scholarly journals Towards a definition of anti-oppressive dietetic practice in Canada

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-14
Author(s):  
Eric Ng ◽  
Caroline Wai

Increasingly, dietitians have found ourselves working with racialized clients, communities, and colleagues across the health and food systems in Canada. We are often asked to treat the adverse health outcomes of Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities resulting from these oppressions at the individual level. However, it is the role of dietitians to engage in efforts to "reduce health inequities and protect human rights; promote fairness and equitable treatment" (College of Dietitians of Ontario, 2019). An anti-oppression approach is required for dietitians to understand how their power and privilege shape the dietitian-client relationship. The purpose of this commentary is to propose a shift from cultural competence or diversity and inclusion in dietetics to an explicit intention of anti-oppressive dietetic practice. We begin our exploration from the Canadian context. We draw from our background working in health equity in public health, and our experiences facilitating equity training using anti-oppression approaches with dietetic learners and other public health practitioners. In creating a working definition of anti-oppressive dietetic practice, we conducted a scan of anti-oppression statements by health and social services organizations in Ontario, Canada, and literature from critical dietetics. A literature search revealed anti-oppressive practice frameworks in nursing and social work. However, this language is lacking in mainstream dietetic practice, with anti-oppression only discussed within the literature on critical dietetics and social justice. We propose that "dietitians can engage in anti-oppressive practice by providing food and nutrition care/planning/service to clients while simultaneously seeking to transform health and social systems towards social justice."

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald A. Beghetto

Purpose: This article, based on an invited talk, aims to explore the relationship among large-scale assessments, creativity and personalized learning. Design/Approach/Methods: Starting with the working definition of large-scale assessments, creativity, and personalized learning, this article identified the paradox of combining these three components together. As a consequence, a logic mode of large-scale assessment and creativity expressions is illustrated, along with an exploration of new possibilities. Findings: Smarter design of large-scale assessments is needed. Firstly, we need to assess creative learning at the individual level, so complex tasks with high uncertainty should be presented to students. Secondly, additional process and experiential data while students are working on problems need to be captured. Thirdly, the human-artificial intelligence (AI) augmented scoring should be explored, developed, and refined. Originality/Value: This article addresses the drawbacks of current large-scale assessments and explores possibilities for combining assessment with creativity and personalized learning. A logic model illustrating variations necessary for creative learning and considerations and cautions for designing large-scale assessments are also provided.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Francisco Xavier Morales

The problem of identity is an issue of contemporary society that is not only expressed in daily life concerns but also in discourses of politics and social movements. Nevertheless, the I and the needs of self-fulfillment usually are taken for granted. This paper offers thoughts regarding individual identity based on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. From this perspective, identity is not observed as a thing or as a subject, but rather as a “selfillusion” of a system of consciousness, which differentiates itself from the world, event after event, in a contingent way. As concerns the definition  of contents of self-identity, the structures of social systems define who is a person, how he or she should act, and how much esteem he or she should receive. These structures are adopted by consciousness as its own identity structures; however, some social contexts are more relevant for self-identity construction than others. Moral communication increases the probability that structure appropriation takes place, since the emotional element of identity is linked to the esteem/misesteem received by the individual from the interactions in which he or she participates.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerardo Chowell ◽  
Sushma Dahal ◽  
Raquel Bono ◽  
Kenji Mizumoto

AbstractTo ensure the safe operation of schools, workplaces, nursing homes, and other businesses during COVID-19 pandemic there is an urgent need to develop cost-effective public health strategies. Here we focus on the cruise industry which was hit early by the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 40 cruise ships reporting COVID-19 infections. We apply mathematical modeling to assess the impact of testing strategies together with social distancing protocols on the spread of the novel coronavirus during ocean cruises using an individual-level stochastic model of the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. We model the contact network, the potential importation of cases arising during shore excursions, the temporal course of infectivity at the individual level, the effects of social distancing strategies, different testing scenarios characterized by the test’s sensitivity profile, and testing frequency. Our findings indicate that PCR testing at embarkation and daily testing of all individuals aboard, together with increased social distancing and other public health measures, should allow for rapid detection and isolation of COVID-19 infections and dramatically reducing the probability of onboard COVID-19 community spread. In contrast, relying only on PCR testing at embarkation would not be sufficient to avert outbreaks, even when implementing substantial levels of social distancing measures.


Author(s):  
Karly Wildenhaus

While no comprehensive studies have yet been published quantifying the extent of unpaid internships within archives and libraries, their prevalence is easily recognized as widespread. Unpaid internships are offered and facilitated based on the implication that they correlate positively to future job prospects, although recent studies point to evidence that complicates this idea. Instead, the prevalence of unpaid internships may negatively impact efforts for diversity and inclusion among information workers while contributing to greater precarity of labor throughout the workforce. Meanwhile, professional organizations and academic programs often do not discuss the realities of unpaid internships, and some MLIS programs require or encourage students to work without remuneration for course credit at their own expense. Situating unpaid internships within larger questions of economic access, labor laws, indebtedness, and neoliberalization, this paper advocates for the denormalization of unpaid internships within archives and libraries, especially for those institutions that articulate social justice as part of their institutional values. Although rendering these positions obsolete is likely beyond the power of any one entity, this paper identify strategies that can be taken at the individual- and institutional-level to advance economic justice and the dignity of all work that occurs in our respective fields. Pre-print first published online11/25/2018


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (138) ◽  
pp. 20170696 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Morozova ◽  
Ted Cohen ◽  
Forrest W. Crawford

Epidemiologists commonly use the risk ratio to summarize the relationship between a binary covariate and outcome, even when outcomes may be dependent. Investigations of transmissible diseases in clusters—households, villages or small groups—often report risk ratios. Epidemiologists have warned that risk ratios may be misleading when outcomes are contagious, but the nature of this error is poorly understood. In this study, we assess the meaning of the risk ratio when outcomes are contagious. We provide a mathematical definition of infectious disease transmission within clusters, based on the canonical stochastic susceptible–infective model. From this characterization, we define the individual-level ratio of instantaneous infection risks as the inferential target, and evaluate the properties of the risk ratio as an approximation of this quantity. We exhibit analytically and by simulation the circumstances under which the risk ratio implies an effect whose direction is opposite that of the true effect of the covariate. In particular, the risk ratio can be greater than one even when the covariate reduces both individual-level susceptibility to infection, and transmissibility once infected. We explain these findings in the epidemiologic language of confounding and Simpson's paradox, underscoring the pitfalls of failing to account for transmission when outcomes are contagious.


Author(s):  
Emma Rary ◽  
Sarah M. Anderson ◽  
Brandon D. Philbrick ◽  
Tanvi Suresh ◽  
Jasmine Burton

The health of individuals and communities is more interconnected than ever, and emergent technologies have the potential to improve public health monitoring at both the community and individual level. A systematic literature review of peer-reviewed and gray literature from 2000-present was conducted on the use of biosensors in sanitation infrastructure (such as toilets, sewage pipes and septic tanks) to assess individual and population health. 21 relevant papers were identified using PubMed, Embase, Global Health, CDC Stacks and NexisUni databases and a reflexive thematic analysis was conducted. Biosensors are being developed for a range of uses including monitoring illicit drug usage in communities, screening for viruses and diagnosing conditions such as diabetes. Most studies were nonrandomized, small-scale pilot or lab studies. Of the sanitation-related biosensors found in the literature, 11 gathered population-level data, seven provided real-time continuous data and 14 were noted to be more cost-effective than traditional surveillance methods. The most commonly discussed strength of these technologies was their ability to conduct rapid, on-site analysis. The findings demonstrate the potential of this emerging technology and the concept of Smart Sanitation to enhance health monitoring at the individual level (for diagnostics) as well as at the community level (for disease surveillance).


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-13
Author(s):  
Patrick O’Donnell ◽  
Khalifa Elmusharaf

Social exclusion is a concept that has been discussed and debated in many disciplines in recent decades. In 2006 the WHO Social Exclusion Knowledge Network published a report detailing their work explaining the relevance of social exclusion to the domain of health. As part of that work, the authors formulated a complex definition of social exclusion that has proven difficult to adapt or operationalize in healthcare settings. We looked at this WHO work, and at other published evidence, and decided that social exclusion is a concept that is worth measuring at the individual level in healthcare settings. We suggest that the primary healthcare space, in particular, is an ideal setting in which to do that measurement. We have examined existing social exclusion measurement tools, and scrutinised the approaches taken by their authors, and the various domains they measured. We now propose to develop and validate such a tool for use in primary healthcare settings.


2003 ◽  
Vol 06 (03) ◽  
pp. 331-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
YUTAKA I. LEON SUEMATSU ◽  
KEIKI TAKADAMA ◽  
NORBERTO E. NAWA ◽  
KATSUNORI SHIMOHARA ◽  
OSAMU KATAI

Agent-based models (ABMs) have been attracting the attention of researchers in the social sciences, becoming a prominent paradigm in the study of complex social systems. Although a great number of models have been proposed for studying a variety of social phenomena, no general agent design methodology is available. Moreover, it is difficult to validate the accuracy of these models. For this reason, we believe that some guidelines for ABMs design must be devised; therefore, this paper is a first attempt to analyze the levels of ABMs, identify and classify several aspects that should be considered when designing ABMs. Through our analysis, the following implications have been found: (1) there are two levels in designing ABMs: the individual level, related to the design of the agents' internal structure, and the collective level, which concerns the design of the agent society or macro-dynamics of the model; and (2) the mechanisms of these levels strongly affect the outcomes of the models.


2018 ◽  
pp. 60-71
Author(s):  
З. В. Шевченко

Philosophical anthropology proceeds from understanding the essence of man as a fundamentally open, unfinished entity in its formation. But it was just such a formation that the representatives of philosophical anthropology understood differently: some saw certain stages, stages of such formation, some distinguished certain classification types, and only in recent decades more and more anthropologists have drawn attention to multiple identities as anthropological characteristics of man. Anthropology, in this case, seeks objective, mainly natural, grounds for such a plurality: the splitting of subjectivity, for example, should not appear as an accursedness of chance, a psychiatric anomaly, but on the contrary - as a hidden mechanism, which gives the appearance of singularity to the surface of consciousness. Such a fundamentality of the anthropological approach is determined by most of its advantages, but it is precisely it that explains certain limits and even, in a sense, shortcomings, to identify which called philosophical anthropology - in any case, as the basic theory and methodology of the study of multiple identity of the individual.Life is heterogeneous, and therefore identity can not be homogeneous - as long as it is the identity of the living person, and not its image, created by the researchers as a certain codified version of the interpretation of this personality.Modern anthropologists, such as the French researchers Philippe Descola and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, focus on the specificity, certainty of human existence more than on its openness, uncertainty. For Descola the question is in defining of certain types of sociality that create the preconditions for the formation of different types of human identity. While Schaeffer goes much further and criticizes the metaphysical foundations of the monologue definition of human nature as the false in its basis, it is the false thesis of the exclusivity of man among all living forms.Deskola sees basic natural certainty of human peculiarities, but only takes into account existing and past versions of human identity. Future versions of human identity should also be taken into account, but this is somewhat problematic on a biological basis. Biology can only capture new versions of personality identity, but it is unlikely that they can be foreseen. However, everything that can be said about human identity has once arisen, that is, it just never existed. If Schaeffer’s critique of metaphysics and phenomenology is perfect in its orientation to the present and the past, then it clearly breaks down about the future. However, in the future, one can hardly expect the negation of most of the existing biological characteristics of a person – rather, we should talk about their very gradual, piecemeal improvement.Returning to the original contrasting theories of personality and the theory of social systems, it can be argued that theories of personality, which tend to humanitarian, interpretive interpretation of values, are closer to transcendentalist version of philosophical anthropology; however, the naturalistic version represented by Schaeffer, corresponds to the functional demands of social system theories and more rigid and invariant approaches of social sciences. Despite all the achievements of the natural sciences, one shouldn’t forget that they only realize the possibilities of actually proving counter-factual values that humanities give them. Thus, dehumanization of modern science does not appear as a world trend, but only as another challenge to the humanities. They have experienced a great number of such challenges – and giving each time new impetus for the development of natural sciences.Contradiction of transcendental and naturalistic approaches within the framework of philosophical anthropology should be regarded as somewhat conditional. In particular, both approaches provide sufficient grounds for substantiating the multiple identity of the individual. However, each of these approaches emphasizes the other aspect of the multiple identity of the individual: the transcendental one – the ability to create new versions of the identity of the person in the future, and the naturalistic one – on the classification, combinatorial opportunity to consider multiple identities in its actual diversity.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arie T. Greenleaf ◽  
Joseph M. Williams

The entrenched intrapsychic perspective that currently dominates the counseling professions does not philosophically support social justice advocacy. Because an intrapsychic approach to counseling focuses almost exclusively on change at the individual level, interventions to change an oppressive environment are routinely ignored. Thus, this manuscript presents the argument that a paradigm shift towards an ecological perspective, one that recognizes human behavior as a function of person-environment interaction, is necessary to provide practitioners a clear rationale to engage in social justice advocacy in counseling.


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