Language Of Empowerment Research Articles

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Justice and Empowerment Through Digital Health: Ethical Challenges and Opportunities

The proposition that digital innovations can put people in charge of their health has been accompanied by prolific talk of empowerment. In this paper we consider ethical challenges and opportunities of trying to achieve justice and empowerment using digital health initiatives. The language of empowerment can misleadingly suggest that by using technology, people can control their health and take responsibility for health outcomes to a greater degree than is realistic or fair. Also, digital health empowerment often primarily reaches people who already have high technological and health literacy, leaving others behind. We critically investigate whether the concept of health empowerment could be re-engineered to mean something different, namely the process of improving the health literacy and access of those who least possess it, in line with recent proposals for conceptual engineering in the service of justice. We settle on the weaker conclusion that underlying ethical values including justice should be used to interpret the existing concept of empowerment. To conclude, we take a high-level view of various strategies for achieving the ethical value associated with digital health empowerment.

Internet.org and the rhetoric of connectivity

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the discursive construction of Facebook’s goal to build Internet connectivity in India through its “internet.org” project. I argue that the rhetoric of connectivity emergent in this project uses the language of empowerment and innovation to operationalize a mode of entrepreneurial philanthropy amenable to millennial development that in reality reflects notions of progress reminiscent of colonial modernization practices. I also contend that this case demonstrates the need to understand the particular technopolitics of everyday encounters with infrastructures that cannot be reduced to any single vision of connectivity or singular understanding of digital contexts.

Family History and the Global Politics of DNA

Abstract The global DNA ancestry industry appeals to various “markets”: diasporic groups seeking to reconstruct lost kinship links; adoptees looking for biological relatives; genealogists tracing their family trees; and those who are merely curious about what DNA can reveal about their identity. However, the language of empowerment and openness employed by DNA ancestry-testing companies in their publicity materials masks the important commercial and private interests at stake. Drawing particularly on the experiences of Native and Indigenous American communities, this article highlights some of the contradictions and dilemmas engendered by the industry, and questions to what extent its practices can empower users without infringing upon the rights of other groups.

A Rhetoric of Contradiction: SuicideGirls, Female Empowerment, and Sexuality

The intersection of female empowerment and sexuality is prevalent in contemporary public discourse. In this analysis, we critique the rhetoric of female empowerment from the SuicideGirls, a soft-core pornography website that claims to promote an alternative beauty. Existing literature on SuicideGirls provides consensus that the website promotes female empowerment. We critique SuicideGirls’ rhetoric as an example of why consistency between rhetoric and action are important to analyze in a sex-positive culture that embraces contradiction as empowerment. A rhetoric of contradiction emerges when the language of empowerment is not supported with empowering action, and ultimately we argue that this undermines the goals of a sex-positive culture for women. Our conclusions address the complexity of cultural texts that equate sexuality with power, and to ultimately illuminate the boundaries to challenging the status quo in a society that embraces a rhetoric of contradiction as female empowerment.

Is English for Mere Employment or Social Empowerment?

English has always been socially viewed as a passport to employment and therefore economic liberation and social uplift from the days of the introduction of English in India during the early colonial times. The then upper caste Indians capitalized on the opportunities available through English education to shift from temple-based occupations to company- dependent employment in the East India Company. The new converts from Hinduism, the first generation of Indian Christians chose teaching as their vocation in institutions started by missionaries. A sort of social engineering about the importance of English for employment and development was successfully created by sponsored church leaders, independent evangelists, and secular professionals who felt a burden to impart western knowledge to Indians who were perceived to be in the darkness through English. Such efforts were sanctified and legalized through the English language teaching discourses such as Charles Grant’s Observation and Macaulay’s Minute. Later, the colonial design of English for employment module was unquestioningly adopted by policy makers and accepted by people of ‘free’ India. However, empowerment aspect of colonial educational policies was conveniently sidestepped in postcolonial educational reports. The research paper proposes to investigate the colonial and post-colonial educational reports to ascertain if there is any paradigm shift in the social perception on English just as the language of higher education and employment or the language of empowerment and development.

Crocheted Strategies: Women Crafting their Own Communities

In 1987 Virago Press published Women and Craft. Su Richardson was one of the co-editors and contributed an interview with Gaie Davidson called “Crocheted Strategies: A New Audience for Women’s Work.” The book was an outcome of the Feminist Arts News 1981 “Craft” issue which raised a number of questions about the relative status of crafts and arts and the value-level derived from women’s assigned status as “other” than artist. In turn, this emerged out of Feministo, a postal art project instigated by Kate Walker from 1975–1978. Women who trained in art schools in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Su Richardson, Monica Ross, and Walker, communicated with each other in the media of domestic crafts, sewing, knitting, and crochet to represent their lives and work from within the home.Alexandra M. Kokoli, curator of the exhibition of Richardson’s work “Burnt Breakfast” and other Works (2012), wrote in the press release of the same title that:Su Richardson’s homemade objects explore domesticity, femininity and their mutual implication from a distinctly feminist point of view. The exhibition included the iconic crocheted ‘full English’, in which the womanly skill of crochet is used against the grain, to express in a humorous manner a growing dissatisfaction with patriarchal gender roles, and also to challenge the hierarchical division between art and craft.This article explores the relevance of these ideas in the context of the recent resurgence in craft, particularly in textiles and particularly amongst the indie crafters and activists who are able to refer to feminist histories and practices yet not feel bound by them. On the other hand, handcrafting can be mobilized as a statement on domestic roles firmly based within the language of empowerment and enacted through collaborative practice-based work encompassing several disciplines, social media and public engagement. Forty years on there is another kind of news from the crafts community, propelled by social media and a renewed interest in the politics of crafting but not necessarily the crafting of politics.

Language, corpus and empowerment: applications to deaf education, healthcare and online discourses

Language, Corpus and Empowerment applies a novel corpus-driven approach to the exploration of the concept of empowerment in healthcare. The book proposes an innovative corpus-based methodology for finding evidence of empowerment in language use, using data from a video intervention delivered to families of deaf children, as well as assessing the effects of the intervention on the family. Language, Corpus and Empowerment provides a working definition of empowerment which incorporates concepts from linguistics and learning theory; uses corpus analysis to provide evidence of how video interventions can transform peoples perspectives; examines this new methodology as a potential tool for analysing conversational data longitudinally and at a case-by-case level; demonstrates how a corpus-based methodological approach can be applied in conjunction with other language-based approaches, such as discourse analysis and conversation analysis, to explore the ways in which complex social processes occur in interaction; makes a valuable development in the assessment of the impact of healthcare interventions and the language of empowerment. Insightful and ground-breaking, Language, Corpus and Empowerment is essential reading for anyone undertaking research within corpus linguistics.

Empowerment in the field of health promotion: recognizing challenges in working toward equity.

Over the last 25 years, the language of empowerment has been woven into the guiding missions and descriptions of institutions, funding and projects globally. Although theoretical understandings of empowerment within the domain of health promotion remain contentious, we have little idea of how a shift toward an empowerment agenda has affected the daily work of those in the field of health promotion. A systematic examination of the implementation of the empowerment agenda is important as it can help us understand how redistributive agendas are received within the multiple institutional contexts in which health promotion work is carried out. The goal of this study, therefore, was to try to understand the empowerment agenda within the context of everyday health promotion. We conducted semi-structured interviews with health promoters from a variety of geographical regions, institutional backgrounds, and job capacities. Essentially we found that empowerment remains conceptually dear to health promoters' understanding of their work, yet at the same time, mainstreaming empowerment is at odds with central trends and initiatives that govern this work. We argue that many of the stumbling blocks that have hindered this specific agenda are actually central stumbling blocks for the wider field of health promotion. We examine some of the barriers to implementing transformational change. Overcoming the primary limitations uncovered in this exploration of empowerment is actually crucial to progressive work in health promotion in general, particularly work that would seek to lessen inequities.

Empowering the South African community's AIDS intervention workforce: an informetric study of HIV/AIDS research projects, with special reference to masters and doctoral dissertations and theses

The prevalence rate of HIV in South Africa has maintained an alarmingly high level and has become a great concern for all stakeholders. The situation has demanded an increase in the number and strengthening of the HIV / AIDS intervention workforce to fight the pandemic. This has resulted in many individuals enrolling to undergo training in institutions of higher learning and the aftermath has been an increased number of graduates conducting research on various aspects of the disease. The purpose of this study is to generally assess the role that is being played by various institutions of higher leaning in South Africa in graduate preparedness as a means of empowering the country's HIV / AIDS intervention workforce. Using publication count, the study analyses research publications found indexed in SABINET's Current and Completed Research and the Union Catalog of Theses and Dissertations databases. Results are presented under the headings: empowerment trends; language of empowerment; institutions behind the empowerment; individuals behind the empowerment: "study leaders" and students; information sources for empowerment; purposes for which candidates were prepared (or empowered); and the areas/sectors of empowerment. Conclusions and recommendations as well as suggestions for further research are provided.

Engineering compliance and worker resistance in UK further education

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore control and resistance in the UK further education (FE) sector by examining senior college managers’ attempts to engineer culture change and analysing lecturers’ resistance to such measures.Design/methodology/approachData were derived from interviews with managers and lecturers in two English FE colleges and the analysis of college documents. Interview data were analysed thematically using NVIVO software.FindingsIt was found that college managers sought to build consent to change among lecturers based on values derived from “business‐like” views. Culture change initiatives were framed within the language of empowerment but lecturers’ experiences of change led them to feel disempowered and cynical as managers imposed their view of what lecturers should be doing and how they should behave. This attempt to gain control of the lecturers’ labour process invoked the “Stepford” lecturer metaphor used in the paper. Paradoxically, as managers sought to create lecturers who were less resistant to change, individualised resistance intensified as managers’ attempts to win hearts and minds conspicuously failed.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper draws on data from two case study colleges and this limits the generalisability of its findings.Practical implicationsThe paper provides a critical perspective on the received wisdom of investing in stylised change programmes that promise to win staff over to change but which may alienate those they purport to empower and ultimately lead to degenerative workplace relations.Originality/valueThe paper offers new insights into culture change from the juxtaposed, polarised views of senior managers and lecturers, while highlighting the negative consequences of imposing change initiatives from above.

Steam Punks

This article discusses how some amateur engineers are working to design and build a set of tools that would enable self-reliant people to make everything they need. Marcin Jakubowski and his colleagues are among such people who are working for the past many years on the concept of open-source economy. The rationale for this concept is steeped in the language of empowerment. Using an open-source Web platform known as a wiki, Jakubowski worked with a far-flung network of collaborators over the Internet to identify the minimum number of technologies needed to produce a reasonable facsimile of modern life. Some of the items on the resulting list are the greatest hits of industrialism over the past 200 years: the steam engine, the combine, and the induction furnace. So far, the team has completed seven prototype machines: the tractor, a tiller, a hydraulic power unit, a computer numerically controlled plasma torch table, a drill press, a hole punch, and a compressed earth block press.

Poverty, TESOL’s Narratives and “Other Languages”: Hermeneutic Tensions in Texting-Researching Practices

This brief response addresses concerns raised by Ruanni Tupas in his reading of my book, The English-Vernacular Divide. It provides some background about my study, and attempts to uncover some researching and texting tensions I experienced when writing the book. Straddling as I am different geographic spaces—India and the US—with different discourses regarding English language learning and teaching in each space, the response details how my focus on the local and everyday became a way of showing how some discourses about English (its being a democratizing force, or the language of empowerment) run the risk of turning a blind eye to issues of poverty, access and “other languages, issues that are crucial for TESOL to address.”

Exploring the Experience of Hallucinations From a Perspective of Self: Surviving and Persevering

Despite improved treatment, little is understood about how clients view their hallucinations from a perspective of self, and few studies address the meaning of hallucinations or the relationship of hallucinations to the individual sense of being. To understand hallucinations from an individual perspective of self. Heideggerian and hermeneutics-guided thematic analysis. Twelve individuals described their experiences of hallucinations. All interviews were recorded (with consent) and transcribed verbatim. Four themes described surviving and persevering: (a) Are they who they are? (b) a not-so-certain life; (c) finding strength in the broken places; and (d) I am still me. Although experiencing hallucinations was analogous to living with loss, participants recalled hallucinations as providing something positive in how they cared for and related to others. Practitioners can incorporate a language of caring that meets the needs of their clients, rather than the language of empowerment, which proved overwhelming for participants already overwhelmed by the "business of getting better." J Am Psychiatr Nurses Assoc, 2008; 14(5), 353-362.

Ulimi lwenkululeko: Township ‘women's language of empowerment’ and homosexual linguistic identities

abstract The repertoire of South African females in the Nguni language cluster is remarkably diverse. Considering not only so-called ‘standard’ languages, but also different varieties, sociolects, ethnolects and registers, the linguistic diversity of South Africans is even more noteworthy. In this focus we explore a language variety termed isiTsotsi, which if employed by females, is often associated with lesbianism in KwaZulu-Natal. The masculinity historically and traditionally linked to isiTsotsi is the reason why there exists the common perception among men that females who do employ isiTsotsi-varieties must be lesbians. While many urban lesbians may indeed make use of the variety, this paper shows that the female use of isiTsotsi does not represent an exclusively homosexual register, but rather a context-dependent sociolect that African streetwise women employ to empower themselves. Hence, female isiTotsi-speakers are not necessarily representative of lesbian society in South Africa. Rather, they represent a new generation of emancipated African females who are capable of communicating their freedom and equality in relation to men.

Development of a measure of intrapersonal empowerment.

This article reports the development of a self-report instrument that measures 4 components of intrapersonal empowerment for people with disabilities. Subscales are Personal Competence, Group Orientation, Self-Determination, and Positive Identity as a Person With a Disability. Psychometric data indicate that subscales are reliable and support trait validity of the instrument. All 64 items with scoring key and preliminary norms are included so that interested readers can use the instrument in research studies and assessment applications. Empowerment refers generally to the capacity of disenfranchised people to understand and become active participants in matters that affect their lives. With origins in the community-development movement of the late 1970s, empowerment has become the human-service philosophy of the 1990s, and the language of empowerment now pervades the rhetoric of politicians, management consultants, and human-service professionals, including rehabilitation specialists. Despite the popularity of empowerment in current rehabilitation literature, ranging from expositions of empowerment philosophy to how-to-do-it presentations for rehabilitation professionals, there have been no attempts to comprehensively define and measure the concept. Work by Zimmerman and his colleagues (i.e., Zimmerman, 1990; Zimmerman, Israel, Schulz, & Checkoway, 1992; Zimmerman & Rappaport, 1988), who have conducted the bulk of the empirical research on empowerment, helps provide the foundation for developing a comprehensive measure of empowerment. For example, Zimmerman et al. (1992) proposed a conceptual model of psychological empowerment consisting of three components: intrapersonal, interactional, and behavioral. Generally, the intrapersonal component refers to how people think about their capacity to influence social and political systems important to them. More specifically, the intrapersonal component treats empowerment as a personality variable that encompasses intrapsychic processes such as perceived control, self-efficacy, sense of community, and perceived competence. Rehabilitation Psychology, 1998, Vol. 43, No. 2, 131-142 Copyright 1998 by the Educational Publishing Foundation, 0090-5550/98/$3.00 131 Th is d oc um en t i s c op yr ig ht ed b y th e A m er ic an P sy ch ol og ic al A ss oc ia tio n or o ne o f i ts a lli ed p ub lis he rs . Th is a rti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r t he p er so na l u se o f t he in di vi du al u se r a nd is n ot to b e di ss em in at ed b ro ad ly . 732 Bolton and Brookings The interactional component includes knowledge about needed resources and problem-solving skills, and the behavioral component refers to specific actions taken to exercise influence through participation in organizations and activities. The current investigation focuses on Zimmerman and colleagues' intrapersonal component of empowerment, because it can be argued that empowerment is ultimately a personological construct that reflects the degree to which the values and attitudes associated with empowerment have been internalized. In other words, empowerment entails the acquisition of values and attitudes that are incorporated into the individual's personal worldview and thus constitutes a foundation for action. Because intrapersonal empowerment is an internalized orientation consisting of traits and behavioral predispositions, it follows that the construct is amenable to measurement by standard self-report questionnaire methods. The need for a psychometrically acceptable measure of intrapersonal empowerment was expressed by Zimmerman et al. (1992), who recommended that factor-analytic studies be undertaken to develop an instrument that would comprehensively measure the intrapersonal component of empowerment. Sciarappa and Rogers (1991) assembled the only instrument in rehabilitation constructed to measure empowerment. They constructed a self-report instrument called the Making Decisions scale to measure individual empowerment. The Making Decisions scale consists of 28 items adapted from existing measures of locus of control, self-efficacy, and self-esteem. A standard 4-point response format is used to indicate feelings about each of the 28 items. The responses of 100 people with psychiatric disabilities who were members of two self-help programs were analyzed to reduce an original set of 46 items to 28 items that best measured empowerment. The total empowerment score had an internal consistency reliability coefficient of .85, and it correlated positively with community activism and educational achievement. The Making Decisions scale is based on the assumption that empowerment is a unidimensional construct. The purpose of this research was to develop a multidimensional instrument that comprehensively measures the intrapersonal component of psychological empowerment for people with disabilities.

The Language of Empowerment

Examines the concept of “empowerment”, and its implications for public sector management. Argues that it is not a single concept, but rather a cluster of concepts. Offers a typology of the different approaches to empowerment contained within this cluster, and details the issues that these raise for the management of public sector services. Concludes with two short examples of how this typology could be used to further understanding of empowerment, in the context of community care for elderly people.