Contemporary British Policy in the International Context

ABSTRACTIn far too many instances treatment of persons with dementia has reflected a fundamental denial of basic human rights. At times, these individuals are treated worse than the treatment of animals when the five basic freedoms of animals, described by Pachana in her editorial, are implemented. A number of such examples of dehumanizing (and “de-animalizing”) persons with dementia are presented. A case is made for the position that this is the direct result of the “medicalization” of dementia and “Alzheimer Disease.” This has led to the disenfranchisement of persons with dementia and their caregivers regarding the treatment of dementia, while medical “expertise” has led to a paradigm of learned helplessness while waiting for “the cure.” While the medicalization of dementia has been a financial success in terms of funding failed researcher to find a cure, it has been a catastrophe for the quality of life of persons with dementia and their caregivers. It is time to take control of the treatment of dementia back, and especially to listen to the voices of persons with dementia. It is time to take action NOW – to become disruptive to the current paradigm. The emperor and his cure have no clothes. We deserve better. We must make this change in paradigm our mission, to demand it, and to accept nothing less. Power to the people.

Road sediment, an underutilized material in environmental science research: A review of perspectives on United States studies with international context

Beyond Claim‐Rights: Social Structure, Collectivization, and Human Rights

During the sterling crises between 1947 and 1952, the empire occupied a prominent position in Britain’s external economic relations and fulfilled a pivotal role in the discriminatory management of the sterling area. The following analysis will cast light on the question of whether British policy phased in a promising new imperial deal or was doomed from the start. The international context, sanctioned by the United States, defined the feasibility of Britain’s discriminatory management. The economic conditions in the colonies determined where commodity exports were viable. Moreover, during the 1930s and the war considerable social transformations had taken place that affected British policy in the sterling area, and the legacy of the colonial state and its economic institutions to some extent facilitated discriminatory management. After the war, socio-economic movements increasingly manifested themselves politically and challenged the colonial state. British policy was a balancing act between shielding key economic institutions and fostering austerity management to achieve export surpluses on the one hand, and securing alliances with local groups conducive to British aims on the other. Britain’s management of the colonial sterling area had a distinct political rationale. The considerable literature dealing with Britain and the colonies during the period is generally not concerned with this dimension, though it touches upon numerous aspects of the problem.1 However, innovative research links sterling relationships with British colonial development policy. This research and the present account are genuinely complementary to one another.2

The many terms and legal expressions in the discourse of human rights are often unknown or misunderstood in their international context. Yet human rights have their ultimate expression in the international legal context: in international treaties, declarations, country-specific or thematic reports, decisions of administrative or quasi-judicial bodies, and court judgments, all of which employ legal terminology. The same is increasingly so in the national legal context, which looks to the international context as a source of law and legal interpretation. A Handbook of International Human Rights Terminology is a much-needed tool that provides access to the developing language of human rights and aids in full comprehension of human rights theory and issues. In this convenient handbook almost eight hundred key terms and acronyms commonly used in international and national human rights discourse are defined in non-technical language. Included are definitions of foreign language terminology, including many Latin terms. A useful appendix contains the full text of the four principal international human rights instruments that constitute the International Bill of Rights, along with an internationally accepted list of the specific substantive human rights contained in those instruments. An accessible introduction for students and newcomers to the field of human rights, this handbook will also serve as an indispensable reference for specialists.

This paper explores the conceptual connections between poverty and human rights through the lens of the capability approach. The concept of capability can be seen as the bridge that links poverty with human rights because it plays a foundational role in the characterisation of both poverty and human rights. Once this common foundation is noted, poverty can be defined as denial of human rights. Furthermore, the capability approach also helps us to address the question of whether just any denial of human right should count as poverty or whether there should be some restriction in this regard admitting only certain cases of denial of human of rights into the domain but not others. The capability perspective suggests that the domain should indeed be restricted in some well‐defined ways. Finally, the paper argues that such restriction of domain need not be inconsistent with the principle of indivisibility of human rights.

Ralph Ellison emerged onto the literary scene as the concept of human rights was being formulated on the political one. He began crafting Invisible Man (1952) in 1945, four years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his “Four Freedoms” State of the Union address to Congress. The “essential human freedoms” that Roosevelt hoped to instill across the world included freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—lofty international ambitions for a country that regularly denied these freedoms to its African American citizens. For Roosevelt and many Americans, these ideals were closely associated with the abstract notion of “technological progress.” In fact, the “Four Freedoms” address listed “[t]he enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress” alongside “the preservation of civil liberties for all” as parallel values that Americans demand from their government. Roosevelt’s faith in the “fruits of scientific progress” echoed a gradual shift in American political thought. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, politicians began to portray science-based technological production as an end in itself rather than as a means to facilitate social change. Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith characterize this “technological determinism” as the process by which “a complex event is made to seem the inescapable yet strikingly plausible result of a technological innovation” (xi). In the context of this influential ideology, President Roosevelt could promise that government-sponsored initiatives such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration would improve every American’s life, and thousands would believe him. While many Americans invested in the hope that technological development would beget social progress, the international community began to elaborate on the concept of human rights more rigorously. On 23 October 1947, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sent W. E. B. Du Bois’s An Appeal to the World to the United Nations (UN). Subtitled A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress, this document raised international alarm about human rights abuses against African American citizens. In 1948, the UN expanded Roosevelt’s

South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe occupy a special place in the history of United Nations action to promote human rights. The perpetuation of white minority rule in these territories in a world order committed to decolonisation, self-determination and majority rule provoked a concerted response from the United Nations, which included economic sanctions and the toleration of military support to national liberation movements. United Nations action against Southern Rhodesia (as it then was) was premised on the denial of self-determination and the perpetuation of minority rule. The international status of South West Africa/Namibia and the failure of South Africa to honour the obligations contained in the Mandate for South West Africa provided the basis for United Nations action against South Africa. In South Africa itself racial discrimination, political repression, military intervention in neighbouring states and minority rule combined to justify United Nations intervention. But in all three cases there was a serious denial of human rights and most of the resolutions adopted by the General Assembly and the Security Council on these three territories castigated the government or the administering authority for its denial of human rights to the majority of the people. The action of the United Nations in the Southern African region can therefore legitimately be characterised as action taken to promote human rights. It is not surprising that when change came to these territories the national liberation movements involved in the negotiations that led to the establishment of new political orders should insist on constitutions that provided guarantees for human rights.

Why and how do individuals distance themselves from information about their government's participation in torture and other human rights violations? Such citizen (non)response implicitly legitimates and thus facilitates the continuation of abusive state actions. Drawing on a model of socially organized denial, we explore how sociocultural contexts and practices mediate individuals’ avoidance, justification, normalization, silencing, and outright denial of human rights abuses in two sites: Argentina during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983) and the United States during the “war on terror” post September 11, 2001. The study is based on 40 in‐depth interviews with members of diverse civic, religious, community, and political organizations in both countries (20 in each site). Comparing the political circumstances of a dictatorship and an electoral democracy, the analysis shows the roles of patriotic and national security ideologies and practices of silence and talk as organizers of cultures of denial.

This issue of JAN

Evolutionary journeys: International practice experiences of Australian social workers Research aims Social work is an international profession. Built on the foundations of social justice, human rights, and guided by evidence-based ethical practice, social work works with people and communities in many jurisdictions and organisational roles. As social work developed as a professional project in major Western countries, social workers sought to engage with the developing world where people faced many problems – poverty, wars, oppression, natural disasters, lack of education options and major health problems. The desire of Western social work to reach out and embark on international projects has been a contested project and the topic of social work research and scholarship. Yet little is known about what those social workers engaging in international practice, actually experience. What were their motivations? How did they prepare for the work? What were the challenges and what guided their practice during the period of international work? This research explores the experiences of Australian social work practitioners who have worked in international practice contexts. It specifically seeks to determine: What are the practice experiences of Australian social workers, working internationally? What ‘guides’ Australian social workers’ practice, in an international context, predominately Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern and African countries? The aim of the research is to examine how Australian social workers understand and can ‘better understand’ the nature of their international practice. As more social workers embark on working in social development, (South), there is an increasing need to understand the nature of that practice for western trained social workers (North), as they become immersed in totally different contexts. Questions of accountability, ethical practice, and the dilemmas of working cross culturally, arise. This research aims to build upon our current knowledge about Australian social work practitioners working in these international contexts. Adopting a constructionist theoretical approach and based on Trevithick’s framework for knowledge use in practice, the exploratory qualitative study was undertaken using semi structured interviews with 17 Australian qualified social workers. The study identified several influences on participants’ motivations for entry into international practice, how prepared they were for the work and what they looked for to guide their practice. Participants drew on a range of knowledge sources and were significantly guided by personal and professional values. The study found that international practice is a highly complex and difficult context and requires preparation, extensive practice experience, content/context knowledge and professional insight. Implications for social work education, practitioner preparation and support and the general running of international programs are discussed and a new conceptual model for international practice proposed.

Many literature professors in the U.S. strive to foster skills of critical self-reflection: we ask students to be responsible to textual evidence, historical context, and the implications of the interpreter's acts. Recent teaching also stresses the transnational contexts for literary expression and interpretation. But what happens when these pedagogical practices are transported to classrooms abroad? This essay addresses this broad question through the problem of developing an American Studies curriculum in Turkey. The authors outline the conceptual genealogy of departments of "American Culture and Literature" in Turkey and then relate it to narratives of emergence for American Studies in the U.S. and other countries. The authors then discuss the evolution of the curriculum they revised. They conclude by assessing the outcome, especially noting the difficulty of cultivating critical self-reflection in a social and institutional setting that has few of the safeguards for freedom of expression found in the U.S.

My dissertation project Double bass in Czech music of the 21st century with a focus on solo and chamber music literature in a historical and international context aims to convey a report about the state of the Czech contemporary music for double bass in the new millennium. The output value should be a summarization and cataloguing of new compositions, a comparison of the same and a description of them in both an international and historical context. An- other important aspect of this thesis is the case analysis of some pieces and a description of compositional techniques used. This work is meant to be mainly for musical high school (conservatories in the Czech Republic) and musical universities students and pedagogues, as well as double bass interpreters and others interested in this topic, who want to broaden their horizons and discover the state of the contemporary Czech literature for double bass and learn new and often superior compositions. First and foremost, an encyclopaedic style summariza- tion of contemporary double bass pieces should provide a useful tool for all readers interested in discovering new pieces for the deepest string instrument. Another important point of the thesis is a description and explanation of the most common interpretation techniques and a guide to their realisation in praxis.

Within the international context, fashion retailers have suffered the most in the economic downturn in the last years. Nevertheless, the historically high-margin fashion sectors composite net profit margin was still the highest of all the product groups. Based on the importance of fashion retail sector for the international economy in general, this paper examines the international retailing situation showing sales data between most important retailers around the world in general and Europe in particular. Specifically, this paper offers an overview on fashion retailing sector in the international context in order to study the position of this sector in the international crisis context. Due to the importance of fashion sector for national economies, in this paper is carried out a comparison between two countries characterized for economic growing of this sector in general, and the women segment in particular: United Kingdom and Spain. As conclusion, some solutions are explained to face the current situation by the apparel retail management.

Since the early 1970s, nations have taken steps to help disabled persons free themselves from the traditional bonds of debility—isolation, loneliness, unemployment, poverty, and discrimination. One of the most visible symbols of this concern was passage in the United States of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Enacted in 1973, Section 504 applied the same principle to disability as that applied nine years earlier when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited the denial of human rights on the basis of race, sex and religion. Though similar in geography and urban culture, the United States and Canada have taken very different approaches to transportation in the context of human rights. Promulgated in the early 1980s, the Canadian Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms was enacted on behalf of all Canadians and singled out a wide range of minorities, including the mentally and physically disabled, in declaring that all are equal before the law.