Mental health program evaluation: Where you start?

Seduced by the elegance, sophistication and jargon characteristic of new developments in applied research, practicing evaluators are in danger of becoming distracted from achievement of their evaluative goal: that of providing timely, reliable and useful data to program management to facilitate rational data-based decision-making. To avoid such seduction, the author advocates adaptation of simple, inexpensive and efficient evaluative methods tailored to organizational needs and presentation of findings in language readily understood by constituent groups. Likewise, insistance by evaluators upon maintenance of a strict role boundary — that is, limiting role functioning exclusively to those tasks considered evaluation — may be dysfunctional. Rather than detract from accomplishment of his goals, the author maintains that such participation allows development of skills, insights and staff relationships which enhance the evaluator's effective functioning within the organizational context and contribute to organizational acceptance and use of his evaluative results.     

后现代小说《白雪公主》的互文性分析--以童话隐喻为例

美国后现代小说《白雪公主》主要嫁接于经典格林童话《白雪公主与七个小矮人》,其中也穿插了其他经典童话故事的情节。唐纳德·巴塞尔姆运用互文性将文本历史与社会现实相融合所进行的诗学构建,是对文本历史的承续与反叛,体现了后现代主义创作的锐意创新。在互文性的框架下解析《白雪公主》的童话隐喻,旨在阐述文本表面散漫的叙事风格背后隐藏的对社会现实的深切关注。     

别把STS做小了!——唐纳德·麦肯齐访谈录

从统计学历史到导弹防御系统,再到金融市场、碳交易、信贷风暴,麦肯齐以数学知识贯穿其中的研究主题从不仅是狭隘的学术研究。若将一个看似相当有限的技术问题置于社会、文化、科技、历史的脉络之下,即可解释清楚那些关乎人类生存的重要议题。有限论与描述指涉活动的“操演性”概念对于科学知识社会学、特别是经济学研究大有助益。贯穿爱丁堡学派理论主轴的是科学知识社会学的强纲领,以及由此发展而来并补强了强纲领的有限论。强纲领就某种意义上而言是方法论的,而有限论运用于科学上时,实质上更像是理论性的。建议中国科技与社会学界不要把STS想得太窄,这个领域最令人兴奋之处也许就是那些从传统议题中超脱出来的部分,应该将目光放在像这样的知识的良机上。     

选择性退出、多边间竞争与特朗普的反制度化国际战略

特朗普改变前任对国际制度的承诺和支持,在国际政治中执行了一种反制度化的国际战略。特朗普的反制度化国际战略由指导原则、主要目标和执行措施构成,是“美国优先”国家安全战略的有机组成部分。反制度化战略以选择性退出主义和竞争性多边主义为基本原则,通过国际制度内的抗议、退约、机制转移及新建国际制度等多重措施,试图把国际制度作为继续维持霸权地位的工具。反制度化国际战略具有历史延续性和当前特殊性相结合的特征,反映了美国的霸凌主义和单边主义。美国自认是自由国际秩序的牺牲品,力图改变现行国际制度体系;中国崛起给美国带来的恐慌和美国的地位焦虑,加速了美国终结其接触与融入的国际制度战略;而特朗普本人对国际制度持质疑态度,执意实施反制度化国际战略。特朗普反制度化战略引发多边主义危机,进一步恶化了基于规则的国际制度体系。不过,这一战略无法阻止多边主义和多边制度的发展演进。反制度化战略能否成功实现,取决于目标、能力与执行的匹配度及多极化的发展趋势。     

Occupational preferences and the quality of life

This paper focuses on the theoretical and empirical aspects of occupational choice by examining the structure of individual preferences expressed in terms of abstract characteristics. Both verbal and quantitative models were successfully tested, and a rough upper limit was set on the ability of individuals to specify their quality-of-life technology. The study was too restrictive to permit general inferences concerning the quality of life of particular occupations. However, it may be concluded from the limited empirical findings that the qualitative model captured career-living preferences almost as consistently as did the highly structured quantitative approach. The experiments extracted subjects' cognitive structures for career-living stiuations in all the richness and generality permitted by verbal expression. Although more costly to determine, such qualitative information is of considerable potential benefit to policy makers, ect., and equivalent knowledge cannot be obtained from numerical representations.     

Motherless Subjects and Mothered Selves: The Implications of Jacques Lacan’s and Donald Winnicott’s Writings on the Formation of the ‘I’ for American Studies

ABSTRACT

This article contrasts the theories of ego formation put forward in Jacques Lacan’s ‘The Mirror Stage’ and Donald Winnicott’s ‘The Mirror Role of the Mother,’ and discusses their methodological implications for the field of American studies. While Lacan theorises subjectivity as irreparably split and (self-)alienated, Winnicott offers an optimistic version of a self which is sustained in its going-on-being by a nourishing maternal presence. These disparate conceptualisations of the human being produce two powerful frames through which to approach culture. Yet, while Lacan is widely recognised in the American studies scholarship, Winnicott remains virtually unknown. This article aims to enhance the visibility of the British author by outlining the productivity of his ideas for any cultural or literary analysis. By stressing the foundational significance of the primary bond Winnicott’s theory intervenes in the recent critiques of neoliberal capitalism which remain halted in a Lacanian-like melancholic mode, masked by a cultural command of perpetual enjoyment. The Winnicottian perspective challenges Lacan’s fixation on the unattainable objects of desire, reiterated by the neoliberal myth of self-perfection through consumption, and offers an alternative pattern of human sociality, based on relational, self-reflexive moderation.     

(Dis)Arming the madman: sane supremacy and the Second Amendment

Abstract

The protection of American mental health consumers’ Second Amendment rights is the ‘mad’ liberation issue of the twenty-first century. Federal laws currently dispossess the differently minded of their Second Amendment access and rights to bear firearms. In response to a spate of school shootings, ‘Red flag laws’ are used in an effort to circumvent mad citizens’ rights to self-preservation and defence. In this article I am proposing neither a political-left nor right side of the aisle position, but rather a bipartisan, anti-sanist stance, where I call for an end to America’s contemporary era of sane supremacy that strips the mad citizenry of their rights to own firearms.     

Ableism and the Trump phenomenon

This article argues that Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential campaign was abetted by ableism, both directly, through Trump’s rhetoric, and indirectly, through the ableist culture and infrastructure of the rural, white working-class communities that turned the election for Trump. The article uses Robert McRuer’s account of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ to situate Trump’s popularity in relation to the neoliberal policies that have marginalized and stigmatized the white working class, and deploys Lennard Davis’s account of normalcy to explain why Trump’s own bodily difference was widely, and hypocritically, mocked by the left, and also why Trump’s ‘non-normative’ embodiment appealed to his white working-class supporters.     

Trump,proto-presidency,and the rise of sane supremacy

This articles opines that America’s far-Left is sowing the seeds of ‘sane supremacy’: first, by unapologetically tarring President Trump as ‘insane’ for political purposes; and, second, legislating for psychiatry to colonize the White House so as to remove Trump on account of his suspected ‘insanity’. This article deploys an anti-sanist lens and uses the notion of ‘prototypicality’ to show how the regressive far-Left portrays Trump as not meeting the ‘normative’, ‘proto-presidential’ standard. Instead of depicting Trump as mentally unfit, we need to focus on his politics and their effects.     

In the Streets of San Francisco

The presidency of Donald Trump has occasioned critical repercussions within the field of American Studies around the world. This piece is a response from Germany: a country marked by the historical experiences of fascism and a socialist surveillance state, but a country that, in spite of the liberal pluralistic consensus that grew out of these historical traumata, now has to face a similar development as other Western countries: the rise of new forms of nationalist parochialism, racism coupled with white patriarchal nostalgia and a militant anti-humanism. The rise of a new right, the piece argues, must be regarded as the manifestation of deep insecurities about individual and collective identities which are increasingly defined not on the basis of achievement but on the basis of inheritance. Remembering an instance of ‘hospitality toward a stranger’ in 1979 California, the essay evokes the spirit of cosmopolitanism which, though currently under fierce attack, continues to thrive in the United States, thanks to the commitment of local civil actors, and which needs to be defended by comparatively minded American Studies scholars.