Suchergebnisse

In this article, I explore pathways towards critical reflexivity as a way of understanding the interaction between personal and professional development. How much do we, and can we, put our personal lives into our work? Reflexivity can be developed through various methods but is explored herein through life stories and dialogical poetry as ways of deepening the connection between personal discourses and professional lives. A heuristic inquiry framework developed by Clark MOUSTAKAS is used together with poetry and dialogue to map a personal exploration of reflexivity through life story work. The journey follows six phases: initial engagement, immersion, incubation, illumination, explication, and culmination in a creative synthesis. Acknowledging that reflexivity is viewed as occurring in context, a narrative lens is used to integrate the importance of working with lived experience while recognizing how we are influenced by our past and present social interaction with others. In this way, as researchers and professionals, we are better able to position ourselves, to better understand the context in which we work, and to develop a more ethical lens through which we view our reality. The scope for personal agency and the creation of voice is explored through these interactions.

The ambiguity of community allows it to be a space for a vast range of imposed and 'organic' social reproduction functions, and an accessible site for meaningful collective action, but it also has the potential for disempowerment. The breadth of the concept of 'community' allows for it to be critiqued as ephemeral or as romantic fiction, but also used and exploited by government. It is because it retains such power to evoke reaction and contest that we need to understand the power that drives it, and the ideological purpose for which it may be used or misused. The notion of discourse immediately becomes useful. We can recognise competing discourses of community, and examine how they are used politically. We can recognise ways in which social work can engage with community discourses of empowerment rather than control. The article will explore a number of discourses and examine their usefulness for practice.

This research involves examining the current, highly individualising and specialised nature of social work, and its capacity to respond to a more political agenda of community development and community building. It emerges from action research that I conducted with a group of social workers in which we examined the challenges in reconceptualising their practice to include a greater community orientation. The thesis explores the origins of professional social work in nineteenth century liberalism and the rise of the 'social', and it draws on Foucauldian notions of governmentality and discourse to analyse the potential for community to exert collaborative agency, while also responding to demands for 'governing at a distance'. I develop a typology of competing discourses of community that are evident in the literature, in policy and in practice, and apply these to my analysis. In concluding, I develop a model for community practice to integrate my critique. While the research commenced as a traditional doctorate, three years and four articles into the process, I resolved that my original objectives could be met as effectively by converting to a PhD by Publication. The resulting thesis comprises nine chapters: a framing chapter, three chapters linking each of the four refereed papers published during the period of candidature, and a concluding chapter. The framing chapter provides the intellectual context for the total project, and the linking chapters serve to supplement the theoretical analysis with specific discussion relating to the discursive commonalities and interconnections between the chapters. The conclusion seeks an integration of the project in a model that develops an approach to social work that reconciles the critique explored throughout the research.

Abstract
The World Health Organization lists air pollution as one of the top five risks for developing chronic non-communicable disease, joining tobacco use, harmful use of alcohol, unhealthy diets and physical inactivity. This review focuses on how host defense mechanisms against adverse airborne exposures relate to the probable interacting and overlapping pathophysiological features of neurodegeneration and multiple chemical sensitivity. Significant long-term airborne exposures can contribute to oxidative stress, systemic inflammation, transient receptor subfamily vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) and subfamily ankyrin 1 (TRPA1) upregulation and sensitization, with impacts on olfactory and trigeminal nerve function, and eventual loss of brain mass. The potential for neurologic dysfunction, including decreased cognition, chronic pain and central sensitization related to airborne contaminants, can be magnified by genetic polymorphisms that result in less effective detoxification. Onset of neurodegenerative disorders is subtle, with early loss of brain mass and loss of sense of smell. Onset of MCS may be gradual following long-term low dose airborne exposures, or acute following a recognizable exposure. Upregulation of chemosensitive TRPV1 and TRPA1 polymodal receptors has been observed in patients with neurodegeneration, and chemically sensitive individuals with asthma, migraine and MCS. In people with chemical sensitivity, these receptors are also sensitized, which is defined as a reduction in the threshold and an increase in the magnitude of a response to noxious stimulation. There is likely damage to the olfactory system in neurodegeneration and trigeminal nerve hypersensitivity in MCS, with different effects on olfactory processing. The associations of low vitamin D levels and protein kinase activity seen in neurodegeneration have not been studied in MCS. Table 2 presents a summary of neurodegeneration and MCS, comparing 16 distinctive genetic, pathophysiological and clinical features associated with air pollution exposures. There is significant overlap, suggesting potential comorbidity. Canadian Health Measures Survey data indicates an overlap between neurodegeneration and MCS (p < 0.05) that suggests comorbidity, but the extent of increased susceptibility to the other condition is not established. Nevertheless, the pathways to the development of these conditions likely involve TRPV1 and TRPA1 receptors, and so it is hypothesized that manifestation of neurodegeneration and/or MCS and possibly why there is divergence may be influenced by polymorphisms of these receptors, among other factors.