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This study investigates the lived experiences of multiple sclerosis family carers during the COVID-19 pandemic and explores the impact of the pandemic on psychological resilience processes using a socioecological framework. Following thematic analysis of interviews, two main findings emerged: first, behavioural vigilance intended to mitigate viral spread eclipsed carers’ needs and deprived them of support resources; and, second, multiple sclerosis carers harboured resilience via practices of gratitude and leveraging interpersonal relationships. Future action is needed to develop public crisis responses that integrate multiple sclerosis carers’ needs, including improved care-continuity models, the alleviation of social isolation and advancements in multifaceted wellness preservation.
It is self-evident that critique lies at the heart of Critical Social Work. Even so, more attention should be given to clarifying the meaning of this form of evaluation, particularly when it is applied in the social sciences and social professions. More precisely, it is necessary to explain the meta-theoretical conceptualisation of critique and, crucially, note its different expressions. Through gaining such clarity, the contention is that Critical Social Work sharpens its appreciation of social injustice and how to tackle it. This article describes and augments one meta-theoretical conception of critique involving a typology delineating interconnected forms of evaluation. The indelible bond between this paradigmatic outline of critique, critical theory and Critical Social Work is subsequently considered, highlighting some possibilities for social transformation. Adopting these precepts, by way of conclusion, leads to a critical cosmopolitan orientation within Critical Social Work, making it relevant to the pressing challenges of today’s world.
Background:
This study examines the engagement of knowledge users in knowledge mobilisation (KMb) research on Canadian K-12 teaching and education policy. Research on and around KMb has grown in the decade since this field was first assessed comprehensively. Thus, it is timely to re-evaluate if current knowledge producer-user relationships in KMb research feature the mediating variables or recursive elements promulgated as best practices in KMb research.
Methods:
A scoping review was conducted to identify the profile of knowledge users, map the engagement of knowledge users, and account for any changes to their roles in the research process since 2008. Twenty-eight relevant studies were identified. Contextual data and frequency of engagement with knowledge users were collected and analysed.
Findings:
Findings indicate that a diverse group of knowledge users are engaged in KMb research and draws on knowledge from various disciplines. A majority of the studies reported that knowledge users were engaged in at least two stages of their research process, with them most frequently engaged during the search and data collection phase of the research process.
Discussion and conclusion:
There has been an encouraging effort in building iterative producer-user connections with knowledge users being engaged, often repeatedly, across different phases of the research process. This indicates an increasingly collaborative model of soliciting user insights on the development and diffusion of research evidence. The review sets the foundation for potential future research on producer-user engagement and provides insights applicable beyond the Canadian K-12 education system.
This article reports on how young people (aged 18–24) and stakeholders working in the area of violence against women (VAW) in Ireland, perceive young men’s role in addressing VAW. We find that men are considered well positioned to intervene as active bystanders and to engage in feminist allyship. However, several barriers to men’s active bystanding and engagement with the issue of VAW, as well as ethical, theoretical and practice issues, need to be considered. These include: the privileging of men’s willingness to listen to other men, thereby devaluing women’s perspectives; pluralistic ignorance where men feel other men do not share their discomfort of violence-supportive practices; and a tendency for men to default to confrontational modes of active bystanding. We highlight how these issues are even more pertinent to address given the presence of political forces that seek to stymie men’s support for feminist activism and causes related to gender politics.
Russia’s open military aggression against Ukraine is a matter of agentic misrecognition rather than of classic rationalist considerations. Through the war in Ukraine, Russia exercises neglected agency and tries to reverse the feeling of marginalisation, irrelevance and status degradation in world politics. Russia’s war in Ukraine allows the current Russian leadership to escape from the stigma of an impotent power and to stabilise its identity as an important one, independent of Western norms and rules. Looking at Russia’s revisionism from the perspective of agentic misrecognition has some advantages. First, it helps in filling gaps that conventional interpretations and explanations of the war, found prominently in both public and academic discourses, leave open. These are problematic because they are too entrenched in positivist thinking and construct the world along essentialist concepts. Second, it allows room to understand the war as the result of a contingent process. In this process, it is not only the agency expectations of Russia’s leadership that play an important role but also the relational dynamics between Russia and the West and their impact on the further transformation of Russian identity constructions and self-descriptions.
This article examines carers’ potential to care for older adults with disabilities in Trinidad. Quantitative data on willingness, availability and skills, together with qualitative data on factors affecting care potential, were collected from a large, nationally representative sample of Trinidadians. About 68 per cent of Trinidadians were willing to care for older relatives with disabilities, 42 per cent were available and 31 per cent perceived having the required skills. Factors affecting care potential include personal views, potential of social network, competency and constraints. Integrated results indicate the importance of evaluating existing governmental programmes, targeted support for various ethnic groups and to older carers, and skills training.
First, I describe and innovatively interpret the most important APM and explain how to use them best. Next is a critique of APM sensitive to distribution among the poor, based on two questions: a) Why should the relevant inequality for an APM be the inequality among the poor excluding the non-poor? and b) Why should decreasing marginal well-being start from the very bottom, from the second soup spoon? Nutritional evidence is shown to prove that this assumption is false; in food intake there is a stage of increasing marginal well-being to food additions. Dasgupta has called this the high fixed cost of living. APM sensitive to distribution among the poor are thus demolished, and I propose two new APM sensitive to total social inequality. One focuses on the inequality between the poor and the non-poor, which follows the logic of Sen’s poverty index but instead of the Gini coefficient (G) among the poor introduces what I call the relative gap between the average achievement score (A) of the poor (AP) and that of the non-poor (AR): which is GPR = (AR − AP) / AR. The second replaces G among the poor by G among the whole population in Sen’s APM. Illustrative results for Mexico are presented.
The chapter includes analysis of the seven combined poverty measurement methods (PMM), identifying a central difference between Latin American and European PMM. In the latter, direct measurement aims at identifying deprivation due to income restrictions. In sharp contrast, in both the Integrated PMM (IPMM) and Social Progress Index (SPI), the point of departure is that direct and indirect methods are complementary, as they consider different well-being sources (WBS) and identify deprivation in different dimensions. This difference explains the divergent P criteria which are applied in both groups of PMM methods (in both regions). In this chapter, a typology of such criteria is built. Whereas ‘truly poor’ PMM identify as poor only those who are poor both in the direct and indirect dimensions (the intersection of both sets), the IPMM and SPI do not restrict P to this intersection, as they use a weighted average of each dimension’s scores to obtain the overall P index. The conclusion arrived at is that combined methods which can be grouped under the heading ‘truly poor’ end up reducing their field of study to the consequences of a low level of current income, reducing the six WBS to one, leaving the hope for an integrated approach only to the IPMM and SPI.
This book integrates my best texts on poverty conceptualisation/measurement over 35 years, presenting an innovative approach practically unknown in English. The core breakthrough is the holistic view that culminates in the Integrated Poverty Measurement Method (IPMM). The book provides the critique to support this approach, reflected in conceptual discussions and critical appraisals that constitute the Critique of the Political Economy of Poverty (CPEP), including systematised criticism of salient poverty measurement methods. I appropriated positive ideas from many authors and intertwined them with the concepts I developed to build the narrative, which becomes transparent in principles and good practices. Three distinctive features delineate. a) It includes free time (FT) – going beyond combined methods that include only income/consumption and unsatisfied basic needs (UBN) – thus broadening the range of phenomena considered, including domestic chores, caring, and leisure activities. b) It avoids dichotomic indicators by cardinalising ordinal variables, allowing the calculation of a synthetic final metric indicator and the more elaborated aggregate poverty measures (APM). Chapter 9 discusses existing APM, interprets them innovatively, shows the conceptual flaws of those that are sensitive to distribution among the poor, and proposes an APM that integrates social inequality. c) Regarding income, IPMM introduces innovations and calculates a specific poverty line for each household.
