Social workers play a vital role in making violence-stricken communities into safer places for human development. However, research examining the experiences of community practitioners in political ...conflicts is scarce. Using a place-making analytical framework, this study addresses this gap exploring community practitioners’ practices around outbreaks of violence in Israeli Jewish-Arab mixed cities. Based on 50 semi-structured interviews, the findings reveal three modalities of place-making: place-developing, place-protecting, and place-remaking. The study highlights community practice’s significant role in constructing spaces in light of practitioners’ sense of place. It encourages the inclusion of place-making as a framework to understand social work within conflict zones.
The public administration literature has long observed the efforts of street-level bureaucrats to actively represent the clients with whom they share a social or demographic identity. However, it has ...not examined the responses that street-level bureaucrats receive when they represent minorities and how these responses shape how they use discretion in implementing policies. We explore these issues empirically through in-depth interviews with 23 Israeli Arab social and community workers and 32 Israeli LGBTQ+ teachers. This exploratory study reveals the variety of reactions that street-level bureaucrats encounter when representing minorities. Furthermore, it highlights the significant role of reactions from clients and organizations in encouraging, reducing, or impeding the efforts of minority street-level bureaucrats to represent those with whom they share an identity, which, in turn, underscores the importance of external responses for confirming and legitimizing active representation.
OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effect of laser polar-body biopsy (PBB) for preimplantation genetic diagnosis on embryo quality. STUDY DESIGN: Retrospective case-control analysis. The quality of 145 ...embryos after PBB was compared to 276 embryos of the same group of women without biopsy. SETTING: University-based tertiary-care medical center. PATIENT(S): Women with inherited genetics disease. INTERVENTION(S): Laser PBB of IVF embryos for genetic diagnosis. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S): The study and control embryos were compared for fertilization rate, pronuclear grading, and cleavage-stage parameters on days 1, 2, and 3 after oocyte retrieval. RESULT(S): The study embryos demonstrated higher rates of cleavage arrest (3.6% vs. 0.7%), higher rate of significant fragmentation on day 2 (9.5% vs. 3.0%), and lower rate of good cleavage embryos on day 2 (69.1% vs. 78.4%) compared with control embryos. On day 3, the study embryos had lower cleavage rates (six or more blastomeres; 56.5% vs. 74.5%), higher fragmentation (11.7% vs. 3.9%), higher rate of embryos presenting inferior cleavage pattern (57.2% vs. 38.5%), and lower mean blastomere number (5.8 ± 2.1 vs. 6.6 ± 1.9) compared with control embryos. CONCLUSION(S): Polar-body biopsy may have a negative effect on embryo quality.
There is a paucity of research examining street-level bureaucracy in cities affected by ongoing ethnopolitical conflict. This study addresses this limitation by exploring the work of social workers ...in the public services of mixed cities in Israel. It shows the interconnection between ambiguous institutional policies, varying workers’ views of the role of social services, and changing discretion patterns. Findings also suggest that episodes of conflict escalation intensify staff ethnic sectarianism, as well as increase workers’ own ethnic biases, which affect the ways in which they act as a liaison between the welfare system and citizens through their use of discretion.
Summary
Mixed cities are defined as ethnically diverse cities located within turbulent contexts of intensive, ongoing intergroup political conflict. As such, they may pose serious challenges to ...social workers’ efforts to develop culturally competent practices, especially in the public service sector. This article examined social workers’ constructions of cultural competence in the social public services delivered to Arab and Jewish clients in Israeli mixed cities. Based on extensive qualitative data gathered from 80 public social workers in Haifa, Acre, and Jerusalem, this study discusses the strengths and limitations of the cultural competence approach, especially when applied in the context of varying degrees of political conflict.
Findings
Findings illustrated three approaches to the provision of social welfare services: (1) the “universal” construction, which corresponds to universal and egalitarian value-based approach, by which social work professionalism is claimed sufficient to ensure equal treatment for Israeli Arab and Jewish clients; (2) the “indispensable” cultural approach, which indicates that cultural competence is vital and unavoidable in addressing the ethno-diversity needs of Israeli Arab and Jewish clients in mixed cities; and (3) the “critical” construction, which critiques the cultural competence and universal approaches as lacking the complexity to address the problematic ethno-political nature of mixed city settings.
Applications
The study proposes to adopt an integrated cultural competence approach that combines vital elements of each discrete construction to guide social workers’ practices in mixed cities. Context-informed priorities may occasionally emphasize some elements and minimize others. Institutional support and training is necessary for the proposition to work.
Mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells are isolated from the inner cell mass of blastocysts, and can be preserved in vitro in a naive inner-cell-mass-like configuration by providing exogenous stimulation ...with leukaemia inhibitory factor (LIF) and small molecule inhibition of ERK1/ERK2 and GSK3β signalling (termed 2i/LIF conditions). Hallmarks of naive pluripotency include driving Oct4 (also known as Pou5f1) transcription by its distal enhancer, retaining a pre-inactivation X chromosome state, and global reduction in DNA methylation and in H3K27me3 repressive chromatin mark deposition on developmental regulatory gene promoters. Upon withdrawal of 2i/LIF, naive mouse ES cells can drift towards a primed pluripotent state resembling that of the post-implantation epiblast. Although human ES cells share several molecular features with naive mouse ES cells, they also share a variety of epigenetic properties with primed murine epiblast stem cells (EpiSCs). These include predominant use of the proximal enhancer element to maintain OCT4 expression, pronounced tendency for X chromosome inactivation in most female human ES cells, increase in DNA methylation and prominent deposition of H3K27me3 and bivalent domain acquisition on lineage regulatory genes. The feasibility of establishing human ground state naive pluripotency in vitro with equivalent molecular and functional features to those characterized in mouse ES cells remains to be defined. Here we establish defined conditions that facilitate the derivation of genetically unmodified human naive pluripotent stem cells from already established primed human ES cells, from somatic cells through induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell reprogramming or directly from blastocysts. The novel naive pluripotent cells validated herein retain molecular characteristics and functional properties that are highly similar to mouse naive ES cells, and distinct from conventional primed human pluripotent cells. This includes competence in the generation of cross-species chimaeric mouse embryos that underwent organogenesis following microinjection of human naive iPS cells into mouse morulas. Collectively, our findings establish new avenues for regenerative medicine, patient-specific iPS cell disease modelling and the study of early human development in vitro and in vivo.
Among the arenas that reproduce inequality for marginalized groups, housing remains one of the most important. Guided by scholarship on housing insecurity among the poor and parenting amidst poverty, ...this article investigates the lived experience of parenting within the intricate landscape of housing insecurity. To do so, we draw on in-depth interviews with 100 low-income parents who rent a house in Israel. Our findings show that amidst severe housing challenges, parents constantly enact strong social agency by striving to secure decent housing for their children. Our analysis also reveals how three main facets of housing insecurity permeate and shape everyday parent–child relationships: overcrowded living conditions, economic tensions, and emotional and health challenges. We employ the concept of “negotiation” to offer a threefold conceptualization of our findings regarding parenting experience in the shadow of housing insecurity.
To describe isolation and in vitro maturation of primary oocytes from the ovarian cortex in the presence of hypothalamic pituitary down-regulation.
Case report.
Tertiary care university-affiliated ...hospital.
An 18-year-old patient was given treatment with the ABVD (Adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine) protocol for Hodgkin's disease. She underwent ovarian tissue cryopreservation while being cotreated with GnRH agonist because of disease relapse.
Laparoscopic oophorectomy, ovarian tissue cryopreservation, and in vitro maturation of primary oocytes.
Maturation of primary oocytes isolated from the medium used for preparation of ovarian tissue.
Twenty-one immature germinal vesicle-stage oocytes were isolated from the medium of dissection. All were incubated in in vitro maturation medium, and five were maturated and frozen.
The fact that germinal vesicle-stage oocytes were present in our patient's medium despite hormonal down-regulation demonstrates that GnRH agonist does not completely inhibit antral follicle development.
Abstract
Since its very inception, the field of social work has acknowledged the importance of place in shaping communal identity, construing shared meanings and generating collective actions. ...Nevertheless, the analytical framework of place-making, which enjoys growing interest in other disciplines, has little impact on social work and its incorporation into social work community practice is still embryonic. The place-making perspective is particularly relevant to the multiple challenges faced by community practice in the twenty-first century. This qualitative study aims to encourage the inclusion of place-making analytical perspective in community practice research by examining community practitioners’ engagement in place-making processes within the complex context of Israeli Jewish–Arab mixed cities. Based on semi-structured interviews with thirty community practitioners in the public services, the findings reveal that participants were highly engaged in four main interrelated aspects of place-making: shaping the ethnocultural meanings of place, managing the meaning of space in power relations, re-constructing the conflicted meaning of space and framing the history of place. The study illustrates the usefulness of the place-making analytical framework in community practice, especially in the context of increasing contested and divided urban realities.
Social work research has increasingly focused on the role of social work in shaping policies on behalf of disadvantaged individuals, families, and communities. However, scarce research has examined ...the contribution of social work community practitioners to policy development and practice. This qualitative study addresses this gap in the literature, exploring public community practitioners' discretion patterns within Israeli Jewish-Arab mixed cities. Based on street-level bureaucracy perspective theory, the findings reveal that ambiguous formal policy allows participants an extensive discretionary space to initiate policies, informed by three perceptions of the urban community: as a shared space of cultural encounters; as a challenged site of structural unequal power relations; and as a contested arena of ethnic clashes. Consequently, three main patterns of discretion were identified: promoting cultural competence, addressing inequalities through service development for excluded populations, and mitigating ethnic conflicts by developing opportunities for dialogue. The study offers a conceptualisation to understand public community practitioners' use of discretion and discusses their ability to critically address political issues in contested community settings.
