The EU youth guarantee – a critical analysis of its implementation in Spain

The significant increase in youth unemployment in different parts of Europe caused by the economic crisis has led to the European Council Recommendation on Establishing a Youth Guarantee (2013). This Guarantee addresses the so-called ‘NEET’ (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) younger than 25 years of age and stipulates that employment, education or training shall be provided within a period of 4 months. As the initiative is relatively recent, in-depth analyses of its contents and implantation in the Member States are still missing. This paper analyses the European Recommendation and its implementation in Spain, evaluating its potential to improve the situation of the young people and society as a whole and its risks in provoking undesired side-effects. Our results question if the whole target group will be reached and highlight the measures’ low potential to promote a real and durable change. Increasing precariousness and insecurity and the tendency to only redistribute existing labour make it conceivable that the Guarantee may contribute to converting precariousness into a new labour paradigm for the whole population. The insufficient and retroactive funding of the Youth Guarantee can provoke negative side-effects for other social policies and the country's development. We conclude with several recommendations on how to improve the Youth Guarantee and its implementation.     

Parental involvement in the development of a culture‐based school curriculum

This study focuses on parental involvement in Sámi schools when developing a culturally sensitive school curriculum. The research recognizes a number of competing and complementary interests that play a role when constructing structures and policies in curriculum development. Two Sámi schools in Sweden with 115 pupils, their parents and 27 teachers were included in a longitudinal three‐year study. Interviews, school visits, videotapes and document analysis were used to gather information. The results indicate the invisible existence of culture‐based school practice and curriculum texts. The lack of contact among homes, schools and community culture was obvious. Parents and teachers expressed an interest in developing a culture‐based local curriculum through a process of reflecting on and creating an education incorporating the past, the present and the future. The study showed that parents, pupils and teachers experienced increased awareness in culture‐based schoolwork. The study pointed to a desire for cooperation between home and school in the development of a culture‐based school curriculum and a school practice supported by a culturally responsible teacher.     

Investigating the link between migration and civicness in Italy. Which individual and school factors matter?

This paper investigates the link between migration and civicness using data on cognitive skills and civic competences collected from a sample of 2747 eighth-graders in Italy. Contrary to the abundant evidence of migrant/native gaps in educational and occupational attainments in the country, this study finds no migrant-specific gap on civicness development. Children of immigrants achieve lower levels of civic knowledge than natives, but differences disappear once social background and, particularly, cognitive test scores are equalized across groups. Moreover, no differences are found, on average, between natives and children of immigrants with respect to institutional trust. However, at the top tail of the civic knowledge distribution, children of immigrants display less trust than natives. This result, coupled with their greater openness towards immigrants’ rights, suggests that immigrants’ children attach great importance to the inequality in rights concerning the immigrant population in the country and, as a reaction, participate more actively in the community. Insignificant or positive associations between the proportion of immigrants’ children in the classroom and natives’ civicness are found. Finally, fairness in student–teacher interactions is found to improve students’ civicness development, suggesting that, besides citizenship education, also the school climate plays a vital role in enhancing children's civic competences.     

The voluntary sector in ‘the information society’: a study in division and uncertainty

At a time of rapid social, political and economic change in Britain, voluntary and community groups are being encouraged to assume a more prominent role in general welfare provision. Accordingly, their need to know has never been more acute. Yet the information environment of the voluntary sector is also in a state of flux and transition. Profound changes in the institutional world of information provision hold significant implications for the way voluntary and community groups seek and disseminate information. In this paper these structural changes are outlined and the findings presented of an extensive investigation into information needs and usage in the voluntary sector.     

Does a Perinatal Infant Mental Health Team Hold the Family in Mind? Opportunities and Challenges for Working Systemically in this Specialised Field

This paper considers whether systemic family therapy frameworks are used in current Perinatal Infant Mental Health (PIMH) practice. PIMH is a field that is, by nature, relational, focusing on enhancing the development of early parent–infant relationships. It is well accepted that the early years of an infant's life are crucial for brain development, and disturbances in early parent–infant relationships can impact negatively upon the child's development. Five clinicians from a PIMH service in a metropolitan area participated in a focus group related to key systemic concepts: genograms, family of origin, transitions, and morphogenesis. Findings suggest that the PIMH team does hold the family in mind, utilising systemic frameworks predominately in the engagement and assessment phase of intervention. They also highlight that PIMH clinicians focus on roles and boundaries occurring within the immediate and extended family unit and support families with the transition to family expansion phase. The application of working systemically differed significantly among participants, suggesting that the use of systemic frameworks in the PIMH field requires further exploration.     

The last 20 years of visual anthropology – a critical review

This article is a critical review of the last 20 years of the development of visual anthropology in the United States and United Kingdom. It is argued that there are three approaches to the field – visual anthropology as ethnographic film, as the cultural study of pictorial media and as an inclusive anthropology of visual communication. The development and expansion of scholarly journals, training programmes and increasing general acceptance of this branch of cultural anthropology bodes well for the future. The anthropologist as image‐maker and scholar of the visible and pictorial world is becoming increasingly commonplace.     

Citizen Bodies: embodying citizens – a feminist analysis

The starting point for this paper is that bodies give substance to citizenship and that citizenship matters for bodies. However, the growing literatures on the body and on citizenship rarely 'speak to each other' in any straightforward sense. Feminist theory has made a significant contribution to both fields of thought,but once again the connections between these fields tend to be passing and underdeveloped. Feminist literature on citizenship – for example in discussions of participation – increasingly offers a critique of the model of the disembodied (supposedly universal) citizen as exclusionary and advocates taking bodies seriously (Lister; Yuval-Davis). Yet bodies appear in such discussions in quite limited ways and remain instrumentally conceived. On the other hand,the growing work on the body fromcontemporary feminist theorists has designated the body a political site par excellence (Grosz). Nevertheless, these writings are typically relatively abstract and philosophical, tend to perceive corporeal politics in circumscribed ways, and are positioned at a distance from political theorizing about implications for citizenship. We intend to consider how to flesh out the bodily element in feminist citizenship literature and how to interrogate the contextual sociality of the political in recent feminist theorizing of the body, in order to suggest ways of thinking about citizen bodies and related future directions for policy-making.     

High school students’ academic causal attributions in the cultural-political context of the Arab school system in Israel

While motivation is commonly interpreted as an individual student’s characteristic, motivational perceptions and beliefs, such as causal attributions of success and failure, are embedded in cultural meanings and contextual practices. The current study aimed to investigate causal attributions among Arab high school students in Israel and to interpret them in the light of their cultural-political context. Two hundred and five 11th-grade Arab students from three different geographic regions in Israel responded to open-ended and closed survey questions about events of success and failure in school. The analysis indicated that students overwhelmingly considered exams when thinking about events of success and failure, reflecting the normative teacher-centred pedagogical practices in schools. The analysis also manifested patterns of a self-serving bias. These findings are interpreted in the light of the cultural-political characteristics of the Arab school system in Israel.     

Disabled students’ experiences of higher education in Sweden,the Czech Republic,and the United States – a comparative institutional analysis

Students with disabilities face obstacles in their encounters with higher education. The aim of this study is to investigate how the institutional context shapes students’ experiences of unequal opportunities in higher education. In comparing disabled students’ experiences from universities in Sweden, the Czech Republic, and the United States, the study makes visible the kind of experiences that students share and how experiences differ between these countries within the global context of higher education. The study has shown that students’ possibilities for equal participation are shaped by the institutional context that is based on medical diagnosis and compensation for an inaccessible education.     

Lost in Translation? Embracing the Challenges of Working With Families From a Refugee Background

This article describes the difficulties a mainstream family therapy service experienced in working with families from a refugee background. The experience of six therapists and five bicultural workers, who are also the referring agents, was captured in focus groups, and the reflections that emerged shaped a four‐part approach for working with families from a refugee background. Live consultation, either by the family therapist or bicultural worker, is suggested as a way to marry the expertise of family therapists who are not cultural ‘insiders’ with the ‘lived experience’ and cultural expertise of bicultural support workers. The process of reflecting on therapeutic failure resulted in several principles for working therapeu‐tically with families with a history of refugee trauma, unmet resettlement needs and family relationship challenges. These include maintaining a flexible approach to therapy, ascertaining a clear understanding of the referral context, defining an explicit therapeutic contract from the first session, being mindful of the important role that language plays and terminating therapy if it is contra‐indicated.     

Evaluating homelessness – a comparative analysis of top 10 articles from the US and Europe

Homelessness as a political and social dominion has a number of features that make it particularly difficult to tackle. In addition to being a wicked problem, homelessness offers several analytical avenues. How do these characteristics affect the evaluation of programmes and projects aspiring to combat homelessness? Dissimilar pictures and solutions regarding homelessness in the US and in European countries will likely affect recommendations given as a result of evaluations performed. For this study, the empirical base is a sample of the most cited evaluations of homelessness programmes published in professional journals between 1996 and 2010. Most of these evaluations are from the US. These US evaluations more often use large-scale national programmes and quantitative methods, whereas European evaluations more often have smaller sample sizes and qualitative methods. In both regions, the evaluators seldom use theory from social science when analysing their findings. It is suggested that European evaluation research should be noticed to a larger extent since it is probably better suited for application in a European context.     

Arab school principals in Israel – between conformity and moral courage

ABSTRACT

The Arab-Israeli education system is a separate but not autonomous system serving Israel’s inhabitants whose first language is Arabic. These include the Muslim and Bedouin majority communities and smaller Christian, Druze and others, whose children attend schools in which the curriculum is determined by a Zionist perspective, taught in Arabic. Thus, in the context of a system established according to the Israeli cultural/national narrative, this study brings to light the voice of ten principals who, through open, in-depth interviews – ‘small stories’ – reveal their prospective and management of issues-in-conflict to formulate and present their professional identity according to their own sense of self. It presents the conflicts their position confronts vis-à-vis both the formal education authorities and the unique situation their society and culture pose in executing their educational/administrative and moral responsibilities. The findings reveal situations ranging from active acceptance of the institutional dictates of a conformist nature, through passive acceptance, (‘conformity’) to attempts at promoting autonomous activities within the defined limitations (‘moral courage’).     

Asserting disadvantaged communities’ deliberative agency in a media-saturated society

This article investigates how communities experiencing poverty can exercise their deliberative agency in a media-saturated society. While empirical research on deliberative democracy tends to focus on the role of mini-publics in giving low-income households the opportunity in small-scale, carefully designed forums to characterise, justify, and reflect on their views, such conception of deliberative agency gets lost in the picture once deliberative theory begins thinking in systemic terms. This article proposes a remedy to this theoretical and analytical gap by characterising the hypermediated character of the deliberative system and identifying possibilities for communities experiencing poverty to maximise the affordances of digital media for them to make an appearance in the public sphere, speak in their own voice, and carry the embodied and storied character of their arguments. I present two illustrative cases drawing on the experiences of families with low income directly affected by the bloody war on drugs in the Philippines who utilise photojournalism and online music streaming to break in the public sphere and engage in systemic deliberations about the drug war. These examples demonstrate how communities experiencing poverty express their deliberative agency amidst fear, trauma and deprivation and democratise a media-saturated deliberative system under an increasingly authoritarian regime. Overall, this article hopes to strengthen the link between normative media studies and democratic theory and offering possibilities for reforming the public sphere that recognises the poor’s deliberative agency.

     

Unlikelihood of Condorcet’s paradox in a large society

We provide intuitive, formal, and computational evidence that in a large society Condorcet’s paradox (the intransitivity of social preference obtained by pairwise vote) can hardly occur. For that purpose, we compare two models of social choice, one based on voting and another one based on summing individual cardinal utilities, expressed either in reals, or integers. We show that in a probabilistic model with a large number of independent individuals both models, almost surely, provide the same decision results. This implies that Condorcet’s and Borda’s methods tend to give the same decisions as the number of voters increases. Therefore, in the model with a large number of voters, the transitivity of the Borda preference is inherent in a majority preference as well. Received: 26 June 1998/Accepted: 16 April 1999     

From neglect to partnership? Challenges for social services in promoting the welfare of Traveller children

This paper explores current and potential directions in social services' provision for Traveller children, drawing on a Nuffield‐funded study. Many Traveller communities experience harassment, racism and oppression, which create a structural ‘vulnerability’ for children. However, the paper focuses on services for children where structural and family vulnerability interact, and the extent of statutory neglect. After outlining the study, three models of provision are explored. Firstly, crisis response in relation to child protection and youth justice issues has dominated social services' interaction with Travellers, tending to reinforce existing difficulties in relationships between the two. Secondly, family support was the subject of initiatives beginning in the study areas (selected as more engaged with Traveller issues) to facilitate Travellers' access to services, and plan a more strategic engagement with Traveller communities. Thirdly, specialist work was represented both formally and informally in the study, and demonstrated considerable benefits. Lessons from these findings suggest priorities for developing work with Travellers: recognition of Travellers as a minority ethnic/cultural group; inclusion of Travellers in equality policy and practice; training for workers; changes to referral systems; development of community support services; specialist posts; support to, and outreach work in partnership with, voluntary agencies; interagency initiatives; and, crucially, consultation with Travellers. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mobilisation through early activation and school engagement – the story from Scotland

This paper explores the experience of 16–17 year olds participating in the Scottish independence referendum and discusses whether it can be seen as positive or negative considering civic attitudes and participation. Using data from two comprehensive and representative surveys of 14–17 year olds, it engages empirically with claims about young people's alleged political (dis-)interest and provides qualifications for commonly believed stories of young people as mere recipients of information given to them by parents and teachers.

The paper develops a positive view of young people's engagement in the referendum process and suggests that inputs from parents and schools actually have distinguishable effects on young people, who do not simply ‘follow the lead’ of others uncritically. The analyses suggest that the discussion of political issues in the classroom (rather than the simple delivery of civics-style classes per se) may act as a positive factor in the political socialisation of young people, but suggests that further research is required to examine these effects beyond the specific context of the Scottish independence referendum in particular in relation to questions about whether reducing the voting age to 16 could be expected to generally lead to positive outcomes.     

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) in the elderly – a geriatrician's perspective

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is becoming increasingly prevalent among many different populations all over the world, including the US and Europe. Its multitude of complications with devastating outcomes leads to a significantly higher risk for cardio-vascular and all-cause mortality in an individual. However, it is clear now that early detection of CKD might not only delay some of the complications but also prevent them. Therefore, various important public health organizations all over the world have turned their focus and attention to CKD and its risk factors, early detection and early intervention. Nevertheless, the general goals in preventing the increase in CKD and its complications are far from being completely achieved. Why is this so? What is the magnitude and complexity of the problem? How is it affecting the population – are there differences in its affection by age, gender or frail elderly versus the robust? Are we modifying the risk factors appropriately and aggressively? Are there subtle differences in managing the risk factors in those on dialysis versus the non-dialysis CKD patients? Is it important to treat anaemia of CKD aggressively, will it make a difference in the disease progression, its complications or to quality of life? What do these unfortunate individuals commonly succumb to? What do we advise patients who refuse dialysis or those who desire dialysis or transplant? Are there useful non-dialytic treatment recommendations for those who refuse dialysis? What is the role of the physicians caring for the elderly with CKD? When should the primary care givers refer a CKD patient to a nephrologist? The key to eventually controlling incident and prevalent CKD and improve quality of life of affected individuals, lies in not only knowing these and many other vital aspects, but also in applying such knowledge compulsively in day-to-day practice by each and every one us. As CKD is increasingly a disease of the elderly with men being affected more, this review details fairly comprehensively the vital aspects of CKD, especially from a primary care geriatrician's practical standpoint.