Animals

Rachel Theilheimer teaches early childhood education at Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City.     

Munchausen by Proxy in an international context

OBJECTIVE: The professional literature on Munchausen by Proxy (MBP) abuse consists of more than 400 articles, chapters, and books. Most have come from a handful of English-speaking industrialized countries. Our aims were to establish the extent to which published work about MBP has emerged from outside these countries, and to determine the characteristics of any reported cases. METHOD: Numerous health care computer databases were queried, and the results supplemented by materials accumulated less formally. RESULTS: We identified 59 articles from 24 countries describing at least 122 cases in 9 different languages. Among cases in which the information was available, the mother was the sole perpetrator in 86%, the victim was aged between 3 years and 13 years in 52%, and the victim was male in 54%. The presentations of MBP appear to be similar across the world with the exception of induced apnea, which emerged as notably uncommon in this review. An extensive table presents the characteristics of each case. CONCLUSIONS: MBP clearly is not a phenomenon unique to Western or highly medicalized societies. This form of abuse is being increasingly recognized and reported throughout the world. The literature from the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand often presupposes access to resources, such as subspecialists and social service agencies, that may be seriously constrained in other countries. The contributions of professionals elsewhere will be vital in ensuring that the efforts in English-speaking industrialized settings to develop standards of care encompass an international perspective.     

Understanding new hybrid professions: Bourdieu,illusio and the case of public service interpreters

Public spending reductions across the advanced capitalist world are creating new professions that have a ‘hybrid’ status and/or role. However, research on professional learning has paid little attention to them. This qualitative study of one such profession, public service interpreting (PSI), addresses that lacuna. The paper focuses on interpreters’ interactions with other professionals and with migrants using public services. It evokes Bourdieu’s important but neglected concept of illusio – the extent to which players invest commitment in the stakes of a field – to frame the analysis. This highlights the lack of autonomy for PSI, interpreters’ own ambiguous illusio, and their conflicts with the illusio of more powerful professions with which they must work. We conclude that there is a need for more research on the power relations between new hybrid professions and established professions, and that Bourdieu’s illusio is a potent analytical concept for this task.     

Social Justice Education in a Diverse Classroom: Examining High School Discussions about Race,Power, and Privilege

High school students who participate in social justice education have a greater awareness of inequities that impact their school, community, and society, and learn tools for taking action to address these inequities. Also, a classroom that consist of students with a diverse set of identities creates an ideal circumstance in which a teacher can build upon student differences in order to facilitate meaningful discussions about social justice, especially issues of race. Therefore, in this article we use qualitative case study approaches to examine a high school course on social justice education, paying specific attention to the classroom pedagogy and dialogue on issues of race, power, and privilege. The course was purposefully diverse in enrollment, which brought students together who might not have had interactions with each other prior to the class. We employ Hackman's (2005) five components of social justice education (SJE) as a framework for the analysis of the pedagogy and discussions constructed in the classroom, as well as a common language for what constitutes as social justice education in our research inquiry. Students in the course developed a facility for defining and identifying various forms of oppression and injustice. However, we questioned to what extent these very same issues played out in the class dialogue. Due to the level of student diversity, the course was a unique space to learn about racism and intersecting issues of social justice. However, there was still some student resistance to acknowledging certain aspects of racism. In conclusion, we discuss how social justice education is not absolved from, but rife with complex racial politics.