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The Ngaa-bi-nya framework presented here is a practical guide for the evaluation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and social programs. It has a range of prompts to stimulate thinking about critical success factors in programs relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's lives. Ngaa-bi-nya was designed from an Aboriginal practitioner-scholar standpoint and was informed by the holistic concept of Aboriginal health, case studies with Aboriginal-led social and emotional well-being programs, human rights instruments, and the work of Stufflebeam. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and social programs have been described as suffering from a lack of evaluation. Ngaa-bi-nya is one of the few tools developed specifically to reflect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' contexts. It prompts the user to take into account the historical, policy, and social landscape of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's lives, existing and emerging cultural leadership, and informal caregiving that supports programs. Ngaa-bi-nya's prompts across four domains—landscape factors, resources, ways of working, and learnings—provide a structure through which to generate insights necessary for the future development of culturally relevant, effective, translatable, and sustainable programs required for Australia's growing and diverse Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations.

This article is a book review of Don Weatherburn's Arresting Incarceration, about causes and solutions to the over‐representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australian correctional centres.

At least 80% of Aboriginal people in Australian prisons have been there before. They have long been over-represented, constituting 27% of the Australian prison population yet 3% of the community population. These disproportionate numbers highlight that existing legal, prison and throughcare policies and programs remain ineffective. The limited inclusion of Aboriginal cultural knowledge and practices in policy and programs renders them theoretically and culturally irrelevant, despite documented commitments by governments to enact the wholistic definition of Aboriginal health and wellbeing. Programs inadequately address underlying and compounding risk factors such as poverty, poor health, discrimination and racism. The vast criminal justice research and advocacy on preventing reincarceration recommends that people need more support after release from prison, with the community better prepared to provide it especially in urban areas where most are released. Public health studies show mounting evidence that Aboriginal cultural processes strengthen family and community connections and promote health and wellbeing. Social work studies acknowledge that social support is instrumental in assisting a person to transition from one life phase to another, as an independent determinant of health and wellbeing. At the intersection of criminal justice, health and social work, this research aimed to explore post-prison release social support from an urban Aboriginal perspective, and its role in preventing reincarceration. Designed as a qualitative grounded theory study, three rounds of data collection were completed, comprising 36 in-depth interviews with individual Aboriginal ex-prisoners released from prison at least two years prior to interview, as well as Aboriginal family members and Aboriginal service providers. This research identified a range of connective, practical, emotional and spiritual post-prison supports, as well as the timeliness of support, and the relationships in which support occurred. Many participants ...

On May 2, 2008, millions of people across the Irrawaddy Delta in Burma took shelter as flood waters surged and winds of up to 200km/h carved a path of destruction, destroying villages and flooding agricultural fields throughout the Delta. The worst disaster ever recorded in Burma, Cyclone Nargis killed an estimated 140,000 people and displaced at least 800,000 more. The world watched, stunned, at not only the extent of devastation caused by the cyclone, but by the shockingly inadequate response of the Burmese regime who failed to launch any substantial relief effort and moved to block many private donors and international aid agencies from the worst affected areas. For the international community this brought to the fore the complicated environment within which aid agencies operate in Burma. Poverty in Burma is widespread. More than 30 percent of the population lives in acute poverty with an estimated 90 percent of the country spending three quarters of income, less than 65c, on food. What makes this poverty more intense is the low level of Official Development Assistance (ODA) the country has received despite the obvious need. After a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1988 and the ruling regime's refusal to recognise the results of democratic elections in 1990, many western countries suspended, or scaled back their ODA programs. However in the last decade, and particularly in response to Cyclone Nargis, donor countries have again begun to recommit funds to ODA programs in Burma. This report focuses on Australian ODA to Burma. The Australian Government, through it's development agency, AusAID, is showing increasing commitment to it's aid program in Burma. In February 2010, the then foreign minister, Stephen Smith, announced an increase in the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) program to Burma, taking Australia's ODA commitment to nearly $50million, making Australia one of the largest donors. Burma has become well known for the ruling military regime which has governed the country ruthlessly since 1962, yet little is known about the context which many development agencies work within. This report aims to highlight the key challenges involved in aid delivery to Burma and to provide suggestions for Australia's future development engagement in the country. Many of the issues and challenges faced by aid agencies in providing effective aid delivery in Burma are not unique to those receiving funding from the Australian government. Accordingly this paper has drawn on literature from a broad range of international agencies. The operating environment, as in any developing country, provides a myriad of challenges for agencies. These range from a lack of basic infrastructure which makes work more time consuming and costly to the politicised nature of humanitarian aid in Burma which results in restrictions and limitations placed upon agencies operations. Despite the challenges, this report makes clear that agencies have completed vitally need work in Burma. This report also notes a number of key critiques of the Australian aid program and makes recommendations for the future. These are to: • Engage in capacity building programs • Increase scholarship programs • Fund and support civil society groups • Re-establish a human rights training program • Apply more diplomatic pressure on the Burmese government to significantly increase their commitment to social policy reform • Significantly increase the ODA commitment The challenges discussed within this report are not a comprehensive list of the challenges faced by agencies on a daily basis, but it is hoped they go some way to help the reader better understand the context and opportunities for development in Burma Every hour, Save the Children estimates that ten young children in Burma die from diseases which are easily preventable and treatable. Ensuring effective aid delivery is more than addressing the political situation. It is about ensuring that families get access to healthcare, children have access to school, farmers can grow crops, and the human rights of all Burmese citizens are upheld.

As a hypervisible black woman, whose overdetermined image was evoked by blacks and whites to represent racialized political interests on both sides of the color line throughout the long civil rights era, singer–actress Lena Horne was burdened with the requirement to perform blackness. In this dissertation, I explore Horne's attempts to negotiate these performance expectations during the postwar, McCarthy, and civil rights eras. I contend that Horne self–fashioned a series of politicized black female personas that negotiated, challenged, and appropriated, with varied and often conflicting results, her Hollywood–manufactured glamour girl image in an effort to talk back to the dominant society and talk to her black audiences. Moreover, I argue that Horne's autobiographical performances of politicized blackness reflect and shape the changing, always contested, definitions of black "authenticity" and radical protest politics between 1945 and 1965.

Indigenous people around the world have long healing traditions. Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander healing projects are designed to empower individuals, families and communities; strengthen connections to culture; and reduce the damaging effects of colonisation and government policies such as the forcible removal of children (the Stolen Generations). Evidence on the conditions necessary for healing to occur, and how healing works for different people and in different contexts, is limited. Evaluations that will help identify good practice and document the full range of outcomes are sorely needed. This paper is based largely on experiences and learnings from Stolen Generations projects around Australia funded by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Healing Foundation, and the reflections of experienced scholar-practitioners. It argues that evaluations that are responsive to, and ultimately owned and led by, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities need to be designed and implemented differently to mainstream evaluations. Timeframes, methods, relationships between evaluators and stakeholders, and the identification and measurement of outcomes all need to be carefully considered. Challenges include definitions of healing, diversity of landscapes and programs, and data collection. Qualitative methods that preference and support Indigenous cultural frameworks and ways of creating and sharing knowledge work well. In addition to ensuring culturally sensitive methodologies and tools, working ethically and effectively in the Indigenous healing space means emphasising and enabling safety for participants, workers and organisations.

AbstractChild to parent violence (CPV) involves continual and cumulative abusive actions perpetrated by children and adolescents towards their parents or caregivers. This abuse produces short‐term distress and ongoing long‐term harmful consequences for parents and their families. Practitioners, researchers and policy‐makers are increasingly challenged to identify, conceptualize and respond to this form of family violence. A major challenge is that parents and caregivers under‐report this abuse so there is a lack of awareness and understanding of their psychological experiences in relation to CPV. This research adopts an interpretative phenomenological approach to explore the psychological experience of CPV. Interviews were conducted with six New Zealand mothers and two grandmothers who all experienced CPV. This abuse was experienced as an 'emotional bloody roller coaster' of unconditional love through to hatred; as 'judgement' – self‐blame and others' blame of their parenting skills; and the 'absent father' in their adolescents' lives was drawn on as an explanation for the abuse. Taken together, these psychological experiences identify the silencing of CPV is related to parents' conflicting emotions towards their children, their thoughts and feelings about themselves and how other people view them, and the impact of an absent father figure in their children's everyday lives.

AbstractObjectivesPrevious studies in older adults found robust associations between executive functions (EF) and physical performance, as well as sociodemographic variation in physical performance decline. To examine these associations earlier in the adult lifespan, we investigated relations of EF, race, and sex with age-related physical performance decline during middle adulthood.MethodParticipants were 2,084 urban-dwelling adults (57.2% female; 57.8% African American; 37.3% living in poverty; mean baseline age = 48.1) from the Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity across the Life Span study. Mixed-effects regression was used to examine interactive relations among EF, race, sex, and age (indexing time) with change in dominant and nondominant handgrip strength and lower extremity strength over approximately 5 years. All analyses adjusted for poverty status, and subsequently adjusted for education, body mass index, hypertension, and diabetes.ResultsThere were no significant prospective associations between EF and decline in physical performance measures. Significant cross-sectional associations revealed that lower EF was associated with worse performance on all physical performance measures averaged across both time points (p < .05). A significant two-way interaction of Sex × Age (p = .019) revealed that men experienced greater age-related decline in lower extremity strength than women.DiscussionFindings did not reveal prospective associations between EF and physical performance decline in middle adulthood. However, they identified robust cross-sectional associations between EF and physical performance, and unexpectedly greater decline in lower extremity strength in men than women. Ultimately, these findings may inform prevention and intervention strategies targeting groups at risk for poorer physical function status and decline.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Contributors -- Chapter 1 Introduction: The Age of Secretaries -- Chapter 2 Records, Politics and Diplomacy: Secretaries and Chanceries in Renaissance Italy (1350-c. 1520) -- Chapter 3 Mercurino di Gattinara (1465-1530): Imperial Chancellor, Strategist of Empire -- Chapter 4 'This continuous writing': The Paper Chancellery of Bernhard Cles -- Chapter 5 Parables and Dark Sentences: The Correspondence of Sir William Cecil and William Maitland (1559-73) -- Chapter 6 Axel Oxenstierna and Swedish Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century -- Chapter 7 Statecraft and the Role of the Diplomat in Ducal Savoy: The Career of Alessandro Scaglia (1592-1641) -- Chapter 8 Richelieu, Mazarin and Italy (1635-59): Statesmanship in Context -- Chapter 9 The Learned Ideal of the Mughal Wazīr: The Life and Intellectual World of Prime Minister Afzal Khan Shirazi (d. 1639) -- Chapter 10 Reconsidering State and Constituency in Seventeenth- Century Safavid Iran: The Wax and Wane of the Munshi -- Chapter 11 Choreographers of Power: Grigorii Kotoshikhin, State Secretaries and the Muscovite Royal Wedding Ritual -- Chapter 12 Eberhard von Danckelman and Brandenburg's Foreign Policy (1688-97) -- Chapter 13 Chancellor of State: Prince Wenzel Anton Kaunitz, the Habsburg Foreign Office and Foreign Policy in the Era of Enlightened Absolutism -- Index

Kinchin, I orcid:0000-0003-0133-2763; Mccalman, JR orcid:0000-0002-3022-3980 ; © 2019 Researchers worldwide are increasingly reporting the societal impact of their research as part of national research productivity assessments. However, the challenges they encounter in developing their impact case studies against specified government assessment criteria and how pitfalls can be mitigated are not reported. This paper examines the key steps taken to develop an Aboriginal Family Wellbeing (FWB) empowerment research impact case study in the context of an Australian Research Council (ARC) pilot research impact assessment exercise and the challenges involved in applying the ARC criteria. The requirement that researchers demonstrate how their institutions support them to conduct impactful research has the potential to create supportive environments for researchers to be more responsive to the needs of users outside academia. However, the 15-year reference period for the associated research underpinning the reported impact and the focus on researcher's current institutional affiliation constitute potential constraints to demonstrating the true impact of research. For researchers working with Indigenous people, relationships that build over long periods of time, irrespective of university affiliation, are critical to conducting impactful research. A more open-ended time-frame, with no institutional restrictions for the 'associated research' provides the best opportunity to demonstrate the true benefits of research not only for Indigenous people but for Australian society more broadly. ; Associated Grant Code:1078927