Negotiating: Experiences of community nurses when contracting with clients

A community nurse is required to have excellent interpersonal, teaching, collaborative and clinical skills in order to develop effective individualised client care contracts. Using a descriptive qualitative design data was collected from two focus groups of fourteen community nurses to explore the issues surrounding negotiating and contracting client care contracts from the perspective of community nurses. Thematic analysis revealed three themes: ‘assessment of needs’, ‘education towards enablement’, and ‘negotiation’. ‘Assessment of needs’ identified that community nurses assess both the client’s requirements for health care as well as the ability of the nurse to provide that care. ‘Education towards enablement’ described that education of the client is a common strategy used by community nurses to establish realistic goals of health care as part of developing an ongoing care plan. The final theme, ‘negotiation’, involved an informed agreement between the client and the community nurse which forms the origin of the care contract that will direct the partnership between the client and the nurse. Of importance for community nurses is that development of successful person-centred care contracts requires skillful negotiation of care that strikes the balance between the needs of the client and the ability of the nurse to meet those needs

Negotiating the boundaries of parental school engagement: the role of social space and symbolic capital in urban teachers' perspectives

As public schools continue to be driven by standards-based accountability practices, scholars contend that family engagement must become more egalitarian, with parents contributing their own insights for the betterment of the entire school community. Classroom teachers are key stakeholders in this process, with enormous potential impact. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of social space and symbolic capital, we examined teachers’ perspectives on their role in engaging diverse parents, using focus group interviews with urban classroom teachers. Multi-layered qualitative analyses elicited three themes that illustrated the powerful, but contradictory, positioning of teachers in facilitating authentic partnerships with families: (a) creating responsive relationships (b) casting engagement as education, and (c) creating varied-and tailored-opportunities, yet also revealed teachers’ assertions of power and authority, most often expressed as a need for boundaries between home and school. A progressive approach to family engagement and educator resistance is discussed, whereby teachers engage in collaborative advocacy with urban families to reclaim the notion of teaching as a public service, aimed at the promotion of equitable, accessible, and culturally responsive schools.Accepted manuscrip

Enacting children's citizenship: developing understandings of how children enact themselves as citizens through actions and acts of citizenship

Children have an unsettled relationship with the status of citizenship, being given some rights, responsibilities and opportunities for participation, and being denied others. Yet if citizenship is conceived of as a practice, children can be firmly seen as citizens in the sense that they are social actors, negotiating and contributing to relationships of social interdependence. This article develops understandings of children’s agency in citizenship and some of the different ways in which children’s actions enact them as interdependent citizens. It presents one aspect of the understanding of citizenship generated from research by six groups of marginalised children, aged 5-13, in Wales and France. Synthesising the research groups’ descriptions of activities they associated with the component parts of citizenship with citizenship theory, these children can be seen to engage in actions of citizenship that include making rules of social existence, furthering social good and exercising freedoms to achieve their own rights. Their activities also transgress the boundaries of existing balances of rights, responsibilities and statuses, through their (mis)behaviour, in ways that can be interpreted as Acts of citizenship. In children’s everyday activities, however, the distinction between actions and Acts of citizenship can at times be blurred. This is because recognizing aspects of children’s practices as citizenship is a challenge to dominant definitions of citizenship, and claims a new status for children. Exploring children’s citizenship in these ways has potential for widening understandings of participation and appreciating broader aspects of children’s agency in citizenship

The complications of ‘hiring a hubby’: gender relations and the commoditisation of home maintenance in New Zealand

This paper examines the commoditization of traditionally male domestic tasks through interviews with handymen who own franchises in the company ‘Hire a Hubby’ in New Zealand and homeowners who have paid for home repair tasks to be done. Discussions of the commoditization of traditionally female tasks in the home have revealed the emotional conflicts of paying others to care as well as the exploitative and degrading conditions that often arise when work takes place behind closed doors. By examining the working conditions and relationships involved when traditionally male tasks are paid for, this paper raises important questions about the valuing of reproductive labour and the production of gendered identities. The paper argues that while working conditions and rates of pay for ‘hubbies’ are better than those for people undertaking commoditized forms of traditionally female domestic labour, the negotiation of this work is still complex and implicated in gendered relations and identities. Working on the home was described by interviewees as an expression of care for family and a performance of the ‘right’ way to be a ‘Kiwi bloke’ and a father. Paying others to do this labour can imply a failure in a duty of care and in the performance of masculinity

Religion and urban regeneration: a place for faith?

The British government has identified 'faith communities' as a neglected resource in urban regeneration. This article first explores the context of official support for faith involvement in urban and neighbourhood policy and identifies the assumptions underlying key policy documents. These assumptions are then critically explored by reference to the links commonly drawn between religion and 'community', 'neighbourhood' and 'social cohesion'. Attempts to enlist faith groups within this essentially consensual agenda often fail to recognise both the potential divisiveness of religion and also the more positive and radical lessons that often stem from the action, experience and critical analysis of religious organisations and their members.</p

Urbanisation as a Threat or Opportunity in the Promotion of Human Wellbeing

It is possible to present a credible picture of urbanisation as one of the greatest threats to human health, wellbeing and development, although this paper will argue that to do so requires focusing on a limited set of cities. There is a stronger evidence base on cities and urbanisation underpinning good health, fulfilment of civil rights, democracy and freedom from deprivation, although with important exceptions. It is possible to present urbanisation as the most serious driver of human-induced climate change (and of most other kinds of ecological damage). But cities also have the potential to be places where high living standards can be delinked from unsustainable ecological footprints and high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (and there are some cities that demonstrate this). Of course, a very different set of urban centres get highlighted, depending on which of these points one wants to substantiate. What this paper seeks to do is to highlight both the threats and the opportunities posed by urbanisation

Working with and for social enterprises: the role of the volunteer ethnographer

Purpose – This paper considers the specific opportunities and challenges of engaging in ethnographic research with organisations in which the researcher participates as a volunteer ethnographer. Design/methodology/approach – The findings in this paper are based on four years of ethnographic research within a social enterprise. Findings – This paper finds that there are significant benefits of the role of the volunteer ethnographer and suggests ways to address some of the challenges. Research limitations/implications – As the field of social enterprise and ethnography grows and researchers engage with methodological discussions about participant observation, the authors suggest that attention should also be paid to the specifics of the role of the volunteer ethnographer. Originality/value – There is growing interest in the use of ethnography in social enterprises. This paper offers unique insight into how this methodology has been applied in the context of self-reliant groups and the importance of the engaging with discussion about the specific role of the volunteer ethnographer

Researching coethnic migrants: privileges and puzzles of "insiderness"

This article reflects on fieldwork experiences with coethnic migrants in London to challenge understandings of insiderness centred in shared ethnicity, as well as the usefulness of the insider-outsider divide in migration research more generally. Drawing on examples from a study of migrants' social relations, it shows how gender, migrant status, and occupational position sometimes shape research encounters in more important ways than shared ethnicity. Furthermore, whilst shared ethnicity is undoubtedly useful in certain respects, participants' ethnicised discourses and practices may also generate feelings of distance in the coethnic researcher. Whilst supporting the "ethnic bias" critique to migration studies (GLICK SCHILLER, ÇAĞLAR & GULDBRANDSEN, 2006), the analysis thus highlights how both ethnic and non-ethnic factors alternate or interact to create perceptions of insiderness or outsiderness in specific research contexts