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Breast cancer is the most diagnosed type of cancer in the world, and mastectomies to remove tumors are still common. An external breast prosthesis (EBP) can be used to minimize the asymmetry, due to the ablation. Some governments do not cover costs of that assistive technology, and women end up using socks and fabric pockets filled with seeds, to simulate the volume lost in the surgery. This study aims to offer to those women a decent solution, ergonomic, but still affordable.

The authors interviewed 20 mastectomized Brazilian women, listened to their relate and 3D scanned them, to give rise to personalized external lightweight breast prostheses. The authors used free software for computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing, and low-cost 3D printers. From the strategy of bespoke products, this study generalized the method, to conceive mass customized prostheses, in a compromise solution that reduces personalization, conserving the best features of design.

This study achieved a method to manufacture ergonomic, bespoke external breast prostheses, using low-cost technology. Previous literature made them using expensive scanners, software and printers.

The authors validated this method during pandemic, which restricted the number of patients the authors could have access to. This impacted authors’ possibility to work on matching the color of the final product and real skin. The authors understood, though, that precision of color, in the final product, is challenging, because of the peculiar aspects of human skin.

Using the method the authors proposed, personalized external breast prostheses can be manufactured using low-cost resources, democratizing better quality of life for more breast cancer survivors.

Bioelectrical impedance vector analysis (BIVA) and phase angle (PA) have importance in assessing nutritional and prognosis, and this study hypothesized that these measurements can have a relationship with nutritional risk and outcomes. This study aims to analyze the association between Nutrition Risk in the Critically ill (NUTRIC) score and bioelectrical impedance measures with hospital mortality in critically ill patients.

A prospective, cohort study was performed with a consecutive sample of patients admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU), between January and June 2017 at a hospital university in Northwest Brazil. The NUTRIC score and the bioelectric measures, such as resistance (R), reactance (Xc), PA and BIVA, were completed within the first 24 h of admission. The Student’s t or Mann–Whitney, Pearson’s or Spearman’s coefficient and Fisher’s exact tests and BIVA were used for statistical analyses.

The sample consisted of 81, with a mean age of 57 (16.7) years, with 60.5% women. It was detected that PA and Xc were lower (p < 0.001), and age was higher (p < 0.001) in a high nutritional-risk group. It was found an association between low nutritional risk and hospital discharge (p < 0.001), and that individuals who died spent more days in the ICU (p = 0.0375), had significantly lower PA and Xc values (p = 0.043 and p = 0.0172, respectively) and higher NUTRIC scores (<0.0001). There was a displacement of the mean impedance vector in men and women with high nutritional risk (p = 0.0037 and p = 0.004, respectively).

The height measurement was estimated using predictive formulas, which may affect the accuracy of the values; BIA was performed only upon admission of the patient to the ICU and the study population was heterogeneous, as it is a general ICU.

This paper shows that, in critically ill patients, nutritional screening and the assessment of bioelectrical measures help in clinical-nutritional decisions, and were able to predict outcomes.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

Few people with special educational needs (SEN) had access to higher education in Brazil until the 1980s, mainly due to their lack of access to basic education and a lack of specific public policies for this population. It was only in 2003 that the Brazilian government implemented strategies for the dissemination of the factors referring to inclusive education. The objective was one of the support for the transformation of educational systems into inclusive educational systems. As these policies are recent; few studies have been carried out in Brazil. According to Brazilian statistical data, the number of enrollments connected to special education in regular basic education classes, in 2015, was almost 751,000 students, while in higher education in diverse graduation courses the number was 38,000. In this sense, this chapter aims to unveil and discuss Brazilian public policies for the access and permanence of SEN students in higher education. Reflections will also be presented related to the evolution of the number of enrollments of students with specific SEN (visual, physical, hearing, and intellectual) in basic and higher education, as well as the implementation of public policies focused on this population in a Brazilian context.

This chapter explores the ethical dilemmas that emerged in situ from an ethnographic study in collaboration with Latin American children and youngsters. It was developed in the challenging conditions of isolation and lockdown, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In such times, a group of eight researchers from different geographical locations in the Americas looked into the ways children reorganise, reconstruct and reinterpret their daily lives in social isolation. The methodological approach, which enabled dialogue and conversation, began through a system of correspondence – in oral, written, recorded, drawn, photographed and audiovisual forms – among Latin American children. The expectations about the viability of this fieldwork modality brought, from the beginning, ethical challenges that required continuous adjustments, agreements, rectifications, adaptations and explicit reflection on such ethical aspects. Here we focus on three challenges that we analyse individually, although in practice they were interconnected. The first one was the dilemma regarding perception and use of time. The second ethical challenge is based on the fact that we recruited the young participants through friendships and kinship networks that each of the eight researchers previously had. The third challenge was connected to the decision to communicate through letters (a markedly confessional, private and intimate epistolary genre) that were both intervened by our ‘special’ position and also taken as ethnographic documents. In our fieldwork, in the specific spatial and temporal situations we worked, we understand the self as emerging from intersubjectivity and knowledge relations as co-created between researcher and researched. Thus, ethical decisions are made during the research process itself and, for us, in situ ethics entails a reciprocal commitment, between children, youth and adults as co-researchers, to adjust themselves to the developments and boundaries of the ethnographic field. This also allowed the participants to manage the adjustments in this specific and situated context that circumscribed everybody, seeking answers in conversations and paying careful attention to the situation.

Brazil’s economic growth in the first decade of this century was accompanied by greater visibility of the disadvantaged economic classes in films, in television, and in the press. Even the celebrated telenovelas and TV series began to feature a side of Brazil which, previously, had only been presented in a negative light. This chapter proposes a central question: Could media visibility be masking the complexity of economic class for social structure or class structure in Brazilian society, which, despite recent improvements, is still marked by stark social divides?

Our objective is to approach this issue from a cultural perspective focused on analyzing media representations of underprivileged groups, following Douglas Kellner’s (1995) ideas that suggest a contextualizing account of media cultural artifacts.

The analysis encompasses the audiovisual production as its corpus – telenovela and TV series – from Rede Globo produced from 2002 to 2012. However, bringing to bear complementary data, we reference other genres and formats as well. We argue that, while attention has been paid to the recent contesting of some of the negative stereotypes surrounding the underprivileged classes circulating within the media, they do not do justice to the complexities of social inequality in contemporary Brazil. We show that mainstream media treatments of social inequality focus entirely on showing the lifestyle of the underprivileged “working poor,” while overlooking many other aspects of social inequality and deprivation.

This chapter examines some key themes raised by the intersection of the urban, the rural and the penal against the backdrop of the Australian ‘rural ideal’. But the chapter also seeks to look critically at that ideal and how it relates (or does not) to the various lifeworlds and patterns of settler development that lie beyond the Australian cityscape. Attention is directed away from the singular focus on the rural/urban divide to stress the importance of North/South in understanding patterns of development and penal practices beyond the cityscape in the Australian context.