Language attitudes and language shift among ethnic migrants in Khartoum

This paper investigates language attitudes among ethnic migrant groups in Khartoum, the capital city of Sudan. A questionnaire was used to collect data on language preference, language parents prefer their children to learn, and reasons for language preference. Results suggest that while positive attitude played a significant role in learning Arabic among some of the groups under investigation, it proved to be of no help in maintaining the groups’ ethnic languages. Arabic was reported as very important for education, religious activities, economic privileges and social interaction. Ethnic languages, on the other hand, were preferred for purely symbolic reasons (symbolizing groups’ ethnic identity).

Welcome to the Jungle: The Liability of Internet Intermediaries for Privacy Violations in Europe

In Europe, roughly three regimes apply to the liability of Internet intermediaries for privacy violations conducted by users through their network. These are: the e-Commerce Directive, which, under certain conditions, excludes them from liability; the Data Protection Directive, which imposes a number of duties and responsibilities on providers processing personal data; and the freedom of expression, contained inter alia in the ECHR, which, under certain conditions, grants Internet providers several privileges and freedoms. Each doctrine has its own field of application, but they also have partial overlap. In practice, this creates legal inequality and uncertainty, especially with regard to providers that host online platforms and process User Generated Content.

Beyond the Pro and Contra of Evidence-Based Practice: Reflections on a Recurring Dilemma at the Core of Social Work

Currently, social work is witnessing a quite polarized debate about what should be the basis for good practice. Simply stated, the different attempts to define the required basis for effective and accountable interventions in social work practice can be grouped in two paradigmatic positions, which seem to be in strong opposition to each other. On the one hand the highly influential evidence based practice movement highlights the necessity to base practice interventions on proven effectiveness from empirical research. Despite some variations, such as between narrow conceptions of evidence based practice (see e.g. McNeece/Thyer, 2004) and broader approaches to it (see e.g. Gambrill, 1999, 2001, 2008), the evidence based practice movement embodies a positivist orientation and more explicitly scientific aspirations of social work by using positivistic empirical strategies. Critics of the evidence based practice movement argue that its narrow epistemological assumptions are not appropriate for the understanding of social phenomena and that evidence based guidelines to practice are insufficient to deal with the extremely complex activities social work practice requires in different and always somewhat unique practice situations (Webb, 2001; Gray & Mc Donald, 2006; Otto, Polutta &Ziegler, 2009). Furthermore critics of evidence based practice argue that it privileges an uncritical and a-political positivism which seems highly problematic in the current climate of welfare state reforms, in which the question ‘what works’ is highly politicized and the legitimacy of professional social work practice is being challenged maybe more than ever before (Kessl, 2009). Both opponents and proponents of evidence based practice argue on the epistemological, the methodological and the ethical level to sustain their point of view and raise fundamental questions about the real nature of social work practice, so that one could get the impression that social work is really at the crossroads between two very different conceptions of social work practice and its further professional development (Stepney, 2009). However, this article is not going to merely rehearse the pro and contra of different positions that are being invoked in the debate about evidence based practice. Instead it aims to go further by identifying the dilemmas underlying these positions which - so it is argued – re-emerge in the debate about evidence based practice, but which are older than this debate. They concern the fundamental ambivalence modern professionalization processes in social work were subjected to from their very beginnings.