Loss and grief in the workplace. What can we learn from the literature?

<b>Purpose &ndash;</b> The purpose of this paper is to determine how Australian workplaces, their managers and employees respond to those who are grieving at work, as a result of chronic or terminal illness, or caring for those with chronic or terminal illness. The review draws on Australian and relevant international literature and seeks to answer this question. <br /><b>Design/methodology/approach &ndash;</b> A literature review was undertaken in preparation for an Australian study examining workplace supports for people who are grieving &ndash; because they are carers, have experienced a death, or are balancing their own illness with their work. Using a range of search terms, the literature was searched for relevant work between 1980 and 2010. The search found examples of workplace supports throughout the world and some developing Australian literature.<br /> <b>Findings &ndash;</b> Despite illness and death occurring at any stage of a person's life, there is little research that identifies workplace issues associated with grief and loss. And while workplace legislation allows for minimal supports, there was evidence that some workplaces have begun to offer flexibility for work life balance.<br /> <b>Practical implications &ndash;</b> Effective workplace supports will involve individual and workplace responses, but also require legislative approaches in order to effect broad-based system change. <b><br />Originality/value &ndash;</b> The paper compares Australian and international literature about workplace supports and provides an overview of the issues arising.

A literature review on vulvodynia and distress

&nbsp;Distress about a sexual problem is a necessary part of diagnosing female sexual dysfunction. It is an important way to distinguish between a sexual problem and normal sexual variation and has implications for treatment seeking, motivation for therapy and prognosis. The concept of distress, however, has not been clearly defined and is complex and poorly understood. Furthermore, there has been limited research into distress related to genital pain disorders. This paper explores the concept of distress within the field of vulvodynia research, specifically the distress that results from genital pain. Due to the limited research into distress relating specifically to genital pain this review will contextualise the available literature within the larger context of distress related to other female sexual dysfunctions. The discussion includes the current and future Diagnostic and Statistical Manual definitions for genital pain, as well as general definitions of distress. It also explores distress in the genital pain and general female sexual dysfunction literature and discusses its diagnostic, research and clinical implications.

Censorship, resistance and transformation in modern Indonesian literature

This paper investigates the way in which Indonesian literature has reflected violations of human rights in Indonesia in the last decade of the New Order (1990-1998). The regime was authoritarian and responded harshly to any challenge which could cause trouble to national stability. Some writers, such as Seno Gumira Ajidarma, used the power of allegory to resist this oppression. The three works examined here &ndash; &lsquo;Saksi Mata&rsquo;, &lsquo;Pelajaran Sejarah&rsquo;, and &lsquo;Misteri Kota Ninggi&rsquo; &ndash; can be considered as a form of resistance literature.<br />

Reading the local and global: teaching literature in secondary schools in Australia

Recently Australia has witnessed a revival of concern about the place of Australian literature within the school curriculum. This has occurred within &nbsp;a policy environment where there is increasing emphasis on Australia&rsquo;s place &nbsp;in a world economy, and on the need to encourage young people to think of &nbsp;themselves in a global context. These dimensions are reflected in the &nbsp;recently published Australian Curriculum: English, which requires students to read texts of &lsquo;enduring artistic and cultural value&rsquo; that are drawn from &nbsp;'world and Australian literature&rsquo;. No indication, however, is given as to how the reading and literary interpretation that students do might meaningfully be framed by such categories. This essay asks: what saliences do the categories of the &lsquo;local&rsquo;, the &lsquo;national&rsquo; and the &lsquo;global&rsquo; have when &nbsp;young people engage with literary texts? How does this impact on teachers&rsquo; &nbsp;and students&rsquo; interpretative approaches to literature? What place does a &nbsp;&lsquo;literary&rsquo; education, whether conceived in &lsquo;local&rsquo;, 'national&rsquo; or &lsquo;global&rsquo; &nbsp;terms, have in the twenty-first century?

Facilitating students' reflective practice in a medical course: literature review

<b>Introduction</b>: <br />Reflection and <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">reflective</span> <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">practice</span> is of increasing importance in <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">medical</span> education curricula. The aim of this <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">review</span> is to summarise the <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">literature</span> published around <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">facilitating</span> refection in <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">a</span> <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">medical</span> <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">course</span>, and to answer the question: What is the current evidence regarding learning and development moments across the <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">medical</span> curriculum in developing <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">students</span>' <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">reflective</span> <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">practice</span>? <br /><br /><b>Methods</b>: <br /><span class="ScopusTermHighlight">A</span> <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">review</span> of the <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">literature</span> was undertaken using defined databases and the search terms '<span class="ScopusTermHighlight">medical</span> <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">students</span>', '<span class="ScopusTermHighlight">medical</span> education', 'reflection', 'reflect*' and 'medicine'. The search was limited to peer-reviewed published material in English and between the years 2001 and 2011, and included research, <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">reviews</span> and opinion pieces. Results: Thirty-six relevant articles were found, identifying enhancing factors and barriers to effectively teaching <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">reflective</span> <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">practice</span> within <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">medical</span> curricula, relating to: The breadth of the meaning of reflection; <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">facilitating</span> reflection by <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">medical</span> educators; using written or web-based portfolios to facilitate reflection; and assessing the <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">reflective</span> work of <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">students</span>. <br /><br /><b>Discussion</b>: <br /><span class="ScopusTermHighlight">A</span> variety of <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">reflective</span> purposes was found in this <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">literature</span> <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">review</span>. Evidence indicates that, if <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">students</span> are unclear as to the purpose of reflection and do not see educators modelling <span class="ScopusTermHighlight">reflective</span> behaviours, they are likely to undervalue this important skill regardless of the associated learning and development opportunities embedded in the curriculum.

Infrared face recognition: a literature review

Automatic face recognition (AFR) is an area with immense practical potential which includes a wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications, and it continues to be one of the most active research areas of computer vision. Even after over three decades of intense research, the state-of-the-art in AFR continues to improve, benefiting from advances in a range of different fields including image processing, pattern recognition, computer graphics and physiology. However, systems based on visible spectrum images continue to face challenges in the presence of illumination, pose and expression changes, as well as facial disguises, all of which can significantly decrease their accuracy. Amongst various approaches which have been proposed in an attempt to overcome these limitations, the use of infrared (IR) imaging has emerged as a particularly promising research direction. This paper presents a comprehensive and timely review of the literature on this subject.

Associations between child temperament, maternal feeding practices and child body mass index during the preschool years: a systematic review of the literature

It is a research priority to identify modifiable risk factors to improve the effec- tiveness of childhood obesity prevention strategies. Research, however, has largely overlooked the role of child temperament and personality implicated in obesogenic risk factors such as maternal feeding and body mass index (BMI) of preschoolers. A systematic review of relevant literature was conducted to inves- tigate the associations between child temperament, child personality, maternal feeding and BMI and/or weight gain in infants and preschoolers; 18 papers were included in the review. The findings revealed an association between the temperament traits of poor self-regulation, distress to limitations, low and high soothability, low negative affectivity and higher BMI in infants and preschool- aged children. Temperament traits difficult, distress to limitations, surgency/ extraversion and emotionality were significantly associated with weight gain rates in infants. The results also suggested that child temperament was associated with maternal feeding behaviours that have been shown to influence childhood over- weight and obesity, such as using restrictive feeding practices with children per- ceived as having poor self-regulation and feeding potentially obesogenic food and drinks to infants who are more externalizing. Interestingly, no studies to date have evaluated the association between child personality and BMI/weight gain in infants and preschoolers. There is a clear need for further research into the association of child temperament and obesogenic risk factors in preschool-aged children.

Information needs of family carers of people with diabetes at the end of life: a literature review

<b>Background</b>: <br />Recent research identified the issue that family carers of people with diabetes at the end of life (EOL) did not receive sufficient information to enable them to help their relative manage their diabetes at the EOL.<br /><br /><b>Aim</b>: <br />The aim of the current study was to undertake a literature review to identify the information needs of family carers of people with diabetes at the EOL.<br /><br /><b>Method</b>: <br />A comprehensive review of the literature was conducted by searching the following databases: CINAHL, PubMed, PsychInfo, Scopus, and SocINDEX. The grey literature was also searched for papers relevant to the aim. All study designs were included. A content analysis of relevant papers was undertaken to identify themes.<br /><br /><b>Results</b>: <br />Sixteen of the more than 300 papers identified addressed the information needs of family carers of people with diabetes at the EOL and were included in the review. Five key themes were identified from the papers reviewed: (1) performing diabetes care tasks, (2) focus of care, (3) blood glucose management, (4) EOL stages, and (5) involving patients and family carers in decisions about diabetes care. Most of the 16 papers represented the views of health professionals and focused on the need to provide information about the medical aspects of diabetes management.<br /><br /><b>Conclusions</b>:The review suggests further research is needed to identify the information needs of family carers of people with diabetes at the EOL to enable interventions to be developed to support the family carers and meet their unique information needs.

Literature as activism: interrogating the 21st century demise of the Arendtian political public sphere

This article explores Don DeLillo's literary activism through Arendtian perspectives to investigate what the demise of literature's relevance, specifically in a political context, may mean in the current era of an increasingly complex and conflicting 'web of human relationships'.&nbsp; In that it is accepted that narrative has a particular ability to reveal insights as prelinguistic elements that are distinct from all we are able to access through our limited human perceptions, it remarks the Lacanian paradox that if <i>being</i> is in excess of language, then language is the medium by which this is accessed in the world. For DeLillo, writers may be under threat in a dynamic but destabilizing era, their art superceded by technology and fundamentalist terrorism, however, as suggested in <i>Mao II,</i> this renders the writer all the more necessary.&nbsp; It is at the point at which the writer has nothing to say or is under duress to say noting, that a human crisis is reached. I ask, do current forms of political pressure to censure literature constitute a further diminishing of the Arendtian political public domain in which speech as action has primacy?