There is a link between changes in the contemporary political economy and the criminalization of homelessness. Anti‐homeless legislation can be understood as an attempt to annihilate the spaces in which homeless people must live, and perform everyday functions. This annihilation is a response to the economic uncertainty produced by the current political economy. The process of criminalizing homelessness 1) destroys the very right of homeless people to be; and 2) reinforces particularly brutal notions of citizenship within the public sphere. Such laws are made possible when urban government and surrounding communities and elites seek to promote the urban landscape at the expense of urban public space. This usurpation of public space will have profound impact not only on homeless people but also on how the housed interact with each other.

No abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

No abstract

No abstract

This article is about the question of social agency in the animation of things, and about how this problematic has been conceptualized in Marxist and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approaches to human-nature-technology relations. Notwithstanding many obvious differences, we note that each tradition was founded on a radical shift to a relational ontology, a world of relations and processes and not things-in-themselves, and that each has developed, partly as a consequence of this move, analytically useful ways of investigating and talking about the work that things do, or appear to do, in the world. By relating the ANT category of non-human actors to the Marxist concept of dead labor, and by revisiting Marx's own dialectics of technology as embodied in his figure of the ''living machine'' in Capital, we explore the different implications of these approaches for our understandings of the nature, materiality, and the efficacy of social agents. We argue that ANT's reconfiguration of agency as a collective social and technical process-a process wherein the ''nonhuman'' can have very real social effects-can be deepened and given some political efficacy only if we take seriously the ontological problems of causality, accountability, and the directedness of social relations (and things) which ANT, and its wider, still evolving ethos among the social sciences and cultural studies, would have us forestall.

No abstract

Four experiments were conducted to examine the processes by which fluent readers comprehend prose. I n each study the material was presented a few words at a time on an on-line visual display and the subject pressed a button to move on from one display to the next. The inter-reponse time was used as an index of local processing difficulty. The results of Experiment I indicated that readers pause considerably at the ends of clauses and sentences, and that they show no tendency to speed up across sentences. This pattern of results questions the role of prediction in reading. I n Experiments I1 and I11 immediate processing was found to be unaffected by two types of syntactically-predictive clue and the effect of a third (semantic) clue was equivocal. Experiment IV replicated the results of Experiment I and showed, in addition, that pausing at the ends of clauses and sentences is a function of the difficulty of the content of the text. More detailed analyses showed that reading rate is modulated by the frequency of the words and by the number of characters in the display. Taken together the results suggest that reading rate is largely determined by the speed with which a reader can access the meanings of words and construct a representation of the text rather than by the speed with which they can formulate and test successive predictions about it.