Reimagining dialogue in public relations: Bakhtin and open dialogue in the public sphere

Over the past several decades, public relations scholarship has added significant richness to its understanding of dialogue. Such research has followed a theoretical trajectory centered on the “I and Thou” philosophy of Martin Buber. Drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination, this essay puts public relations dialogic scholarship into conversation with the concept of dialogue in a broader societal context. Bakhtin’s work provides additional understanding of public relations’ roles in dialogue, particularly in regards to facilitating public conversations. Bakhtin’s emphasis on contextual and individually generated meanings illuminates the nature and structure of public conversations and the potential for public relations practitioners to play a more active and positive role in the enactment of open dialogue.     

Empowerment evaluation: Exemplary is its openness to dialogue,reflective practice,and process use

On the occasion of the 21 st anniversary of empowerment evaluation, congratulations are in order for having established global credibility, demonstrated utility, and for its exemplary openness to dialogue, reflective practice, and process use.     

Promoting sexual well-being in social work education and practice

This paper explores the importance of including sexual well-being within social work practice and education. Social workers often work with individuals for whom opportunities for sexual expression are limited and who face discriminatory attitudes. Sexual well-being is a global concern, and is particularly relevant considering international interest in the influence of notions of well-being on mental and physical health. Implementation of new social care policy in England, underpinned by the well-being principle, provides practitioners with the opportunity to explore what is meaningful to individual’s well-being through person-centred approaches to practice. There is currently little coverage of sexual well-being within social work education, this means students and practitioners lack the knowledge and skills to challenge barriers. Promotion of the concept of sexual citizenship, with its associated rights and responsibilities, enables social workers to engage in rights focused practice. Sexual well-being is a sensitive subject and the social and personal barriers practitioners may experience in addressing this topic are explored.     

Promoting reflective practice with older people: Learning and teaching strategies

Social work with older people is often characterised as low status employment and is dominated by medicalised constructions of old age. Consequently, there is a need for educational responses that address students' negative attitudes toward older people and enable the development of practice skills in this area. The present paper evaluates an elective course for third year social work students that challenged their perceptions of their own and others' ageing, and stimulated a reflective approach to practice with older people. Reflective learning techniques were employed in the course, including observations in aged care service settings. Students in the course showed a high degree of interest in working with older people in the future and, although this did not increase much throughout the course, they evaluated it positively, noting greater awareness of issues affecting older people.     

Hybridizing the canon: Russian-American writers in dialogue with Russian literature

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Russian-American writers – that is, Russian-speaking Jews who immigrated to North America from the late 1970s to the early 1990s – have garnered both a wide readership and critical acclaim. Although they live in the United States and write in English, their works manifest a marked focus on Russian-related themes, including the frequent employment of Russian literature. Three Russian-American texts engage in sustained intertextual play: Irina Reyn’s What Happened to Anna K. with Lev Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina; Lara Vapnyar’s Memoirs of a Muse with the diary of Fedor Dostoevskii’s mistress, Polina Suslova; and Anya Ulinich’s Petropolis with Osip Mandel’shtam’s poem “Na strashnoi vysote bluzhdaiushchii ogon'” (“At a terrifying height a wandering fire”). This article has two interrelated aims. The first is to demonstrate that, similar to postcolonial and other diasporic writers, Russian-American writers’ intertextual use is inextricably linked with a negotiation of cultural identities. The second is to offer a close analysis of the ways in which Reyn’s What Happened to Anna K., Vapnyar’s Memoirs of a Muse, and Ulinich’s Petropolis recast Russian texts as Russian-American elaborations of cultural hybridity and immigrant sensibility.     

The role of the therapist in common factors: continuing the dialogue

The common factors debate conducted on the pages of this and other major family therapy journals has evolved toward a preliminary consensus that the therapist plays a crucial role in activating and effectively bundling common and model-specific factors in the delivery of successful treatment. However, Blow, Sprenkle, and Davis (2007) remain unconvinced that therapist-worldview/model-worldview congruence, which I have hypothesized plays a determinative role in enabling the therapist to effect this activation and bundling, does, indeed, play such a role. In this article, I use key findings of Davis and Piercy's (2007a, 2007b) recently reported research on common factors to answer Blow and colleagues' objections to my hypothesis.     

Using reflection and dialogue to prepare social work students for practice with LGBT populations: An emerging pedagogical model

ABSTRACT

Using analysis of student focus groups, this article describes the learning experiences of graduate social work students in a semester-long course on social work with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals and families. Deconstructing their beliefs about sexuality, gender, religion, and family was for many students both an uncomfortable and rewarding learning process. Drawing from students' voices and using the concept “creative tension” (Palmer, 1998 Palmer, P. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), this article describes students' growth processes and how providing forums for personal reflection and dialogue supported students in this deconstruction process. An emerging pedagogical model that expands and deepens what it means to create a “safe” classroom environment for learning about LGBT issues is offered.     

The LORS-enabled dialogue: improving insight in psychotic illnesses

Patients often underestimate the degree of their psychiatric illness and consequently have difficulty effectively participating in interventions to optimize recovery. This problem of insight may be connected with neurological difficulties resulting in poor explicit memory; however, most interventions nurses use to help patients improve their understanding of illness rely on explicit memory. The discrepancy between clinician and patient scores on the Levels of Recovery from Psychotic Disorders Scale (LORS) has been correlated with measures of insight and psychopathology. This difference can be used in a therapeutic dialogue, the LORS-Enabled Dialogue (LED). This intervention engages patients' implicit memory, asking a series of open-ended questions and using motivational interviewing to help promote patients' attainment of life goals. Large-scale studies of this intervention are currently underway and should help better define questions about the effectiveness of the LED.     

Mad studies and neurodiversity: a dialogue

In this paper we explore what we consider to be the shared concerns of those neurodivergent and/or mad-identified scholars and activists who are seeking to make space for themselves within the academy. In doing so, we consider what critical questions and action people involved in these could address together in ways that move beyond identity-based politics     

Child advocacy: a dialogue of inclusion

This paper is a case study that illustrates how privilegingchildren's voices in conversations has assisted our work withchildren who have witnessed domestic violence. Using the ChildCrisis Team in Auckland, New Zealand as case study, we arguethat as an inclusive practice child advocacy seeks to positionchildren as active participants in the community developmentprocess rather than the passive recipients of adult hopes anddreams. To break the cycle of violence in the home, children'sexperiences and knowledge should be enabled to enter the spacefor the production of strategies and actions that enhance thecreation of safe home environments, by incorporating their voicesthrough respectful practice by professionals working in theareas of domestic violence and child protection.     

Communities and academics: A developing dialogue

Intentional communities have been described as laboratories for testing and demonstrating new ideologies and social structures. This paper focuses on the part played by academics in disseminating the results of these ‘social experiments’ to a wider audience. The relationship between intentional communities and academics has often been difficult, with mistrust on both sides. By looking at the underlying needs of both, this paper intends to throw light on the source of some of the difficulties, so that both may better fulfil their important social functions. A case study is reported to illustrate the main points. The paper concludes with advice to both intentional communities and academics for building better relationships and developing co-operative projects.     

Research note: Promoting intercultural education through art education

Taking UNESCO’s proposal ‘learning how to live together’ as a starting point, we examined to what extent visual education can be used as a tool to promote the aims of intercultural education. We analyzed the power of using artistic images from different cultures to change students’ perception of cultural differences, thereby facilitating the development of attitudes of respect towards different ethnic/cultural groups. We also investigated to what extent this strategy could contribute to the integration of minority peers into a majority group. Students were assigned to either an experimental or a control group. The experimental treatment consisted of exposing students to several art object images associated with different cultures. Our measurement instrument was based on an adapted version of the ‘Draw‐A‐Person‐Test’, which we have called the ‘Draw‐Two‐Persons‐Test’. We also used a questionnaire to examine attitudes among subjects