Many eye care programmes are supported by donors and once this funding stops, they can collapse. In this article, I will explain how some programmes and institutions have been able to keep going despite losing their donor funding. I have had the opportunity to work with government, church-run and privately owned institutions in Ghana, Zambia, Kenya and Rwanda, and will share with you what we ha...

This article aims to open a new line of debate about religion in public schools by focusing on religious ideals. The article begins with an elucidation of the concept ‘religious ideals’ and an explanation of the notion of reasonable pluralism, in order to be able to explore the dangers and positive contributions of religious ideals and their pursuit on a liberal democratic society. We draw our ...

The authors review experimental evidence that religious conviction can be a defensive source of compensatory control when personal or external sources of control are low. They show evidence that (a) belief in religious deities and secular institutions can serve as external forms of control that can compensate for manipulations that lower personal control and (b) religious conviction can also se...

Performance and Counter-Power (1): The Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Sphere1 Sociologists have written much about the social forces that create conflict and polarize society, about the fragmenting structures and compelling powers of political, economic, racial, ethnic, religious, and gender groups. But they have said very little about the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of c...

The unification of a strong and authoritarian state with religious laws and institutions after the 1979 revolution in Iran has resulted in the creation of a dualistic state structure in which non-elected and non-accountable state authorities and institutions-the majority of whom have not accepted either the primacy of democracy nor the premise of equality between men and women (or Muslims and n...

This paper explores the social, medical, institutional and enumerative histories of blindness in British India from 1850 to 1950. It begins by tracing the contours and causes of blindness using census records, and then outlines how colonial physicians and observers ascribed both infectious aetiologies and social pathologies to blindness. Blindness was often interpreted as the inevitable consequ...