Search results

This study examines the impact of mediator style, mediation outcome, and mediator background variables on community mediation participant satisfaction and fairness perceptions along several dimensions. Our data were collected from a community mediation program located in a justice court in the Southwestern United States. During a twelve‐month period, 40 mediation sessions, each involving a single mediator, were videotaped. The 108 mediation participants completed surveys assessing their perceptions of and satisfaction with their specific mediation experiences. The findings indicate important impacts of mediator facilitativeness on all perceptions and of conflict resolution success on satisfaction. Mediator experience impacted perceptions of the mediator; mediator gender and law background had no impacts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the hidden social worlds of competent clandestine users of drugs controlled within the confines of the UK Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, which now includes NPS substances. The authors explore how and in what way socially competent drug users differ from others who are visible to the authorities as criminals by criminal justice bureaucracies and known to treatment agencies as defined problem drug users.

This qualitative research utilises a bricoleur ethnographic methodology considered as a critical, multi-perspectival, multi-theoretical and multi-methodological approach to inquiry.

This paper challenges addiction discourses and, drawing upon empirical evidence, argues the user of controlled drugs should not be homogenised. Using several key strategies of identity management, drug takers employ a range of risk awareness and risk neutralisation techniques to protect self-esteem, avoid social affronts and in maintaining untainted identities. The authors present illicit drug use as one activity amongst other social activities that (some) people, conventionally, pursue. The findings from this study suggest that punitive drug policy, which links drug use with addiction, crime and antisocial behaviour, is inconsistent with the experience of the participants.

Due to the small sample size (n=24) employed, the possibility that findings can be generalised is rendered difficult. However, generalisation was never an objective of the research; the experiences of this hidden population are deeply subjective and generalising findings and applying them to other populations would be an unproductive endeavour. While the research attempted to recruit an equal number of males and females to this research, gendered analysis was not a primary objective of this research. However, it is acknowledged that future research would greatly benefit from such a gendered focus.

The insights from the study may be useful in helping to inform future policy discourse on issues of drug use. In particular, the insights suggest that a more nuanced perspective should be adopted. This perspective should recognise the non-deviant identities of many drug users in the contemporary era, and challenge the use of a universally stigmatising discourse and dominance of prohibition narratives.

It is envisaged that this paper will contribute to knowledge on how socially competent users of controlled drugs identify and manage the risks of moral, medical and legal censure.

The evidence in this paper indicates that drug use is an activity often associated with non-deviant, productive members of the population. However, the continuing dominance of stigmatising policy discourses often leads to drug users engaging in identity concealment within the context of a deeply capitalist Western landscape.

“All things are in a constant state of change”, said Heraclitus of Ephesus. The waters if a river are for ever changing yet the river endures. Every particle of matter is in continual movement. All death is birth in a new form, all birth the death of the previous form. The seasons come and go. The myth of our own John Barleycorn, buried in the ground, yet resurrected in the Spring, has close parallels with the fertility rites of Greece and the Near East such as those of Hyacinthas, Hylas, Adonis and Dionysus, of Osiris the Egyptian deity, and Mondamin the Red Indian maize‐god. Indeed, the ritual and myth of Attis, born of a virgin, killed and resurrected on the third day, undoubtedly had a strong influence on Christianity.

The chapter discusses pedagogical models of digital learning in the United Kingdom with a focus on online and blended learning, rolled out as a case study in one university. The chapter appraises the effectiveness of the model that implemented and foregrounded the evidence in the wider literature on models of digital learning in higher education. The chapter provides thematic analysis and methodological opportunities for the improvement of practice and presents a set of implementation implications and pitfalls to avoid for higher education institutions in Africa. Furthermore, a number of trends regarding the blending of learning and communication synchrony in digital learning have also been identified.

In this chapter, we explore the role of disability-based employee resource groups (ERG) in implementing large organizations' disability inclusion strategies and how pandemic responses shaped the workplace treatment and inclusion of disabled employees.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with disability-based ERG members and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) professionals in large corporate settings. Then, we analyzed how pandemic-induced changes in the workplace impacted disability inclusion efforts and experiences of disabled employees.

Results from our study revealed that workplace disability inclusion responsibilities shifted to disability-based ERGs during the onset of the pandemic. Participants detailed how organizational disability inclusion practices and policies expanded through increased awareness among some employee bases and were de-prioritized to the point of erasure in other situations. Within the context of the pandemic, members of disability-based ERGs played an integral part in both enhancing visibility of disability and responding to instances of ableism in their respective organizations.

Findings provide context as to how shifting organizational contexts, such as pandemic related workplace policies, becomes disabling, and in turn illustrate the fluid nature of disability. By framing disability as an evolving (fluid) identity category and prioritizing the awareness of disabled perspectives, organizations can better support disabled employees in their future, overarching DEI strategies and approaches to workplace inclusion post-pandemic.

The Standing Committee of the House of Commons on Trade, presided over by LORD E. FITZMAURICE, met again on July 16th and proceeded with the Sale of Adulterated Butter Bill.