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Oberlin

Individualism

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Individualism, Privacy, And Poverty In Determining The Best Interests Of The Child, Dena Jolie Miller Jan 2019

Individualism, Privacy, And Poverty In Determining The Best Interests Of The Child, Dena Jolie Miller

Honors Papers

This thesis explores the guiding legal standard in child custody law, that custody should be decided 'in the best interests of the child.' I begin with the most common critique of the best interests standard: that it is too vague, allowing for the personal biases of judges to play too great a role in custody decision-making. I challenge this critique by examining the standard in a different context, shifting from divorce proceedings to the child welfare system, to ask how the vagueness of the standard is mobilized differently in child protective proceedings. I argue that it is not the individual …


Inverted Quarantine: Individual Response To Collective Fear, Katherine Parker Moncure Jan 2016

Inverted Quarantine: Individual Response To Collective Fear, Katherine Parker Moncure

Honors Papers

In his 2007 book Shopping Our Way to Safety, sociologist Andrew Szasz coined the term inverted quarantine to describe a phenomenon in the way that Americans react to the changing natural environment. Inverted quarantine, or the impulse to remove one’s self from perceived environmental dangers, often manifests in consumption behavior such as consuming only organic food, drinking filtered or bottled water, moving from a city to a suburb, or even being enclosed in a gated community. Although inverted quarantine may result in some form of protection, in the long run it is unsustainable in the face of the changing natural …