Involving Young Service Users as Co-Researchers: Possibilities, Benefits and Costs

This article seeks to contribute to the debate concerning thebenefits and costs of involving young service users in research.The paper locates involvement within a continuum of consultation,collaboration and user-controlled research. The mandate forchildren and young people’s involvement is identified.In particular, the paper focuses on the benefits and costs inrelation to: research and development, research disseminationand service development, service users and researchers. Thepaper does not suggest that these benefits and costs can bemeasured arithmetically but argues that if the costs in termsof resources, training, support, timescale and remunerationare not addressed, the research will be undermined and in dangerof becoming tokenistic. The article argues that the involvementof young service users as co-researchers is worthwhile, butthat it should not be entered into lightly and that furtherwork needs to be undertaken on which parts of the process youngservice users can be included in and where their involvementresults in change in service delivery or service outcomes.     

Scapegoating and Therapeutic Storytelling Intervention

Scapegoating is an interpersonal process which is as old as humanity. It offers a means of protecting a social group from disintegration, but at the cost of blaming one individual for having a problem which he or she cannot then fix. Family therapy attempts to unravel the scapegoating process and address the underlying difficulty, but often fails because the family responds fearfully and reasserts the scapegoating. Therapeutic Storytelling Intervention (TSI), among other things, offers a means of adding individual therapy to family therapy without reinforcing scapegoating.     

Negotiating accommodations so that work-based education facilitates career development for youth with disabilities

Workers with disabilities are entitled to have their individual needs accommodated in a way that allows them to perform the essential duties of their job. However, adults with disabilities are often lacking in career development and are ill-prepared to negotiate workplace accommodations. This has led educators to seek workplaces that can accommodate the needs of adolescents with disabilities, so these adolescents can learn to negotiate accommodations and enhance their career development through work-based education. This paper reports on two case studies in which employers had agreed to accommodate the needs of adolescents with disabilities participating in work-based education. Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) framed the analyses of these two cases - a case of a student with physical disabilities and a case of a student with developmental disabilities. SCCT proves valuable in understanding the role of work-based education in the career development of disabled youth.     

Negotiating race and place in the Garifuna Diaspora: Identity formation and transnational grassroots politics in New York City and Honduras

This paper is an exploration of the relations between the politics of identity and the socio‐economic and political processes of the current era of globalization. Using ethnographic material from the transnational grassroots organizations of the Garinagu—an Afro‐Indigenous population living in transnational communities between Central America and the US—I show the multiple ways that they articulate their identity between and among the tropes of “autocthony,” “blackness,” “Hispanic,” “diaspora,” and “nation.” This construction and negotiation of identity is intimately connected to the negotiation of rights vis‐à‐vis nation‐states and international political bodies, where ideologies of race, ethnicity, nation, and citizenship carry with them different implications for rights and belonging. I argue that the complexities of this case point to the uneven processes of globalization, within which the power to define the ideological terrain of economic and political struggles is still profoundly unequal.     

After Morogoro: the continuing crisis in the African National Congress (of South Africa) in Zambia, 1969–1971

This article examines the Zambian dimension in the calling and aftermath of the Morogoro Conference of 1969. After the failure of the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns, Chris Hani and six other members of MK produced a memorandum, which constituted a devastating attack on the ANC’s exile leadership. The authors of the memorandum were expelled and were unable to attend the conference, but their memorandum had a strong influence on its deliberations. The conference recommended their reinstatement, but this did not resolve the crisis in Lusaka, which had ‘tribal’ undertones, and was intensified by Zambian government pressure to remove MK from Lusaka and the country. The reinstatement of Hani and his comrades was followed by protests and defiance by about 30 members of a Transvaal group. Attempts to remove MK members from Lusaka to a bush camp resulted in further defiance and the expulsion of 30 members. There were further crises involving the movement of arms and an ill‐fated attempt by Flag Boshielo and three others to return to South Africa through Botswana. It was not until 1971 that stability was restored, though the position of the ANC in Lusaka remained at a low ebb until the inflow of new recruits following the Soweto Uprising in 1976.     

Motherhood,Apple Pie and Interprofessional Working

This article seeks to challenge the uncritical and often benign way in which interprofessional practice is considered within social work and other social professions. In particular the article highlights issues concerning definitions, structural solutions, interprofessional education, the assumption of consensus, the lost voice of the service user, the potential for unnecessary surveillance and some ideas of what distinctly good interprofessional working might look like. This article is not an attack on interprofessional practice per se but an attempt to go beyond the ‘motherhood and apple pie’ nature of much of the current debate.     

Energy, population and the environment: exploring Canada’s record on CO2 emissions and energy use relative to other OECD countries

Across the OECD, Canada??s record on CO₂ emissions is particularly poor, with overall emissions up 32% over the 1990?C2007 period. The current paper seeks to better understand this situation by making systematic comparisons of Canada with other OECD countries. For Canada overall, the rapid increase in emissions over the 1990?C2007 period can be explained by several factors, including major population growth, increased affluence (although to a lesser extent than elsewhere in the OECD), a continued dependence on fossil fuels, while continuing to increase its overall demand for energy. While the energy intensity of Canada??s economy has declined somewhat over recent years, it actually lagged behind most OECD countries on this front and remains one of the most energy intense economies in the world (2nd highest in the OECD on our indicator of energy intensity). While there are many factors responsible for this, Canada??s particularly energy-intensive industrial structure is certainly relevant, as is the importance of its primary sector relative to most developed nations.     

How would you like your gain in life expectancy to be provided? An experimental approach

This paper reports the results of an empirical study investigating people’s preferences over three different types of perturbation to their survival function, each perturbation generating the same gain in life expectancy. Preferences over the three different perturbations were found to be distributed more or less evenly across the subject pool. Use of a novel experimental methodology generated economically consistent and intuitively plausible responses to (necessarily) hypothetical questions concerning improvements in life expectancy by first allowing respondents to gain experience while making similar choices in an incentivized setting involving financial risk. The results demonstrate the potential for economic experiments to contribute to the development of more robust methods for policy evaluation in domains where physical risk is an important factor.