Social workers play a vital role in making violence-stricken communities into safer places for human development. However, research examining the experiences of community practitioners in political conflicts is scarce. Using a place-making analytical framework, this study addresses this gap exploring community practitioners' practices around outbreaks of violence in Israeli Jewish-Arab mixed cities. Based on 50 semi-structured interviews, the findings reveal three modalities of place-making: place-developing, place-protecting, and place-remaking. The study highlights community practice's significant role in constructing spaces in light of practitioners' sense of place. It encourages the inclusion of place-making as a framework to understand social work within conflict zones.
The public administration literature has long observed the efforts of street-level bureaucrats to actively represent the clients with whom they share a social or demographic identity. However, it has not examined the responses that street-level bureaucrats receive when they represent minorities and how these responses shape how they use discretion in implementing policies. We explore these issues empirically through in-depth interviews with 23 Israeli Arab social and community workers and 32 Israeli LGBTQ+ teachers. This exploratory study reveals the variety of reactions that street-level bureaucrats encounter when representing minorities. Furthermore, it highlights the significant role of reactions from clients and organizations in encouraging, reducing, or impeding the efforts of minority street-level bureaucrats to represent those with whom they share an identity, which, in turn, underscores the importance of external responses for confirming and legitimizing active representation.
Abstract Since its very inception, the field of social work has acknowledged the importance of place in shaping communal identity, construing shared meanings and generating collective actions. Nevertheless, the analytical framework of place-making, which enjoys growing interest in other disciplines, has little impact on social work and its incorporation into social work community practice is still embryonic. The place-making perspective is particularly relevant to the multiple challenges faced by community practice in the twenty-first century. This qualitative study aims to encourage the inclusion of place-making analytical perspective in community practice research by examining community practitioners' engagement in place-making processes within the complex context of Israeli Jewish–Arab mixed cities. Based on semi-structured interviews with thirty community practitioners in the public services, the findings reveal that participants were highly engaged in four main interrelated aspects of place-making: shaping the ethnocultural meanings of place, managing the meaning of space in power relations, re-constructing the conflicted meaning of space and framing the history of place. The study illustrates the usefulness of the place-making analytical framework in community practice, especially in the context of increasing contested and divided urban realities.
AbstractRecent decades have witnessed an increasing trend towards the development of critical approaches to the study of poverty, which call upon social workers to perceive people living in poverty as active agents who resist their condition. Relatively few studies, however, have examined how women living in poverty, who embody collective-political agency, experience the encounter with the welfare services, and how their manner of organisation is shaped by this encounter. This study examines this issue based on fifteen semi-structured interviews with mothers in need of public housing in Israel who are activists in protest groups against the public housing policy. The findings reveal that the encounter with welfare services generated feelings of othering due to the meanings attributed to their homelessness and to the nature of their mothering. Conversely, activism was perceived as a practice for challenging, redesigning and reducing power relations with the welfare agencies. The findings also show that the encounter shaped the participants' manners of activist mobilisation. The study contributes to the research literature on social work with women who live in poverty, by highlighting the important role of women's activism within the encounter.
There is a paucity of research examining street-level bureaucracy in cities affected by ongoing ethnopolitical conflict. This study addresses this limitation by exploring the work of social workers in the public services of mixed cities in Israel. It shows the interconnection between ambiguous institutional policies, varying workers' views of the role of social services, and changing discretion patterns. Findings also suggest that episodes of conflict escalation intensify staff ethnic sectarianism, as well as increase workers' own ethnic biases, which affect the ways in which they act as a liaison between the welfare system and citizens through their use of discretion.
Summary Mixed cities are defined as ethnically diverse cities located within turbulent contexts of intensive, ongoing intergroup political conflict. As such, they may pose serious challenges to social workers' efforts to develop culturally competent practices, especially in the public service sector. This article examined social workers' constructions of cultural competence in the social public services delivered to Arab and Jewish clients in Israeli mixed cities. Based on extensive qualitative data gathered from 80 public social workers in Haifa, Acre, and Jerusalem, this study discusses the strengths and limitations of the cultural competence approach, especially when applied in the context of varying degrees of political conflict. Findings Findings illustrated three approaches to the provision of social welfare services: (1) the "universal" construction, which corresponds to universal and egalitarian value-based approach, by which social work professionalism is claimed sufficient to ensure equal treatment for Israeli Arab and Jewish clients; (2) the "indispensable" cultural approach, which indicates that cultural competence is vital and unavoidable in addressing the ethno-diversity needs of Israeli Arab and Jewish clients in mixed cities; and (3) the "critical" construction, which critiques the cultural competence and universal approaches as lacking the complexity to address the problematic ethno-political nature of mixed city settings. Applications The study proposes to adopt an integrated cultural competence approach that combines vital elements of each discrete construction to guide social workers' practices in mixed cities. Context-informed priorities may occasionally emphasize some elements and minimize others. Institutional support and training is necessary for the proposition to work.
Organophosphorus compounds are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors used as pesticides and chemical warfare nerve agents. Acute organophosphorus poisoning (acute OPP) affects 3 million people, with 300 000 deaths annually worldwide. Severe acute OPP effects include overstimulation of cholinergic neurons, seizures, status epilepticus, and finally, brain damage. In a previous study, we developed 3 different chemical models of acute OPP in zebrafish larvae. To elucidate the complex pathophysiological pathways related to acute OPP, we used integrative omics (proteomic, transcriptomics, and metabolomics) on these 3 animal models. Our results show that these stochastic, apparently disparate morphological phenotypes can result from almost linear concentration-response variations in molecular levels. Results from the multiomics analysis strongly suggest that endoplasmic reticulum stress might play a central role in the pathophysiology of severe acute OPP, emphasizing the urgent need of further research on this molecular pathway. Endoplasmic reticulum stress could be an important therapeutic target to be included in the treatment of patients with severe acute OPP. ; NATO SfP project MD.SFPP 984777 (D.R.); the European Research Council under European Union's Seven Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 320737; the Spanish Government (CTM2017-83242-R and CTM2015-65691-R). M.F. acknowledges the financial support from the Government of Catalonia through a Beatriu de Pinos fellowship (2016 BP-B 00233) ; Peer reviewed
Two essential key events in acrylamide (ACR) acute neurotoxicity are the formation of adducts with nucleophilic sulfhydryl groups on cysteine residues of selected proteins in the synaptic terminals and the depletion of the glutathione (GSx) stores in neural tissue. The use of N-acetylcysteine (NAC) has been recently proposed as a potential antidote against ACR neurotoxicity, as this chemical is not only a well-known precursor of the reduced form of glutathione (GSH), but also is an scavenger of soft electrophiles such as ACR. In this study, the suitability of 0.3 and 0.75 mM NAC to protect against the neurotoxic effect of 0.75 mM ACR has been tested in vivo in adult zebrafish. NAC provided only a mild to negligible protection against the changes induced by ACR in the motor function, behavior, transcriptome and proteome. The permeability of NAC to cross blood-brain barrier (BBB) was assessed, as well as the ACR-scavenging activity and the gamma-glutamyl-cysteine ligase (γ-GCL) and acylase I activities. The results show that ACR not only depletes GSx levels but also inhibits it synthesis from NAC/cysteine, having a dramatic effect over the glutathione system. Moreover, results indicate a very low NAC uptake to the brain, probably by a combination of low BBB permeability and high deacylation of NAC during the intestinal absorption. These results strongly suggest that the use of NAC is not indicated in ACR acute neurotoxicity treatment. ; This work was supported by the NATO SfP project MD.SFPP 984777 (D.R.) and the Spanish Government (CTM2017-83242-R; D.R.). M.F acknowledges financial support from the Beatriu de Pinós programme (Grant No. 2016 BP 00233) provided by the Secretariat of Universities and Research department of the Ministry for Business and Knowledge, Catalonia Government. Mention of specific products or trade names does not indicate endorsement by the US federal government. ; Peer reviewed
