Boxing, narrative and culture: critical perspectives

In response to increasing calls for better consideration of social dimensions in Forest (and) Landscape Restoration (FLR), this systematic literature review identifies and synthesises relevant themes associated with critical social perspectives in FLR. Critical perspectives are methodologically diverse but generally share an intention to interrogate power and knowledge, challenge the ‘status quo’ and ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions, alongside promoting social justice. Critical perspectives therefore play a key role in illuminating complex social dimensions in global environmental governance. This review asks: What is the role of critical social perspectives within the academic discourse on FLR, and what key insights about FLR have these perspectives provided over the period 2000–2023? A total of 449 relevant academic papers were published during this period. An initial assessment of the abstracts, title and keywords found social dimensions were addressed in some way, even if only negligibly, in 211 of the 449 papers, and themes associated with critical social perspectives were evident in only 40 papers. These 40 papers were then read in full, and six key topic areas emerged: 1) Assumptions underpinning the links between FLR and human-wellbeing, particularly the tendency to measure human-wellbeing using simple economic indicators, were challenged as naïve and potentially misleading; 2) Tenure issues appear to be frequently under-appreciated, with serious consequences such as displacement of communities; 3) Top-down, technocratic models of governance are problematised for neglecting the socio-political contexts of FLR, which are laden with value and power asymmetries, as well as the implications of historical legacies (e.g., colonialism); 4) While there has been a proliferation of discursive intent to better ‘engage local stakeholders’, doing so remains opaque in principle and practice; 5) The heterogeneity of ‘local stakeholders’ emphasises the need to consider multiple intersections of social identities and diversity, and attend to gendered dimensions of FLR; 6) Accepting epistemological pluralism is considered fundamental to incorporating local and Indigenous Peoples’ knowledges into more people-centred, locally-relevant FLR governance and practice. The review concludes that, if FLR is to genuinely pursue the imperative to enhance human-wellbeing alongside the goal of regaining ecological integrity, a recalibration of research priorities toward interdisciplinary social sciences, and better representation of locally-situated stakeholders, are required. This will involve deliberation between researchers, from both social and natural sciences, as well as practitioners; and making concerted efforts to steer away from simplistic framings of the issues, toward more nuanced understandings of and responses to the systemic complexities embedded in FLR.

The Critical Theoretical Perspectives and the Health Care System Daisy Michelle Princeton Abstract Background of the study: The goal of healthcare system is to achieve a well-organized, safe and holistic patient care. However, the existing healthcare system of today remains fragmented and complex (St. Meld. Nr.47, 2008-2009). Hence, it is still unable to meet the patients´ complete integrated health care needs; and at the same time patients often experience extraneous disappointments due to unnecessary delays, disputes and complications (St. Meld. Nr.47, 2008-2009). Aim: The aim of this literature study is to show how critical theoretical perspectives influence the healthcare system through professional practitioners, institutional strategies and research methodology and/or policy; in order to meet the complete needs of the patients and guarantee health care services of quality and safety. Result: Health care is a set of complex phenomena that involves a vast of objective theoretical and scientific knowledge; professional's subjective ability to properly apply such knowledge; and a system of interaction that can ensure a well-coordinated, sufficient, efficient and safe health care service. There are three emerging levels of developing culture in health care that are addressing the health care needs of human beings today: 1 Professional level (provision of critical health care through professional´s subjective synthesis of knowledge; 2 Institutional level (provision of critical institutional multidisciplinary health care through facilitated socially construed team coordination); 3 Academic level (provision of critical academic health care through interdisciplinary research generating objective knowledge with ideological policies and approach). Conclusion: Critical theory embraces the scientific traditions that advocate proper objectivity and subjectivity in a manner that social construction of health care becomes more appropriate, effective, and complete. Critical perspectives in health care transform the system into an integrative multidisciplinary model that provide a more thorough patient care, which brings about emancipating social changes at the three levels of health care system. Critical competencies facilitate holistic-oriented, trustworthy and safeguarding individual professional independent practice, regulatory institutions and ideological academy. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/rah.v4n1a9

During the last couple of decades, the state of the Swedish welfare society has deteriorated. Political decisions concerning the labour market, housing and education have significantly increased precarious conditions for many people. Income inequality and economic difficulties have increased. Changes in the welfare system make it harder to receive adequate support, while the repressive elements have also increased. We argue that critical and radical perspectives in social work can help reverse this negative development. What students learn in their social work education will affect their ways of understanding social problems, their practice, and their ability to work for change. We therefore regard social work education as an important arena for social change. But what is the state of such perspectives at our Swedish universities? This article examines the presence of critical and radical perspectives in the Swedish social work curriculum and attempts to answer the question ”How well equipped are future social workers to work in a critical and radical way?” The study shows that a critical perspective is common in the social work curriculum of some universities, but that critical and radical perspectives in general are absent. We argue that this

Environmental degradations have been recurrent in South America for centuries. Today, this areas are the result of the neo-extractivism expansion logic, and they affect both nature and political, economic, social and cultural relationships, modifying the life and customs of inhabitants. In this context, science education, carried out from a critical perspective, emerges as a potential resistance practice. This chapter analyzes, from a critical and eco-feminist perspective, three experiences of teachers in the Aconcagua Valley, in Chile. Connections between the territory and attention to socio-environmental conflicts were identified in all three cases, both in and out of the classroom, which includes the discussion of economic, social and cultural factors. The professional trajectories and the form of resistance of teachers, reveal the importance of formative and collaborative spaces for teaching in contexts on environmental degradation.

BackgroundLaw enforcement traffic stops are one of the most common entryways to the US justice system. Conventional frameworks suggest traffic stops promote public safety by reducing dangerous driving practices and non-vehicular crime with little to no collateral damage to individuals and communities. Critical frameworks interrogate these assumptions, identifying significant individual and community harms that disparately impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and low-income communities.MethodsThe Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP) and multi-level frameworks from community anti-racist training were combined into a structured diagram to guide intervention and research teams in contrasting conventional and critical perspectives on traffic stops. The diagram divides law enforcement and drivers/residents as two separate agent types that interact during traffic stops. These two agent types have different conventional and critical histories, priorities, and perspectives at multiple levels, including individual, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural levels. Conventional solutions (identifying explicitly racist officers, “meet-a-cop” programs, police interaction training for drivers) are born from conventional frameworks (rewarding crime prevention regardless of cost, the war on drugs saves lives, driver behavior perfectionism). While conventional perspectives focus on individual and interpersonal levels, critical perspectives more deeply acknowledge dynamics at institutional and cultural levels. Critical solutions may be hard to discover without critical frameworks, including that law enforcement creates measurable collateral damage and disparate social control effects; neighborhood patrol priorities can be set without community self-determination or accountability and may trump individual and interpersonal dynamics; and the war on drugs is highly racialized and disproportionally enforced through traffic stop programs.ConclusionsTraffic stop enforcement and crash prevention programs that do not deeply and critically consider these dynamics at multiple levels, not just law enforcement-driver interactions at the individual and interpersonal levels, may be at increased risk of propagating histories of BIPOC discrimination. In contrast, public health and transportation researchers and practitioners engaged in crash and injury prevention strategies that employ law enforcement should critically consider disparate history and impacts of law enforcement in BIPOC communities. PHCRP, anti-racism frameworks, and the included diagram may assist them in organizing critical thinking about research studies, interventions, and impacts.

Within this special issue, we turn our attention to critical perspectives within the communication discipline and seek to illuminate the implementation of critical methods across its broader contexts. While the communication discipline has historically been grounded in the normativity and centering of whiteness, critical perspectives, which are characterized by attention to communicative practices that attend to systems of power and hierarchy across social spheres, have been broadly integrated into and meaningfully shaped the study of communication contexts such as rhetoric, intercultural communication, and performance studies. We argue, however, that the incorporation of critical perspectives within the larger discipline remains underdeveloped. Therefore, in this special issue, we present articles that employ critical methodological approaches to offer important new ways of studying and centering marginalized identities, positionalities, and epistemologies across a range of contexts. Ultimately, we argue for a more expansive approach to thinking and teaching about methodology in general, and critical methods specifically, that inspires further “play” among communication scholars who value the need for social justice imperatives and epistemic delinking across all facets of communication studies.

This article looks at the relatively understudied phenomenon of short-term international mobility of faculty from the critical internationalization perspective. It uses data from interviews with academics from Kazakhstan, who participated in short-term professional development trips abroad to understand who benefits and who loses as a result of short-term faculty mobility and how the short-term international mobility may contribute to the process of reproduction of the existing social structures and inequality. Critical internationalization perspective in general, as well as mobility paradigm more specifically, helps to reveal some important insights about short-term international mobility from a non-Western country to predominantly Western institutions. The main conclusion from the study is that host university’s engagement in hosting mobile faculty coming on short visits seems to be driven predominantly by the neoliberal profit-seeking motives rather than by a more humanistic desire to serve the larger global society by sharing its expertise or to engage in equal and mutually beneficial partnership relationships.

Shields (Critical advocacy research: An approach whose time has come. In: Steinberg SR, Cannella GS (eds) Critical qualitative research: reader. Peter Lang, New York, pp 2–13, 2012) describes critical advocacy research as an approach whose time has come, where critical inquiry “begins with the premise that research’s role is not to describe the world as is, but also to demonstrate what needs to be changed” (p. 3). While critical perspectives have gained increased visibility in studies of higher education access across social identities, student life, and faculty work, they remain underutilized in studies of postsecondary organizations. In this chapter we review and critique dominant approaches to the study of higher organizations, noting the ways in which these traditional research perspectives constrain understandings of contemporary colleges and universities. Next we explore what it means to intentionally design organization research from critical advocacy perspectives. We reflect on existing critical studies in the higher education organization literature and provide new insights on the ways in which critical questions and methodologies may be employed to advance socially just higher education organizations.

This Thematic Issue seeks to explore critical perspectives of an international nature on social innovation (SI), social enterprise (SE) and/or social solidarity economy (SSE). The aim is to examine the grand narrative, explore the ontological assumptions of the field, challenge the normative and present alternatives that draw attention to political economy, critical theory and critical management studies. Critical perspectives emerged in social innovation (SI) literature as a concerted effort sometime in 2008. A few voices sounded from the edges of the field much earlier. Ash Amin, Professor of Geography at Durham University, inspected the new favourite of public policy way back in 2002, discarded it as a "a poor substitute for a welfare state" and never returned to the subject. There were heated debates that challenged the grand narrative of SI at the International Social Innovation Research Conferences (ISIRC) (once called the Social Enterprise Research Conference before becoming ISIRC with the involvement of the social innovation theme from Skoll Centre). The Voluntary Sector Studies Network (VSSN) conferences picked away at the promise of unlimited performance and achievement of the upstart SE in a mature voluntary and charity network (

A politics of time is hidden in the way we approach our objects and areas of inquiry. This includes media, organizations, social movements, technologies, publics, social spaces, identity politics and the environment. Claims upon time are made when we locate power and the various possibilities for social change. In this moment, marked by technological speed up, there is a pervading cultural sense of being short on time. Increasingly time figures within the field and across the disciplines as a problem of better management and control. Time is understood as tension that individuals and institutions wrestle with and must solve. A critical perspective on time should ask a different set of questions. To take a critical perspective is to look beyond individual time and consider time as uncompromisingly tethered, in common while disparate. This paper outlines the possibility of a critical time perspective in communication studies - one where time is understood as multiple, relational, and deeply uneven.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue, which explores the concept and significance of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship internationally.Design/methodology/approach – This introductory article examines the literature that exists to date and presents an outline of some of the fundamental issues and the challenging tensions within the conceptualisation of social enterprise. The article concludes with a discussion of critical future research needs.Findings – The findings suggest that a critical perspective is required in order to add originality and value to this developing area of research.Originality/value – The papers presented raise some interesting issues about current conceptualisations of social enterprise and entrepreneurship, challenging tensions from critical, theoretical and empirical perspectives. The Special Issue seeks to expand the debate in social enterprise and bring to the fore some critical perspective in order to highlight alternative views which...

Books Received Mark I. West Classic Animal Stories. Edited by Sally Grindley. New York: Kingfisher, 2008. Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter. 2nded. Edited by Elizabeth E. Heilman. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. The Japanification of Children's Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki. Edited by Mark I. West. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009. A Picture Book Primer: Understanding and Using Picture Books. By Denise I. Matulka. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008. Summer Reading Renaissance: An Interactive Exhibits Approach. By Rita Solton. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008. Classic Animal Stories. Edited by Sally Grindley. New York: Kingfisher, 2008. This collection consists of sixteen animal stories by such authors as Joy Adamson, Betsy Byars, Joel Chandler Harris, Rudyard Kipling, and Oscar Wilde. The collection includes both realistic and fantasy stories. Sally Grindley provides an informative headnote for each story. Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter. 2nd ed. Edited by Elizabeth E. Heilman. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. Since the publication of the first edition of this book in 2003, J. K. Rowling has completed her famous Harry Potter series. In recognition of this development, Elizabeth Heilman has updated this collection of scholarly essays on the Harry Potter phenomenon. The collection consists of eighteen chapters, which are organized into the following four sections: Perspectives on Identity and Morality; Critical and Sociological Perspectives; Literacy Elements and Interpretations; and Cultural Studies and Media Perspectives. The Japanification of Children's Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki. Edited by Mark I. West. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009. The contributors to this volume discuss how Japanese trends and cultural products have had a major impact on children's popular culture in America. Among the nineteen contributors, several are well known in the field of children's literature studies, including Jan Susina, Rieko Okuhara, and Nathalie op de Beeck. A Picture Book Primer: Understanding and Using Picture Books. By Denise I. Matulka. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008. As Denise Matulka states in her introduction, her goal in writing this book is to "help readers better understand what picture books are, how they evolved over time, what elements they are composed of, how they are designed and made, and some of the issues involved in using picture books with readers" (xv). She more than accomplishes this goal. Her discussion of the art terms and techniques related to picture books is especially helpful for readers who approach picture [End Page 65]books from more of a literary rather than an artistic background. Summer Reading Renaissance: An Interactive Exhibits Approach. By Rita Solton. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008. Intended primarily for librarians and media specialists who run summer reading programs for children, this guidebook provides practical guidelines for creating interactive centers designed to encourage children to read. Rita Solton draws on ideas from the museum world to come up with exhibits that far transcend the traditional bulletin boards used in libraries of yesteryear. [End Page 66] Copyright © 2009 Children's Literature Association

This book explores welfare politics, unemployment, and interventions in relation to the labour market from a critical psychological perspective. Using critical fieldwork and theory, the author explores the administration of the unemployed, and the drive to increase labour market participation through strategies of activation. There is a strong and coherent conceptual and theoretical framing for this work, with a critical perspective (essentially, question everything) taking centre stage. It will give an overall coherence in addressing the topic. The theoretical framing is cogent and, in combination with the critical perspective, works well for integrating the material and delivering a fresh approach to this topic. Psychology, Punitive Activation and Welfare will appeal to students engaging with critical psychology, unemployment or policy, by providing a distinct application of theoretical and methodological tools to think differently about the relationship between labour market non/participation, human misery, psychology, and frontline enactment of policy and research.

The aim of this chapter is to share insights from a critical socio-cultural perspective on school food systems in Denmark and Greenland. The countries are connected financially and historically, but school food systems still differ to a high degree. This chapter represents an attempt to explain these differences based on critical discourse analysis of documents, reports and interviews. The Self Rule and Greenland municipalities have conducted two public health programs, Inuunaritta I and II. Based on recommendations from HBSC Greenland and critical reports from UNICEF these reforms included a free school meal program. In Denmark, there is no national school food system and the responsibility for school food is parents’ responsibility. The Danish legislation states that municipalities must consider voluntary meal schemes, which has led to some municipalities deciding to establish meal schemes, but none of them offer free school meals as they do in Greenland municipalities. Instead, commercial companies and charities have gained influence, financially supported by powerful networks in the Danish Food industry. In order to get a deeper understanding of the motives and drivers behind the current school food systems, this analysis applies a critical discourse analysis on central texts that constitutes the school foodscapes respectively in Greenland and Denmark. Neoliberal and individualized discourses seem to alternate with socialist discourses of the caring welfare state in a complex hyper-textual, dynamic. Finally, the disturbing implications of large public-private partnerships across food, health and educational sectors in Greenland and Denmark are discussed, especially with regard to equity and social justice for children and youth.

En las últimas décadas, el rol específico de las mujeres en las relaciones internacionales ha recibido más atención y las teorías feministas han ganado terreno en el debate intelectual, lo que ha contribuido a una sensibilización general hacia la incorporación del análisis de la categoría de género en la disciplina de las Relaciones Internacionales. De hecho, uno de los rasgos característicos de la disciplina había sido la invisibilización de las estructuras de género que impactan a hombres y mujeres de forma distinta. Sin embargo, con la irrupción del llamado “cuarto debate” se abrió una nueva oportunidad para pensar lo internacional desde miradas más críticas e inclusivas. El impacto de los estudios feministas tuvo lugar a finales de la década de 1980 con una publicación especial sobre género en la revista académica Millennium: Journal of International Studies. De gran relevancia en la actualidad son las teorías producidas fuera de los centros hegemónicos y que cuestionan tanto las teorías clásicas como el sistema de género occidental por encubrir un proyecto etnocéntrico. En efecto, las teóricas post y decoloniales pretenden desestabilizar los discursos hegemónicos sobre una supuesta experiencia universal de las mujeres. En este sentido, el objetivo central del presente artículo es realizar una revisión bibliográfica sobre las principales escuelas feministas, así como sistematizar la pluralidad de teorías y de prácticas feministas que han tenido lugar en el devenir de los estudios internacionales. De esta forma, tras una breve introducción sobre el surgimiento de los enfoques feministas en la disciplina, el presente estudio realiza un análisis de las aportaciones de las principales escuelas feministas: el feminismo liberal, el feminismo del punto de vista, el feminismo constructivista, el feminismo posmodernista, el feminismo postcolonial, el feminismo decolonial, la teoría queer y el enfoque sobre las masculinidades. A través del examen de estas diferentes corrientes teóricas, se analizará su impacto en la disciplina de las Relaciones Internacionales, evidenciando los cambios epistemológicos, metodológicos y ontológicos presentes en las diferentes escuelas. Las teorías feministas en las Relaciones Internacionales deben ser abordadas, pues, de manera multidimensional, en el sentido de reconocer las diferencias y elementos comunes respecto a las experiencias de las mujeres, hombres y disidentes sexuales desde diferentes latitudes.