International and industry partnerships: Building nursing capacity in Thailand

A newly formed partnership between Edith Cowan University, the Ministry of Public Health in Thailand, a College of Nursing and two major hospitals in Bangkok is building capacity within Thai Nurses to manage mental health problems and HIV/AIDS. The partnership, funded through the AusAID Public Sector Linkages Program is developing and delivering these training programs in three phases. The first two phases support the development of the curriculum and planning for the course delivery, with Phase 3 being the delivery of a four month certificate course in each of the specialist areas, mental health and HIV/AIDS, to local Thai Nurses. The program provides the opportunity for senior Thai Nurse Educators to gain insight into the Australian perspective of the relevant specialist areas as well as the broader Australian health system. Participants have then been able to review the course curricula and teaching methodologies, including additional and revised information and strategies as is relevant to the Thai health environment. An integral component of the program is evaluation. Following completion of the courses, nurses will be followed up on return to their workplace, to assess the impact of the course on the work practices of nurses. The program evaluation will support better understanding of emerging issues for all program partners and provide a strong basis for refinement of the program for future delivery. At the time of the ECU-COM 2006 conference, the program will be at the stage where the Thai nurses are completing the four month course. This paper will discuss the progress of the program to date, from the perspective of the Australian program partner

The infimum, supremum and geodesic length of a braid conjugacy class

Algorithmic solutions to the conjugacy problem in the braid groups B_n were given by Elrifai-Morton in 1994 and by the authors in 1998. Both solutions yield two conjugacy class invariants which are known as `inf' and `sup'. A problem which was left unsolved in both papers was the number m of times one must `cycle' (resp. `decycle') in order to increase inf (resp. decrease sup) or to be sure that it is already maximal (resp. minimal) for the given conjugacy class. Our main result is to prove that m is bounded above by n-2 in the situation of the second algorithm and by ((n^2-n)/2)-1 in the situation of the first. As a corollary, we show that the computation of inf and sup is polynomial in both word length and braid index, in both algorithms. The integers inf and sup determine (but are not determined by) the shortest geodesic length for elements in a conjugacy class, as defined by Charney, and so we also obtain a polynomial-time algorithm for computing this geodesic length.Comment: 15 pages. Journa

Review of La novela naturalista hispanoamericana, by Manuel Prendes

In his study, Prendes undertakes an analysis of the naturalist movement in Spanish America. The introduction sets the literary and socio-historical context for his study by briefly discussing other literary movements in nineteenth-century Spanish America and by commenting on the ways that politics and social thought influenced novelists. Prendes then reviews the extant criticism about naturalism, focusing on criticism published in Spanish, although the bibliography includes references to several critical works written in French and English. He aptly points out that Spanish American naturalist writers have begun to receive more critical attention in the past couple of decades, although he does not connect this to the fairly recent surge of interest in nineteenth-century Latin American literature in general

MLA Interviews From the Candidiates Point of View

This article is based on Lee Skinner\u27s presentation at the 1998 MLA convention in San Francisco, California

Constructions of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

It is by now a commonplace that in nineteenth-century Spanish American literature the family serves as a metaphor for the nation and that authors express their political agendas through allegories of courtship and marriage. In such readings, potential love matches symbolize the reconciliation of contesting political or ethnic groups and point toward ways for the newly-formed Spanish American nations to negotiate difference without falling into civil war. Most notably, Doris Sommer\u27s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America succinctly explains her project-subsequently taken up and adapted by a generation of critics-as one that wishes to locate an erotics of politics, to show how a variety of novel national ideals are all ostensibly grounded in \u27natural\u27 heterosexual love and in the marriages that provided a figure for apparently nonviolent consolidation during internecine conflicts at midcentury (6). At its core Sommer\u27s interpretations of what she identifies as the key novels in nineteenth- century Spanish America are concerned with courtship and the process of arriving-or fu.iling to arrive-at successful matches. Her analysis concentrates on erotic love and the ways by which lovers overcome obstacles to marry and thus consummate the political unions signified by their personal relationships. As she says, Erotic passion was [... an] opportunity (rhetorical and otherwise) to bind together heterodox constituencies: competing regions, economic interests, races, religions (14). Her work focuses, then, on the characters\u27 struggles to lay claim to their love objects and on the resolution of those struggles in matrimony. Foundational Fictions offers a highly convincing analysis of Latin America\u27s national novels and a rubric for further literary criticism that ties together representations of personal and political events

Review of Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Re-Rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations

Recent years have seen the publication of several excellent collections of essays devoted to nineteenth-century Latin American cultural studies. Works such as Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, edited by Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, and special numbers of journals such as Revista Iberoamericana’s issue on cultural change and periodical reading in nineteenth-century Latin America (January–March 2006), to adduce but two examples, have amplified our understanding of the complex ways in which hegemonic and nonhegemonic discourses functioned in the nineteenth century and how the divisions between elite and popular cultures were constructed and deconstructed. This collective scholarly labor has also done much to counteract and supplement the persuasive and powerful, but often totalizing, interpretations proposed by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities and Doris Sommer in Foundational Fictions. Acree and González Espitia’s anthology may now be added to the extant corpus of such volumes. Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America unites essays by historians and literary and cultural critics, all of whom examine different discursive phenomena from within rather than from without. The works have in common their desire to offer insight into movements, groups, and sociocultural manifestations that to date have not been studied from a cultural studies perspective. Thus Patricia Lapolla Swier’s essay on José Martí finds space next to González Espitia’s piece analyzing representations of syphilis in both “high” culture (poetry, fiction) and “low” culture (magazine advertisements). Indeed, the chapters here also share the refusal to privilege one form of discourse over another. It is welcome to find a collection offering essays that vary widely in terms of content, but that also maintain a similar theoretical approach

Pandora\u27s Log: Charting the Evolving Literary Project of Rosario Ferré

In her essay La Cocina de la escritura, published in 1982, Rosario Ferré describes her authorial project, her literary influences and her motivations for writing fiction. As part of this short autobiographical essay, she discusses the moment she embarked upon her career as a writer and the way she selected her initial literary theme

“Identity, Nation, and Revolution in Latin America.” Review of Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas by Karen Kampwirth, Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico by Magali Roy-Féquière, The Revolution Question: Feminisms in El Salvador, Chile and Cuba by Julie D. Shayne, and My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary: Reflections of a Former Guerrillera by María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo, trans. Lorena Terando.

Women\u27s relationships to the state, to their societies, and to the construction of national discourses continue to provide topics for at-times-heated debates. On the one hand, generalizing about women in such a way as to claim that all women have a particular type of connection to political or social phenomena runs the risk of subsuming certain categories of difference—racial, ethnic, class, sexual—at the same time that it attempts to highlight gender difference. On the other hand, refusing to make any kind of statement about the issues faced by groups of women as they negotiate their relationships with the political movements, countries, and social structures surrounding them also leads to a critical dead end. Four recent books walk this tightrope in varying ways as they address the topic of gender and national construction and discourse