses its significance in relation to ongoing UK welfare reforms. It revisits the idea of 'moral economy' and identifies two strands in its contemporary application; that all economies depend on an internal moral schema, and that some external moral evaluation is desirable. UK welfare reform is analysed as an example of the former, with reference to three distinct orientations advanced in the work of Freeden (1996), Laclau (2014), and Lockwood (1996). In this light, the paper then considers challenges to the reform agenda, drawn from third sector and other public sources. It outlines the forms of argument present in these challenges, based respectively on rationality, legality, and morality, which together provide a basis for evaluation of the welfare reforms and for an alternative 'moral economy'.

Contested Issues of Efficacy and Safety between Transnational Formulation Regimes of Tibetan Medicines in China and Europe

Tibetan medicines are key material objects for medical treatment and have become part of a global trend of 'pharmaceuticalisation', playing increasingly important political and socio-economic roles in an 'alternative modernity'. As I argue in this paper, they also have become key 'sites of contestation' between different epistemic values and styles of practice related to efficacy and safety that are reproduced in and through specific formulation regimes. Based on my multisited ethnography of production, prescription, and use practices of Tibetan medicines in China and Europe, this paper conceptualises three distinct formulation regimes, offering a heuristic model for transnational comparison-a classical, an industrialised or reformulated, and a polyherbal regime. The first two are the major orientations while the polyherbal is a conjoint hybrid with either the classical or the industrialised formulation regime. Globalised national drug safety regulations legalise and confer legitimacy to industrialised Tibetan formulas that follow biomedically defined efficacy, safety, and disease categories, while classical formulas produced by private physicians or small-scale cottage pharmacies are increasingly marginalised as producing 'unsafe' and at times illegal medicines, and need to find new ways for adapting and circulating their formulas.

Land and Law in Marijuana Country: Clean Capital, Dirty Money, and the Drug War's Rentier Nexus

Despite its ongoing federal illegality, marijuana production has become a licit, or socially accepted, feature of northern California's real estate market. As such, marijuana is a key component of land values and the laundering of "illegal" wealth into legitimate circulation. By following land transaction practices, relations, and instruments, this article shows how formally equal property transactions become substantively unequal in light of the "il/legal" dynamics of marijuana land use. As marijuana becomes licit, prohibitionist policies have enabled the capture of ground rent by landed interests from the marijuana industry at a time when the price of marijuana is declining (in part due to its increasing licitness). The resulting "drug war rentier nexus," a state-land-finance complex, is becoming a key, if obscured, component within marijuana's contemporary political economy.

Informal and Illicit Entrepreneurs: Fighting for a Place in the Neoliberal Economic Order

A panel at the 2007 meetings of the American Anthropological Association examined the working lives of illicit and informal entrepreneurs living in "the gaps" or "shadows" of neoliberal globalization. Panelists challenged dichotomies such as informal/formal and legal/illegal by examining the everyday practices of workers in diverse settings. Emphasis was placed on entrepreneurs' efforts to legitimate their activities and identities to themselves and others.