Cultural Competence: New Conceptual Insights into its Limits and Potential for Addressing Health Disparities

The increasing interest in the role of racism and racialization in health disparities, calls for exploring new paradigms in addressing and eliminating health disparities related to race/ethnicity. Cultural competence is conceptualized as one of the keys ways to address racial/ethnic disparities in public health and healthcare. However, for cultural competence to fulfill this role, it requires a critical understanding of the underlying socio-political and economic processes of power, privilege and institutional racism that create, support and maintain existing health disparities. This paper outlines how the concept of cultural competence can be made more robust, by incorporating concepts such as Public Health Critical Race praxis (PHCR) and cultural humility, to more fully tackle the impact of structural inequities on health disparities

Realistic Utopianism and Alternatives to Imprisonment:The ideology of crime and the utopia of harm

Although the harms and inadequacies of the criminal justice and penal systems are well-documented, the contemporary impulse is largely one born in critique.Currently, it seems that as critical scholars, activists, and citizens, we are far better at deconstruction than positive construction of meaningful alternatives.Even where evidence of an impulse toward the latter exists, this is often diluted over time via its translation into routine politics.Whilst, in many ways, understandable (given the contemporary climate of knowledge-production which eschews ‘radical’ reform as hopeless and idealistic and/or inherently dangerous, and where the politics of knowledge production sees an endless tension between political independence and irrelevance on the part of those working in this field), this article explores the question of how, given this climate, we might begin to move beyond critique, towards the development of radical, yet realistic, meaningful alternatives to punitive penal practices.Despite attempts to develop realistic alternatives within criminology and penology, through a burgeoning interest in the concept of utopia as a form of praxis, the central argument put forward here is that responding differently to crime begins by thinking differently about crime.Drawing on Mannheim’s distinction between ideology and utopia, it offers the discourse of social harm as an important means of encouraging us to think differently and respond differently to social problems.It is argued that, so long as we take the criminal justice system as the starting point of our critique and the locus for the construction of alternatives, reforms are destined to reinforce and legitimise the contemporary ‘regime of truth’ and dominant constructions of crime, harm and justice. Therefore, it is only through the adoption of a ‘replacement discourse’ of harm that we can start to build realistic utopias and meaningful alternatives to imprisonment

Fostering Critical Thinking about Climate Change: Applying Community Psychology to an Environmental Education Project with Youth

This article argues for the participation of community psychology in issues of global climate change. The knowledge accumulated and experience gained in the discipline of community psychology have great relevance to many topics related to the environment. Practitioners of community psychology could therefore make significant contributions to climate change mitigation. To illustrate this assertion, we describe an education project conducted with youth engaged in a community-based environmental organization. This initiative was motivated by the idea that engaged and critically aware youth often become change agents for social movements. Towards this purpose, rather than using mass marketing strategies to motivate small behavior changes, this project focused intensively on a few youth with the vision that these youth would also influence those around them to rethink their environmental habits. This project was influenced by five community psychology concepts: stakeholder participation, ecological and systems thinking, social justice, praxis, and empirical grounding. In this article we discuss the influence of these concepts on the project’s outcomes, as measured through an evaluative study conducted to assess the impacts of the project on the participating youth in terms of their thinking and action. The contributions of community psychology were found to have greatly impacted the quality of the project and the outcomes experienced by the youth

Feminism, women’s movements and women in movement

Non peer reviewedPublisher PD

Editorial: Feminism, women’s movements and women in movement

Introduction to Special Issue that engages with the increasingly important, separate yet interrelated themes of feminism, women’s movements and women in movement in the context of global neoliberalism

Speaking Up: Opening Dialogue with Pre-service and In-service Teachers about Reading Children’s Books Inclusive of Lesbian and Gay Families

One of the best ways to include all family structures in classroom practice is through children‘s literature. While more and more quality books depicting family diversity, inclusive of gay and lesbian families, are published every year, it is often the unknown discourse surrounding such readings and the unknown support of the teacher that keeps these books from even entering preschool through grade four classrooms

Between Theory and Praxis: Art as Negative Dialectics

This paper takes up Adorno’s aesthetics as a dialectic between philosophy and art. In doing so, I argue that art provides a unique way of mediating between theory and practice, between concepts and experience, and between subjectivity and objectivity, because in art these relations are flexible and left open to interpretation, which allows a form of thinking that can point beyond itself. Adorno thus uses reflection on art as a corrective for philosophy and its tendency towards ideolog

Voicing embodiment, relating difference: towards a relational legal subjectivity

Focusing on the writings of Adriana Cavarero and Lia Cigarini, this piece examines the possible counterpractices and counterspaces of a politics of relational subjectivity outside the time of the masculine legal order which are to be found in Italian sexual difference theory. Both Cavarero and Cigarini share a desire to create a practice of sexual difference based on relational subjectivity. In their writings and in their praxis they have attempted to bring into being spaces where the unique embodied existent can interact with other unique existents in a space of relational politics. This is a politics based on the unique existent who acts, speaks, and thinks for herself rather than one based on the ideal abstract individual of liberal rights ideology. In effect, it amounts to a politics of relational plurivocality