Dying children and their families : a therapeutic approach for clinical psychologists

Bibliography: pages 203-221.The aim of this thesis is to describe the clinical psychologist's potential role as a member of the interdisciplinary team dealing with dying children and their families. For this purpose, it includes a theoretical review of the experience of the child who suffers from terminal illness, and the expected reactions of the family. The psychologist's contribution is described; the existing literature is reviewed and suggestions for possible further therapeutic intervention with the child and his family are made. It is concluded that the psychologist is a potentially valuable source of support for both the child and his family, someone who can improve the quality of the child's life and eventual death, and assist the family in their adjustment to the loss of a child and a sibling

Negotiating Socio-Technical Contracts: Anticipatory Governance and Reproductive Technologies

abstract: This project develops the "socio-technical contract" concept, a notion that signifies the kinds of socio-technological assumptions and arrangements that characterize a particular domain of policy or practice. Socio-technical contracts, unlike their social contract counterparts in political theory, represent active negotiation and renegotiation of social contracts around emerging technologies, as opposed to the tacit social contracts of thinkers such as Locke. I use the socio-technical contract concept to analyze the governance of assisted reproductive technologies in the United Kingdom. For increasing numbers of people, reproduction is happening in a fundamentally different way. Conception outside of the womb became a reality with the 1978 birth of Louise Brown, the first baby born via in-vitro fertilization. Alongside Louise Brown's birth emerged new social and governance configurations around reproductive technologies, including, in the United Kingdom, the establishment of a national regulatory agency, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The project applies the socio-technical contract concept in order to examine how distributed governance and socio-cultural processes in the British context worked over time to renegotiate fundamental ideas about families and kinship, the boundaries of "ethical" science, rules governing release of information, the "right to an identity," the role of the state in the reproductive choices of individuals, and general approaches to how to think about the roles and relationships of the child, parents, and the state in and around the introduction of these technologies. As these changes have occurred, policies, social understandings, and legal rights have been renegotiated and new governance capacities, what I call "anticipatory capacities," have come into existence to manage and coordinate change across complex social systems. In illuminating anticipatory capacities in each context, I explore the tools deployed by government actors, scientists, stakeholders, and citizens in negotiating evolving socio-technical contracts around reproductive technologies.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Political Science 201

Social entrepreneurship, and the technopolitics of millennial development in Cape Town

In Cape Town, as in many other cities of the Global South, a range of new developmental experiments have emerged around the idea that, by empowering entrepreneurs, poverty can be fought with profit. Social enterprises, for example, are being promoted by global institutions as organisations that, by seeking both financial profit and social good, are ideal vehicles for meeting the demands of contemporary development. As a result, local authorities, NGOs, and other developmental agencies have all embraced social entrepreneurship as one of the devices that have the capacity to yield market solutions to poverty. Bringing together insights from postcolonial human geography and critical ethnography, this research examines how social entrepreneurship functions as a political technology of ‘millennial development’, by tracing the experiments through which ingrained issues such as racialised poverty and urban marginality are framed as domains of entrepreneurial innovation. Hence this work asks: what does seeing social entrepreneurship as a system of developmental expertise reveal about the claim that social enterprises are empowering? What kind of technical and political regimes are mobilised, invented, and experimented to address economic marginality in a postcolonial, post-apartheid city? To address these questions, this dissertation follows a network of very diverse sites of expertise, where social entrepreneurship is put into action in material ways. The empirical core of this research combines ethnographic and interview material gathered between March and November 2015. Drawing on fieldnotes and documentary evidence, this dissertation argues that it is through tentative, material and failure-ridden experiments that social entrepreneurship becomes a viable technology of development expertise. The findings of this research also show that the technopolitics of millennial development in Cape Town are not only centred around finding market solutions to poverty. Social entrepreneurship, while opening new frontiers for capitalist expansion, is also a terrain of diverse opportunities, where distinct technical, economic, and ethical regimes are cultivated. This dissertation thus concludes that examining social entrepreneurship as a political technology reveals its spatial, material and performative qualities in reproducing the promises of millennial development, as well as the possibility for alternative politics of entrepreneurial empowerment