An Exploratory Study on Attitudes Toward Persons with Disabilities Among U.S. and Japanese Social Work Students

ABSTRACT

This exploratory study was conducted to understand and compare attitudes among social work students in the United States and Japan toward people with disabilities. The Modified Issues in Disabilities Scale (MIDS), designed to measure attitudes toward people with physical disabilities, was implemented on convenient samples of 92 U.S. and 73 Japanese social work students. The findings suggest that social work students in both countries hold moderately positive attitudes. Other similarities as well as differences among the sampled students from the two countries, and their implications to social work education, will be discussed in this paper.     

Economic Rights,Economic Myths,and Economic Realities

Summary

Although the myth is that gay and lesbian people, especially gay men, are affluent and are faring well in the workplace, research shows that they in fact experience wage discrimination and lack many other fundamental rights related to employment. This article reviews the literature addressing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgend-ered people as workers, showing the ways in which their economic rights are still compromised in the United States today. The social work profession must understand these realities and seek ways to address them.     

Charity or Entitlement Conundrum: Welfare Policies and Safe Motherhood in Impoverished Buffalo,New York

ABSTRACT

In contrast to the most industrialized Western nations, the United States faces great social and economic disparities and a deep gap between the socioeconomic strata. The child poverty rate is almost three times higher than in any other industrialized Western country, and single mother families represent 60% of all poor families in the United States. Concentrating on the situation of single mothers in impoverished Buffalo, New York, the authors argue that similar to the underdeveloped world, the fate of single mothers in the United States is tied to the global economy. This project seeks to understand how systemic (social location) and idiosyncratic (individual) factors interactively affect the health and well-being of female-headed, single-parent families. The quantitative analyses are supported by an examination of a case study of a transitional housing program, called Gerard Place. We examine the impact of this comprehensive program offered to poor mothers, including housing, counseling, education, child care, and financial support. These support systems assist female-headed families to rebuild self-sufficiency, sustainable income, and economic independence. The call to approach welfare programs as a synthesis of systemic and idiosyncratic factors concludes the study.     

Hierarchical multiplicity in the international monetary system: from the slave trade to the Franc CFA in West Africa

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the relationship between international currency hierarchies and ‘societal multiplicity’. I provide an historical sketch of how West African societies and the rest of the world have engaged in trading money for slaves and raw commodities for centuries. I concur that societal multiplicity can indeed be seen as lying at the root of the global monetary system with its multiple currencies. However, my analysis offers three criticisms: First, the multiplicity project fails to give adequate attention to hierarchies in general and to those that come with monetary relations in particular. Second, Because of the existence of the world market, there is always a global and hierarchical sphere that is non-identical to societies and transcends their interaction. Third, money as both global and multiple relation points at the need for a more dynamic understanding of ‘society’ as political and economic borders do not necessarily map unto each other.     

Is human organ donation a human rights issue: An exploratory study

Abstract

This paper proposed a new model of psychosocial stress in the light of changing social norms and value orientation. It is argued that the prevalent psychosocial distress underscores the emergence of psychopathy in everyday life. In today's world, psychopathy is becoming a norm and is sustained by social and political institutions. The article discusses the consequent crisis of psychology in Russia and the United States. A need to develop a unifying science with less rigid professional and disciplinary boundaries is highlighted.     

Utilizing International Clinical Practice to Build Inter-Cultural Sensitivity in Social Work Students

ABSTRACT

This paper describes an international clinical internship that uses a developmental model to build inter-cultural sensitivity in baccalaureate social work students. The paper analyzes the stages students go through as they struggle to develop a bi-cultural professional perspective. This model adheres to the position that cross cultural practice in a multicultural world not only conforms to the emerging picture of life in the United States, but is also in accord with the values of social work.     

Nations Rebound?: Crossing Borders in a Gated Globe

This article engages critically with the proposal that flow, fluidity, and mobility are the central and organizing features of globalization. By focusing on the growing obstacles that people- most of them from poorer nations- encounter as they attempt to cross national borders, I explore global interconnection and mobility as stratified and highly regulated. My adoption of crossing borders as a central analytic grows out of a broader discussion within border studies about the problematic way in which "crossings" have been used, namely in cultural studies and Border Theory. This article therefore explores crossing borders as moments in which differences can be powerfully reinforced and opportunities for transnationality systematically denied. Here, I attempt to look at the transnational as occurring within established structures of power (a militarized border) and probe the politics of "border crossings" by focusing on a group of social movement actors as they contest the state's authority to organize and manage movement across its southern border. In this analysis I attempt to frame the United States-Mexico border as a "diagnostic" site where anthropologists can study the dynamics of power and flows across global landscapes in the context of specific political fields and histories. Consequently, this line of analysis leads to a different set of metaphors for globalization-one rooted not so much in an iconography of a world in ceaseless motion, but in an image of a "gated globe."     

The Devil is in the Details: Self-Neglect in Australia

ABSTRACT

Although elder self-neglect is of significant concern to adult protective service (APS) workers in the United States, minimal research has been conducted on this topic in Australia. Using qualitative research methods, this article examines how 24 Australian professionals understand situations of self-neglect. Unlike in the United States, where the term self-neglect is used in a broad and all-encompassing manner, participants in this research differentiated among self-neglect (the neglect of self), squalor (extreme neglect of environment), collecting (the accumulation of certain objects), and hoarding (the inability to throw objects away). It is argued that separating out the various behaviors that are classified under the broad umbrella of neglect can be useful in fostering reflective interventions in these situations.     

After the transnational turn: Looking across borders to see the hard face of the nation-state

This paper leverages the repressive turn in U.S. migration policy to understand how a cross-border perspective can illuminate the experiences of two different, but contemporaneous second-generation populations: Those whose lives have unfurled in the United States, all the while growing up in internationalized families with ongoing homeland ties; and those whose childhoods began in the United States, but were disrupted as part of the ‘Great Expulsion’, and thus migrated to Mexico, albeit often with U.S. citizenship and almost always with cross-border ties to family members still living in the United States. As the paper demonstrates, looking across borders highlights the importance of the territorial frontier and the continuing power of the national to undermine the forces that produce cross-border connections.     

Introduction: Mobilities and Enclosures at Borders

Our central agenda is to rethink the concept of movement in anthropology and other social sciences. We do this through two themes-mobilities and enclosures-both of which draw our attention to power and its diverse outcomes, especially at borders. Enclosure addresses processes that delimit and restrict the movement of specific goods, people, and ideas, while mobilities concern processes that enable and induce such movements. Consideration of these themes breaks with theoretical tendencies that celebrate unbounded movement, and instead focuses us on the political-economic processes by which people, nature, commodities, and knowledge are bounded, emplaced, and allowed or forced to move. Mobilities and enclosures are plural, favoring close-grained ethnographic studies. They involve unequal rights and powers, demanding precision about the political implications of movements of various sorts. This introduction situates these themes in recent border studies and social theory more generally and summarizes how the authors in this special issue advance scholarship on these matters.     

Jewish lesbians: New work in the field

Abstract

This introduction provides an overview of the field of Jewish lesbian studies, particularly in the United States and the English-speaking world. The author looks at the opening of the field of Jewish lesbian feminist work and then explores ways in which Jewish lesbians have been active in religious and spiritual initiatives, the arts, politics and history, as well as academic and organizational life, and matters of exclusion.     

Retirement Income Security in the United States of America

Abstract

Population aging in the United States poses a challenge for the present and coming generations: how to financially support the growing numbers of retired people? There is also a need to explore the potential for conflict across generations if young people see themselves as funding a system that may not be able to support them fully when they are older. This paper explores this intergenerational dimension and suggests that such stories of potential conflict are not borne out by research.     

The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Response to Peak Oil

ABSTRACT

After the two-fold crises of the liberal world order in the first decade of the twenty-first century, including the debacle of the Global War on Terror and the global financial crisis around 2008, we are witnessing a combined crisis of US hegemony and the transnational moment, along with the explosion of populism across the Atlantic world. In this context, this research not only analyses how the United States has designed and maintained the liberal interstate order and globalization but also the way the hegemon proactively starts to destroy its cross-national project today. Therefore, I aim to fathom the future of globalization by interrogating the current US state's key strategies that express America's changing national identity and self-role conception under shifting structural imperatives from unipolarity to the emerging multipolar world.     

Impact of Culture on Lactation Policies: The Case of United States and Liberia

ABSTRACT

Programs or policies that are effective in reducing social problems have several things in common: They acknowledge the realities of culture, respect the sociocultural underpinnings of the community, and are often built on an innovative understanding of the issues. Policies that are created without regard for the culture in which they are to operate are destined to fail. This study discusses cultural attributes of different motivations, benefits, and approaches to breast-feeding, depending on the development of their infrastructure, scientific understanding, reliance on myths to understand their environment, and social norms. It argues that in some cases ignorance and lack of scientific information result in policies (both formal and informal) that negatively impact breast-feeding, whereas in other cases cultural or social norms drive policy decisions. Three examples of policies that impact breast-feeding negatively are discussed in this article. Two of them relate to developing nations and the third occurred in the United States, although it could also occur anywhere people lack basic information about the impact of hormones on normal human physiology and human sexual response.     

Race and Place in the Adaptation of Mariel Exiles*

The influx of lower class émigrés during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift complicates the “success story” image of previous waves of Cuban exiles to the United States. Examination of Mariel exiles in terms of racial variation in adaptation does not exist; nor is analysis of the geographic distribution and internal migration of Mariel Cubans within the United States represented. Mariel exiles maneuver along distinguishable paths of adaptation as evidenced by patterns of settlement and geographical mobility. I argue that place is a necessary ingredient in illuminating diverse adjustment experiences among immigrants and refugees in the United States.

相似文献   

A Comparison of Spanish and American Housing Policy Frameworks Addressing Housing for the Elderly

Abstract

Housing policies in Spain and die United States have important similarities and dissimilarities mat affect housing for the elderly. Spain, even more so than me United States, promotes homeownership. Bom countries face significant challenges in addressing the housing needs of the elderly, particularly those challenges associated wim aging in place. The paper reviews me broader housing policy frameworks in bom countries in order to understand me context for elderly housing policy. The paper identifies lessons from the American experience mat can expand housing policies in Spain.     

Strangers to and Producers of Their Own Culture: American Popular Culture and Turkish Young People

Abstract

American popular culture is virtually everywhere, including Turkey. Turkey is a close ally of the United States and American cultural products have long been present in Turkey. How does the presence of American popular culture in Turkey affect young people? Employing a series of focus groups comprised of Turkish university students, we explored the meanings they attach to American popular culture and the place it has in their lives. What emerged was a portrait of Turkish young people constructing themselves and their imaginations from a multiplicity of traditions, including American, into an ever changing, shifting whole. The Turkish young people in this study seem to exemplify this as they blend their lives, not always easily or smoothly, around Turkish, American, European and numerous other cultures.     

A Postmodern Perspective on Black Suicides in the United States

Abstract

This paper offers an alternative explanation to the rationalist perspective of black suicides in the United States. It assumes a deconstructionist approach, offering the proposition that the social construction of reality in the black community is such that suicide among blacks occurs at a far greater number than their quantitative measures reveal.

The postmodern turn is far more interpretive in placing the reality of black suicide in context than the modernist language of Durkheim and others. The postmodern turn suggests that there is more to black suicides in the United States than meets the eye-more, in that the word, suicide, carries “traces” of other words and texts. Social workers, as enablers and facilitators, must grasp the significance of this social reconstruction if they are to have an impact upon the intertextual nature of black suicides.     

Developing Diversity Competence in Child Welfare and Permanency Planning

ABSTRACT

The vision of the pluralistic society of the 1960s relied on the recognition of differences rather than on assimilation. Pluralism held that finally, in America, minorities did not need to melt and adopt the norms of the majority. But the cultural pluralistic perspective has been strongly questioned since the 1990s. Concerns have been raised about whether the alteration of power relations in the United States can be achieved civilly. This article examines the value of long-held assumptions about the common core and explores the desirability of building on it for the next millennium. It moves beyond traditional perspectives of the common core and proposes the notion of a transcul-tural citizen who might be able to move with ease between cultures, whether within the confines of the United States or on a more global level. Illustrations from the United States and abroad are given. Lessons for social work in Europe and America are drawn.