How to Change the World by Promoting Diversity in “Big Green Groups”

By Virginia Palacios

The 2015 documentary film How to Change the World, directed by Jerry Rothwell, asserts itself as a chronicle of the origins of the “modern” environmental movement through its telling the story of the founding of Greenpeace in 1971. But a story that is nearly 50 years old about an environmental movement that has gone through significant changes since then is hardly “modern.”  The environmental movement continues to change, and “big green groups” like Greenpeace and Environmental Defense Fund, where I work, need to change with it or they will become relics. Continue reading How to Change the World by Promoting Diversity in “Big Green Groups”

What Is Healing?

Dr. Joseph Gone discusses indigenous healing practices in HI’s Faculty Fellows Seminar on Health, Well-Being, Healing
By Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley and Clare Callahan

As an illness, cancer preserves its fundamental characteristics in spite of how cancer patients and the broader population feel about or define the illness. Cancer, in other words, is an indifferent phenomenon to the extent that how it operates is immune to the meanings one assigns to it. By contrast, an illness such as multiple personality disorder interacts with the human narratives told about it. For example, prior to approximately 1950, there were only 50 cases of multiple personality disorder in the history of medicine. In the 1990s, however, there were 50,000 cases documented in America and elsewhere. This sharp increase in the number of documented cases was arguably due to media documentation of multiple personality disorder in films such as The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and Sybil (1976). The depiction of the illness in the media, as well as the discovery of battered-child syndrome in the 1960s, created the conditions for the expression and diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. Depression may similarly interact with the narratives that are told about depression.

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How a Twentieth Century Philosophy of Language Can Advance Health, Well-Being and Healing in Schools

Dr. Cynthia Franklin discusses therapeutic intervention in schools in HI’s Faculty Fellows Seminar on Health, Well-Being, Healing
By Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley and Clare Callahan

As Professor and Associate Dean for Doctoral Education in the School of Social Work, Dr. Cynthia Franklin currently works with at-risk students, most visibly at Austin’s Gonzalo Garza Impendence High School, where she implements solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT). Developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg in the late 1970s, SFBT, as Dr. Franklin described it in the HI Faculty Fellows Seminar, is “a brief therapeutic intervention”—taking place over only four to six sessions—that strives so build solutions to patients’ current and future problems, on the individual level and within “groups, families, communities, and organizations.” Specifically, SFBT works through the co-construction of meaning between patients and therapists and specific action-oriented techniques.

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