Lifelong Learning, The Individual and Community Self-Help

2001 ◽  
pp. 733-754 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Individual

scholarly journals Consumer-run services research and implications for mental health care

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 410-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. P. Segal ◽  
S. L. Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Functional Improvement ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Services Research ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Mental Health Consumers ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact

Mental health consumers/survivors developed consumer-run services (CRSs) as alternatives to disempowering professionally run services that limited participant self-determination. The objective of the CRS is to promote recovery outcomes, not to cure or prevent mental illness. Recovery outcomes pave the way to a satisfying life as defined by the individual consumer despite repetitive episodes of disorder. Recovery is a way of life, which through empowerment, hope, self-efficacy, minimisation of self-stigma, and improved social integration, may offer a path to functional improvement that may lead to a better way to manage distress and minimise the impact of illness episodes. ‘Nothing about us without us’ is the defining objective of the process activity that defines self-help. It is the giving of agency to participants. Without such process there is a real question as to whether an organisation is a legitimate CRS or simply a non-governmental organisation run by a person who claims lived experience. In considering the effectiveness of CRSs, fidelity should be defined by the extent to which the organisation's process conveys agency. Unidirectional helping often does for people what they can do for themselves, stealing agency. The consequence of the lack of fidelity in CRSs to the origins of the self-help movement has been a general finding in multisite studies of no or little difference in outcomes attributable to the consumer service. This, from the perspective of the research summarised herein, results in the mixing of programmatic efforts, some of which enhance outcomes as they are true mutual assistance programmes and some of which degrade outcomes as they are unidirectional, hierarchical, staff-directed helping efforts making false claims to providing agency. The later CRS interventions may provoke disappointment and additional failure. The indiscriminate combining of studies produces the average: no effect.

Genealogy of the Cerebral Subject

Being Brains ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Vidal ◽  
Francisco Ortega
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Brain Structure And Function ◽  
Cerebral Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Function ◽  
Cerebral Self ◽  
The Brain

The first chapter proposes to trace the distant roots of the cerebral subject to the late seventeenth century, and particularly to debates about the seat of the soul, the corpuscularian theory of matter, and John Locke’s philosophy of personal identity. In the wake of Locke, eighteenth century authors began to assert that the brain is the only part of the body we need to be ourselves. In the nineteenth century, this form of deterministic essentialism contributed to motivate research into brain structure and function, and in turn confirmed the brain-personhood nexus. Since then, from phrenology to functional neuroimaging, neuroscientific knowledge and representations have constituted a powerful support for prescriptive outlooks on the individual and society. “Neuroascesis,” as we call the business that sells programs of cerebral self-discipline, is a case in point, which this chapter also examines. It appeals to the brain and neuroscience as bases for its self-help recipes to enhance memory and reasoning, fight depression, anxiety and compulsions, improve sexual performance, achieve happiness, and even establish a direct contact with God. Yet underneath the neuro surface lie beliefs and even concrete instructions that can be traced to nineteenth-century hygiene manuals.

On the (Virtual) Road

2017 ◽  
pp. 164-179
Author(s):  
Robert Matthew Poole
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Us ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
The Individual

In the US, travel writing and the travel novel have historically held important positions in the literary landscape –not only as self-help guides and conveyances for empirical information but also as vehicles for satire, social commentary and analyses of the human condition. John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat-Moon are just a few of the important 20th century authors who have made insightful use of this genre. Today, increasingly realistic virtual reality environments have been sculpted, imbued with creative content and populated with both artificial agents and real avatars on a scale that can be measured in hundreds of virtual square miles. In some cases, the content is thematic and designed; in others it has grown up spontaneously through the individual contributions and creativity of users and small groups. It is this spontaneous blossoming of art, culture and ideas sprawling across increasingly spacious and interconnected virtual landscapes that presents us with the opportunity to continue the tradition of the epic travel story across new virtual territory.

Professional Growth and Development

2015 ◽  
pp. 165-181
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Professional Growth ◽  
Growth And Development ◽  
Health Care Services ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Continuous Development ◽  
Care Services ◽  
The Individual

The purpose of this chapter is to explore why a medical professional's career is one of lifelong learning and growth. Even after the period of formal education is over, continuous development and maintenance of skills is essential. Along with this, attention is also directed towards the improvement of health care services at the individual and general levels.

scholarly journals Educationalisation of youth unemployment through lifelong learning policies in Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 525-543
Author(s):  
Oscar Valiente ◽  
Queralt Capsada-Munsech ◽  
Jan Peter G de Otero
Keyword(s):  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Management Strategy ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Youth Unemployment ◽  
Economic Problem ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Policy Initiatives ◽  
Learning Policies ◽  
The Individual

In the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, European authorities reinforced the economic objectives of European lifelong learning policy, promoting employability solutions to address youth unemployment, and increasing their political influence on the implementation of national lifelong learning reforms. This article investigates to what extent these supranational policy orientations have been translated into concrete national lifelong learning initiatives. Although European countries were not equally affected in terms of time and intensity by the rise in youth unemployment rates, the political responses from their governments shared a central focus on employability solutions to youth unemployment in lifelong learning policy reforms. Our comparative analysis shows how different lifelong learning policy initiatives managed to ‘educationalise’ a structural economic problem (i.e. youth unemployment) into an individual educational concern (i.e. lack of education and skills). We argue that the ‘educationalisation’ of youth unemployment through lifelong learning policies is a crisis management strategy, which has allowed governments to focus on the individual symptoms of the problem while avoiding offering solutions to the underlying structural causes of young people’s poor labour market prospects.

‘Be a model, not a critic’: Self-help culture, implicit censorship and the silent organization

Organization ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 135050842093923 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Mygind du Plessis
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Meaningful Activity ◽  
7 Habits ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Analytical Perspective ◽  
Employee Silence ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Empirical Point ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article seeks to explain ‘silent organizations’ (i.e. organizations with an absence of critical voices) through an analytical perspective derived from Judith Butler’s work on censorship, and in this way suggest an alternative to explanations in the existing literature on employee silence, which are often tied to the actions and motivations of the individual employee. It is thus argued that self-help books are reflective of wider cultural dynamics and concomitant normative pressures directed at the subject in contemporary capitalism, which among other things promote the absence of criticism in the workplace. The empirical point of departure for this argument is the two bestselling and culturally resonant self-help books The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Theoretically, the article applies Butler’s notion of ‘implicit censorship’ where censorship is understood as productive in the sense of being constitutive of language and subjects. Hence, in the analysis, it is shown how discursive regimes in self-help literature tend to be constructed in such a way that extroverted criticism cannot emerge as a meaningful activity, and is thus implicitly censored.

Self Help, Not Self Pity': Caring for People with Diabetes in a Voluntary Organisation

1997 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Elica Ristevski ◽  
Heather Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Health Promotion ◽  
Support Services ◽  
Cost Efficiency ◽  
Service Provision ◽  
Voluntary Sector ◽  
Voluntary Organisation ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Voluntary Organisations

The importance of the voluntary sector in providing services for people with a chronic illness has been increasingly recognised. A consumer organisation in the voluntary sector, which provides services for people with diabetes, was selected to explore the role of voluntary organisations in service provision. The investigation revealed that voluntary organisations provide support services such as information and education, advocacy, health promotion, the encouragement of research, social activities, and aids and appliances. These services focus on the individual, social, financial and economic needs of people with diabetes and fill the gaps in programs provided by public sector organisations, which are largely targeted toward acute care, are less flexible, and increasingly concerned with cost efficiency. With the shift towards decentralising services to the community and the increased participation of consumers in health care, the work of voluntary organisations will become even more indispensable in Australia.

scholarly journals Foucault, Governmentality, Neoliberalism and Adult Education - Perspective on the Normalization of Social Risks

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Kopecký
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Adult Education ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
The Individual

Foucault, Governmentality, Neoliberalism and Adult Education - Perspective on the Normalization of Social RisksThe article deals with the relevance of the work of Foucault to critical analysis of the political concept of lifelong learning that currently dominates. This concept relates to the field of adult education and learning. The article makes reference to the relatively late incorporation of Foucault's work within andragogy. It shows the relevance of Foucault's concept of a subject situated within power relations where the relation between knowledge and power plays a key role. The analysis of changing relations between knowledge and power will help us to understand important features of neoliberal public policies. The motif of human capital is key. The need to continually adapt to the changing economic and social conditions follows on from the neoliberal interpretation of learning, and the individual is to blame for failure on the labour market or in life generally.

Dezvoltare personală și feminism: O perspectivă sociologică asupra mișcărilor pentru drepturile femeilor în România neoliberală

Transilvania ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 51-61
Author(s):  
Elena Trifan
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Structural Inequality ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

The article aims to analyze the ways in which personal development is used as a tool to manage social justice issues, domestic violence cases and other forms of structural inequality. In most works in the social sciences, self-help discourse has been criticized for reiterating the individualizing neoliberal discourse that leads to growing social inequalities, along with blaming the most vulnerable for their own fate. However, personal development as a practice has been used by organizations working at community level to address personal issues caused by social inequalities. The analysis aims to present the intertwining of global ideological and political plans at the individual level through non-governmental organizations, their projects and personal development courses. The research consisted in the analysis of the activities and projects of the organizations that are part of the Network for Preventing and Combating Violence against Women (VIF) and the ethnography data of personal development practices in Romania from a previous research.

scholarly journals EDITORIAL FOREWORD

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 659-661
Author(s):  
Akram Khater ◽  
Jeffrey Culang
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Life Choices ◽  
Ethical Practices ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Editorial Foreword

How to realize your self? This question, reflective of neoliberal understandings of individual subjectivity and the sacred, is the basis of the Egyptian self-help guide whose artwork graces this issue's cover. The book is one among hundreds like it that can be bought in Egypt's bookstalls and bookstores, from where they circulate through the homes and workplaces of readers. This growing and popular corpus is the focus of Jeffrey T. Kenney's “Selling Success, Nurturing the Self: Self-Help Literature, Capitalist Values, and the Sacralization of Subjective Life in Egypt,” the first of two articles that make up the section “Therapeutic Discourses.” Kenney argues that as capitalism has expanded in Egypt, it has given rise to a pervasive consumer culture and, relatedly, a self-help literature that competes with Islamic etiquette manuals. Mixing modern ideas and ethical practices to form varied and unpredictable combinations, self-help has become a flat universal idiom, but what has given it its legitimacy in Egypt is its association with local tradition. “The inherent message of self-help,” Kenney writes, “is not simply the glorification of the individual but, more pointedly, the sacralization of the self and subjective life choices—an interpretive trend that, in Egypt, simultaneously functionalizes Islam and fosters new understandings of what it means to be Muslim.”

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