Conerly Casey

Perceptions about risk for HIV/AIDS among adolescents in juvenile detention.

Although progress has been made toward reducing risk-taking behavior among teens, adolescents confined in juvenile detention facilities and youths living in inner cities remain vulnerable. Reaching these populations with appropriate risk-reduction strategies continues to challenge health providers and educators. Crucial first steps in the design of relevant programs involve discovering how at-risk teens perceive risk and which risks and dangers within their communities occupy their attention. Participants in this study did not identify HIV/AIDS as a primary concern; instead, they described the dangers and risks they encountered in their home neighborhoods. Based on these findings, this discussion addresses the implications for the development of health education programs to empower teens for responsible behavior after release from detention.

Mediating Justice: Youth, Media, and “Affective Justice” in the Politics of Northern Nigeria

Recent protests across North Africa and the Middle East testify to public outrage at the failure of postcolonial states to produce “justice” in their governance structures. Attempts at the federal level in Nigeria to enact justice and institute accountability have led to changes to the Independence Constitution of 1960 in 1963, 1979, 1989, and 1999, to the deregulation of capital in the 1990s and the primacy of the market, and to demilitarization, in 1999, coinciding with democratic elections. Inflation in the 1990s, and unprecedented levels of poverty and insecurity that accompanied these efforts, mediated and refracted in political allegations of blame, galvanized Christian and Muslim reformist networks, as well as groups of armed youths who use violence to control the means of coercion. These armed groups gain advantage in conflicts over state and national sovereignty, the control of public space, and the appropriation and distribution of resources, their views and actions defining imaginings of Nigeria in national, transnational, and social media (Abbink and Kessel 2005; Adebanwi 2005, 2008; Akinyele 2001; Baker 2002; Casey 2007, 2008, 2009; Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Mbembe 2001; Nolte 2004; Obadare 2006; Pratten 2007; Smith 2004, 2007). As the implementation of Shari’ah criminal codes in northern Nigeria, and regime change in the context of the Arab Spring confirm, young people have the capacity to reform and enact diasporic, micronational, national, and transnational forms of “justice,” exerting extraordinary public pressure for governmental change.

The Process of Instrument Development for Ethnically Diverse Early Adolescents

Through a combination of pilot study, consultation, and field-testing, an instrument was developed to evaluate the major content areas in the curriculum of a community-based family life education program: parent/child communication, peer influence, family values, self-efficacy, sexuality knowledge, and high-risk behaviors. The wording, format, and question content were structured to be appropriate developmentally for male and female early adolescents J0 through 14 years of age in diverse sociocultural communities in Los Angeles County. Age-related developmental issues facing early adolescents, combined with the ethnic diversity in the county, created serious challenges to the development of a valid, reliable, and relevant instrument for evaluating the effectiveness of an adolescent family life education program. An instrument with some stable and internally consistent components was developed through the key processes of pilot testing and field-testing with focus groups from the target population of ethnically diverse early adolescents.

Sensory Politics and War: Affective Anchoring and Vitality in Nigeria and Kuwait

Media coverage of the US Wars on Terrorism and in Iraq created affectively charged images, movements and sounds of war, sensoria of violence that amass and circulate. Such sensoria, in predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria and Kuwait, elicited emotional memories of other wars, and moral appraisals of war that collapsed times and spaces of “danger.” Musa and Dahlia, living in Nigeria and Kuwait, respectively, shared common interests in global Islam and piety movements, and with the post-9/11 wars, intensified anxieties about potential harm to themselves and to other Muslims. Tracing their political-spiritual intersubjectivities, Casey’s chapter sheds light on the mutual inclusion of micro- and macro-political sensoria and consciousness—in which there is an excess of affect with tendencies to conform socially or to escape societal norms.

The Art of Suffering: Postcolonial (Mis)Apprehensions of Nigerian Art

(Mis)apprehensions of African arts, and their relegation to distant temporal, spatial, and relational realms, are part of violent structures of power that continue to diminish our understanding of others. European and American representations of African arts and aesthetics, embedded in what James Clifford (1988, 225) refers to as the “art-culture” system, tend to devalue them as “primitive,” signs of stagnant, traditional, and unchanging culture, or to value “authentic” forms, typically precolonial art, assumed to hold ritual power.1 With Europeans and Americans, the primary buyers of “authentic” African art, this double bind leaves contemporary African artists unable to sell their work in global art markets, their creativity sidelined to “fake” antiques, or to “copy” Western music, in mimetic processes that entangle African and European artists and consumers. Within the past two decades, however, the global marketing of African art and aesthetics appears to have morphed; European and American consumers continue to assume transcultural, cosmopolitan creativity the purview of Western artists and non-Western cosmopolitanism a sign of “inauthentic” cultural expression, but this dynamic fosters divergent trends—one, a corporate, commoditized branding of “ethnicity” and corporate authentications of ethnic arts (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), and two, the burgeoning of African and African diasporic markets in which cosmopolitan creolization is a shared aesthetic of postcolonial experience (Hannerz 1997; Larkin 2008).