Статті в журналах з теми "Church work with developmentally disabled"

This first of two social work studies with developmentally disabled adults evaluates the effectiveness of a social skills training package in a replication of Bales (1980). Two groups of four trainees from vocational training programs were organized at two sites, respectively (n = 8). Both groups received a 12-session training package designed to improve social skills in four domains. A multiple baseline design across skills was used to evaluate effectiveness for individuals in each group, with skills assessed using a 16-situation role-play test. As a result of training, participants improved in skill performance using the role-play test, but an in-vivo assessment showed little change. Thus it was concluded that the treatment package was effective in improving social skills, but not powerful enough to effect significant changes in other settings. Suggestions are given concerning treatment effectiveness and implications for social work practice.

A survey was conducted of the community adjustment of 108 developmentally disabled (mentally retarded) persons who had spent at least three years in an institution in southeastern Ontario. On average, they had resided 3.5 years in the community, were 40 years of age, with a mental age of five years and a median IQ of 41, and most had one or more moderate to severe physical disabilities. During their most recent year living in the community it was found that their daily living skills remained unchanged compared with their skill level in the year prior to community placement. As well, the community staff rated them as average in level of performance and amount of supervision required compared with others of similar ability. About one third were found to have a moderate to severe behavioural/psychiatric problem with aggressive disruptive behaviour being most frequent. Of the two-thirds capable of being interviewed, over three-quarters expressed satisfaction with their present living, work, education and recreation environment and had no desire to return to the institution. Most had few if any meaningful relationships with non developmentally disabled persons other than caregivers. Support agency staff and psychiatric consultants identified additional service needs for those with behavioural/psychiatric problems who may be placed in the community.

Definition The term "developmental disabilities" is used to describe a broad array of conditions that delay development and includes individuals who have "mental retardation." In 1992, the American Association on Mental Retardation defined mental retardation as an intelligence quotient (IQ) less than 70 or 75, with onset before age 18 years and limitations in two or more of the following adaptive skills: communication, self-care, home living, social skills, community use, self-direction, health and safety, functional academics, leisure, and work. This definition assumes that the testing performed was sensitive to differences in culture, language, communication, and behaviors and that the child's broadly defined environment was considered. Developmental disabilities may be isolated, as in the child whose vision is impaired, or may be multiple, as in the child whose fine motor, gross motor, and social functioning are delayed. Epidemiology Mental retardation has a prevalence of 10 in 1000 children. Specific common conditions and their prevalence per 1000 children include: cerebral palsy, 2; Down syndrome, 1; hearing impairment, 1; visual impairment, 1; and fragile X syndrome, 1. Delayed development is more frequent among children from low socioeconomic conditions. Developmental disabilities are encountered commonly in pediatric practice: Horwitz et al found that 5.3% of the patients encountered in a study of pediatric practices had cognitive and language disorders and that 4.0% had motor abnormalities.

New federal legislation involving infants at risk for handicaps and their families, in the form of Public Law 99-457, will rely on interaction between pediatricians and other professionals to maximize health and social benefits. Involvement in early identification and remediation of infants at risk is a role well suited to the primary care pediatrician. Early Intervention Programs offer remediation and enhancement of development for children at biologic or environmental risk. Pediatricians should be alert to screen, identify, and assess children who may be helped by Early Intervention Programs. The primary care pediatrician should work with children who have these problems, help coordinate care, and serve as an advocate for the child and family.

The challenge of appropriately serving children with handicaps who reside in rural areas is being answered in part by a rural aide training model developed by staff at Teaching Research in Monmouth, Oregon. The Rural Aide Model was designed to serve Oregon's developmentally disabled population, and uses an aide or paraprofessional who is trained in the components of the Teaching Research Data-Based Classroom Model. The approach involves supervision of the rural aide by a certified teacher in the school in whose classroom the student with handicaps and his rural aide work. Personnel interested in implementing this approach are trained in a five-day session accompanied by two follow-up visits to the aide's own work site. Training involves hands-on practica along with lecture and seminar sessions. Training is provided which assists the rural aide in assessment procedures, program planning and evaluation of student progress. Behavior modification techniques are woven throughout the instructional model.

All University Affiliated Facilities conduct interdisciplinary programs of training, education/service, research, and outreach in the area of developmental disabilities. In this article four representative programs of the Waisman Center University Affiliated Facility in Madison, Wisconsin are described. They all share the following common features: each has been designed to augment and support the independence of persons who are developmentally disabled, each is either conducted in a community-based setting or designed to train persons who will work in such settings, and each is used as a resource for the conduct of interdisciplinary training for educators and clinicians. Included in this article are descriptions of (a) a paraprofessional training program that leads to an associate degree in community services, (b) an innovative supported employment program specifically designed for adults still living in public institutions, (c) a service/research program that provides persons who do not have speech capability with the technology and training for communicating, and (d) an evaluation/research program for promoting communication skills in persons who are mentally retarded, deaf, and blind.

As a member of a team of people providing support to Alaskans who experience a developmental disability, I have been privileged to live and work in a setting which allows for constant reflection on the principles and concepts of applied anthropology. Among its other lessons, anthropology prepared me to realize that colonialism has not been directed only at foreign nations but can be seen operating in contemporary dealings with Native American and other minority groups and even in relations with the developmentally disabled. It showed me that the educational system is a powerful tool for both enculturation and acculturation, and that education can limit the development of individual potential as well as promoting it. It gave me an evolutionary perspective on human behavior which is a constant reminder of the importance of belonging to a community and the importance of having socially valued roles.

Summary Violence towards health-care personnel represent an increasing problem, but little is known in terms of how different occupational groups are affected. A questionnaire was sent to a stratified sample of 2,800 of 173,000 employees in the Swedish municipal health and welfare sector. Seven major groups working with the elderly or persons with developmental disabilities were considered: administrators, nursing specialists, supervisors, direct carers, nursing auxiliaries, assistant nurses, and personal assistants. The response rate was 85 percent. Fifty-one percent of respondents reported exposure to violence or threats of violence over one year. The most vulnerable groups were assistant nurses and direct carers (usually of the developmentally disabled). Individual characteristics, such as age and organizational tenure, were related to exposure. Work-related characteristics, such as type of workplace, working full-time with clients, organizational downsizing, and high workload, were also associated with risk. Greater knowledge of impacts on different professional groups and relevant prevention are required.

This paper aims to introduce the Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) as an interconnected theme to the development ofmultisector actions (health, education, work and social action) carried out with the community participation. To make easy the access for disabled people to the rehabilitation services, the International Health and Rehabilitation Organizations suggested a (CBR), as one of their enlargement strategies of aid coverage ffom local resources management mainly to the Third World. In the light of this proposition, purposes are discussed for the implantation ofrehabilitation actions with community participation from an experience in progress in São Paulo city-Brazil. In this case there is an emphasis on territorial labor with the local people's mobilization, including the disabled. By changing the "place" of the rehabilitation actions the professionals will face another subject, now integrated into the sociocultural context. The professionals reviewing and establishing new means/looks to decode the pertaining leveis of the disabled, form a differentiated view of the subject. They transfer part of their knowledge of the fíeld simplifying it, making it public and democratized. The experience in progress counts on the occupational therapists participation (professionals and graduate students) from social organizatiofrs representatives (school, day care center and health unit) from pastoral sections connected with the Roman Catholic Church, the local Child and Juvenile Protective Council, from relativos and the disabled, as well as volunteers. The project is being developed by a management group and plenary meeting for planing and assessment. Disabled people are followed up and general population in income generation activities for adults, group familiarity and sociocultural activities and local discussion of the disabled people^ needs and the general population in a particular sociocultural context. That would be a way to know the sociocultural context to locate subjects and knowledge about that group and their problems. Far more complex than increase the aid coverage or create services and rehabilitation actions at a low cost, it is to contribute to the production of the emancipation process and the self-management for the disabled.

The article studies reasons for moving employees and ministers of ecclesiastical institutions of the Tobolsk diocese in the second half of the 18th – early 20th century and analyses the procedure of the reshuffles. This topic has not been studied yet, it is here disclosed on basis of archival sources that are being introduced into scientific use. The author has studied files of the Tobolsk spiritual consistory stored in the State Archive in the city of Tobolsk. The article reveals content of these cases, examines documents on reshuffles of ministers of church institutions of the Tobolsk diocese. The author determines terms, on which the record keeping procedure depended, identifies its main stages, isolates initiating documents in the files. The most frequent reason for the displacement of church institutions officials and ministers was their inability to support themselves and their families on the salary. When ecclesiastical consistory needed clerical workers, the diocesan authorities preferred to transfer experienced employees from other church institutions, rather than to accept graduates from educational institutions where they were taught nothing of office work. Moreover, most graduates preferred the civil service to the spiritual, so there was a lack of clerical workers, and sometimes freelancer clerks were to be hired. The documents interesting not for dry statement of facts, but for remarks and reflections that are often emotionally colored. The archival documents show that the Russian Orthodox Church took care of all of its servants, even those disabled, in ill health or elderly and found opportunity to find them all a suitable position within their power.

This study analyzes the €ght between the Japanese judiciary and legislature. In Japan, under the ex-Eugenic Protection Act, disabled people were obligated to undergo sterilization procedures for about 20 years. This surprising Act was established in 1948 and enabled doctors to sterilize people in order to eliminate hereditary diseases; they could also perform this procedure on physically or developmentally disabled people without their consent. The 2016 Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women advised that research and compensation is urgent and necessary, but the government stated that it was a legal medical operation, and no compensation was necessary. Even under concrete judicial review, the judiciary in Japan may exercise its power to provide remedies for minorities who cannot amend statutes in the political process, or their constitutional rights will be infringed upon. is study argues that even concrete judicial reviews work to prevent serious damage before it occurs. This study will use a legal approach to review the first voting rights decision, as well as several decisions that are relevant to families in Japan. Under a concrete judicial review of the Japanese constitution, a plaintiff needs to bring a dispute in law to the court and allege that the statute or administrative disposition infringes on their human rights as provided for in the constitution. If there is no statute in the case, it is very difficult for a plaintiff to compel the legislature to pass the statute. If the legislature does not function well, the judiciary is obligated to find a way to encourage the legislature or the government to provide a remedy. The judiciary cannot compel the legislature, but may show some of the steps that it follows in its decisions.

A glance at the Case Notes section of the Ecclesiastical Law Journal over the last few years points the reader to a flurry of activity in alteration of listed church buildings. This is spurred on by (among other things) changing views and practice of liturgy, access for the disabled, repair of damaged buildings. replacement of worn fabric, making a building multi-purpose, comfort and audibility in worship, the incorporation of new technology, providing space for hospitality, accommodating children's work and commemorating the turn of the Millennium. Chancellors have had to strike a delicate balance between two opposing and contradictory points of view. On the one hand the view of some petitioners that ‘any alteration which is seen by the incumbent and congregation to be desirable in order to encourage and assist true worship should be permitted without outside restraint’. On the other hand the view of the heritage lobby and others that ‘most of the churches in this land are national treasures of which the present incumbent and the present congregation are merely temporary occupiers and custodians with no right to make unnecessary or, as some would seem to argue, any alterations’. Whilst the ecclesiastical courts have at times placed a restraining hand on those seeking to alter church buildings, there is ‘no requirement in law either that a church should be maintained for all time in the state in which it happens to be at present, or that it should automatically be changed in accordance with the latest liturgical fashion’.

RESUMENLa Iglesia de Salsipuedes en la Provincia de Córdoba fue construida en el año 1875 y su techo está conformado por una estructura de madera, vigas reticulada y correas sobre las cuales se apoyan bovedillas cerámicas, capa de mortero y tejas musleras. La Iglesia está inhabilitada por precaución debido a la aparición de fisuras en barras del reticulado y desprendimiento de trozos de mampostería en las cercanías del apoyo de las vigas principales. En este trabajo se estudia el estado tensional de las barras del reticulado y la materialización del apoyo de las vigas principales en los muros de mampostería.Constatado el alto valor de las tensiones de trabajo de las barras con manifestaciones patológicas, como así también el inadecuado sistema de apoyo en la mampostería, se proyectan los refuerzos necesarios para lograr un funcionamiento de la estructura con un grado de seguridad adecuado.Palabras clave: estructuras; madera; patología; patrimonio.ABSTRACTSalsipuedes The Church of the Province of Cordoba was built in 1875 and its roof is formed by a wooden structure, reticulate beams and straps which support ceramic arches tile mortar layer and tiling LegguardsThe Church is disabled as a precaution due to the appearance of cracks in the grid bars and breaking away of pieces of masonry near the support of the main beams. In this work we study the stress state of the grid bars and support the realization of the main beams in the masonry walls.Confirmed the high value of the working stresses of the bars with pathological manifestations, as well as inadequate support system in the masonry, projecting reinforcements necessary for safe operation of the structure with a degree of security.Keywords: Wooden structures; pathology; patrimony.

Paroxetine (PX) is the most potent serotonin reuptake inhibitor utilized in depression and anxiety treatment. It has drawbacks, such as having a very bitter taste, low water solubility, and undergoing extensive first pass metabolism, leading to poor oral bioavailability (<50%). This work aimed to develop and optimize palatable oral fast-dissolving films (OFDFs) loaded with a paroxetine nanosuspension. A PX nanosuspension was prepared to increase the PX solubility and permeability via the buccal mucosa. The OFDFs could increase PX bioavailability due to their rapid dissolution in saliva, without needing water, and the rapid absorption of the loaded drug through the buccal mucosa, thus decreasing the PX metabolism in the liver. OFDFs also offer better convenience to patients with mental illness, as well as pediatric, elderly, and developmentally disabled patients. The PX nanosuspension was characterized by particle size, poly dispersity index, and zeta potential. Twelve OFDFs were formulated using a solvent casting technique. A 22 × 31 full factorial design was applied to choose the optimized OFDF, utilizing Design-Expert® software (Stat-Ease Inc., Minneapolis, MN, USA). The optimized OFDF (F1) had a 3.89 ± 0.19 Mpa tensile strength, 53.08 ± 1.28% elongation%, 8.12 ± 0.13 MPa Young’s modulus, 17.09 ± 1.30 s disintegration time, and 96.02 ± 3.46% PX dissolved after 10 min. This optimized OFDF was subjected to in vitro dissolution, ex vivo permeation, stability, and palatability studies. The permeation study, using chicken buccal pouch, revealed increased drug permeation from the optimized OFDF; with a more than three-fold increase in permeation over the pure drug. The relative bioavailability of the optimized OFDF in comparison with the market tablet was estimated clinically in healthy human volunteers and was found to be 178.43%. These findings confirmed the success of the OFDFs loaded with PX nanosuspension for increasing PX bioavailability.

Introduction. The article analyzes the results of the sociological research undertaken by the authors in 2018 within the framework of the research project “Social Projects of the Russian Orthodox Church” in terms of comparing motivation, social technologies and social consequences of implementing Orthodox social projects in the capital and other regions of Russia in order to identify factors contributing to and hindering their successful implementation at the regional level. The purpose of the empirical research was to identify the social functions fulfilled in the process of developing and implementing social projects by organizations within the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), as well as by lay organizations created and headed by parishioners of the Russian Orthodox Church. Materials and Methods. The study used qualitative methods of collecting and analyzing sociological data such as observation, in-depth interviews with people participating in social activities of the Orthodox projects and with the members of their target groups. The qualitative study used theoretical sampling and the method of selecting typical cases, which made it possible to describe and analyze social technologies and the consequences of the Orthodox social activities in different areas of impact on the society, including helping the poor and the socially deprived strata of the population, rehabilitation of the disabled, ‘pro-life’ movements, as well as educational activities. Results. In the process of research, based on the analysis of the survey data, the goals of the Orthodox social projects and their hierarchy have been identified, as well as the peculiarities of motivation of the activities of the participants of the Orthodox social projects studied and the specifics of the forms of organizing social assistance in Moscow, the Republic of Mordovia, and the Ivanovo Region. The social technologies of direct and indirect influence of the Orthodox social projects in terms of educational activities have been studied. The authors sought to assess the transformational consequences of implementation of the Orthodox social projects studied at the levels of the individual, social institutions, and groups. Discussion and Conclusion. The study has revealed that the Orthodox social initiatives help their participants master such skills as fundraising, interaction with the society, government bodies and commercial entities, thus becoming an important segment of civil society. The main difficulties the Orthodox social projects encounter have been revealed: poor systemic work and dependence on the personality of the leader, dependence on grants. The scientific results of the study can be used when developing strategies and implementing social policies with the participation of Orthodox non-profit organizations through a comprehensive analysis of methods and social technologies.

The role of the “Evangelical house of diligenceˮ in the religious space of St. Petersburg is considered. The tradition of creating “Houses of diligenceˮ originated in St. Petersburg in the 19th century and began to revive again in the city on the Neva River at the beginning of the 21st century. At present time a few “Houses of diligenceˮ operate as rehabilitation centers for children and adults with disabilities engaging them in various workshops and other labour activities. It is obvious that the possibility of providing unemployed citizens with social assistance through the provision of temporary work, as well as assistance in their further employment, does not lose its relevance. The goal of this paper is to assess the role of “The Evangelical house of diligenceˮ in the religious space of Saint Petersburg. During the writing of this paper we used materials from the Russian Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg. For the main research we used chronological and comparative historical methods of analysis. Using the chronological analysis, we explored the sequence of formation and development of “The Evangelical house of diligenceˮ. Using comparative historical analysis, we determined the structure of that institutions, sources of his financing and the underlying mechanism of his operation. The article makes an effort to evaluate the role of pastor A. Mazing in organisation of “The Evangelical house of diligenceˮ. Management of “The Evangelical house of diligenceˮ and in addition to organising of the temporary employment to those in need of the Evangelical Lutheran faith, was providing charitable assistance to the disabled individuals. It was also involved in creations of a hospice and a shelter for alcoholics. In that “institution of labour assistance” they paid a special attention to the concerns for morality of the wards in accordance with the canons of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church, therefore they prioritised the faithful of this Church dur-ing the admission. “The Evangelical house of diligenceˮ was offering its workers in need an option to live on the premises, which was a welcome offer especially during wintertime.

Relevance. On one hand Catholic schools have a tradition of caring for the weakest, of paying attention to each person and to his or her needs; on the other hand, factually, they do not differ from other schools in the aspect of integrating of people with disabilities, as shown by the sources studied. Why is there a discrepancy between the paradigm of Catholic education and its realization? Authors (J. M. Barton (2000), M. E. Blackett (2001), J. Ruškus (2002), D. A. Bello (2006), T. J. Long, M. J. Schuttloffl (2006), A. Galkienė (2008), M. Scalan (2009), C. Ch. Grima-Farrell (2012), who have studied inclusive Catholic education pay more attention to the pedagogical or administrative questions raised by inclusive education than to the philosophical basis of such a choice. As a matter of fact, the analysis of Catholic education under the aspect of inclusive education is a new thing in Lithuania. The practical use of the research is the evaluation of the situation, with the identification of the weak aspects of inclusive education in Lithuania. This would allow, in the future, modeling the organization of the education of pupils with special needs on the basis of the paradigm of Catholic education. Problem question for the research: what is the situation of inclusive education in Catholic schools in Lithuania? How is it related to the conception of inclusive education expressed by the documents of the Catholic Church? The aim of the research: on the basis of empirical research find out the tendencies of inclusive education in Catholic Schools in Lithuania according to the documents of Catholic Church. The objectives of the research: 1. Make a survey of scientific literature about inclusive education in Catholic schools. 2. Analyze the vision of inclusive education contained in Church documents and the Church’s declarations about persons with a handicap, their needs and their rights. 3. Analyze the inclusive education in catholic schools according to the documents of Catholic Church. Methods of the research: 1. Survey of scientific literature and research results on inclusive education in Catholic schools. 2. Analyze documents of the Catholic Church from Vatican II on Catholic education and persons with a handicap. 3. Case study on the education of people with disabilities in Catholic schools. The analysis of the understanding of inclusive education in Catholic schools shows that: 1. It is obvious that students with disabilities should be integrated – this is understood as a norm and as a natural consequence of the Christian understanding of the value of each human person. 2. We underline the qualitative aspect of inclusive education – how it can be organized while, at the same time, maintaining the major components of Catholic education. 3. Practical research shows that, although Catholic education is favorable to inclusiveness, there are many obstacles to its qualitative realization: there is often a lack of financial and human resources, and, as a result, a gap between theory and practice. The documents of the Catholic Church show very clearly the theological grounds of inclusiveness: the person is accepted for his/her own valuable and unquestionable contribution to the community as a human person, since the definition of a Catholic school corresponds to that of a Christian community in which various persons, joined by a common aim live out the values of the Gospel and collaborate. The empirical method was applied in 17 Lithuanian Catholic schools, all of which were analyzed not as multiple cases, but as part of one case-situation of Catholic schools in Lithuania. The empirical research findings reveal that inclusiveness often means that students with disabilities are accepted in the common educational process, but without adapted conditions necessary for a full participation in this process and for personal success. As far as religious education is concerned, students with special needs are integrated in common programs, but there is practically no adaptation or personalization of pastoral work or moral education. The role of the disabled person in forming a community with other students is enhanced, but the vertical, transcendental dimension of his/her mission, which is underlined by the theological approach of the documents, is not mentioned by the schools authorities. Comparison between declarations of the Church documents on people with special needs and the information received from the schools shows a discrepancy between the aim and the reality as evaluated by school authorities, which is more functional than philosophical.

Community centres have been institutions acting like driving forces in the cultural life of villages. They were based on direct collaboration with intellectuals in each village: the priest, the teacher, the notary, the doctor. The cultural life of community centres was diverse and included various fields of activity aiming at multiple aspects in the life of each community. Generally, such activities were oriented towards solving economic issues, without limitation to them. It should be mentioned here the concern for public health, the control of epidemics, the rearing and education of children, the moral and intellectual development thereof.The community centre organizes various cultural activities where explanations are given to community, including people of all ages, about our historic past, thepresent time finding of paths and the future time for whose wellbeing they should a harmonious development. Starting from such points of interest, this work covers aspects of the community cultural life at Grăjdana, where the community centre established in 1934 played a major role in the development thereof, due to its achievements marking the period 1934-1940. A particularly significant contribution in the cultural becoming and development of the Grăjdana community was brought by the parish priest together with the village intellectuals. Thanks to their love for the people, they managed to invigorate the community in a short time by involving the villagers in various activities of spiritual, scientific, moral, artistic and recreational nature. According to the minutes executed on 3 July 1934, the initiative of creating a community centre was wholeheartedly approved, with the knowledge that it would be useful for the community. The following took part in the creation of the Grăjdana community centre: the priest Constantin Bunea, the teachers Ion Marinescu, Caliopia M. Rădulescu, Elisabeta Bunea and the notary Mihail Rădulescu. In addition to the creation of the centre, the people found out that the centre library was enhanced with all the parish library brochures and magazines that were made available, with new subscriptions for magazines, and that a people pharmacy was established. In time, the people would attend the meetings by categories of age and measures would be continuously taken so as to fulfil the articles of the Rules for the Functioning of Community Centres.In addition to the promotion of culture, the manager of “Regele Carol II“ Community Centre of Grăjdana together with active members bore in mind charitytoo, raising funds for building a monument dedicated to the heroes killed in the Great War, for helping orphans and the injured, for maintaining school canteens, for helping the locals get trained in the agricultural field. The good functioning of the Grăjdana Community Centre was successful also due to the collaboration with “Principele Carol“ Cultural Royal Foundation which approved and upheld the proposals submitted by the centre management, providing books, magazines, medicines, awards in cash and in kind, diplomas and decorations to encourage and select the cultural work. In addition to the local management continuous work and capacity, the envisaged goals were achieved also due to the kindness of distinguished persons, most of whom the Centre declared Honorary Members. One of them was Colonel I. Săndulescu, who made a number of donations, such as 8 plows and plowshares needed by the community. On the celebration of the Heroes’ Day, Regele Carol II Community Centre of Grăjdana conducted a number of activities with the participation of: widows, orphans, the war disabled, the Decorați (The War Decorated) and Foști Luptători (Former Fighters) associations, members of the centre council, commune authorities, schools led by teachers, premilitaries and villagers. The Grăjdana Church performed the Divine Liturgy praying in memorial of heroes. At the Heroes’ Monument blessings were delivered by the representatives of: the church, the mayor’s office, the forest range, war disabled and others. For its fruitful activity, in addition to the thanks received from various institutions such as the Ministry for Endowment of the Army, the Red Cross Society, Principele Carol Cultural Royal Foundation, the community centre of Grăjdana was awarded a prize in 1940 and called Model Community Centre together with other 50 community centres from throughout Greater Romania. The Centre managers were also rewarded with the Centenarul Regelui Carol I (Charles I Centenary) medal. In 1940, the Community Centre of Grăjdana achieved the following: fundraising for raising two school buildings, for opening three school canteens for the disadvantaged pupils, a people pharmacy store providing medicines to people at cost prices. At the Centre consulting room 261 vaccines were delivered against tuberculosis for children, as well as medical consultations free of charge. Poor families were helped with food supplies. The library was endowed with new books and magazines, a nursery of fruit trees, locust trees and grafted fruit trees and selected seeds was created. The Centre made donations to the army amounting to Lei 1882 and delivered courses on hygiene, religion, morality, household. Under the Community Centre patronage the following developed: Hora tinerilor (The Youth Round-Dance), Foștii luptători (Former Fighters) Association, Asociația Decoraților de războiu (The Association of the War Decorated), Post-Militari (Post-Militaries) Association, Crucea Roșie (Red Cross) Society. Although no solid material basis was available in the beginning, as the community was quite poor, the means that were employed allowed the development of love and respect for the historic past, keeping authenticity and the perpetuation of traditions.

Background One-fifth of all disabled children have mobility limitations. Early provision of powered mobility for very young children (aged < 5 years) is hypothesised to trigger positive developmental changes. However, the optimum age at which to introduce powered mobility is unknown. Objective The aim of this project was to synthesise existing evidence regarding the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of powered mobility for very young children, compared with the more common practice of powered mobility provision from the age of 5 years. Review methods The study was planned as a mixed-methods evidence synthesis and economic modelling study. First, evidence relating to the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, acceptability, feasibility and anticipated outcomes of paediatric powered mobility interventions was reviewed. A convergent mixed-methods evidence synthesis was undertaken using framework synthesis, and a separate qualitative evidence synthesis was undertaken using thematic synthesis. The two syntheses were subsequently compared and contrasted to develop a logic model for evaluating the outcomes of powered mobility interventions for children. Because there were insufficient published data, it was not possible to develop a robust economic model. Instead, a budget impact analysis was conducted to estimate the cost of increased powered mobility provision for very young children, using cost data from publicly available sources. Data sources A range of bibliographic databases [Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINHAL), MEDLINE, EMBASE™ (Elsevier, Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro), Occupational Therapy Systematic Evaluation of Evidence (OTseeker), Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (ASSIA), PsycINFO, Science Citation Index (SCI; Clarivate Analytics, Philadelphia, PA, USA), Social Sciences Citation Index™ (SSCI; Clarivate Analytics), Conference Proceedings Citation Index – Science (CPCI-S; Clarivate Analytics), Conference Proceedings Citation Index – Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH; Clarivate Analytics), Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), NHS Economic Evaluation Database (NHS EED), Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Database and OpenGrey] was systematically searched and the included studies were quality appraised. Searches were carried out in June 2018 and updated in October 2019. The date ranges searched covered from 1946 to September 2019. Results In total, 89 studies were included in the review. Only two randomised controlled trials were identified. The overall quality of the evidence was low. No conclusive evidence was found about the effectiveness or cost-effectiveness of powered mobility in children aged either < 5 or ≥ 5 years. However, strong support was found that powered mobility interventions have a positive impact on children’s movement and mobility, and moderate support was found for the impact on children’s participation, play and social interactions and on the safety outcome of accidents and pain. ‘Fit’ between the child, the equipment and the environment was found to be important, as were the outcomes related to a child’s independence, freedom and self-expression. The evidence supported two distinct conceptualisations of the primary powered mobility outcome, movement and mobility: the former is ‘movement for movement’s sake’ and the latter destination-focused mobility. Powered mobility should be focused on ‘movement for movement’s sake’ in the first instance. From the budget impact analysis, it was estimated that, annually, the NHS spends £1.89M on the provision of powered mobility for very young children, which is < 2% of total wheelchair service expenditure. Limitations The original research question could not be answered because there was a lack of appropriately powered published research. Conclusions Early powered mobility is likely to have multiple benefits for very young children, despite the lack of robust evidence to demonstrate this. Age is not the key factor; instead, the focus should be on providing developmentally appropriate interventions and focusing on ‘movement for movement’s sake’. Future work Future research should focus on developing, implementing, evaluating and comparing different approaches to early powered mobility. Study registration This study is registered as PROSPERO CRD42018096449. Funding This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology programme and will be published in full in Health Technology Assessment; Vol. 24, No. 50. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information.

It was not the state but the missionaries that first gave special attention to the disabled in Colonial India. In other words, the conceptualization of awareness about special care and education for the disabled in India started with the Christian theological idea of disability and with the idea of charity. Christian missionaries established special education institutions in India with funding from overseas charitable societies. Through the preaching of Christianity in these schools, missionaries constructed the idea of ‘divinity of brokenness’ for the disabled in India. They preached about the divinity of suffering and used education as a tool to integrate the disabled into Christianity. The missionaries primarily used basic interpretations of the Bible to create an awareness of the care needs for the disabled among the local populations. They tried to spread the Christian ideology that everything under God’s patronage was a created image of God and that everyone held a high value. Most importantly, they maintained that all believers were created by God, and each has a mission to fulfil based on his/her destiny. For every evangelization, the missionaries quoted the Bible for more support and interpretation. The rooted dogma of having a life for a purpose was spread across the country to advocate the significance of the disabled in society. The missionaries indoctrinated the idea that ‘in a healthy church, everybody belongs.’ Christianity was appealed as a religion of ‘inclusion’ and this continuous mission work among the disabled population increased the popularity of Christianity in India.

This case focuses on the financial health of Aspire, a forty-year-old nonprofit organization serving the needs of the developmentally disabled. To meet the residential, educational, and vocational needs of its clients, Aspire has grown significantly by expanding services and buying residences. As a nonprofit organization, Aspire has to consider financial implications and organizational/mission concerns as it explores the purchase of a building and the consolidation of administrative activities. The case enables students to explore the strengths and weaknesses of Aspire's financial situation, the primary financial indicators that different types of lenders would consider, as well as the financial and organizational costs and benefits to Aspire for the various lending options. The case profiles several different types of financing options, including traditional bank loans, the issuance of tax-exempt bonds, and the participation of a community development financial institution. Students are asked to do analysis and recommend a financing choice for Aspire. The case is based on work that the Illinois Facilities Fund, an Illinois community development finance institution, did with Aspire in 2000.This goal of this case is to teach students how to examine the strengths and weaknesses of a nonprofit's financial situation, show them the primary financial indicators that different types of lenders would consider, and help them weigh the financial and organizational costs and benefits of the various lending options. The case also teaches students the importance of understanding the financial implications of mission-based decisions.

For many commentators autobiographical videogames represent a step towards a more human vision of digital play, promising to transform a medium still widely associated with mindless and dehumanising virtual violence into a vector for self-expression, empathy and understanding. Viewed through the lens of life-writing theory, however, the situation looks somewhat different. As scholar in this fieldhave shown, works of auto/biography and life-writing have been instrumental in propagating ideas about agency, politics and the human that remain both pervasive and pernicious. Their work suggests that if we are to talk about ‘humanising’ videogames we must first address how understandings of the human are constituted and who they have historically excluded. Here developments in life-writing theory align with recent scholarship on how videogames undercut the liberal humanist conception of the autonomous agential subject by implicating players in complex assemblages of human and non-human actors. This work holds out another way of reading the encounter between gaming and auto/biography: as a catalyst for new forms of posthumanist life-writing, in which the autobiographical mode co-exists with what this article dubs the ludobiographical mode. If games are autobiographical to the extent that they involve creators giving an account of episodes from their own life, they are ludobiographical to the extent that they foreground the challenges videogames pose to humanism’s vision of autonomous individuals in possession of their own bodies, stories and identities. This idea is elaborated through an analysis of That Dragon, Cancer ( Numinous Games, 2016 ). Created by Ryan and Amy Green, the game documents the death of their developmentally disabled son Joel and their consequent crisis of faith. Controversial and widely discussed, it constitutes a rich case study in how autobiographical videogames raise irreducibly political questions about agency, identity and the (post)human.

Category: 1.01 Original scientific paper Language: Original in Slovene (Abstract in Slovene and English, Summary in English) Key words: Diocese of Ljubljana, Diocese of Maribor, charity work, military graves, war orphans, widows, Slovenia Abstract: The events during the war and the time after it brought several consequences for the population of the Slovenian lands. These were noticeable in all areas of personal and community life, and were particularly challenging for church communities, which prepared a series of initiatives to alleviate social distress and to regulate the issues raised by the war. Attention was drawn to various groups of the population: war orphans, widows, disabled soldiers, refugees from the Gorica (Gorizia) region, and the missing. Additional care had to be given to the military graves and the military sections of the cemeteries. The various forms of charitable action needed to be coordinated. The alliance Karitativna zveza became an umbrella organization for said charity work. There were various rallies, the preparation of programs and the raising of funds for the charity work. When the Spanish disease broke out at the end of the war, it was in the ecclesiastical context to find original explanations of this ordeal. The paper also outlines initiatives taken by individual bishops to regulate the situation. They placed greater emphasis on the religious dimension of the event. At the same time, they warned people against taking advantage of affected friends and relatives, and against a disorderly life.

In the 1980's, I was privileged to attend the profession ceremony of my sister into the Catholic Sisters of St. Joseph (SSJ). She entered the convent in the fall after her high school graduation and, ten years later, had decided that she was ready to make her final vows and commit her life to the work of God on earth and to this particular apostolic community. Though I was happy that my sister was following her calling in life, I worried that she was committing herself to an unnecessarily harsh life, ruled by the long-standing patriarchy of the Catholic Church. I didn't have much faith that the Church, in its tradition and dogma, could accommodate my sister's spirit of activism and desire to bring about social justice. However, this ceremony, designed and enacted by the SSJ, changed my mind about the possibilities. They demonstrated how "sisterhood" and life in community would position my sister to affect change in the community and allow her to participate in the creation of a kinder, more inclusive version of the Catholic religion. The profession ceremony and the accompanying mass, though they reflected the new directions in the Church, were unlike any other Catholic ceremonies that I had ever experienced. In a break from the usual service, the Sisters performed the majority of the activities of the mass. A priest (male, of course) was present only to carry out the consecration of the host for communion services and to give the blessing. The taking of such freedom in the mass by the Sisters was something that was unheard of in earlier days in the Church. In the Catholicism that I knew, the strictly ordered rituals of the mass were to be enacted by the priest and observed by the congregation. The enactment of mass also served as a subliminal vehicle for hierarchically ordering the congregation: from God to priests, to nuns, and finally to the people. The positioning of priests and nuns and their respective roles in the church has been an ongoing struggle for nuns since Vatican II, a series of councils created in 1962 by Pope John XXIII to update the workings and interactions of the Church (http://www.rcchurch/vatican2/). Religious orders were given much more autonomy over their lives and lifestyles, but little had changed in regard to the hierarchy. In 1979 when the Pope visited the U.S., women religious urged him to allow greater recognition and participation for nuns. Theresa Kane, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) asked the Pope on behalf of all nuns to "respond by providing the possibility of women as persons being included in all ministries of the church" (Kane, in McNamara, 1996, p.663). Their request went unheeded. Even now, with the turn of a new century, Catholic women religious are still denied the privilege of becoming priests or moving into positions of power within the Church. It has been a great disappointment for many nuns, but they have persevered and created new ways of operating. They changed into contemporary dress, moved beyond just teaching and nursing positions and took up social activism in earnest (Rogers, 1996). They have been bolstered by their desire to make a difference in the church and society, and are determined to find alternative ways to have their voices heard in their work of serving the people. My sister's commitment ceremony also broke from Catholic tradition and reflected the new directions of the SSJ. She based her personal statement of commitment on the Shakertown Pledge, making a connection to another monastic community, the Shakers, who live simply in the service of God and community (http://www.nypl.org). Among others, she made promises of becoming a world citizen, leading an ecologically sound life, living a life of creative simplicity, sharing of her personal wealth with the poor, renewing herself through prayer, meditation, and study, and responsibly participating in a community of faith. This personal statement was followed by her formal commitment to the Sisters of St. Joseph. To the President of the SSJ, (no longer a Mother Superior), my sister vowed to unite her life to the Community, bring the Gospel to the people and seek union of neighbor with neighbor through commitments to poverty, celibacy and obedience. She received a plain gold wedding band, not as a "bride of Christ", but as a symbol of her commitment to God, the community of the SSJ, and the world community. In their simplicity and sincerity, the vows touched my heart. My sister had moved from our nuclear family into a new family of the SSJ and the world. Her work and the world in which she moved would certainly be different than the one we had envisioned throughout our childhood together. According to Schneiders (2000), it is much more difficult today to "locate" and "situate" women religious. Unlike nuns of the earlier part of the century, my sister would not be secluded in a convent, away from people and identifiable only by a flowing black habit and service in an insular community. The world was open to her to find her ministry. In these times, many religious orders find and create their own ministries, like a "bricolage", pieceworking solutions to individually fit the myriad of life situations. Schneiders (2000, p. xxvii) describes the phenomenon in this way: "The unity of the final product and its utility result not from a preordained plan correctly followed but from the inner directedness of the one creating." More than likely, the possibility of continually being involved in creative change was the lure of the SSJ for my sister. For the SSJ, the ever-changing, creative nature of their work allows them the freedom to work in places where ministries are most needed. The Sisters of St. Joseph use their marginalized position in the Church and society as a position for change. At the profession ceremony, the Sisters had found an alternative way to reach the people and serve their congregation. They knowingly pushed the limits of tradition in the church as they expanded their participation in the ceremony and the mass. Then and in the present time, the SSJ, like bell hooks, choose to live on the margins of society for a reason; the margins are "a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one's capacity to react. It offers to one the possibility of a radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternative-new worlds (1990, pp. 149-50)." At the ceremony, members of the SSJ made statements of ongoing commitment to service and their ministries. They spoke in support of poor people, disabled people, those labeled as criminals, and for all those who were not getting their fair share of life. The SSJ profoundly believe in God "who is the origin of all that is", and they seek "the union of ourselves and all people with God and with one another in and through Christ Jesus" (1987, Constitution of the Sisters of St. Joseph, p. 3; http://www.nd.edu/~csjus/home.html). For the SSJ, this charism means becoming prophets of the Church. Like their founding order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Le Puy, France in the seventeenth century, they continually seek out those people and organizations that are in need and create solutions with them. Once programs are established and integrated into the community, they move on to the next area of need. Similarly, they see their formation as Sisters of St. Joseph as a "lifelong process" (SSJ Constitution, p. 18). After the seriousness of the vows and statements, the profession ceremony became a celebration. Happiness and energy filled the chapel as people smiled widely and enthusiastically joined in the singing of hymns. The final song, an old Black spiritual, "Oh, Happy Day", nearly brought the house down. It was the most emotional group expression I had ever seen in a Catholic service. A special experience had been co-created and shared by all of us, even the many long-time traditional Catholics who all responded enthusiastically. With the staid protocol of the mass was cast aside, the spirit of the people took over. Pearce and Cronen (1980) would propose that we, the nuns and laity, in our conjoint action, had reached a moment of liberation; we were able to create a new way of being in the Catholic Church. In their work, the SSJ accept and circumvent the worldly struggles they face with the Catholic Church by acting in a spirit of connection with the people and the community. In their ongoing ministries, the SSJ give witness to their "love of God and neighbor by living simply and working for a more just society" (SSJ Constitution, p. 12). They often struggle with the most difficult of situations and work with the most unfortunate members of society. With their love of God and service, they encourage community members to work with them to change not only the daily conditions of life, but also, the way the Church and others in the community understand and accept all people. The Catholic religion in this form is reachable; the Creator, positioned as God, works through and is simultaneously created in the actions and words of the people. In a circular fashion, God is connected with people, and people are connected neighbor to neighbor, as they connect with the spirit and word of God. In this way, the SSJ continually work toward and create their goal "that all may be one." At the profession ceremony, the people took this gift of spirit with them and, hopefully, were inspired to begin connecting in new ways with the people and chosen God/spirit of their own lives. When my sister first entered the convent, I used to wonder why nuns thanked each other after sharing a religious service. After participating in the profession ceremony, I knew. Thank you, Teresa.

Despite numerous critics describing him as an auteur (i.e. a film-maker who ‘does’ everything and fulfils every production role [Bordwell and Thompson 37] and/or with a signature “world-view” detectable in his/her work [Caughie 10]), Rolf de Heer appears to have declined primary authorship of Dance Me to My Song (1997), his seventh in an oeuvre of twelve feature films. Indeed, the opening credits do not mention his name at all: it is only with the closing credits that the audience learns de Heer has directed the film. Rather, as the film commences, the viewer is informed by the titles that it is “A film by Heather Rose”, thus suggesting that the work is her singular creation. Direct and uncompromising, with its unflattering shots of the lead actor and writer (Heather Rose Slattery, a young woman born with cerebral palsy), the film may be read as a courageous self-portrait which finds the grace, humanity and humour trapped inside Rose’s twisted body. Alternatively, it may be read as yet another example of de Heer’s signature interest in foregrounding a world view which gives voice to marginalised characters such as the disabled or the disadvantaged. For example, the developmentally retarded eponyme of Bad Boy Bubby (1993) is eventually able to make art as a singer in a band and succeeds in creating a happy family with a wife and two kids. The ‘mute’ girl in The Quiet Room (1996) makes herself heard by her squabbling parents through her persistent activism. In Ten Canoes (2006) the Indigenous Australians cast themselves according to kinship ties, not according to the director’s choosing, and tell their story in their own uncolonised language. A cursory glance at the films of Rolf de Heer suggests he is overtly interested in conveying to the audience the often overlooked agency of his unlikely protagonists. In the ultra-competitive world of professional film-making it is rare to see primary authorship ceded by a director so generously. However, the allocation of authorship to a member of a marginalized population re-invigorates questions prompted by Andy Medhurst regarding a film’s “authorship test” (198) and its relationship to a subaltern community wherein he writes that “a biographical approach has more political justification if the project being undertaken is one concerned with the cultural history of a marginalized group” (202-3). Just as films by gay authors about gay characters may have greater credibility, as Medhurst posits, one might wonder would a film by a person with a disability about a character with the same disability be better received? Enabling authorship by an unknown, crippled woman such as Rose rather than a famous, able-bodied male such as de Heer may be cynically regarded as good (show) business in that it is politically correct. This essay therefore asks if the appellation “A film by Heather Rose” is appropriate for Dance Me to My Song. Whose agency in telling the story (or ‘doing’ the film-making), the able bodied Rolf de Heer or the disabled Heather Rose, is reflected in this cinematic production? In other words, whose voice is enabled when an audience receives this film? In attempting to answer these questions it is inevitable that Paul Darke’s concept of the “normality drama” (181) is referred to and questioned, as I argue that Dance Me to My Song makes groundbreaking departures from the conventions of the typical disability narrative. Heather Rose as Auteur Rose plays the film’s heroine, Julia, who like herself has cerebral palsy, a group of non-progressive, chronic disorders resulting from changes produced in the brain during the prenatal stages of life. Although severely affected physically, Rose suffered no intellectual impairment and had acted in Rolf de Heer’s cult hit Bad Boy Bubby five years before, a confidence-building experience that grew into an ongoing fascination with the filmmaking process. Subsequently, working with co-writer Frederick Stahl, she devised the scenario for this film, writing the lead role for herself and then proactively bringing it to de Heer’s attention. Rose wrote of de Heer’s deliberate lack of involvement in the script-writing process: “Rolf didn’t even want to read what we’d done so far, saying he didn’t want to interfere with our process” (de Heer, “Production Notes”). In 2002, aged 36, Rose died and Stahl reports in her obituary an excerpt from her diary: People see me as a person who has to be controlled. But let me tell you something, people. I am not! And I am going to make something real special of my life! I am going to go out there and grab life with both hands!!! I am going to make the most sexy and honest film about disability that has ever been made!! (Stahl, “Standing Room Only”) This proclamation of her ability and ambition in screen-writing is indicative of Rose’s desire to do. In a guest lecture Rose gave further insights into the active intent in writing Dance Me to My Song: I wanted to create a screenplay, but not just another soppy disability film, I wanted to make a hot sexy film, which showed the real world … The message I wanted to convey to an audience was “As people with disabilities, we have the same feelings and desires as others”. (Rose, “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation”) Rose went on to explain her strategy for winning over director de Heer: “Rolf was not sure about committing to the movie; I had to pester him really. I decided to invite him to my birthday party. It took a few drinks, but I got him to agree to be the director” (ibid) and with this revelation of her tactical approach her film-making agency is further evidenced. Rose’s proactive innovation is not just evident in her successfully approaching de Heer. Her screenplay serves as a radical exception to films featuring disabled persons, which, according to Paul Darke in 1998, typically involve the disabled protagonist struggling to triumph over the limitations imposed by their disability in their ‘admirable’ attempts to normalize. Such normality dramas are usually characterized by two generic themes: first, that the state of abnormality is nothing other than tragic because of its medical implications; and, second, that the struggle for normality, or some semblance of it in normalization – as represented in the film by the other characters – is unquestionably right owing to its axiomatic supremacy. (187) Darke argues that the so-called normality drama is “unambiguously a negation of ascribing any real social or individual value to the impaired or abnormal” (196), and that such dramas function to reinforce the able-bodied audience’s self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other. Able-bodied characters are typically portrayed positively in the normality drama: “A normality as represented in the decency and support of those characters who exist around, and for, the impaired central character. Thus many of the disabled characters in such narratives are bitter, frustrated and unfulfilled and either antisocial or asocial” (193). Darke then identifies The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) and Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) as archetypal films of this genre. Even in films in which seemingly positive images of the disabled are featured, the protagonist is still to be regarded as the abnormal Other, because in comparison to the other characters within that narrative the impaired character is still a comparatively second-class citizen in the world of the film. My Left Foot is, as always, a prime example: Christy Brown may well be a writer, relatively wealthy and happy, but he is not seen as sexual in any way (194). However, Dance Me to My Song defies such generic restrictions: Julia’s temperament is upbeat and cheerful and her disability, rather than appearing tragic, is made to look healthy, not “second class”, in comparison with her physically attractive, able-bodied but deeply unhappy carer, Madelaine (Joey Kennedy). Within the first few minutes of the film we see Madelaine dissatisfied as she stands, inspecting her healthy, toned and naked body in the bathroom mirror, contrasted with vision of Julia’s twisted form, prostrate, pale and naked on the bed. Yet, in due course, it is the able-bodied girl who is shown to be insecure and lacking in character. Madelaine steals Julia’s money and calls her “spastic”. Foul-mouthed and short-tempered, Madelaine perversely positions Julia in her wheelchair to force her to watch as she has perfunctory sex with her latest boyfriend. Madelaine even masquerades as Julia, commandeering her voice synthesizer to give a fraudulently positive account of her on-the-job performance to the employment agency she works for. Madelaine’s “axiomatic supremacy” is thoroughly undermined and in the most striking contrast to the typical normality drama, Julia is unashamedly sexual: she is no Christy Brown. The affective juxtaposition of these two different personalities stems from the internal nature of Madelaine’s problems compared to the external nature of Julia’s problems. Madelaine has an emotional disability rather than a physical disability and several scenes in the film show her reduced to helpless tears. Then one day when Madelaine has left her to her own devices, Julia defiantly wheels herself outside and bumps into - almost literally - handsome, able-bodied Eddie (John Brumpton). Cheerfully determined, Julia wins him over and a lasting friendship is formed. Having seen the joy that sex brings to Madelaine, Julia also wants carnal fulfilment so she telephones Eddie and arranges a date. When Eddie arrives, he reads the text on her voice machine’s screen containing the title line to the film ‘Dance me to my song’ and they share a tender moment. Eddie’s gentleness as he dances Julia to her song (“Kizugu” written by Bernard Huber and John Laidler, as performed by Okapi Guitars) is simultaneously contrasted with the near-date-rapes Madelaine endures in her casual relationships. The conflict between Madeline and Julia is such that it prompts Albert Moran and Errol Vieth to categorize the film as “women’s melodrama”: Dance Me to My Song clearly belongs to the genre of the romance. However, it is also important to recognize it under the mantle of the women’s melodrama … because it has to do with a woman’s feelings and suffering, not so much because of the flow of circumstance but rather because of the wickedness and malevolence of another woman who is her enemy and rival. (198-9) Melodrama is a genre that frequently resorts to depicting disability in which a person condemned by society as disabled struggles to succeed in love: some prime examples include An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957) involving a paraplegic woman, and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) in which a strong-spirited but mute woman achieves love. The more conventional Hollywood romances typically involve attractive, able-bodied characters. In Dance Me to My Song the melodramatic conflict between the two remarkably different women at first seems dominated by Madelaine, who states: “I know I’m good looking, good in bed ... better off than you, you poor thing” in a stream-of-consciousness delivery in which Julia is constructed as listener rather than converser. Julia is further reduced to the status of sub-human as Madelaine says: “I wish you could eat like a normal person instead of a bloody animal” and her erstwhile boyfriend Trevor says: “She looks like a fuckin’ insect.” Even the benevolent Eddie says: “I don’t like leaving you alone but I guess you’re used to it.” To this the defiant Julia replies; “Please don’t talk about me in front of me like I’m an animal or not there at all.” Eddie is suitably chastised and when he treats her to an over-priced ice-cream the shop assistant says “Poor little thing … She’ll enjoy this, won’t she?” Julia smiles, types the words “Fuck me!”, and promptly drops the ice-cream on the floor. Eddie laughs supportively. “I’ll just get her another one,” says the flustered shop assistant, “and then get her out of here, please!” With striking eloquence, Julia wheels herself out of the shop, her voice machine announcing “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me”, as she departs exultantly. With this bold statement of independence and defiance in the face of patronising condescension, the audience sees Rose’s burgeoning strength of character and agency reflected in the onscreen character she has created. Dance Me to My Song and the films mentioned above are, however, rare exceptions in the many that dare represent disability on the screen at all, compliant as the majority are with Darke’s expectations of the normality drama. Significantly, the usual medical-model nexus in many normality films is ignored in Rose’s screenplay: no medication, hospitals or white laboratory coats are to be seen in Julia’s world. Finally, as I have described elsewhere, Julia is shown joyfully dancing in her wheelchair with Eddie while Madelaine proves her physical inferiority with a ‘dance’ of frustration around her broken-down car (see Starrs, "Dance"). In Rose’s authorial vision, audience’s expectations of yet another film of the normality drama genre are subverted as the disabled protagonist proves superior to her ‘normal’ adversary in their melodramatic rivalry for the sexual favours of an able-bodied love-interest. Rolf de Heer as Auteur De Heer does not like to dwell on the topic of auteurism: in an interview in 2007 he somewhat impatiently states: I don’t go in much for that sort of analysis that in the end is terminology. … Look, I write the damn things, and direct them, and I don’t completely produce them anymore – there are other people. If that makes me an auteur in other people’s terminologies, then fine. (Starrs, "Sounds" 20) De Heer has been described as a “remarkably non-egotistical filmmaker” (Davis “Working together”) which is possibly why he handed ownership of this film to Rose. Of the writer/actor who plied him with drink so he would agree to back her script, de Heer states: It is impossible to overstate the courage of the performance that you see on the screen. … Heather somehow found the means to respond on cue, to maintain the concentration, to move in the desired direction, all the myriad of acting fundamentals that we take for granted as normal things to do in our normal lives. (“Production NHotes”) De Heer’s willingness to shift authorship from director to writer/actor is representative of this film’s groundbreaking promotion of the potential for agency within disability. Rather than being passive and suffering, Rose is able to ‘do.’ As the lead actor she is central to the narrative. As the principle writer she is central to the film’s production. And she does both. But in conflict with this auteurial intent is the temptation to describe Dance Me to My Song as an autobiographical documentary, since it is Rose herself, with her unique and obvious physical handicap, playing the film’s heroine, Julia. In interview, however, De Heer apparently disagrees with this interpretation: Rolf de Heer is quick to point out, though, that the film is not a biography.“Not at all; only in the sense that writers use material from their own lives.Madelaine is merely the collection of the worst qualities of the worst carers Heather’s ever had.” Dance Me to My Song could be seen as a dramatised documentary, since it is Rose herself playing Julia, and her physical or surface life is so intense and she is so obviously handicapped. While he understands that response, de Heer draws a comparison with the first films that used black actors instead of white actors in blackface. “I don’t know how it felt emotionally to an audience, I wasn’t there, but I think that is the equivalent”. (Urban) An example of an actor wearing “black-face” to portray a cerebral palsy victim might well be Gus Trikonis’s 1980 film Touched By Love. In this, the disabled girl is unconvincingly played by the pretty, able-bodied actress Diane Lane. The true nature of the character’s disability is hidden and cosmeticized to Hollywood expectations. Compared to that inauthentic film, Rose’s screenwriting and performance in Dance Me to My Song is a self-penned fiction couched in unmediated reality and certainly warrants authorial recognition. Despite his unselfish credit-giving, de Heer’s direction of this remarkable film is nevertheless detectable. His auteur signature is especially evident in his technological employment of sound as I have argued elsewhere (see Starrs, "Awoval"). The first distinctly de Heer influence is the use of a binaural recording device - similar to that used in Bad Boy Bubby (1993) - to convey to the audience the laboured nature of Julia’s breathing and to subjectively align the audience with her point of view. This apparatus provides a disturbing sound bed that is part wheezing, part grunting. There is no escaping Julia’s physically unusual life, from her reliance on others for food, toilet and showering, to the half-strangled sounds emanating from her ineffectual larynx. But de Heer insists that Julia does speak, like Stephen Hawkings, via her Epson RealVoice computerized voice synthesizer, and thus Julia manages to retain her dignity. De Heer has her play this machine like a musical instrument, its neatly modulated feminine tones immediately prompting empathy. Rose Capp notes de Heer’s preoccupation with finding a voice for those minority groups within the population who struggle to be heard, stating: de Heer has been equally consistent in exploring the communicative difficulties underpinning troubled relationships. From the mute young protagonist of The Quiet Room to the aphasic heroine of Dance Me to My Song, De Heer’s films are frequently preoccupied with the profound inadequacy or outright failure of language as a means of communication (21). Certainly, the importance to Julia of her only means of communication, her voice synthesizer, is stressed by de Heer throughout the film. Everybody around her has, to varying degrees, problems in hearing correctly or understanding both what and how Julia communicates with her alien mode of conversing, and she is frequently asked to repeat herself. Even the well-meaning Eddie says: “I don’t know what the machine is trying to say”. But it is ultimately via her voice synthesizer that Julia expresses her indomitable character. When first she meets Eddie, she types: “Please put my voice machine on my chair, STUPID.” She proudly declares ownership of a condom found in the bathroom with “It’s mine!” The callous Madelaine soon realizes Julia’s strength is in her voice machine and withholds access to the device as punishment for if she takes it away then Julia is less demanding for the self-centred carer. Indeed, the film which starts off portraying the physical superiority of Madelaine soon shows us that the carer’s life, for all her able-bodied, free-love ways, is far more miserable than Julia’s. As de Heer has done in many of his other films, a voice has been given to those who might otherwise not be heard through significant decision making in direction. In Rose’s case, this is achieved most obviously via her electric voice synthesizer. I have also suggested elsewhere (see Starrs, "Dance") that de Heer has helped find a second voice for Rose via the language of dance, and in doing so has expanded the audience’s understandings of quality of life for the disabled, as per Mike Oliver’s social model of disability, rather than the more usual medical model of disability. Empowered by her act of courage with Eddie, Julia sacks her uncaring ‘carer’ and the film ends optimistically with Julia and her new man dancing on the front porch. By picturing the couple in long shot and from above, Julia’s joyous dance of triumph is depicted as ordinary, normal and not deserving of close examination. This happy ending is intercut with a shot of Madeline and her broken down car, performing her own frustrated dance and this further emphasizes that she was unable to ‘dance’ (i.e. communicate and compete) with Julia. The disabled performer such as Rose, whether deliberately appropriating a role or passively accepting it, usually struggles to placate two contrasting realities: (s)he is at once invisible in the public world of interhuman relations and simultaneously hyper-visible due to physical Otherness and subsequent instantaneous typecasting. But by the end of Dance Me to My Song, Rose and de Heer have subverted this notion of the disabled performer grappling with the dual roles of invisible victim and hyper-visible victim by depicting Julia as socially and physically adept. She ‘wins the guy’ and dances her victory as de Heer’s inspirational camera looks down at her success like an omniscient and pleased god. Film academic Vivian Sobchack writes of the phenomenology of dance choreography for the disabled and her own experience of waltzing with the maker of her prosthetic leg, Steve, with the comment: “for the moment I did displace focus on my bodily immanence to the transcendent ensemble of our movement and I really began to waltz” (65). It is easy to imagine Rose’s own, similar feeling of bodily transcendence in the closing shot of Dance Me to My Song as she shows she can ‘dance’ better than her able-bodied rival, content as she is with her self-identity. Conclusion: Validation of the Auteurial OtherRolf de Heer was a well-known film-maker by the time he directed Dance Me to My Song. His films Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Quiet Room (1996) had both screened at the Cannes International Film Festival. He was rapidly developing a reputation for non-mainstream representations of marginalised, subaltern populations, a cinematic trajectory that was to be further consolidated by later films privileging the voice of Indigenous Peoples in The Tracker (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006), the latter winning the Special Jury prize at Cannes. His films often feature unlikely protagonists or as Liz Ferrier writes, are “characterised by vulnerable bodies … feminised … none of whom embody hegemonic masculinity” (65): they are the opposite of Hollywood’s hyper-masculine, hard-bodied, controlling heroes. With a nascent politically correct worldview proving popular, de Heer may have considered the assigning of authorship to Rose a marketable idea, her being representative of a marginalized group, which as Andy Medhurst might argue, may be more politically justifiable, as it apparently is with films of gay authorship. However, it must be emphasized that there is no evidence that de Heer’s reticence about claiming authorship of Dance Me to My Song is motivated by pecuniary interests, nor does he seem to have been trying to distance himself from the project through embarrassment or dissatisfaction with the film or its relatively unknown writer/actor. Rather, he seems to be giving credit for authorship where credit is due, for as a result of Rose’s tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success. Firstly, it is a rare exception to the disability film genre defined by Paul Darke as the “normality drama” because in the film’s diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she ‘dances’ better than the ‘normal’ Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining possession of the primary credits, and the mantle of the film’s primary author, Rose is shown triumphing over other aspiring able-bodied film-makers in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. Despite being an unpublished and unknown author, the label “A film by Heather Rose” is, I believe, a deserved coup for the woman who set out to make “the most sexy and honest film about disability ever made”. As with de Heer’s other films in which marginalised peoples are given voice, he demonstrates a desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower him/her. He both acknowledges their authorial voices and credits them as essential beings, and in enabling such subaltern populations to be heard, willingly cedes his privileged position as a successful, white, male, able-bodied film-maker. In the credits of this film he seems to be saying ‘I may be an auteur, but Heather Rose is a no less able auteur’. References Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Capp, Rose. “Alexandra and the de Heer Project.” RealTime + Onscreen 56 (Aug.-Sep. 2003): 21. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue56/7153›. Caughie, John. “Introduction”. Theories of Authorship. Ed. John Caughie. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 9-16. Darke, Paul. “Cinematic Representations of Disability.” The Disability Reader. Ed. Tom Shakespeare. London and New York: Cassell, 1988. 181-198. Davis, Therese. “Working Together: Two Cultures, One Film, Many Canoes.” Senses of Cinema 2006. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/41/ten-canoes.html›. De Heer, Rolf. “Production Notes.” Vertigo Productions. Undated. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film_id=10&display=notes›. Ferrier, Liz. “Vulnerable Bodies: Creative Disabilities in Contemporary Australian Film.” Australian Cinema in the 1990s. Ed. Ian Craven. London and Portland: Frank Cass and Co., 2001. 57-78. Medhurst, Andy. “That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship.” Screen 32.2 (1991): 197-208. Moran, Albert, and Errol Veith. Film in Australia: An Introduction. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006. Oliver, Mike. Social Work with Disabled People. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1983. Rose Slattery, Heather. “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation.” Words+ n.d. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.words-plus.com/website/stories/isaac2000.htm›. Sobchack, Vivian. “‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ (A Phenomenological Meditation in Movements).” Topoi 24.1 (2005): 55-66. Stahl, Frederick. “Standing Room Only for a Thunderbolt in a Wheelchair,” Sydney Morning Herald 31 Oct. 2002. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/30/1035683471529.html›. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Sounds of Silence: An Interview with Rolf de Heer.” Metro 152 (2007): 18-21. ———. “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003).” Metro 156 (2008): 148-153. ———. “Dance Me to My Song (Rolf de Heer 1997): The Story of a Disabled Dancer.” Proceedings Scopic Bodies Dance Studies Research Seminar Series 2007. Ed. Mark Harvey. University of Auckland, 2008 (in press). Urban, Andrew L. “Dance Me to My Song, Rolf de Heer, Australia.” Film Festivals 1988. 6 June 2008. ‹http://www.filmfestivals.com/cannes98/selofus9.htm›.

In his recent re-evaluation of McLuhanite theories for the information age, Digital McLuhan, Paul Levinson makes what at first glance appears to be a curious statement: he says that on the Web "the common denominator ... is the written word, as it is and has been with all things having to do with computers -- and will likely continue to be until such time, if ever, that the spoken word replaces the written as the vehicle of computer commands" (38). This, however, seems to directly contradict what any Web user has been able to experience for several years now: Web content has increasingly come to rely on graphics, at first still, now also often animated, and continues to include more and more audiovisual elements of various kinds. We don't even have to look at the current (and, hopefully, passing) phase of interminable Shockwave splash pages, which users have to endure while they wait to be transferred to the 'real' content of a site: even on as print-focussed a page as the one you're currently reading, you'll see graphical buttons to the left and at the bottom, for example. Other sites far surpass this for graphical content: it is hard to imagine what the official Olympics site or that of EXPO 2000 would look like in text-only versions. The drive towards more and more graphics has long been, well, visible. Already in 1997 (at a time when 33.6k modems were considered fast) Marshall considered the Internet to have entered its "graphic stage, a transitional media form that has made surfing the net feel like flipping through a glossy magazine or the interlinkages of a multimedia game or encyclopedia CD-ROMs"; to him this stage "relies on a construction that is textual and graphically enhanced through software overlays ... and highlighted by sample images, sound bites and occasionally short, moving images" (51). This historicised view mirrors a distinction made around the same time by Lovink, who divided users into "IBM-PC-modernists" still running text-based interfaces, and those enjoying the "Apple-Windows 95-postmodernism" of their graphical user interfaces (Lovink and Winkler 15). In the age of GUIs, in fact, 'text' in itself does not really exist on screen any more: everything from textual to graphical information consists of individual pixels in the same way, which is precisely what makes Levinson's initial statement appear so anachronistic. The move from 'text' to 'graphics and text' could thus be seen as a sign of the overall shift from the industrial to the information age -- a view not without precedent, since the transition from modernist to postmodernist times is similarly contemporaneous with the rise of graphic design as a form of communication as well as art. Beyond such broad strokes, we can also identify some of the finer details presented by the current state of graphics on the Web, however. Marshall's 'graphic stage', after all, was a 'transitional' one, and by now it seems that we might have passed it already, entering into a new aesthetic paradigm which appears to have borrowed many of its approaches from the realm of computer games: the new Web vision is shiny, colourful, animated, and increasingly also accompanied by sound effects. This is no surprise since the mass acceptance of personal computers themselves was largely driven by their use as a source of entertainment. Gaming and computers are inseparably interconnected, and the development of home computers' graphical capabilities in particular has long been driven almost exclusively by players' needs for better, faster, more realistic graphics. Of course, the way we interact with computers also owes a significant debt to games. Engagement in a dialogue with the machine, in which the computer displays both our own actions and its responses, representing us and itself simultaneously on screen, is the predominant mode of computing, and such a mode of engagement (dissolving the barriers between human mind and machinic computation) can now also be found in our interaction with the Web. Here, too, individual knowledge blends with the information available on the network as we immerse ourselves in hypertextual connectivity. As Talbott writes, "clearly, a generation raised on Adventure and video games -- where every door conceals a treasure or a monster worth pursuing in frenetic style -- has its own way of appreciating the hypertext interface" (13); not only has the Web taken on the aesthetics of computer gaming, then, but using the Web itself exhibits aspects of participation in a global 'knowledge game'. Talbott means to criticise this when he writes that thus "the doctrines of endless Enlightenment and Progress become the compelling subtext of a universal video game few can resist playing" (196), but however we may choose to evaluate this game, the observation itself is sound. One possible reason for taking a critical view of this development is that computer and video games rarely present more than the appearance of participation; while players may have a feeling of control over features of the game, the game itself usually remains entirely unaffected and ready for a restart at any moment. Web users might similarly feel empowered by the wealth of information to which they have gained access online, without actually making use of that information to form new knowledge for themselves. This is a matter for the individual user, however; where they have a true interest in the information they seek, we can have every confidence that they will process it to their advantage, too. Beyond this, the skills of information seeking learnt from Web use might also have overall benefits for users, as a kind of 'mind-eye coordination' similar to the 'hand-eye coordination' benefits often attributed to the playing of action games. The ability to figure out unknown problems, the desire to understand and gain control of a situation, which they can learn from computer games, is likely to help them better understand the complexity and interconnectedness of anything they might learn: "it could ... well be true that the cross-linking inherent in hypertext encourages people to see the connections among different aspects of the world so that they will get less fragmented knowledge" (Nielsen 190). The increasingly graphical nature of Web content could appear to work against this, however: "extensions of traditional hyperTEXT systems to encompass hyperMEDIA introduces [sic] a new dimension. ... The picture that 'speaks a thousand words' may say a thousand different words to different viewers. Pictures or graphics lend themselves much more than does text to multiple interpretations", as McAleese claims (12-13) -- but perhaps this overrates significantly the ability of text to anchor down meaning to any one point. Rather, it is questionable whether text and images really are that different from one another -- viewed from a historical perspective, certainly, opinions are divided, it seems: "the medieval church feared the power of the visual image because of the way it appeared to licence the imagination and the consideration of alternatives. Obversely, contemporary cultural critics fear that the abandonment of the written word in favour of graphics is stifling critical and creative powers" (Moody 60) -- take, for example, the commonly held view that movies made from novels limit the reader's imagination to the particular portrayal of events chosen for the film. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that both text and images (especially when they are increasingly easy to manipulate by digital means, thus losing once and for all their claim to photographic 'realism') can 'say a thousand different words to different viewers' -- indeed, traditional photography has also been described as 'writing with light'. As Levinson notes, therefore, "once the photograph is converted to a digital format, it is as amenable to manipulation, as divorced from the reality it purports to represent, as the words which appear on the same screen. On that score, the Internet's co-option of photography -- the rendering of the formerly analogue image as its content -- is at least as profound as the Internet's promotion of written communication" (43), and this, then, may perhaps begin to provide a resolution to his overall preference for writing as the predominant Internet communication form, as quoted above: online writing now includes in almost equal measure 'print' text and graphical images, both of which are of course graphically rendered on screen by the computer anyway; they combine into a new form of writing not unlike ancient hieroglyphics. On the Web, writing has come full circle: from the iconographic representations of the earliest civilisations through their simplification and solidification into the various alphabets back to a new online iconography. This also demonstrates the strong Western bias of this technology, of course: had computers emerged from Chinese or Japanese culture, for example -- where alphabets in the literal sense don't exist -- chances are they would never have existed in a text-only form. Now that we have passed the alphabetic stage to re-enter an era of iconography, then, it remains to be seen how this change along with our overall "'immersion' in hypertext will affect the way that we mentally structure our world. Linear argumentation is more a consequence of alphabetic writing than of printed books and it remains to be seen if hypertext presentation will significantly erode this predominant convention for mentally ordering our world" (McKnight et al. 41). Perhaps the computer game experience (where a blending of text and graphics had begun some time before the Web) can provide some early pointers already, then. The game-like nature of information search and usage online might help to undermine some of the more heavily encrusted structures of information dissemination that are still dominant: "we are promised, on the information 'library' side, less of the dogmatic and more of the ludic, less of the canonical and more of the festive. Fewer arguments from authority, through more juxtaposition of authorities" (Debray 146). This is also supported by the fact that there usually exists no one central authority, no one central site, in any field of information covered by the Web, but that there rather is a multiplicity of sources and viewpoints with varying claims to 'authority' and 'objectivity'; rather than rely on authorities to determine what is accepted knowledge, Web users must, and do, distil their own knowledge from the information they find in their searches. Kumon and Aizu's notion that from the industrial-age "wealth game" we have now moved into the "wisdom game" (320) sums up this view. However, for all the ludic exuberance of this game, we should also be concerned that, as in any game, we are also likely to see winners and losers. Those unaware of the rules of the game, and people who are prevented from playing for personal or socioeconomic reasons (the increased use of graphics will make it much more difficult for certain disabled readers to use the Web, for example) must not be left out of it. In gaming terminology, perhaps the formation of teams including such disadvantaged people is the answer? References Debray, Régis. "The Book as Symbolic Object." The Future of the Book. Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. 139-51. Kumon, Shumpei, and Izumi Aizu. "Co-Emulation: The Case for a Global Hypernetwork Society." Global Networks: Computers and International Communication. Ed. Linda M. Harasim. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1994. 311-26. Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. London: Routledge, 1999. Lovink, Geert, and Hartmut Winkler. "The Computer: Medium or Calculating Machine." Convergence 3.2 (1997): 10-18. Marshall, P. David. "The Commodity and the Internet: Interactivity and the Generation of Audience Commodity." Media International Australia 83 (Feb. 1997): 51-62. McAleese, Ray. "Navigation and Browsing in Hypertext." Hypertext: Theory into Practice. Ed. Ray McAleese. Oxford: Intellect, 1993. 5- 38. McKnight, Cliff, Andrew Dillon, and John Richardson. Hypertext in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Moody, Nickianne. "Interacting with the Divine Comedy." Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context. Ed. Jon Dovey. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996. 59-77. Nielsen, Jakob. Hypertext and Hypermedia. Boston: Academic P, 1990. Talbott, Stephen L. The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst. Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly and Associates, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "The Knowledge Adventure: Game Aesthetics and Web Hieroglyphics." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/adventure.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "The Knowledge Adventure: Game Aesthetics and Web Hieroglyphics," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/adventure.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: AxeM/C: A Journal of Media and Culture l Bruns. (2000) The knowledge adventure: game aesthetics and Web hieroglyphics. 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/adventure.php> ([your date of access]).