news, new scholarship & more from around the world
Today’s therapy-dog handlers recognize the need to be teammates with their dogs. Teaming with one’s dog involves unobtrusively providing physical and emotional support as well as respectful guidance in what to do. Being a teammate requires attention to our own behavior, not just our dog’s. This book reminds all handlers that being conscious of what we do with our dogs helps them do their best work, and also can increase the effectiveness of our visits.
For the past three years, Putnam has been nursing an outlandish ambition. He wants inequality of opportunity for kids to be the central issue in the 2016 presidential election. Not how big government should be or what the “fair share” is for the wealthy, but what’s happening to children boxed out of the American dream.
Taking readers into the darkness of solitary confinement, this searing collection of convict experiences, academic research, and policy recommendations shines a light on the proliferation of supermax (super-maximum-security) prisons and the detrimental effects of long-term high-security confinement on prisoners and their families.
Private Equity at Work provides a new roadmap to the largely hidden internal operations of these firms, showing how their business strategies disproportionately benefit the partners in private equity firms at the expense of other stakeholders and taxpayers.
The contributors to Street Economies in the Urban Global South highlight individual and collective resistance by street vendors to overcome numerous processes that exacerbate the marginality and disempowerment of street economy work.
Although budget cuts made to the university sector by Margaret Thatcher’s government were followed by a degree of relative prosperity, more recently, even harsher attitudes towards the state funding of higher education (or anything else) have, Thomas Docherty argues in this passionate book, ensured that “money has systematically replaced thought as the key driver and raison d’être of the institution’s official existence”.
While many psychosocial interventions used in social work practice have strong research evidence supporting their efficacy, a surprising number do not, potentially resulting in harmful outcomes. With the goal of promoting critical thinking among social workers and related professionals, this book evaluates commonly used scientific and pseudoscientific practices in social work today.
Imagine yourself without a face—the task seems impossible. The face is a core feature of our physical identity. Our face is how others identify us and how we think of our ‘self’. Yet, human faces are also functionally essential as mechanisms for communication and as a means of eating, breathing, and seeing. For these reasons, facial disfigurement can endanger our fundamental notions of self and identity or even be life threatening, at worse. Precisely because it is so difficult to conceal our faces, the disfigured face compromises appearance, status, and, perhaps, our very way of being in the world.
The politics of old age in the twenty first century is contentious, encompassing ideological debates about the rights and welfare entitlements of individuals in later life. An important aspect is the manner in which older people and their representative groups are given the opportunity to articulate their interests in the policy-making process.
Are most teenage—or younger—children really going to sex parties and having multiple sexual encounters in an orgy-like fashion? Researchers say no—teen sex is actually not rampant and teen pregnancy is at low levels. But why do stories like these find such media traffic, exploiting parents’ worst fears? How do these rumors get started, and how do they travel around the country and even across the globe?
From call centers, overseas domestic labor, and customer care to human organ selling, gestational surrogacy, and knowledge work, such as software programming, life itself is channeled across the globe from one population to another. In Life Support, Kalindi Vora demonstrates how biological bodies become a new kind of global biocapital.
When a four-year-old California girl died on March 9, 1984, the state charged her mother with involuntary manslaughter because she failed to provide her daughter with medical care, choosing instead to rely on spiritual healing. During the next few years, a half dozen other children of Christian Science parents died under similar circumstances. The children’s deaths and the parents’ trials drew national attention, highlighting a deeply rooted, legal/political struggle to define religious freedom.
Experts from a range of disciplines offer practical advice for conducting social science research in racial and ethnic minority populations. Readers will learn how to choose appropriate methods—longitudinal studies, national surveys, quantitative analysis, personal interviews, and other qualitative approaches—and how best to employ them for research on specific demographic groups.
Juveniles possess less maturity, intelligence, and competence than adults, heightening their vulnerability in the justice system. For this reason, states try juveniles in separate courts and use different sentencing standards than for adults. Yet, when police bring kids in for questioning, they use the same interrogation tactics they use for adults, including trickery, deception, and lying to elicit confessions or to produce incriminating evidence against the defendants.
