Download or read book Uneasy Endings written by Renée Rose Shield and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If we continue, we grow old, and this is how it could be for us," writes Renée Rose Shield in her candid and sympathetic account of life in one American nursing home. Drawing on anthropological methods and theory to illuminate institutional life, she probes the sources of the profound sense of unease she found at the place she calls "The Franklin Nursing Home."For fourteen months Shield participated in life at a nursing home in the northeastern United States. She got to know many of the people associated with the home—doctors, nurses, custodians, kitchen workers, administrators, social workers, visiting relatives, and above all, the residents, who emerge in this book as the individuals they are. Sections in which the residents speak poignantly in their own voices are woven throughout her richly detailed observations of everyday routines and events. We see them using guile and humor to get by, struggling to approach the end of their lives with a measure of autonomy and dignity, and we meet an often conscientious and caring staff constrained by conflicting professional perspectives and by the bureaucratic structure in which they work.There are no villains here. Rather, Shield explains how conditions in the nursing home create a difficult and uncomfortable "liminality"—the transition from an accustomed role to a new one-for the residents. In characterizing nursing-home existence, she goes beyond Erving Goffman's classic definition of the "total institution" to show how residents pass from adulthood to death without the comfort of ritual or community support common in rites of passage. In addition to the isolation created by this solitary passage, she finds restrictions on "reciprocity"—the old people are always recipients whose need and obligation to repay are seen as unnecessary and difficult to satisfy. The system encourages their passivity, which deepens their dependency and helps to explain why they are often perceived as children. Offering concrete suggestions for improving the quality of nursing-home life, Uneasy Endings will find a broad audience among those who work with the aged.
Download or read book The Sense of an Ending written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
Download or read book Shakespeare Unlearned written by Adam Zucker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare Unlearned dances along the borderline of sense and nonsense in early modern texts, revealing overlooked opportunities for understanding and shared community in words and ideas that might in the past have been considered too silly to matter much for serious scholarship. Each chapter pursues a self-knowing, gently ironic study of the lexicon and scripting of words and acts related to what has been called 'stupidity' in work by Shakespeare and other authors. Each centers significant, often comic situations that emerge -- on stage, in print, and in the critical and editorial tradition pertaining to the period -- when rigorous scholars and teachers meet language, characters, or plotlines that exceed, and at times entirely undermine, the goals and premises of scholarly rigor. Each suggests that a framing of putative 'stupidity' pursued through lexicography, editorial glossing, literary criticism, and pedagogical practice can help us put Shakespeare and semantically obscure historical literature more generally to new communal ends. Words such as 'baffle' in Twelfth Night or 'twangling' and 'jingling' in The Tempest, and characters such as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Holofernes the pedant, might in the past have been considered unworthy of critical attention -- too light or obvious to matter much for our understanding of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Adam Zucker's meditation on the limits of learnedness and the opportunities presented by a philology of stupidity argues otherwise.
Download or read book Maltreatment of Patients in Nursing Homes written by Diana Harris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Abuse, although often not detected or reported, existed in every facility we surveyed. It is a serious problem.” Old, weak, and often cognitively impaired, nursing home patients can be easy targets for physical, psychological, material, and financial mistreatment at the hands of those entrusted with their care, safety, and well-being. Maltreatment of Patients in Nursing Homes: There Is No Safe Place examines the dark side of nursing homes, where not every employee has the commitment of Mother Theresa. This groundbreaking book applies criminological theory to help develop practical methods of controlling abuse and presents the results of the first and only nationwide study on the theft of patients’ belongings, a form of abuse too often ignored by the nursing home industry. Maltreatment of Patients in Nursing Homes surveys employees, administrators, and family members of patients in 47 nursing homes throughout the United States. Their responses provide invaluable insights on a wide range of topics, including the social and psychological factors that cause different types of abuse, characteristics of nursing home patients and employees, the bureaucracy of nursing homes, victimization rates, workforce issues of nursing home aides, and federal regulations for nursing homes. The information gained from the surveys forms the basis for detailed recommendations for creating a safer environment and reducing all forms of abuse, including theft-prevention training programs, background checks and improved screening of potential employees, education and advocacy for current staff, and the reform of federal regulations. Maltreatment of Patients in Nursing Homes examines: types of physical abuse (restraints, sexual abuse, neglect) the who, what, and why of nursing home theft types of financial abuse (trust accounts, bank accounts, improper charges for services and drugs, identity theft) types of psychological abuse (abandonment, segregation, childlike treatment, verbal abuse) effects of psychological abuse (depression, learned helplessness, psychiatric disorders) reasons for abuse by employees (staff turnover, job burnout, job dissatisfaction, caregiver stress) One of the few books to deal with abuse of the elderly outside a domestic setting, Maltreatment of Patients in Nursing Homes: There Is No Safe Place interprets and analyzes abuse to provide new ways of thinking about this growing problem and new methods of preventing it from growing any more widespread.
Download or read book Living and Dying at Murray Manor written by Jaber F. Gubrium and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic text that documents the "work" of everyday life in a nursing home. In 1973 sociologist Jaber F. Gubrium spent several months at a nursing home as a participant-observer. Through his observations, interviews, and transcriptions, Gubrium recounts case studies of clients, doctors, the dynamics between them, patient socialization, and the intimacies of daily hygiene.
Download or read book The Not so golden Years written by Laura Katz Olson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book City of Green Benches written by Maria D. Vesperi and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In City of Green Benches, Vesperi combines the ear of a journalist, recording scores of conversations with elderly residents, with the eye of an anthropologist, trying to understand how people's self-esteem and self-perception are transformed in the process of social change. In this contribution to gerontology theory, Vesperi examines the cultural construction of old age in American society and its impact on the self-concept of the aged.
Download or read book History and Power in the Study of Law written by June Starr and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on earlier work in the anthropology of law and taking a critical stance toward it, June Starr and Jane F. Collier ask, "Should social anthropologists continue to isolate the ‘legal’ as a separate field of study?" To answer this question, they confront critics of legal anthropology who suggest that the subfield is dying and advocate a reintegration of legal anthropology into a renewed general anthropology. Chapters by anthropologists, sociologists, and law professors, using anthropological rather than legal methodologies, provide original analyses of particular legal developments. Some contributors adopt an interpretative approach, focusing on law as a system of meaning; others adopt a materialistic approach, analyzing the economic and political forces that historically shaped relations between social groups. Contributors include Said Armir Arjomand, Anton Blok, Bernard Cohn, George Collier, Carol Greenhouse, Sally Falk Moore, Laura Nader, June Nash, Lawrence Rosen, June Starr, and Joan Vincent.
Download or read book Capturing the Ineffable written by Philip Y. Kao and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded in ethnographic case studies that examine experiences from which wisdom emerges, Capturing the Ineffable provides a rigorous analysis of the sociocultural context of wisdom in the contemporary world. Each chapter in the volume deals with different aspects and showcases how communities in different contexts - nursing homes, religious organizations, corporations, and monastic institutions, for example - engage with the ineffability of wisdom. Contributors draw from a range of disciplines and cross-cultural and historical data in order to interpret the meaning and value of wisdom as a human endeavour. This book also represents an anthropological method for evaluating various philosophical and scientific approaches to understanding wisdom, including how wisdom is learned and taught. Readers will be able to appreciate how action, emotion, uncertainty, and cultural systems come to bear on wisdom as a value in human life and expression. In the end, Capturing the Ineffable reveals how the conception and paradoxical nature of wisdom dispels the dichotomies of self/other, structure/agency, known/unknown, nature/culture, and the like. What is at stake is a recasting of wisdom as a particular kind of anthropological endeavour and, thus, a return to and modification of philosophical anthropology.
Download or read book Medicalizing Ethnicity written by Vilma Santiago-Irizarry and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Medicalizing Ethnicity, Vilma Santiago-Irizarry shows how commendable intentions can produce unintended consequences. Santiago-Irizarry conducted ethnographic fieldwork in three bilingual, bicultural psychiatric programs for Latino patients at public mental health facilities in New York City. The introduction of "cultural sensitivity" in mental health clinics, she concludes, led doctors to construct essentialized, composite versions of Latino ethnicity in their drive to treat mental illness with sensitivity. The author demonstrates that stressing Latino differences when dealing with patients resulted not in empowerment, as intended, but in the reassertion of Anglo-American standards of behavior in the guise of psychiatric categories by which Latino culture was negatively defined. For instance, doctors routinely translated their patients' beliefs in the Latino religious traditions of espiritismo and Santería into psychiatric terms, thus treating these beliefs as pathologies.Interpreting mental health care through the framework of culture and politics has potent effects on the understanding of "normality" toward which such care aspires. At the core of Medicalizing Ethnicity is the very definition of multiculturalism used by a variety of institutional settings in an attempt to mandate equality.
Download or read book Human Services as Complex Organizations written by Yeheskel Hasenfeld and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1992-04 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On human services
Download or read book Putting Activity Theory to Work written by Yrjö Engeström and published by Lehmanns Media. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural-historical activity theory is a powerful toolkit for social sciences. This book demonstrates how the Finnish school of developmental work research uses activity theory in the analysis and practical transformation of work, technology and organizations. Developmental work research is a longitudinal and interventionist approach. Researchers aim at generating, supporting and following cycles of expansive learning in the activity systems they study. The process opens up qualitatively new possibilities for creating use values and for developing the capabilities and agency of the practitioners and their clients. Critical dialogue and partnerships are built between the researchers and the organizations they study. In their 18 chapters, the 23 authors of the book give a broad sample of work done over a period of ten years in the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research at University of Helsinki. The theoretical and methodological themes range from the polyphony of activity to relationships between history, ethnography and interventions. The empirical chapters range from the work of teachers and judges to collaboration between industrial enterprises. Yrjö Engeström is Professor of Adult Education and Director of the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research at University of Helsinki. Joachim Lompscher (1932-2005) was Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology at University of Potsdam. Georg Rückriem is Professor Emeritus of Education at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Cover photo: Faces of the authors in the order of their chapters.
Download or read book Chinatown No More written by Hsiang-Shui Chen and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By focusing on the social and cultural life of post-1965 Taiwan immigrants in Queens, New York, this book shifts Chinese American studies from ethnic enclaves to the diverse multiethnic neighborhoods of Flushing and Elmhurst. As Hsiang-shui Chen documents, the political dynamics of these settlements are entirely different from the traditional closed Chinese communities; the immigrants in Queens think of themselves as living in "worldtown," not in a second Chinatown. Drawing on interviews with members of a hundred households, Chen brings out telling aspects of demography, immigration experience, family life, and gender roles, and then turns to vivid, humanistic portraits of three families. Chen also describes the organizational life of the Chinese in Queens with a lively account of the power struggles and social interactions that occur within religious, sports, social service, and business groups and with the outside world.
Download or read book Lord I m Coming Home written by John Forrest and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lord I'm Coming Home focuses on a small, white, rural fishing community on the southern reaches of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina. By means of a new kind of anthropological fieldwork, John Forrest seeks to document the entire aesthetic experience of a group of people, showing the aesthetic to be an "everyday experience and not some rarefied and pure behavior reserved for an artistic elite." The opening chapter of the book is a vivid fictional narrative of a typical day in "Tidewater," presented from the perspective of one fisherman. In the following two chapters the author sets forth the philosophical and anthropological foundations of his book, paying particular attention to problems of defining "aesthetic," to methodological concerns, and to the natural landscape of his field site. Reviewing his own experience as both participant and observer, he then describes in scrupulous detail the aesthetic forms in four areas of Tidewater life: home, work, church, and leisure. People use these forms, Forrest shows, to establish personal and group identities, facilitate certain kinds of interactions while inhibiting others, and cue appropriate behavior. His concluding chapter deals with the different life cycles of men and women, insider-outsider relations, secular and sacred domains, the image and metaphor of "home," and the essential role that aesthetics plays in these spheres. The first ethnography to evoke the full aesthetic life of a community, Lord I'm Coming Home will be important reading not only for anthropologists but also for scholars and students in the fields of American studies, art, folklore, and sociology.
Download or read book The Culture of Long Term Care written by J Neil Henderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1995-08-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the only collection of its kind to offer an inside view of life and work in contemporary nursing homes with the purpose of developing a theory of the culture of long term care. The anthropological research in nursing homes presented here produces a seldom seen native view of patients, staff, and the day-to-day workings of American nursing homes. The use of ethnographic methods penetrates the reality barriers found in industry descriptions, muck-raking discourse, and general societal aversion toward nursing homes. The tensions found between and within staff culture and patient culture are explored in terms of adaptations to institutional life in the context of current policy and the larger American ageist culture.
Download or read book Loving Our Own Bones written by Julia Watts Belser and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A transformative spiritual companion and deep dive into disability politics that reimagines disability in the Bible and contemporary culture A 2024 National Jewish Book Award winner and essential read on disability, spirituality, and social justice “What’s wrong with you?” Scholar, activist, and rabbi Julia Watts Belser is all too familiar with this question. What’s wrong isn’t her wheelchair, though—it’s exclusion, objectification, pity, and disdain. Our attitudes about disability have such deep cultural roots that we almost forget their sources. But open the Bible and disability is everywhere. Moses believes his stutter renders him unable to answer God’s call. Jacob’s encounter with an angel leaves him changed not just spiritually but physically: he gains a limp. For centuries, these stories have been told and retold in ways that treat disability as a metaphor for spiritual incapacity or as a challenge to be overcome. Through fresh and unexpected readings of the Bible, Loving Our Own Bones instead paints a luminous portrait of what it means to be disabled and one of God’s beloved. Belser delves deep into sacred literature, braiding the insights of disabled, feminist, Black, and queer thinkers with her own experiences as a queer disabled Jewish feminist. She talks back to biblical commentators who traffic in disability stigma and shame. What unfolds is a profound gift of disability wisdom, a radical act of spiritual imagination that can guide us all toward a powerful reckoning with each other and with our bodies. Loving Our Own Bones invites readers to claim the power and promise of spiritual dissent, and to nourish their own souls through the revolutionary art of radical self-love.
Download or read book Caribbean New York written by Philip Kasinitz and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1965, West Indians have been emigrating to the United States in record numbers, and to New York City in particular. Caribbean New York shows how the new immigration is reshaping American race relations and sheds much-needed light on factors that underlie some of the city's explosive racial confrontations. Philip Kasinitz examines how two forces--racial solidarity and ethnic distinctiveness--have helped to shape the identity of New York's West Indian community. He compares "new" (post-1965) immigrants with West Indians who arrived earlier in the century, and looks in detail at the economic, political, and cultural rules that Afro-Caribbean immigrants have played in the city during each period.
