‘My master and Miss … warn’t nothing but poor white trash’: poor white slaveholders and their slaves in the antebellum South

While the majority of enslaved people lived on large plantations, there were a significant minority who lived on smaller farms where they and their families were the only slaves owned by their master (or mistress). This article uses 22 Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews conducted in the 1930s with former slaves from across the South to investigate the lives of enslaved people living with masters or mistresses that they described as ‘poor’, and argues that enslaved experiences on small farms owned by poor whites varied widely, but were marked particularly by violence, material deprivation, and intense loneliness.     

International Academic Mobility in Chinese Academia: Opportunities and Challenges

International academic mobility is an important dimension of the internationalization of higher education institutions, which aims to enact practical changes in economies and societies. Although many studies have investigated the mobility of international students, the mobility of international academics has been less investigated, particularly in the context of mainland China. This qualitative study explores the experience of international academics in Chinese academia. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with twenty-six international academics from different countries, working at different universities in Beijing. Through a four-stage systematic analysis, the study shows that international academics’ engagement with mobility in Chinese academia can be characterized by a combination of gains and losses. This article explores how international academics view Chinese academia as either resourceful or restrictive for their academic career. It then discusses the hidden narratives concerning the challenges that international academics face in relation to mobility.     

Social work supervision of young people

This paper summarizes findings on 50 teenagers supervised by local authority social services (work) departments. Interviews were held with social workers, young people and parents at the start of intervention and about a year later. Pre-tests and post-tests were also used to complement other statistical and qualitative data. After identifying the main reasons for the teenagers being on formal or informal supervision, the paper moves on to discuss the process, content and outcome of supervision as perceived by each of the three key actors. It also outlines what the young people and their parents found positive and helpful about supervision. Finally the paper demonstrates that forms of help and control need not be opposites and that social workers can help some very troubled teenagers. However, in order for services to have an impact, they have to be deployed as part of a package rather than as alternatives.     

Mending the Levee: How Supernaturally Anchored Conceptions of the Person Impact on Trauma Perception and Healing among Children (Cases from Madagascar and Nepal)

When dealing with children and youth who experience distressing events, psychosocial diagnostics and healing programmes principally resort to biomedical models. Children are often viewed as individualised ‘victims’ suffering from trauma and ‘in need’ of outside help. Highlighting case studies from Madagascar and Nepal, this article argues that the biomedical approach to trauma would be strengthened by a concomitant analysis of social networks, including the perceived relations with the supernatural. The various tandems of family and kin relationships, the living and the dead, constitute not only a social ‘levee’ breached by distressing events, but also the locus around which social relations are rebuilt.     

Epistemic authority and the gender lens

Researching ‘hidden’ forms of social inequality such as gender often poses particular challenges. Not least of these is how to uncover such dimensions of social life whilst preserving the perspectives of research participants, who may not consider such matters relevant to their lives, particularly if other forms of identity or oppression are more prominent for them. Here, I reflect on these issues in the context of researching user involvement in mental health services from a feminist perspective. I show how ‘uncovering’ gender and other forms of social inequality in the field was aided through adopting a wide analytical lens focusing on power, along with reflexivity and openness in discussing my own political analysis and commitments in relation to the study area with the researched. I also describe how I attempted to resolve the epistemological‐ethical issues involved through conceptualising these in terms of ‘situatedness’ and gender salience and adopting a feminist standpoint which emphasised what researchers can, and indeed should, bring to the research enterprise. Related issues of power and empowerment in the research process are discussed.     

The Creation of a Shared Space through Fantasy between a Seven Year Old Child and his Therapist: A Case Study

This paper applies self psychological and intersubjectivity theories to the in-depth understanding and treatment of a seven-year-old boy with a history of severe trauma. From the beginning, this patient’s primary mode of communication was through fantasies with the therapist who participated in their creation. The jointly-created fantasies gradually contributed to the transformation of the patient’s bleak inner world. The creation and sharing of the fantasies became an enlivening experience for both members of the therapeutic dyad.