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Sensing Nature
Get PDFThe rise of urbanisation has reduced connection with nature and physical interaction, both crucial for well-being and pro-environmental behavior. Sensing Nature is a multisensory virtual reality installation that aims to energize and nourish the spirit by reimagining the natural world as a playful, immersive experience. Users create a sensory journey by interacting with a haptic tree and exploring real-world fabrics and textures. Each touch triggers a transformation of the virtual tree, blending blooming virtual flowers, nature-inspired spatial sounds, and physical vibrations for a unique immersive experience. This project investigated multisensory interaction in virtual reality’ s impacts on people's feelings and attitude to nature, addressing the lack of direct touch-based haptic interactions in VR by incorporating active and passive haptic feedback. Qualitative studies shown that multisensory interactions in virtual reality induce healing effects, relaxation and shift attitudes towards nature, demonstrating sensing nature's potential application for relaxation and pro- environmental attitudes
Live Methods as creative resistance: Crafting a PhD and solidarity in the neoliberal university
Get PDFThe call to revisit Live Methods prompted us to consider the legacy of this text at Goldsmiths college, where the editors and many of the contributors were writing from in 2012. We are PhD students in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, a space where Live Methods has left a marked influence through practices of teaching, learning and research. At Goldsmiths, the 2021–2023 academic years saw an extensive and deeply unpopular ‘restructuring’ process imposed on the college community by senior management, with staff unions responding through extended industrial action. This article reports on PhD student solidarity and creative resistance during that time. We discuss how the ‘Live Methods manifesto’ was used as an intervention on the picket line and as a critical resource for fostering resistance against the neoliberal restructuring of our university. This creative resistance was deeply rooted in the solidarities and affective infrastructures of support that grew out of our weekly Sociology graduate student seminar, ‘Crafting a PhD’. In this article, we present a multimodal account of these events, including narrative and audiovisual material. A decade on from the publication of Live Methods, with the neoliberalisation of UK universities intensifying, we argue that the manifesto’s call for sociologists to embrace a creative and critical orientation towards research is more vital than ever. Live Methods is a resource not only for research, but for inspiring creative resistance and sustaining our collective projects of learning and life within the university
Skateparks as communities of care: the role of skateboarding in girls’ and non-binary youth’s mental health recovery during lockdown
Get PDFThis paper details findings from our research into girls’ and non-binary young people’s take-up of skateboarding during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis contributes to wider discussions on gendered relations, young people’s embodied capacities and leisure adaptations in response to ongoing changes such as the pandemic. Based on qualitative interviews with 18 young people at a London skatepark, we found that the physical culture enacted there facilitated recovery from mental unwellness developed during or preceding the Covid crisis. This recovery was generated within new patterns of embodied movement, through relationships engendered in the space, and within the collective community ethic that was fostered at the skatepark. The temporal pause from usual routines during the pandemic created a space for collective critical reflection, healing and renewal within what we describe as a feminist ethic of care. We argue that this ethic contrasted in particular with the growing expectations of schooling and ‘intensified girlhoods’ that have come to characterise gendered everyday lives and therefore represents an alternative pedagogy of hope and recovery for these young people
Notting Hill Carnival and Rock Against Racism: converging cultures of resistance during late 1970s Britain
Get PDFThe Notting Hill Carnival and Rock Against Racism were two of the most significant cultural and political movements of the mid-to-late 1970s. While the two movements had numerous contact points, academia has hitherto viewed them in isolation. In contrast, this article examines three areas of convergence that Rock Against Racism held with the Notting Hill Carnival to assess whether their connectedness advanced the struggle against racism in Britain. The first point of convergence relates to how the two cultural forms interlaced politics and culture in response to a racially charged hostile environment in the mid- 1970s. Secondly, contesting social space became a central tactic of the respective movements’ cultural and political interventions. Finally, in responding to the challenges of incorporating and representing young people, the two movements became platforms which engendered cross-pollination between black and white youth subcultures, strengthening antiracist solidarity. The article utilises data from qualitative interviews and archival research
Creative writing and autoethnography: a layered approach to exploring positionality
Get PDFIn this paper I describe how I used the creative writing of Interactive Fiction (IF) and autoethnographic playthroughs to gain a richer understanding of my professional identity as a secondary school English teacher and my positionality as a qualitative researcher working in the context of CentreTown academy. Using this novel combination of research methods, I offer insight into the discomfort and unease that I experience as an English teacher working in a large, inner-city secondary academy in England, as well as the factors that motivate me as a teacher-writer. These personal insights are remarkable, for in an education sector preoccupied with improving measurable outcomes, nuanced accounts of the discomfort that results-driven, performative approaches to education can produce become noteworthy counter-narratives
Qualities of culturally and religiously sensitive practice: a cross-sectional study
Get PDFBackground: Culture and religion influence lived experience and particularly dying and grieving. Research has largely focused on exploring culturally and religiously sensitive practices, but not necessarily in palliative and hospice care or across nations. Acquired knowledge from the more advanced end-of-life care systems (eg the UK) tends to be generalized to other contexts where its cultural appropriation is not tested.
Aim: This study explored the different qualities, among hospice and palliative professionals in Cyprus, describing cultural competence, cultural humility, and religious literacy.
Design: A cross-sectional study of 41 palliative and hospice professionals in Cyprus, with the use of a 5-point Likert style questionnaire (a = 0.898).
Setting: The study took place in Cyprus and participants were recruited from across palliative and hospice care organizations, including the only hospice in Cyprus, Cyprus Association of Cancer Patients and Friends (PASYKAF), and the Cyprus Anti-Cancer Society (CACS).
Results: This study found that there are four main qualities that lead to effective culturally and religiously sensitive practice—informed decision-making, respect, adaptability, and nonjudgmental practice.
Conclusions: Future education and training of professionals can consider these findings to appropriate approaches in practice that fit the Cypriot end-of-life care context more effectively
Bangladeshi footballers from the east end of London: An ethnography of the dynamic role of football in resisting everyday 'lived' racisms
No full textThis article explores the intersectional racisms experienced by a group of Bangladeshi men from the east end of London in the late 1970s/ 80s and how 'football' was a vehicle of resistance towards the everyday lived experience of racialised violence and language The study adopts an ethnographic approach and also utilises online digital methods
Self-Generated Cues: The role of cue quality in facilitating eyewitness recall
Get PDFPurpose: Witness-led techniques, informed by theory, have been recognised as best practice for eliciting information from cooperative eyewitnesses. In the current research, we test a self-generated cue (SGC) mnemonic grounded in memory theory and explore the impact of three SGC mnemonics on subsequent recall performance.
Methodology: Participants (N = 170) witnessed a live staged event and reported their recall using a SGC mnemonic (keywords only, event-line, or concept map) or control technique (other-generated cues or free recall only). These mock witness accounts were compared in terms of correct and incorrect details reported.
Findings: Fewer correct details were reported in the other-generated cue condition compared to the SGC event-line (p = .018) and SGC concept map (p = .010). There were no significant differences between free recall alone and any other condition. The number of inaccurate details reported did not differ between conditions (p = .153). Our findings suggest that high quality free recall instructions can benefit recall performance above generic cues (e.g. other-generated cues) but using SGCs to support a structured recall (e.g., concept map or event-line) may offer an additional recall benefit.
Originality: Our findings support previous research that SGCs benefit recall beyond other-generated cues. However, by comparing different cue generation techniques grounded in the literature, we extend such findings to show that SGC generation techniques are not equally effective and that combining SGCs with structured recall is likely to carry the greatest benefit to recall
Decoherence Implies Information Gain
Get PDFIt is shown that if the wave function of a quantum system undergoes an arbitrary random transformation such that the diagonal elements of the density matrix in the decoherence basis associated with a preferred observable remain constant, then (i) the off-diagonal elements of the density matrix become smaller in magnitude, and (ii) the state of the system gains information about the preferred observable from its environment in the sense that the uncertainty of the observable is reduced in the transformed state. These results do not depend on the details of how the system-environment interaction generates the random state transformation, and together imply that decoherence leads in general to information gain, not information loss
Editors' Introduction: What is Promotional Culture Today?
No full textThe editors' introduction to the 35-chapter collection in The Sage Handbook of Promotional Culture and Society, updating perspectives offered by Andrew Wernick in his field-defining book, 'Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression', published in 1991