Japan's progressive sex: male homosexuality, national competition, and the cinema

This essay serves as a broad investigation of the origins of what came to be called the "gay boom" in 1990's Japanese cinema: a culmination of print media, television, and especially films which made the gay male not merely a visible (political) subject but also the site of displaced contestations of gendered (female) desire. The most visible transnational signifier of the "gay boom" was the 1992 film Okoge, a film which, in keeping with a Japanese trend which relocates the gay male as a safe displacement of female desire, posits the heterosexual female as the audience's point of identification in a film about the lives of gay Japanese men. Using this as a starting point, this essay seeks to explore how male homosexuality and gender construction operate within both Japanese nationalism and the transnational discourse of Japanese cinema's dissemination.     

Population growth: U.S. and Latin American views

Abstract This article is an attempt at interpretation. As one who has worked professionally both in the United States and in Latin America, I would like to interpret how I see the United States and Latin America responding to the high Latin American population growth rate. This is a personal interpretation and as such, of course, is biassed. It is also a very broad subject to which a few pages of interpretation can hardly do justice. The very generalizations 'the United States' and 'Latin America' lend themselves to misunderstanding. These are not homogeneous areas but contain a variety of forces pulling in many directions. And yet, just because this is such a difficult subject as well as such an important one in the world of to-day, it is perhaps worth while to try to distil some common components which may help us gain a better understanding of the actions of others as well as our own.     

Interviewing parents of children in care: Perspectives, discourses and accountability

The ‘parental perspective’ in child care work is a matter of concern and is actively solicited by practitioners, managers, policymakers and researchers for differing reasons. This paper argues that the search for such a stable “parental perspective” should be abandoned and suggest that research should embrace a social constructionist turn by concentrating on how parents' views are negotiated conversationally in discourse. Using data drawn from research interviews with parents of children in care and employing conversation and discourse analytic methods, the paper demonstrates how there are critical issues of accountability, blame, and testing at stake in the interview encounter, as interviewer and interviewee jointly produce a moral version of the client, the institution, the case and its attributes. The implications of this argument are delineated.     

Afraid to care; unable to care: A critical ethnography within a long-term care home

This paper describes the findings of a critical ethnographic research study conducted in an urban long-term care home. While our intention was to learn more about the culture of care, specifically as it relates to mental health care provision, the participants in the study consistently spoke with us about (what we have labeled as) a culture of compliance. In a context where new long-term care legislation is being implemented along with new, standardized resident assessment instruments, gaining a deeper understanding of the (un)intended consequences of government's efforts to ensure a high quality of care is of paramount importance. This research demonstrates how policy-driven structural mechanisms can (re)produce conditions that result in frontline staff being afraid and unable to care, and thus contributes to a better understanding of the lived experience of frontline long-term care staff who find that their caregiving responsibilities are displaced by caregiving accountabilities.     

Communication with parents in child welfare: skills, language and interaction

This paper reviews the literature on communication between professionals and parents/carers in health and social care. It notes that there is considerable research on doctor–patient communication and counselling, but much less on professionals who visit families in their homes. While there is a large literature on good practice and communication skills, there is little research on the actual encounters themselves. What counts as 'communication' in such publications is explored. The paper suggests that there is much to be gained by considering research in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics on professional–client encounters. Examples of some of the key concepts are discussed and an engagement with this literature is recommended.     

Implications of Eurocentrism for Social Work Education: Trivialization vis-à-vis Skin Color

The significance of skin color among people of color and its relative absence in social work literature is arguably attributed to Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism defines human reality via Eurocentric norms, ideas, values and perspectives. Evidence of Eurocentrism in social work is contained in its literature priorities, skin color litigation, brown racism and skin bleaching. Demonstration of the aforementioned social pathologies involving skin color pertaining to people of color is a critical, existential phenomenon. If social work is to remain viable and be sustained in the future, it must conform to the dictates of changes in the population. That will require a commensurate adjustment and a willingness of its intelligentsia to accommodate skin color and other alternative views relative to education and practice.     

Room for climate advocates in a coal‐focused economy? NGO influence on Australian climate policy

Many Australian environmental non‐government organisations (NGOs) have campaigned for greater political action and community awareness on human‐induced climate change for almost two decades. Australian emissions are the highest per person in the world, yet the Government's response is heavily influenced by the economically‐significant fossil fuel industry. NGO campaigners are sceptical of their campaigns' effectiveness. This paper presents three methods for evaluating the effectiveness of NGO climate change campaigns: Moyer's Movement Action Plan, Schumaker's Assessment of Political Effectiveness, and a document analysis of the influence of NGO submissions to climate policy processes. Evaluation is critical for NGO campaigns to improve their effectiveness, and evaluation criteria and methods should ideally be designed in parallel with the campaign strategy. Using these evaluation methods, it is evident that Australian NGO campaigns on climate change have been effective.     

Parent participation in social work meetings - the case of child protection conferences

This paper is about parent participation in cases where children are involved in a child protection process in the UK. It concentrates on the child protection conference as a site at which the participation of the client and decision-making by professionals are balanced with one another. Unlike previous research, which has been concerned with asking participants their reactions and views using research interviews, the focus here will be on the verbal exchanges between participants in the conference, based on a recording of a child protection review. In this way it is proposed that attention is directed at how the client is enabled to participate and what significance is given to such participation during the event. Der Aufsatz befaßt sich mit der Partizipation von Eltern im Fall, daß Ihre Kinder von der Arbeit des Kinderschutzes erfaßt werden. Er konzentriert sich auf die Kinderschutzkonferenz als den Ort, an dem die Partizipation von Klienten und die Entscheidungen der Professionellen in ein Gleichgewicht gebracht werden. Anders als vorgängige Forschungsansätze, die im Rahmen von Interviews die Klienten nach ihren Reaktionen und Einschätzungen befragt haben, wird hier auf der Basis eines aufgezeichneten Gesprächs zur Prüfung des Falles der Fokus auf die verbalen Interaktionen zwischen den Teilnehmern der Konferenz gerichtet. Deshalb wird vorgeschlagen, die Aufmerksamkeit darauf zu richten, auf welche Weise die Klienten zur Partizipation befähigt werden und welche Bedeutung einer solchen Form der Partizipation während des Prozesses zugemessen wird. Este artículo trata de la participación de los padres en casos en los que los niños se encuentran en situación de protección infantil en el Reino Unido. Se concentra en las conferencias para la protección a la infancia como un lugar en el que se equilibran la participación de los clientes y el proceso de toma de decisiones por parte de los profesionales. A diferencia de anteriores investigaciones, donde se pedía a los participantes que expresaran sus reacciones y puntos de vista a través de entrevistas, aquí nos centramos en los intercambios verbales entre los participantes de las conferencias, a través de la gravación de un caso específico. De esta manera se propone que se dirija la atención hacia cómo se facilita la participatión del cliente y la importancia que se da a dicha participatión durante el encuentro. Cet article traite de la participation des parents d'efants bénéficiant de la protection de l'enfance en Grande-Bretagne. La conférence sur la protection de l'enfance constitue l'objet de cette étude, en tant que lieu dans lequel la participation des usagers et la prise de décision par les professionnels se contrebalancent l'une l'autre. Contrairement à une recherche précédente pour laquelle on cherchait à connaître la réaction et l'opinion des participants en utilisant des entretiens de recherche, il s'agit ici d'étudier les echanges verbaux entre les participants de la conférence, à partir de l'enregistrement d'un compte-rendu sur la protection de l'enface. Ainsi, les auteurs choisissent de se concentrer sur la façon dont l'usager est amené à participer et sur la signification donnée à cette participation pendant l'événement.