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Hospitality workers’ experiences of technological change – Key findings from a large-scale study
No full textThis document summarises the key findings from a large-scale study that involved conducting over 60 interviews with hospitality workers (receptionists, housekeepers, chefs, bartenders, baristas, front-office staff), employers, managers, technologists and industry experts about their experiences and perspectives of technological change.</p
Technological change with workers in mind: Checklist for hospitality workers experiencing technological change in their workplaces
No full textThis document is intended to help hospitality workers understand the impacts of technological change on their workplaces and identify what good practice looks like. The checklist draws on data from over 60 interviews with hospitality workers, managers, employers, technologists and industry stakeholders.</p
A visual and poetic response - Community Workshop & Gallery
No full textIn the Derridean sense of écriture—writing as a system of inscription that precedes and exceeds language—skateboarding can be read as a form of writing enacted upon the urban environment. Within this framework, the skateboard functions as a tool of inscription, translating bodily movement into a material text across concrete, steel, and asphalt. Each grind, scrape, or mark left upon architectural surfaces constitutes a trace in Derrida’s terms: a residual sign that both reveals and conceals the act of its making. These inscriptions operate within a system of différance, continually recontextualising and deferring the fixed meanings of urban design. A bench, curb, or handrail, when engaged through skateboarding, ceases to signify solely as an element of civic utility and instead becomes a site of reinterpretation and resistance—a rewritten fragment of the city’s text. In this way, skateboarding enacts a local and unconventional writing practice, one that challenges dominant spatial grammars and redefines the relationship between subject, surface, and meaning. The environment becomes both page and participant, a palimpsest upon which identity, movement, and space are co-authored through acts of performative inscription.</p
SEAsick
No full textSeasick is a creative platform that celebrates process. Surf culture and related media (especially in the UK) is harder and harder to locate. Coastal towns serve as hubs for a passionate but relatively small network of surfers who balance their pursuit of waves with the realities of unpredictable weather, limited swell windows, and seasonal tourism economies.The shift toward digital platforms and social media has fragmented the audience further, with local surf photography and film often circulating within small online communities rather than cohesive national publications. However, the fresh drop of Thomas Campbells’ YI-WO has been a well-received tonic.With this renewed love for the play in the process the Seasick platform will start displaying project developments (either successful or epic creative accidents) to get us all through the midweek hump. SEAsick Wednesday’s, adventures in oil and ink.</p
The multifaceted implications of mental fatigue on women’s football players’ performance in small-sided games
No full textResearch shows that mental fatigue (MF) can negatively impact physical performance. However, the effects of MF during football match-play are not well understood, particularly in women, and its impact on psychological factors is less known (e.g., attentional focus). This study explored the physical and psychological effects of MF in women’s football during 7 vs. 7 small-sided games (SSGs). 14 Women’s National League players (M age = 25.9±5.9 years) participated. A counterbalanced cross-over design was implemented involving a MF (30-min social media use), and a control condition (30-min sitting with teammates with no phone access) prior to 3 × 7-min SSGs, interspersed with 2-min rest. GPS was used to monitor work output. Participants had microphones attached and were asked to ‘think aloud’ (TA) during SSGs; content analysis was used to examine players’ attentional focus and communication. MF (visual analogue scale) and fatigue (BRUMS) increased pre- to post-MF (+1.95±1.45, p p = .038) but in control (p = 1.00), and happiness (BRUMS) was lower in MF vs. control (-1.96±.68, p = .013). No differences were found between conditions for work output or RPE (ps > .05). Total TA was lower (p = .046) and there was less positive performance-related TA (p = .022) in MF (22.53±13.11; 0.15 ± 0.38) vs. control (30.00±17.84; 1.54±2.11). There was more negative non-performance related communication (p = .031), and less joking with teammates (p = .020) with MF (0.85±1.07; 1.69±1.80) vs. control (0.08±0.28; 4.39±3.78). In sum, 30-min social media use was associated with reduced happiness, vigour and heightened perceptions of fatigue, and effected how able participants were to engage in TA, how positive their thoughts were, and how they communicated with teammates. Avoiding phone use prior to training and match-play may be worth considering. Further team-sport research could incorporate TA methods which the present study showed to be feasible, to understand more on players’ cognitive processing in match-play.</p
Identifying the Mental Health Research Priorities in Rural Settings, With Implications for Coastal Communities: A Rapid Evidence Synthesis
No full textIntroductionThere appears to be a spatial mismatch in rural communities between demand for and uptake of mental health services. There is currently no existing evidence synthesis of mental health research priorities pertaining explicitly to rural and coastal contexts.ObjectiveThe rapid review aimed to identify and map existing international evidence on rural and coastal mental health research priorities.DesignA rapid systematic review was conducted, consistent with guidelines from the Cochrane Rapid Review Methods Group and PRISMA. Keywords and subject headings were searched in PubMed and PsycINFO. Supplementary searching was performed in Google Scholar. Data were extracted using an adapted version of the REPRISE framework. Content analysis was conducted to establish priorities.Findings1285 studies were screened and 20 publications included (Australia n = 8, USA n = 9, UK n = 2, no geographic focus n = 1). The content analysis grouped the priorities into seven categories: (1) interventions; (2) space and place; (3) stakeholder engagement; (4) improving understanding; (5) standardising data and terminology; (6) outreach; and (7) collaboration. Within these categories, there were 16 priorities and 53 sub-priorities. No evidence focused on mental health research priorities in coastal contexts.DiscussionFuture rural mental health research requires stronger collaboration between relevant stakeholders to reflect local needs. Participatory research is key to achieving that. There was no mental health research priority setting exercise that accounted for the coastal context, highlighting a notable gap.ConclusionThe findings can inform how rural and coastal mental health research proceeds at a local, national, and international level.</p
Physical profiling of national talent pathway age-group and senior national basketball players from England
No full textBackground: This study aimed to conduct physical profiling within national talent pathway age-group and senior national male and female England basketball players.Methods: In total 235 players (male, 124; female, 111) from squads U14, U15, U16, U18, and senior featured. The testing battery featured; anthropometrics, countermovement jump (CMJ), 10-m sprint, modified 5-0-5 change of direction test.Results: There were no differences in CMJ (p = 0.659) between female groups (29.9-33.0 cm). CMJ was significantly different across male groups (p Conclusions: The study’s data and findings can be used to inform practice and guide the long-term strategy regarding physical development of talented young basketball players particularly within the national talent pathway in England.</p
The Wounded Me
No full textThe Wounded Me is a research project and literary novel inspired by Hugo Simberg’s Symbolist painting The Wounded Angel (1903). An allegorical response to the Venezuelan crisis and diaspora, this project mobilizes the characters in Simberg’s painting and asks a core question: why do we follow leaders? Central to my practice-based research, this novel utilises the prism of ironic self-revelation in the point of view of the central unreliable first-person narrator influenced by Olympia in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love to explore leadership, charisma, origin myths, the promise of utopic ideas, oral storytelling as a method to reshape reality, brotherhood, the cost of belonging, confusion, frustration, loss, hope, explanation-seeking, mourning, binary discourse, socioeconomic crisis and systems of believe and oppression that evaporate difference and favour self-replication. The novel finds in the angel child of Simberg’s painting a literary challenge. This bird child functions as a witness and his evident difference posits an enigma for the narrator: what is the meaning od difference in a world regulated by self-replication? Responding to the prevalence of angels in the Symbolist art, and to literary examples of boys and angels such as in David Almond’s Skellig, Gabriel García Márquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Time for Everything, The Wounded Me uses the bird child’s sustained silence to fuel narrative tension and innovate on a recognisable character. Employing creative writing and allegory as methods, the project synthesises Simberg’s influence in my aesthetics, and seeks an original response in form, focus and approach from other artistic engagements with The Wounded Angel (poems: Seamus Heaney’s Known World, Paul Durcan’s The Children of Lir; short stories: John Burnside’s Inches Away, Amanda Auchter’s Riverlocked, Robert Phillips’ Cast Down, Lance Olsen’s The Wounded Angel and Joanne Gerber’s Listening to the Angels).</p
Craft Therapy in Imperial Military, Medical, and Museum Spaces, 1939–45
No full textBetween 1943–44, as part of The Arts in Therapy exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibited photographs of servicemen from the British Middle East Command engaged in weaving and embroidery under the supervision of artist turned occupational therapist Margaret Lewthwaite. This chapter analyzes the craft practices established by Lewthwaite and their representation in Harry Lotzof’s photographs by locating them in three main imperial spaces of war. The first is Egypt, which, although never officially part of the British Empire, was effectively under British colonial control for seventy years, until the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. The larger colonial context and attempts by different Western powers—namely Britain and the United States—to exert their influence in Egypt were, this chapter shows, woven into Lewthwaite’s experiences and relations in Cairo and manifested in the embroidery subjects, the materials, and the locations of the craft therapy. The second section focuses on the military hospitals, exploring how the therapeutic craft practices were understood to operate, the dominant ideas about the body and recovery underlying this, and how the photographic images constructed the program in order to convey ideological narratives about the British Empire. The final section analyzes the display of the photographs at MoMA, contextualizing the role of the images in the exhibition’s presentation of therapeutic art and craft making, and locating them in view of the museum’s agenda and its position in the cultural politics of race. In mapping craft’s practices, discourses, and representations across these different spaces and sites, this chapter brings to light new historical aspects of occupational therapy in the British Empire. It shows how the contents, framing, and display of the craft were implicated in the larger imperial tensions and contests that underlay the relations between the UK and the US as wartime allies, and, furthermore, brings forth translocal dimensions of craft, therapy, and war.</p
Development of a consensus definition of “separation anxiety” for horses
No full textHorses are separated from other horses as part of routine management practices, such as for training, transport, competition or veterinary procedures. However, being separated from a close companion or being isolated from all other horses are both potentially stressful scenarios for a socially gregarious species like the horse, and some individuals can struggle to cope with this. In addition to social isolation, for a species with strong intraspecific group bonds, separation from an individual to whom the horse is particularly bonded, even with others still present, may also result in distress. What is commonly referred to as separation anxiety is not simply about being alone but may also relate to the loss of anyone to with whom the horse has a close bond. Therefore, the aim of this study was to better understand the nature of what is described as separation anxiety in horses and to build a consensus for the definition of this complaint for future research purposes, considering the contexts in which it may happen and the potential behaviours which can be expressed. To achieve this goal, we sought owner and caregiver opinion on separation anxiety in horses. Content analysis of the transcribed responses was conducted to reveal distinct definitions and contexts of separation anxiety along with the common signs shown by horses with separation anxiety. This was followed by an equine behavioural expert consensus exercise to provide external face validity for our analysis. We highlighted eight different contexts defined along two axes: one based on whether the horse is left behind or actively leaving the group, the other on the timing of the response within the separation process; this was separated into: during ‘preparation’ for departure; when ‘actively leaving or being left behind’; when there is an ‘initial barrier to contact’ and finally when there is a ‘loss of contact’. Moreover, we identified several signs potentially associated with separation anxiety, ranging from increased arousal (e.g., increase locomotor activity, hypervigilance) to ‘apathy’. We provide a theoretical model that integrates this information to illustrate the phenomenon commonly referred to as “separation anxiety in horses”. Future work can test the predictions made here and their clinical implications.</p