For over a decade, a number of social work scholars have advocated for an Africentric paradigm shift in social work practice with African Americans; yet the paradigm shift has been slow in coming with respect to infusing Africentric theory and interventions into social work practice, education, and research. Interventions that infuse Africentric values (such as interdependence, collectivism, transformation, and spirituality) have been shown to create significant change across a number of areas important to social work practice with African Americans. However, a barrier to the full integration of Africentric models into social work practice is that Africentric programs lack cohesive documentation and replication and, thus, have limited potential to be established as evidence-based practices. The authors present an overview of various Africentric interventions, including their program components and methods of evaluation, with the aim of establishing guideposts or next steps in developing a discourse on Africentric interventions that are promising best practices or are emerging as evidence-based practices. The authors conclude with implications for social work practice, education, and research and a call for Africentric scholars to engage in increased discussion, dissemination of manualized treatments, and collaborative research to build the evidence-based Africentric knowledge base and foster replication of studies.

This study explores stigma in the lung cancer experience by interviewing 18 oncology social workers employed at cancer centers across the United States who provide care to people diagnosed with lung cancer and their family members. A content analysis of the interviews suggests stacked stigma exists with respect to cigarette smoking. Poor prognosis and disparity in advocacy efforts emerged as stigmatizing events that are linked with smoking stigma, particularly in the arenas of support groups, patient-matching programs, availability of resources, and the lung cancer population itself. Emotional phenomenon resulting from this stigma experience may increase the illness burden for people with lung cancer and explain the variance in distress levels among people with different cancer diagnoses.

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This article reviews the literature on challenges faced by engineering faculty in educating their students on community-engaged, sustainable technical solutions in developing countries. We review a number of approaches to increasing teaching modules on social and community components of international development education, from adding capstone courses and educational track seminars to integrating content from other disciplines, particularly the social sciences. After summarising recent pedagogical strategies to increase content on community-focused development, we present a case study of how one engineering programme incorporates social work students and faculty to infuse strategies for community engagement in designing and implementing student-led global engineering development projects. We outline how this interdisciplinary pedagogical approach teaches students from the two disciplines to work together in addressing power balances, economic and social issues and overall sustainability of international development projects.

The Healer Women Fighting Disease Integrated Substance Abuse and HIV Prevention Program for African American women is based on a conceptual framework called "culturecology" and an African-Centered Behavioral Change Model (ACBCM). Culturecology poses that an understanding of AfricanAmerican culture is central to both behavior and behavioral transformation. The ACBCM model suggests that behavioral change occurs through a process of resocialization and culturalization. These processes minimize negative social conditions and maximize prosocial and life-affirming conditions. The participants were 149 women-105 in the intervention group and 44 in the comparison group. Findings show significant changes among participants from pretest to posttest in (1) increasing motivation and decreasing depression (cultural realignment), (2) increasing HIV/AIDS knowledge and self-worth (cognitive restructuring), and (3) adopting less risky sexual practices (character development). The African-centered approach demonstrates promise as a critical component in reducing and/or eliminating health disparities in the African American community.