Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
392
result(s) for
"Williams, Val"
Sort by:
Misfitting the Research Process: Shaping Qualitative Research “in the Field” to Fit People Living With Dementia
It is increasingly recognized that people living with dementia should be included in qualitative research that foregrounds their voices, but traditional research approaches can leave less room for flexibility than is necessary. This article builds on others who have examined the challenges and rewards of the qualitative research process with people living with dementia. With reference to a specific project on communication and dementia, the research design adaptations needed at each step to turn a “misfit” into a “fit” are examined. Misfitting, as a concept related to social practice theories, is used to argue the need for a coproduced and flexible approach to research design and data collection. Recommendations include being willing to adapt research methods, data collection locations, and aims of the project to fit participants’ competencies, preferences, and realities; spending sufficient time getting to get to know staff and potential participants to build relationships; working round care practices and routines to minimize disruption; and using observational/visual methods can help include people living with dementia at each stage. People with dementia require researchers in the field to be creative in their methods, reflexive in their approach, and person-centered in their goals. Those adaptations can fundamentally change the ways in which the social practice of research is shaped.
Journal Article
Pitching Perspectives on Disability: Voyage Experiences of Disabled Sailors on Tall Ships
This paper explores the experiences of disabled sailors on board a tall sailing ship, adapted for accessibility. Eight disabled sailors kept audio diaries and created artwork during the voyages, as well as taking part in interviews afterwards. In reporting their accounts, we explored what it meant for participants to go to sea. We became particularly interested in embodied activities on board ship, the ways in which sailing created and highlighted new identities, and the social aspects of sailing in a team. Our account brings together some of the central concerns in Disability Studies with the perspectives of social practice theorists, and seeks to add layers of meaning to both approaches. Since this is a nautical project, the paper is structured by following the stages of going to sea, and in the words of one participant, we seek to 'join the dots between medical, academic and anecdotal knowledge'. Keywords: Disability-studies, embodiment, socio-medical, sailing, identity, social-practices
Journal Article
Being a Disabled Patient: Negotiating the Social Practices of Hospitals in England
Accessing hospital care and being a patient is a highly individualised process, but it is also dependent on the culture and practices of the hospital and the staff who run it. Each hospital usually has a standard way of ‘doing things’, and a lack of flexibility in this may mean that there are challenges in effectively responding to the needs of disabled people who require ‘reasonably adjusted’ care. Based on qualitative stories told by disabled people accessing hospital services in England, this article describes how hospital practices have the potential to shape a person’s health care experiences. This article uses insights from social practice theories to argue that in order to address the potential problems of ‘misfitting’ that disabled people can experience, we first need to understand and challenge the embedded hospital practices that can continue to disadvantage disabled people.
Journal Article
Mythologizing the Vietnam War : visual culture and mediated memory
The Vietnam War is evolving from contemporary memory into history. Fifty years on, it still serves as a benchmark in the history of war reporting and in the representation of conflict in popular culture and historical memory. However, as contemporary culture tries to come to terms with the events and their political, psychological and cultural implications, the 'real' Vietnam War has been appropriated and changed into a set of mythologies which implicate American and Vietnamese national identities specifically, and ideas of modern conflict more broadly, particularly in shaping the mediation of the twenty-first century 'War on Terror'. This collection of interdisciplinary critical essays explores the cultural legacies of the US involvement in South East Asia, considering this process of 'mythologising' through the lenses of visual media and tracing the war's evolution from contemporary reportage to subsequent interpretation and consumption. It reassesses the role of visual media in covering and remembering the war, its memorialisation, mediation and memory. The origin of this collection of essays was an international conference, titled \"Considering Vietnam\", held at the Imperial War Museum, London, in February 2012, co-organised by the museum and the University of the Arts London Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC).
eBook
The insider view
This paper reports on research about the experiences of disabled staff members in UK universities, drawing on eleven semi-structured interviews with disabled staff in one university, alongside a group auto ethnography conducted by the first four authors, all of whom identified as disabled academics. Disability is generally considered to be predominantly an issue for students, both in practice and in the literature. By contrast, taking a social practice approach, we focused on the barriers faced by disabled employees, both overt and hidden. We found that disability was still viewed as a medical problem, and that disabled members of staff faced considerable extra labour in organising their own supports. We were often made to feel that we were unwanted and that we were ‘misfits’ in the institution. This paper contributes to theory by showing how social practices can become exclusionary, and how interconnections between practices matter. We discuss ways in which ableism, based on the ideal of ‘individual’ excellence, creates barriers for disabled staff. In the global context of Higher Education, the increasing marketization of universities in higher income countries creates a difficult climate for the values of inclusion.
Journal Article
A social practice theory approach to exploring the ubiquity of quizzes in dementia care settings
Quizzes are a ubiquitous part of the dementia social care landscape. This article explores why. Using an ethnographic approach which draws on close analysis of communication, we examine dementia quizzes as a ‘social practice’, and what such a lens can tell us about their popularity in social care settings. Vignettes of real interactions drawn from ten different quizzes recorded in four different group settings attended by 28 people living with dementia and 15 staff members are presented to highlight particular issues. We show that the conditions of post-diagnosis dementia social care are uniquely well suited to an activity such as quizzes which are malleable, requiring little preparation or materials, and impose a communication framework which can help to organise the interactional space. Quizzes also draw on previously forged interactional competences, such as turn-taking and question–answer sequences, a skill that has been shown to persist even as dementia progresses. Finally, we argue that the meaning of quizzes with people with dementia feeds into wider societal values and associations attached to memory, dementia and personhood. The extent to which quizzes are akin to a ‘test’ or a fun and enjoyable social activity rests in how they are enacted. We suggest that practice can be adapted, developed and made more inclusive through input from people living with dementia themselves.
Journal Article
'A bit of common ground': personalisation and the use of shared knowledge in interactions between people with learning disabilities and their personal assistants
Personalisation is the new mantra in social care; this article focuses on how personalisation can be achieved in practice, by presenting an analysis of data from people with learning disabilities and their personal assistants (PAs), where traditional care relationships have often been shown to be disempowering (Antaki et al., 2007b). The focus here is on the ways in which both parties use references to shared knowledge, joint experiences or personal-life information. These strategies can be used for various social goals, and instances are given where shared references are used during non task-related talk. Both parties are seen on occasion to attempt to refer to shared information, and dense layers of inference can result, which move the interaction onto an ordinary, more symmetrical and friendly footing. The article concludes that shared knowledge referencing creates a way to shift between the personal and the professional, to blur the boundaries, and to create a new and more personalised relationship.
Journal Article
In search of a national approach to professional supervision for mental health and addiction nurses: The New Zealand experience
A competent nursing workforce is crucial for recovery of mental health and addiction service users. Professional supervision is central to facilitating this competency. This article reports on research that scoped the current provision of professional supervision then explores possibilities for developing a standardised national approach to professional supervision for mental health and addiction nurses in New Zealand. The study involved telephone and mail surveys with nurse leaders and current supervisors from district health boards and non-government organisations. The findings indicated that the majority of those canvassed were supportive of a nationally endorsed approach. Standardisation was seen as a means of assisting in the monitoring and quality refinement of the content and provision of professional supervision, and the training of supervisors. It was also recommended that to be successful, a national approach must incorporate partnerships with significant stakeholders in the sector, including service users and Maori.
Journal Article
Direct and indirect ways of managing epistemic asymmetries when eliciting memories
This article aims to explore how epistemic status is negotiated during talk about the life memories of one speaker. Direct questions which foreground ‘remembering’ can lead to troubled sequences of talk. However, interlocutors sometimes frame their first parts as ‘co-rememberings’, and the sequential positioning of these can be crucial to the outcome of the talk. We draw on almost 10 hours of video data from dementia settings, where memory is a talked-about matter. Our focus is on 30 sequences which are initiated with a question or other first part taking a K-stance, selecting one person as next speaker, and topically relating to the recipient’s past life. We show how type 2 knowables can be used alongside markers of tentativeness, to jointly construct the recipient’s epistemic primacy.
Journal Article