Changes in young adults after peace corps experiences: Political-social views,moral reasoning,and perceptions of self and parents

A variety of changes in Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs), 43 men and 34 women, are reported. Analyses were based on assessments made before and after an overseas tour of duty for political status, self and ideal-self constructions, perceptions of parents' child-rearing techniques, and moral reasoning. Comparisons with several samples of students and activists, studied earlier, indicated that initially the PCVs were a middle group politically, rather conventional personally, and family entrenched, the women more than the men. Evidence of their various but unitary shifts to political liberalization, greater intraceptiveness and self-determination, greater detachment from their parents, and increased incidence of principled moral reasoning suggests that the PCVs had undergone substantial self-redefinition.Received Ph.D. from California School of Professional Psychology, 1974. Interests lie in the areas of adolescent development, moral development, ego functioning, and political psychology.     

Kate Davis: re-visioning art history after modernism and postmodernism

This article engages with the work of Scotland-based artist Kate Davis (b.1977). The discussion begins to articulate a framework for understanding Davis’s work within a feminist logic of re-visioning and re-citing, strategies that are explicated and suggested as paradigmatic to feminist art production since 1970. Fundamentally, the article explores Davis’s complex strategies for adopting and adapting motifs from within the archives of art history, arguing that her work constitutes a mode of visual research and historiography.     

Love,Passion, Conversion: Constance Maynard and evangelical missionary writing

This article explores how Constance Maynard understood her sexual emotions as part of her evangelical religion and how, in doing so, she was drawing on an evangelical tradition which placed strong emotion at the centre of religious experience. The article outlines how nineteenth-century women tract writers, missionaries and biographers wrote about female friendship and conversion using emotional rhetoric. The article analyses Maynard's diary entries to identify her use of missionary narrative tropes, arguing that, in the absence of psychoanalytic theories, Maynard turned to missionary narrative to make sense of her relationships with vulnerable women.     

Constructing the self in mental health practice: identity,individualism and the feminization of deficiency

The discursive production of the ‘self’ in the context of mental health care has potential implications for how the subjects of intervention come to understand and experience themselves. Eating disorders provide an illustrative example of the ways in which conceptualizations of the self that structure mental health practices can be gendered, because they are mainly diagnosed in women and dominant explanations of their origins are feminized. This discourse analytic study examines the gendered nature of mental health workers' constructions of the eating-disordered self through the psychological construct of ‘identity’, examining the dominant discourses implicated in the feminization of deficient identity, and addressing the implications of this construction for mental health practice.     

Cook,eat, man,woman: understanding the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition,nutritionism and its alternatives from Malawi

The Group of Eight Countries (G8) launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition to improve nutritional outcomes through private sector involvement in agricultural development. The accession of Malawi to the Alliance reveals the assumptions behind the intervention. We show that while the New Alliance may seem to have little to do with nutrition, its emergence as a frame for the privatization of food and agriculture has been decades in the making, and is best understood as an outcome of a project of nutritionism. To highlight the failings of the approach, we present findings from the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Initiative in northern Malawi, which has demonstrated success in combatting malnutrition through a combination of agroecological farming practices, community mobilization, women's empowerment and changes in intrahousehold gender dynamics. Contrasting a political economic analysis of the New Alliance alongside that of the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Initiative shows the difference between a concern with the gendered social context of malnutrition, and nutritionism. We conclude with an analysis of the ways that nutrition can play a part in interventions that are inimical, or conducive, to freedom.     

“Taking care”: Maintaining the self and the home in early adolescence

This paper explores young adolescents' experience of basic daily tasks: personal maintenance (e.g., grooming and eating) and household maintenance (e.g., chores and errands). Quantity of time, companionship, and subjective states in these activities were examined during one week in the lives of 401 5th–9th graders with the Experience Sampling Method (Csikszentmihalyi and Larson, 1987). Our findings show that these tasks are particularly subject to sex typing. Girls engaged in grooming more often than boys, and this time increased in the higher grades, while boys showed no age effects. Boys did more outside chores while girls did more indoor chores. Girls were also more likely to carry out household tasks with family while boys did more chores alone. An examination of subjective states during household maintenance revealed that older girls reported a greater sense of motivation and choice than younger girls, but boys' experience did not differ. Experience of maintenance as socialization for adult activities is discussed.This research was supported by NIMH grant number MH38324, Stress in Daily Life During Early Adolescence, awarded to Reed Larson.Current research interests are the effects of maternal employment on children and adolescents, and the study of day care.Current research interests are family relationships in early adolescence, interpersonal conflict and the study of daily psychological experience.Current research interests are pubertal development, precursors of eating disorders, and the effects of maternal employment on young adolescents.