Environmental hazards and home loss: The social construction of becoming homeless

Home loss due to landslides is a recurrent phenomenon in unstable lands in Caracas, Venezuela, where poor people help themselves by building their precarious homes. The social construction of becoming homeless in such situations was studied through in-depth interviews with 27 adults who lost their homes due to a landslide. The main topics brought up by the interviewees included the meaning of their homes, the impact of having lost them, the impact on their sense of family, the meaning of having become homeless and remaining indefinitely as such, and attribution of responsibilities for the disaster and for solutions to their homelessness. We present an analysis of some of the psychosocial processes related to these topics, as well as some ideas derived from the interpretation of the information gathered regarding risk prevention and the conception of homelessness.     

Awareness of Self—A Critical Tool

This paper discusses the applications of self-awareness to all levels of clinical practice, and the urgency for its development in social work students; self-reflectiveness builds clinical competence, can prevent boundary violations and burnout, and offers protection against client violence. It is a basic cornerstone for the development of the professional self, which is the foundation for evolving professional maturation. Students need guidance in becoming aware of how their own feelings, attitudes, and relationships with clients are major factors in the helping process in all service settings, and further, that helping others is in itself a process. Students are generally idealistic, and wish to ease suffering, without understanding the obstacles to be overcome, nor how they themselves would be involved in the process. Social work education, dominated by cognitive-behavioral theories and evidence-based treatments, reinforces students' own tendencies to offer advice and to provide the ‘right solution’ to clients' problems. Educational recommendations for developing self-reflectiveness include: reclaiming psychodynamic theories; emphasizing self-awareness academically and in the field; utilizing process recording; and providing special educational opportunities such as video labs and observational experiences.     

THE HI/STORIES OF HONG KONG

This paper examines the formation of modernity in three colonialist epics of Hong Kong and the recent historical and fictional works that aim to rewrite the history of the ‘local’. Adopting a challenge-response structure, the paper argues that the colonialist epics construct a monolithic discourse of modernity-as-progress via the amnesia of conflicts, tensions, and processes of domination and negotiation in the rural and everyday space of colonial Hong Kong. It is stressed that to piece together the above anomalies is not an attempt to restore a pre-given ‘native’ to but rather an endeavour to examine how the ‘local’ as divergent historical agents shaped and has been shaped by the political, social, and economic environment of Hong Kong and the larger world outside. This can be called a model of dialectics composed of an internal dialectic and a dialectic of articulation. In this regard, with the benefit of the rapprochement of history and anthropology and a non-linear view of history, this paper is a historical bricolage of the anomalous history of Hong Kong, aiming to destabilize the Hong Kong historical grand narrative. Through rethinking the impact of the colonial experience, this paper hopes to liberate alterity and diversity in historical interpretations and imaginations.     

Depression and Parenting by Nonoffending Mothers of Children Who Experienced Sexual Abuse

Parenting may be one mechanism by which depression in nonoffending mothers impacts child emotional and behavioral adjustment after sexual abuse. This study examined the relationship between self-reported maternal depression and parenting behaviors by nonoffending mothers of children who experienced sexual abuse. The participants were 204 nonoffending biological mother–child pairs recruited from a clinic providing services for children who experienced sexual abuse. The mothers completed pretreatment self-report measures of demographic information, depression, and parenting behaviors. Children (7 to 17 years) completed a measure of mothers’ parenting behaviors. Mothers with clinically high levels of self-reported depression employed more inconsistent parenting behavior and provided poorer monitoring/supervision of their children than mothers without clinically high levels of self-reported depression. Implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed.     

The influence of donors on cross class social movements: same sex marriage and trans rights campaigns in New York State

ABSTRACT

New York State’s largest gay rights organization, the Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA), won significant legislative victories, including the legalization of same sex marriage in 2011. Yet ESPA was never able to mount comparable efforts for its long-standing commitment to transgender rights before disbanding in 2015, despite the fact that marriage equality was less widely supported than transgender rights in ESPA’s own public opinion polling. In-depth interviews reveal that ESPA was constrained by the class and personal interests of its affluent major donors, mainly high-income gay white men. The organization’s abrupt closure provided an unusual opportunity to research the often secret topic of major donor influence, as frustrated former staff were willing to be frank in interviews. ESPA was only able to successfully campaign on issues that were especially compelling for these donors, and was forced to close when its legislative agenda diverged from their interests. This case suggests class interests and access to resources shape the causal impact of collective identities on social movement dynamics.