Income gains to the poor from workfare - estimates for Argentina's TRABAJAR Program

The authors use propensity-score matching methods to estimate the income gains to families of workers participating in an Argentinian work-fare program. The methods they propose are feasible for evaluating safety net interventions in settings in which many other methods are not feasible. The average gain is about half the gross wage. Even allowing for forgone income, the distribution of gains is decidedly pro-poor. More than half the beneficiaries are in the poorest decile nationally and 80- percent of them are in the poorest quintile --reflecting the self-targeting feature of the program design. Average gains for men and women are similar, but gains are higher for younger workers. Women's greater participation would not enhance average income gains, and the distribution of gains would worsen. Greater participation by the young would raise average gains but would also worsen the distribution.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Services&Transfers to Poor,Health Economics&Finance,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Health Economics&Finance,Rural Poverty Reduction,Services&Transfers to Poor

Menorah Review (No. 43, Spring/Summer, 1998)

Books on Contemporary Israel: Process, Perception and Progress -- A Story Too Often Told: Supersessionism and Triumphalism -- By the Law of the Land -- A Complex Partnership? -- On Heroes and Jews -- Book Briefing

Rhetorics of Reflection: Revisiting Listening Rhetoric through Mindfulness, Empathy, and Non-violent Communication

Invention work with multiple perspectives and empathy set up the context for students to practice mindfulness as they develop skills in argumentative writing

Scoping a vision for formative e-assessment: a project report for JISC

Assessment is an integral part of teaching and learning. If the relationship between teaching and learning were causal, i. e. if students always mastered the intended learning outcomes of a particular sequence of instruction, assessment would be superfluous. Experience and research suggest this is not the case: what is learnt can often be quite different from what is taught. Formative assessment is motivated by a concern with the elicitation of relevant information about student understanding and / or achievement, its interpretation and an exploration of how it can lead to actions that result in better learning. In the context of a policy drive towards technology-enhanced approaches to teaching and learning, the question of the role of digital technologies is key and it is the latter on which this project particularly focuses. The project and its deliverables have been informed by recent and relevant literature, in particular recent work by Black andIn this work, they put forward a framework which suggests that assessment for learning their term for formative assessment can be conceptualised as consisting of a number of aspects and five keystrategies. The key aspects revolve around the where the learner is going, where the learner is right now and how she can get there and examines the role played by the teacher, peers and the learner. Language: English Keywords: assessments, case studies, design patterns, e-assessmen

The prevalence and practice of self-injury: a sociological enquiry.

The widespread practice of non-suicidal self-injury suggests that it might no longer be reasonable to frame such behaviours as individual pathologies and highlights the need to understand such acts as sociological phenomena instead. This dissertation therefore explored the core elements of self-injury such as the self, the body, and meanings ascribed to acts of injuring the self/body, in relation to forms of sociation. Focusing on intent and aetiology, this qualitative enquiry used an interpretive mode of explanation, and collected data via indepth face-to-face interviews from a characteristically diverse community sample of fifteen participants. Findings indicated that respondents' aetiologies of self-injury were located in social interactions characterised by abuse, neglect, bullying, and invalidation. Individuals who perceived themselves as worthless and unlovable objects punished themselves, or branded themselves as failures. Paradoxically, sufficient castigation averted the complete annihilation of the existential self. Findings concur with previous studies which reported that, at its deepest level, self-injury is antithetical to suicide. This study also highlighted the body's communicative role in the symbolic expression of traumatic experiences, and emphasised its physiological role in (a) emotion regulation and (b) self-injury's propensity to become addictive. From a sociological perspective, instant emotion regulation via self-injury allowed individuals to avoid social stigma; well managed social performances in turn protected social bonds. Although self-injury constitutes a maladaptive coping mechanism, its reported physiological, psychological and social gains are significant and need to be considered in intervention programmes and policy. This dissertation therefore makes two recommendations: firstly, restorative practices should be reinstituted, particularly in schools; secondly, the growing and alarming trend of copycat behaviours reported in children and young teens needs to be researched further in relation to the mediation, ideation and imitation of self-injurious behaviours

A poet(h)ics of intercultural dissonance: dynamics of perception in Elizabeth Bishop's braz/silian texts

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente.Análise da poética intercultural de Elizabeth Bishop, elaborando uma percepção expansiva de dissonância ou choque cultural, que problematiza os próprios termos através dos quais o pensamento antitético reduz a realidade experiencial. Demonstra inter-relações entre os textos teórico-críticos de Bishop, que engajam sua crise com a concepção linear do tempo narrativo, e a concepção de 'dissonância emancipatória' ou atonal elaborada por Arnold Schöenberg. Demonstra que os mapeamentos de dissonância cultural feitos por Bishop no Brasil desafiam seus próprios modelos esteticistas e solucionistas (lineares, teleológicas) de representação (especificamente, os modelos de transculturalismo e autenticismo), ao se recusarem a resolver a alteridade (do outro e do eu) na uniformidade (consonância), ou mesmo a dissolver seus conflitos, fixando a alteridade num 'passado atemporal' (sic), primitivizado. Examina a crise (a crítica) textual de consciência social e de gênero no corpus brasileiro de Bishop, argumentando que ele se torna valioso justamente porque a autora fracassa, e de modo perturbador, em realizar seu projeto de produzir resolução sobre suas percepções dissonantes da realidade. Engaja uma política irredutível ou ética de leitura que recusa reduzir o texto intercultural de Bishop a seus discursos solipsistas, pelos quais até mesmo atos aparentemente democráticos convergem dissimuladamente com dinâmicas totalitárias

Populism, anti-populism and crisis

This article focuses on two issues involved in the formation and political trajectory of populist representations within political antagonism. First, it explores the role of crisis in the articulation of populist discourse. This problematic is far from new within theories of populism but has recently taken a new turn. We thus purport to reconsider the way populism and crisis are related, mapping the different modalities this relation can take and advancing further their theorization from the point of view of a discursive theory of the political, drawing primarily on the Essex School perspective initially developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Second, this will involve focusing on the antagonistic language games developed around populist representations, something that has not attracted equal attention. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, focusing on their mutual constitution, we will test the ensuing theoretical framework in an analysis of SYRIZA, a recent and, as a result, under-researched example of egalitarian, inclusionary populism emerging within the European crisis landscape

Aboriginal Child Welfare

As the relationships between Canada’s Aboriginal peoples and the state undergo changes, the issue of Child Welfare is in the foreground; for it is around the well being, education and care of Aboriginal children that much of the painful historical relationship between First Nations and Canadian government has been played out. In this paper we consider the major issues in Canadian Aboriginal child welfare, drawing upon an extensive review and synthesis of current theory and research. Although there is an abundance of material available concerning Aboriginal child welfare, much of it exists outside mainstream academic child welfare literature. Some of the salient work on Aboriginal child welfare is contained in the justice literature and much is contained in evaluation reports, operational reviews, submissions to government bodies and in oral stories and testimony. Our goal has been to cull these sources in order to present a coherent understanding of Aboriginal child welfare issues that encompasses history, theoretical analysis, politics, visions, realities, education, evaluation and aspirations