Protect My Future: The Links Between Child Protection and Equity

The lack of care and protection facing children is a global crisis with billions of children experiencing abuse, neglect or exploitation, and many millions growing up outside of families, on the streets or in harmful institutional care. This lack of adequate care and protection is commonly the result of inequalities.Gender norms make girls especially vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation, early marriage and domestic work, and boys to hazardous child labour and detention. Children with disabilities, from ethnic minorities or living with or affected by HIV are more likely than their peers to suffer from a loss of care and protection, and income inequalities increase exposure to child labour and institutionalisation.Children without adequate care and protection are commonly stigmatised, and have inequitable access to education, health, social protection and justice. Combined with the long lasting impacts of neglect, abuse and institutionalisation, this lack of access to basic services severely diminishes life chances, creating a spiral of disadvantage.In order to break this spiral, a three-pronged strategy is required which sees: reductions in social and economic inequalities that have a major impact on children's care and protection; increased investments in strong and equitable national child protection systems and efforts to address the stigma and discrimination faced by children without adequate care and protection

The transformation of Cyavana : A case study in narrative evolution

Few will argue with the proposition that stories are fluid and continuously evolving; nor are many likely to deny that a successful narrative can spread like wildfire across time and space. Yet in spite of these two well-documented truths, attempts at the identification of borrowings and parallels (though a venerable scholarly pursuit) can be tricky. Few other common scholarly undertakings generate the level of resistance that the proposal of a set of parallels can, and perhaps with some valid reasons. Shared features that make an enormous impression on one scholar will strike others as insignificant or coincidental, and most comparativists have come to accept that many of our colleagues are completely uninterested in the endeavor, particularly when engaging with a borrowed narrative requires transporting their focus beyond the boundaries of their field.Emily West is an Associate Professor of Classics, History, Fine Arts, and Hinduism at St. Catherine University in Minnesota. She has primarily published on Homeric epic, particularly on episodes that parallel the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. She is currently working on an analysis of the evolution of several versions of various Sanskrit narratives and on the development of the St. Catherine University Online Summer Sanskrit course

I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era

Agency and Survival over Slavery and Oppression This is an important, inspiring, and at times a rather sad book about African American fights for freedom in the Civil War era. Williams makes a vital historiographical contribution to his field and uses a vast array of primary sources to ma...

Invitation to Witness: The Role of Subjects in Documentary Representations of the End of Life

This article considers recent media texts from four Western countries that invite audiences to watch someone die. When dying people resist the default of social invisibility by participating in documentary media, they challenge hegemonic attitudes about dying and physical fallibility, even as they introduce this aspect of life into the logics of media visibility and self-disclosure. I focus on their invitation to witness and the faith in the possibilities of media visibility they express by agreeing to die on camera, bearing in mind the power relations among dying people, media professionals, and audiences within which this invitation occurs. The participants in these texts articulate a desire to deprivatize the deathbed in order to help other dying people and their caregivers. Their motivation speaks to the idea that seeing death may puncture the neoliberal fiction of the autonomous, invulnerable self

Review Pollution: Pedagogy for a Post-Truth Society

Consumer reviews on platforms like Amazon are summarized into star ratings, used to weight search results, and consulted by consumers to guide purchase decisions. They are emblematic of the interactive digital environment that has purportedly transferred power from marketers to ‘regular people,’ and yet they represent the infiltration of promotional concerns into online information, as has occurred in search and social media content. Consumers’ ratings and reviews do promotional work for brands—not just for products but the platforms that host reviews—that money can’t always buy. Gains in power by consumers are quickly met with new strategies of control by companies who depend on reviews for reputational capital. Focusing on ecommerce giant Amazon, this article examines the complexities of online reviews, where individual efforts to provide product feedback and help others make choices become transformed into an information commodity and promotional vehicle. It acknowledges the ambiguous nature of reviews due to the rise of industries and business practices that influence or fake reviews as a promotional strategy. In response are yet other business practices and platform policies aiming to provide better information to consumers, protect the image of platforms that host reviews, and punish ‘bad actors’ in competitive markets. The complexity in the production, regulation, and manipulation of product ratings and reviews illustrates how the high stakes of attention in digital spaces create fertile ground for disinformation, which only emphasizes to users that they inhabit a ‘post-truth’ reality online

Neuropsychological Test Performance in Pediatric TBI, Learning Disability, and ADHD: Difference in Reliable Digit Span

Children have been found to give non-credible performances on neuropsychological evaluations and using Performance Validity Tests (PVT) can help identify such cases, but maximum effort is necessary for tests to be reliable for determining next steps. This study assessed the differences in rates of non-credible performance on the Reliable Digit Span (RDS) between traumatic brain injury (TBI), learning disability (LD) and ADHD diagnoses in a pediatric clinical sample. It was hypothesized that those with ADHD would have a higher failure rate than those with either TBI or LD. RDS data from 200 clients referred to neuropsychological testing agencies were collected and scores were analyzed to determine mean differences and failure rates using a ≤ 6 cutoff score. Results showed a significant difference (p = 0.005) in RDS performance between those with a diagnosis of TBI or ADHD and between those with LD or ADHD (p = .003), with LD having a higher rate of failure than ADHD, and ADHD having a higher failure rate than TBI. The results indicate that rates of non-credible performance on RDS vary across diagnoses, which concurs with past literature, and emphasizes the importance of examining PVTs, like RDS, when conducting neuropsychological exams with children. Additional research is needed to clarify whether this finding persists with improved methodology (e.g., balanced sample sizes, clarified diagnoses, etc.)

Understanding Authenticity in Commercial Sentiment: The Greeting Card as Emotional Commodity

What could be a more quintessential emotional commodity, or “emodity” as coined by Illouz, than the greeting card? Perhaps no other brand, at least in the United States, is as associated with emotion than Hallmark, estimated to control 44% of the greeting card market, including both paper and e-cards (Turk 2014). The core promise of Hallmark’s brand is to deliver reliable and effective emotional products to use in interpersonal communication, most often for people with whom we are already close. And yet, the propriety of relying on the market to communicate personal emotions is in question. When we use a greeting card to communicate emotion, are we taking a shortcut, an easy way out? Are we becoming deskilled in the practice of connecting with others, or expressing our feelings with words? Are we allowing the market to intrude ever more into a “sacred sphere” of personality and intimate life? In other words, are greeting cards – or commodified sentiment - a threat to the authenticity of emotion

Buy Now

How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now, Emily West examines Amazon's consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon promotes the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. West shows how Amazon has cultivated personalized, intimate relationships with consumers that normalize its outsized influence on our selves and our communities. She describes the brand's focus on speedy and seamless ecommerce delivery, represented in the materiality of the branded brown box; the positioning of its book retailing, media streaming, and smart speakers as services rather than sales; and the brand's image control strategies. West considers why pushback against Amazon's ubiquity and market power has come mainly from among Amazon's workers rather than its customers or competitors, arguing that Amazon's brand logic fragments consumers as a political bloc. West's innovative account, the first to examine Amazon from a critical media studies perspective, offers a cautionary cultural study of bigness in today's economy

Functional Design and Analysis of a Linked Shoulder Prosthesis

Persistent shoulder instability following joint arthroplasty remains a concern with mixed outcomes following clinical and surgical intervention. Thus, a linked universal joint implant was developed and functionally analyzed. A virtual model of the linked implant was developed and implanted in a 3D bony specimen to measure the available circumduction range of motion. Stresses in the implant were estimated using finite element analysis based on joint loads during activities of daily life. The glenoid fixation stress was evaluated using finite element analysis. The implant was capable of restoring normal range of motion, and withstanding expected joint loads without yield or fatigue failure. Bone fixation stress remains a concern, depending on the implant configuration and aggressive joint loading

BLM Land Use Planning in Western Oregon: A Case Study for Integrating Public Participation in Natural Resources Planning

Public participation can fundamentally improve natural resources planning and decision-making. On an ad hoc basis, it has been shown that public participation improves the durability and sustainability of plans and decisions; it increases the technical, consensus-building, and decision-making capacity of the public; it increases levels of trust; and it improves relationships between agency personnel and members of the public. Despite the proliferation of these new tools and strategies and their successful implementation, innovative and inclusive public participation methods have still not become widely integrated into the natural resources planning and administrative decision-making processes of federal agencies. Utilizing the Bureau of Land Management\u27s Western Oregon Plan Revision process as a case study, this paper considers barriers to the regular inclusion of innovative and inclusive public participation methods in agency\u27s planning and decision-making processes and provides some prescriptions for overcoming those barriers. Through analysis of this case study, I identify eight potential roadblocks to integrating innovative forms of public participation in natural resources planning and decision-making, including: 1) political context, 2) the purpose and need of the planning effort, 3) false expectations for public involvement, 4) geographic scope of the planning area, 5) the plan timeline, 6) federal budgetary pressure, 7) agency culture and individual attitudes towards public participation, and 8) the limitations of leadershi