“She’s Mlungu but she looks like me!”: disrupting insider/outsider dichotomies in ethnographic fieldwork

What happens when the biologically and socially visible (and invisible) boundaries used to maintain differences between the researcher (outsider) and the researched (insiders) are broken down or denied acknowledgment? This article explores one challenge of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in regards to race and the unintentional blurring of the insider–outsider dichotomies within the field. As an English-speaking African American attempting to penetrate Langa, a black South African, predominantly isiXhosa-speaking township, it became apparent that my physical appearance automatically relegated me to an ‘insider,’ awarding me a certain and perhaps undeserved membership in the field. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2011 to 2012, this article is a reflection of my experience of balancing my role as a black-American researcher – and by default an outsider – in an environment where my “outsider-ness” was visibly non-existent. This both mitigated an exacerbated my ethnographic data collection.     

Issues in Implementing a Comprehensive Intervention for Public School Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Many students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are educated separately from their typically developing peers, while others are placed in inclusive classes but without supports that would help them benefit from less restrictive placements. The needs of students with ASD who are in inclusive settings are often not planned for or met appropriately, resulting in continuing problems and movement to increasingly restrictive environments or private placements. There is a critical need for school models to fill the gap in appropriate services for this population of children with ASD. These models should include those that are inclusive and academically challenging, that can be implemented by many school districts, and that are responsive to the unique combination of strengths and deficits in these students. In the current article, the authors describe the development and core components of the model, and implementation of the ASD Nest program in public schools in New York City.     

A Framework for Assessing Power in Collaborative Governance Processes

The growing use of collaborative methods of governance raises concerns about the relative power of participants in such processes and the potential for exclusion or domination of some parties. This research offers a framework for assessing power that considers authority, resources, and discursive legitimacy as sources of power and considers the participants, the process design, and the content of collaborative governance processes as arenas for power use. A case study of a collaborative governance process is presented and analyzed using the power framework. Implications for the design of collaborative governance processes are discussed, including the benefits of a multidimensional definition of power, tools for managing power imbalances among participants, and strategies that participants can use to participate more fully in collaborative governance processes.     

Mental Health Review Tribunals

This paper is concerned with the operation of the Mental Health Review Tribunal system and summarizes the findings of an empirical investigation of tribunal decision making. The tribunals constitute an independent body which reviews the necessity for the continued compulsory detention of patients in psychiatric hospitals. The research focuses on the interpretation and application of mental health legislation by individual tribunal members and the manner in which these individual approaches are qualified in the group context. The study comprises three stages: a self-report questionnaire, a national statistical analysis of decisions, and a simulation study of decision making using a videotape of a hypothetical case. The research establishes considerable inconsistency in tribunal decision making at both an individual and group level and attributes some of this inconsistency to individually based factors isolated by the research. The findings further indicate that these factors remain influential within the group decision-making context.