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This book presents a new approach to how culture works in contemporary societies. Exposing our everyday myths and narratives in a series of empirical studies that range from Watergate to the Holocaust, it shows how these unseen yet potent cultural structures translate into concrete actions and institutions. Only when these deep patterns of meaning are revealed, it argues, can we understand the stubborn staying power of violence and degradation, but also the steady persistence of hope. By understanding the darker structures that restrict our imagination, we can seek to transform them. By recognizing the culture structures that sustain hope, we can allow our idealistic imaginations to gain more traction in the world.

The goal of cultural psychology is to explain the ways in which human cultural constructions—for example, rituals, stereotypes, and meanings—organize and direct human acting, feeling, and thinking in different social contexts. A rapidly growing, international field of scholarship, cultural psychology is ready for an interdisciplinary, primary resource. Linking psychology, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and history, this publication unites the variable perspectives from these disciplines. It comprises over fifty contributed articles, providing a comprehensive overview of contemporary cultural psychology, comparing cultures and the (often differing) human psychological functions occurring within them. It presents a concise history of psychology that includes valuable resources for innovation in psychology in general and cultural psychology in particular; interdisciplinary articles including insights into cultural anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, culture and conceptions of the self, and semiotics and cultural connections; close, conceptual links with contemporary biological sciences, especially developmental biology, and with other social sciences; and a section detailing potential methodological innovations for cultural psychology.

In an effort to pursue and achieve quality and equity in science education, the South African National Curriculum Statement stipulates that learners should be accorded an opportunity to acquire and apply knowledge and skills in meaningful ways. Accordingly, the curriculum promotes knowledge in both local and global contexts. The study investigated how teachers’ knowledge of learners’ socio-cultural backgrounds is invoked in enacting various teaching and learning approaches that bring relevance of science to learners. Three science teachers from three township high schools were observed teaching while incorporating learners’ socio-cultural practices, experiences and beliefs when teaching the topics reproduction, nutrition and healthy diet. The teachers were interviewed after each lesson via a closed-ended protocol. Science local curriculum documents and lesson plans were also analysed. A total of five lesson observations and five post-lesson interviews per teacher were analysed using the constant comparative method. The findings revealed that teachers use probing and open-ended questions, argumentation in groups, authentic problem-solving activities and resources, examples, experiences and language familiar to learners. Such practices promote class and group interaction, develop critical and analytical thinking skills in learners and promote conceptual understanding. The research findings provide insights into how certain science topics can be taught in meaningful ways to socio-economically and culturally diverse learners, which can contribute to the current debate on relevant education in a country faced with huge diversity.

This book enters into the many worlds of expression brought forth across Africa by the ravaging presence of HIV/AIDS. Africans and non-Africans, physicians and social scientists, journalists and documentarians share here a common and essential interest in understanding creative expression in crushing and uncertain times. Chapters investigate and engage the social networks, power relationships, and cultural structures that enable the arts to convey messages of hope and healing, and of knowledge and good counsel to the wider community. And from Africa to the wider world, the text here brings intimate, inspiring portraits of the performers, artists, communities, and organizations that have shared here their insights and the sense they have made of their lives and actions from deep within this devastating epidemic. Covering the wide expanse of the African continent, the chapters include explorations of, for example, the use of music to cope with AIDS; the relationship between music, HIV/AIDS, and social change; visual approaches to HIV literacy; radio and television as tools for “edutainment”; several individual artists’ confrontations with HIV/AIDS; various performance groups’ response to the epidemic; combating HIV/AIDS with local cultural performance; and more. Source material, such as song lyrics and interviews, weaves throughout the collection, which is a nuanced and profoundly affective portrayal of the intricate relationship between HIV/AIDS and the arts in Africa.

In 1997, when Lucia Guerra-Reyes began research in Peru, she observed a profound disconnect between the birth care desires of health personnel and those of indigenous women. Midwives and doctors would plead with her as the anthropologist to \"educate women about the dangerous inadequacy of their traditions.\" They failed to see how their aim of achieving low rates of maternal mortality clashed with the experiences of local women, who often feared public health centers, where they could experience discrimination and verbal or physical abuse. Mainly, the women and their families sought a \"good\" birth, which was normally a home birth that corresponded with Andean perceptions of health as a balance of bodily humors. Peru's Intercultural Birthing Policy of 2005 was intended to solve these longstanding issues by recognizing indigenous cultural values and making biomedical care more accessible and desirable for indigenous women. Yet many difficulties remain. Guerra-Reyes also gives ethnographic attention to health care workers. She explains the class and educational backgrounds of traditional birth attendants and midwives, interviews doctors and health care administrators, and describes their interactions with local families. Interviews with national policy makers put the program in context.

The history of footbinding is full of contradictions and unexpected turns. The practice originated in the dance culture of China's medieval court and spread to gentry families, brothels, maid's quarters, and peasant households. Conventional views of footbinding as patriarchal oppression often neglect its complex history and the incentives of the women involved. This revisionist history, elegantly written and meticulously researched, presents a fascinating new picture of the practice from its beginnings in the tenth century to its demise in the twentieth century. Neither condemning nor defending foot-binding, Dorothy Ko debunks many myths and misconceptions about its origins, development, and eventual end, exploring in the process the entanglements of male power and female desires during the practice's thousand-year history.Cinderella's Sistersargues that rather than stemming from sexual perversion, men's desire for bound feet was connected to larger concerns such as cultural nostalgia, regional rivalries, and claims of male privilege. Nor were women hapless victims, the author contends. Ko describes how women-those who could afford it-bound their own and their daughters' feet to signal their high status and self-respect. Femininity, like the binding of feet, was associated with bodily labor and domestic work, and properly bound feet and beautifully made shoes both required exquisite skills and technical knowledge passed from generation to generation. Throughout her narrative, Ko deftly wields methods of social history, literary criticism, material culture studies, and the history of the body and fashion to illustrate how a practice that began as embodied lyricism-as a way to live as the poets imagined-ended up being an exercise in excess and folly.

The paper presents the first results of a PRIN PNRR research aimed at exploring the parenting experiences of mothers with a migratory cultural background, living in conditions of social vulnerability in reception centers in the Florence metropolitan area.Assuming the intersectional and decolonial perspective as an analytical and interpretative key, the contribution sheds light on the multiple nuances of being a mother in migration and, in particular, on the specificities of being a parent within a reception center. Starting from the voices of the women interviewed, the article offers some elements of reflection useful for the design of educational interventions aimed at supporting parenting in vulnerable conditions.

In our study we analysed the factors that influence and determine sport activity of students studying in higher education institutions in the North-Eastern Plains Region of Hungary and the adjacent cross-border regions. In the research we included students studying in three Hungarian, five Romanian, two Slovakian, three Ukrainian and one Serbian Higher Education institutions (N=2017). Our findings indicate that students in Hungary, as well as ethnic Hungarian students in Romania, Serbia and Slovakia, do little sport, in the entire region students do some sport once a week only. An analysis of the social and individual factors influencing sports activities in a single model shows powerful differences in terms of gender and financial background in Hungary, Ukraine and Romania (the differences are the biggest in the latter). If we include attitudes based on subjective choice and way of life in our model, the gender differences vanish.

Clinical practice guidelines, such as those focusing on traumatic stress treatment, can play an important role in promoting inclusion and equity. Based on a review of 14 international trauma treatment guidance documents that explicitly mentioned children, we reflect on two areas in which these guidelines can become more inclusive and equitable; a) representation of children's cultural background and b) children's opportunity to have their voice heard. While a few guidelines mentioned that treatment should be tailored to children's cultural needs, there was little guidance on how this could be done. Moreover, there still appears to be a strong white Western lens across all stages of producing and evaluating the international evidence base. The available documentation also suggested that no young people under the age of 18 had been consulted in the guideline development processes. To contribute to inclusion and equity, we suggest five elements for future national guideline development endeavours. Promoting research and guideline development with, by, and for currently under-represented communities should be a high priority for our field. Our national, regional and global professional associations are in an excellent position to (continue to) stimulate conversation and action in this domain.

One of the major issues in L2 learning and cognitive styles is the ambiguity of these concepts. A solution to this issue should involve the following two aspects. First, studies of factorial validity should be conducted with empirical data, and with an appropriate analysis using a theoretically well-developed scale. Second, such studies should focus on a particular group of learners, as the learning and cognitive styles could be affected by learners’ cultural and educational backgrounds. This study, focusing particularly on cognitive styles, aims (1) to explore whether the concept of cognitive styles represented in the Ehrman and Leaver Learning Style Questionnaire (Ehrman & Leaver, Ehrman and Leaver Learning Style Questionnaire, 2002 ) show factorial validity for Japanese adult EFL learners and (2) if it does not, to explain the new factor structure, particularly in terms of Japanese educational and cultural backgrounds. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted for the dataset comprising 362 Japanese adult EFL learners, and the frequency distribution of each extracted factor was also investigated. (1) The result did not support the factorial validity as it extracted three factors different from the original questionnaire: impulsive – reflective (access to actual behavior), active – passive (cognitive engagement), and global – particular (cognitive focus); and (2) the new factor structure is discussed in terms of Japanese backgrounds such as cautious behavior, on which a certain value is often placed in Japanese culture, and the influences of university entrance examinations in the Japanese education system. The last part of the paper describes some pedagogical implications for effective use of the questionnaire in practical situations.