This case study describes tensions that became apparent between community members and school administrators after a proposal to close a historically African American public high school in a large urban Southwestern city. When members of the city's longstanding African American community responded with outrage, the school district's senior administration backed away from their proposal to close the school, despite making what it felt was a "neutral" and technical-rational decision. However, the local community interpreted this move as the historical continuation of racist behaviors and policies that had been experienced by the community over a period of several decades. Critical race theory (CRT) allows for an analysis regarding the nature of these beliefs about race and indicates the need for school Article 148 Urban Education 49(2) administrators to engage the realities of the community members they serve, rather than merely enacting technical-rational administrative behaviors that serve to continue regimes of marginalization and oppression.

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Health professionals associated with stroke care tend to emphasize the optimistic possibilities for recovery from stroke and downplay its disabling nature. Therefore, unlike in cancer care, the 'bad news' interview is not a recognized part of stroke care. Nevertheless, at some stages in the trajectory of the illness the issue of disability may have to be discussed and this paper concerns one such occasion. The data are taken from a corpus of video-recorded naturally occurring interactions between stroke patients and health professionals. In the case studied here, an occupational therapist discusses with a patient the arrangements for her care after discharge from hospital. It emerges over the course of the interaction that the patient has to face some unpleasant realities about her future daily life. By conducting a microanalysis of this interaction, using appropriate concepts from conversation analysis and politeness theory, we show how the patient and therapist collaboratively manage the emergent 'bad news' situation and, over the course of the interaction, arrive at the realization that 'things are not the same'.

Th is paper re-examines missionary medicine in Tanganyika, considering its relationship with the colonial state, the impulses that led it to evolve in the way that it did, and the nature of the medical services it offered. Th e paper suggests that, contrary to traditional depictions, missionary medicine was not entirely curative in focus, small in scale, nor inappropriate to the health needs of the communities in which it was based. Rather, missionary medicine should be considered as a vital aspect of early colonial health services, serving those excluded by the colonial state. Missionary medicine before 1945 was fragmented, small-scale, lacking in resources and overstretched. Its services could not necessarily compete in quality with the best of the state hospitals. But it succeeded, within the local context, in providing a network of health services that stretched into the rural society, and ensured that, where there was a mission hospital, there was an option for the local people to make western biomedicine a choice for healing.