Living in a “Parallel World”: Disability in Post-Soviet Ukraine

[Excerpt] These are challenges that are familiar to disabled people all over the world. Challenges such as these make many persons with disabilities in Ukraine feel as if they live in a “parallel world,” one separate from that enjoyed by “able-bodied” people. The disabled in Ukraine face both hidden and open discrimination in their daily lives, and they are stigmatized through popular stereotypes of disabled persons as inferior, deformed, and even contaminating. These attitudes stem in part from the Soviet-era policies towards the disabled, which perpetuated such harmful stereotypes. Persons with visible disabilities (i.e., spinal injuries, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, mental problems, and others) were isolated in their homes, hidden from the public and thus made seemingly invisible. Since disability was seen as a defect and as a tragedy, the Soviet regime pursued a policy of compensation. The invisibility of disabled persons positioned them as a non-problem. Their lives were not discussed, and there was practically no public debate about their needs. When attempts were made to rehabilitate people with disabilities, rehabilitation was primarily medical and vocational in nature, an approach that reflects the ideology that the problem is located within the individual, who needs to be changed/improved (i.e., given maximum physical functioning or gainful employment)

Disability and Citizenship in Post-Soviet Ukraine: An Anthropological Critique

[Excerpt] In this paper I examine Ukraine’s burgeoning disability rights movement through the lens of citizenship to illustrate the complex processes through which certain categories of people (here, persons with disabilities) are transforming themselves—and being transformed— into particular types of citizens in a changing welfare state. I take an institutional and relational approach to understanding “citizenship,” a tack that has recently been suggested by scholars such as Margaret Somers (1994, 1995) and Allison Carey (2003), to suggest approaches to understanding citizen-state relations that shed light on the complex intersections of agency, power, and personhood that post-socialist social justice struggles entail

Specimens as research objects: reconciliation across distributed repositories to enable metadata propagation

Botanical specimens are shared as long-term consultable research objects in a global network of specimen repositories. Multiple specimens are generated from a shared field collection event; generated specimens are then managed individually in separate repositories and independently augmented with research and management metadata which could be propagated to their duplicate peers. Establishing a data-derived network for metadata propagation will enable the reconciliation of closely related specimens which are currently dispersed, unconnected and managed independently. Following a data mining exercise applied to an aggregated dataset of 19,827,998 specimen records from 292 separate specimen repositories, 36% or 7,102,710 specimens are assessed to participate in duplication relationships, allowing the propagation of metadata among the participants in these relationships, totalling: 93,044 type citations, 1,121,865 georeferences, 1,097,168 images and 2,191,179 scientific name determinations. The results enable the creation of networks to identify which repositories could work in collaboration. Some classes of annotation (particularly those regarding scientific name determinations) represent units of scientific work: appropriate management of this data would allow the accumulation of scholarly credit to individual researchers: potential further work in this area is discussed.Comment: 9 pages, 1 table, 3 figure

Health promotion in emergency care: rationale, strategies and activities.

The concept of health promotion emerged in the 1970s, prompting global health leaders to adopt a perspective on maintaining and improving the population's health that accounts for the underlying causes of ill-health and mortality. Health is affected by social, economic and environmental factors, which explains why there are health inequalities within and between countries. Health services have been partly reoriented to focus on promoting health as well as treating ill-health, but health promotion is still misunderstood, including in the nursing profession. Health promotion is often viewed as being concerned with addressing patients' lifestyle behaviours, but this is only one aspect of a much broader framework of health promotion strategies. This article introduces the concept of health promotion, explains its relevance to nurses working in the emergency department (ED), and identifies activities ED nurses can undertake to promote the health of patients, staff and the wider community. It also explains how ED nurses can play a role in health activism to better understand the social determinants of health and address health inequalities. [Abstract copyright: © 2021 RCN Publishing Company Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be copied, transmitted or recorded in any way, in whole or part, without prior permission of the publishers.

Developing Teacher Capacity with Culturally Responsive Classroom Management Practices

As elementary classrooms are becoming more diverse, school staffs remain predominantly White, with a perspective of mainstream sociocultural norms. Additionally, research has shown a disproportionate number of minority students receiving behavioral referrals. The cultural mismatch between teachers and students combined with the disproportionality seen in discipline data indicate that change is needed. The purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate the development of educators’ capacity to foster their own identity development and use culturally responsive classroom management practices that meet the needs of diverse students through a series of professional learning experiences. Additionally, this study will examine the relationship between educator self-reported perceptions of their capacity to meet the needs of diverse students and the number of discipline referrals retrieved from School-Wide Information System (SWIS). The study included 35 certified staff members from a Pre-K through fifth grade elementary school in Oregon. Pre- and post-survey data were collected using the Teacher Multicultural Attitude Survey (TMAS) and the Survey of Behaviour Management Practices (SOBMP). A pairedsample t-test indicated a statistically significantly higher mean scores on the post TMAS (p = .036). A Pearson’s r indicated there was not a statistically significant relationship at the p \u3c .05 probability level between the number of disciplinary referrals and either survey. There were statistically significantly higher mean scores on the SOBMP for those who participated in the Circles book study than those who did not (p = .037). These findings supported the importance of understanding how privilege and bias impact how individuals interact with others and how learning about other cultures can change how a person then interacts with/or understands those different than himself. Additionally, it highlighted the effectiveness of the Circles book study on increasing capacity for culturally responsive classroom management practices. A lack of findings in regard to the relationship between behavioral referrals and a change in teacher capacity could be due to the length of the study. Additional results, opportunities for future study, and program recommendations are presented

And All the Things that Grew on the Ground

This is a document archiving and describing my work for the years 2019-2021 as part of the completion requirements for the Master of Fine Arts degree. As a whole, this work investigates the paradox and negotiations of access to the self, the history, and to the landscape you occupy. It asks questions about authorship, valuing, sacred and sacrament, but retains the gravitation, umbilical tie to memoir and narrative. Ritual, habit, and transformational cleansing are recurring themes in the work. Body, breath-- access to the invisible. Preservation of the uncertain. Fragility carries weight, and importance, destruction and negotiation as vessels of repair. Washing, waiting, filtering-- and, ultimately, letting go

Literature of Societal Trauma: A Study of Literature Following the Holocaust and the Dirty War

This is a study of the tangible effects of societal trauma that manifest themselves in the literature of a community in the years and decades following said traumas. This paper focuses on literature that follows the Holocaust from World War II Germany and the Dirty War from 1970\u27s Argentina