The arrival of Jewish refugee children in England, 1938–1939

Between December 1938 and the outbreak of World War II in the following September over 9,300 children were brought to England from Nazi occupied territories, under the auspices of the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany. The event which precipitated this exodus was Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938). This paper examines the background to the formation of this organization, how it operated, and the problems which it faced. Attention is also given to the disquiet which was voiced in various quarters about the Movement's work.     

Embodiment,care and practice in a community kitchen

This article explores activist practices in a community kitchen based in the south of the United Kingdom with a dual focus on social and environmental justice. It draws on these practices to develop further feminist, and specifically ecofeminist, concepts of care ethics by arguing that embodiment is an essential element in lived relationships of care. Moreover, we show that these embodied components enable learning that can disrupt settled understandings of social and environmental injustices, including negotiating tensions relating to class and race. We demonstrate how this disruption combines with imaginative processes to stimulate critical political analysis of the relationship between local contexts of need and broader socio‐political structures and power relations. Crucially, we work towards illuminating how care ethics and social practice combine to stimulate and inform political action.     

Puberty and Transdiagnostic Risks for Mental Health

Puberty in girls represents a notable period of vulnerability for different psychological disorders. The research literature has primarily considered external and contextual factors that might explain these rises in symptomatology. In the present study, we investigate relations of pubertal status and timing with individual cognitive, emotional, and behavioral tendencies, commonly identified as transdiagnostic processes, in a sample of N = 228 girls (M_age = 11.75 years). We also test whether these transdiagnostic processes mediate associations of pubertal status and pubertal timing with depressive symptoms. Results support greater endorsement of rumination, co‐rumination, negative urgency, and both anxious and angry rejection sensitivity in girls with more advanced pubertal status, as well as in girls with early pubertal timing. Higher levels of transdiagnostic processes fully mediated associations of pubertal status and timing with depressive symptoms at significant and marginally significant levels, respectively. Although the data are cross‐sectional, these findings offer promising preliminary evidence that transdiagnostic processes represent an important mental health risk in early adolescent girls.     

Performing blackness,forming whiteness: Linguistic minstrelsy in Hollywood film1

The ideological and indexical aspects of linguistic representation have been extensively examined in contemporary sociolinguistics both through investigations of language crossing in everyday interaction and through analyses of mediatized linguistic performances. Less well understood are the indexical meanings achieved when language crossing itself becomes the focus of linguistic representation. One prominent instance of this phenomenon is the use of African American English by European American actors in Hollywood films as part of what is argued to be a complex language‐based form of blackface minstrelsy. As mock language, linguistic minstrelsy in such films involves sociolinguistic processes of deauthentication, maximizing of intertextual gaps, and indexical regimentation of the performed language, but unlike earlier forms of minstrelsy these performances are typically problematized within the films as transgressions of the ideology of racial essentialism. In the two films analyzed in detail in the article, linguistic minstrelsy is shown both to reproduce and to undermine the symbolic dominance of hegemonic white masculinity.     

Infant-led Research: Privileging Space to See,Hear, and Consider the Subjective Experience of the Infant

ABSTRACT

The subjective experience of infants is seldom considered in research directly concerning them. Commonly, infants are not believed to possess self-agency or innate communicative abilities, obscuring space for researchers to consider the infant’s subjectivity. Rather, measuring and coding behaviour or seeking the parent’s perspective is privileged. Making meaning is not limited to the capacity to verbalise; as meaning encompasses feelings, behaviours, and contexts. In this paper, a novel “infant-led” qualitative research methodology is presented utilising infant observation techniques, drawing on theories of “intersubjectivity” and using a constructivist grounded theory method. Distinct to this methodology is how data collection begins with the infant before any other, as does the process of data analysis; providing the basis upon which all other data are interpreted. The application of such an approach is nonintrusive and has much to offer social workers working with infants in high risk situations in community, health, and mental health settings.

IMPLICATIONS

• The experience of infants is entitled to be included in research that directly impacts them.

• Adopting an infant-led approach brings alive the experiences of infants and challenges assumptions that minimise the competencies and contributions infants make.

     

Towards a ‘virtual’ world: Social isolation and struggles during the COVID‐19 pandemic as single women living alone

This article is a personal reflection of how the current COVID‐19 pandemic affects our working lives and wellbeing, as single female academics who live alone in the UK. We offer a dialogue of our daily lives of being confined at home with lockdown measures extended. In particular, we focus on the experience of, and coping with, isolation and loneliness. Is isolation making us more socially connected? Through ‘virtual’ working and changing learning environments for us as teachers and learners, we explore changes in our working life and subsequent changes in the domestic environment. By capturing our lived experiences, we create an intellectual and safe space to voice our emotional struggles — as ‘invisible’ isolated individuals containing and consuming loneliness on our own. We foster alternative conversations as to how we might engender new perspectives from single female academics to combat social isolation in the workplace.     

The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic: A Sociological Analysis

A new type of sex crime was discovered in the United States in the 1980s – the sexual abuse of young children in ghastly rituals performed by devil worshippers who happened to be their day care providers. ‘Ritual abuse’, as this new sex crime came to be termed, appeared to be epidemic during that decade; hundreds of day care centers were investigated and scores of providers were arrested and prosecuted. This article asserts that the day care ritual abuse scare was a moral panic, in fact, the ‘purest example’ of a moral panic in that the putative threat to children had to be wholly constructed. Using the key sociological elements set out by Cohen (1972/2002), this article analyzes the day care ritual abuse moral panic and concludes by discussing additional key elements that will facilitate future sociological analyses of moral panics.     

Alcohol Use after Combat-Acquired Traumatic Brain Injury: What We Know and Don't Know

Military personnel engage in unhealthy alcohol use at rates higher than their same age, civilian peers, resulting in negative consequences for the individual and jeopardized force readiness for the armed services. Among those returning from combat deployment, unhealthy drinking may be exacerbated by acute stress reactions and injury, including traumatic brain injury (TBI). Combat-acquired TBI is common among personnel in the current conflicts. Although research suggests that impairments due to TBI leads to an increased risk for unhealthy drinking and consequences among civilians, there has been little research to examine whether TBI influences drinking behaviors among military personnel. This article examines TBI and drinking in both civilian and military populations and discusses implications for clinical care and policy.     

Tattoo Narratives: The intersection of the body,self‐identity and society

Drawing upon Frank's (1995) discussion of the personal and social aspects of embodied storytelling, this paper considers the tattoo as a form of visual communication created within a multiplicity of contexts. Based on in‐depth interviews with eight tattooed men and women, the focus of this article is the stories that these individuals tell about their tattoos. I argue that the tattooed body is a distinctively communicative body. It has a great deal to say, not only about the identity of the wearer, but also about the culture in which she lives. I conclude with some reflections on examining the tattoo as a conceptual latchkey—a tool that may enable researchers to begin to unlock the complicated relationship between the body, self‐identity and society.