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Nursing care for youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the times of COVID-19: Toward a Nursing Practice Competency Framework
No full textBackground: Persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) face interlocking inequities in access to healthcare services. Nurses require education and training in specific competencies to address their needs. This cross-sectional study explored the experiences and perspectives of youth with IDD on nursing care in the times of COVID-19 restrictions across 4 provinces in Canada. Methods: Nine youth (16-29 years) completed a virtual survey: without assistance of caregiver parent (n=3), supported by a parent (n=3), and represented by parent proxy (n=3). Close-ended Likert-type questions assessed health, mental health, and Quality of Care and Support (QOCS). Open-ended questions addressed Person-and-Family-centred Care (PFCC), communication and behaviour management. At the analytical stage the qualitative and quantitative data were integrated applying concurrent mixed-methods principles. Results: Emerging themes include: 1) Limited access to quality of care (e.g., dismissive attitude, safety concerns, insufficient respite funding, unaffordable care, shortage of nurses prepared in developmental disability, complicated program enrolment process, insufficient knowledge on IDD rights and services, competency and professionalism); 2) Person-and-Family-Centered Care (e.g., experiences of PFCC, not a Person-Centered care; 3) Communication is key to quality nursing care; and 4) Inadequate emotional support (e.g., respect and value youths’ wishes, nurses need emotional support too). Conclusion: Barriers to quality nursing care for youth with IDD include lack of communication skills, emotional support, and Person-and-Family-Centered Care. Nursing care tailored to the needs of persons with IDD is crucial for their health and wellbeing and requires structural changes at the macro (enhanced funding for program/services), meso (education, curricula, training), and individual levels (awareness)
Bitter Tart / Butter Tart
No full textThe hyper-surveillance of self as it relates to what our bodies look like (and how we may make them look a certain way through rigid food and exercise routines) is often disregarded as a very real form of disordered eating or body dysmorphia when it manifests in a fat person. Often spoken about under the guise of simply watching one’s figure, being disciplined, or taking pride in one’s appearance, the motivation to have one’s body take up space in a particular way to appease onlookers is to self-inflict the policing of fat bodies. The endorsement of one’s obsession with achieving a particular bodily aesthetic should not be contingent on this aesthetic being the fatphobic, Eurocentric beauty standard. How might we as fat folks move beyond attaining this endorsement or this scrutiny about our bodies as vessels to be perceived? How might this revelation influence how we view ourselves, both from the onlooker’s perspective and from within? This poem aims to address these two lenses in a piece about the act of eating a simple butter tart
Funeral for a Friend: Memorial, Protest, and Fat Kinship
No full textThis piece uses reflective questions to explore how fat people can respond to art and creative work that dehumanizes fat bodies. It uses text and photography to illustrate one protest response to a local art exhibit.
Echoes of the Canadian Aporia: NFBC’s Media Resonances and the Democratic Public Sphere
No full textThis paper examines how the National Film Board of Canada (NFBC) employs interactive media to create resonance by engaging audiences with the Canadian aporetic condition—a paradox within Canada’s national identity marked by tensions between multiculturalism, environmental stewardship, and colonial history. Through innovative projects like The Space We Hold, The Orchid and the Bee, and Circa 1948, the NFBC invites viewers into immersive experiences that foster deep reflection on Canada’s social and environmental challenges, cultivating collective understanding and responsibility.
The Space We Hold brings viewers into the lived experiences of marginalized and silenced communities, mainly through the narrative of survivors of wartime sexual violence. This project evokes empathy and solidarity through interactive elements that transcend cultural and geographic boundaries. It highlights Canada’s aporetic condition as a nation committed to human rights while grappling with the legacies of its own colonial and exclusionary practices, encouraging audiences to reflect on these unresolved contradictions.
The Orchid and the Bee approaches the aporia from an environmental perspective, using biodiversity to illustrate the delicate interdependence between natural ecosystems and human activity. This project resonates with viewers on an ecological and ethical level, underscoring Canada’s dual role as both steward and exploiter of its natural resources. Through this digital narrative, the NFBC confronts audiences with Canada’s environmental paradox, urging a reflection on sustainable practices within a global context.
Circa 1948, an interactive project set in post-war Vancouver allows users to explore two neighbourhoods—a run-down hotel district and a wartime housing project—through 3D environments and audio narratives. This project resonates by immersing audiences in Canada’s complex social history, reflecting the aporetic condition in Canada’s past. The project evokes themes of inequality, displacement, and social change, bridging historical events with contemporary conversations about urban development, social justice, and the impact of colonial structures on marginalized communities. Through this immersive exploration, Circa 1948 encourages viewers to engage with Canada’s socio-political landscape, highlighting the progress and persistent challenges within Canadian society.
This paper argues that the NFBC’s approach to interactive storytelling activates resonance by making complex social and environmental issues accessible and emotionally engaging. By foregrounding the Canadian aporetic condition, NFBC projects reflect national contradictions and inspire audiences to contemplate their roles within these tensions. The NFBC’s use of digital media provides a model for how interactive storytelling can foster resilience, solidarity, and meaningful connections in response to contemporary global crises.
Through these interactive experiences, the NFBC encourages public dialogue that transcends boundaries, inviting Canadian and global audiences to explore and address the issues shaping Canada’s collective future. By examining these projects, this paper highlights how resonance in interactive media can cultivate a sense of shared responsibility and action within the democratic public sphere
DRINK THE RIVER: Towards an Embodied Understanding of the Eden
No full textDRINK THE RIVER is a collection of moving image and sound-based works, developing ways of sensing, sounding, and relating to and with the River Eden in Cumbria. The collection seeks to respond to questions of “modern water” – exploring issues of representation and how abstraction leads to extraction from the river.
The River Eden – 90 miles running south to north through the county of Cumbria – is one of the top 20 most polluted rivers in the UK. It is also my home. I was confronted with the ecological realities – dramatic flooding, sewage pollution, private land ownership – making it increasingly difficult to have daily encounters with this river. In DRINK THE RIVER (the collection of image and sound-based research projects that have grown out of this work) I became obsessed with the ways in which the River Eden is seen, understood, represented and framed, and how these ways of knowing nudge us towards certain ways of relating. For example, 90 MILES (2024) – an “armchair voyage” down the Eden – is the starting point and explores the abstraction of the river into maps and statistics – an abstraction that enables the separation from, and control over, the river. DRINK. DON’T SWALLOW! (2023) takes this abstraction even further, reframing the absurdity of our “modern” definitions, and the overspilling commodification of water. DRINK THE RIVER (2024) – the video game that the whole collection takes its name from – responds to separation, as barriers of ownership and pollution compelled us to rebuild the River Eden in this watery (re)imagined world.
Contrasting the abstracted and extractive, in all works the body is centred. The methodology I developed throughout involved daily repeated simple acts of swimming in the Eden – this grew into the final piece in the collection, a line made by swimming (2024), not necessarily a film, but a documentation of a performance. Taking its name from Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking, itself growing out of ‘simple creative acts of [swimming] and marking’… becoming ‘about place, locality, time, distance and measurement [and rhythm]’ and a messy (un)knowing of this leaky, diffuse, turbid, transforming river
Happenings: Finding New Forms for Traumatic Shared Histories
No full textAmong the many decisive political changes that have occurred in the past few years that bode poorly for our shared future is the US overturning of Roe Wade, and the appointment of men with histories of sexual assault to positions that will determine law and political policy. This paper discusses my new work Happenings, an interactive philosophical essay that takes the form of a cinematically haunted digital poem that mashes up the work of Carolee Schneeman, the nineteen seventies feminist performance artist who famously pulled a scroll out of her vagina, with the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Abel Azonca, and Vladimir Nabokov and other men for whom the imagination of sexual violence was inextricably bound to their art.
Schneemann writes in 1991’s “The Obscene Body/Politic”: “I didn’t want to pull a scroll out of my vagina and read it in public, but the culture’s terror of my making overt what it wished to suppress fueled the image; it was essential to demonstrate this lived action about ‘vulvic space’ against the abstraction of the female body and its loss of meaning” (Moreland). Schneeman’s impulse to reach inside and show the world something raw seems again to be necessary.
I will situate Happenings somewhere in between the tradition of films that ask you to read written words, such as Michael Snow’s So Is This (1982) and Hollis Frampton’s Poetic Justice (1985), and electronic literature where the written word becomes cinematic, showing how this interactive digital work maintains the opposition between the static (pinned down?) word and free moving image, and gives the moving image medium license to invade and penetrate the other’s spaces. The result is a violation of the rules of genre (is it a book? a film? an essay? a poem? a documentary? a lightbox? horror? philosophy? ) intended to leave the viewer unsteady, and discuss the soundtrack, composited from the BBC Sound Effects’ archive of moths and butterflies, is intended to generate deeply somatic affective responses. I will also discuss how Happenings turns to large language models for some animation and video augmentations, allowing these reservoirs seeded with Western culture memory to reveal their own uncanny and terrifying understanding of women\u27s bodies.
My paper presents Happenings as a critique of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s approach to touch, which refer to the history of painting yet frequently miss the denotative point of artworks that tell the stories of rape, and at the same time de Sadian origins of much of contemporary cultural theory, with the goal of making the argument that contemporary academic culture’s approaches to the body, including much of queer theory, has proceeded by ignoring the reality of assault
Listening and Affection in an Interactive Documentary: A Practice-Research Approach
No full textThe territory of interactive and immersive nonfiction narratives has ignited ideas and expressions for creating varied digital environments and diversifying dialogues. Expanded documentary practices (Takahiko 1966; Kim 2022) flourish as creators and researchers-practitioners continually reimagine their strategies and methodologies. In recent years, there has been a shift toward conceptualizing polyphonic (Aston and Odorico 2018; Zimmermann 2020) digital spaces and decolonizing practice-based research in interactive documentary (Ryan and Staton 2022), resulting in a fertile union of theory and practice. As a practitioner-researcher pursuing a PhD, I investigate the intersection of interactive documentary practices and family archives from the Portuguese diaspora within a practice-based research framework (Vear, Candy, and Edmonds 2022). My practice focuses on personal narratives, memories, and testimonies of Portuguese descendants and their families’ recollections of migratory experiences during the 1960s and 1970s. The interactive documentary Orange in the Pocket, Aerograms, and the Rest of the Memories (2024) incorporates four family archival elements and audible testimonies depicting the fragmentary nature of these remembrances.
This paper aims to discuss the development of my interactive documentary practice, Orange in the Pocket, Aerograms, and the Rest of the Memories (2024), focusing on listening to multiple voices throughout the creative work and within the interactive documentary. I propose to examine the artifact through the lens of listening (Rangan 2020; Munro 2019), “listening being” (Lipari 2009), "haptic listening" (Leimbacher 2017), and "affective intermediality" (Pethő 2023) concepts, reflecting on how these concepts and ideas relate to new spheres of dialogue, polyphony, and affective geographies (Chauvin 2019), while perceiving and engaging more deeply with the interactive documentary sphere. Resonances punctuated this making process as I explored encounters between private memories and their collective potential to create a diversified place for exchanging migratory experiences. I suggest that interactive documentary practices create affective tapestries that transform personal interactive experiences into meaningful listening habits and encounters with oneself, others, and the larger context beyond our everyday lives through listening and affective imaginaries, conceivably creating novel webs of polyphonic dialogues
Senses and Sense-ability: From Care to Resonance
No full textResonance, the conference’s central theme, refers to our ability to form deep, meaningful connections that provoke thoughts, evoke emotions, and stimulate the senses through personal images and memories, often drawing on an individual or community’s lived experiences” (“Call For Proposals | Interactive Film & Media Journal”). Communication of these individual and community experiences requires a medium, usually a common language. One common language that transcends linguistic, socio-political, and even species-specific boundaries is the language of care. This paper explores the role care has in the process of resonance formation and demonstrates that care is a language and a medium with universal elements. It further discusses how this repositioning of care as a medium can help us use resonance in a socially responsible manner with regard to solidarity and collective formation.
Even when communicating through personal images and memories, the significance of these moments is not only derived from their visual or verbal representations but also the emotional resonance they create. To gain further insights into this phenomenon, this paper establishes the theoretical framework by intersecting linguistics, education, and media studies to establish that care can be viewed as a language and medium, which makes it central to the discussion of resonance. In addition, feminist studies and ethics of care will be central to further exploration of resonance to examine the latter’s role with regard to creating solidarity and collective. These frameworks are then applied to an analysis of interspecies relationships with companion animals to disentangle the verbal competent from the complex structure of care communication to explore the relevance of care as a language in the context of resonance and meaning-making. This discussion further references materials relating to animal studies.
Insights gained from interspecies relationships with companion animals, which rely predominantly on nonverbal communications of care, demonstrate how the interpersonal nature of this type of communication foregrounds practices of deep listening/observation, interpretation, and simulation. Resonance remains integral to these relationships in the absence of verbal communication. This disentanglement of the verbal component from care language provides key findings that are then used to investigate the non-verbal elements of resonance in human-to-human relationships.
The findings from the analysis of interspecies relationships aids the analysis of human-to-human relationships, where examples of communication between speakers of different languages and the same languages are scrutinized to examine the role of care as a non-verbal language and its relevance to resonance. The discussion furthermore explores this role within the contexts of creating solidarity and collectives. Using these analyses, the paper argues that the language of care in its interpersonal form is integral to creating solidarities and collectives based on a sense of belonging that derives from the resonance care as a language establishes.
Key Hypotheses:
Considering care as a language and a medium repositions it as a form of communication rather than an activity.
Disentangling verbal and non-verbal communication of care allows for a more in-depth understanding of resonance
Lean into the mess: A review of Your Fat Friend (2023) and conversation with director and producer Jeanie Finlay
No full textAllegra Morgado’s review of the film Your Fat Friend brings together her perspective as a fat woman and the power of seeing one’s experiences mirrored on screen. Featuring a conversation with director and producer Jeanie Finlay, Morgado explores the nuanced depiction of author and podcaster Aubrey Gordon’s life in the documentary film, the meaning of it, and the impact the film has for fat folks and non-fat folks alike. Morgado includes excerpts from her conversation with Finlay to invite the reader into a behind-the-scenes look of the making of the film and the joyous messiness of the creative process. 
