Forced termination: Reconsidering theory and technique

Abstract

Forced terminations typically are described in the therapy literature as grim mourning processes fraught with peril and little benefit. Such endings, although not optimal, are potential opportunities for mastery, growth, and maturation. Overemphasizing the grim aspects of forced termination may impair the departing therapist's ability to sustain a belief in the client's ability to survive loss, use the process productively and, when indicated, transfer to another therapist. Case histories are used to illustrate other constructions and differential interventions during forced terminations.     

Results in family casework with feebleminded clients 1

Abstract

The bombing in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 was a massive assault on the meaning‐making of survivors and community members. Utilizing a social constructionist perspective, this article explores the evolution of the community's social narrative as it shifted in the immediate wake of the blast to a new framework for understanding the event three months later. It is speculated that the community's storying of the bombing was initially centered on issues of action and recovery in order to restore civil order. Only after the departure of the Red Cross, which contributed to the formation of this communal narrative, did traditional crisis notions concerning phases of grief begin to appear in the local Oklahoma City newspaper. In addition, individual stories that did not conform to the larger understanding of events were conferred less authority than those in accordance with the dominant narrative.     

Using Collaboration to Maximize Outcomes for a John A. Hartford Foundation Geriatric Enrichment Project

Summary

Two institutions representing two BSW and one MSW program and a geriatric education center collaborated in a John A. Hartford geriatric enrichment project. Sharing the risks and benefits of a collaborative model, 75 percent of faculty participated in mini faculty fellowships, and bimonthly dinner meetings with colleagues from each of the three programs, and actively engaged in the curricula revisions. Faculty report pervasive geriatric enrichment in each program's foundation content areas, and increases in students placed in geriatric enriched field practicum settings, from pre-project levels of 8.1 percent to a high of 24 percent. The features of the collaborative project include: respecting each program's autonomy while actively sharing ideas, resources and partnering with community's aging experts; and strengthening mutually reciprocal relationships among faculty and the gérontologie practice community. This model of shared risks and benefits also provides opportunities for innovation, diverse thinking, and shared decision making.     

'Ingenious & learned gentlemen' social perceptions and self-fashioning among parish elites in Essex, 1680-1740

Alan Everitt's well-known characterization of parish elites as the 'pseudo'-gentry has precluded further study of their social aspirations and identity. Recent research has emphasized the varied nature of literary definitions of gentility, but has not examined their relationship to social practice. This study focuses ona network of parish rulers and vestrymen in rural Essex, and their social and intellectual self-fashioning through the pursuit of natural science and history. Following Shapin's isolation of social gentility as a key component in constructing scientific credibility, the study shows the efforts of parish elites to conform to ideals of 'gentelmanly' objectivity, learning and erudition. In doing so, they moulded this acquired status to their circumstances, to break out of circumscribed, contingent social hierarchies in the parish. Gentility was employed as a new currency, to supersede existing, local tokens of status, to be reputed 'a better man and more excellent' than mere inhabitants of 'the town'. Yet the study also illustrates the social limits of this acquired status, and the fears of stepping outside the faniliar local 'sphere'. The study emphasizes that for these parish elites the attainment of gentility was a mixed blessing - a move from the small, secure pond of parish status to the deeper, hostile waters of a more universal status criterion.     

Unruly Voices in the Museum

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the use of audio recordings and oral memory for the critical engagement with colonial pasts in ethnographic museums by focusing on the traveling exhibition What We See, curated by Anette Hoffmann (2009). Specifically, it draws on Jeffrey Feldman's notion of colonial “contact points,” i.e. material traces of colonial encounter, to highlight the exhibition's ability to convey and critique the sensory experience of colonial contact. In What We See, this colonial contact consisted in an anthropometric project conducted in South-West Africa, today's Namibia, in 1931, resulting in an archive of anthropometric measurements and photographs, life-casts, and phonographic recordings. The exhibition proposed an innovative way of reworking this archive by staging an intricate interplay between sound and sight, thereby disrupting conventional ocularcentric forms of display. However, this multisensory approach provoked highly divergent reactions at its various exhibition venues. This article argues that the divergent reactions in Cape Town, South Africa, and Vienna, Austria, were due to different levels of what Ann Stoler describes as “colonial aphasia”—that is the context-dependent difficulty of addressing disquieting colonial pasts and its sensory dimensions.     

Slavery by another name: Apprenticed women in Jamaican workhouses in the period 1834–81

Hitherto, the historiography of Jamaican slavery has ignored the period of Apprenticeship which lasted from 1834 until 1838 when Jamaica changed from a forced labour to a free labour economy. The purpose of this article is to show that the period deserves studying as it was 'slavery by another name'. It does this by examining the experiences of apprenticed women in the island's workhouses. The disciplinary regime that the women faced was similar to that exercised on the estates prior to 1834 and was enforced by a similar set of officers. It is shown that the disciplinary regime served above all the needs of the local planters. It not only safeguarded their economic enterprises but also enabled them to regain some of the arbitrary and proprietary power they had lost after 1834. The planters therefore fiercely combated attempts by the colonial governor and the Colonial Office to change the disciplinary regime. They only lost their fight in March 1838 when the British parliament issued an Act in Aid which allowed the colonial governor to legislate against abuses in the workhouses. It is argued that the planters were able to stay in control of the workhouse for such a long time because the Apprenticeship System depended upon existing administrative, judicial and legal systems.     

A little too much of the buchenwald touch? Military radiation research at the university of Cincinnati, 1960–1972

From 1960 through 1972, Dr. Eugene Saenger oversaw the experimental administration of lethal and near‐lethal doses of radiation to hospital patients at the University of Cincinnati. These experiments were funded by the US Department of Defense, and were specifically designed to acquire military information on the effects of radiation in combat soldiers. Although Saenger's research was terminated after public exposure in 1971, a full and detailed account has not been available until now. The account provided by the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) in their Final Report of 1995 was incomplete. Our account is based on a reanalysis of all the material available to ACHRE, including highly critical peer reviews by U.C. faculty members. We also present, for the first time, several case histories taken from the medical records of Dr. Saenger's subjects.     

Essential Partnership: Child Welfare Officers’ Perceptions of Cooperation With Rabbis in the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Community in Israel

ABSTRACT

This article describes collaborations between child welfare officers and rabbis in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Israel. The study is based on interviews with 10 child welfare officers who intervene in ultra-Orthodox communities. The analysis of the interviews showed that cooperation with the rabbis was essential for reducing the community's hostile resistance to interventions by the child welfare officers, who were perceived as threatening to community values. On the other hand, the child welfare officers had to cope with conflicts between religious values, the law, and professional perceptions. The discussion of the findings highlights the need for understanding the cooperation in terms of boundaries and power. Future research is needed to explore further the issues raised from the perspectives of the rabbis and the families involved.     

On the importance of getting even: A study of the origins and intention of revenge

This essay is an abbreviated study of revenge; its ubiquity, its function in maintaining biological and psychological order, balance and stability of one's sense of self, and its place with respect to a community's laws, religions and culture. Also commented on are its connections to feelings of spite, envy and guilt, and to the concepts of fairness, justice and harmony.     

Parents Beyond Borders: A Social Group Work Curriculum for Supporting Immigrant Parents and Building Solidarity

Parents Beyond Borders, a curriculum first implemented in 2008 as part of The Center for Family Life's ParentShip Program, encourages group members to create a shared narrative about their traumatic immigration experiences. The result is twofold. First, immigrant parents gain a more assertive and poignant voice to communicate with family and others in their lives when sharing their family's acculturation experience. Second, because social group work promotes recognition of collective trauma due to the community's experience of marginalization, it improves members' group self-concept and empowers them to take action and advocate for themselves.     

From Manitoba to the Memel: Max Sering,inner colonization and the German East

Whereas most of the debate surrounding the ‘colonial roots' of the Holocaust has centred around the German genocidal campaign against the Herero in south-western Africa, a much more direct and continuous story emerges when one traces the flow of ideas from the North American western frontier to the German East. In the 1880s, the agrarian economist Max Sering travelled throughout America and Canada, and came to formulate a settlement programme modelled upon what he saw there as the answer to Germany's ‘Polish problem', and indeed to virtually all the ills of modernity. From 1886 to 1914 Sering provided the intellectual ammunition for the Prussian programme of inner colonization, the purchase of land from Poles and the settlement of German ‘colonists' in the provinces of Posen and West Prussia. During the First World War, Sering's views, along with Germany's, would radicalize, as he drew up plans for the settlement of two million Germans in Latvia. Although the Nazi biological racist Darré would reject Sering's assimilationist thinking, the ‘spatial planner' Meyer would see to it that the legacy of a German way of seeing the East as a colonial empire would find its final and most radical application during the Second World War.     

Reading sites as sights for reading. The sale of newspapers in Germany before 1933 : Bookshops in railway stations,kiosks and street vendors

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the founding of the German nation-state, the removal of various restrictions on the distribution of newspapers, a decrease in the price of paper and an improvement in printing techniques, lighting and means of communication opened the way in Germany for the mass distribution of reading material, in general, and newspapers in particular. In those years a closely-knit network of distribution of newspapers and journals developed which had a decisive role in popularising a reading culture in the period of transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. Various aspects of this system of distribution are considered through examination of three points of distribution of newspapers and journals; bookshops in railway stations, kiosks and the sale of newspapers on the streets. Methods of distributing newspapers and the position of these points of distribution in the social space are considered to decipher the social and cultural significance of these points of distribution as 'reading sites': that is, as places where readers and newspapers came together, representing a variety of social, economic and cultural interests. Thus the aim of this paper is not only to examine the points of distribution as 'reading sites' but to reveal these places as 'sights of reading'; that is, as places that helped people orient themselves in the modern space. Orientation in the modern urban space depended more and more on the eyes and this rapid development of the 'viewing' culture led to an increase in semiotic sensibility and to a need for means of learning and sources of information to cultivate this sensibility.     

II. Patients of the department of psychological medicine,guy's hospital,london 1

Abstract

Harvey Dean (1998) rejects my (Wakefield, 1988a; 1988b) argument that minimal distributive justice is the essential mission of social work and that treatment of mental disorder is not part of the profession's essential mission but rather a derived task. He argues that social work has broader ethical aims that encompass both pursuit of justice and treatment of mental disorder. In this article, 1 review my earlier position and respond to Dean's objections. I argue that Dean's narrativist account of the profession's ethical aims is overly broad and that he confuses non‐disordered psychological problems with mental disorders. I conclude that neither my “minimal distributive justice” view of social work's mission nor my exclusion of treatment of mental disorder from the profession's essential mission are disconfirmed by Dean's arguments.     

Child Maltreatment Reporting Laws: Impact on Professionals' Reporting Behaviour

While claims are continually made about the various child maltreatment reporting laws, few systematic evaluations could be found. Overseas evidence suggests that the number of notifications from professionals does increase after the introduction of mandatory reporting, providing all professions and all types of maltreatment are included. This paper tested the potential effect on involved Victorian professionals of introducing a mandatory reporting law, all other things remaining unchanged. It was found to be marginal. The value of reporting laws as a philosophical statement about the community's concern for children's welfare was not investigated, nor their effect on the maltreating parents' behaviour.     

Of peasants and publics in colonial India: Daduram's story

ABSTRACT

This article uses an exceptionally well-documented law case from the 1650s to offer a fresh perspective on the English experience of Atlantic settlement during its early years. It argues for the centrality of the Essex county quarter sessions court in the building of neighbourhood on the geographic and cultural margins of the Massachusetts Bay colony. By focusing on the north-eastern margin at Cape Ann, the analysis reveals aspects of state building through a common law judicial process which was just as important, but less readily apparent, in other settings. The article addresses three major historiographic areas, engaging with the historical literature on English neighbourhoods and English adaptation to the American environment, on the significance of witchcraft or maleficium in English societies, and on the nature and meanings of law, law courts and judicial process in the building of communities. Case documents also enable the use of some concepts and techniques of literary analysis related to the study of narrative, arguing that judicial verdicts selected and suppressed aspects of local stories elicited during the course of the investigation in order to craft an account of local neighbourhood that suited a broader cultural narrative of Massachusetts Bay’s political consolidation during the 1650s.     

Healthcare decommodification in decentralization context: Reviewing the ideational constructions of “classless hospital policy” initiatives in Kulon Progo Regency,Indonesia

This article illustrates the emergence of radical local welfare initiatives as a political response to the imperfect national program in decentralization context in Indonesia. In order to gain further understanding of the topic, it is worth reviewing Kulon Progo Regency's experience which recently embarked on removing class stratification at any in‐patient room in all local government‐owned hospitals through “classless hospital policy” initiatives. Using exploratory case study method, this article aims to review the ideational constructions of healthcare decommodification that is displayed on this initiative. It is concluded that the classless hospital policy reflects how social citizenship was organized through the mechanism of idea contestation which originated in the past community's behavior, combined with the vested interest of political regime for then subduing market logics under state power. This circumstance ultimately has provided the groundwork for encouraging innovative welfare outcome.     

Social Welfare Development in Hong Kong

The Social Welfare Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government attaches great importance to building a caring and harmonious society. The department has spearheaded social welfare reform initiatives to meet the community's changing needs, maximize utilization of public funds, ensure sustainability of welfare services, and promote service diversity, choice and accessibility. Achievements in the various service areas exemplify the policy of building a caring and harmonious society. In the coming years, the department will strive for continuous improvement by forging partnership with the government, the welfare sector, the business sector, and the public at large to provide quality and sustainable services to meet life's challenges.     

Fingerbombing,or “Touching is Good”: The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch

ABSTRACT

The development of new interface technologies involves reimagining perceptual processes. Grounded in histories of perception, this paper examines the discursive framing of touch in the advertisements for Nintendo's Dual Screen portable gaming system, explaining the way that the ads posit the DS as a means of reconnecting with a lost and repressed mode of perception. In the process of technologizing touch, the ads paradoxically assert a nostalgic memory of a pretechnological sensorium that can be restored using technology. However, in doing so, they displace older models of touch and attempt to redefine what it means to touch. I argue that the DS ads, in addition to demanding new body habits, call for a reconfiguration of perception that brings it into accord with the limits of the present technology. The DS interface serves as sensory armor that allows the subject to touch without feeling, to manipulate without sensation.