Serials from the Other Side: An Editorial Perspective on Current Trends in Scholarly Communication

The panel session for the 22nd North Carolina Serials Conference brought together perspectives from current and former journal editors about their careers and changes in the publishing industry. Moderated by Patricia Hudson, David Goldfield discussed his experience with the Journal of Urban History; Elaine Hubal talked about her experience with the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology; and Priscilla Wald discussed her experience as editor of American Literature. A question and answer session followed the presentation.     

Critical reflection workshops and knowledge exchange: findings from a Scottish project

In 2013, academics from a Scottish university came together with social work managers and practitioners from two local authorities (LAs) in Scotland to run a knowledge exchange (KE) project co‐sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council and the LAs. The project's aim was an ambitious one: to contribute to culture change in the children and families' departments in the two partner agencies. The project grew out of an earlier KE venture that had explored ways of engaging better with involuntary service users in social work; it thus both anticipated and reflected wider concerns about services for children that were also demonstrated in Munro's Review of Child Protection. The KE project had three components: training for managers, practitioner research projects and critical reflection workshops. Whether, and to what degree, the KE project changed culture is not the focus of this paper, which is written jointly by academic researchers and practitioners. Instead, one element of the KE project, namely the critical reflection workshops, is discussed. Findings provide strong evidence of the pressures currently experienced by children and families' services in the UK public sector. They also indicate how important good relationships are in building meaningful KE.     

Becoming Flexible: Self-flexibility and its Pedagogies

Much of the debate on flexibility has remained at a stubbornly macro, demographic level without looking closely at individual attempts to become more flexible. This paper argues that the debate on flexibility has been dominated by attention to the structural side, looking at flexi-time and part-time contracting, for example, to the neglect of what we call self-flexibility through self-reflexivity and self-transformation. The paper begins to redress this imbalance drawing upon two different cases which examine specific forms of self-flexibility: feedback and personal malleability and risk-taking through experiential learning. Drawing upon sociological research, we seek to examine critically the ways in which self-flexibilities are taken up and pursued by employees in their attempts to remain employable and their gendered implications.     

Graduate education: A bridge between two worlds

This essay is written from the perspective of a doctoral student in sociology who through experience became aware of a critical gap between worlds of practice and academia. My experiences reconfirm the view that applied and academic orientations are not antithetical but rather complimentary components of a realistic and integrated view of society. The pro-active position of this essay states that a student who sincerely seeks a comprehensive education will take the responsibility of seeking exposure to a broad range of opportunities which will provide the skills and insights necessary to contribute substantially to the future of sociology.     

Wherein Lie the “Secrets of Life”?: An Argument Against Biological Essentialism

There is a very strong trend in American culture to impute fixed, stable, and universal properties to a wide range of behaviors and conditions, thereby essentializing their qualities and locating them within nature. Both persons with disabilities and queers have been designated as nature's deviants. The author explores parallels and points of divergence in the responses of both disability rights and queer rights activism and scholarship to this assigned classification. She further illuminates this exploration by drawing upon insights derived from growing up with a congenital disability. As a child, the author felt that her body was a text composed, crafted, and edited by those who had the power to manipulate it. Recently, she entered a lesbian relationship, and together she and her partner planned a commitment ceremony that allowed her to reclaim her own body, because the body of the text that ensued was one of their own creation.     

Detecting ongoing intimate partner violence in the emergency department using a simple 4-question screen: the OVAT

We wanted to prospectively evaluate the use of a brief screening tool for ongoing intimate partner violence (IPV), the OVAT, and to validate this tool against the present Index of Spouse Abuse (ISA). The design was a prospective survey during randomized 4-hour shifts in an urban emergency department setting. The scale consists of four questions developed based on our previous work. The ISA was compared as the gold standard for detection of present (ongoing) IPV. Of 362 eligible patients presenting during 75 randomized 4-hour shifts, 306 (85%) completed the study. The prevalence of ongoing IPV using the OVAT was 31% (95% CI 26% to 36%). For the ISA, the prevalence was 20% (95% CI 16% to 25%). Compared with the ISA, the sensitivity of the OVAT in detecting ongoing IPV was 86%, specificity 83%, negative predictive value 96%, positive predictive value 56%, with an accuracy of 84%. In conclusion, four brief questions can detect ongoing IPV to aid in identifying the victim.     

The intermediary role in youth worker professional development: successes and challenges

This chapter examines the role of a national network of local and regional intermediary organizations in initiating and sustaining community-based youth worker professional development systems. This approach is instructive for other intermediaries in establishing training standards, assessing impact, providing organizational supports for youth development workers, and going to scale.     

Did socioeconomic inequalities in morbidity and mortality change in the United States over the course of the twentieth century?

In this article we present two sets of empirical analyses that consider the extent to which socioeconomic gradients in self-assessed health and child mortality changed since the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States. This empirical issue has important and wide-ranging research and policy implications. In particular, our results speak to the value of considering the role of broader social, economic, and political inequalities in generating and maintaining socioeconomic disparities in morbidity and mortality. Despite dramatic declines in morbidity and mortality rates in the United States across the twentieth century, we find that socioeconomic-status gradients in morbidity and mortality declined only modestly (if at all) during that period.