Creating a Healthy Community Arts and Music Initiative in Columbus, GA Introduction With the goal of finding a local healthy arts and music community initiative, I went looking for local programs because there has been at least one in every city I have lived, and because I am personally more interested in and committed to music than most other cultural activities. Unfortunately, I was not able… Read More
Reflections on Locke, Silverman, Spirduso’s Reading and understanding research Quantitative Methods and MacDonald, Friedman, and Kuentzel’s A survey of measures of spiritual and transpersonal constructs: Part one The process of constantly contemplating a research topic from one class to another serves an interesting purpose in my mind. It causes me to constantly rethink this topic and others that I have dwelled on for the last few years. I see this as a powerful engagement with the topic of gender and racism propaganda,… Read More
Reflections on Locke, Silverman, and Spirduso’s Reading and Understanding Research and the Institutional Review Board The research process is something that feels very familiar to me. While I am always learning, always searching and seeking, and perpetually digging deeper, not for passages to prove q point, though that is not unfamiliar to me, but to learn, always to learn more. Locke, Silverman, and Spirduso (2010), introduce the idea of researching… Read More
The Final Retrospective of Full Life Farm This may be my final retrospective of Full Life Farm for 2014, but life and adventures, the academic and homesteading ones, will continue as I work towards an MSc in social psychology, a PhD in community psychology, and the co-creation of an intentional community eco-village while I also learn of life and the uses of… Read More
Unintentional Sexism: The influence of language upon media propaganda, individuals and small groups Abstract While propaganda in the form of unintentional influence and the language of sexism has been independently researched, a review of literature reveals no such studies that link these two topics. In this paper, I link these two subjects to study the hypothesis that the language of sexism, embedded within media, unintentionally influences individuals and… Read More
Full Life Farm Ethnographic Diary Week 11 Ending 28 March 2014 On Sunday, I baked the bread ground from the wheat berries from the previous week, described in the last post. While I am a perfectionist (regarding taste and aesthetic and artistic appearance) with my bread experiments, everyone is always pleased with the results. The recipe is basic and a modification of a standard Southern Italian… Read More
Reflections On Daniel Boorstein’s “Ten-Nine-Eight-Childline!” and “What Kind of Mother Are You?” History in the Western Hemisphere, especially the United States is filled with example after example of the upper classes, the rich and wealthy, engaging in social reform of the poor and the lower classes. But those rich and wealthy, who thought they knew better, passed judgment on those so-called poor and lower classes, and judged… Read More
Reflections On McKnight & Kretzmann’s Mapping Community Capacity and Mathie & Cunningham’s From clients to citizens – Asset-based community development as a strategy for community-driven development McKnight & Kretzmann’s Mapping Community Capacity address an issue that I have puzzled over for many years: How can the government create an incentive to better one’s life circumstances without creating and perpetuating an environment of unhealthy need and dependence that engenders mere existence and probably hopelessness, to create producers rather than service clients? Unfortunately,… Read More
Reflections On Transformational leadership Chapters 9 and 10, Lykes, Blanche, and Hamber’s Narrating survival and change in Guatemala and South Africa, and Hershbert and Lykes’ Redefining family-Transnational girls narrate experiences of parental migration, detention, and deportation Hacker and Roberts open with what for me is a very prescient idea, the idea of victim-blaming in an organization, and indeed in most Western modern societies, rather than looking for solutions and rising to challenges that can teach one to be stronger. Their John Stewart Mill quote speaks to current events in government that… Read More
Reflections On Johnson, Murungi, and Pugh’s Naming our reality, Fine and Torre’s Re-membering exclusions, Kidd and Kral’s Practicing participatory action research, and Lykes,, Mcdonald, and Box’ The post-deportation human rights project (This is it folks. I may have found the research method of choice to write thesis and dissertation in social psychology and media studies respectively. It’s Participatory Action Research. Everyone teaches and everyone learns, including the study participants. Stay tuned.) Participatory action and the research that it entails give me hope for the future. … Read More