Police Budgeting: Using Overtime as a Management Tool

Public Organization Review - Following the death of George Floyd, there were national calls for budget reductions and reforms for police departments. The City of San Jose’s Auditor’s...     

Multiple stories: Collaborative and generative possibilities for psychological evaluation

This paper explores a collaborative generative approach to psychological assessment employed in Puerto Rico, with children, adolescents, and adults. It begins with a critical reflection on how the dominant discourse of mental health, founded in the suppositions and practices of Euro-American-centred psychological knowledge, has been disseminated to the globalise south under the claim that its assertions are unaffected by social, ideological, or historical forces. It discusses how its claims of expert scientific knowledge have contributed, through classificatory instruments such as the DSM and the ICD, to the production and re-production of deficit narratives in our day-to-day life. It also examines how these practices have been applied in the use of assessment instruments in Puerto Rico. It then describes, how, through a collaborative approach and narrative theory, the established colonising practices and narratives of traditional forms of psychological assessment can be questioned, deconstructed, and transformed. This approach promotes the co-creation of dialogic and generative spaces that allow for the emergence of multiple stories and performances that give meaning to a person's identity and relational being. A brief clinical case exposition is used to illustrate how this collaborative, dialogic, and culturally sensitive approach to psychological assessment can help to undermine and disrupt deficit-based narratives and provide families with new generative possibilities for re-storying and re-performing their lives and particularly, the lives of their children.     

The importance of clinician courtroom testimony for children exposed to domestic violence

Children exposed to domestic violence account for as many as a third of all children in the United States. Many of these children will seek mental health treatment for symptoms of trauma. The clinicians who provide their treatment are often called as witnesses in family law proceedings, especially child protection and custody cases. Clinicians are often anxious when they receive subpoenas to testify and prefer to avoid testimony. Training about court proceedings, subpoenas and how to prepare for testimony would be beneficial for clinicians and will help clinicians be more confident in the courtroom. Additionally, becoming designated as expert witnesses can only help mental health clinicians provide a greater understanding of the issues encountered by children experiencing domestic violence, and these clinicians can provide recommendations that will take into account child safety without exacerbating trauma symptoms.     

Subculture wars: The struggle for the vape industry

Drawing on a 2-year study, I argue that the UK vape industry is engaged in a classificatory struggle between a subcultural industry and its “other”, the mainstream industry. I build on Thornton's analysis of club culture to characterize the subcultural vape industry as a community of taste built round a masculine aesthetic and a commitment to authenticity and DIY practice. Its attachment to complex systems and masculine spaces risked excluding customers without specialist knowledge or interest. The mainstream industry included tobacco companies which promoted vaping as a complementary category to smoking, linking their own vaping products to historic meanings of the cigarette as a lifestyle product. This task was hampered by the toxic legacy of combusted tobacco and its increasing reversion to a generic category rather than a branded product. Finally, the success of the price-focused vaping industry has been largely overlooked, but suggests that for most consumers, electronic cigarettes are still a contrasting category to combusted tobacco and are purchased largely on price. I conclude that the exclusion of a feminized, classed “other” is a defining element of subcultural formation, itself an overwhelmingly male mechanism of group identity construction.