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Virginia Woolf's The London Scene essays, published in 1931–1932 in Good Housekeeping , showcase her engagement with the contemporary life sciences, as expressed by Arthur George Tansley, Julian Huxley, and H.G. and G.P. Wells, among others. While Woolf embraces certain aspects of contemporary ecology, namely observing species in their habitats and material interconnectedness—elements that inform her essay writing—the series displays reservations about the field's imperial androcentric foundation. Through the trope of birds, Woolf unsettles this patriarchal framework, positing more polyvocal, cooperative networks of human and non-human exchange to her female middlebrow readers. Rethinking "nature," Woolf suggests, can destabilize social hierarchies and generate alternative political and economic futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an exploration of cultural codes of humanitarianism and human rights in feature-length films. The aim of the article is to contribute to the study of mediated human rights, which has been very little developed [End Page 784] in comparison with work on humanitarian media and culture. The article draws on close readings of films and interviews with filmmakers and curators of human rights film festivals. The analysis is organized into themes that are prominent in critiques of humanitarianism and existing work on human rights films: victims, temporality, scale, and bearing witness. While there can be no definitive list of the essential differences between humanitarianism and human rights, there are differences as well as commonalities in the cultural codes of human rights films and humanitarian media. It is important to be aware of how mediated human rights represent alternatives to the humanitarian imaginary dominant in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Film is an increasingly important medium for communicating knowledge about human rights, and human rights film festivals are growing in number and scope. How do feature-length films produce knowledge about human rights? The analysis here is based on close readings of the narratives and cinematography of films associated with human rights, supplemented by fieldwork carried out at human rights film festivals, and readings of film reviews and published interviews with directors and curators. The article identifies three key cinematic strategies encoded in human rights films to produce knowledge as justified belief: authenticity, reflexivity and ambivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do human rights offer the potential to challenge neoliberalism? I argue that rather than understanding human rights as ideology, as obscuring or legitimating neoliberalism, it is more productive to see both human rights and neoliberalism as hegemonic projects. In this article I explore convergences and divergences between dominant discourses and practices of human rights and neoliberalism around key ideas 'the state', 'the individual' and 'the nation', to clear a space for appreciation of the cultural politics of human rights: divergences in constructions of responsibility and hierarchies of value of concrete individuals offer openings for challenging ideas and practices of neoliberalism through campaigns for human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kate Nash and Anna Garratt discuss how quality improvement can make an impact on practice and summarise the key approaches to this process [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kate Nash, Senior Lecturer and Professional Midwifery Advocate, provides an overview of the advocating for education and quality improvement (A-EQUIP) model and role of the Professional Midwifery Advocate [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newly qualified midwives highlight the lessons they learnt during their final year of training during the global pandemic [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neo-liberalisation of universities is advancing through a bureaucratic revolution. 'Marketising bureaucracy' advances neo-liberalisation through audit and rankings in the name of ensuring value for money and consumer choice. However, bureaucracy in universities is not total, just as neo-liberalisation is a project which advances on an uneven terrain of values. This article argues that to exercise academic autonomy, to continue to value education, we must learn to distinguish between 'marketising' and 'socialising' bureaucracy. Socialising bureaucracy encodes the ethos of impartiality in practices that support academic judgement – both against marketisation and against abuses of collegiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the factors that contribute to the development of responsive intrapartum interpersonal skills and supportive personalised care during labour. They include emotional intelligence, the concepts of containment and reciprocity, and attentiveness. It also explains why effective interpersonal skills are integral to midwifery practice.

A closer examination of the physiological and behavioural signs exhibited by women to facilitate assessment of labour progress [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's important that vaginal examinations are undertaken only when there is a clear clinical indication rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The moral questions raised by synthetic media are considered in the context of posthumous documentary biography. Two possibilities are explored: firstly, that synthesis of the voice in biographical documentary deceives in a distinctive way and secondly, that it is possible for synthetic media to harm the subject of posthumous documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kate Nash and Debra Sloam consider preventive and restorative strategies required to support the infant microbiome, and the midwife's role in relation to this [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I compare the political rhetoric of Podemos and the Tories. Ideologically opposed, both parties use populist rhetoric and both thematise human rights as central to their populism. The article compares the parties’ uses of human rights along three dimensions: Who are human rights for? What are human rights? And how should they be achieved in practice? How Podemos and the Tories construct human rights challenges the ongoing project of European legal constitutionalism, the juridicalisation of rights which means that disputes over the interpretation of rights are referred to constitutional courts, where – ideally – they become the object of impartial and definitive decisions by judges who reason only through legal principles. Podemos from the Left is challenging European legal constitutionalism in the name of social justice, the Tories from the Right in the name of security: both parties construct European elites (and in Podemos’s case, national elites too) as a danger to democracy. Demonstrating what it means to take seriously the theoretical consequences of social constructivism - human rights are necessarily political – the article proposes a framework for the analysis of explicitly politicised human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kate Nash and Debra Sloam explore the benefits of critical thinking and the A-EQUIP model for student midwives [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has seen the emergence of a new kind of documentary making that marries documentary storytelling and the principles of strategic communication. Strategic impact documentary is a transmedia practice that aims to achieve specific social change by aligning documentary production with online and offline communications practices. The contemporary media environment is one in which a wide range of organizations work to achieve their political and social goals through the media. This article highlights key characteristics of an emerging form of professional documentary production, drawing attention to formal development and changing contexts of production and the implications of this for our understanding of the link between documentary and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asylum: Exit Australia is a first-person simulation game that puts the player in the shoes of an asylum seeker. Produced to accompany the television series Go Back to Where You Came From it seeks to make a new kind of intervention in a divisive social debate. This paper considers simulation games in terms of their ability to foster civic engagement. Locating simulation games within the broad field of popular factual media, several strands of continuity are identified, while attention is also paid to the specific characteristics of simulation games, particularly the relationship they establish between player and text. Audience responses to Asylum provide insight into the experience of play and the ways in which audiences relate this experience to the asylum seeker debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documentary has been so closely associated with the mediums of film and television that the emergence of new forms of documentary, made for computerized mediums such as the Internet, mobile phones and tablets appear fundamentally transformative. The potential for audiences to interact with documentary in various ways is at the heart of what makes these new modes of documentary distinctive; audiences are potentially able to engage in a range of practices from navigating virtual environments, to choosing video content from a database, taking part in ‘chat’ sessions and creating content. Engaging theoretically with these emerging audience practices raises questions about authorship and the social impact of documentary. In this paper, interactivity and participation are considered from a social perspective. It is suggested that there is a need to distinguish between user actions that impact on the documentary text and the ability of users to engage with others through documentary. The concept of documentary voice is interrogated to reveal two distinct dimensions: voice-as-authorship and voice-as-social participation. Drawing on documentary and digital media scholarship, this paper explores the social functions of documentary interactivity and participation with reference to a range of web-documentary examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between social movements, human rights and law at different scales. I compare ‘global constitutionalism’ and ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’ as approaches to movements, rights and law. As sociologists, we are especially well placed to address certain assumptions on which these inter-disciplinary approaches rely. I argue that assumptions about the relationship between social movements and human rights that are fundamentally normative limit our understanding of the diversity of organisational forms through which human rights are being defined, and of the complexity of multi-scalar law through which claims to justice are being made. In particular, the importance of the state and national law for institutionalising human rights norms should not be neglected by privileging either local or international law as the legitimate focus of democratic claims for justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to provide an overview of a collaborative service improvement project that was undertaken by midwives at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust to improve services for women in early labour. The labour triage line was set up to increase the consistency of information and advice provided to women in early labour and to enable women to feel confident in using coping strategies to help them remain at home during early labour. It was hoped that this would reduce the number of women attending the labour ward for early labour assessment and increase both women's and midwives' satisfaction with the service provided. A review of early labour services was initially undertaken to inform the project. This revealed that most women in early labour telephoned and were assessed on the labour ward with only a small proportion receiving advice about coping strategies. A survey of postnatal women found that the provision of calm, friendly advice over the telephone was reassuring, with more than half of the women surveyed stating that their experience of early labour could be improved through good telephone advice from a midwife. Following this, the telephone labour triage line was implemented and evaluated following a 6-month pilot. Feedback from women suggested a high degree of satisfaction with the service and a significant improvement in midwives discussing coping strategies with women in early labour. Other findings included an increase in the use of the midwifery-led unit and normal birth rate for low-risk first-time mothers. The triage line has now been extended to 24 hours and will move to the new midwifery-led unit that is being built this year where the outcomes will continue to be monitored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to provide an overview of a collaborative service improvement project that was undertaken by midwives at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust to improve services for women in early labour. The labour triage line was set up to increase the consistency of information and advice provided to women in early labour and to enable women to feel confident in using coping strategies to help them remain at home during early labour. It was hoped that this would reduce the number of women attending the labour ward for early labour assessment and increase both women's and midwives' satisfaction with the service provided. A review of early labour services was initially undertaken to inform the project. This revealed that most women in early labour telephoned and were assessed on the labour ward with only a small proportion receiving advice about coping strategies. A survey of postnatal women found that the provision of calm, friendly advice over the telephone was reassuring, with more than half of the women surveyed stating that their experience of early labour could be improved through good telephone advice from a midwife. Following this, the telephone labour triage line was implemented and evaluated following a 6-month pilot. Feedback from women suggested a high degree of satisfaction with the service and a significant improvement in midwives discussing coping strategies with women in early labour. Other findings included an increase in the use of the midwifery-led unit and normal birth rate for low-risk first-time mothers. The triage line has now been extended to 24 hours and will move to the new midwifery-led unit that is being built this year where the outcomes will continue to be monitored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The webdocumentary positions itself as documentary re-mediated for the internet age. Not only does the name webdocumentary consciously reference film and television documentary but it is possible to trace continuities in representational strategies, purpose and production practices that situate the webdoc within the documentary tradition. In spite of this family resemblance, however, the webdoc challenges current thinking about documentary representation. Interactivity in particular has consequences for theorizing in relation to modes of representation and user engagement. This article considers interactivity as a representational strategy, suggesting three dimensions for assessing its contribution to documentary. Following on from this it is suggested that, like film and television documentary, webdocs exhibit patterns of textual organization. It is suggested that there are at least three interactive structures found in webdocs: the narrative, the categorical and the collaborative. Each can be further divided – indicating the diverse uses of interactive features. A challenge of researching interactive texts is that the whole text is never completely available for analysis. Each viewing has the potential to be different from the last. Although necessarily provisional, this article seeks to demonstrate what might be achieved through close reading of the interactive documentary text. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objective: To compare clinical and effectiveness outcomes between robotic-assisted laparoscopic myomectomy (RALM) and abdominal myomectomy (AM). Study design: Records were reviewed for the first 27 RALM procedures at our institution. Age, BMI, insurance status, race, uterine size, and operative indication were used to select comparable patients who had undergone AM. Clinical and efficiency outcomes were compared stratifying for uterine size, specimen weight, and matched propensity scores. Results: IV hydromorphone use was significantly lower for RALM ( P < 0.01), with no significant differences in blood loss or complications. RALM patients had significantly shorter hospital stays; however, total hospital charges were higher ( P < 0.0001). This likely reflects longer operating room time ( P < 0.0001), which was magnified as specimen size increased ( P < 0.0001). Conclusion: RALM patients require less IV hydromorphone, have shorter hospital stays, and have generally equivalent clinical outcomes compared with AM patients. Additionally, as specimen size increased, the operative efficiency of RALM decreased compared with AM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While documentary ethics has been largely normative to date, there is growing interest in alternative forms of ethical thinking. The work of Emmanuel Levinas in particular is providing a way of thinking through both the ethics of documentary viewing and production. This article begins by drawing attention to the link between documentary ethics and aesthetics and then uses Levinas's work to consider the ethical relations established in observational documentary production. Of the different documentary modes, the observational has been the source of particular ethical difficulties, yet viewed from a Levinisian perspective it is possible to identify ways in which observation preserves the alterity of the documentary subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the effects of the legalization of international human rights on citizens and non-citizens within states. Adopting a sociological approach to rights it becomes clear that, even in Europe, the cosmopolitanization of law is not necessarily resulting in greater equality and justice. In fact, 'actually existing' cosmopolitan citizenship is characterized by a proliferation of status groups that concretize new forms of inequality, including those of super-citizens, marginal citizens, quasi-citizens, sub-citizens and un-citizens. Far from inaugurating a new era of genuinely universal human rights, in some cases cosmopolitan law may even contribute to the creation of conditions in which fundamental human rights are violated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does global citizenship mean to the citizens of a liberal democratic capitalist state? As part of an historically unprecedented, globally coordinated, NGO-led campaign against poverty in the underdeveloped South, 'Make Poverty History' attempted to give this question an answer. Cultural politics was integral to the campaign. Make Poverty History was not only mediated (as all campaigns must be), it also aimed to form global citizens with obligations to non-nationals outside the territorial boundaries of the state within national media. One of the most interesting aspects of his attempt was the engagement with popular culture and the importance of mobilizing emotions in relation to distant suffering. This article discusses the extraordinary originality of this campaign in terms of its aims and means, and draws conclusions from its successes and failures to achieve cosmopolitan solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the Pinochet case, widely heralded as a landmark, as a case of ‘intermestic’ human rights that raises difficult normative and empirical questions concerning cosmopolitan justice. The article is a contribution to the sociology of human rights from the perspective of methodological cosmopolitanism, developing conceptual tools and methods to study how cosmopolitanizing state institutions and cultural norms are inter-related. The argument is made that in order to understand issues of cosmopolitan justice, sociologists must give more consideration to political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Nancy Fraser, the author of the article "Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World" published in "New Left Review," is presented. When asked of the role of the political theorist, she answers that she tries to describe something that takes place in the politics and lend some support to something that is emergent. She wonders how such counter-public spheres could play a role under current political situation. She suggests critical theorist to address some political issues.

The author comments on the article "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere," by Nancy Fraser. She says that the article reflects Fraser's illustration of the relevance of empirical studies of social and political structures to the development of normative category of political theory and vice versa. To the author, however, such analysis has also revealed few points. One is that, it must be clear how far the existing media could contribute to post-Westphalian public spheres.

The concept of a human rights culture has been crucial to the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law. In this paper media and activist representations of human rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender human rights are considered as indicative of an emerging human rights culture, especially around the Civil Partnerships Act 2004. A typology of representations of rights is developed and discussed. It is concluded that insofar as there is an emerging human rights culture, it is one that is concerned above all with creating and maintaining civic relationships rather than with the assertion of individual liberty, and as inviting political compromise rather than a principled stance on universal human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identification with a national community is typically associated with hot emotions, and opposed to cool cosmopolitanism as an ideal. Hence, it is considered in this paper how the oversimplified characterization of national feeling as hot and cosmopolitanism as cool tends to reify the former and idealize the latter. It considers cosmopolitanism in the neo-Kantian terms of human rights, in which, although emotion has not been addressed directly, hot national feeling and cool cosmopolitanism are implicitly opposed in this way. The author argues that the dichotomy makes it difficult to see how warm cosmopolitanism is actually developing in political communities organized by western national states, in less rationalist ways than is suggested by neo-Kantians and in association with, rather than in opposition to, national feeling.

This article is concerned with post-Marxism and materialism in the work of Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. As 'postMarxists' these writers use 'material' in a variety of ways, all of which indicate limits and constraints. The article focuses on one version of 'materialism' in this work, a version that is more implied than elaborated, in which 'material' is equivalent to institutionalized performativity or sedimented discourse: to 'objective' social structures and institutions. Post-Marxists often use 'the social' as equivalent to 'material' in this sense, to gesture towards the context in which politics succeeds or fails. I argue that the specificities of 'the social' cannot be theorized from within the terms of post-Marxism itself and that Butler and Laclau acknowledge this limitation in their most recent work. I therefore conclude that post-Marxism needs a supplement that I call political sociology. This is a dangerous supplement in the Derridean sense: a necessary addition that destabilizes the value post-Marxism gives to the distinction between 'social' and 'political' in which the latter is the privileged term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a diversity of views among feminists who have been debating whether or not a women's movement exists in Britain today. In part this is due to the lack of a clear working definition of social movement. This article uses social movement theory to discuss the ambiguous signs that are taken to indicate either the movement's continuing existence or its disappearance: the growth of mainstream political organizations; a focus on 'women' in cultural production; the 'micro-politics' of everyday life (often enacted in the terms of 'I'm not a feminist but...'). The article looks at the history of second-wave feminism in England using the two main schools of social movement theory: the 'contentious politics' model focusing on organizations and formal political structures; and the 'submerged networks' theory that takes solidarity, conflict and challenging dominant cultural codes to be central to social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberal citizenship has been seen as posing a dilemma for feminists. Either women are taken to be equal to men, in which case their specific capacities as women are unrecognised and their citizenship is substantively unequal; or else women are taken to be different, with the consequent risk that the rights citizenship allows and the obligations it imposes will again be substantively unequal. On this view, women cannot simply be included in liberal citizenship because the meaning of the liberal public sphere is constructed in opposition to the private sphere of natural feminine care and women's subordination to male heads of household. Using Derridean deconstruction to examine three significant moments in liberalism, this paper argues that the term 'women' is more productively seen as 'undecidable' in this tradition, working both to construct the binary opposition between public and private on which it depends but also to disrupt it. While the feminist critique of liberalism is important to analysing the logic by which women have been positioned outside full citizenship rights, in practice feminists have made some gains by reconfiguring the terms of liberalism around this undecidability. The aim of the paper is to carry out something like a genealogy of contemporary liberalism in order to discern its multiple origins and contingent development; we will then be in a better position to understand the practical possibilities for women's citizenship in Britain today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a well-documented 'cultural turn' in social theory. This takes two forms: the 'epistemological' case in which culture is seen as universally constitutive of social relations and identities; and the 'historical' case in which culture is seen as playing an unprecedented role in constituting social relations and identities in contemporary society. In this paper I take it that both cases overlap in studies of contemporary society and that the stronger case is justified. I argue that a model of cultural politics is necessary to fully develop the impetus of the 'cultural turn' away from structural determinism, and that relations between the state and society should no longer be taken as the central focus of political sociology. I propose that the understanding of politics developed by Foucault in his later work on power and domination can provide the basis of a 'cultural turn' in political sociology. Finally, I offer some suggestions about how those working in the field of political sociology are already beginning to develop the theme of cultural politics -- albeit without naming it as such -- and how this might be extended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines feminist criticism of liberalism as masculinist, and the implications for feminism as a political project. View that feminist version of liberalism is ahistorical; Information on the depiction of women in John Locke's `Two Treatises of Government'; Political power as legitimate; Use of women as a Derridean undecidable.

Analyzes the role of deconstruction in feminism. Advantages; Detriments; Importance of representing knowledge as rhetoric; Importance of experience; Classification of the perspectives of various critics.

Background Health coaching is a new intervention offering a one-on-one focused self-management support program. This study implemented a health coaching pilot in primary care clinics in Eastern Ontario, Canada to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of integrating health coaching into primary care for patients who were either at risk for or diagnosed with diabetes. Methods We implemented health coaching in three primary care practices. Patients with diabetes were offered six months of support from their health coach, including an initial face-to-face meeting and follow-up by email, telephone, or face-to-face according to patient preference. Feasibility was assessed through provider focus groups and qualitative data analysis methods. Results All three sites were able to implement the program. A number of themes emerged from the focus groups, including the importance of physician buy-in, wide variation in understanding and implementing of the health coach role, the significant impact of different systems of team communication, and the significant effect of organizational structure and patient readiness on Health coaches' capacity to perform their role. Conclusions It is feasible to implement health coaching as an integrated program within small primary care clinics in Canada without adding additional resources into the daily practice. Practices should review their organizational and communication processes to ensure optimal support for health coaches if considering implementing this intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

GRAPH: Data S1 GRAPH: Data S2 GRAPH: Data S3 GRAPH: Data S4 GRAPH: Data S5 GRAPH: Data S6 GRAPH: Data S7 GRAPH: Data S8 GRAPH: Data S9 GRAPH: Data S10 REFERENCES 1 de Jonge A, De Vries R, Declercq E. Where the Ockenden report goes wrong: let us keep calm and follow the evidence. The independent review of maternity services at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH) is the most comprehensive review of a single maternity service in the history of the NHS. [Extracted from the article]

Background: Fibrocytes are bone-marrow derived cells, expressing both haematopoietic and stromal cell markers, which contribute to tissue repair as well as pathological fibrosis. The differentiation of fibrocytes remains poorly characterised and this has limited understanding of their biology and function. In particular two methods are used to generate fibrocytes in vitro that differ fundamentally by the presence or absence of serum. Methodology/Principal Findings: We show here that fibrocytes grown in the absence of serum (SF) differentiate more efficiently from peripheral blood mononuclear cells than CD14+ monocytes, and respond to serum by losing their spindleshaped fibrocyte morphology. Although fibrocytes generated in the presence of serum (SC) express the same range of markers, they differentiate more efficiently from CD14+ monocytes and do not change their morphology in response to serum. Transcriptional analysis revealed that both types of fibrocyte are distinct from each other, fibroblasts and additional monocyte-derived progeny. The gene pathways that differ significantly between SF and SC fibrocytes include those involved in cell migration, immune responses and response to wounding. Conclusions/Significance: These data show that SF and SC fibrocytes are distinct but related cell types, and suggest that they will play different roles during tissue repair and fibrosis where changes in serum proteins may occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]