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It has been argued that arts participation may be ‘more potent than anything medicine has to offer’ (Smith, 2002). Travelling further upstream from the government's initiatives to improve access to talking therapies as a solution to the mounting burden of depression, this paper describes ways in which community arts programmes involving primary schools are seeking to strengthen the mental wellbeing of children. The arts, the authors argue, deal in imagination, and imagination can be stronger than will power. Thus, by harnessing the imagination, arts interventions can influence change in children's health patterns into adulthood, and thereby help establish a healthy culture in a healthier nation.

This article considers how participatory arts programmes within mental health services can contribute to the challenging agenda of improving both individuals' well‐being and helping a community to flourish. Health services and other statutory bodies supporting this work, however, need to understand the potential of the arts to be a transformational force and not just an instrumental tool for therapeutic diversion. Patient demand for creative activity as an integral part of care plans can help this pioneering field of arts practice to develop influentially within mainstream services, however, we need to think beyond an individual therapy model to one of social integration in which everyone can feel ‘at home’.

Purpose – To compare the histories of two opioid medications that are pharmacologically similar but subject to contrasting regulations in their use in treatment of opiate dependence in the United States – methadone and buprenorphine – in order to analyze the role of racial imagery and racial politics in the legalization and clinical promotion of their use.

Methodology/approach – Historical methods of archival analysis of published articles and unpublished governmental records were used in researching methadone. Ethnographic methods of participant observation and semistructured interviews were used in researching buprenorphine.

Findings – Contrasting uses of racial imagery played a major role in shaping the current regulatory differences between the two treatments. The association of methadone with black and Latino heroin users has contributed to its increased federal regulation, while the association of buprenorphine with white, middle class prescription opioid users enabled its use in deregulated private physicians’ offices.

Originality/value of paper – Advocates of biomedicalization of behaviors and conditions thought of as social or moral, such as addiction, argue that biomedicalization reduces the stigma of the condition and imply that, in turn, it also reduces the racial inequalities associated with the condition. This study of the biomedicalization of treatment for opioid dependence indicates that the very process of biomedicalization depended on heightened racial imagery associated with each treatment and ultimately intensified, rather than reduced, the stigma of addiction for black and Latino low-income patients.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of instructional leaders in promoting culturally responsive practice in ways that make schooling more inclusive and humanizing for minoritized students and communities.

The data pull from a six-month long case study of a mid-sized, Midwestern school district that was attempting to implement culturally responsive leadership practices. After axial coding, findings emerged from interview data and field notes.

Instructional leaders can play significant and useful roles in promoting culturally responsive teaching and pedagogy in schools. Districts can establish positions in which instructional leaders can work to strengthen the culturally responsive pedagogy of every teacher in a district.

This study has implications for both research and practice. Culturally responsive school leadership (CRSL) exists in multiple spaces and at various levels in a district. CRSL is not only a school-level function, but it can also be a district-level practice. Culturally responsive instructional leaders (in this case, not principals, but coaches) can have significant impact in promoting culturally relevant pedagogy.

This contribution moves beyond school leadership and examines how district leadership practices and decisions foster culturally relevant practices and the challenges in employing this equity work.

This article considers how an evidence base may be found for the effectiveness of using arts in mental health care services. It looks at what arts in health work brings to the promotion of social inclusion and summarises current issues in the field. It calls for arts in health workers to share their practice and undertake research as a preliminary to evaluation. It outlines the contextual factors that appear to have a bearing on the successful development of arts in mental health services.

The current study was guided by narrative and feminist inquiry and focuses on the procreative consciousness and the construction of a procreative identity in 14 unmarried, child-free graduate students. Analysis of respondent and narrative interviews revealed five themes in the narrative data, which were used to hypothesize how men and women form their procreative identities, how their stories have been altered through time, and how they think others view their procreative decisions. Findings support five different pathways to the informant’s current procreative consciousness. Informants also perceived an existing traditional stereotype toward the childfree lifestyle.

The sexual lives of religious youth and young adults have been an increasing topic of interest since the rise of abstinence-only education and attendant programs in many religious institutions. But while we know a lot about individual-level rates of sexual behavior, far less is known about how religious organizations shape and mediate sexuality. We draw on data from observations with youth and young adult ministries and interviews with religious young adults and adult leaders from Muslim, Hindu, and Protestant Christian groups in order to examine how religious adults in positions of organizational authority work to manage the gender and sexual developments in the transition to adulthood among their youth. We find three distinct organizational styles across the various religious traditions: avoidance through gender segregation, self-restraint supplemented with peer surveillance, and a classed disengagement. In each of these organizational responses, gender and sexuality represent something that must be explained and controlled in the process of cultivating the proper adult religious disposition. The paper examines how religious congregations and other religious organizations oriented toward youth, work to manage the gender and sexual developments in their youth’s transitions to adulthood. The paper draws from a larger project that is studying the lived processes of religious transmission between generations.

Data were extracted from (a) ethnographic observations of youth programming at religious organizations; (b) ethnographicobservations with families during their religious observances; (c) interviews with adult leaders of youth ministry programs. The sample includes Protestant Christian, Muslim, and Hindu organizations and families.

The paper presents three organizational approaches toward managing sex and instilling appropriate gender ideas: (a) prescribed avoidance, in which young men and women are segregated in many religious and educational settings and encouraged to moderate any cross-gender contact in public; (b) self-restraint supplemented with peer surveillance, in which young people are repeatedly encouraged not only to learn to control themselves through internal moral codes but also to enlist their peers to monitor each other’s conduct and call them to account for violations of those codes; and (c) “classed” disengagement, in which organizations comprised of highly educated, middle-class families do little to address sex directly, but treat it as but one aspect of developing individual ethical principles that will assist their educational and class mobility.

While the comparative sample in this paper is a strength, other religious traditions than the ones studied may have other practices. The ethnographic nature of the research provides in-depth understandings of the organizational practices, but cannot comment on how representative these practices are across regions, organizations, or faiths.

Most studies of religion and youth sex and sexuality either rely on individual-level data from surveys, or study the discourses and ideologies found in books, movies, and the like. They do not study the “mechanisms,” in either religious organizations or families, through which messages are communicated and enacted. Our examination of organizational and familial practices shows sex and gender communication in action. Further, most existing research has focused on Christians, wherein we have a comparative sample of Protestant Christians, Muslims, and Hindus.

This review article seeks to draw on experience in the UK to describe the different forms that arts in health activity can take and to examine the challenges for research in this field.

A case study is used to describe the kind of arts in health project that intends to enhance the social capital of its community and to show how difficult it is to measure the effects of this work using conventional measures of health improvement. However, those who are responsible for providing funding for arts in health are increasingly demanding results that indicate a measurable health gain from the projects.

A literature review of the evaluation of arts in health projects in the UK has shown that few aim at direct health improvement but rather at intermediate indicators of health gain, such as raising awareness of health issues and social activity and participation. This suggests that artists instinctively locate their work as having value within a social model of health where improvements in social inclusion and social cohesion are the important indicators which may go on to lead to long‐term improvements to the health of the community in which they are working.

Understanding the nature of this work has implications for the kind of research appropriate to measure its effect and the timescale required for such research.