scholarly journals Performing Baadinyaa: Music, Emotion, and Health in The Gambia

Author(s):  
Bonnie B. McConnell

This medical ethnomusicological study examines musical performance in The Gambia as a socio-emotional intervention to promote health and wellbeing. Based on interviews and observations conducted during seventeen months of ethnographic research (2009; 2012-2013), this research is also informed by my long-term involvement with a Gambian HIV/AIDS support group (2006-present). I use the local concept of baadinyaa (Mandinka, “positive relationship”) in order to interrogate connections between musical performance, emotion, and health as they are articulated by performers and health workers in The Gambia. The concept of baadinyaa provides insight into musical performance as a “flexibility primer” (Hinton 2008) that facilitates emotional transformation and healing. Not uniform across social categories, emotional responses to music are shaped by social identity and power relations as well as individual experience and preference. This study finds that in the face of conflict and stigma, Gambian artists use musical performance, and its association with baadinyaa, as a resource to address negative emotions such as anger and anxiety and thereby promote health and healing.

Author(s):  
Daniel Terry ◽  
Blake Peck

Grit is the capacity to persevere, to have passion, and be committed to achieve goals long-term regardless of adversity or challenge. Grit provides an insight into why some nursing students succeed academically or clinically, while others do not. This quantitative cross-sectional correlational study measured levels of grit among nursing students undertaking a three-year bachelor’s degree program. All students (n = 2349) within the program were invited to complete a questionnaire which included the short grit scale (Grit-S) which measured each student’s level of perseverance and passion. Overall, it was highlighted that increased levels of grit correlated with an increase in the student’s year of study, greater perceived clinical and academic performance, not using television as a motivator for entry to nursing, being lower on the socio-economic spectrum, and being older in age. Grit was found to develop exponentially as students entered second and third years, suggesting that a balance of constant academic and clinical challenge was an impetus for many to achieve in the face of adversity, and is reminiscent of the journey of the koi fish. This paper culminates in a call for educators to consider the inclusion of creative grit forming challenges that focus on developing a student’s sense of open-mindedness within first year of undergraduate nursing programs.


Author(s):  
Dr. Uma Shankar Shukla

How does COVID-19 pandemic affect the India? How many people can be hit in a state and how many of them will succumb to the disease? When is it going to peak? How long should the government continue with the lockdown? What is the damage to the economy and what is its impact on each sector? These are some of the questions that haunt not only the decision makers but every sensible people in India. Mathematical models developed by mathematicians and epidemiologists has come to assist decision makers in evaluating the effects of countermeasures to an epidemic before they actually deploy them. The model could give political and beuricatic person's critical insights into the best steps they could take to counter the spread of disease in the face of pandemics. Mathematicians use modeling to represent, analyze and make predictions or otherwise provide insight into real world phenomena. Real world scenarios can be designed into a mathematical model to bring clarity to big messy questions amid fast changing variables. These models aim to make simplifying assumptions in order to arrive at tractable equations. Dealing with the novel coronavirus is an unprecedented situation which the world could not have foreseen. In order to track the COVID-19 pandemic, make predictions about the disease's progression and take decisions, as of now, the government is solely dependent on data from doctors and health workers.


Author(s):  
Joanne R. Stevenson ◽  
Hlekiwe Kachali ◽  
Zachary Whitman ◽  
Erica Seville ◽  
John Vargo ◽  
...  

On 22 February 2011, Canterbury and its largest city Christchurch experienced its second major earthquake within six months. The region is facing major economic and organisational challenges in the aftermath of these events. Approximately 25% of all buildings in the Christchurch CBD have been “red tagged” or deemed unsafe to enter. The New Zealand Treasury estimates that the combined cost of the February earthquake and the September earthquake is approximately NZ$15 billion [2]. This paper examines the national and regional economic climate prior to the event, discusses the immediate economic implications of this event, and the challenges and opportunities faced by organisations affected by this event. In order to facilitate recovery of the Christchurch area, organisations must adjust to a new norm; finding ways not only to continue functioning, but to grow in the months and years following these earthquakes. Some organisations relocated within days to areas that have been less affected by the earthquakes. Others are taking advantage of government subsidised aid packages to help retain their employees until they can make long-term decisions about the future of their organisation. This paper is framed as a “report from the field” in order to provide insight into the early recovery scenario as it applies to organisations affected by the February 2011 earthquake. It is intended both to inform and facilitate discussion about how organisations can and should pursue recovery in Canterbury, and how organisations can become more resilient in the face of the next crisis.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid Merkx ◽  
Marlein Ausems ◽  
Luc Budé ◽  
Raymond de Vries ◽  
Marianne J. Nieuwenhuijze

BACKGROUND: Unhealthy gestational weight gain (GWG) contributes to long-term obesity in women and their offspring. The aim of this study is to quantify midwives’ behavior in promoting healthy GWG and to identify the most important determinants related to this behavior.METHODS: A survey based on the attitude–social influence–self-efficacy (ASE) model and prior qualitative research was conducted among 112 Dutch practicing midwives.RESULTS: Midwives were moderately active in monitoring GWG and diet education and less active in physical activity education. Regression analysis showed that efforts to promote healthy GWG were associated with several determinants, including attitudes, self-efficacy, social influence, the involvement of other health workers, health promotion, and barriers.PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: The identified behavioral determinants provide insight into ways to stimulate midwives to promote healthy GWG.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bobby J Cottam ◽  
Eric A. Specking ◽  
Colin A. Small ◽  
Edward A. Pohl ◽  
Gregory S. Parnell ◽  
...  

This paper surveys the literature on resilience, provides several definitions of resilience, and proposes a new comprehensive definition for a resilient engineered system, which is: a system that is able to successfully complete its planned mission(s) in the face of disruption(s) (environmental or adversarial), and has capabilities allowing it to successfully complete future missions with evolving threats. This definition captures the subtle differences between resilience and a resilient engineered system. We further examine the terminology associated with resilience to understand the various resilient time-frames and use the terminology to propose a resilience cycle, which differentiates mission resilience (short term) and platform resilience (long term). We then provide insight into various resilience evaluation methodologies and discuss how understanding the full scope of resilience enable designers to better incorporate resilience into system design, decision makers to consider resilient trade-offs in their assessment, and operators to better manage their systems. A resilient engineered system can lead to improved performance, reduced life-cycle costs, increased value, and extended service life for engineered systems.


Crisis ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jérôme Ottino

This paper deals with an inpatient unit that recently opened in Geneva, specializing in the treatment of patients aged 16-21 years who had attempted suicide or felt the desire to commit suicide. This particular center was established because of the significant weaknesses found in the provision of care to adolescents who had attempted suicide. Despite the growing interest of health workers in this area of study over recent years, the frequency of suicide among the young has not decreased and there are numerous recurrences of the suicide attempts. Further, all efforts to improve the adolescents' compliance with psychiatric treatment have failed to date. The number of drop-outs from treatment is still very high. Thus, the objectives of our inpatient unit are as follows: (1) to overcome initial resistance to treatment and to improve long-term compliance; (2) to decrease the number of recurrent attempts as a consequence of the above, thus increasing life expectancy; (3) to offer the adolescents who have tried (or have contemplated) committing suicide an improved quality of life, after first helping them overcome the suicidal crisis. To achieve these goals, the therapeutic team of the unit proposes short stays during which the work with the adolescents consists of a very intensive psychoanalytic-oriented crisis intervention. Numerous practical aspects of our therapeutic approach in the inpatient unit are related here in detail, always with reference to our theoretical hypothesis.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Sarah Hackett

Drawing upon a collection of oral history interviews, this paper offers an insight into entrepreneurial and residential patterns and behaviour amongst Turkish Muslims in the German city of Bremen. The academic literature has traditionally argued that Turkish migrants in Germany have been pushed into self-employment, low-quality housing and segregated neighbourhoods as a result of discrimination, and poor employment and housing opportunities. Yet the interviews reveal the extent to which Bremen’s Turkish Muslims’ performances and experiences have overwhelmingly been the consequences of personal choices and ambitions. For many of the city’s Turkish Muslim entrepreneurs, self-employment had been a long-term objective, and they have succeeded in establishing and running their businesses in the manner they choose with regards to location and clientele, for example. Similarly, interviewees stressed the way in which they were able to shape their housing experiences by opting which districts of the city to live in and by purchasing property. On the whole, they perceive their entrepreneurial and residential practices as both consequences and mediums of success, integration and a loyalty to the city of Bremen. The findings are contextualised within the wider debate regarding the long-term legacy of Germany’s post-war guest-worker system and its position as a “country of immigration”.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-173
Author(s):  
Andrzej Lorkowski ◽  
Robert Jeszke

The whole world is currently struggling with one of the most disastrous pandemics to hit in modern times – Covid-19. Individual national governments, the WHO and worldwide media organisations are appealing for humanity to universally stay at home, to limit contact and to stay safe in the ongoing fight against this unseen threat. Economists are concerned about the devastating effect this will have on the markets and possible outcomes. One of the countries suffering from potential destruction of this situation is Poland. In this article we will explain how difficult internal energy transformation is, considering the long-term crisis associated with the extraction and usage of coal, the European Green Deal and current discussion on increasing the EU 2030 climate ambitions. In the face of an ongoing pandemic, the situation becomes even more challenging with each passing day.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Akmal Hisham ◽  
Devananthan Ilenghoven ◽  
Wan Syazli Wan Ahmad Kamal ◽  
Salina Ibrahim ◽  
Shah Jumaat Mohd Yussof

The emergence of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has revolutionized the prognosis of HIV-infected patients. However, the extended use of HAART is associated with a disfiguring complication termed lipodystrophy, a disorder of body fat maldistribution causing peripheral fat loss (lipoatrophy) and central fat accumulation (lipohypertrophy). Lipoatrophy commonly affects the face, legs, buttocks and arm, whilst lipohypertrophy frequently favours the abdomen, breast and dorsocervical region. To our knowledge, we present only the second documented case in the literature of a labia majora lipohypertrophy in a HIV-positive patient receiving long-term HAART. The severity of labial abnormality caused significant physical and functional morbidities. Labiaplasty with dermolipectomy of the labia majora and excisional lipectomy of the mons pubis was successfully performed. At a 6-month follow-up, patient had no recurrence with resolution of symptoms and resumption of normal activities of daily living (ADL).


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