ACTIVE AGEING IN THE UK-ISSUES,BARRIERS, POLICY DIRECTIONS

Active ageing is defined as allowing people to remain independent and achieve their potential regardless of age. However, age is also a device used widely in society for assigning or taking away responsibilities, allocating resources or determining access to services on age grounds, or as a proxy for mental and physical well being. This paper is one of several prepared by the Active Age consortium funded by the European Union to undertake a review of the institutional framework in each participant country and how this shapes policies towards older people, including the barriers and opportunities affecting active ageing1 1. Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Switzerland and the UK. The aims are to identify policy goals, policy instruments, and institutional mechanisms of current active ageing policy agendas in each country. It considers not only public policies, but also includes some ageing initiatives from other sectors. View all notes. The expected outcome of this phase of research is a comprehensive overview of active ageing strategies in Europe, including barriers to active ageing, as well as a map of the socio-institutional and political landscape in which active ageing policies operate. This paper argues that the UK is quite well advanced in preparing and defining policies, but that some of the high public profile is as a result not of ageing as such, but issues arising in specific areas such as employment, education, pensions, health and health care.     

Jordan's Principle and Indigenous Children with Disabilities in Canada: Jurisdiction,Advocacy, and Research

This article discusses Indigenous¹¹In this article, the terms Indigenous, First Nations, Aboriginal, and Treaty Indian are used interchangeably, and as needed to describe the political reality of the First Peoples of Canada. children with disabilities in Canada and examines their experiences with federal and provincial jurisdictional and funding disputes. It explores Canada's adversarial legal and policy techniques to delay implementation and funding of Jordan's Principle, a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal action seeking to address the delays, and the recommendations of a recent independent Canadian research project. Finally, it suggests ways to advance Jordan's Principle in Canada and elsewhere.     

“SOCIOECONOMIC DIVERSITY IS OVERRATED”: WHITE ATTITUDES ON RACE AND CLASS IN A RACIALLY INTEGRATED NEIGHBORHOOD

This article investigates homeowners' perceptions of race and class within a racially integrated neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. Forty-two semi-structured interviews were completed with 59 white homeowners between September 2005 and September 2006. Adding a social class component to Bonilla-Silva's (2006 ——— . 2006 . Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, , 2nd edition . Lanham , MD : Rowman & Littlefield . [Google Scholar]) color-blind racism perspective, I ask if white homeowners in a racially-integrated neighborhood accept a color-blind worldview, or if they have an alternate framework for understanding race. Akin to O'Brien's antiracists (2001 Bonilla-Silva , Eduardo. 2001 . White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era . Boulder , CO : Lynne Rienner Publishers . [Google Scholar]), there was a range of rejection of color-blindness, from selective to reflexive race cognizance. Most homeowners recognized the institutional basis of racial inequality and their own white privilege. However, many conflated race and class and argued that it was really class differences that caused racial differences. While many supported more racial integration, most rejected class integration in the neighborhood. This paradoxical set of attitudes will most likely continue to be an obstacle to the maintenance of racially integrated neighborhoods.     

Children's Development as Participation in Everyday Practices across Different Institutions

Children participate in different institutional collectives in their everyday life. Home, school, and kindergarten are the institutional contexts that most children share. Although there are variations between home practices and school practices, they collectively share a common core framed by societal conditions. In drawing upon Vygotsky's (1998) Vygotsky, L. S. 1998. The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (M. J. Hall, Trans., Vol. 5, Child Psychology), New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.  [Google Scholar] theory of the social situation of development and Hedegaard's (2009) Hedegaard, M. 2009. “Children's development from a cultural-historical approach: Children's activity in everyday local settings as foundation for their development”. In Mind, Culture, and Activity Vol. 16, 64–82. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] theory of development conceptualised as the child's participation within and across several institutions at the same time, it has been possible to examine how school practices influence home practice and the child's social situation of development. A case study of an Australian child's participation across different institutions (family and school) was undertaken to capture and analyse the dynamic processes through which development was afforded. In the case study there was a large disjunction between institutional practices of the home and school that the child had to negotiate. Due to teacher knowledge of only the child's relation to the school institution, and not the home institution, the affordances for development and the child's changing relations to his environment, were invisible to the educators in this study. The findings suggest foregrounding an understanding of children's development as changes in children's activities and thereby changing their relations to reality across institutional practices in order to support a broader view of development in early childhood education.     

Princess of Networks: Lisa Baraitser's Object-Oriented Maternities

This response to Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009 Baraitser , L. ( 2009 ). Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption . London , UK, and New York, NY : Routledge . [Google Scholar]) puts the book in conversation with recent speculative realist thinking and object-oriented philosophies. Drawing on the democratizing onticology of Levi Bryant, Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy, Ian Bogost's alien phenomenology, and Jane Bennett's political ecology of matter, I argue that Baraitser develops a “vibrant maternality” and an object-oriented feminism that gives nonhuman actants their due in a constellation of relations between maternal subjects and the objects they encounter.     

El discurso literario como análisis social. El ejemplo de Nieve de Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow 1 1. English version by Maureen Freely (2004). View all notes uses fiction as an instrument of social analysis. It attempts to comprehend the complicated situation contemporary Turkish society is exposed to in consequence of its persisting efforts on behalf of modernization, which is a key condition for its future integration into the European Community. This process, initiated almost 90 years ago by Kemal Atatürk, finds itself opposed to the tenacity of both an ethnically multiform traditional culture and religious fundamentalism as strong ideological elements of distortion and violence within changing social relations and structures. The first part of the article discusses the sociological interest in a hermeneutic analysis of the contents and structures of communication as they are reflected in some of the most significant dialogues between Pamuk's actors. The text highlights the conflictive background of the cultural drama in the bosom of Turkish society. The second part interprets the literary treatment based on the political and sociological analysis by S.N. Eisenstadt (1987) and Gokhan Bacik (2003), which focused on the present situation of the Kemalist movement and its discourse in spite of the transformation of Muslim identity in Turkey.     

The National Association of Manufacturers' Community Relations Short Film Your Town: Parable,Propaganda, and Big Individualism

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) faced growing antibusiness sentiment. In 1940, as part of a widespread propaganda campaign to assuage public concerns about industry and rehabilitate big business's reputation, NAM created and distributed the community relations short film, Your Town. The movie, pursuing an integration propaganda strategy, appealed to Americans' individualistic values by portraying industry as a beneficent fellow traveler who was a big individual—a heroic, larger-than-life figure who could make the land profitable and guard the citizenry against evil, antibusiness influences. Applying Vogler's (1997) synthesis of Campbell's (1949 Campbell , J. ( 1949 ). The hero with a thousand faces . Princeton , NJ : University Press . [Google Scholar]) heroic narrative form, this article shows that NAM's portrayal of industry as a hero has continued to resonate with strains of contemporary American thought that (a) sees business as the foundation for societal progress and stability and (b) conceptualizes the corporate entity as a person. Finally, this study finds that, although the language of corporate personhood has been implied in organizational community relations rhetoric for at least six decades, more recent events reveal a public that is more circumspect about the beneficence of the corporate persona.     

With/Out a State,Kurds Rising: The Un/Stated Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq

Abstract

Located in northern Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) rules over an autonomous province in Iraq. Constitutionally, ‘Kurdistan Region’ is not independent, but empirically the KRG behaves as if it is a sovereign entity. With an elected parliament, a president, a prime minister, a cabinet, a flag, a national anthem, schools taught in Kurdish, and a booming economy, the ‘Kurdistan’ embodied by the KRG clearly exists empirically while unrecognized internationally. In this paper, I examine the rise of the KRG as an agent in international relations since the first Gulf War in 1991. I argue that foreign policy as a field of conduct and discourse has been central to the KRG's effective agency. In my analysis, I employ and interrelate Robert Jackson's work on ‘quasi-states’, Doug McAdam's argument on ‘political opportunity structures', and Giorgio Agamben's discussion on ‘indistinct zones of politics’ as in Iraq and the Middle East. Ultimately, I contend that while less than a full state in constitutional legal form, the KRG is more than a quasi-state in substance.¹1 See the official site of KRG at: http://cabinet.gov.krd/?l=12     

No child left behind

The No Child Left Behind Act (U.S. Department of Education 2002 U.S. Department Of Education 2002 No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (PL 107–110) Washington D.C. U.S. Department of Education http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html, (accessed 1 July 2004)  [Google Scholar]) has inadvertently engendered literacy programs that are often inappropriate or incompatible with young children's development. It overlooks children's need to access their many intelligences, especially those that enable them to negotiate between and among symbol systems. Inherent in its focus on “scientifically based research to inform their classroom” (Center on Education Policy 2004 Center On Education Policy 2004 Title I funds: Who's gaining, who's losing & why by T. W. Fagan & N. L. Kober Washington D.C. Center on Education Policy  [Google Scholar], 7), is an emphasis on “a standardized, explicit, and systematic approach to teaching reading to students at risk of reading failure” (Manzo 2004 Manzo, KK. 2004, 4 February. Reading programs bear similarities across states. Education Week, 1: 13 [Google Scholar]). Yet, numerous theorists recommend that young learners, especially those that are challenged due to learning disabilities, or cultural or economic diversity, can learn best by using alternative symbol systems that match their “stronger intelligences.” Premier among these “alternative symbol systems” are the arts. This article addresses the issues associated with No Child Left Behind Act and the educational implications of its repudiation of the arts in the literacy development of young learners.     

Masculinities and the Aesthetics of Love: Reading Terrorism in De Niro's Game and Paradise Now

This article examines Rawi Hage's (2006 Hage , R. ( 2006 ). De Niro's Game . Toronto , Ontario , Canada : House of Anansi Press . [Google Scholar]) De Niro's Game and Hany Abu-Assad's (2005) Paradise Now for their capacity to give us insight into the meanings of racialized masculinities. Neither text represents a very consoling picture of men in war and conflict, but they have a great deal to teach us about the fragility that underpins masculinity in volatile political contexts. Indeed, they give us insight into the affective realities of racial traumas that inhabit our constructions of identity, ideological positionalities, and cultural representation. Inspired by Frantz Fanon's (1952 Fanon , F. ( 1952 ). Black Skin, White Masks . New York , NY : Grove Press, 1967 . [Google Scholar]) plea for a new humanism and Paul Gilroy's (2005 ——— . ( 2005 ). Postcolonial Melancholia . New York , NY : Columbia University Press . [Google Scholar]) assertion that we attend to and politicize human suffering, I propose a psychoanalytic aesthetics of loss as a model for understanding and renewing cultural and political life. My method demands that we recognize that aesthetic cultural texts have an emotional source and that “being touched” by affect might teach us how to become better readers of our time.     

THE COMMUNITIES WE ARE REGAINING BUT NEED TO LOSE

Michael Young and Gerard Lemos’ (1997 Young, M. and Lemos, G. 1997. The communities we have lost and can regain, London: Lemos and Crane.  [Google Scholar]) text The communities we have lost and can regain has had a substantial influence on New Labour's communitarian thinking. This paper critically examines a specific aspect of New Labour's communitarian agenda, namely, its use of public housing policy to rebuild communities in order to combat social exclusion on so-called ‘sink estates’. The paper is presented in four main parts. The first part of the paper discusses how, why and to what extent ‘community’ has been lost, with particular reference to public housing estates. The second part examines why community rebuilding is now seen as the solution to the problems caused by the loss of community on public housing estates and, to this end, pays particular attention to the communitarian values that underpin New Labour's third way. The third part of the paper examines some empirical studies of community in order to highlight the key characteristics of ‘community’ and thereby develop a critical understanding of what New Labour are currently seeking to achieve. The fourth part of the paper juxtaposes this discussion of ‘community’ with a discussion of emerging socio-economic trends that have been identified in the literature on late modernity and globalization. By highlighting emerging socio-economic trends such as residential mobility into the community debate, the paper concludes by criticizing the policy of community building as ‘good for you’. Our key point is that community building restricts the residential mobility of poorer households and exacerbates (rather than combats) their social exclusion because a key indicator of social inclusion is their ability to take advantage of the social, cultural and economic opportunities that so often exist ‘elsewhere’.     

Institutional processes of organizational culture

Queries into the creation of collective meaning through social processes arise in both organization culture and institutional theory. This paper applies DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983 DiMaggio, P.J. and Powell, W.W. 1983. The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48: 147–60. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) three isomorphic processes (mimetic, normative and coercive) from institutional theory to re‐think how structural and dynamic aspects of culture become nested, taken‐for‐granted and transmitted. We consider both acquiescence and resistance to isomorphic pressures in an effort to understand cultural persistence and transmission, forms of resistance to culture, change, the role of sub‐cultures and power usage through Oliver’s (1992 Oliver, C. 1992. The antecedents of de‐institutionalization. Organization Studies, 13: 563–88. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) de‐institutionalization thesis. Our purpose in applying isomorphic processes to organizational culture is to offer another layer of understanding enhanced by the growing body of research in institutional theory, bridge one division between micro and macro theory and provide some suggestions for future research.     

Samson Now,an Introduction

In this introduction to the group of essays that follows by Sam Gerson, Jean-Max Gaudillière, Miri Rozmarin, and Udi Aloni, I trace the inspiration for this project, a collective contemplation of the figure of the biblical Samson using as its springboard David Grossman's book about Samson, Lion's Honey (2005 Grossman , D. ( 2005 ). Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson . New York , NY : Canongate . [Google Scholar]). I write about how the project emerged out of my work with a patient who recommended Grossman's book to me and my effort to grapple with the dilemmas of familial and collective loyalties that transpired as a core aspect our joint endeavor. How does one let go of one's child, in life or in transference? And what kind of letting go should, on the other hand, be resisted? How can we think about this conundrum of freedom and responsibility? This is the crucial clinical and ethical concern underlying the collection of essays published here.     

The Power of the Vulnerable Body

Abstract

Through a critical Agambean reading of aging Finland's care deficit, I argue that the human body is politically powerful in its “bare” vulnerability. Even in feminist care theory, however, the neediness of the body is barely recognized as political. This is somewhat paradoxical, given that the vulnerable body is discursively deeply feminized. Thus, through a deconstructive reading of feminist care theory and Joan Tronto's (1993 Tronto, J. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York and London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) ethics of care in particular, I argue for a new political understanding of care, defined as a corporeal relation. In this conception, the political dimensions of care are no longer understood in terms of work or the moral dispositions enabled by caring, as the existing literature largely suggests. Rather, the political relevance of care is seen as departing from that which makes the work of care an absolute necessity: namely, the needy body that belongs to each and every one of us. Through its neediness, the vulnerable body exposes itself as a constant opening of the political, the recognition of which also leads to an alternative type of ethics.     

Generating Dynamic Democratic Discussions: An Analysis of Teaching With U.S. Presidential Debates

Researchers have found that when young people participate in discussions of controversial political issues, they often become more politically engaged and informed (Hess, 2009 Hess, Diana E. (2009). Controversy in the classroom: The democratic power of discussion. New York, NY: Routledge.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Nonetheless, some educators avoid fostering such discussions because they can become heated and distract from academic learning (Hess, 2002 Hess, Diana E. (2002). Discussing controversial public issues in secondary social studies classrooms: Learning from skilled teachers. Theory &; Research in Social Education, 30(1), 10–41.[Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). Presidential elections, including the highly publicized debates, provide substantial material for discussions of major national and international issues, but no published research has examined how educators can leverage these events to generate productive civic learning experiences. In this article, we analyze data collected in seven high school classrooms during the 2012 presidential election to examine the challenges and opportunities associated with generating substantive, dynamic discussions of presidential debates. Our findings indicate that students enjoyed learning about candidates' different perspectives and that certain strategies were especially helpful for fostering substantive discussions: (a) scaffolding students' preparation for discussion; (b) providing opportunities for students to address open-ended questions; (c) redirecting students' engagement in competitive, interpersonal dynamics to learning about public issues; and (d) countering students' partisan tendencies. We discuss implications for practice and research and present a conceptual framework for generating dynamic, substantive democratic discussions.     

EXPECTATIONS RELATING TO CHILDCARE AMONG FRENCH AND SWEDISH FAMILIES

This paper investigates how policy and values interrelate concerning expectations of childcare based on 80 interviews with 40 families with young children from France and Sweden, respectively. Upbringing, learning and socialization are important expectations among French parents. The results presented here are in line with educational goals that may have been influenced by policy. The findings suggest that France may, in terms of expectations on childcare, still belong to the conservative cluster as categorized by Esping-Andersen (1990 Esping-Andersen, G. 1990. The three worlds of welfare capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press.  [Google Scholar]), although family policy may differ from that of, for example, Germany and Italy in the same cluster. Swedish parents stress the importance of the individual child as well as pedagogy, thus, indicating compatibility between a parental wish for the individual development of the child and an emphasis on collective care in Swedish family policy.     

Community-Based Participatory Research as a Social Work Research and Intervention Approach

Social workers are now often expected to base their practice on solid empirical findings, but research can vary in terms of its usefulness and relevance to practice. Some social workers have criticized traditional research approaches, suggesting that they are not consistent with the profession's mission to serve vulnerable and disadvantaged populations (e.g., Finn, 1994 Finn, J. L. 1994. The promise of participatory research. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 5: 25–42. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). Community-based participatory action research may be an appropriate alternative that is participatory, empowering, and committed to social justice (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2008 Minkler, M. and Wallerstein, N. 2008. “Introduction to CBPR: New issues and emphases”. In Community-based participatory research for health, 2nd, Edited by: Minkler, M. and Wallerstein, N. 5–23. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.  [Google Scholar]). This article explores the connection between social work and CBPR, illustrating how CBPR can contribute significantly to achieving the field's goals.     

Intersectionality,Multiple Messages,and Complex Causality: Commentary on Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins

In this article I approach gender, sexuality, and race as analytical concepts and intersectionality as an analytical framework for examining the relations between these concepts and the context within which they operate. Issues of complex causality make the disentangling of messages communicated by symbolic and everyday acts susceptible to oversimplification and paralysis of political action. Intersectionality addresses many of the pitfalls featured among intractable political problems such as racism. Patricia Hill Collins's provocative book Black Sexual Politics (2005) Collins, P. H. 2005. Black Sexual Politics, New York: Routledge.  [Google Scholar] proposes an alternative lens, that of the “new racism,” and I interrogate the utility of both frames for the analysis of African American popular culture and sexuality in the 21st century.     

Whither the Blank Slate? A Report on the Reception of Evolutionary Biological Ideas among Sociological Theorists

Sociologists have drawn considerable criticism over the years for their failure to integrate evolutionary biological principles in their work. Critics such as Stephen Pinker (2002 Pinker , Steven. 2002 . The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature . New York : Penguin Books . [Google Scholar]) have popularized the notion that sociologists adhere dogmatically to a “blank slate” or cultural determinist view of the human mind and social behavior. This report assesses whether sociologists indeed ascribe to such a blank slate view. Drawing from a survey of 155 sociological theorists, we find the field about evenly divided over the applicability of evolutionary reasoning to a range of human tendencies. Although there are signs of a shift toward greater openness to evolutionary biological ideas, sociologists are least receptive to evolutionary accounts of human sex differences. Echoing earlier research, we find political identity to be a significant predictor of sociologists' receptiveness. We close by cautioning our colleagues against sociological reductionism and we speculate about the blank slate's political-psychological appeal to liberal-minded social scientists.