Childless African American women over 50 in the USA: a qualitative descriptive study

In modern society, some African American women are choosing a career before accepting the traditional role of birthing a child or children at an early age and marriage is not always part of the equation. Women’s freedoms (i.e., equality, personal choice, sexuality) have increased since their early struggles for their rights as citizens and as women. Some are viewed as agents against the norm by some conservative-minded people by not having a child or children well into their adulthood, especially if they are over the age of 50. Research suggests that women without children are perceived negatively by others and experience adverse and challenging outcomes in society (Crandall & Eshleman, 2003). Childlessness can be an emotional hurdle for some African American women to easily overcome after establishing their career and going past the fecund period define as; (the age where women are still able to bare children with low health risks), of their life without procreating, often prompting them to adopt a child or children. For other childless African American women, but want a child or children, infertility has cursed them from motherhood, and this is a scar that tugs at their heart. Also, physical trauma or illness contribute to this fact, preventing conception. Before these women surpass their fertile stage and are childless, they must develop healthy management schemes to avoid unnecessary stresses of daily life from society, marriage, and personal living to enter their twilight years without regrets of childlessness, if possible

Dialogue on African Religion, Culture and Development

Dialogue on African Religion, Culture and Development: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference of the Association for the Promotion of African Studie

Understanding current teacher implementation of Zimbabwe's primary school AIDS curriculum: a case study

Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Education Sport, Arts and Culture offers as one of the primary school curricula, an AIDS curriculum which all Grades 4 to 7 teachers in Zimbabwe’s primary schools mandatorily implement with a view to contributing towards the prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS among the young primary school learners. The purpose of this research was to explore and describe teachers’ understanding and implementation of Zimbabwe’s primary school AIDS curriculum regarding the ways in which they articulated teaching practices and processes in their classrooms. The study also aimed to elicit the teachers’ views on how personal and contextual factors impact their adaptation and enactment of the curriculum. The study also sought to establish teachers’ perceptions of their practical experiences with the implementation of Zimbabwe’s primary school AIDS curriculum and their suggestions for improving practice. The study follows a qualitative case study design with minimal quantitative results. It involved three purposively selected primary school grade six teachers (n=3) each of whom was asked to teach five lessons while being observed over a period of three months. Each teacher availed his or her teaching scheme/plan to the researcher who conducted document analysis to glean their symbolic conceptualisation of actual classroom practice of the curriculum. This was followed by three semi-structured interviews with each participating teacher to elicit their perceptions. A content analysis using ideas borrowed from the grounded theory approach was employed resulting in thematic findings. The findings of the study confirm and enhance the theoretical significance of the phenomenological-adaptive perspective of educational change and Honig’s (people, policy, places) and cognition model for describing teacher implementation of the mandatory AIDS curriculum. The findings also confirm the complex ways in which human-generated personal and contextual factors played out in framing and shaping teachers’ personal adaptation of the mandatory AIDS curriculum. The study confirms the adaptation claim that as cognitive sense-makers, teachers mutate and enact a curriculum according to their personal subjective interpretations in the context of unique use-setting implementation realities. Although one of the participants’ understanding and practice displayed considerable comprehension of the requirements of the curriculum, the other teachers displayed an understanding of this curriculum in a superficial way, and experienced few positive experiences and several conceptual and operational constraints in its implementation. Drawing on their practical experiences with the implementation of the curriculum, teachers offered suggestions for transforming the implementation proficiency of this curriculum, which formed part of the conceptual strategy I developed for improving practice. Thus the resultant achievement of the study was a conceptual strategy that was constructed from the key findings of the study to provide educational change leaders with nuanced ideas and insights for improving practice

An Investigation of Successful and Unsuccessful Communication between International and North African Social Workers at Centres for Disabled Children in North Africa

There is a need to improve the quality of life for disabled children in North Africa. Although local governments and communities have been providing social services support, an increase in social services investment, particularly, specialists who work in the area of providing disability support, is needed from local and international organisations. However, international social workers’ lack of cross cultural sensitivity creates communication barriers and prevents effective means of collaboration between international and local social workers. The main aim of this research is to identify culturally appropriate communication skills and possible pitfalls for international social workers by investigating successful and unsuccessful communication between international and local social workers working at schools and centres for disabled children in North Africa. A constructivist qualitative approach has been used to explore the complex world of lived experiences of the social workers. The stories of four international and three local social workers were gathered through semi structured in-depth interviews. Three main themes emerged as a result of analysis of the interviews: language and religious value, gender relations, shame and honour. The findings have shown that in order for international social workers to communicate culturally appropriately and achieve successful collaboration with local social workers, the international workers need to be aware of the differences in mind-sets between individualistic and collective cultures, and be sensitive to the Arab/ Muslim cultural values of local social workers

Towards a fifth cinema

Following other advances in international film movements, namely Third and Fourth Cinema, we propose the concept of Fifth Cinema to refer to a composite of audio-visual outputs developed primarily by refugees and/or enabled with their interests and stories at heart. Although the experience of forcible displacement and expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, Fifth Cinema exhibits certain similarities. It is a cinema that is nomadic, insecure, fragmented, displaced, accented, and hybrid. Emotionally and politically fraught, it is emergency cinema, getting unheard voices out there. It is a ‘smart cinema’ enabled by the spread of digital technologies making it instantaneous, dispensable yet indispensable as a record of a millennial phenomenon. By no means a concerted social movement, it is certainly about reflecting on the surge of individual movements and their filmic outputs, occasionally collective as the result of shared endeavours and co-productions. In this article, we chart out some key features and proponents of Fifth Cinema as an ‘open corpus’ and as part of making a political statement: that refugee conditions and contributions are appreciated, valorised and supported with the means to represent themselves, creatively, interculturally and politically through the (co-)production of their own stories

The Advocate, Law School 75th Anniversary Edition, 1906-1981

https://dc.suffolk.edu/ad-mag/1037/thumbnail.jp

Three Studies on Multi-attribute Market Mechanisms in E-procurement

Successful e-procurement depends on selecting the appropriate mechanisms that comprise rules governing and facilitating transaction process. Existing mechanisms have theoretical or practical limitations such as limited number of attributes, disclosure of buyer’s preferences and costly processes. The present research addresses these issues through three studies. Study 1 presents two feasible mechanisms for multi-attribute multi-supplier transactions. They allow buyers to control preference representation and information revelation, assuring that suppliers obtain sufficient information in making effective proposals while protecting confidential information. Following the design-science approach, the mechanisms are implemented to support multi-attribute reverse auctions and multi-bilateral negotiations. Study 2 examines the revelation of information in multi-attribute reverse auctions. Three revelation rules are formulated with admissible bids, winning bids and all bidders’ bids. Their effects on the process, outcomes and bidders’ assessment are tested in two experiments. The results show significant improvement in process efficiency when more information is revealed. The suppliers reached better outcomes with either admissible bids only or all bidders’ bids, while the buyers gained more when revealing the winning bids only. Bidders were more satisfied with the outcomes and system when more information was provided. Study 3 compares multi-attribute reverse auctions and multi-bilateral negotiations in both laboratory and online experiments. The results show that auctions are more efficient than negotiations in terms of the process. Auctions led to greater gains for the buyers, whereas more balanced contracts were reached in negotiations. Suppliers’ assessment was affected by their outcomes, and the winning suppliers were more satisfied with the process, outcomes and system. The buyer’s role was also examined. Different types of information conveyed from buyer influence suppliers’ behavior in making bids/offers and concessions, which in turn affected buyer’s gains. This research provides implications to future studies and practices in e-procurement, in particular, the formulation of a procedure of two multi-attribute mechanisms and the formulation of general guidelines for strategic use of different mechanisms in various e-procurement contexts