Reconciling care and justice in contesting social harm through performance and arts practice with looked after children and care leavers

The proportion of young people taken into the care of the state has increased recently and there is evidence that this social group suffer negative long‐term outcomes that might be conceptualised by the emergent criminological category of ‘social harm’. Debates in social work around an ethics of care and justice offer different ways of thinking about responding to social harm. This paper reports findings from an innovative arts‐based intervention with Looked After Children and young people and concludes that holding these competing value sets in creative tension is central to the success of the programme in helping young people to cope with and contest social harm.     

法律的困惑

我国现行法律给人予太多的困惑,如劳动法管不到农民工,婚姻登记管理条例违反婚姻法关于结婚条件的规定,交通法规大幅度减免机动车事故责任,赔偿责任违背重在保护弱者权益的立法精神,生产安全事故责任人刑事责任倚轻的规定,违背公平公正原则等,已经日益成为社会和谐的消极因素,应该引起人们足够的重视.     

政府:一个公正社会不可或缺的角色——关于政府再分配职能正当性的思考

建立一个公正的社会是人类的理想。在实现这一理想的过程中,政府承担着重要的责任。一个优良的政府不仅是善治的政府,而且也必须是能够维系社会公正的政府。政府的再分配职能,不仅能够为公民身份具有实质意义创造各种条件,而且也能延缓或减少自然秩序中的不平等因素与偶然性因素对人类命运的影响,改善政治共同体公民之间的关系,建构合理的政治秩序;不仅有助于改善社会弱势群体的生活境遇,而且也有助于提升社会整体的生活质量,实现社会成员低成本地和谐共处。政府再分配职能的正当性,体现在它力图构建一个公正社会的良善意图与行动之中,它为公民有尊严地生活提供了可能性,也超越了市场形式正义与丛林法则,减少了政治不作为可能带来的改变社会结构的暴力行动。政府以实现社会公正为目的的再分配行为,决不像新古典自由主义者所主张的那样必然使人类通往奴役之路,恰恰相反,它是迈向和谐社会的重要保证。     

科技正义与法之正义关系的辨析

改革开放后,我国的科技发展模式由行政计划模式向市场法治模式过渡,市场经济使科技主体与立法主体的正义观发生巨大变化,进而导致科技法的正义内涵也在发生着演化.科技产生的社会问题激化了伦理道德与实在法之间的矛盾,立法者亟须发掘当代科技的正义内涵,并适时创制或修订科技法,以适应新形势的要求.应从正义内涵入手,拓展科技的正义价值观,为整合科技法的价值目标提供理论基础,并且探析科技引发现行法弊端的解决途径.     

Does it get better? LGBTQ social work students and experiences with harmful discourse

Although the field of social work is grounded in social justice, the social work educational experience, including classrooms, may not live up to this value, especially for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students. Using a qualitative phenomenological approach, this study examined the experiences of harmful discourse in social work classrooms for LGBTQ students. Findings indicate that students experienced being misgendered, tokenized, and erased through cis-/heteronormative language and classroom teachings. Although social work is guided by frameworks of social justice, microaggressions and discrimination may be vaguely glossed over, if addressed at all. This study highlights the gap between the values social work teaches and how social work education is delivered.     

The belonging model of trust

Although we know that high‐quality employee–organization relationships are beneficial, these relationships are complex and not fully understood, especially among employees of nonprofit organizations. In particular, we know little about how these employees perceive trust, which may overlook an important contributor to effective management. We begin to address this issue by testing a new theoretical model that conceptualizes perceived insider status, psychological ownership, and organizational identification as foundations for the perception of justice and subsequent trust. Our results indicate that psychological ownership and perceived insider status relate to trust through procedural and interpersonal justice. These results contrast those typically found in for‐profit contexts in that organizational identification did not predict justice and that distributive and informational justice did not predict trust.     

Assessing the role of hope in processes of transitional justice: mobilizing and disciplining victims in Sierra Leone’s truth commission and reparations programme

Existing studies have not been able to take the role of hope in processes of transitional justice (TJ) into account, as they focus on how TJ changes institutions and the relationships between individuals and therefore conclude that failed processes of TJ have no effect. In contrast to this approach, a different understanding of power as productive helps to understand how TJ-instruments create hope and which effects this has on how people conceive of themselves and the world they live in. A framework for analysing such processes is introduced that brings together individual meaning-making of hope and hopelessness with the role of the state in the provision of hope in the context of uncertainty. Transitional justice is therefore discussed as a performative project that aims at triggering specific emotions among the persons taking part in it and the broader society and at creating a vision of a better future based on social equality through the protection and fulfilment of human rights. By applying this framework to the case of the Sierra Leone truth and reconciliation commission and the reparations programme, it is argued that hope had a mobilizing as well as a disciplining function in these instruments. The promise of support mobilized victims to provide statements to the truth commission, and therefore enabled the commission to work in the first place. However, it failed in its attempt to discipline victims in their feelings about the past violence. The reparations programme constituted the embodiment of these promises, but victims interpreted its inadequate benefits and bad management as a proof that the state still does not care for them and competition over benefits is the norm despite their entitlement to support. This experience destroyed the hopes of many victims and created social envy among them, preventing the development of solidarity among victims and the chance for resistance against this policy.     

Bioecological Implications of Narrative Exposure Therapy in Low‐Resource Settings: Individual,Family, Community,and Socio‐Political Contexts

Traumatic stress can have detrimental effects on individuals, families, and communities. Narrative exposure therapy (NET) is an evidence‐based intervention for decreasing individuals’ post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and has been tested in some of the most challenging contexts, such as in post‐conflict refugee camps. Although the focus of NET is on reducing individual PTSD symptoms, the impact of NET can be seen beyond the individual level. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the ecological implications of using NET with trauma‐affected populations in low‐resource settings. We describe the implications of NET at the family, community, and sociopolitical levels using several case examples. Finally, we outline limitations and future directions for improving the delivery of NET in settings with limited resources.     

Parents’ perspectives of social support and social cohesion in urban contexts of diversity

Although provisions for young children are increasingly considered as ideal places to foster an inclusive and socially just society by embracing issues of social support and social cohesion, there is no in-depth understanding of the role these provisions can play in enabling supportive and cohesive encounters in contexts of diversity. Even more striking is the absence of parents’ voices in this discussion. Based on an analysis of qualitative interviews with 18 parents who use childcare services in urban contexts of diversity, our findings show the relevance of ephemeral contacts with diverse people that could offer bridging opportunities in terms of social connectedness to familiarise within diversity while decoding the other in urban contexts of diversity. However, neither bonding nor bridging contacts appear as self-evident. Our research shows that the role of childcare services might be vital in creating light and temporal communities as the prerequisite for social cohesion to flourish, in both individual as well as collective dimensions.