Fathers exist in the lives of women and children involved with child welfare authorities, and yet, they are rarely seen by child welfare. This invisibility exists whether or not fathers are deemed as risks or as assets to their families. Using an analysis of fundamental child welfare policies and practices and relevant literature, the paper examines how ‘ghost’ fathers are manufactured, and how this phenomenon affects families and professionals in child welfare. An analysis of gender, class, race and culture of child welfare discourses shows how these fathers are seen as deviant, dangerous, irresponsible and irrelevant, and even further, how absence in child welfare is inextricably linked to blaming mothers. In failing to work with fathers, child welfare ignores potential risks and assets for both mothers and children.

Manufacturing ghost fathers: the paradox of father presence and absence in child welfare

A thorough-going ambiguity surrounds the very meaning of racial profiling at the border. This ambiguity, including in particular the slippage between race/nationality, effectively enables both official denials of racial profiling as well as the continued play of racialized risk knowledges at the border. In this paper, we take this ambiguity seriously and trace the dynamic and heterogeneous configurations of racialized knowledges that constitute border risks and that shape the broad discretion of frontline border control officers in Canada. This discretion, emboldened by the crime-security nexus, is itself shaped by a protectionist logic that represents the nation as ‘damsel in distress’, border officers as her guardians and the border as the thin blue line in need of constant vigilance.

Chivalry, ‘Race’ and Discretion at the Canadian Border

The last decades have seen several trends emerging in policing, the policing landscape has become fragmented, (surveillance) technology is starting to play an increasingly important role in policing practices and recently new police models are more and more geared to predicting what will happen in the future. A first goal of this article is to explore new developments in policing and more specifically the focus will be on the huge expansion of the use of surveillance technologies by police, and the growing belief amongst both policy makers and police that it is possible, to a certain extent, by using surveillance technology to predict crime before it happens. A second goal is to explore a number of important unintended consequences that arise as a result of what we will call ‘preemptive policing’. For this exploration the article draws from several disciplines; it reviews literature on policing, but will also venture into surveillance studies and science and technology studies. The goal of this contribution is not to present empirical data to test the literature but to discuss certain unintended consequences that are raised by preemptive policing and to critically analyse how European law deals with these consequences through a discussion of several judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. For our exploration Garland’s much cited theory of the ‘culture of control’ is used as a theoretical backdrop to contextualize the trends in policing that have led to the emergence of pre-emptive policing. The article shows the fundamental importance of taking into account social and legal issues arising when deciding upon the deployment of new surveillance technologies by police and that proportionality, transparency, non-discrimination and due process need to take centre stage in the development of new police models

Policing, surveillance and law in a pre-crime society: Understanding the consequences of technology based strategies.

This study examines Canadian media coverage of a female visitor from the Congo, suspected of car- rying a deadly disease, to show how "race" has been constructed and sustained in Canadian soci- ety. Critical discourse analysis of four major Canadian newspapers constitutes the data of the paper. Findings show that the media used the case to cause panic in the Canadian population by cross- articulating immigration and racial identity with health risks. Analysis of the media coverage reveals that anti-racial diversity discourse in the media is coded in non-race terms. We argue that news cov- erage of the event reinforces broader racial ideologies around immigration and risk that are capable of tapping into the anxiety of Canadians over the growing presence of racial minorities in Canada.

/pdf/there-will-be-a-next-time-media-discourse-about-an-35qol0tzog.pdf

"There Will Be a Next Time": Media Discourse about an "Apocalyptic" Vision of Immigration, Racial Diversity, and Health Risks

.......................................................................................................................ii  Introduction..................................................................................................................1  Definitions of Terminology .........................................................................................7  Intellectual disabilities ..........................................................................................7  a)  Social vs medical...................................................................................7  b)  Definition of intellectual disabilities...................................................11  Offender/alleged offender...................................................................................12  Criminal justice system.......................................................................................12  Discourse of truth ...............................................................................................12  1.  Literature Review: Intellectual Disabilities – A Discourse of Truth ..................14  1.1  Eugenic discourse and institutionalisation of people with intellectual disabilities...................................................................................................14  1.1.1 Biological discourse..........................................................................18  1.1.2 Social discourse ................................................................................23  1.1.3 Economic discourse ..........................................................................26  1.2  Criminal justice and institutionalisation.....................................................31  1.2.1 Medical discourse of truth (in relation to guilt and crime) ...............34  1.2.2 Medicalisation of social conflicts in criminal justice .......................37  1.3  Discourse in criminal justice ......................................................................41  1.3.1 Criminal justice and efficiency and control ......................................41  1.3.2 Criminal justice and discipline .........................................................45  1.3.3 Criminal justice and risk ...................................................................48  2.  Methodology.......................................................................................................54  2.1  Symbolic interactionism.............................................................................56  2.1.1 The micro/ macro debate ..................................................................57  2.1.2 Social structures in symbolic interactionist thought .........................57  2.1.3 The structural enhancement of symbolic interactionism ..................60  2.1.4 Remaining problems .........................................................................61  2.2  Foucauldian power of discourse in criminal justice...................................63  3.  Methods ..............................................................................................................69  3.1  Ethics..........................................................................................................69 

Justice of truth? Alleged offenders with intellectual disabilities in the criminal justice system

In the United States the phenomenon of racial profiling has emerged as an important and controversial issue within political and criminal justice policy debates. For the most part, these debates have assumed a sort of racism at work in order to explain law enforcement's use of criminal profiles largely determined by racial classifications. Accordingly, many have worked to expose this allegedly racist behavior in the hopes that such exposure will bring an end to the practice. This essay argues that racial profiling is embedded in much larger social developments that must be explored in order to understand the role race now plays in the maintenance of social order in contemporary American society.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20020159.pdf

Crimes of Color: Risk, Profiling, and the Contemporary Racialization of Social Control

According to Stanford Lyman, a specter continues to haunt social theory in the United States and that specter is "postmodernism" In Roads to Dystopia,2 Lyman continues3 a critical engagement with postmodern theory?especially that work which has been most influential with, and appropriated by, American sociologists Although critical of postmodern thought, Lyman is never dismissive of his subject4 Indeed, Lyman expresses a certain sympathy with some arguments within postmodernism because much is familiar to him5 In his existentialist sociology of the absurd, an intellectual project first articulated by Lyman and others more than a quar ter century ago,6 several recognizably "postmodern" themes, he maintains, can be found Lyman accepts that we live in postmodern times, a condition characterized, he suggests, by alienation and despair It is because of this, however, that he ultimately rejects the postmodernist's response Reflecting on our present historical condition, Lyman observes that it is "no wonder, then, that the present millennial moment is conceptualized as one 'in between' another, as one whose condition can only be designated as post-modernity, with no name for the age and situation that will follow"7 He concedes that our sense of time, our social and cultural memory, and even our abilities for self-expression, are all subject to ever-increasing fragmen tation Although our traditional landmarks are now blurred and shifting, Lyman refuses to acquiesce to other claims of postmodernism: namely, that

Postmodern Subjects: On Lyman's Sociology of the Absurd

One of my concerns here has to do with what I perceive as the possible elision of the normative possibilities of law– and, therefore, the possibility of a more democratically meaningful understanding of justice in the space provided by law. It is an attempt to think seriously about the claim that ``law provides a terrain of contestation on which the powerless can hold the powerful to account by insisting that [the] legitimating rhetoric [of liberal legalism] be turned into action.''

William Rose

Papers

Crimes of Color: Risk, Profiling, and the Contemporary Racialization of Social Control

Postmodern Subjects: On Lyman's Sociology of the Absurd

Legal Indeterminacy and/as Professional Expertise