I Want to Do Something

AT the First Women and Environment Conference of China, I saw Jiang Shaozhen, conference organizer, board director and general manager of the Sino-Japan funded Beijing Kangqiao Environmental Protection Limited Company, affiliated with Qinghua University. At the conference, she was awarded the title of "National Best Woman in Environmental Protection." But when she introduced herself, she tended to say, "I used to be a teacher at Qinghua University." Indeed, Jiang is fond of the teaching     

I Want to Look at the World

MORE than a decade ago, for a peasant to get the chance to visit, work or even live in Beijing was almost equal to a dream for most rural people. However, with reforms and the policies of increasing openness, dreams that seemed impossible in the past are now realities for many people. According to statistics, the daily floating population of Beijing is about one million. People from all parts of China are pouring into this metropolitan     

“I Want to Be Who I Am”: Narratives of Transgender Persons

Research has documented the difficulties that face persons identifying as transgender, and that research has been steadily increasing. However, the bridge between research findings and practice is often elusive, particularly for those counselors, therapists, and other mental health professionals already in their respective professional lives. This retrospective phenomenological study documented the lives of 16 persons identifying as transgender (11 transwomen, five transmen) as they narrated the difficulties they encountered beginning in childhood through transition in adult life. Eight persons identifying as transgender were younger than age 40 years and eight were older than age 40 years and brought different narratives about their childhood, teen, and adult years.     

Women Want to Hold Up Half the Sky

OVER the last few years more and more people have shown a strong interest in Chinese women's issues. At the University of Oriental Studies of Naples, Italy, where I come from, many students and teachers are researching and writing about the transformations of women's position in Chinese society. The policy of reform and opening to the outside world sponsored by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 has brought many changes to the country, not only in the     

“Everything I Didn't Want to Know I Learned in Lit Class”: Sex, Sexual Orientation, and Student Identity

If discussing sexuality with college students is difficult, discussing sexual orientation often seems impossible. However, given the prejudice and societal violence against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered persons, students need to understand the harmful effects of homophobia and heterosexism. This article offers a review of the literature on teaching about sexual identity, nonthreatening strategies for effecting change, and suggestions about fiction and poetry that might be used in the classroom to raise awareness. Secondary sources provide additional techniques and resources.     

There are Some Things I Don’t Want to Know: Leichsenring and Rabung’s Long Road to the 2008 JAMA Report

Psychodynamic practitioners have been slow to evaluate their outcomes empirically and to disseminate these findings publicly. This historic stance is changing, with psychoanalytic leaders now calling for more empirical research and with important, recent contributions. This response lauds the JAMA paper as a developmental achievement among dynamic theorists, and as an example of the kind of interdisciplinary scholarship which is needed. The author offers a critique and raises questions about what constitutes the treatment in these quite disparate treatments, spanning 25 years. It compares their findings to those of a current, clinic-based longitudinal study (N = 1,050), and asks if this latter study’s findings might challenge or at least complicate some of the strong assertions Leichsenring and Rabung make.     

“I Just Want to Do God's Will:” Teaching Martin Luther King,Jr. as a Religious Leader

Teachers often respond to the perils of teaching about religion by simply avoiding the subject. An investigation of secondary lesson plans on three prominent Martin Luther King, Jr. websites reveals little attention to the ideology of the civil rights movement, especially those touching on religious ideas. Ignoring King's religious views risks fundamentally misrepresenting his identity, his ideology, and his motivation for nonviolence. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, King's 1958 account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott articulates three key features of the theological framework that inspired his activism: the spiritual motivation for his leadership, the ethical basis for his strategy of nonviolent direct action, and the theological understanding of human nature that undergirded his leadership and strategy. These points provide a useful model for introducing King's ideas in the classroom. The effort to intentionally and thoughtfully teach religion could contribute one step toward inculcating genuine tolerance among students. Civil discourse is not fostered simply by identifying core principles everyone shares but also through thoughtful, critical engagement with disparate ideas, including what are, for many people, the most heavily freighted ideas.     

I Return to my Second Home

LAST September, Chai Ran, my classmate and roommate in Shanxi, and I took a train to Yuanping to visit our second home. Twenty-five years ago, we 31 students from Beijing went to live in the Xiadalin Village in Yuanping, Shanxi Province, where we lived and labored for seven years. In our railway car, Chai told me that Yuanping, to which the Xiadalin Village belonged in the past administration, was celebrating its emergence as a city. Chai had married a villager and had returned to Beijing only two years ago. Her son and daughter, who were both born in the village, had just visited there and had brought her the news. Although I knew that Yuanping had changed a great deal, I was still unable to imagine what it had become, since I had left eighteen years ago. In my memory, it was only a series of streets with a     

I Have Learned to Accompany Myself

XIAO Ya was my middle schoolmate. She was gentle and quiet. We called her Ah Fang because she looks like Wang Fang, the leading lady of the film "Heroic Sons and Daughters." Xiao Ya lived in the red building that was constructed in the 1960s near the small wood behind my family's home. Her family lived on the second floor. Below the window was a board which read "Aiguo Grain Shop" (aiguo means love the country). Xiao Ya didn't like to speak. When she did, her face often turned red; but when she sang, she had an easy manner. I could hear her singing from a long distance. I used to take my worn-out accordion to her house. Since I could sing to my own     

‘I Want to Persuade You!’ – Investigating the effectiveness of explicit persuasion concerning attributes of the communicator and the marketing campaign

In explicit persuasion, the communicator states explicitly a desire to persuade the consumer. By referring to an attributional approach, social engagement was simultaneously explored as a beneficial communicator attribute, while cause-related marketing (CRM) was addressed as a boundary condition. In an experiment, we varied the persuasion strategy (explicit vs. implicit), the communicator’s prior experience with social engagement (yes vs. no), and the specific marketing strategy (CRM vs. non-charity marketing). As expected, in the non-charity marketing condition, explicit (vs. implicit) persuasion was more effective when the communicator had prior experience in social engagement. In the CRM condition, explicit (vs. implicit) persuasion was less effective when the communicator had prior experience in social engagement; when no prior experience was reported, persuasiveness increased.     

What Do Men Want?

Abstract

Men play a key role in determining good sexual health outcomes for themselves and their sexual partners. However, many interventions and much of the programmatic focus and effort in reproductive and sexual health care delivery, are focused on women. This paper shows how international goals for development (the Millennium Development Goals), and international agreements on population and development (such as that agreed at the International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo,1994) cannot be met without the full and active involvement of men. We argue that achieving international goals and targets requires more than simply encouraging men to take more responsibility for their actions, it requires a detailed understanding of men's own concerns in the field of sexual health and a commitment to address those concerns to achieve better sexual health for all.

Using examples from south Asia, the paper explores the evidence surrounding the burden of men's sexual ill-health in the Region. We find that while public health programmes are (rightly) focused on controlling HIV (and sexually transmitted infections to some degree), evidence from population-based surveys of men across south Asia shows that men are most concerned with ‘psycho-sexual conditions’ including discharge syndromes, weakness, and erectile dysfunction. There is evidence that some of these conditions may be linked to higher rates of risk-taking and gender-based violence in some men. We further review patterns of care seeking for men reporting these and other sexual health problems.

We conclude that the challenges facing public health professionals are how to ensure that men receive interventions which are appropriate (and affordable and accessible and of high quality) for addressing their own sexual health concerns whilst also meeting wider public health goals of improving population levels of sexual and reproductive health.     

“I Help the Ones that Want Help”: Emotion Work and the Victim Advocate Role

Using data gathered from participant observation and 32 individual in-depth interviews, this study examines how victim advocates achieve emotion management in their work with battered women. This research reveals that victim advocates often experience difficulty coping with occupational stress via daily “deep acting” strategies as they work to change their understandings of battered women and the advocate role from the “inside out.” The data reveal that the core of their ability to cope requires victim advocates to redefine their perceived role from “savior” to “options giver” to more accurately define their role interactions with battered women.     

‘I Don't Just Want to Do It for Myself’: Diverse Pespectives on Being Successful at University by Social Work Students Who Speak English as an Additional Language

This article gives attention to furthering understandings about what being successful at university means to social work students, focusing on the perspectives of students who speak English as an additional language (EAL). It departs from approaches in the literature that focus on problematic aspects of teaching and learning. The article is informed by data from a small-scale focus group study of nine students from an undergraduate and a postgraduate social work programme in a South Australian university. Drawing on a methodological approach known as ‘Appreciative Inquiry’, students were asked how they conceptualise, experience and imagine success at university. The study found that students’ understandings of success are inextricably intertwined with their individual, family and community aspirations. These findings are discussed in the light of current dominant assumptions about the notion of success and possible directions for future research and implications for social work education.     

“I’ve changed my mind; I don’t want to go home”

Abstract

This article considers the motif of porosity and its opposite, impenetrability, in relation to the home or places where we feel at home. It discusses ambiguities in how the physical boundaries of the home—but also of the perceived human subject—are portrayed in the technology-pervaded world of the dystopian science fiction narrative Total Recall. Tracing the story from the 1966 novel by Philip K. Dick, through the 1990 film to the recent remake (2012), allows for a consideration of the changes in our understanding of how the boundaries between the home and its other are culturally conceived and what happens when the integrity of these boundaries are put into question. Despite their differences, we argue that all three narratives use the built structures of walls and the imagery of the container as a way of portraying the basic conflict of an outer world that tries to take possession of the protagonist’s inner life. Tracing narrative shifts, we suggest, can become a vehicle for understanding the ongoing negotiation of boundaries of the “self,” the human body, the home and even the city, and the implications these cultural negotiations have across the period from 1966 to 2012.     

“No Matter What I Do They Still Want Their Family”: Stressors for African American Grandparents and Other Relatives

Grandparents and other relatives increasingly assume the role of primary caregiver to minor children. This study interviewed family members caring for children whose parents were not available due to parental incarceration, other involvement in the criminal justice system, and substance abuse-related issues. Interviews with 25 African American women examined the impact of caregiving including stress and depression. Stress included caregiver issues related to finances, time allocation, care responsibilities, and concerns about the absent parent, as well as issues specific to the children related to school concerns, child behavior, and emotional problems. These stresses were examined along with caregiver depression scores using the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, which indicated more depression related to caregiver illnesses, older caregivers, and care for older and a larger number of children. This study suggests that caring for these children is both challenging and stressful, and caregivers are at risk for depression and other mental health concerns. Health and service providers should carefully assess the needs of caregivers when determining the needs of families where children are under care of nonparental relatives. Family-based services are needed that include caregiver supports as well as support for children.     

“I Want a Better Life for Her”: Father-Adolescent Daughter Relationships in a Minority,Low-Income South African Community

Although research indicates the importance of fathers in adolescent daughters’ psychosocial development, father–adolescent daughter relationships have been neglected in both international and local research. Furthermore, the relatively small body of research that does exist has mostly been conducted in North American and European contexts. Our study aimed to generate knowledge about father–adolescent daughter relationships in a minority, low-income South African community. In this social constructionist informed community-based study, we explored father–daughter relationships in 42 individual interviews with father–daughter dyads. This article focuses on a prominent theme in the interview data that revolves around fathers’ repeated statements that they wanted their daughters to have betters lives than they themselves had and the parenting strategies they reported to achieve this aspiration. We conclude that these fathers could benefit from reflecting on the apparent limitations of their parenting practices and from knowledge and skills regarding more effective parenting practices.     

Through the Mist—I Recall a Visit to West Lake

IT has been many years since the last time I visited West Lake in Hangzhou but it is still fresh in my menlory. It was in late spring, a cloudy and drizzly day. I did not feel like going at first, but later went along as two veteran editors insisted upon going. It didn't take long to get to the lake. This was my first time to appreciate the landscape of the region south of the Yangtze River at leisure. The air was damp and chilly as we strolled along the bank. Mist and fog hovered over the lake, and it was hard to distinguish the water from the sky. At a kiosk on the     

World War I,Japan’s Road to Pearl Harbor

This qualitative study investigates the perspectives of two cohorts of elementary preservice teachers on citizenship education in today's culturally and globally diverse classrooms. Both cohorts were enrolled in the same university; however, one group participated in an urban-based teacher education program designed around the needs of urban school children. While participants reported varying views of citizenship and offered diverse strategies for incorporating citizenship in the classroom, findings suggested that those participating in the urban-based cohort viewed citizenship more in terms of culture and valued promoting cultural learning and sharing in the classroom. Implications for teachers wanting to teach for cultural citizenship are discussed.     

Where can I mourn? Psychodynamic contributions to working in residential child care

ABSTRACT

Loss permeates the experience of being placed in residential child care, yet residential workers are rarely trained to work with young people who are grieving the loss of family and home. This article will provide an overview of psychodynamic theories of mourning, and will discuss how grief work can be facilitated for children and youth in residential child care.