Victim-Defendants in Mandated Treatment: An Ethical Quandary

Battered women are being arrested and convicted of domestic violence-related crimes in higher numbers than ever before. In addition, battered women are being sentenced to treatment as primary perpetrators even though their aggression was in response to the violence perpetrated against them. Many service providers are presently ill-equipped to offer treatment and/or other services that will effectively serve these women in a manner that will truly reduce violence and is not re-victimizing. This article will present key issues surrounding the problem, and provide suggestions for effective advocacy and intervention approaches.     

Thomas J. Sweeney: A Visionary Leader and Advocate for the Counseling Profession

The contributions of Thomas J. Sweeney to the counseling profession through professional leadership and advocacy, scholarship, teaching, and the development of Chi Sigma Iota are chronicled through a personal interview and comments from professional colleagues. Readers are provided with a sense of the depth and breadth of his more than 50 years of dedicated service.     

‘An Association for All’—Notions of the Meaning of Autistic Self‐Advocacy Politics within a Parent‐Dominated Autistic Movement

In this paper, we seek to explore the tensions between advocacy and self advocacy autistic movements in a Swedish context with a special focus on the meanings that enable the production of particular understandings of autism and the autistic subject. Drawing on articles written for the Swedish advocacy magazine Empowerment written for and by people with autism, the discourse analysis explores two competing discourses: a reformist and a radical. The reformist discourse underlines a goal of (political) representation expressed in Empowerment. It may be understood as an important part of producing a legitimate autistic political subject–positioned as a full member, with a full membership–within a parent‐dominated autistic advocacy movement. The reformist discourse can be viewed as a result of a negotiation, where full membership is conditioned on the parents' terms and granted on specific terms. These include working together (neuro‐inclusively), advocacy based on interest rather than identity/position as a specific target/member group, agreement upon a definition of autism as a disability (a deficit) a person has rather than an identity. In relation to this, an alternative legitimate autistic subject is produced through invoking the counter‐hegemonic radical discourse. Such a narrative produces the ‘Asperger’ or ‘Aspie’. Here, the ‘full membership’ refers to a sense of identification with sense of belonging to and being at home with other people with autism. It contains a certain amount of autistic solidarity within the group of adults with autism. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Woven together: advocacy and research as complementary

One of the many important contributions of second-wave feminist scholarship was the re-positioning of scholarly activity as being necessarily situated in relation to ‘I.’ This insistence on standpoint, or positionality, was coupled with a contribution from postmodernism, which challenged the notion that (universal) truths could circulate without specific attachments to people and places. Advocacy was a less used word, but the position taken in this paper is that every piece of research, in all science, carries with it the potential for advocacy. Drawing on the author's own experiences of advocacy as interwoven though her career as a lawyer and an academic, this paper examines various aspects of the intersection of advocacy and professional work.     

Off the stage,on the page: on the relationship between advocacy and scholarship

When and how should scholars of religion draw a line between advocacy and research activities? In what ways does advocacy contribute to or cut against scholarly credibility? Addressing these questions from the intersection of the academic study of religion and Indigenous Studies, this article opens by asserting that both fields are frequently hampered by deferential treatments of their subject matter, a problem that is potentially exacerbated when scholars in these fields engage in forms of political advocacy. Problematizing this narrative, the author turns to his ethnographic experiences in Hawai'i with regard to burial-protection struggles in order to describe ways his theoretical commitments and advocacy activities stand in tension and how he has attempted to navigate these competing but sometimes complementary elements of his scholarly life. In this context, a heuristic definition of advocacy is advanced in order to sketch a spectrum of forms, ranging from direct advocacy (e.g., physical action, legal testimony, or publication) to indirect advocacy (e.g., sharing documents, brainstorming about pending issues, or providing transportation to a meeting). The article concludes with reflections on advocacy and changing institutional demands upon scholars in the humanities and social sciences with reference to perceived public relevance.     

Review Section

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