Agency of internal transnationalism in social memory

The article examines the limitations of methodological nationalism in the studies of social memory through a case study of memory of Stalinist repression in Belarus. It analyses how various social agencies – national and local activists, religious organisations, and international foundations – use the memory of repression for constructing post‐Soviet Belarusian identity by embedding their national representations in larger transnational frameworks. Drawing on the concept of ‘internal globalisation’, this article develops the idea of ‘internal transnationalism’ that suggests the importance of wider transnational configurations for the definition of nation. Internalized transnationalism does not make a national memory concept less nation‐centred, but it affects the choice of its cultural, political and civilizational framing. In contrast to methodological cosmopolitanism that implies rediscovering of the national as an internalized global, methodological transnationalism emphasizes the multiplicity of co‐existing transnational networks that can be invoked by social actors in their national mnemonic agenda. Using the case of the Kurapaty memorial site the article analyses how multiple framings of memory representations – the Belarusian national memory, liberal anti‐communist memory, contesting memories, such as Polish, Baltic and Jewish – compete and juxtapose in the space of social memory of political repression.     

社交网站兴起与青年价值结构分析

青年价值结构反映了青年在价值观念变迁中现代化维度和后现代化维度中的转变程度。目前社交网站覆盖人数众多，用户以高学历、年轻化、城市分布规律化和交际现实性为主要特点。社交网站发展与青年价值结构变迁具有内在的密切关联。社交网站技术引进国内却丧失了原有的“意义图景”，说明我国青年在价值理性方面的缺失和对工具理性的追逐：接受社交网站说明“熟人社会”结构在青年社交活动中仍然延续．社交网站也能为青年实现个人成就提供可能性：社交网站馈赠型社会化模式有效改进了青年“相对被剥夺感”严重、幸福感低迷的现状，这是社交网站进一步发展壮大的功能基础。     

Conceptualizing anxiety among social work students: implications for social work education

Student anxiety is frequently discussed within social work education. Due to its potentially devastating impacts, social work educators need to have a full understanding of anxiety in this context, in order to determine the best way to support students. Research on student anxiety from a broad body of literature provides implications for social work classrooms and field education. Key underlying concepts from previous social work and related research on student anxiety inform a conceptual model to help educators develop a more complex understanding of student anxiety. Implications for further research and important next steps in the development of support strategies for social work students are identified.     

Connecting and Strengthening Young Aboriginal Men: A Family Wellbeing Pilot Study

A significant proportion of young people in Australia are currently not being engaged in school and other social systems. This article presents the results of a mixed-methods study of a pilot Family Wellbeing intervention designed to enhance the social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB) of young Aboriginal men and improve engagement in education, employment, and other social participation. A questionnaire incorporating the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale and respondent self-assessment SEWB questions was administered to program participants pre and post intervention (N = 30) and qualitative data were collected from program organisers (N = 6). The results suggest that the Family Wellbeing intervention has the capacity to make a marked contribution to the SEWB of young Aboriginal men; participants experienced strong improvement in capacity to manage relationships, engagement in education and employment, and mental and physical health. The factors that enabled the program to be adapted to the target group and setting are documented.     

Cracking the Code—An Approach to Developing Professional Writing Skills

The development of writing skills sufficient to meet the complexities of contemporary social work practice is a growing demand from employers and practice educators. The paper explores current pedagogical debate relating to student support and the development of writing skills and relates this debate to meeting the needs of social work students engaged in practice learning and professional practice. A number of questions are raised about current social work education in England and the needs of students entering from non-traditional academic backgrounds facing the increasingly rigorous demands of professional report writing. The discussion is then grounded in a practice example of staff from a university social work course and education guidance service working together to meet student need in respect of developing writing skills. The development, implementation and evaluation of a university writing skills programme for social work students are explored. The paper concludes by setting out a range of challenges arising from experience of the programme and a consideration of theory, and points to potential ways forward based on a social practice approach to teaching writing skills.     

The Brazilian organic food sector: Prospects and constraints of facilitating the inclusion of smallholders

The Brazilian organic food sector has experienced important growth during the last two decades. Brazilian smallholders, however, are facing huge challenges to enter and benefit from this growth in a sustainable way. Combining the lens of New Institutional Economics and socio-anthropology, we analyze six experiences of Brazilian smallholders who converted to organics in the 1990s’. Three different food systems are featured in this analysis: an alternative food system, which is strongly interwoven with the Brazilian Agro-ecological movement and two commercial food procurement systems oriented towards domestic and an export markets driven mainly by supermarket chains. The analytical focus was on 1) the governance of these food systems, 2) the constraints farmers are facing within these food systems and, 3) the benefits that they can expect from market inclusion. We highlighted the roles that NGOs, Faith-based organizations and public-related agencies play in supporting the inclusion of smallholders into all three food systems. We confirmed the arguments in support of pursuing the agro-ecological development based model in Brazil, but underlined that there is a critical lack of support for farmers included in the commercial market-oriented food systems. Such a lack is even more critical as the food systems driven by expanding supermarket chains are characterized by strong asymmetric power relations at the expense of smallholders. Considering the reluctance of NGOs and Faith-based organizations to support these farmers, we call for efforts to be made to provide a policy framework to enable public-related entities to secure sustainable inclusion into these systems and exit strategies for those experiencing exclusion from these highly competitive food systems.     

An affective social tie mechanism: Theory,evidence, and implications

This paper presents substantial evidence of a simple social tie mechanism that endogenizes people’s care about other individuals under the influence of interaction experiences. The mechanism is rooted in scientific studies from various disciplines. For our evidence, we propose and estimate a dynamic model of tie formation using different experimental datasets regarding public goods, test its within-sample and out-of-sample predictive performance, and compare it with other models. In addition to the support obtained for the mechanism, we find that the effects of interaction experiences show substantial persistence over time, and that only a minority looks ahead to strategically influence the behavior of interaction partners. Furthermore, our model appears to track the often volatile behavioral dynamics of the different datasets remarkably well. Additional evidence is presented of a neural substrate of the tie mechanism, based on a recent (fMRI) application of the estimated model, and of the explanatory power of our model regarding other extant experimental findings. Implications for private and public governance and topics for future research are discussed.     

Analytic strategies for longitudinal networks with missing data

Missing data are often problematic when analyzing complete longitudinal social network data. We review approaches for accommodating missing data when analyzing longitudinal network data with stochastic actor-based models. One common practice is to restrict analyses to participants observed at most or all time points, to achieve model convergence. We propose and evaluate an alternative, more inclusive approach to sub-setting and analyzing longitudinal network data, using data from a school friendship network observed at four waves (N = 694). Compared to standard practices, our approach retained more information from partially observed participants, generated a more representative analytic sample, and led to less biased model estimates for this case study. The implications and potential applications for longitudinal network analysis are discussed.     

场域视野下社区工作的主体建构

社区在一定意义上就是一个场域,社区工作展现着两个分别体现各自场域的主体人群即社会工作者和社区居民之间的相互影响。社区工作中确定谁是场域主体,有助于社会工作者对自身角色的定位及对社区工作不同阶段策略和方法的把握。社区工作准备阶段,侧重于社区居民的主体场域;社区工作预估与服务策划方案制定阶段,侧重于社区工作者的主体场域;社区工作服务策划方案执行阶段,是社区工作者场域与社区居民场域互为主体;社区工作评估阶段,则侧重于社区居民的主体场域。