Bewilderment: Preparing prisoners for 'real' work in the fictional world of prison

This article explores the history of employment training programmes for prisoners and three contemporary examples of practice. It argues that the history and current practice can be seen as a movement between two competing discourses. One that treats prison work as relevant for how it passes time and the other for how it prepares a prisoner for release. These are referred to as a ‘constative’ position‐one where the activity is only related to the here and now‐and the ‘performative’‐where the activity is said to ‘rehearse’ the prisoner for action to be performed at a later date. By examining projects that use drama workshops to examine employment issues with prisoners, the article argues that these positions are limited. It claims that the link between prison activity and performance outside is far more complicated than a simple shift of new competencies from one arena to another. This transition is met more often by the ‘bewilderment’ of the title than by a smooth transition. The article concludes that drama workshops in fact have a potential to offer a more powerful intervention than simple behaviour rehearsal and that they could provide one means for bridging the gap between the fictional arena of prison and the ‘real’ world. Este artículo explora la historia de programas de capacitacioén laboral para presos y de tres ejemplos contemporáneos de práctica. Sostiene que la historia y la práctica actual pueden considerarse como un movimiento entre dos discursos competidores. Los dos consideran relevantes las actividades laborales en la cárcel, el uno porque ayuda a pasar el tiempo, y el otro porque prepara al preso para la puesta en libertad. Se refiere a los dos discursos como (1) la posición ‘constativa’, en la cual la actividad laboral se relaciona únicamente al momento actual y (2) la posición ‘performativa’, en la cual la actividad laboral sirve de ensayo para actividades que desempeñaráel preso en una fecha por venir. Al examinar proyectos que recurren a talleres del drama para examinar temas laborales con los presos, este artículo sostiene que están limitadas estas posiciones. Alega que la conexión entre la actividad en la cárcel y el desempeño fuera de la cárcel supone algo mucho mas complicado que un sencillo cambio de nuevas competencias de una arena a otra. Sostiene que esta transición se caracteriza mas por el desconcierto que provoca que por su suavedad. El artículo concluye que los talleres del drama pueden ofrecer una intervención mas poderosa que los sencillos ensayos de conducta, y que podrían ofrecer un medio de salvar la distancia entre la arena ficticia de la cárcel y el mundo ‘verdadero’.     

Introduction: Queering Later Life

Summary

The field of sexual trauma developed from the sociopolitical movements of the feminist, rape, and child protection movements. As thinking in the field developed, however, it has been difficult to integrate the perspective of the male survivor of sexual trauma into these perspectives. Gay men, in particular, have been notably absent from the literature, except when their abuse history is discussed as an etiology for their sexuality. It is clear that gay men suffer violence and oppression in the form of homophobia—an abuse with a sexual focus. Integrating the experience of gay men who have suffered trauma into perspectives regarding sexual trauma offers a possibility to enhance understanding about, as well as prevention efforts against, the sexual abuse of children. This includes expanding definitions and vocabulary regarding sexual trauma, as well as recognizing the impact on mental health professionals of working with survivors of sexual trauma.     

An Introduction to Modern Matrix Methods and Statistics

In this article, using the representation that the Kalman filter recursions in state-space models can be expressed as a matrix-weighted average of prior and sample estimates, we supplement the usual filtering algorithm by an extreme bounds analysis. Specifically, as the covariance matrix of the state error is varied in the class of symmetric and positive-definite matrices, the filtering estimates are shown to be in an ellipsoid.     

Working the circuit: An explanation of employee turnover in the restaurant industry

This study examines the relationship between frequency of viewing television news and crime dramas, and adherence to an ideology of individualism. Attitudes toward women, blacks, and the poor were examined among members of these groups and among white males. Among women and blacks, exposure to television news increases group consciousness, while viewing crime dramas decreases personal efficacy. Among white males, we find an association between exposure to crime drama and endorsement of individual rather than structural causes of inequality. Television news, by contrast, fosters a belief that women's unequal status is due to structural sources.     

Listening—Ubiquitous Yet Obscure

Service learning continues to evolve as an exciting, innovative teaching tool in education. This paper defines and explains the service learning movement and details a service learning unit applied in an “Effective Listening” classroom and the mutual student, institutional, and educator benefits.     

The Thomson ISI Journal Selection Process

Abstract

For more than four decades, Thomson ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) has been committed to a fundamental mission: to provide essential products and services that enable access to and management of the highest quality, most relevant materials for all participants in the research process. In 1958, Dr. Eugene Garfield started ISI by borrowing five hundred dollars from Household Finance. Current Contents^® of Chemical, Phamaco-Medical & Life Sciences was the sole product, covering 286 journals. Today the Thomson ISI database covers more than 16,000 international journals, books, and proceedings in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. This article describes the processes and standards that result in ISI's abstracting and indexing services. Serials Review 2003; 29:210–212.     

Conference reports

The lack of women engaging themselves in science has been thoroughly discussed in feminist and nonfeminist science studies. It has remained a mystery why so few female students take professional careers as scientists. Though more and more female students enroll in physics studies, for example, they seem to disappear before they reach academic positions. Instead of discussing this as a query of gender inequality in this article, I discuss the more general issues of inclusion and exclusion in communities of practices. I argue that selection mechanisms in a group of students can be connected to their premises for engaging themselves in an activity. As students have different embodied experiences, they also have different premises for engaging themselves. What seems like the same practice can, in fact, be analyzed as practices belonging to different activities. This approach might bring us a small step further in the discussions of the relations between gender and science.