A Fragmentary Archive: Migratory Feelings in Early Anglo-Saxon Women’s Letters

The letters by Anglo-Saxon women in the Boniface correspondence are connected by cultural practices and emotions centered on the conversion mission that functioned to maintain connections between the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. A striking recurring focus of these letters is on loss and isolation, which connects them to the Old English elegies. Many of the letters describe the writers’ traumatic experiences that result from the death or absence of kin. These are women who endured the trauma of being left behind when others migrated overseas or who, in traveling away from their homeland, found themselves isolated in an alien environment, displaced in time as well as space. This article offers an analysis of the letters, focusing on the queer temporalities they explore, the queer emotions they evoke, and the queer kinships that they forge. It argues that the women’s letters represent fragments of an early queer archive of migratory feelings.     

The Unintended Consequences of “Lack of Supervision” Child Neglect Laws: How Developmental Science Can Inform Policies about Childhood Independence and Child Protection

Policies and programs designed to serve children and families are sometimes misaligned with developmental science research. Broad child neglect reporting laws, first adopted by the United States in 1974, have led to families being prosecuted by child protection authorities for allowing children to participate in everyday age-appropriate activities unsupervised. In this report we describe the challenges of defining child neglect and outline the current landscape of neglect laws in the United States. We then provide a broad overview of some of the developmental milestones children need to reach to participate in unsupervised activities and the benefits of independent activities on child development. Children can often accomplish tasks at a much younger age than law, parents, and caregivers in the U.S. believe. We then turn to the literature from across the world and argue that culture, not innate ability, drives much of the variation in the age at which children can do things on their own. Finally, we make recommendations to parents, caregivers, legislators, advocates, and developmental scientists to better align practice with research. This is a social justice issue that should resonate across party, racial, and class lines. Developmental scientists are needed as advocates and advisors on policies impacting children and families, especially child neglect laws.     

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Abstract

There is a growing emphasis in the social work literature that social work's overall mission should be that of social justice and that mental health be relegated as outside of social work's realm. This paper draws upon a constructionist and narrative perspective in developing a general formulation of clinical social work to bridge the gap between social justice and mental health.     

Understanding the meanings of children: a reflexive process

This paper identifies a number of children's voices within qualitative academic writing. It suggests that researchers can discover a variety of children's voices by employing reflexive techniques to ensure that their interpretations are not influenced by their personal prejudice, or the ethics, tools, roles and theories of their professional paradigm. It concludes that those who work with children may be able to reinforce the theme of the UN Convention on Rights of the Child by employing this reflexive approach to enable them to attribute equal status to the views of all the children whom they encounter.     

Deserving Victims?: Sexual Status and the Social Construction of Violence

Theoretical understanding of the meaning of the term violence is underdeveloped. This paper examines the question of how violence to the person is socially defined, and in particular how understandings of violence are both gendered and sexualised. It highlights how victim characteristics, as well as the social and interactional contexts in which violence occurs, influence interpretative frameworks, with specific reference to the binary distinction between the public and private and to notions of culpability and victimisation. This entails a consideration of the social meanings which constitute notions of a 'person' with a 'right to life' and occupation of 'public space'. The importance of the victim/perpetrator dichotomy in theorising violence is also considered. These themes and issues are examined in relation to a relatively new area of study; the case example of public violence towards lesbians and gay men.