Reducing Child Protection Error in Social Work: Towards an Holistic-Rational Perspective

Social work in the United Kingdom remains embroiled in concerns about child protection error. The serious injury or death of vulnerable children continues to evince much consternation in the public and private spheres. Governmental responses to these concerns invariably draw on technocratic solutions involving more procedures, case management systems, information technology and bureaucratic regulation. Such solutions flow from an implicit use of instrumental rationality based on a ‘means-end’ logic. While bringing an important perspective to the problem of child protection error, instrumental rationality has been overused limiting discretion and other modes of rational inquiry. This paper argues that the social work profession should apply an enlarged form of rationality comprising not only the instrumental-rational mode but also the critical-rational, affective-rational and communicative-rational forms. It is suggested that this combined, conceptual arsenal of rational inquiry leads to a gestalt which has been termed the holistic-rational perspective. It is also argued that embracing a more rounded perspective such as this might offer greater opportunities for reducing child protection error.

Measurements of immune responses for establishing correlates of vaccine protection against HIV

Well-defined correlates of protective immunity are an essential component of rational vaccine development. Despite years of basic science and three HIV vaccine efficacy trials, correlates of immunological protection from HIV infection remain undefined. In December 2010, a meeting of scientists engaged in basic and translational work toward developing HIV-1 vaccines was convened. The goal of this meeting was to discuss current opportunities and optimal approaches for defining correlates of protection, both for ongoing and future HIV-1 vaccine candidates; specific efforts were made to engage young scientists. We discuss here the highlights from the meeting regarding the progress made and the way forward for a protective HIV-1 vaccine.

The performance of a cathodic protection system in reinforced concrete structure: Monitoring and Service Life Modelling

The use of cathodic protection in reinforced concrete is becoming increasingly common with such systems being installed on a number of structures throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland. However the prescribed design lives (or service life) of each cathodic protection system vary widely. The aim of this project was to assess the effectiveness of a sacrificial anode cathodic protection system and to predict its design life through a series of laboratory based experiments. The experimental plan involved casting a number of slabs which represented a common road bridge structure. The corrosion of the steel within the experimental slabs was then accelerated prior to installation of a cathodic protection system. During the experiment corrosion potential of the steel reinforcement was monitored using half-cell measurement. Additionally the current flow between the cathodic protection system and the steel reinforcement was recorded to assess the degree of protection. A combination of theoretical calculations and experimental results were then collated to determine the design life of this cathodic protection system. It can be concluded that this sacrificial anode based cathodic protection system was effective in halting the corrosion of steel reinforcement in the concrete slabs studied. Both the corrosion current and half-cell potentials indicated a change in passivity for the steel reinforcement once sacrificial anodes were introduced. The corrosion current was observed to be sensitive to the changes to the exposure environment. Based on the experimental variables studied the design life of this sacrificial anode can be taken as 26 to 30 years.

The Landscape of Differences: Contact and Segregation in the Everyday Encounters

The article examines everyday life in Northern Ireland’s segregated communities and focus on a neglected empirical dimension of ethnic and social segregation developed within the socio-spatial relations between people and their built environment. It shows how the everyday urban encounters are reproduced through negotiating differences and the ways in which living in divided communities lead to social inequality and imbalanced use of space. The article employed qualitative research methods with individuals and community groups from the Fountain estate, a small Protestant enclave in Derry/Londonderry. Their stories were replete with cases of injustice and insights into the daily struggles that have generally occurred within theories of contact and social segregation as a whole. In fact, people in the Fountain presented their own intertextual references on what was more significant for them as a matter of routine survival and belonging, which allowed them to be more constructive about themselves. While segregation has persisted for multiple decades; time is believed to be the factor most likely to change it, as it is hoped that the younger generation will provide lasting change to Northern Ireland and eventual peace between currently segregated communities.

Time for Reform? Refugees, Asylum-seekers and Protection Under International Human Rights Law

The aim is to explore the protection that international human rights law offers to refugees, asylum-seekers, and the forcibly displaced. The ambition of the global rights framework is to guarantee a defined range of rights to all human beings, and thus move the basis for normative entitlement from exclusive reliance on national membership to a common humanity. This comprehensive and international perspective remains formally tied to states - acting individually or collectively - in terms of creation and implementation. The norms must find an entry point into the empirical world, and there must be clarity on responsibilities for practical delivery. It should remain unsurprising that the expectations raised by the normative reach of the law are frequently dashed in the complex and difficult human world of instrumental politics, power, and conflict. The intention here is to outline the international human rights law context, and indicate the value and limitations for the protection of refugees and asylum-seekers. A question is then raised about possible reform.

The International Protection of Refugees and Asylum Seekers: the Role of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights

This book presents a comprehensive assessment of regional responses to the crisis in the asylum/refugee system and critically examines how different regions tackle the problem. The chapters consider the fundamental challenges which undermine an effective asylum process as well as regional difficulties with the various circumstances surrounding asylum seekers. With contributions on Africa, Europe, Latin America, South Asia and the Middle East, and the Pacific, the collection strives to appreciate what informs each region’s approach to the asylum process and asks if there are issues common to every region and if regions can learn from one another. The book seeks an understanding of the existing legal regime for the protection of asylum seekers and how regional institutions such as human rights commissions and regional courts enforce and adjudicate the law.

Chase over the Nile: The Social Evolution of Riverine Landscape in Urban Egypt

Throughout its history, Cairo evolved as a regional metropolis that sprawls along the banks of the Nile accumulating narratives of evolving social landscape. Overlooking the Nile reflected a privileged social position and place for the urban elite. In spatial terms, the urban bourgeoisie tend to develop living havens in enclaves that are distant from the populace’s everyday life. Ironically, exclusive settlements only attract urban growth further in their direction. This chapter offers an analytical reading of the socio-spatial structure of Cairo following the emergence and decline of a series bourgeoisie quarters along the shores of the Nile. It reports urban narratives based on archival records, documents and investigation of historical texts and travelers’ accounts. This essay argues that cities are essentially social constructs in which hierarchy and connectivity are fundamental aspects of its economic and spatial logic. Through social ambition and desire for upgrade, middle class infiltrate into bourgeoisie havens and sometimes encircle it, seeking better living condition inscribed by social mobility and connectivity to centres of wealth and power. Being both natural barrier and cohesive spine, the Nile helped Cairo to develop successive nucleuses of highly crafted urban experiences that have left their imprints on the contemporary urban scene.

Living in the Landscape: Essays in Honour of Graeme Barker

This edited volume reflects on the multitude of ways by which humans shape and are shaped by the natural world, and how Archaeology and its cognate disciplines recover this relationship. The structure and content of the book recognize Graeme Barker’s pioneering contribution to the scientific study of human-environment interaction, and form a secondary dialectic between his many colleagues and past students and the academic vista which he has helped define. The volume comprises 22 thematic papers, arranged chronologically, each a presentation of front-line research in their respective fields. They mirror the scope of Barker’s legacy through a focus on transitions in the human-environment relationship, how they are enacted and perceived. The assembled chapters illustrate how climate, demographic, subsistence, social and ecological change have affected cultures from the Palaeolithic to Historical, from North Africa and West-Central Eurasia to Southeast Asia and China. They also chronicle the innovations and renegotiated relations that communities have devised to meet and exploit the many shifting realities involved with Living in the Landscape.

Holocene landscape intervention and plant food production strategies in island and mainland Southeast Asia

In the areas adjacent to the drowned Pleistocene continent of Sunda – present-day Mainland and Island SE Asia – the Austronesian Hypothesis of a diaspora of rice cultivators from Taiwan ∼4200 years ago has often been linked with the start of farming. Mounting evidence suggests that these developments should not be conflated and that alternative explanations should be considered, including indigenous inception of complex patterns of plant food production and early exchange of plants, animals, technology and genes. We review evidence for widespread forest disturbance in the Early Holocene which may accompany the beginnings of complex food-production. Although often insubstantial, evidence for incipient and developing management of rainforest vegetation and of developing complex relationships with plants is present, and early enough to suggest that during the Early to mid-Holocene this vast region was marked by different approaches to plant food production. The trajectory of the increasingly complex relationships between people and their food organisms was strongly locally contingent and in many cases did not result in the development of agricultural systems that were recognisable as such at the time of early European encounters. Diverse resource management economies in the Sunda and neighbouring regions appear to have accompanied rather than replaced a reliance on hunting and gathering. This, together with evidence for Early Holocene interaction between these neighbours, gives cause for us to question some authors continued adherence to a singular narrative of the Austronesian Hypothesis and the ‘Neolithisation’ of this part of the world. It also leads us to suggest that the forests of this vast region are, to an extent, a cultural artefact.