Back to where we came from: evolutionary psychology and children’s literature and media

In 2010, The New York Times ran an article which announced that ‘the next big thing in English [Studies]’ was ‘using evolutionary theory to explain fiction’. This announcement may be considered somewhat belated, given that the interest in the potential relevance of evolutionary psychology to literary studies might be traced back to a considerably earlier date than 2010. Joseph Carroll first published on the subject as far back as 1995, and by 2002 Steven Pinker could claim that ‘within the academy, a growing number of mavericks are looking to Evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to re-establish human nature as the center of any understanding of the arts’. Nevertheless, The New York Times’s announcement may be taken as a measure of an increasingly visible trend in both popular and academic thinking. We argue in this chapter that this trend is motivated specifically by nostalgia, or the longing for a past which seems forever lost. A second aspect of this nostalgia will also be discussed to do with the way that we argue that this supposedly ‘new’ area of research repeats exactly a long history of prior claims of many eminent children’s literature critics with respect to ideas of childhood, language and children’s literature and media. Despite the repeated, insistent claims of several of the Literary Darwinists, including, for instance, Joseph Carroll, one of the founders of this way of thinking, that they are working in heroic opposition to a dominant, obscurantist and anti-science ‘literary theory’, we argue here that in fact there is a high degree of convergence between the claims made about childhood, language and children’s literature in Literary Darwinism and much children’s literature criticism. We therefore see Literary Darwinism and (children’s) literature studies as not being in any sense about an opposition or separation between science and literary or humanist studies, but about a convergence underpinned and driven by the same nostalgia for a singular, stable, uniform and universal past, leading to a singular, stable, uniform and universal present. Finally, we suggest that it is not just in these two fields in which this nostalgia operates, but that this can currently be seen in sub-streams within many disciplines – in both in arts, sciences and humanities -- as a founding, powerfully political, driver

Community Health Centers: Health Care as It Could Be

This article explores the potential of community health centers (CHCs) to become a central component providing health care in America. It focuses on health centers as a proposed solution to the dual national problems of access to care and the shortage of primary care doctoring. It argues that CHCs have the capacity to address the problem of access to health services and to provide a vibrant model for the revival of primary care. Part I deals with the history, structure, current scope, and funding of CHCs. Part II looks at national health care goals and how CHCs are uniquely poised to actualize those goals. The demonstrated successes and potential growth of the CHC model are viewed against the backdrop of national health care priorities established through the Healthy People 2010 report. Part III looks at physician workforce issues, Graduate Medical Education (GME), and efforts to extend residency programs to ambulatory settings, including CHCs. State initiatives to reform GME so that it will produce a physician workforce better adapted to meet local health care needs are discussed, and the needs for federal action are identified. The role of the GME funding structure is examined as a key component in shaping potential reforms. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the benefits delivered by CHCs and notes the need for systemic shifts to help facilitate the growth of this successful health care model. The broader policy questions of how CHC expansion fits into health care policy reform as a whole will be left to another Article