Which Medicine? Medicine-Taking and Changing Sherpa Lives

An increasing quantity of medicines, including medicines of different healing systems, have become available since the nineteen fifties to the mainly Sherpa inhabitants of the Mt. Everest region of Nepal. Considerable change and economic development has occurred in which this mountainous and remote area has become one of Nepal’s principal tourist destinations and people have gained access to education, health services, and modern means of communication. Many Sherpa travel regularly in Nepal and overseas, especially for work, education, or pilgrimage, or have migrated permanently. Focusing on oral histories, this article explores factors that have influenced people’s use of different medicines over time. It provides a wider understanding of the health-seeking process for Sherpa and emphasizes the importance of individual Sherpa life experiences, as well as collective changes. Many factors influence medicines use, but perceptions of efficacy and appropriateness continue to appear more important than ‘scientific’ knowledge underpinning ‘modern’ medicines. The source of medicines also matters. Over time people have become familiar with and generally trust Khunde Hospital, which was built in 1966 by New Zealand climber Sir Edmund Hillary. In contrast, Sherpa traveling to the capital Kathmandu have greater access to different types of medicines yet often face uncertainty about where to get medicines and issues of quality and cost. People prefer the ease of taking tablets, but some consider injections more powerful, if problematic, because of the influence of spirits. Cultural practices relating to health prevention, including taking religious medicines, remain important

Risk and rehabilitation in criminal records checking by employers: What employers are doing and why?

The use of criminal record checking has dramatically increased over the last 10-15 years, leading to concerns that ex-offenders are disadvantaged in seeking employment and therefore at greater risk of engaging in reoffending. In order to better understand why and how employers are using criminal record checks, a two-stage empirical research project was conducted involving a survey of and interviews with HR managers across a wide variety of industries. As indicated, a number of disadvantages to the wholesale use of criminal record checking in employment have been identified previously, such as obstructing the reintegration of ex-offenders and encouraging recidivism, limiting the labour pool, and exposing the organisation to discrimination claims and to the overreliance on a single type of risk assessment. This research, therefore, seeks to understand how these disadvantages are apparently outweighed from an employer's perspective by opposing factors in the recruitment process

Sensitising green criminology to procedural environmental justice: a case study of First Nation consultation in the Canadian oil sands

Procedural environmental justice refers to fairness in processes of decision-making. It recognises that environmental victimisation, while an injustice in and of itself, is usually underpinned by unjust deliberation procedures. Although green criminology tends to focus on the former, distributional dimension of environmental justice, this article draws attention to its procedural counterpart. In doing so, it demonstrates how the notions of justice-as-recognition and justice-as-participation are jointly manifest within its conceptual boundaries. This is done by using the consultation process that occurs with indigenous peoples on proposed oil sands projects in Northern Alberta, Canada, as a case study. Drawing from ‘elite’ interviews, the article illustrates how indigenous voices have been marginalised, and their Treaty rights misrecognised, within this process. As such, in seeking to understand the procedural determinants of distributional injustice, the article aims to encourage broader green criminological scholarship to do the same

When silence means acceptance: Understanding the right to silence as a linguistic phenomenon

This article presents a linguistic analysis of police-suspect interviews with a focus on the right to silence. The author, a linguist, seeks to introduce the legal community to a linguistic understanding of the way that a person might invoke their right to silence and explain how the rules of conversation will have a critical impact on the potential for adverse inference. Extracts from police interviews are analysed using a Conversation Analysis framework, drawing on the notion of 'preference' and adjacency pair structures in particular. The analysis finds that a preference for denials following accusations will problematise any attempts by the suspect to offer a non-response to a police accusation and that, in accordance with conversational rules governing preference, non-response will be interpreted by participants and future audiences as an acceptance of the accusation

Helping the police with their enquiries: Enhancing the investigative interview with linguistic research

Since the UK Police and Criminal Evidence Act introduced tape recorders to police interview rooms in 1984, the insights gained from audio- (and, more recently, video-) recorded police interview data have enabled forensic psychologists to analyse the cognitive and behavioural processes of interview participants, leading to sweeping changes in the way that interviewing is taught and practised by British police officers. However, less attention has been paid to the language of police interviewing and police interviewing methods practised in other parts of the world, such as the Reid Technique, which is ubiquitous in North America. This paper seeks to address both these deficiencies by introducing a linguistic perspective to the analysis of data drawn from an Australian corpus of recorded police interviews. This analysis examined the 'roles' that speakers take up when producing talk as a way of showing how the speaker aligns to the content of the talk. It finds that voluntary confessions by suspects differ in role alignments from police assertions. When evaluating the quality of evidential information obtained in an interview, it is critical to the robustness of the case that the brief is prepared on the basis of volunteered information and not police suggestions. Linguistic theory about role alignments provides a simple tool for distinguishing between talk that is initiated by the suspect and represents new intelligence in the interview, and information that is introduced by the polic

The control of seasonal changes in reproduction and food intake in grazing red deer hinds (Cervus elaphus)

Red deer exhibit seasonal rhythms of metabolism, reproduction and pelage which have evolved in response to the variation in climate and food resources characterizing temperate zone habitats. The aim of this study was to investigate the interaction between herbage availability and the endogenous seasonal rhythms controlling seasonality. Advancing the phase of seasonal rhythms by administering melatonin between July and October was associated with a reduction in the level of herbage intake by non-lactating hinds grazing a high herbage availability pasture in autumn. This is the first direct evidence that the seasonal appetite cycle demonstrated in enhoused deer fed an ad libitum diet, can influence the food intake of grazing deer. However, expression of seasonal and lactational appetite changes were dependent on availability of herbage resources. The ability of hinds to compensate for reductions in herbage abundance by modifying grazing strategies was limited. This appeared to be primarily due to a ceiling on the duration of daily grazing activity of about 12 hours. The timing of the onset of the breeding season was unaffected by low herbage resources or lactation. The principal influence of these factors on reproduction was to reduce the proportion of hinds exhibiting oestrous cyclicity. Lactation only suppressed oestrous cycles if it was associated with a loss of body condition and thus its impact was related to prevailing herbage availability. The timing of seasonal changes in coat growth were associated with changes in plasma prolactin concentrations. Low herbage availability and lactation delayed the timing of winter primary fibre growth, and reduced the density of coat fibres. This study also examined the influence of the breeding season on the timing of seasonal changes in VFI, live weight, coat growth and prolactin secretion. Only seasonal changes in pelage exhibited a significant phase delay in mature compared to pre-pubertal females