Religions and social progress: critical assessments and creative partnerships

This extended version of the published version is also available at www.ipsp.org/downloads.This chapter starts from the premise that some 80 percent of the world’s population affirms some kind of religious identification, a percentage that is growing rather than declining. Emphasizing the significance of belief and practice in everyday lives and local contexts, we analyze the impact of religion and its relevance to social progress in a wide variety of fields: family, gender, and sexuality; diversity and democracy; conflict and peace; everyday wellbeing; and care for the earth. We also identify a series of cross-cutting themes that establish a foundation for policy-making

Toward a Better Future for this Generation and the Next...

The Oak Foundation commissioned Promundo-US to review and assess Oak's overall strategy in relation to its goal of engaging men and boys in the elimination of sexual abuse of children and comment more specifically on possible priorities and directions for work with respect to its objective that: Men and boys will have greater opportunities to engage positively in children's lives and to protect them from sexual abuse This report is the result of this assessment. The report is based on an extensive desk review of published research and program and policy evaluations, as well as the 'grey' literature on work with men and boys on child sexual abuse and other forms of intimate violence in the lives of children. Out of this review, a total of 35 key informants across a range of targeted sectors both internationally and within Oak's priority regions were identified and interviewed in person or over the phone, using a semi-structured interview tool. These key informant phone interviews gathered detailed information on both experiences and lessons from current thinking, policy and practice as well as on opportunities and priorities for future grant-making

Early intervention for obsessive compulsive disorder : An expert consensus statement

© 2019 Elsevier B.V.and ECNP. All rights reserved.Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is common, emerges early in life and tends to run a chronic, impairing course. Despite the availability of effective treatments, the duration of untreated illness (DUI) is high (up to around 10 years in adults) and is associated with considerable suffering for the individual and their families. This consensus statement represents the views of an international group of expert clinicians, including child and adult psychiatrists, psychologists and neuroscientists, working both in high and low and middle income countries, as well as those with the experience of living with OCD. The statement draws together evidence from epidemiological, clinical, health economic and brain imaging studies documenting the negative impact associated with treatment delay on clinical outcomes, and supporting the importance of early clinical intervention. It draws parallels between OCD and other disorders for which early intervention is recognized as beneficial, such as psychotic disorders and impulsive-compulsive disorders associated with problematic usage of the Internet, for which early intervention may prevent the development of later addictive disorders. It also generates new heuristics for exploring the brain-based mechanisms moderating the ‘toxic’ effect of an extended DUI in OCD. The statement concludes that there is a global unmet need for early intervention services for OC related disorders to reduce the unnecessary suffering and costly disability associated with under-treatment. New clinical staging models for OCD that may be used to facilitate primary, secondary and tertiary prevention within this context are proposed.Peer reviewe

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship

Populist Constitutionalism in Brazil and Peru: Historical and Contextual Issues

Given populism's common practice in South America, the region provides a crucial case to identify populism as a prevalent strategy by different ideologies. The link between populism and constitutionalism is paramount because populist governments typically use constituent power and constitutional identity to reach political goals. This study aimed to provide a comparative constitutional analysis of the recent development of populism in Brazil and Peru. The first was the rhetoric and practices of Jair Bolsonaro's government in Brazil, whereas the second was Pedro Castillo's government in Peru regarding constitutional reforms and human rights issues. This comparison justified that Brazil and Peru are presidential republics where harsh political polarization shakes their societies. Bolsonaro and Castillo have anti-corruption discourses and support a new constituent process but present antagonistic economic views. This study was comparative in nature that used a qualitative approach, sourced from bibliographic and documentary research that included specialized literature on South American populism and constitutionalism and the government's plans and legislation. This study showed that both governments have difficulties executing their respective agendas on customs and constituent referendums due to governability problems and important features of the constitutional design, such as eternity clauses, judicial review, and constitutional rigidity. It concluded that the populist strategies of Bolsonaro and Castillo are different. Bolsonarism is antiliberal and promotes human rights regression, whereas Castillo's populism is conservative but democratic. In common, both face the coalitional presidentialism and constitutional protection mechanisms as constraints to putting their political goals entirely into practice. KEYWORDS: Authoritarianism, Constitutionalism, Fundamental Rights, Populism

Start With a Girl: A New Agenda for Global Health

Examines how social factors shape the health issues adolescent girls face in developing countries. Calls for a health agenda for girls, including focused HIV prevention and maternal health advocacy; elimination of child marriage; and secondary education

Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing

Against the background of recent methodological debates pitting ethnography against interviewing, this paper offers a defense of the latter and argues for methodological pluralism and pragmatism and against methodological tribalism. Drawing on our own work and on other sources, we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing. We argue that concern over whether attitudes correspond to behavior is an overly narrow and misguided question. Instead we offer that we should instead consider what interviewing and other data gathering techniques are best suited for. In our own work, we suggest, we have used somewhat unusual interviewing techniques to reveal how institutional systems and the construction of social categories, boundaries, and status hierarchies organize social experience. We also point to new methodological challenges, particularly concerning the incorporation of historical and institutional dimensions into interview-based studies. We finally describe fruitful directions for future research, which may result in methodological advances while bringing together the strengths of various data collection techniques. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Quality of Life

This book is a collection of chapters addressing various aspects of quality of life and health psychology from a biopsychosocial perspective. Chapters cover crucial issues, both clinical and social. Starting with an analysis of the concept of quality of life as it is described by the World Health Organization, subsequent chapters of the book examine the biological, psychological, social, and spiritual issues related to the concept. The book explores how health, climate, psychiatric diseases, and social conditions of specific geographical areas can impact quality of life