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We present a conceptual exploration of armed love as a component of liberatory pedagogy. We ground our work in community cultural wealth theory (CCW) that centers social capital often found in non-dominant communities under pressure. We argue that recognizing and working against exploitation using the community's social, cultural, and historical assets are central to liberatory pedagogy. Explicating the connections between armed love and CCW is a novel contribution to the field, as it has not been done before and it highlights how asset-based pedagogies that are grounded in love can act as a protective factor for students in a racist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the ironies of education, especially under-funded K-12 public education, is that although it is a field that significantly creates the future, the concerns of the present are so intense and so varied, that people working within these systems find themselves almost entirely in reactive mode. My work, and that of my colleagues, is focused on bringing strategic foresight into public education, giving system leaders, their staff, and their internal and external communities tools, approaches, and ways of thinking with which to engage intentionally with the future, and to build a sense of collective agency about the future. This paper is based on key learnings from over a decade of taking US school districts and their diverse communities - students, family members, staff, community partners, business partners, faith leaders and city government officials - through future visioning processes. The paper describes three approaches that have been integral to developing Futures Literacy in groups with widely divergent relationships to the future, ranging from fear or avoidance to unexamined beliefs that privilege will maintain and protect, and on to anticipatory hope for a more just, more sustainable world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Black teachers have used liberatory literacy practices through a lens of care when working with Black students. The prioritization of care is particularly important for Black students as they often experience a lack of care within schools due to labeling, stereotyping, and a lack of racially and culturally diverse teaching staff, curriculum, and resources. Black teachers are particularly effective in improving literacy outcomes for Black students, and this article emphasizes the importance of the care they provide in implementing culturally and historically responsive pedagogies that foster deep, meaningful learning. This article also emphasizes the funds of knowledge that Black teachers and students possess and highlights approaches that Black teachers have taken that create a warm, caring environment where Black students can thrive instead of being forced to fit into current systems that are unresponsive to Black student needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that writing for publication has the potential to support the creation, negotiation and stabilisation of the professional identities of third space practitioners in higher education. Caught in the impermanence and unpredictability of liquid life, third space opens up unique opportunities in writing that afford its practitioners a means of building and sustaining identity. It expands academic writing beyond its normative constraints, creating a tension between the apparent permanence and solidity of writing and the liquidity that allows for the negotiation of meaning and identity. As such, writing, particularly for dissemination, provides third space practitioners with a strategy for creating a grounding narrative that helps to stabilise their own identity while allowing the flexibility required by a 'liquid' and uncertain present. We explore this process of negotiation by examining the role of writing in identity formation from the perspective of a range of third space practitioners, in an international triple-site qualitative research study involving learning developers, learning designers, academic developers and writing specialists. Our findings reveal that writing, as an act of negotiation of identity in third space, has the potential to actuate the fluidity of the space, so that it can become a site of liberation and resistance that may transform the very act of scholarly writing. What our study shows is that writing offers third space practitioners an opportunity to establish a narrative thread that may stabilise their liquid roles in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work praxis has long been in conversation with feminist praxis and has more recently been informed by an anticolonial feminist praxis that aims to center theorizing, activism, and service delivery around individuals and communities considered "most marginalized." While this "most marginalized" class may be deemed newly worthy social service consumers this framing reinforces extant settler colonial hierarchies of power and oppression by constituting new classes of "deserving" and "undeserving" social service recipients. This article explores how the feminist organizing, scholarship, and activism of the past decade—specifically around the #MeToo movement and trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) wars—have impacted social work praxis and laid bare the dualistic binds of a post-structuralism that has been consumed and recast within neoliberalism as demobilized identity politics. By examining these limitations, questions are raised regarding next steps for a social work praxis concerned with justice, transformation, and liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this column, I urge educators to reject transactional partnerships in their family literacy work. Drawing from my research centering Black parents' school engagement experiences, I examine two types of transactional partnerships: those that tether high‐quality education to educators' perceptions of parenting, and those that tether high‐quality education to parents' levels of advocacy. Ultimately, I consider four characteristics of educators enacting more liberatory family literacy work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes up the concept of surrogacy from Lynne Howarth's research within the domains of cataloging and information studies and considers it in light of parallel and emergent research informed by a range of disciplines including Indigenous studies, museum studies, queer theory, and anthropology. The cases considered share Howarth's approach to cataloging as a liberatory tool for expressing relationality, agency, and empowerment. Common amongst the examples is also an interest in the ways knowledge systems can be hospitable—that is, to both support the growth of knowledge, and nurture the social, material and natural worlds in which we live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose of the review: To define the best up-to-date practical approach to treat benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV). Recent findings: Both posterior and horizontal canal BPPV canalith repositioning maneuvers (Semont, Epley, and Gufoni's maneuvers) are level 1 evidence treatment for evidence-based medicine. The choice of maneuver (since their efficacy is comparable) is up to the clinician's preferences, failure of the previous maneuver, or movement restrictions of the patient. Maneuvers for controversial variants, such as anterior canal and apogeotropic posterior canal BPPV, have weaker evidence of efficacy. Despite this, these variants are increasingly diagnosed and treated. Maneuvers also play a role in the differential diagnosis with central vestibular disorders. Chair-assisted treatment may be of help if available while surgical canal plugging should be indicated in selected same-canal, same-side intractable severe BPPV. Summary: The primary evidence-based treatment strategy for BPPV should be physical therapy through maneuvers. Despite the high success rate of liberatory maneuvers, there is a low percentage of subjects who have unsatisfactory outcomes. These patients need to be investigated to identify recurrences, multiple canal involvement, associated comorbidities (migraine, persistent postural perceptual dizziness), or risk factors for recurrences (low vitamin D serum level). Future research should also identify the optimum maneuvers for variants whose diagnosis and treatment are still a matter of some debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa since 1994 is widely represented as a society which has broken both historically and politically with white supremacy. One of the central discursive pillars sustaining this representation is the appeal to the most recent South African constitution Act 108 of 1996, the founding provisions of which declare that South Africa is founded on the value of non-racialism. The central argument of this article is that an examination of the philosophical underpinnings of the non-racialism of the constitution can give us a better understanding of why and how South Africa remains a racial polity despite the coming into effect of the constitution. We will conclude the article by considering the ethical and political demands which must be met before the actuality of non-racialism may be experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article serves as the introduction to the Special Issue on Liberatory and Critical Voices in Decolonising Community Psychologies. The Special Issue was inspired by the Sixth International Conference on Community Psychology, held in South Africa in May 2016, and resonates with the call for the conscious decolonisation of knowledge creation. We argue that the decolonial turn in psychology has re-centred critical projects within the discipline, particularly in the Global South, and offered possibilities for their (re)articulation, expansion, and insertion into dominant and mimetic knowledge production. In the case of Africa, we suggest that the work of decolonising community psychologies will benefit from engagement with the continent’s multiple knowledge archives. Recognising community psychologies’ (dis)contents and the possibilities for its reconstruction, and appealing to a liberatory knowledge archive, the Issue includes a distinctive collection of articles that are diverse in conceptualisation, content, and style, yet evenly and singularly focused on the construction of insurgent knowledges and praxes. As representations of both production and resistance, the contributions in this issue provide the intellectual and political platforms for social, gender, and epistemic justice. We conclude that there are unexplored and exciting prospects for scholarly work on the psychologies embedded in the overlooked knowledge archives of the Global South. Such work would push the disciplinary boundaries of community psychologies; help produce historicised and situated conceptions of community, knowledge, and liberation; and offer distinctive contributions to the global bodies of knowledge concerned with the well-being of all of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experience has become a primary means by which we understand post-industrial, consumer societies. Whilst we have learned much about consumption experiences, most studies have relied on theories whose underlying assumptions have restricted our understanding of this important topic. More specifically, whilst the experiential literature has expanded our perspective of the broader structures of consumption experiences, it has limited our understanding by ascribing a function(s) to these experiences. By interrogating not merely the empirical findings but also the theoretical (and methodological) assumptions underlying the extant literature, this article aims both to critique and to extend our current understanding of consumption experiences. Towards this end, we propose a framework that examines consumption experiences on the dimensions of structural relations and functional consequences. Based on the corresponding sub-dimensions of structure, anti-structure, function and anti-function, we identify four primary types of consumption experience: performance, liberatory, stochastic and adventure. A detailed description of each type of consumption experience is provided, with special emphasis given to anti-functional experiences, the nature of which both challenges and expands our understanding of experiential consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poststructuralist philosophy of Deconstruction proposed by Derrida gives rise to a poetics of disruption and transgression through dismantling of the traditional bases of Western epistemology, i.e., the idea of logocentrism, presence, transcendental signifiers and dyadic pairs which support the notion of fixed meanings and give rise to distinct and isolated categories. The current study argues that the erosion of absolute centers and distinct identities resulting from deconstructive relativism has led to the collapse of the binary opposition between the real and the magical in contemporary fantasy literature. Selected works of postmodern fantasy literature are analyzed to assess how in keeping with the principles of difféprance, supplement and trace these works represent a decentered universe in which the categories of magic and the real are fluid and subject to constant slippage. Consequently, the real world moves parallel to and not distinct from the world of magic and there is a constant overlapping of categories of real and magical. The present study argues that this dissolution of the boundaries between real and magical enables these postmodern texts to interrogate, subvert and dismantle logocentric thought manifested in ethnocentrism and racism and support a liberatory politics in which the voice of the marginalized alterity is recovered. For this purpose the current study is delimited to an analysis of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and J. R. R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]