People with Disabilities and the Role of Social Workers in Lesotho

Après Pachaka (2003: 109), l' assemblé générale des nations unies a ratifié le programme d' action mondiale concernant les personnes avec des handicaps dans leur 37ième session 1982. Le but de ce programme est de promouvoir des mesures de prévention des handicaps, de réhabilitation et la réalisation des buts de la participation intégrale des personnes handicapées dans la vie sociale et du développement de l' égalité. Ce programme a mis en valeur que ces concepts devraient s' appliquer avec la même ampleur et urgence a tous les pays, indépendamment de niveau de développement. Pendant cet ère, l' attention et la conscience publique a été directé envers la nécessité de munir les personnes handicapées avec les mêmes opportunités a disposition aux autres citoyens. De suite, la décennie des nations unies pour personnes handicapées (1983-1992) a été mise en place. Néanmoins, la situation des personnes avec handicaps ne s'est guère amélioré depuis lors et leur nombre est actuellement en croissance.

Implementing Swedish Models of Social Work in a Russian Context

The economic and social changes taking place in Russia in recent decades have implied a restructuring of the Russian society. Among other things, Russian leaders have expressed a need for the reorientation of social development. In the 1990’s, cooperation was initiated on a number of social work and social welfare projects with international support, a process further speeded up during President Jeltsin’s state visit to Sweden in 1997. Discussions between the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and the Russian authorities dealing with welfare issues started from the assumption that Russian professional social work was weak and needed to be strengthened. In the 1990's Sida was also given a stronger general mandate to work with other former Soviet countries in Eastern Europe, for example the Baltic States. The Russian-Swedish discussions resulted in projects aiming to raise social work competencies in public authorities, managements and among social workers in Russia. One of the areas chosen for these projects was Saint Petersburg, where several projects aiming to develop new models for social work were launched. The point of departure has been to transfer and adjust Swedish models of social work to the Russian context. The Stockholm University Department of Social Work became responsible for a number of such projects and besides using academic teachers also involved a number of practitioners, such as social workers in disablement services and reformatory staff who could meet and match Russian authorities and partners.

Social skills as predictors of communication, performance and quality of collaboration in project-based learning

The assumption that social skills are necessary ingredients of collaborative learning is well established but rarely empirically tested. In addition, most theories on collaborative learning focus on social skills only at the personal level, while the social skill configurations within a learning group might be of equal importance. Using the integrative framework, this study investigates which social skills at the personal level and at the group level are predictive of task-related e-mail communication, satisfaction with performance and perceived quality of collaboration. Data collection took place in a technology-enhanced long-term project-based learning setting for pre-service teachers. For data collection, two questionnaires were used, one at the beginning and one at the end of the learning cycle which lasted 3 months. During the project phase, the e-mail communication between group members was captured as well. The investigation of 60 project groups (N = 155 for the questionnaires; group size: two or three students) and 33 groups for the e-mail communication (N = 83) revealed that personal social skills played only a minor role compared to group level configurations of social skills in predicting satisfaction with performance, perceived quality of collaboration and communication behaviour. Members from groups that showed a high and/or homogeneous configuration of specific social skills (e.g., cooperation/compromising, leadership) usually were more satisfied and saw their group as more efficient than members from groups with a low and/or heterogeneous configuration of skills.

Motor ability and self-esteem: The mediating role of physical self-concept and perceived social acceptance

Objectives: One important issue in sport and exercise psychology is to determine to what extent sports and exercise can help to increase self-esteem, and what the underlying mechanism might be. Based on the exercise and self-esteem model (EXSEM) and on findings from the sociometer theory, the mediating effect of physical self-concept and perceived social acceptance on the longitudinal relationship between motor ability and self-esteem was investigated. Design: Longitudinal study with three waves of data collection at intervals of ten weeks each. Method: 428 adolescents (46.3 % girls, mean age = 11.9, SD = .55) participated in the study, in which they performed three motor ability tests and completed paper-and-pencil questionnaires for physical self-concept and perceived social acceptance, as well as for self-esteem, at all three measuring points. Results: Using structural equation modelling procedures, the multiple mediation model revealed both physical self-concept and perceived social acceptance to be mediators between motor ability and self-esteem in the case of boys. In girls, on the other hand, the mediation between motor ability and self-esteem only takes place via physical self-concept. Conclusions: Gender differences in the relationship between motor ability and self-esteem suggest gender-specific interventions aimed at promoting self-concept.

Hippocampus is place of interaction between unconscious and conscious memories retrieval

Recent experiments suggest that humans can form and later retrieve new semantic relations unconsciously by way of hippocampus - the key structure thought to support conscious relational (episodic) memory. Given that the hippocampus subserves both conscious and unconscious relational encoding/retrieval, we expected the hippocampus to be place of unconscious-conscious interactions. This hypothesis was tested in an fMRI experiment on the interaction between the unconscious retrieval of face-associated occupations and the subsequent conscious retrieval of celebrities’ occupations. For subliminal encoding, masked combinations of an unfamiliar face and a written occupation (“actor” or “politician”) were subliminally presented. At test, we presented the former subliminal faces again, without occupations and masks, as conscious retrieval cues. We hypothesized that faces would trigger the unconscious reactivation of the associated occupation - actor or politician -, which in turn would facilitate or inhibit the subsequent conscious recollection of a celebrity’s occupation. Following the presentation of a former subliminal face, we presented the portrait of a celebrity that participants were required to sort according to “actor” or “politician”. Depending on whether the triggered unconscious occupation was congruent or incongruent with the celebrity’s occupation, we expected an expedited or retarded conscious retrieval process as reflected in reaction times. Conscious retrieval was expedited in the congruent condition, but there was no effect in the incongruent condition. fMRI data collected during subliminal relational encoding confirmed that the hippocampus was interacting with neocortical semantic storage sites. fMRI data collected at test indicated that the facilitated conscious retrieval of celebrity-associated occupations was related to deactivations in this same network spanning hippocampus and neocortical semantic storage sites. Hence, unconscious retrieval likely preactivated this network, which allowed for a sparing recruitment of additional neural resources to assist conscious retrieval. This finding supports the notion that consciously and unconsciously acquired relational memories are stored in a single, cohesive hippocampal-neocortical memory space.

Placing Displacement: Place-making in a World of Movement

Over the last two decades, there has been a radical shift in anthropology from stable, rooted and mappable identities to fluid, transitory and migratory forms of belonging. Displacement has become the new trope through which anthropologists have come to look at the world. As a result, place has received an ambiguous position. Focusing on the life experiences of one Somali refugee woman living in Melbourne and her engagement with place, this article questions the current emphasis on space and boundlessness in anthropological discourses on displacement. It argues that rather than developing theoretical concepts that bypass people's experiences, the zooming in on individuals' lifeworlds allows for a close look at the particularity and everydayness of being-in-place. It shows the need for a more complex and nuanced view of displacement – one that values people's lived experiences and one that takes the placement in displacement more seriously.

Reciprocity as a trigger of social cooperation in contemporary immigration societies?

While the system stabilizing function of reciprocity is widely acknowledged, much less attention has been paid to the argument that reciprocity might initiate social cooperation in the first place. This paper tests Gouldner’s early assumption that reciprocity may act as a ‘starting mechanism’ of social cooperation in consolidating societies. The empirical test scenario builds on unequal civic engagement between immigrants and nationals, as this engagement gap can be read as a lack of social cooperation in consolidating immigration societies. Empirical analyses using survey data on reciprocal norms and based on Bayesian hierarchical modelling lend support for Gouldner’s thesis, underlining thereby the relevance of reciprocity in today’s increasingly diverse societies: individual norms of altruistic reciprocity elevate immigrants’ propensity to volunteer, reducing thereby the engagement gap between immigrants and natives in the area of informal volunteering. In other words, compliance with altruistic reciprocity may trigger cooperation in social strata, where it is less likely to occur. The positive moderation of the informal engagement gap through altruistic reciprocity turns out to be most pronounced for immigrants who are least likely to engage in informal volunteering, meaning low, but also high educated immigrants.

Take me to a Place Outside

The film is the result of a participatory media project with female offenders at HM Styal prison. Eight women present and represent an imagined outside through dimensions of the visual and aural offering alternative ways for understanding their realities. Focusing on the imagination shaped by the experience of absences and presences this film is a sensory journey into these women's worlds of desire, longing and relief.

Mobile Temporalities: Place, Ruination and the Dialectics of Time

In this chapter I explore the ambiguous, contradictory and often transient ways the past enters into our lives. I shed light on the interplay of mobility and temporality in the lifeworlds of two Somalis who left Mogadishu with the outbreak of the war in the 1990s. Looking into the ways they actively make sense of this crucial ‘memory-place’ (Ricoeur 2004), a place that that has been turned into a landscape of ruins and rubble, alternative understandings of memory and temporality will emerge. Instead of producing a continuum between here and there, and now and then, the stories and photographs discussed in this chapter form dialectical images – images that refuse to be woven into a coherent picture of the past. By emphasising the dialectical ways these two individuals make sense of Mogadishu’s past and presence, I am following Walter Benjamin’s cue to rethink deeply modern analytical categories such as history, memory and temporality by highlighting the brief, fragmented moments of their appearance in everyday life.