Disciplining the Sex Ratio:Exploring the Governmentality of Female Feticide in India

The ‘girl child’ has attracted a considerable amount of attention in India as an object of policy addressing gender discrimination. This article examines the field of campaigns seeking to address female foeticide and positions the public discourse on the ‘girl child’ and sex selective abortion in India within a broad cultural backdrop of son preference. The article argues that anti-female foeticide campaigns exist within a disciplinary domain of female foeticide which both generates a discourse of saving the ‘girl child’ and also shows attempts to utilise both incentives and punitive measures in carving out a female foeticide carceral space

'Gendercide,' Abortion Policy, and the Disciplining of Prenatal Sex-selection in Neoliberal Europe

This article examines the contours of how sex-selective abortion (SSA) and ‘gendercide’ have been problematically combined within contemporary debates on abortion in Europe. Analysing the development of policies on the topic, we identify three ‘turns’ which have become integral to the biopolitics of SSA in Europe: the biomedical turn, the ‘gendercide’ turn, and the Asian demographic turn. Recent attempts to discipline SSA in the UK and Sweden are examined as a means of showing how the neoliberal state in Europe is becoming increasingly open to manoeuvres to undermine the right to abortion, even where firm laws exist

Between Returns and Respectability: Parental Attitudes towards Girls' Education in Rural Pakistan

This article focuses upon perceptions of girls’ education in the family context within which decisions around children’s education and opportunities are made. The article presents a framework showing how parental attitudes to girls’ education are shaped by an objective logic framed by the notion of returns, relating to potential benefits of daughters’ education, and respectability, relating to girls’ modesty and threats that education may present to normative expectations for girls. Drawing upon data collected in 2011 in rural areas of the districts of Faisalabad (Jaranwala town) and Chiniot (Tehsil Chiniot) in the province of Punjab, the study highlights how assumptions around the liberating effects of education implicit in global education programmes fail to take into account cultural values around gender norms that are central to informing parental attitudes towards their daughters’ prospects for education

Bolometric and non-bolometric radio frequency detection in a metallic single-walled carbon nanotube

We characterize radio frequency detection in a high-quality metallic single-walled carbon nanotube. At a bath temperature of 77 K, only bolometric (thermal) detection is seen. At a bath temperature of 4.2 K and low bias current, the response is due instead to the electrical nonlinearity of the non-ohmic contacts. At higher bias currents, the contacts recover ohmic behavior and the observed response agrees well with the calculated bolometric responsivity. The bolometric response is expected to operate at terahertz frequencies, and we discuss some of the practical issues associated with developing high frequency detectors based on carbon nanotubes.Comment: 11 pages (double-spaced), 3 figure

The effectiveness of persuasive health communication techniques

Objective: This study tests the effectiveness of Framing and Fear conditions to change attitudes towards elective single embryo transfer (eSET) in a large, non-clinical population. Method:A repeated measures randomised control trial design was used with 632 male and female participants allocated to one of two intervention groups (Framing or Fear condition) or a control group. There were two conditions in the Framing group (gain or loss frame), three conditions in the Fear group (high, medium or low fear) and two control conditions (education and non-education). Questionnaires were completed before exposure to the message (time 1) and immediately afterwards (time 2). Results: High fear (β = .637, P<0.008) and gain frame (β = .718, P<0.005) were the only significant conditions predicting hypothetical intentions towards eSET at Time 2 for the total sample. No other conditions were predictive of hypothetical intentions. Education only improved knowledge and non-education showed no changes in scores. Conclusion: These results highlight the benefits of multidisciplinary expertise in designing health promotion to reduce multiple pregnancies. Practice Implications: Findings suggest that educational material needs to be presented along- side persuasive communication techniques incorporating high fear and gain frames to help promote eSET in clinical practice

Pore size distribution and supercritical hydrogen adsorption in activated carbon fibers

Pore size distributions (PSD) and supercritical H_2 isotherms have been measured for two activated carbon fiber (ACF) samples. The surface area and the PSD both depend on the degree of activation to which the ACF has been exposed. The low-surface-area ACF has a narrow PSD centered at 0.5 nm, while the high-surface-area ACF has a broad distribution of pore widths between 0.5 and 2 nm. The H_2 adsorption enthalpy in the zero-coverage limit depends on the relative abundance of the smallest pores relative to the larger pores. Measurements of the H_2 isosteric adsorption enthalpy indicate the presence of energy heterogeneity in both ACF samples. Additional measurements on a microporous, coconut-derived activated carbon are presented for reference