Is cultural sensitivity always a good thing? Arguments for a universalist social work

The requirement for social workers to be sensitive to cultural difference has now become accepted as an essential component of best practice – indeed, social workers failing to display sensitivity to cultural differences would most likely be seen to be in contravention of most professional ethics frameworks. However, closer scrutiny as to exactly how and to what degree one should display cultural sensitivity in practice reveals a complex set of ethical and philosophical dilemmas for social workers. This chapter is concerned with a discussion of these. The chapter concludes with a call for the reconstruction of a universalist ethics in social work, and offers Nussbaum and Sen’s ‘Capability Framework’ as offering a way in which this could be done in Social Work practice

The Poverty of Apologism: The British Left, Feminism and the Islamic Right

This discussion seeks to understand why sections of the British Left have often uncritically allied themselves with Islamist groups which I argue have a political position on the extreme right. I consider the Historical Materialism conference in November 2015 where such views were advanced, and set this in the context of the way the 'War On Terror' has created the conditions for alliance of groupings with utterly opposed values and political approaches, other than their hostility to US foreign policy. I argue that such a political alliance is achieved through the disregard of the impact of Islamist politics on women specifically, resulting in a politics where black and Asian feminist groups which criticise religious dominance are repudiated by the erstwhile allies on the Lef

The intensification of neoliberalism and the commodification of human need – a social work perspective

The drive toward the commodification of human society was first explained by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto as a manifestation of the territorial expansion of capitalist relations across the globe. While this dimension of capitalist expansion continues apace, this paper discuses the further dimension of the way capitalist social relations are intensified in the contemporary period of neoliberal capitalism. This involves reconstruction of subjectivity in the context of the rolling back of the gains from the post-war Keynesian period. We take a critical look at the deployment of terms such as 'empowerment' and 'resilience' in policy discourses and the way these are being used to reconstruct the relationship between the state and citizenry in this period, and the impact this is having on UK Social Work

Safeguarding or Surveillance?:Social Work, Prevent and Fundamentalist Violence

This paper seeks to critically explore the construction of the Prevent counter-terrorism initiative within Social Work in the UK, and to consider the implications this has for Social Work. We begin by discussing the conceptualisation of ‘radicalisation’ in the work of Arun Kundnani, one of the leading critics of Prevent, pointing to the limitations of this as a means of grasping the nature of Salafi-jihadi groupings. We then move to a discussion of the development of counter-terrorism policy in the UK, looking at the way the 2015 legislative guidance has re-situated radicalisation from a ‘security’ issue to a ‘safeguarding’ issue. We see this as significant for the way it has facilitated Social Work being directly drawn into the orbit of Prevent, with radicalisation being re-constructed as part of Social Work’s concern with the vulnerability of children and young people involved in wider forms of exploitation, including Child Sexual Exploitation. We consider the reception of this shift within Social Work as well as look at evidence into how this is working in practice. We then consider challenges to this ‘safeguarding’ paradigm, which argue that this has involved Social Work being drawn into the ideological monitoring of Muslim communities: a ‘surveillance’ paradigm. We conclude by arguing for a critical defence of a safeguarding approach based on the harms which fundamentalist violence clearly represents to children and young people

Faculty Recital, Tabatha Easley, flute

Tabatha Easley, flute and Tracy Cowden, pian

Enrichment for chemoresistant ovarian cancer stem cells from human cell lines

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are defined as a subset of slow cycling and undifferentiated cells that divide asymmetrically to generate highly proliferative, invasive, and chemoresistant tumor cells. Therefore, CSCs are an attractive population of cells to target therapeutically. CSCs are predicted to contribute to a number of types of malignancies including those in the blood, brain, lung, gastrointestinal tract, prostate, and ovary. Isolating and enriching a tumor cell population for CSCs will enable researchers to study the properties, genetics, and therapeutic response of CSCs. We generated a protocol that reproducibly enriches for ovarian cancer CSCs from ovarian cancer cell lines (SKOV3 and OVCA429). Cell lines are treated with 20 µM cisplatin for 3 days. Surviving cells are isolated and cultured in a serum-free stem cell media containing cytokines and growth factors. We demonstrate an enrichment of these purified CSCs by analyzing the isolated cells for known stem cell markers Oct4, Nanog, and Prom1 (CD133) and cell surface expression of CD177 and CD133. The CSCs exhibit increased chemoresistance. This method for isolation of CSCs is a useful tool for studying the role of CSCs in chemoresistance and tumor relapse

Operationalising factors that explain the emergence of infectious diseases : A case study of the human campylobacteriosis epidemic

Peer reviewedPublisher PD