Including Young Mothers: Community-based participation and the continuum of active citizenship

In the United Kingdom, the role of the active citizen is oftenunderstood in terms of the importance and value attached tocommunity-based citizen involvement. However, the structuralissues that prevent people from participating are often ignored.Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty young mothers livingin Greater Pilton, Edinburgh, this paper argues that the involvementof young mothers in their community must be viewed as existingalong a ‘continuum of active citizenship’ that highlightsthe factors that influence how and when young mothers participatein their communities as well as the barriers that young mothersexperience regarding their inclusion in community based participation.     

Infant Sex Moderates the Effects of Maternal Pre‐ and Postnatal Stress on Executive Functioning at 8 Months of Age

Previous studies report that early life stress, including maternal pre‐ and postnatal stress, has adverse effects on cognitive development and that these associations might be sex‐specific. However, no studies exist on early life stress and infant executive functioning (EF). The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between maternal pre‐ and postnatal stress and infant EF, and whether these associations are moderated by infant sex. Maternal prenatal depressive, general anxiety, and pregnancy‐specific anxiety symptoms were measured three times, and postnatal depressive and general anxiety symptoms were measured 6 months postpartum. Infant EF was assessed with a modified A‐not‐B task 8 months postpartum (N = 214). Maternal postnatal general anxiety predicted poorer EF in girls in comparison with boys. Moreover, there was a trend toward an interaction between prenatal anxiety and infant sex such that prenatal anxiety predicted infant EF differently in girls and in boys. No association was found between depressive symptoms or pregnancy‐specific anxiety symptoms and infant EF. These findings suggest that maternal anxiety may have sex‐specific effects on early EF and that pre‐ and postnatal stress may differently affect infant EF/cognitive development. The implications of these findings and important future directions are discussed.     

Disease-related stigma: comparing predictors of AIDS and cancer stigma

This study explores the prevalence of AIDS and cancer stigma as influenced by attitude toward homosexuality, religiosity, authoritarianism, and androgyny. This study used a quasi-experimental survey design (N = 485) to examine attitude toward people with AIDS and cancer, and interaction with people with AIDS and cancer. Negative attitudes toward homosexuality, high religious intensity and ideology, high authoritarianism, and low expressive emerged as factors related to more negative attitudes toward people with AIDS and unwillingness to interact with people with AIDS. Attitudes toward people with cancer were generally not related to the variables. Findings explore how to campaign efforts to reduce existing negative attitudes toward AIDS and homosexuality, given that gay men with AIDS are especially stigmatized. Implications and directions for future research are discussed, especially for interventions.     

Homing blogs as ambivalent spaces for feminine agency

This article discusses a form of lifestyle blogging where women blog about their homes and everyday lives. In these homing blogs, self-representations are characteristically spatially demarcated within the private sphere of the home. As these repeated representations of women in their homes take place in the public space of the internet, homing blogs work towards naturalizing the home as a women’s sphere. Written and commented on mostly by other women, homing blogs represent a feminine form of self-expression and communication that functions as a discursive expression of ongoing social, economic, and cultural changes in affluent Western societies. In this article, Finnish versions of these homing blogs are analysed in the cultural and political context of contemporary Finland, and discussed as a form of intimate publics that reverses the gender politics of other historical, semi-public spaces for the exercise of women’s agency, such as the salon.     

At the intersection of globalization and ‘civilizational originality’: cultural production in Putin’s Russia

ABSTRACT

This special issue originates from a transnational collaboration of scholars in philology, comparative literature, social theory, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and media studies. The collection strives to advance a research agenda built on the nexus of three intellectual and academic domains: post-Soviet ‘Russian cultural studies’, the research paradigm put forward by Cultural Studies, as well as empirical methods developed in sociology. The collection illustrates the importance of expanding the experience of Cultural Studies beyond its established spheres of national investigation, while it also speaks to the necessity to re-evaluate the hegemony of the English-language academic and cultural production on the global scale. The collection offers insights into the gamut of cultural practices and institutional environments in which Russian cultural production happens today. It shows how cultural industries and institutions in Russia are integrated into the global marketplace and transnational communities, while they also draw on and contribute to local lives and experiences by trying to create an autonomous space for symbolic production at personal and collective levels. Through diverse topics, the issue sheds light on the agency, i.e. practitioners and participants, creators and consumers, of Russian cultural production and the neoliberal practices implemented on creative work and cultural administration in Russia today. The Introduction outlines the development of academic studies on Russian cultural practices since 1991; describes main political developments shaping the cultural field in Putin’s Russia; and, finally, identifies the Cultural Studies debates the editors of the collection find most productive for investigations of Russia, i.e. the instrumentalization of culture and culture as resource. Relocated in an analysis of a post-socialist society, these conceptualisations seem increasingly problematic in a situation where local and federal policies governing cultural and creative work focus simultaneously on marketization and on nationalism as the main tools of legitimizing the federal government.     

The Elephant Is Not Pink: Talking About White, Black, and Brown to Achieve Excellence in Clinical Practice

Incorporating issues of race and racism can improve clinical engagement and the therapeutic alliance. Assessing, understanding, and responding to experiences related to racial identity and racism related stress can be an important factor in a clinician??s ability to be culturally responsive. A vignette of client treatment presents common dilemmas in clinical treatment. Responses to questions about race from focus groups are presented to frame the experiences of women of color who struggle with poverty and social-emotional issues. A framework of multicultural antiracist practice highlights the skills necessary for clinicians, supervisors, and managers.     

Teenage employment and career readiness

Most American youth hold a job at some point during adolescence, but should they work? This article presents a broad overview of teenage employment in the United States. It begins by describing which teenagers work and for how long and then focuses attention on the consequences (both good and bad) of paid work in adolescence. It then presents recent nationally representative data from the Monitoring the Future Study suggesting that limited hours of paid work do not crowd out developmentally appropriate after-school activities. A review of the literature also supports the idea that employment for limited hours in good jobs can promote career readiness and positive development. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of youth work for practitioners and policymakers who are delivering career-related programming.     

Getting closure: The role of urban forest canopy density in moderating summer surface temperatures in a large city

With a growing number of people living in urban areas, city residents are more frequently exposed to stresses related to the built environment including elevated summer surface temperatures contributing to the urban heat island (UHI) effect. This study examines the role of urban tree density in moderating surface temperature variation in a densely populated city (Toronto, Canada). By applying parallel aspatial (OLS) and spatial regression (GWR) approaches with satellite derived data describing tree canopy density and surface temperature, one dimension of tree canopy quality (i.e., canopy density) is shown to contribute directly to a reduction in the surface urban heat island (SUHI) effect at a local scale. Though the model fit differed between the two regression approaches, both exhibited moderately strong explanatory power and demonstrated that observed surface temperature decreases in locations with increasing high-density and closed tree canopy. Study findings provide an empirical basis to recommend that municipal urban forest strategies embrace canopy quality metrics, such as increasing the density of existing urban forest stands, as a part of tree planting objectives seeking to effectively deliver temperature moderation as a valuable ecosystem service.     

Kinship care and issues in permanency planning

Kinship caregivers are a child-care resource for families experiencing stress or temporary parenting due to illness, incarceration, or death of a parent. This article examines whether and how felt caregiver burden influences the reported propensity of caregivers to want to adopt the children in their care. Kinship caregivers who were enrolled in KinNET completed the survey (N = 102) and the data were entered anonymously into SPSS for analysis. Their mean age was 57.51 years (SD = 10.13), 95% were female (SD = .19), and two-thirds were non-white (SD = .73). Using “likelihood of adopting the child in my care,” as the outcome variable in the linear regression analysis, caregiver’s age, monthly income, and total hours employed were significant predictors. Total pressures, family service needs, and physical problems scales were not statistically significant predictors. The adjusted R square was .439 and significant (.006). Understanding the factors that are predictive of adopting children in kinship care will help programs target services more effectively. Helping kinship caregivers and the children in their care is also important in promoting their health and social well-being.     

Imagining mobility: the prospective cognition question in migration research

Most migration research is focused on migrant experiences after mobility and settlement. We argue that empirical researchers would benefit from studying how cognitive migration, the narrative imagining of oneself inhabiting a foreign destination prior to the actual physical move, influences migration behaviour. This article notes a gap in our current understanding of the process by which individuals decide to cross international borders and offers an agenda for remedying this. The interdisciplinarity of migration research has not fully extended to social psychology or cognitive social sciences, where a dynamic research agenda has examined human decision-making processes, including prospection and the connections between culture and cognition. The study of socio-cognitive processes in migration decision-making has been largely overlooked because of the after-the-fact nature of data collection and analysis rather than an aversion to these approaches per se. We highlight a number of strategic findings from this diverse field, provide examples of migration scholarship that has benefited from these insights, and raise questions about the sides of migration process that have received insufficient attention. A more nuanced understanding of prospective thinking—imagining potential futures—can shed light on the classic puzzle of why some people move while others in comparable situations do not.