How can I as a Māori music therapy student develop the use of taonga puoro in my practice to support client recovery in an inpatient mental health setting?

<p>This research focuses on developing the use of taonga puoro as part of an individual's music therapy practice, within the context of an acute mental health unit. This was qualitative research guided by Kaupapa Māori Theory, using a self-reflective action research design of three cycles. Through the three action research cycles, themes were observed and developed within the secondary analysis of clinical notes and a reflective journal, with action plans created as a response. At the end of the three cycles, a model for using taonga puoro in music therapy, 'Nga Pou e Ono', was created by looking retrospectively at the cycles. This research acknowledges the importance of narrative, depth of tpic, acknowledgment of self-determination, spirituality, personal power, and the environment within taonga puoro based music therapy. This research has been inspired by the works of other Māori and Indigenous music therapists such as Dennis Kahui (2008), Nolan Hodgson (2014), and Carolyn Kenny (1989), as well as acknowledging the traditions of taonga puoro for healing within Māori society, and the revivalists whose mahi aroha helped to further embed taonga puoro within te ao Māori.</p>

How can I as a Māori music therapy student develop the use of taonga puoro in my practice to support client recovery in an inpatient mental health setting?

<p>This research focuses on developing the use of taonga puoro as part of an individual's music therapy practice, within the context of an acute mental health unit. This was qualitative research guided by Kaupapa Māori Theory, using a self-reflective action research design of three cycles. Through the three action research cycles, themes were observed and developed within the secondary analysis of clinical notes and a reflective journal, with action plans created as a response. At the end of the three cycles, a model for using taonga puoro in music therapy, 'Nga Pou e Ono', was created by looking retrospectively at the cycles. This research acknowledges the importance of narrative, depth of tpic, acknowledgment of self-determination, spirituality, personal power, and the environment within taonga puoro based music therapy. This research has been inspired by the works of other Māori and Indigenous music therapists such as Dennis Kahui (2008), Nolan Hodgson (2014), and Carolyn Kenny (1989), as well as acknowledging the traditions of taonga puoro for healing within Māori society, and the revivalists whose mahi aroha helped to further embed taonga puoro within te ao Māori.</p>

On Authoritarian Leadership

This chapter outlines the established view of the way leadership in an authoritarian regime operates, emphasizing its arbitrary and violent dimensions. It criticizes this literature in terms of both its assumptions and its empirical accuracy. The chapter then discusses the key concepts used in the following analysis. It identifies five regime types: single party, electoral authoritarian, military, monarchy and personal dictatorship. It then discusses the nature of authoritarian leadership, conceived in terms of an oligarchy, including the bases upon which personal power can rest. The chapter discusses the nature of rules, introducing the three types of rules identified as central to the conduct of oligarch politics: operational, relational and constitutive rules. An explanation of the structure and a chapter summary of the book follows. An appendix to this chapter lists the twenty-nine rules identified as structuring leadership politics in authoritarian regimes.

Nicaragua: power crisis and elections in 2021

The article is devoted to the current internal political situation in Nicaragua. The author analyzes the reasons for the acute socio-political crisis that arose in April 2018, presenting a detailed analysis of a historical background of these events. The author notes that a regime of personal power of President Ortega has been established in the country, relying on bureaucracy and power structures, since it is them playing a key role in preserving Ortega as the country’s President. The paper assesses the alignment of political forces and the general political situation in the opposition camp. The author analyzes the reasons for a number of existing contradictions that plague the opposition bloc of Nicaragua. An analysis of political potential and electoral possibilities of the opposition forces is given. The author predicts a possible scenario for the development of events within the framework of internal political situation in connection with the upcoming elections to be held in November 2021. The author comes to conclusion that the regime of Ortega is weakening and losing its positions, but still retains a margin of safety, which allows him to remain in power. As one of the scenarios for the development of events, the author predicts the possibility of a ‘compromise figure’ coming to power, which, however, does not imply a change in the real balance of power and dominant political figures in state politics.

Is a Title Necessary to Become an Effective Leader?: A Theoretical Perspective

There has been a lot of talks lately about the need for a title/position to be a true leader among academics and researchers. Likewise, most people are confused about the title and the action of a leader in an organization. The words on the street are that most of the leaders believe in their titles, not in their actions, as well as in most of the research on leadership are characterized by fragmentation and conflicting nomenclatures. These confusions and conflicts must be solved through adequate reviewing and research studies. The primary goal of the study is to find out if the title is needed to be a leader and to identify the key qualities to be an action-oriented leader. The review is a stand-alone literature review conducted using the electronics databases such as EBSCO, DOAJ, RESEARCH LIFE, EMBASE and Google Scholar. The information on leadership, effective leadership positions and qualities of effective leaders was obtained after reviewing relevant research papers from these different journals. The present review shows some rough ideas on how to be an action-oriented leader without a title. It also showed that communication skills, trust, pragmatism, and relationship building are the most important qualities of leaders to enhance the personal power to gain organizational power, to be the most effective and dynamic leader, the present review suggests some requirement of additional skills such as trust, compassion, stability, hope, relationship and influential skills to make an impact in the 21st century leadership environment.

The New Kremlinology

The New Kremlinology is the first in-depth examination of the development of regime personalisation in Russia. In the post-Cold War period, many previously democratising countries experienced authoritarian reversals whereby incumbent leaders took over and gravitated towards personalist rule. Scholars have predominantly focused on the authoritarian turn, as opposed to the type of authoritarian rule emerging from it. In a departure from accounts centred on the failure of democratisation in Russia, this book's argument begins from a basic assumption that the political regime of Vladimir Putin is a personalist regime in the making. Focusing on the politics within the Russian ruling coalition since 1999, The New Kremlinology describes the process of regime personalisation, that is, the acquisition of personal power by a leader. Drawing from comparative evidence and theories of personalist rule, the investigation is based on four components of regime personalisation: patronage networks, deinstitutionalisation, media personalisation, and establishing permanency in office. The fact that Russia has gradually acquired many---but not all---of the characteristics associated with a personalist regime, underscores the complexity of political change and that we need to unpack the concept of personalism to understand it better. The lessons of the book extend beyond Russia and illuminate how other personalist and personalising regimes emerge and develop. Furthermore, the title of the book, The New Kremlinology, is chosen to emphasise not only the subject matter, the what, but also the how --- the battery of innovative methods employed to study the black box of non-democratic politics.

Fragile minds, porous selves: Shining a light on autoethnography of mental illness

This article sheds light on autoethnographic accounts of mental illness, to address author and reader concerns and questions and to consider what practitioners can learn from these narrative accounts. Drawing from my own and others’ trajectories, I discuss the drawbacks and dangers of exposing a ‘flawed’ identity, the stigma of serious mental illness, intertextuality issues, the tangled nature of revelation and redemption, framing the ‘Other’ in mental illness autoethnography and depictions of ‘life in the asylum.’ I explain how in telling my own ‘psychiatric’ tale, I looked to the symbolic concept of ‘communitas’ as a means of examining inter-relational processes and collective experience in a psychiatric facility. I argue that, while the act of writing about one’s illness experience can be rightly perceived as a way of reclaiming personal ‘power’ and facilitating healing, attempts to ‘evidence’ recovery can run counter to the writer’s reality of life with or beyond mental illness as personally and socially messy. In answer to the question, ‘at what point does a ‘life in the asylum’ narrative become autoethnographic?' I argue for the potential of autoethnography to contribute to broader sociological, ethnographic and medical debates and thus impact on policy. Speaking up about mental health through autoethnography can help to promote awareness of the unpredictability and socially constructed nature of mental illness and can inform strategies toward reducing public stigma, tackle the cyclical impact of labels, highlight the need to change social and medical attitudes, and revisualize treatment and support.

Driver Positioning and Incentive Budgeting with an Escrow Mechanism for Ride-Sharing Platforms

Drivers on the Lyft ride-share platform do not always know where the areas of supply shortage are in real time. This lack of information hurts both riders trying to find a ride and drivers trying to determine how to maximize their earnings opportunities. Lyft’s Personal Power Zone (PPZ) product helps the company to maintain high levels of service on the platform by influencing the spatial distribution of drivers in real time via monetary incentives that encourage them to reposition their vehicles. The underlying system that powers the product has two main components: (1) a novel “escrow mechanism” that tracks available incentive budgets tied to locations within a city in real time, and (2) an algorithm that solves the stochastic driver-positioning problem to maximize short-run revenue from riders’ fares. The optimization problem is a multiagent dynamic program that is too complicated to solve optimally for our large-scale application. Our approach is to decompose it into two subproblems. The first determines the set of drivers to incentivize and where to incentivize them to position themselves. The second determines how to fund each incentive using the escrow budget. By formulating it as two convex programs, we are able to use commercial solvers that find the optimal solution in a matter of seconds. Rolled out to all 320 cities in which Lyft operates in a little more than a year, the system now generates millions of bonuses that incentivize hundreds of thousands of active drivers to optimally position themselves in anticipation of ride requests every week. Together, the PPZ product and its underlying algorithms represent a paradigm shift in how Lyft drivers drive and generate earnings on the platform. Its direct business impact has been a 0.5% increase in incremental bookings, amounting to tens of millions of dollars per year. In addition, the product has brought about significant improvements to the driver and rider experience on the platform. These include statistically significant reductions in pick-up times and ride cancellations. Finally, internal surveys reveal that the vast majority of drivers prefer PPZs over the legacy system.

Taking Responsibility for the Pasts

One of the most significant connections between power and responsibility occurs in relation to the past. The post-revolutionary political powers of the new nations in the nineteenth century reinterpreted or, less politely formulated, invented their past to fit the process of nation building and only then take responsibility for future development of the nations. And they were not alone: pre-nineteenth century periods and the 20th and 21st centuries abound with examples. In our personal lives, self-empowerment often depends on the capacity to take responsibility for one’s past, including all its happy and traumatic moments. In a court room the forensic evidence of past events alone gives the judges the power to decide the fate of the defendant. In neither of the cases power and responsibility can work together without activating individual and collective memory and without finding a language to express responsibility as a manifestation of political, formal and personal power in a process of political legitimization, legal affirmation of justice and personal identity formation. With literary examples from South Africa this article discusses power and responsibility in their relation to a troubled political, legal and personal past.