Strategies for critical reflection in international contexts for social work students

International contexts provide social work students with the opportunity to develop knowledge of international social work, global citizenship and cultural competency. While these contexts are powerful sites of learning, there is a need to ensure that this occurs within a critical framework. The paradigm of critical reflection is used to facilitate this and has been popular in international programs. In this article, we develop this further by describing critically-reflective techniques and providing examples used in a pilot exchange program between a social work school in the UK and in India. The potential implications of these strategies for social work education are discussed. © The Author(s) 2012

An Examination of Volunteer Motivation in Credit Unions: Informing Volunteer Resource Management

Volunteer recruitment and retention is a problem that most credit unions experience. Research suggests that knowledge of volunteer motivation can inform volunteer management strategies. This paper uses a survey approach to determine whether current volunteers in credit unions in Northern Ireland are more motivated by the actual act of volunteering, by the output from the volunteering activity (including altruism) or because the volunteering activity increases their human capital value. Altruistic reasons are found to be the most influential, with the act of volunteering also scoring highly. This knowledge should inform volunteer recruitment programmes and internal appraisal processes as management can reinforce messages that provide positive feedback to volunteers on the social benefits being achieved by the credit union. This will further motivate current volunteers, ensuring retention. When motivation was analyzed by volunteer characteristics we found that older volunteers, retired volunteers and volunteers who are less educated are more motivated in their role. There was little evidence that individuals volunteer to improve their human capital worth.

Ageing in changing community contexts: Cross-border perspectives from rural Ireland and Northern Ireland

Ongoing demographic, social, economic and cultural changes point to the dynamic and continually changing contexts of rural areas in Ireland and Northern Ireland. However, the influence of such changes on the lives of older people remains under-explored, particularly the question of how older people perceive, connect to and engage in their communities. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with indigenous and non-indigenous older people in three case-study sites in Ireland, Northern Ireland and a cross-border region, this article presents a comparative analysis of how changing community contexts have shaped the lives of rural-dwelling older people. The analysis focuses on four key areas: economic structure and service access; social relations and social cohesion; meanings and attachments; and community engagement. While the findings demonstrate that some dimensions of participants’ lives were affected by complex economic and social changes, others dimensions were connected in a more significant way to life course and residential history and the desire to maintain community capacity.

The Emergence of Rural Support Organisations in the UK and Canada: Providing Support for Patrilineal Family Farming

A certain type of rural support has emerged since agricultural restructuring of the 1980s. The article draws on research from the UK and Canada to suggest that support in both countries is derived from a patrilineal culture that still dominates family farming in both countries. Such a way of life, it is argued, involves the majority of farming men and women across generations working increasingly hard to ensure farm survival in order to facilitate an overall pattern of farm succession via the male or ‘patrilineal’ line. The article begins by providing a conceptualisation of patrilineal family farming drawing on insights from gender-informed work on farming identities, political-economy approaches from agricultural geography and the cultural turn in rural studies. This section will provide theoretical direction for discussion of the research findings. Here the article presents a discussion of the context to and typologies of organisations that emerged and five key findings derived from research conducted with members of the organisations in the UK and Canada. This assists in developing the argument that the emergent organisations are responding to and supporting this way of life and highlights some of the potential implications of doing so. The article has two aims. Firstly, it suggests that family farming in the UK and Canada continues to be predominantly structured by a way of life transmitted across generations which has the overall prerequisite of maintaining farm survival to enable patrilineal succession. Secondly, it suggests that a particular type of support for farming families emerged as a response to perceived threats to this way of life and provides evidence of its enduring nature.

The Role of Subjectivity and Knowledge Power Struggles in the Formation of Public Policy

There is a growing incentive for sociologists to demonstrate the use value of their research. Research ‘impact’ is a driver of research funding and a measure of academic standing. Academic debate on this issue has intensified since Burawoy’s (2004) call for a ‘public’ sociology. However the academy is no longer the sole or primary producer of knowledge and empirical sociologists need to contend with the ‘huge swathes’ of social data that now exist (Savage and Burrows, 2007). This article furthers these debates by considering power struggles between competing forms of knowledge. Using a case study, it specifically considers the power struggle between normative and empirical knowledge, and how providers of knowledge assert legitimacy for their truth claims. The article concludes that the idea of ‘impact’ and ‘use-value’ are extremely complex and depends in the policy context on knowledge power struggles, and on how policy makers want to view the world. © The Author(s) 2012

A Contested Landscape: Monuments, public memory, and post-Soviet Identity in Stavropol’, Russia

Much recent literature in cultural, political and social geography has considered the relationship between identity, memory, and the urban landscape. This paper interrogates such literature through exploring the complex materialisation of memorialisation in post-Soviet Russia. Using the example of the statue of General Alexei Ermolov in Stavropol', an analysis of the cityscape reveals interethnic tensions over differing interpretations of the life and history of the person upon whom the statue is based. The existence of a rich literature on Ermolov and the Russian colonial experience in the North Caucasus helps to explain this. The symbolic cityscape of Stavropol' plays an important role in interethnic relations in the multi-ethnic city; it is both an arena through which Russian identity is communicated with people and produced and reproduced, and an arena through which Russian citizens compete with each other for authority on historical narratives that operate at and between a number of scales. People's readings of the cityscape can reveal much about power and space in contemporary Russia.

Amnesties in Transition: Punishment, Restoration, and the Governance of Mercy

Despite the much vaunted triumph of human rights, amnesties continue to be a frequently used technique of post-conflict transitional justice. For many critics, they are synonymous with unaccountability and injustice. This article argues that despite the rhetoric, there is no universal duty to prosecute under international law and that issues of selectivity and proportionality present serious challenges to the retributive rationale for punishment in international justice. It contends that many of the assumptions concerning the deterrent effect in the field are also oversold and poorly theorized. It also suggests that appropriately designed restorative amnesties can be both lawful and effective as routes to truth recovery, reconciliation, and a range of other peacemaking goals. Rather than mere instruments of impunity, amnesties should instead be seen as important institutions in the governance of mercy, the reassertion of state sovereignty and, if properly constituted, the return of law to a previously lawless domain.

The Science of Religious Beliefs

Why have humans, throughout history and across cultures, shown a strong tendency to believe in the existence of superhuman intentional agents and attached this belief to notions of morality, misfortune, and the creation of the world? The answer emerging from the cognitive science of religion appears to be that explicit beliefs are informed and constrained by the natural and cross-culturally recurrent operation of implicit cognitive systems. Successful god concepts resonate with the expectations of these implicit systems but also have attention-demanding and inferentially-rich properties that allow their integration into various areas of human concern. Theological concepts may deviate from these natural cognitive moorings but require special cultural scaffolding, such as Whitehouse's two Modes of Religiosity, to do so and constitute additions to, rather than replacements of the religious beliefs supported by implicit cognitive systems.