Search Results (526)

Objective: To identify the clinical manifestations associated with pain in nursing students in emerging adulthood with Long COVID (LC). Methods: A cross-sectional, descriptive, and analytical study was conducted. The universe comprised 1508 students from a Faculty of Nursing in the State of Mexico. The sample size of 307 participants was calculated using Cochran’s formula (1977) with 95% confidence and a 5% margin of error, with correction for finite populations; participants were invited through an open call and selected non-probabilistically according to inclusion criteria and willingness to participate. Instrument: A questionnaire on post-SARS-CoV-2 health conditions was used, with reliability assessed in a pilot test through internal consistency measures, obtaining a Cronbach’s Alpha = 0.86 and KR-20 = 0.87. It was administered between the third and fourth week following the three-month mark after COVID-19 onset. Descriptive analysis, Fisher’s exact test, and a binary logistic regression model were used, with pain as the dependent variable (1 = yes, 0 = no); statistical significance was set at p < 0.05, with a 95% CI. Results: 40.4% of students reported pain—(46.6%) males and (39.0%) females—with a significant association between age group and pain (p < 0.001). A total of 198 painful clinical manifestations were reported: headache (48.0%), chest oppression (26.8%), and myalgias (23.2%). The model showed that taste alteration (p < 0.001) and decreased vision (p < 0.001) were associated with a lower likelihood of pain, while gastrointestinal alterations (p = 0.025) and fatigue (p = 0.048) were associated with a higher likelihood of pain. Conclusions: Pain in students with LC is associated with clinical manifestations, mainly gastrointestinal alterations, and fatigue. Full article

Despite persistent inequalities and severe resource constraints in South Africa’s education system, some rural public schools continue to achieve strong academic results. This study investigates how curriculum accessibility and pedagogical strategies influence academic performance in public senior secondary schools in the Amathole West Education District in the Eastern Cape Province. Drawing on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the study examines how teachers negotiate structural inequalities through adaptive pedagogical practices. A qualitative research design was used that involved in-depth interviews with teachers, principals, and education officials. The findings reveal that collaborative learning, scaffolding, inquiry-based teaching, and informal resource sharing practices play a critical role in sustaining academic success in resource-constrained contexts. The study argues that teacher agency and community participation function as important mechanisms that mitigate structural inequalities in rural schooling. The paper contributes to debates on educational inequality and sustainable development by demonstrating how localized pedagogical strategies can support academic success in marginalized schooling environments. Full article

Black liberation theology as an academic discipline in the late 1960s was initially conceived, interpreted, and articulated as Christian theology that characterized material and spiritual liberation from oppression as the primary aim, task, and meaning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This Black theology determined to interpret the gospel message in light of black experience in a system of white racism in the United States. This article raises the question: What is a more holistic, comprehensive, inclusive and nuanced depiction of African American experience as a theological source for doing contemporary Black theology in the North American context? To avoid representing the black experience in the US as one-dimensional, overly racialized, and monolithic, this work resists androcentrism, outdated racial reasoning and logic, reductionism, and stereotypical social constructions that falsely circumscribe, essentialize, and totalize the theological representation of black experience. Rooted in the diversity, difference, and otherness found within the African American community, this contemporary Black theology of liberation reframes black experience in terms of the inclusive justice and subjective freedom of the gospel message. It seeks to graciously affirm, honor, and uplift the inherent dignity, integrity, and worth of Blackness, all Black lives, and each Black life. Full article

Gender-based violence may be considered a failure or absence of care across the interpersonal, symbolic, and structural levels. Feminist scholars have called for closer attention to an ethic of care as one vital pathway to shared solidarity for social justice and relations of non-violence. Works from Black, Indigenous, queer and disability writers and activists have similarly illustrated the transformative potential of collective care for building community and ending systems of oppression. In this paper, we draw on this critical literature to argue for framing collective care as both a practice and a long-term objective in work to prevent gender-based violence. To illustrate this framing, we share empirical data from two Australian studies: one with young people using social media to prevent gender-based violence, and one with prevention practitioners who work with men and boys. Our findings are organised around four central themes: care as collaboration; transformative care; a politic of care; and collective care in structural change. These findings represent patterns in practice, political approach, and imagined futures among our research participants that we suggest are reflective of ongoing commitments to empathy, compassion, and accountability. These patterns are substantively distinct from much mainstream programmatic and policy approaches to gender-based violence prevention, which often reproduce individualistic frames and are constrained by funding and governance models. We argue that violence prevention is fundamentally a shared project of collective care: supporting one another to recognise, interrogate, and challenge the gendered norms and structures that perpetuate gender-based violence. This work is inescapably relational, political, personal, and motivated by a shared sense of caring for each other. Full article

Introduction: The Awareness/Acceptance/Action Model (AAAM) was initially developed by one of the authors to explore stigma and prejudice towards people living with HIV/AIDS. In the present study, the AAAM was examined for its personal and professional relevance to people affected by the Troubles, 30 years of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. When unchecked, judgmental or reactive attitudes can undermine intentions to consistently deliver services in line with professional standards and human rights. Methods: Despite a devolved, power-sharing government and steps to address longstanding political and religious grievances, cultural sensitivities and animosity remain on both sides of the divide. A university in Northern Ireland recruited 11 practice teachers and 18 social work students, who participated in one of four focus groups. Mindfulness principles and techniques were used to allow participants to visualise “the other” before exploring how prejudice might impact personal and professional interactions. Thematic analysis of focus group transcripts was conducted using Braun and Clarke to assess the presence and nature of labelling, stereotyping, out-grouping and discriminating against people perceived as “the other”. Findings: Given the potential differences in identity, background, and experiences of social work practitioners and service users, it is important that we critically reflect on how we serve people based on direct or intergenerationally transmitted encounters. The AAAM was then piloted in undergraduate social work degree programmes and shared with practice teachers. Feedback confirmed that it offers a theoretical framework to promote anti-oppressive practice and critical reflection during professional social work training. Using Mindfulness techniques to visualise “the other” prompted participants to listen well and look deeply at the origins of their prejudices or fear, and how these could lead to biased interactions with service users. Full article

This paper argues for the necessity of psychoanalysis in the North American field of spiritual care. More specifically, the essay argues that at a time of social unrest, despair, and authoritarian rule, the work of interiority that psychoanalysis and African religious cosmologies emphasize is especially suited to the current moment in U.S. history. An integrative sampling of black psychoanalytic thinkers and black religious scholars will be highlighted as possible examples of interdisciplinary praxis for the work of spiritual care in a world where freedom and democracy are in peril. As the voices of many black and brown scholars in this area have been overlooked, disregarded, or ghettoized as only being relevant to ethnic minority populations, this essay reflects on how the symmetry between psychoanalytic thought and African spirituality and cosmology can function as a formidable psychospiritual framework for spiritual care in the 21st-century authoritarian state. Full article

This article offers a point-by-point overview of the concept of Christian education as understood by popes Francis and Leo XIV. It could be argued that the writings of these recent popes return to the early Christian idea of paideia Christi. Pope Leo XIV refers directly to the term ‘paideia’ by using the phrase ‘Christian paideia’. Francis’s educational anthropology, on the other hand, is theologically and pedagogically consistent with the tradition of Christian paideia. Although Francis does not use the term ‘paideia’, his understanding of education is also centred on the human person and their integral development. In this theoretical framework, education is no longer viewed merely as a tool for achieving salvation. However, it serves to enable the human person to grow in their humanity and thereby attain integral maturity, the pinnacle of which is union with God. It is within this theoretical perspective that the significance of education for building peace and social order should also be understood. In this view, peace emerges as the result of a humanistic education; hence, to achieve genuine peace among people, the emphasis must be placed on a genuinely humanistic education. The idea is rooted primarily in the ancient Greek understanding of paideia. It has also been taken up throughout history, for example, by Comenius in Pampaedia, Dewey in Democracy and Education (1916), Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968/1970), and, more recently, by Nussbaum in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010). Pope Leo XIV also sees this perspective of internal coherence between authentic personal development. From the very beginning of his pontificate, one can observe in his teachings a linking of these two issues. In one of his earliest addresses, Pope Leo XIV emphasised that the concern for peace amongst people does indeed stem from the Christian faith. It could be said that building peace within human society is a Christian imperative, arising from the sharing of the gift which the Church has received from Christ himself: ‘Peace be with you!’. In this context, it is worth noting that the mission of bringing about peace is not merely the result of specific human activity, although this is, of course, important, and Leo indicates how it should be carried out. Nevertheless, what is crucial to the fulfilment of this mission is that the surest guarantee of its success is a personal relationship with Christ, from which flows the transmission of Christ’s gift of peace to the world. The Pope addressed the Italian Bishops’ Conference with the following words: “the relationship with Christ calls on us to develop a pastoral focus on the theme of peace”. Pope Leo thus points out that the path to building authentic peace in the world, which “is not the absence of conflict”, is the path of personal growth in one’s relationship with Christ, who is the source of peace. In this way, the maturing of a person of faith is the surest way of building—though in this context it would be more accurate to say: conveying—peace in the world. Full article

This article examines the ethics and affective complexities of care in Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil and Other Stories, arguing that the collection foregrounds the imaginative, relational, and often troubling demands of caretaking within a more than human world. Drawing on feminist and posthuman care theory—particularly the work of María Puig de la Bellacasa, Joan Tronto, and Donna Haraway—the article analyzes how Schweblin’s stories stage encounters in which care involves uncertainty, power asymmetry, and the necessity of imagining the needs of others who cannot fully articulate them. In the stories “Welcome to the Club,” “The Fabulous Animal,” “An Eye in the Throat,” and “Atlàntida,” specific relations of care reveal both the failures and transformative potential of caregiving practices. These narratives depict care as simultaneously sustaining and oppressive, exposing how guilt, substitution, and silence shape relationships among humans and nonhumans alike. Schweblin’s fiction frames care as an embodied, relational practice that unsettles human exceptionalism and highlights the ethical importance—and limits—of attempting to perceive the world from marginalized perspectives. Full article

In The Gypsy Goddess (2014), Meena Kandasamy offers a searing retelling of the 1968 Kilvenmani Massacre, in which at least forty-four lower-caste agricultural workers, including women and children, were brutally murdered while mobilizing for better living conditions under the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Distinguishing her novel from earlier representations, Kandasamy employs a non-linear and self-reflexive narrative that satirically draws on multiple voices and genres. My paper argues that the novel’s summoning of Kilvenmani’s specters serves a dual function. First, it exposes the limits of Western postcolonial and postmodern academic discourses in the neoliberal era. Second, by resurrecting a foundational episode in post-colonial India’s communist movement, it advances a case for reimagining communism as a credible alternative to intertwined structures of caste, class, and gender oppression. I demonstrate that Kandasamy accomplishes this through an inward critique of her own postmodern form deployed in The Gypsy Goddess, ultimately gesturing toward solidarities later articulated as Social Reproduction Theory. Full article

Navayāna Buddhism emerged from B. R. Ambedkar’s effort to make Buddhism a path of liberation from caste oppression. Its emphasis on equality, dignity, compassion, and the refusal of humiliation gave it considerable emancipatory power. Yet Buddhism in modern India has remained regionally concentrated rather than broadly expansive. This article argues that this uneven consolidation cannot be explained by external constraints alone, although administrative barriers, anti-conversion laws, reservation policy, and Hindu nationalist pressures have shaped the conditions of Navayāna affiliation. It also reflects the religious form produced by Ambedkar’s founding reinterpretation of Buddhism. Shaped by the urgency of anti-caste struggle, Navayāna developed strong resources for public ritual, collective memory, and moral–political assertion, while devotional, contemplative, and ritually mediated forms of everyday practice were not institutionalized to the same degree. Drawing on Ambedkar’s writings, census data, and historical, sociological, and ethnographic scholarship, this article examines the relationship between conversion, anti-caste emancipation, and religious continuity. It suggests that the features that make a religious movement politically potent are not always the same as those that sustain it as a living tradition across generations. Full article

This article situates school leadership in the Canadian Prairies within a socio-spatial context and ongoing impact of coloniality. It draws on Black geographies to position Black school leaders as occupying diasporic spaces in white settler contexts of the Prairies, exploring how spatial relations are constituted in contemporary social arrangements characterized by longstanding institutional oppression. This spatial gaze exposed four themes for deeper analysis, namely Black school leadership as spatially situated power; the production of “visible difference” in leadership space; navigating whiteness as spatial norm; and loneliness, spatial isolation, and the cost of being “the only one”. The article demonstrates how Black school leadership in the Canadian Prairies cannot be relegated to simply an individual experience nor made reducible to interpersonal discrimination but rather is constituted through historically produced spatial arrangements that regulate belonging, authority, and legitimacy. Full article

This article investigates the functions of the epistolary form in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe as a means of constructing authenticity and probing what Susan Barton calls the “substance of the truth.” Two distinct forms of authenticity play a central role in Foe (1987). The first is related to the narrative conventions of autofiction, particularly fictional autobiography, the epistolary form, and what has been termed “circumstantial realism,” as exemplified by Daniel Defoe and the eighteenth-century novel. The second emerges through Susan Barton’s insistence on the “substance of the truth” (F, 51), which appears to transcend these conventions of realistic narration. By employing a different, non-realist form of authenticity, Coetzee critiques the oppression and erasure of the female writing subject and foregrounds the fate of Friday, the traumatized subaltern who cannot speak. Coetzee’s postmodern rewriting thus both employs and deconstructs the representational conventions that establish authenticity, while also revealing an ethical commitment characteristic of his work in general. Full article

Neither women’s studies nor lesbian and gay studies offers an adequate theoretical or political base for disruptive scholarship. Reading and interpreting Southern African writers, especially Sindiwe Magona and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, promotes women’s studies as an academic and political approach to both gender and the erotic. Drawing on genealogies of rupture and intergenerational studies, we argue that the feminist is a positionality that must be widely available to challenge heterosexual perspectives and become a catalyst for audiences to engage in nuanced analyses of discourses on places and genres—narrative in particular—where memories are rearticulated and elaborated. This article explores how the narratives of Magona, Ngugi, and Soyinka inform and complicate the erasure, erosion, and amnesia that accompany contemporary imaginaries of what is re/membered. We challenge the tendency to evaluate African feminisms as only either oppressive or empowering and read the selected texts and their prototypical characters as dynamic embodiments that inform gendered spaces across both the attachments that people hold to particular gender identities and styles and recognising the punitive realities of dominant gender expectations. The article takes a positionality on the often troubled relationship between feminism and femininity, a critical but generous reading that highlights the potential for an affirmative orientation towards identity politics. This study utilises the theoretical lenses of border thinking and decolonial and African feminisms to interrogate matrifocal borderlands and the sociohistorical and cultural dis/continuities of being and becoming. We explore notions of the entanglement of motherhood, daughterhood, wifehood, and sisterhood as morphing identities. These are identities at the margins of political, sociocultural, and gender normativities in African literature. Magona’s “threshold people”, like Ngugi’s perfect nine, destabilise, disrupt, and refuse to be subordinated as they codify living differently in the in-between worlds. Magona, for instance, laminates the challenging discourse of contestation to map difficult, dangerous, and marginal spaces where women live at the borders of sociocultural, religious, ethnic, and gendered norms. These are spaces suffused with affective possibilities—defensiveness, shame, anxiety, anger, curiosity—and the women have to develop relational solidarities in negotiating hyper-visibilities or (in)visibilities within the 21st-century global south. Full article

Building inclusive, high-density cities requires understanding vulnerable groups’ public space usage. While green exposure significantly impacts urban health, existing research frequently overlooks females’ specific needs regarding streetscape visual quality, green space structures, and daily travel experiences. To address this, the study investigates spatial disparities in Suzhou’s historic district. Utilizing multi-source data and mixed modeling strategies, including Partial Least Squares and Ordinary Least Squares (PLS-OLS) and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), the research analyzes how streetscape perceptions and green space characteristics affect female life satisfaction and expressed sentiment. Results indicate three main findings. (1) Streetscape visual features fundamentally drive subjective evaluations. Safe significantly enhances well-being, whereas boring and lively negatively impact life satisfaction, reflecting females’ acute sensitivity to environmental oppressiveness during daily travel. (2) Park diversity elevates expressed sentiment, while patch density positively influences life satisfaction, demonstrating the vital value of fragmented greenery for daily public space usage. (3) Boring precipitously diminishes life satisfaction after surpassing a specific threshold, while park diversity elevates expressed sentiment only after crossing a critical interval. The study establishes an integrated analytical framework linking visual perception, green space structure, emotional response, and satisfaction. These findings provide targeted strategies for enhancing inclusive urban design and optimizing green space allocation to improve streetscape safety and alleviate visual oppressiveness, thereby advancing gender social justice for vulnerable groups in historic districts. Full article

This article develops an understanding of Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) as a testament film. It considers the filmmaker’s personal philosophy and concept of history, proposing the resonance of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, the epitome of Benjamin’s contention with the ‘continuum of history’ in his final text, Theses on the Philosophy of History. This article considers the testament of Blue as a concept of history, contextualised by Jarman’s reckoning with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and thereby with his own mortality, as Jarman’s attestation of a model of history (both personal and national, or coinhered as ‘memory’), which answers the demand of the ‘tradition of the oppressed.’ Theories of profane illumination, second nature, and the crisis of representation are explicated for the purposes of identifying Jarman’s model of history, and of his refusal of a historicist conception. In addition, it proposes the context of the AIDS crisis, as the ‘state of emergency’, the condition which compels this concept of history. Full article