Doing Sociology with the Design Professions

This paper builds on twin assumptions that human behavior and physical places influence one another, and that design and planning should therefore be sensitive to the users of the built environment. Sociologists have a key role to play in shaping the built environment: they can bring the users\u27 concerns to the design and planning process. Predesign research, research on the design process, and postoccupancy evaluation research are among the tools utilized by clinical sociologists working with environmental and design issues. Criteria to employ in selecting design research methods are identified and nine specific methods are ranked on those criteria and explained

Privately Funded Family Medical Leave?

[Excerpt] Women’s greater participation in the workplace spurred support for the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993. Nonetheless, advocates have not gained what they desired the most: a program of federally funded paid family medical leave and wage replacement. American social insurance models that offer paid family leave through workers’ compensation benefits has been effectuated in states like California, Rhode Island and New Jersey, but it is time to consider an alternative: privately funded family medical leave pensions similar to 401(k) plans authorized by the Internal Revenue Code[1] or the Traditional IRA[2] and Roth IRA plans.[3] These might be funded exclusively through employees’ contributions with the possibility of an employer match. Such programs would meet important policy goals of minimizing Americans’ tax liabilities and contributing towards long-term investment strategies. Income streams would then follow in the wake of a family medical leave occurrence

Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage and Freedom in Nineteenth Century America

Examining Slavery Through a New Lens Tessa Chakkalakal, Assistant professor of Africana Studies and English at Bowdoin College, addresses the topic of slave marriage from a unique perspective. It is one filtered through the challenge posed to historical scholarship on slavery, that of ...

Southern Free Women of Color in the Antebellum North: Race, Class, and a New Women\u27s Legal History

This article develops Welke’s theme and proposes that in the field of legal history, the analyses can not be limited to “race, gender, or class,” but that matrices of race, gender, and class must be considered at their intersections, “race, and gender, and class,” where they might shed light on the significance of shifting legal modalities. It explores how race, gender, and class as legal policy in the 19th century could be crucial for the formation of family and marital relationships in the private sphere. The focus here is upon free women of color living in the antebellum North who had been the previously enslaved partners and biological children of their owners. The men made them bequests of manumission and property in their wills, because the law of slavery did not recognize them as spouses and members of the men’s families. Trusts and estates law gave the men a loophole to force societal recognition of the women and children. Their status as slave women in the South limited their ability to defend their claims, however. Denied the legal status of white wives and children, moving to northern states was crucial for defining them as family members and for ensuring their change in class status from object of property to property owner. Legal institutions in northern jurisdictions like Cincinnati, Ohio, were instrumental in effectuating this change

Three Models ofSocial Planning for Human Services in Energy-Impacted Communities

Human service workers encounter many challenges as they face energy boom town situations in the Western United States. Currently, they respond following one of two models, corresponding to the role reserved for human services in the conservative laissez-faire and liberal enlightened capitalism models of American corporate behavior

I\u27m Going To Tarry Down In Tarry - Town

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Service user involvement in practitioner education: movement politics and transformative change

This paper will attempt to both celebrate key developments and best practice involving the users of health and social care services in programmes of practitioner education in a UK context, and offer a critical appraisal of the extent to which such initiatives meet some of the more transformative objectives sought by service users activists for change. The approach is largely that of a discussion paper but we illustrate some of the themes relating to movement activism with selected data. These data relate to earlier research and two specially convened focus groups within the Comensus initiative at the University of Central Lancashire; itself constituted as piece of participatory action research. We conclude that universities represent paradoxical sites for the facilitation of debate and learning relevant to key issues of social justice and change. As such, they are places that can impede or support movement aims. Particular strategic responses might be more likely to engender progressive outcomes. These ought to include the presence of critically engaged academic staff operating within a scholarly culture that fosters forms of deliberative democratic decision making