Engagement strategies and change: an intentional practice response for the child welfare worker in cases of domestic violence

In order to engage mothers who are victims of domestic abuse, the child welfare worker needs to be challenged to develop an intentional practice response that includes knowledge and skill concerning the complexities of domestic violence, as well as the process of change. Developing a supportive relationship, understanding the stages of change (SOC) and engaging mothers as leaders in the change process are essential to successful child protection outcomes. Within the context of the SOC model, this practice‐based paper focuses on the importance of engaging mothers who are victims of domestic violence in conversations about their own unique dilemmas, challenges and barriers regarding change. Through the inclusion of engagement strategies such as signs of safety, active listening and cost/benefit analysis, in concert with the SOC theory, the child welfare worker would be equipped with an approach to successfully assist mothers through their change journey, ultimately keeping children safe.     

The Development of Peer Interaction in Infancy: Exploring the Dyadic Processes

Peer interaction is an important component of children's social repertoires that is associated with a variety of developmental outcomes and life skills. The present study provides an in‐depth study of early dyadic peer behaviors during the infancy period, during which social competence with peers is first being developed. Results from variable‐centered analyses highlight the effectiveness of behaviors, such as offering objects to peers, and point to the importance of the social context set by a peer's prior social behavior and processes for eliciting peer responses. Findings from person‐centered analyses reveal marked individual differences in the processes through which infants are successful in eliciting responses from their peers, illustrating the presence of multiple pathways to achieving social competence with peers.     

Nanotechnology Risk Communication Past and Prologue

Nanotechnologies operate at atomic, molecular, and macromolecular scales, at scales where matter behaves differently than at larger scales and quantum effects can dominate. Nanotechnologies have captured the imagination of science fiction writers as science, engineering, and industry have leapt to the challenge of harnessing them. Applications are proliferating. In contrast, despite recent progress the regulatory landscape is not yet coherent, and public awareness of nanotechnology remains low. This has led risk researchers and critics of current nanotechnology risk communication efforts to call for proactive strategies that do more than address facts, that include and go beyond the public participation stipulated by some government acts. A redoubling of nanotechnology risk communication efforts could enable consumer choice and informed public discourse about regulation and public investments in science and safety.     

The typification of Hispanics as criminals and support for punitive crime control policies

The Hispanic population is now the largest and fastest growing minority in the United States, so it is not surprising that ethnic threat linked to Hispanics has been associated with harsher crime control. While minority threat research has found that individuals who associate blacks with crime are more likely to support harsh criminal policies, the possibility that this relationship exists for those who typify Hispanics as criminal has yet to be examined. Using a national random sample, this study is the first to use HLM to find that perceptions of Hispanics as criminals do increase support for punitive crime control measures, controlling for various individual and state influences. Moderated and contextual analyses indicate this relationship is most applicable for individuals who are less apt to typify criminals as black, less prejudiced, less fearful of victimization, politically liberal or moderate, not parents, and living in states with relatively fewer Latin American immigrants.     

Forest Conservation,Value Conflict,and Interest Formation in a Honduran National Park*

Abstract We argue that attempts to superimpose park regulatory regimes on existing land uses in the tropics represent conflicts between alternative cultural models of natural resource management. The results of such conflicts are unique regulatory regimes emerging from distinctive processes that redefine the terms and limits of natural resource use. In creating a scarcity of available resources, parks encourage social differentiation and greater awareness of societal patterns of inequality, establishing a potential for the articulation of demands for social and environmental equity. We evaluate these claims with a case study of the Cerro Azul Meambar National Park in Honduras. We base our analysis on 54 indepth interviews of Park residents in five Park communities.     

Children’s Strategies for Agency in Preschool

This article is based on an ethnographic study of children’s everyday life in Swedish preschools. The ethnography is used to explore children’s strategies for influencing, defending and constructing the social order of a preschool institution. The focus of our concern is on how the children, in their interactions with each other and with the preschool teachers, manage the collective regulation and how they negotiate their participation in collective activities. There is an inherent tension between free play and the high degree of routinised and collective activities within the preschool institution. The study shows that children are active in playing at the border, acting as if the institution is the children’s place. It also shows how they draw on different strategies as resources for managing the regulations, accounting for personal autonomy and negotiating the social order. In taking a child perspective and acknowledging children as active agents, it is possible to see how they influence and shape their everyday life in a preschool context. In addition, the article illustrates individual children’s strategic and pragmatic use of resources and in doing so contribute to their own childhood and thereby become part of a social and cultural construction process.     

Witnessing Things A Response to Sue Grand

I respond to Sue Grand's “Unsexed and Ungendered Bodies: The Violated Self” from my position as a cultural critic, noting in particular how Grand's case history shows that historical trauma is made manifest in everyday sensory experience. I am particularly interested in Grand's suggestion that trauma produces a “thing-self” that must be witnessed in the psychoanalytic encounter. Exploring the implications of this insight for my own investigations of cultural responses to trauma, I focus on performances of the body in lesbian public culture, ranging from the writings of Dorothy Allison, Joan Nestle, and Shani Mootoo to performances by punk rock band Tribe 8.     

故事的生产性：叙事与文化记忆

叙事学研究应当通过将一系列故事纳入研究视野而超越方法论文本主义。为此，本文提 出 “故事的社会生命”的概念，研究故事在媒介、代际和文化之间 “跨越”并被改变但同时也得以 保存的过程；并以 《艾凡赫》为例，阐释 “再生产”、“翻译”、 “媒介转换”，以及 “文化跨界”这 四种 “改编”模式，论证了由多种审美特质组合而引发的故事生产并附着于文化记忆的结果，以期 引起读者对叙事文本改编为新文本的长期变化研究产生兴趣。