scholarly journals “Spend your spoons wisely”: Conceptualizations of time, energy and aging invisibly with Crohn’s Disease

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 603-603
Author(s):  
Ginny Natale ◽  
Manacy Pai

Abstract An increasing number of people with chronic medical disabilities are living longer and into old age due to the growing medical and technological advancements over the past half century. We used grounded theory to examine the lived experience of aging “with” a disability in a non-elderly population. On average, participants were 37 years of age at the time of interview. The average time since diagnosis was 17 years and ranged from 3 to 34 years. Many worked full-time outside of the home and some held advanced or graduate degrees. Of the 35 participants interviewed, three-quarters expressed worries about the future and aging, specifically related to physical limitations of having CD. The other 25% talked about learning to accept the diagnosis and ‘moving forward’ with their life as they age. All participants described the difficulties of fatigue and energy limitations. Planning of life was limited to 24 hours — a direct consequence of functional limitations of a relapsing-remitting disease. The most prominent theme that emerged from participants’ narratives to explain aging invisibly with a chronic illness was quantifying energy into ‘spoons’, a way of measuring the stock of their energy on any given day. These findings translate into important insights into the process of aging for those who live and age “with” Crohn’s as their everyday lives are immersed in managing the varying whims of this illness.

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Yoffee ◽  
Roger Matthews ◽  
Bruce G, Trigger ◽  
Philip L. Kohl ◽  
David Webster ◽  
...  

For more than a century, archaeologists have frequently been drawn to understand the human past in broadly evolutionary terms, applying Darwinian thinking to the development of human societies. The unilinear models of human development that often result typically regard the state as the culmination of human progress, the end-point of a journey through intervening stages of bands, tribes and chiefdoms. Neo-evolutionary thinking was especially prevalent from the 1940s onwards, in the work of Julian Steward and others writing on the origins of the state. In the volume reviewed, Norman Yoffee challenges the former dominance of the neo-evolutionary approach, arguing that over the past half century it has stifled rather than stimulated our understanding of early state development.Yoffee contests the idea that states develop through a series of programmatic stages from less complex kinds of society. Instead, he stresses the diversity of the archaic state, drawing heavily on his specialist knowledge (drawn from texts as well as archaeology) of early Mesopotamia. Here we see city-state societies in which heterarchies play a role alongside hierarchies, and in which the varieties of lived experience varied considerably from place to place, even though all may at some level be considered to have been part of a shared Mesopotamian civilization.Yoffee's book is not, however, concerned solely with Mesopotamia; far from it, he draws comparative evidence from Egypt, South and East Asia and Central and South America to demonstrate the diversity and fluidity of the entities he is describing. Few of them conform to models that might be drawn from ethnography, and each state may in many ways be considered unique. Yet in a broader perspective, all states arise through a widespread pattern of change that has taken place in human society since the end of the Pleistocene in which individuals and groups have competed for control of resources.Yoffee concludes that ‘The central myth about the study of the earliest states ... is that there was something that could be called the archaic state, and that all of the earliest states were simply variations on this model’. The methodological alternative is to consider each society (of whatever type) as individual and unique, and constantly in a state of flux. In this review feature we invite a series of archaeologists specializing in the study of early states to address this and other issues raised by this important book. We begin, however, with an opening statement from the author himself.


Author(s):  
Elijah Anderson ◽  
Duke W. Austin ◽  
Craig Lapriece Holloway ◽  
Vani S. Kulkarni

With the racial progress the nation has made over the past half century, including the growth of the black middle class and the election of a black president, many are now prepared to proclaim the United States a postracial society, where egalitarian values most often prevail; race is no longer a significant barrier to power, privilege, and prestige; and racial prejudice is mostly a thing of the past. When observed ethnographically, the lived experience of race relations suggests a different view and conceptual framework. As the legacy of racial caste, the color line persists in social interaction and is evident in racially determined perspectives and local working conceptions that order race relations and contribute to persistent racial inequality. Indeed, the claim of a postracial society is an ideological discourse that denies continuing patterns of race relations.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Philip L. Martin

Japan and the United States, the world’s largest economies for most of the past half century, have very different immigration policies. Japan is the G7 economy most closed to immigrants, while the United States is the large economy most open to immigrants. Both Japan and the United States are debating how immigrants are and can con-tribute to the competitiveness of their economies in the 21st centuries. The papers in this special issue review the employment of and impacts of immigrants in some of the key sectors of the Japanese and US economies, including agriculture, health care, science and engineering, and construction and manufacturing. For example, in Japanese agriculture migrant trainees are a fixed cost to farmers during the three years they are in Japan, while US farmers who hire mostly unauthorized migrants hire and lay off workers as needed, making labour a variable cost.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.


1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (4I) ◽  
pp. 321-331
Author(s):  
Sarfraz Khan Qureshi

It is an honour for me as President of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists to welcome you to the 13th Annual General Meeting and Conference of the Society. I consider it a great privilege to do so as this Meeting coincides with the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the state of Pakistan, a state which emerged on the map of the postwar world as a result of the Muslim freedom movement in the Indian Subcontinent. Fifty years to the date, we have been jubilant about it, and both as citizens of Pakistan and professionals in the social sciences we have also been thoughtful about it. We are trying to see what development has meant in Pakistan in the past half century. As there are so many dimensions that the subject has now come to have since its rather simplistic beginnings, we thought the Golden Jubilee of Pakistan to be an appropriate occasion for such stock-taking.


Author(s):  
C. Daniel Batson

This book provides an example of how the scientific method can be used to address a fundamental question about human nature. For centuries—indeed for millennia—the egoism–altruism debate has echoed through Western thought. Egoism says that the motivation for everything we do, including all of our seemingly selfless acts of care for others, is to gain one or another self-benefit. Altruism, while not denying the force of self-benefit, says that under certain circumstances we can care for others for their sakes, not our own. Over the past half-century, social psychologists have turned to laboratory experiments to provide a scientific resolution of this human nature debate. The experiments focused on the possibility that empathic concern—other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need—produces altruistic motivation to remove that need. With carefully constructed experimental designs, these psychologists have tested the nature of the motivation produced by empathic concern, determining whether it is egoistic or altruistic. This series of experiments has provided an answer to a fundamental question about what makes us tick. Framed as a detective story, the book traces this scientific search for altruism through the numerous twists and turns that led to the conclusion that empathy-induced altruism is indeed part of our nature. It then examines the implications of this conclusion—negative implications as well as positive—both for our understanding of who we are as humans and for how we might create a more humane society.


Author(s):  
Tim Clydesdale ◽  
Kathleen Garces-Foley

Few realize how much Americans’ journey through their twenties has changed during the past half-century or understand how incorrect popular assumptions about young adults’ religious, spiritual, and secular lives are. Today’s twentysomethings have been labelled the “lost generation”—for their presumed inability to identify and lead fulfilling lives, “kidults”—for their alleged refusal to “grow up” and accept adult responsibilities, and the “least religious generation”—for their purported disinterest in religion and spirituality. These characterizations are not only unflattering, they are deeply flawed. The Twentysomething Soul tells an optimistic story about American twentysomethings. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and a survey of thousands across America, it introduces readers to the full spectrum of American young adults, many of whom live purposefully, responsibly, and reflectively. Some prioritize faith and spirituality. Others reject their childhood religion to explore alternatives and practice a personal spirituality. Still others sideline religion and spirituality until their lives get settled or reject organized religion completely. There is change occurring in the religious and spiritual lives of young adults, but little of it is among the 1 in 4 American twentysomethings who have consistently prioritized religious commitment during the past half-century. The change is rather among the now 3 in 10 young adults who, though intentionally unaffiliated with religion, affirm a variety of religious, spiritual, and secular beliefs. The Twentysomething Soul will change the way readers view contemporary young adults, giving an accurate—and refreshing—understanding of their religious, spiritual, and secular lives.


This is the ninth volume of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. As with earlier volumes, these essays follow the tradition of providing a non-sectarian and non-partisan snapshot of the subdiscipline of philosophy of religion. This subdiscipline has become an increasingly important one within philosophy over the last century, and especially over the past half century, having emerged as an identifiable subfield with this timeframe along with other emerging subfields such as the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. This volume continues the initial intention behind the series of attracting the best work from the premier philosophers of religion, as well as including work by top philosophers outside this area when their work and interests intersect with issues in the philosophy of religion. This inclusive approach to the series provides an opportunity to mitigate some of the costs of greater specialization in our discipline, while at the same time inviting wider interest in the work being done in the philosophy of religion.


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