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I will give a detailed description of how model can be used to understand the symptoms of dementia as described by other researchers in particular the concepts of wandering and withdrawal. This will show how Fairbairn’s theory can be related to the experience of those with dementia.
Resilience has attracted immense interest for researchers and practitioners. Arguably, resilience is a laudable quality, and post-COVID-19, the need for resilience is greater. Most studies examining resilience are socially blind and place emphasis on individual responsibility. Developing this critique further, this is the first study that draws significantly on the ideas of Charles Wright Mills and his defining principles to relate the ‘private’ concerns of being resilient to the ‘public’ context that creates this experience. This article presents a qualitative study that investigated how student social workers perceived resilience in their practice. A total of 16 social work students were interviewed using semi-structured interviews. The aim of the article is to analyse the capacity for resilience to be deployed as a means of exercising domination over social work students in order to exploit and control them. An alternative conception of resilience is promoted that advocates a collective response to the challenges facing social workers.
Background:
Elected members of the US Congress rely on staff, including fellows with scientific and engineering expertise, to find and interpret information for use in policymaking. Factors that impede, or facilitate, the communication of scientific information within the institution thus can play a critical role in legislative capacity, but there is a limited understanding of these dynamics in the hyper-partisan body.
Aims and objectives:
This study presents and tests a four-dimensional model describing how the obstacles to science communication in Congress change depending on whether information is sought for use in support of established policy positions (‘strategic use’) or to inform decision making (‘substantive use’).
Methods:
Data were collected between November 2017 and February 2019 through interviews with 58 congressional staff members in personal offices assigned to energy, natural resources, and science issue portfolios, and through surveys with 68 science and engineering fellows who completed their year in Congress between 2015 and 2019.
Findings:
Placing scientists and engineers in Congress as fellows augments staffing and institutional expertise. Yet we find that both staff and fellows experience communication-related impediments in using scientific information. Staff report more challenges in using science to substantively make policy decisions, due not only to lack of time, but also factors such as contacts, access, and information presentation. Fellows report fewer barriers and use science for policy in largely identical ways to staff.
Discussion and conclusion:
These findings support the proposed model and highlight the importance of staff scientific fluency and the decision-making context for science communication in Congress.
Building upon Max Weber’s insightful critique of the capitalist spirit as causing ‘unprecedented inner loneliness’, this article traces the trajectory of a fraught subjectivity over the course of a socioeconomic order from the Protestant Reformation to the present. Beginning with the premise that this socioeconomic order has a long history of both inviting and foreclosing upon the capacity to have an inner life, the general argument is pursued that grappling with one’s separateness, as well as the separateness of the object, gives rise to an inevitable sense of loneliness. This psychoanalytically informed sense of loneliness is juxtaposed with the gnawing loneliness that seems to haunt neoliberal subjectivity, revealing how the former might provide an imperfect but still viable antidote to our increasing inability to sit quietly by ourselves. Particular focus is given to re-evaluating Winnicott’s notion of the capacity to be alone in light of cultivating a separate self. The article concludes with some tentative thoughts on what suffering a separate self might entail, including suffering one’s inevitable loneliness.
In Western academic spaces, more and more stakeholders are claiming commitments to ‘decolonisation’. Yet in environments shaped by rankings, impact factors, citation numbers and third-party funding figures, what claims to be decolonial scholarship can easily end up being as extractive and violent as the subject it is claiming to confront. In this article, we reflect on attempts to decolonise both the discipline and practice of ‘development’, especially with regard to knowledge ‘production’ in this academic disciplinary space. We are doing this from a particular situatedness that is itself contradictory, as we are both facilitators of an EU-funded network focused on ‘Decolonising Development’ and of Convivial Thinking, a non-institutional, transnational web-based collective. We argue that imperial forms of knowing and making sense of the world are deeply entrenched in the structures of higher education, both shaping and limiting the ways in which what we call ‘development’ is researched, taught and practised. By reflecting on instances of academic activism and institutional pushback in both aforementioned networks, we show how institutional violence limits scholarly imaginations in ways that make sure academic or dominant knowledge structures are not radically challenged, thereby making claims of decolonisation purely performative. Despite this, we also point to concrete openings in both networks where undoing the entanglements of decolonising narratives, ‘development’ and the imperatives of scholarship – and thereby dismantling the master’s house that sustains it – seems within reach.
This chapter summarizes the uses of surveillance technologies in migration, border management and humanitarian aid, to explain contemporary capitalism’s mainstream approach to migration and the motivations behind the investments of tech companies.
Given the far-reaching effects of these technologies, it is evident they will soon have consequences for humanity as a whole. Migrants, asylum seekers and refugees have much weaker legal status than those of citizens, and states claim the authority to control those who cross their borders by invoking their sovereign rights. The fields of border and national security are more secretive, face less scrutiny and leak less information, and societies take a less sympathetic approach to migrants and foreigners. This allows tech companies, along with military and financial firms and security bureaucracies, to do as they please on the global stage, and implement the most speculative AI or blockchain projects.
Digital identity projects are related to supporting migrants and refugees and contributing to their financial and social integration. Despite mostly positive approaches (with or without reservations), when digital identity initiatives are evaluated from the perspective of the manifestation of surveillance capitalism in migration management, many examples demonstrate corporate agenda-setting and new hegemonic discourses.
Smart border and digital identity applications do not contradict but complement one another. If the main issue in the use of surveillance technologies in border and migration management is data collection and extraction, smart border applications function, through data analysis, to decide who is allowed to cross the border and, after crossing the border, how far they are allowed to go. A digital identity, on the other hand, is where such data is stored, and thus very valuable for both states and private companies for financial inclusion and tracking purposes.
The author gives a detailed exposition of Fairbairn’s structural model of the self, showing how it develops from the initial stage of infantile dependency, through the transitional stage which is concerned with the abandonment of infantile dependence to the stage of mature dependence where the defences of the transitional stage are given up, and one can relate to others realistically. He gives a detailed description of how Fairbairn’s model can be used to understand the symptoms of dementia as described by other researchers.
Surveillance technologies developed in migration and border management can spread to other fields and affect an entire society. Suppose the lie detectors piloted on borders are successful and they meet no significant opposition from society, then we should not be surprised to see lie detectors in workplaces or in police stations in the near future. This, in turn, would mean new mechanisms of oppression in society at large.
When it comes to social issues, advanced statistics can be manipulated in favour of the powerful, with probable options being presented as inevitable or actual. This encourages an approach that perceives such situations as neutral and objective, magnifying the algorithm and obscuring the structural factors. This can cause serious problems in migration and border management.
Big data analysis has exciting potential in migration and border management and humanitarian emergencies. Inferences made from data sets allow us to analyse the basic characteristics and dynamics of mass movements and make predictions about the future.
This chapter discusses how private companies’ dominance over big data analysis should be questioned more vigorously. Companies that collect and analyse data have better capacity than states and UN agencies to monitor and direct ‘transient’ people. Strong legal protections do not exist regarding privacy and consent in many countries on migration routes.
Because of active national and international use of smartphones, social media and mobile banking, companies have become the biggest collectors and analysts of data. As most of these companies rely on the business model of surveillance capitalism, this provides invaluable resources to capitalism for the surveillance, manipulation and steering of people in a given direction.
