A feminist history of Australian midwifery from colonisation until the 1980s

This paper uses a feminist interpretation and secondary sources to describe the history of Australian midwifery from colonisation until the 1980s. There have been too few midwife scholars who have had access to or used primary data collections to describe the role and place of midwives in the colonising community. I draw on a range of biography, medical literature and work by sociologists and economic historians to produce a limited picture of the history of professional midwifery. This helps to explain the position of midwives today and the problematic relationship we often have with medicine.     

The First Interview in Child Protection: Social Work Method and Process

SUMMARY. A particularly problematic aspect of practice is the initial investigation into non-accidental injury. This article describes a social work approach which will be of interest to other disciplines in seeking to understand social work method. Within a task-centred framework, the author outlines three major tasks in initial child protection interviews: safeguarding the child, obtaining an explanation, and establishing a working alliance with the parent. An exploratory interview, following up an allegation of non-accidental injury, is then analysed to highlight the actual social work process or technical moves within it Although a single example is limited in the number of factors it can illustrate, the principle of trying to establish collaborative alliances is clear, if not always possible. The case example should prove useful in training, from whence it has been developed.     

Adult children of parents with mental illness: navigating stigma

The experiences of children who live with parental mental illness are becoming increasingly recognized. However, there remains a limited body of knowledge in relation to an individual's longer term experiences. This study sought adult children's experiences of childhood parental mental illness. It generated reflections of 13 adult children who had lived with parents with mental illness during their childhood. The narrative design of the study facilitated a voice for participants. The paper presents one main theme of the findings. The findings offer a unique insight into childhood awareness of social stigmas and children's behavioural changes to avoid disclosure of parental mental illness. Participants noted that they were aware of social stigmas associated with mental illness during their childhood. This contributed to their fear of disclosure to others that fuelled a culture of familial secrecy, reinforcing the children's own sense of difference. Further work is required to enhance community understanding about the familial journeys of parental mental illness and the impact of negative‐natured stigmas.     

Why Do People Become Modern? A Darwinian Explanation

A procession of cultural changes, often referred to as “modernization,” is initiated as a society undergoes economic development. But cultural change continues to be rapid in societies that industrialized several generations ago. Much of the change in both developed and developing societies is a progressive abandonment of the norms, values, and beliefs that encourage behavior consistent with the pursuit of genetic fitness. The kin influence hypothesis suggests that these changes are part of a cultural evolutionary process initiated by the replacement of largely kin‐based communities with social groups consisting largely of non‐kin. Kin have an interest in encouraging one another to behave in ways consistent with the pursuit of reproductive success, and a high level of social exchange between kin will tend to maintain norms that prescribe such behaviors. When social exchange between kin is reduced, these norms begin to relax. Cross‐national comparisons of measures that reflect attitudes and behavior support the hypothesis by showing that cultural differences between countries can be substantially explained by their position on a cultural continuum that begins with social networks widening so that they become less kin‐based.     

The Indigenous Knowledge Systems Policy of 2004: Challenges for South African Universities

Abstract

South Africa's Indigenous Knowledge Systems Policy was approved by Cabinet in 2004, and the National Indigenous Knowledge Systems Office (NIKSO) was opened in the Department of Science and Technology in 2006. Proposing the integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) in the arenas of education, commerce, agriculture, the sciences, law, languages, arts, social sciences, and health, the policy document implies several challenges to the idea of knowledge at the postcolonial university, and has significant implications for research and innovation in South Africa. Yet will a dramatically increased budget for research on Indigenous Knowledge Systems bring the kinds of insights and ideas that are needed in order to bring the sciences into dialogue with indigenous knowledge? While arguing for the importance of engaging with the IKS debate, the first part of this paper offers a critique of the conceptual tools contained within the IKS Policy and associated calls for research. The second part of the paper focuses on the question of how universities might approach the task of supporting researchers who are exploring IKS. Arguing that a strong intellectual presence is needed in the implementation of the policy nationally, the paper argues that dedicated IKS research units within universities may be counter-productive to the task of integrating indigenous knowledges with the sciences. However, neither the sciences, nor sociologies of knowledge alone can provide an adequate intellectual home for research on the topic. Rather, if South African universities are to respond productively, there is a need for university executives to remove impediments to teaching and research across faculties and disciplines and between universities, and to stimulate emerging dialogues about the nature of knowledge in the postcolony.     

Utopianism and pragmatism in interprofessional education

Definitions of interprofessionalism tend either to be vague and ambiguous or to ignore key stakeholders such as service users. The authors suggest that a combination of unsound theorising and lack of empirical data mean it is time to introduce a new approach to the study of interprofessional education. They argue that the search for a single factor common to all members of the interprofessional 'family' should be abandoned in favour of a re-conceptualisation of interprofessionalism as a 'family' of similarities and differences. This Wittgensteinian approach is used to look at the different ways programmes of education and training address interprofessional identities and cross-boundary roles and relationships. The centrality of one or the other is seen as indicating a certain kind of philosophical scaffolding within the educational culture of a programme and two case studies are used to explore the impact of Pragmatism and Utopianism. The case studies are drawn from the authors' experiences as teachers and examine how educational culture is shaped by primary philosophical positions. Finally, the implications of this for the future development of social work education are briefly considered.