The child with developmental disabilities: The effects on the whole family. What do the families really need from the ‘early intervention’ professional system?

This paper is based on the premise that the current services delivered to children with developmental disabilities and their families in Wales are in need of revision in order to fully support the families to then be able to support their children. Currently services use a medically dominated approach in trying to ‘fix’ these disabled children and are lacking regard for the emotional and psychological impact on the families. The author comes from a position of having worked with these families as a clinical psychologist for over 20 years and shares with the reader things that her lived experiences tell her matter to these families and what families have said matters. There are ‘extra’ demands of looking after a child with developmental needs and in managing oneself in relation to a complex set of professional demands (services). In relation to this, there are a complex array of emotional experiences and dilemmas that parents are often fluctuating between. Six key themes have been developed which potentially form a model to think about some of the dynamics for families in these situations; Denial v acceptance, Guilt v forgiveness, isolation v support, fear v courage and anxious thinking v reimagining the family story. This paper provides the reader with a practical and strength-based model for service delivery to support children with developmental disabilities and their families. The new model of care is about helping families ‘to come to terms with’ a condition that cannot be cured. The new vision is about adaptation, re-framing or seeing from a different perspective, that is, a ‘fulfillment in new dreaming’. Families must adjust physically, psychologically and practically to living with limitations which can be severe and uncertain at times and may not be resolved. Two main principles that should be followed: 1. Caring about what matters. That is to say addressing a child’s developmental disabilities within the broad context of the child and family’s lives. Parents need space to acknowledge and process their feelings without judgement, with professionals and peers who have ‘good’ understanding and empathy. 2. We the people. Health care should become the work of we the people not we the professionals serving the rest of the people. At the heart of it is the orientating ideal that captures what the work is about – well-being of families. The principles of the model being to engage a resource that is largely untapped in our strained healthcare system: the knowledge, wisdom and energy of individuals, families and communities who have a child with developmental disabilities/learning disabilities in their everyday lives. These families are no longer simply consumers of services who respond to requests to ‘fix’ disabled children. The author describes what she is doing to develop services including the development of Early Positive Approaches to support (EPAtS). The author also considers some issues that get in the way of developing this new practice smoothly. Summary A new way of looking at and considering what is important in the professional system supporting children with developmental disabilities and their families.

We the people? - Theorising constitutional democratic legitimacy to reflect on and enrich New Zealand's constitution

<p>This paper explores the concept of constitutional democratic legitimacy and the democratic legitimacy of New Zealand’s constitution in particular. In so doing, it considers Bruce Ackerman’s constitutional theory in We the People, Volume 1: Foundations and the criticisms it has provoked to develop a theoretical framework of three constitutional models (monism, dualism and rights foundationalism) that can be used to assess constitutional democratic legitimacy. It then utilises this framework as a tool for analysing New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements, observing that New Zealand has a particularly sophisticated monist constitution, noting s 268 of the Electoral Act 1993 and the adoption of MMP voting as particular institutional examples. Nevertheless, it is recognised that New Zealand’s constitution may still be critiqued in terms of its claim to democratic legitimacy through the alternative perspectives of monism (focusing on remaining flaws in New Zealand’s electoral system), dualism (focusing on the absence of avenues for binding public constitutional participation) and rights foundationalism (focusing on the constitutional place of the Treaty of Waitangi). Alternative suggestions for reform are offered.</p>

We the people? - Theorising constitutional democratic legitimacy to reflect on and enrich New Zealand's constitution

<p>This paper explores the concept of constitutional democratic legitimacy and the democratic legitimacy of New Zealand’s constitution in particular. In so doing, it considers Bruce Ackerman’s constitutional theory in We the People, Volume 1: Foundations and the criticisms it has provoked to develop a theoretical framework of three constitutional models (monism, dualism and rights foundationalism) that can be used to assess constitutional democratic legitimacy. It then utilises this framework as a tool for analysing New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements, observing that New Zealand has a particularly sophisticated monist constitution, noting s 268 of the Electoral Act 1993 and the adoption of MMP voting as particular institutional examples. Nevertheless, it is recognised that New Zealand’s constitution may still be critiqued in terms of its claim to democratic legitimacy through the alternative perspectives of monism (focusing on remaining flaws in New Zealand’s electoral system), dualism (focusing on the absence of avenues for binding public constitutional participation) and rights foundationalism (focusing on the constitutional place of the Treaty of Waitangi). Alternative suggestions for reform are offered.</p>

Democratic Aesthetics: Scenes of Political Violence and Anxiety in Nari Ward and Ocean Vuong

By attending to art and writing that interrogates US citizenship and state violence, this essay foregrounds the structural antagonism between democracy as an instituted form of rule, which depends on inegalitarian hierarchies, and democracy’s egalitarian drive. It argues that the realization of democracy as a form of governance (consensus democracy) occurs by substituting the rule of a part for the whole, which violently forces democracy’s constitutive figures to conform to and negotiate its organizing logics. Nari Ward’s We the People (2011) allegorizes this inherent tension in democracy as one between synecdoche and metonymy. The article then theorizes a new form of democratic politics through an engagement with Jacques Rancière before turning to Ocean Vuong’s “Notebook Fragments” (2016) and “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds” (2016) as articulations of a democratic aesthetics constituted by figures—including metonymy, irony, and catachresis—that interrupt the substitutions of synecdoche. Vuong’s poetry foregrounds the violence enacted by state fantasies and insists on the democratic equality disavowed by consensus democracy. Together, Ward and Vuong locate the political force of aesthetics not in reassuring visions of inclusion but in operations that disturb and resist any form of hierarchy.

“We the People of Israel”: Covenant, Constitution, and the Supposed Biblical Origins of Modern Democratic Political Thought

As an originally political term, study of the concept of “covenant” has long demonstrated the intersection of biblical studies and political theory. In recent decades, the association between covenant and constitution has come to the forefront of modern political thought in attempts to find the origins of certain democratic ideals in the descriptions of biblical Israel, in order to garner either religious or cultural authority. This is exemplified in the claims of Daniel J. Elazar that the first conceptual seeds of American federalism are found in the covenants of the Hebrew Bible. Taking Elazar’s work as a starting and end point, this paper applies contemporary biblical scholarship to his definition of biblical covenant in order to reveal the influences of his own American political environment and that of the interpreters he is dependent upon. The notion that biblical covenant or its interpretation remains a monolithic or static concept is overturned by a survey of the diverse receptions of covenant in the history of biblical scholarship from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries, contrasting American and German interpretive trends. As such, I aim to highlight the reciprocal relationship between religion and politics, and the academic study of both, in order to challenge the claim that modern political thought can be traced back to biblical conceptions.

The Presidency Before Trump

This chapter explores how Congress, the courts, and we the people have permitted presidents for the last ninety years to accumulate an immense amount of power with few meaningful and effective restraints. In doing so, the chapter shows how Trump’s abuses of presidential authority were not only the actions of a reckless and autocratic leader, but were also the outgrowth of the steady accumulation of presidential powers that has taken place since the 1930s under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Although progressives since the Vietnam War have worked to limit presidential authority in matters related to armed conflicts and national security, they generally have not pushed for restraining that authority in domestic matters. It is time for progressives to take into account the extent to which proposed laws, regulations, and executive orders expand presidential domestic powers when determining whether such measures merit their political support. This means that there may be times when progressives should refuse to support measures that unduly expand presidential authority even in instances in which the exercise of that authority advances progressive goals. To illustrate this point, the chapter argues that progressives should have been more cognizant of the extent to which President Barack Obama’s humanitarian but unilateral decision to cease deporting Dreamers—the large number of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children—expanded presidential powers.