Women’s perceptions of how their dyslexia impacts on their mothering

Women with children have been depicted as struggling to justify themselves in the shadow of intensive mothering ideology. However, little is said about women who have a disability such as dyslexia, and how disability may intersect with intensive mothering ideology to present additional challenges. In this paper, life-story interviews are drawn upon to start to unpack the ways in which mothering and dyslexia may intersect. The themes discussed include: fear and perceived challenges of having a child with dyslexia; how mothers perceived their impairments manifest in their mothering, including poor organisational skills, short-term memory, reading and spelling; and how mothers may attempt to reframe the apparent contradiction between a ‘good’ mother and a mother with dyslexia by, for example, portraying themselves as a positive role-model for their child and better able to identify and cater for their child’s needs.     

Group Work and Social Justice: Designing Pedagogy for Social Change

In this article the authors explore the gap between education and action in putting the social work core value of social justice into practice. Describing how their School of Social Work has taken up this challenge, the authors analyze how a new social action course helps bridge this gap and draw on student reflection on their experiences and assignments in the course to show how students concretize and interiorize the meaning of social action and social justice. Learning by doing social action through a case study, group work becomes the vehicle through which students act on social issues and work for social change.     

Weapons of Mass Distraction: Magicianship,Misdirection, and the Dark Side of Legitimation1

Most discussions of legitimation focus on factors that are expected to contribute to it, such as tradition, expertise, or prosperity. Less attention has been paid to “the dark side” of legitimation, which depends heavily on evading attention. A potentially informative approach is to learn from professionals with special expertise in evading attention while making things “disappear”—magicians. Rather than seeking overt control over the audience, they perform in plain view, largely by using well‐timed distractions, or “misdirection.” Preliminary evidence suggests that similar techniques may be widely used in political contexts, with some of the most effective forms of misdirection involving diversionary reframing—diverting attention away from any questions about existing distributions of privilege, not by brute force, but by changing the subject, especially by raising questions about the legitimacy of critics. These and related techniques clearly deserve to be the focus of additional research.     

Societal Responses to Familiar Versus Unfamiliar Risk: Comparisons of Influenza and SARS in Korea

This study examines the connections between familiar (influenza) and unfamiliar (SARS) risks among the general public in a SARS affected society. Using a survey of 350 respondents in Chonju, we find that risk perceptions and a belief that influenza vaccination reduces the incidence of SARS explain behavioral intentions for influenza vaccination and purchase responses to a hypothetical SARS vaccine. Those respondents who believe that an influenza vaccination will very likely reduce SARS incidence have a high probability (79%) of intending to vaccinate, but a much lower WTP for a SARS vaccine than those without such a belief. This belief undoubtedly was influenced by a reframing of influenza vaccination as preventing SARS. Such reframing may lead to short-term improvements in vaccination rates to the detriment of long-term SARS vaccination development. When compared with a similar study in Taiwan, societal risk perceptions of SARS and WTP for a vaccine vary greatly according to the extent of a society's experience with SARS.     

政治讲话中框架的构建与重构——以文化指示语、隐喻、否定式为例

从框架构建及重构理论角度研究政治讲话中的词语意义和文本解释,能够将话语与交际者的政治立场、文化语境、生活经验结合起来,有助于更好地理解讲话人的真正意图和话语产生的语境。以美国总统奥巴马2010年和2011年国情咨文讲话为例,考察了三种政治讲话中构建及重构框架的方式,即文化指示语、隐喻、否定式,以说明框架构建及重构在政治语篇中的运用和功能。     

Developing Family Therapy Skills on a Shoe String Budget: A Peer Supervision and Training Approach

Family therapy skills are an essential tool when working with young children and their families, yet accessing family therapy training and supervision in workplace settings has become more difficult. Skills enhancement may be obtained through formal training in accredited courses, a costly undertaking, in which clinicians most often carry the entire cost for the training. In this paper, we propose that specific family therapy skills relevant to working with families of young children can be developed within a peer group format. The peer training described in this paper is extremely cost effective, easy to set up, specifically tailored to our unique training needs and the characteristics of the population of families we are working with. Further, the training allows us to develop fresh and creative ways of skills acquisition, our own ‘curriculum’, with flexible use of training techniques, depending on our particular needs at a given time. We conclude with some of the disadvantages of the model and propose ideas for future development.