Within community-engaged research, education and social care, peer models that partner with local "insiders" are increasingly common. Peer models are composed of insider "lay" community members who often share similarities or background with a project's target population. Peers are not academically trained, but work alongside researchers and professionals to carry out specific tasks within a project, or in the truest sense of partnership, peers collaborate throughout the project from start to finish as an equal member of the team. Although peer models are used widely, the literature lacks consistency and clarity. This systematic review of literature used a qualitative thematic synthesis to examine and report how, where and why peer models have been used in research, education and social care. We examined the language and titles used to describe the peers, details of their involvement in community-engaged projects, the setting, content/topic of study, level of engagement and related benefits/outcomes of such models. Focusing on the last 10 years, we conducted a comprehensive literature search twice between September 2016 and June 2017. The search resulted in 814 articles which were assessed for eligibility. Overall, 251 articles met our inclusion criteria and were categorised into three categories: empirical (n = 115); process/descriptive (n = 93); and "about" peers (n = 43). Findings suggest that there is a wide variety of peers, titles and terminology associated with peer models. There is inconsistency in how these models are used and implemented in research studies and projects. The majority of articles used an employment peer model, while only a handful involved peers in all phases of the project. The results of this literature review contribute to understanding the use, development and evolution of peer models. We highlight potential benefits of peer models for peers, their communities and community-engaged work, and we offer recommendations for future implementation of peer models.
This chapter explores the ways in which political institutions in three countries—Egypt, Sri Lanka, and Argentina—interact with religious and cultural conceptions of motherhood to provide women with social authority, often through respectability politics. State and societal dynamics in each case forced women to bargain with patriarchy in order to secure political gains using—and therefore reproducing—respectability politics. In each of these three cases from different geographical regions of the world, the authors’ analysis has revealed how women’s “bargaining with patriarchy” by employing patriarchal discourses on respectable femininity and maternal identities enabled some women to engage, challenge, and resist the state. By using respectability politics centered around maternalism and the institution of motherhood, women have helped to advance democratization by challenging human rights abuses and/or furthered women’s participation in politics. With these three cases, the chapter demonstrates how, in certain political and cultural contexts where religion and women’s roles as the foundation of the family significantly structure the lives of women, motherhood has been utilized as a powerful tool for political mobilization and contestation.
This article analyzes the effects of COVID-19 on women and girls. It examines policy responses to the pandemic crisis and its implications on the women, peace, and security (WPS) agenda in postwar Nepal and Sri Lanka. Building on our previous work in Nepal and Sri Lanka, we rely on secondary studies, news sources, and governmental and nongovernmental organization reports and social media from March 2020 through March 2022 to demonstrate our argument that policymakers should place women and girls at the center of COVID-19 recovery plans. We further stress the need for an intersectional approach to understand the contextual relationships among gender, race, class, caste, ability, religion, sexual orientation, and additional markers that situate women's and girls’ experiences. The WPS agenda promotes women and girls’ participation in peace and security governance and has seen significant rollbacks given the impacts of the pandemic. We conclude by sketching new policy frontiers for the WPS agenda and urge WPS implementers to rethink their approach to WPS policies to promote women's diverse needs and interests in postwar Nepal and Sri Lanka in pandemic recovery policies.
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