Thinking about change for development practice: a case study from Oxfam GB

Development practice is informed by theories of change, but individuals and organisations may not make them explicit. Practitioners may be unaware of the extent to which strategic choices and debates are informed by disparate thinking about how history happens and the role of purposeful intervention for progressive social change. In the past few years, some Oxfam GB staff have been creating processes to debate their theories of change as part of an effort to improve practice. In this context, the authors introduce four sets of ideas about change, with a discussion of how they have been explored in two instances, and some of the challenges emerging from this process. Through explicitly debating theories of change, organisational decision-making processes can be better informed and strategic choices made more transparent.     

Women,love and power in Enlightenment Scotland

The significance of the Enlightenment for women’s power in society and culture has been a topic of significant historiographical debate. This article looks at how women were located within the discourse of the Scottish Enlightenment and its implications for elite women’s role within public and private life in eighteenth-century Scotland. It argues that women were located as helpmeets to men, a designation that authorised their access to education and to some areas of public debate, but that their authority rested on their ability to improve the position of men, rather than enabling them as autonomous agents. To make this argument it draws together case studies of women’s role in the home and family, with their engagement in public life and as authors, demonstrating how similar values shaped their role in each sphere.     

Individuality of human palatal rugae

Investigators have implied that palatal rugae are unique to each individual. However, these researchers have disagreed as to whether or not legal identification could be based solely on palatal rugae. Previous studies used poor duplicating materials and may not have considered the effects of growth, extractions, palatal expansion, or some combination of these. The inadvertent use of other features of the cast, such as teeth, edentulous ridge morphology, muscle attachments, vestibular depth, or some combination of these, to aid in the identification, may have influenced their results. The purpose of this investigation was to determine if palatal rugae can be relied upon for identification. Twenty-five orthodontic cases were selected with pre- and post-treatment casts; orthodontic treatment had taken eighteen to sixty months. One hundred casts were randomly selected as variables. All casts were trimmed so that all areas except for the rugae area of the hard palate were removed. The twenty-five post-orthodontic casts were dispersed within 100 randomly selected casts. Nine investigators were given the twenty-five pre-orthodontic casts and asked to compare them to the other one hundred and twenty-five casts for possible matches. Data were collected as to percentage of correct matches and time required for comparison. Each set of pre- and post-orthodontic casts was properly identified (100%) by 8 investigators, and the remaining investigator correctly matched 22 out of 25 casts (88%). These conclusions were drawn.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Working hard on the outside: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of The Biggest Loser Australia

The Biggest Loser (TBL) is a reality television weight-loss programme that positions itself as a response to the so-called “obesity crisis”. Research on TBL has thus far focussed on audience responses and its effect on viewers’ beliefs about weight loss. This article focuses instead on how meaning is constructed in TBL. We conducted a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a key episode of TBL (the 2012 Australian season finale) to examine how the textual, visual and auditory elements combine to construct meanings beyond the ostensible health messages. Although the overt message is that all contestants have worked hard, turned their lives around and been “successful”, examination of editing choices, lighting and colour, clothing and time spent on contestants allows us to see that the programme constructs varying degrees of success between contestants and provides accounts for these differences in outcomes. In this way the programme is able to present itself as a putative celebration of all contestants while prescribing narrow limits around what constitutes success. TBL reinforces an ideology in which “success” is a direct result of “the work” of weight loss (both physical and emotional), which can apparently be read straightforwardly off the body. TBL’s “celebration” of weight loss thus reproduces and strengthens the widespread view of fat bodies as physical manifestations of individual (ir)responsibility and psychological dysfunction, and contributes to the ongoing stigmatisation of obesity.