Humanitarian response and stress in Kenya: gendered problems and their implications

ABSTRACT

Stress-related conditions such as burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder are a growing concern in the humanitarian sector. Aid workers themselves report not only that mental health problems are common, but that the support they receive from their employers is insufficient. Problematically, the experience of the international aid worker – particularly those who are white and from the global North – is often foregrounded in explaining what constitutes stress and related mental health problems. This indicates a wider problem of what is required of ‘the perfect humanitarian’ – a personality that is gendered and racialised – and how this influences the different experiences and treatment of national and international staff from aid agencies. This article explores the organisational culture and working conditions of humanitarian settings and their impact on the mental health and well-being of staff. It argues that there is a structural dimension to stress that is less to do with external security threats and more to do with the specific infrastructure, policies, and practices of humanitarian operations, with implications for aid workers which cut across dimensions of race, gender, and nationality.     

Racial diversity in the suburbs: how race-neutral responses to demographic change perpetuate inequity in suburban school districts

Suburbs across the US are experiencing dramatic demographic shifts, yet there is little research available on how suburban school districts are dealing with these changes. In this article, we examine the discourses surrounding race and demographic change in three suburban school districts that have been undergoing rapid demographic changes and which contain demographically distinct areas within their district boundaries. Utilizing a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, we analyze how the policy context (federal and state) frames actors’ discourses and understandings of race, paying particular attention to the political and institutional factors affecting school policy. We illustrate how the discourse, in turn, is related to the actions (or inactions) taken by district and school leaders to respond to demographic change. We conclude the article by discussing policy implications and potential challenges districts may face in the future if efforts to purposively address racial changes continue to be avoided.     

Consultancy to a Care Home: The Influences of Family and Gender Roles,and of Race and Colonialism

This paper is an account and critical analysis of the psychodynamic and systemic consultancy that the author provided to a care home (and the voluntary organisation running it) over a period of about 16 months. In addition two emergent, linked themes are identified and discussed: family and gender roles in care homes, and racism and colonialism. Care homes are of course part of the society in which they exist and of which they are a product. This means that all the overt and covert psychological and social pressures, defences and trends that occur in the wider society, for individuals, families, groups and communities are also to be found in care homes and in the organisations that run them. They are not isolated from these forces, indeed, it is argued in this paper, the forces are intensified in the ‘hot house’ environment of a care home and, if ignored, avoided and denied, result in the exploitation, abuse and neglect of both staff and residents.     

The struggle for Via Bologna street market: crisis,racial denial and speaking back to power in Naples Italy

This paper is based on ethnographic research conducted with migrant and Italian street vendors in Naples, southern Italy, in 2012. It tells the story of Via Bologna market which was nearly closed down by the City Hall at the time. Naples is a city where issues of poverty and unemployment pre‐date and have been exacerbated by manifold narratives of crisis now unfolding across Europe regarding the economy, political legitimacy, security and migration. Street markets have always been an important and visible economic survival strategy for both Neapolitans and migrants there. This article shows how the Via Bologna street vendors appropriated and adapted discourses about crisis to form their own cosmopolitan social movement that halted the closure of the market. It argues that, in the age of globalized migration, the multilingual nature of such collective action is central to understanding social struggles that must be organized between marginalized groups of people divided by race, religion, politics and legal status. This, frequently ambiguous, transcultural solidarity speaks back against a mainstream post‐racial discourse – often articulated by the Neapolitan street vendors at the market – that would reduce the complexity of such collective action to questions of poverty and class struggle.     

The Rules of (Dis)engagement: Black Youth and Their Strategies for Navigating Police Contact

Prior work on youth–police relations examines young people's general perceptions of the police, their differential treatment by police officers, and officers' discretion in dealing with youth. Yet researchers have largely neglected the question of how young people attempt to shape these encounters. I address this critical gap, while also incorporating the experiences of “on track” youth and young women—two groups that are not exempt from police contact but traditionally ignored in the youth–police literature. Drawing on semistructured group and individual interviews with 19 black young people in New York City, I investigate the strategies they employ or subscribe to in navigating police contact. Three types of strategies emerged from my analysis: avoidance, management, and symbolic resistance. Avoidance strategies are marked by young people's attempts to preemptively steer clear of officers on the street. Management strategies are employed by young people during police encounters to limit risk or harm, while symbolic resistance is a subtle tactic used by some youth to preserve their dignity in these interactions. This study also considers the gender differences in respondents' approaches and offers new insights into how they assess their police interactions in an era of highly publicized incidents of police brutality.     

Forget “militarization”: race,disability and the “martial politics” of the police and of the university

This article investigates the limits of the concept of militarization and proposes an alternative concept: martial politics. It argues that the concept of militarization falsely presumes a peaceful liberal order that is encroached on by military values or institutions. Arguing instead that we must grapple with the ways in which war and politics are mutually shaped, the article proposes the concept of martial politics as a means for examining how politics is shot-through with war-like relations. It argues that stark distinctions cannot be made between war and peace, military and civilian or national and social security. This argument is made in relation to two empirical sites: the police and the university. Arguing against the notion that either the police or the university have been “militarized,” the article provides a historical analysis of the ways in which these institutions have always already been implicated in martial politics – that is, of producing White social and economic order through war-like relations with Indigenous, racialized, disabled, poor and other communities. It concludes by assessing the political and scholarly opportunities that are opened up for feminists through the rejection of the concept of militarization in favor of the concept of martial politics.     

Serious case reviews: The lived experience of Black children

Despite the many high‐profile Black child deaths in England, race as a factor remains a largely underexplored factor of serious case reviews (SCRs). Evidence from analysis of SCRs indicates that race receives limited attention, or is virtually absent. Given that the main function of SCRs is to provide opportunities for learning lessons to improve practice, the way in which issues of race and culture may influence child protection processes for Black children is therefore of critical importance. In this article, we employ content analysis to examine the extent that race and cultural factors are considered in SCRs involving Black children. It is argued that race is often an important factor influencing Black children's experiences of abuse and neglect, as well as their encounters in the child protection system. This article therefore poses two key questions: (a) What questions are asked about race, ethnicity, and culture in SCRs concerning Black children? (b) How did the SCRs extract lessons to be learnt for improving practice to safeguard Black children? By extending the analysis of race and ethnicity in SCRs, this article furthers our understandings of the needs of Black children in the child protection system.     

Teaching Black History after Obama

This article is a reflection on the teaching of black history after the Obama presidency and at the dawn of the Trump era. It is both an analysis of the state of the academic field and a primer on how to integrate the past few decades of scholarship in black history broadly across standard K-12 curriculum. It demonstrates the importance of theorizing black history as American history rather than just including African American content in US History courses and offers specific methods that can shift the narrative in this direction even within the confines of a more traditional telling of the American past. Finally, it situates the voluminous work of historians of the black past as critical interventions in pedagogy necessary to challenge today's unrelenting attacks on public education.     

Exotic Place,White Space: Racialized Volunteer Spaces in Honduras

In every year between 2004 and 2012, more than 800,000 Americans reported volunteering internationally (Lough 2013 ). These volunteers are overwhelmingly white (McBride and Lough 2008 ) and entering a largely nonwhite and developing world. This study starts by questioning how racial status informs volunteer/volunteer tourist interactions, both with locals and with other volunteers, in a global context. In‐depth interviews with 23 missionaries, teachers, and volunteers from the United States and Canada reveal that (1) international volunteering is largely motivated by romantic and exotic understandings of the Global South and (2) in spite of a stated interest in cultural immersion, participants’ notions of their whiteness guided their perceptions of Hondurans and their actions as they sought out and retreated to white spaces protected from Honduran influence. These findings further the work of those who have argued first world travelers have homogenized spaces on reserve, by demonstrating that whiteness can be the basis for the construction and maintenance of protected spaces in predominantly nonwhite countries.     

Access is not enough: the impact of emotional costs and self-efficacy on the changes in African-American students’ ICT use patterns

Previous research has examined the impact of computing interventions to reduce digital inequity. However, few studies focus on factors such as inequalities to material access, Internet use patterns, and affective or emotional anxiety. This paper investigates the potential role of emotional costs and computer self-efficacy in the connection between computer use at home and students’ computer use patterns. Data for this research come from pretest and posttest surveys administered to fourth- and fifth-grade African-American students. The results reveal that students’ home computer use is a significant predictor of the change in their information and entertainment usage over the course of the intervention. Students’ emotional costs partially mediate the relationship between home computer use and information-oriented usage over the intervention period. The findings suggest that providing students access to digital devices is not enough to close the digital divide.