Hope for a Cause as Cause for Hope: The Need for Hope in Environmental Sociology

Hope is a crucial component of agency involving the setting of goals, visualization of obstacles, and increasing willpower in the effort of achieving a desired goal. This hope is not simply optimism and is potentially a bridge between structure and agency. Yet, the powers of hope in sociology have been greatly unexplored including the ability of collective hope to create social change. This lack of hope is particularly poignant in environmental sociology as the sub-discipline looks for solutions to some of the greatest challenges humanity and the planet faces. This article discusses the undercurrent of pessimism in environmental sociology and calls for the integration of hope as it is necessary for generating potential social environmental change.     

The Aboriginal People: Literary Perspectives

There continues to be a worrying lack of material about family therapy with Aborigines, despite the massive difficulties experienced by Aboriginal people. A notable exception has been from Geraldine Slattery, whose original paper Transcultural Therapy with Aboriginal Families: Working with the Belief System was published by the Journal in 1987. Here Geraldine reviews two recent publications by University of Queensland Press, which has a long record of publishing about our Aboriginal citizens. While these books are not specifically focused on family therapy, their central relevance will be obvious. — Editor.     

Telling and Re‐telling Stories: The Use of Narrative and Drawing in a Group Intervention with Parents and Children in a Remote Aboriginal Community

The Let's Start Parent‐Child Program is a manualised parent‐child program which aims to improve educational, social and emotional outcomes for Aboriginal parents and their four‐ to seven‐year‐old children. It has been implemented in the Northern Territory, Australia on the Tiwi Islands and in Darwin since 2005. This paper outlines the adaptation of the program to include narrative approaches, the sharing of stories and the use of expressive arts as a way to build understanding between program leaders and participating families. An example from a recent program is used to illustrate how the sharing of stories and expressive use of art engages and binds group participants together. It supports parents to tell their own stories, to speak about their lived experience, to reconsider aspects of their own and their children's experiences and to achieve an increased awareness of their personal resources and a sense of self‐empowerment. The program is designed and delivered with sensitivity to individual parents, children and families, where cultural and interpersonal differences and different developmental and family situations can be taken into account.     

土耳其阿莱维问题的历史嬗变及其和解进程

阿莱维派是历史上在安纳托利亚地区形成的伊斯兰教什叶派分支,在奥斯曼帝国时期曾受到数百年的宗教歧视和政治压迫。土耳其共和国建立后,世俗化和现代化改革在解除对阿莱维派的宗教歧视的同时,也对阿莱维派的宗教体制和信仰体系造成了冲击,宗教传统的迅速衰落导致该派出现了严重的认同危机。为摆脱边缘化的社会地位,阿莱维派寻求恢复传统宗教文化和信仰体系,进而催生了阿莱维复兴运动。随着宗教认同的回归和市民社会组织的建立,阿莱维派开始提出政治认同诉求,导致阿莱维问题逐渐凸显。土耳其阿莱维问题是指阿莱维派追求宗教平等地位的历史过程和现实困境。正义与发展党执政后启动了阿莱维问题和解进程,从法律层面推动阿莱维派组织的合法化,建立了阿莱维问题的和解对话机制,从国家层面承认了阿莱维问题的存在,并在关键性议题上展现出努力推动和解进程的积极姿态。     

The Anatomy of Hope

Hope and despair are antonyms that describe a person's emotional state, determine whether one receives a psychiatric label, and whether one experiences others as potentially loving or threatening. Patients come to the therapist, bereft of a sense of self-esteem and personal potency, seeking the gift of hope which the therapist, who treasures life, is uniquely qualified to give. The cultivation of hope and the abolition of despair are prime ingredients in psychotherapy, yet have received little attention in the therapeutic literature. This article examines the nature and origin of hope and despair.     

School-Choice Stories: The Role of Culture

This article uses data from in-depth interviews conducted with the parents of a sample of 88 ninth-grade students from public, private, Catholic, and Christian high schools in two different suburban communities. This research investigates the ways in which parents understand education and how they make sense of schooling options for their children. It shows both how families who choose schools make the selection among various alternatives and why some families seem not to choose schools. This research finds that the financial and information resources of families are not enough in and of themselves to explain school-choice behavior. While these resources are indeed used by families as they make school choices, such measures do not capture the cultural dimension of school choice. In this context culture is understood as the lens through which people make sense of the social world. The decision to activate resources and the direction in which those resources will be activated are mediated by culture. In particular, as these school-choice stories show, the school-choice decision is influenced by the past educational experiences of the parents and by their religious faith.     

The Psychodynamics of a Clinician's Hope: A Delicate Balance

A clinician's sense of hope is not easily maintained in the therapeutic situation. Exploring the psychodynamics of hope in two interviews—one focusing on a community mental health psychotherapist and the other on a school social worker—this paper proposes that maintaining hope requires an intense affect state, an active blend of emotional and intellectual reflections in the mind of the clinician. Ongoing hope is the product of a delicate balance between a clinician's tolerance for the tragic in life and the expectations of positive treatment outcome. These reflections occur in an intrapsychic space, a point of juncture between the clinician's primary process longings/fears and secondary process thoughts. Hope is constructed in this space. It gains its language, form, and substance from the integration of personal experience, client observation and clinical theory. Reflective activity helps a clinician avoid disabling transference to a client and promotes identifications that lead to realistic treatment goals.     

The Sociology of the Future: Tracing Stories of Technology and Time

The sociology of the future is an emerging field of inquiry that works to understand future consciousness drawing from a mix of Science & Technology Studies and the practice of foresight. Through an exploration of the theories, methodologies, and quagmires of anticipation employed in the study of nanotechnology, this piece introduces the sociology of the future and suggests some ways the field is taking definition. Exploring the future tense provides a means of taking responsibility for what is to come; yet, the movement of the social sciences into the tricky terrain of the future presents tensions. Understanding plausibility, how different communities use anticipatory knowledge, and the performative role of expectations in innovation remain areas of research rich with dilemmas and delights. As social scientists begin to weave their own accounts of futures, they should pay attention to the politics of such rendering.