No abstract

The work presented here, exploratory in nature, uses a comparative and qualitative approach to understand the factors associated with the ability of individuals with severe and persistent mental illness to successfully gain and maintain employment. Based on open-ended interviews with individuals in an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) program, we compare the experiences of those who have been successful gaining and maintaining employment, with those who have been successful gaining but not maintaining work, and those who have been unsuccessful gaining employment. The three groups seemed to differ in three significant ways: (1) in the ways the individuals talked about their illness, (2) in the ways the individuals talked about work, and (3) in the strategies they described for coping with bad days. In each of these areas individuals' awareness of and attitude toward their illness was significant. The findings have clear implications for agencies working to help people with severe and persistent mental illness obtain and maintain employment.

While a good deal of research has been conducted on the factors associated with recovery, we still need a clearer understanding of the dialectic between behavior and attitude. This research uses semi-structured interviews with two groups of mental health consumers, one receiving more intensive ACT services and the other receiving less intensive case management services, to ascertain the illness management strategies used by those who have been transferred to less intensive services. Our research suggests that while engaging in community, vocational, and church activities are important, those who are further along the road to recovery have gained an understanding and acceptance of their illness that allow them to use these activities as effective illness management strategies.

In farming communities dependent on the cultivation of pollinator‐dependent crops, the livelihoods of farmers are inextricably linked with pollinator health. A global pollination crisis interlinked with a crisis of food production and farmer livelihoods, exacerbated by processes of socio‐environmental change, is emblematic of the Anthropocene and of the kinds of ecosocial problems with which critical physical geography (CPG) engages. We propose examining the farmer‐pollinator system in the Indian Himalayas through an ecological livelihoods approach using a range of collaborative citizen science methods including bloom observations to document pollinator visits, plant phenological observations to document year‐round floral resource availability, and farm diaries to document orchard management practices. An ecological livelihoods approach draws on posthumanist theory, which has remained largely disengaged with methodological questions that are of concern to CPG. Citizen science, although widely used across a range of disciplines, has seen limited engagement in CPG. After elaborating some of the opportunities and challenges that an engagement between CPG, posthumanist theory, and citizen science opens up, we propose a methodology that would be simultaneously epistemological (understanding interdependence between livelihoods of farmers and pollinators) and ontological (imagining and building worlds where farmer and pollinator habitats are recomposed).

In spite of the breadth and depth of anthropologists' knowledge of and experience with intercultural and international dynamics, we have done little as a field to tout this knowledge and its relevance and insert it into broader conversations about study abroad, service-learning, and other kinds of experiential learning. The contributions we do make are more idiosyncratic and happen as a result of anthropologists being in positions of influence in their own institutions. However, we have much to offer these conversations; indeed, given the stakes involved—the increasing number of United States students participating in international study and intercultural service learning programs—one could easily argue that we have an obligation to engage in these conversations, sharing our rich methodological and conceptual toolkit to enhance student learning in international and intercultural contexts.