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The interplay of religion, spirituality, and attitudes towards trans and bisexual identities: insights from health and social science students
Get PDFThe relationship of religion, spirituality and individuals self-identifying as transgender or bisexual is a complicated one, while religious beliefs tend to inform attitudes towards trans identities and bisexuality. This study takes the latter as its starting point and explores the extent to which religion, religiosity and spirituality predict negative attitudes toward trans identities and bisexuality. With a probability sampling technique, 597 health and social science students were recruited. The hierarchical regression analysis of the data showed that religious attitudes, age, and political opinion have a significant predicting effect on attitudes toward trans identities and bisexuality, as well as indirect effects of attitudes towards trans and bisexual identities. The study also showed that the effect of religion and religiosity on the attitudes toward trans identities also affects the attitudes toward bisexuality, and vice versa. These findings add to the current body of literature but separate trans identities and bisexuality as worthy areas of direct exploration and not categories merged with the overall umbrella of gender and sexual diversity, commonly referred to by the variations of the acronym LGBTQIA+
Reports of elevated cognitive decline in autistic adults are linked to high anticholinergic potency
Get PDFBackground
Emerging evidence from healthcare claims data indicates that autistic adults receive dementia-related diagnoses at increased rates compared to the general population. Nevertheless, prospective data, including dementia risk screeners, have rarely been collected to directly evaluate risk for cognitive decline among autistic adults. Given high rates of polypharmacy, autistic adults likely experience high anticholinergic burden, which is linked to dementia risk in the general population. The current study uses screeners to assess risk for cognitive decline, documents anticholinergic burden based on reported medication use, and links cognitive decline and anticholinergic burden in two relatively large samples of autistic adults.
Method
Sample 1 includes 210 “independent” autistic adults (age range=42-81yrs, M=56yrs; 58% female-assigned-sex-at-birth). Sample 2 includes 500 “dependent” autistic adults (age range=18-68yrs, M=31yrs; 20% female-assigned-sex-at-birth). Both samples were recruited via SPARK, a research participant registry of autistic people and their caregivers (“independent” vs. “dependent” refers to the autistic adults’ ability to independently consent). Cognitive decline was assessed using the self-rated AD8 among independent autistic adults and via the caregiver-rated Dementia Screening Questionnaire for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities (DSQIID) for “dependent” autistic adults. The CRIDECO Anticholinergic Load Scale/CALS was used to code medications for anticholinergic potency.
Result
30% of independent autistic adults endorsed 2 or more symptoms, thus they “screened positive” for cognitive decline on the AD8, and 10% of dependent autistic adults had caregiver ratings indicating 1 or more memory/communication declines specifically (an index of cognitive decline) and 3% “screened positive” using the more conservative 20+ DSQIID cutoff score. Anticholinergic medication use was high in both groups, with >63% of individuals in both samples taking 1 or more anticholinergic medications. Finally, dimensional ratings of cognitive decline were significantly associated with anticholinergic potency in both samples after accounting for the effects of age and assigned-sex-at-birth (independent: B=0.16, R2Change=0.02; dependent: B=0.18, R2Change=0.03; ps < .01).
Conclusion
Ratings from dementia screeners dovetail with healthcare claims data by revealing relatively common reports of cognitive decline in autistic adults. Furthermore, among autistic adults, anticholinergic medication use is high, and increased anticholinergic potency is linked to reports of cognitive decline, often at younger ages than in the general population
Embodied Dialogues: an improvised duet between Sensor Dress and voice
Get PDFEmbodied Dialogues is a collaboration-in-progress between Jenn Kirby and Iris Garrelfs, exploring the intersection of wearable technology, voice, and improvised performance. Central to the project is Kirby’s Sensor Dress, a motion and touch-sensitive wearable instrument, paired with Garrelfs’ unamplified, extended vocal improvisation. The Sensor Dress generates and processes sound shaped by the performer’s movement. Garrelfs activates the dress while moving through the audience and improvising with extended vocal techniques, fostering an intimate and spatially aware performance experience. This collaboration engages with postdigital aesthetics, emphasizing the fluidity, unpredictability and materiality of sound-making. Contributing to ongoing conversations within digital musical instruments (DMIs), embodiment and gendered technology, Embodied Dialogues values identity, agency, and entanglement in human-object relationships, and explores how wearables can expand embodied improvised performance through emergent interactions between voice, movement, technology and environment
Ethical Reflexivity, Care, and Slippery Data: Lessons From Working With the Mass Observation Project
Get PDFAs part of a research project on the lived and everyday temporal experiences of British people in the Covid-19 pandemic, a Mass Observation directive was commissioned that asked volunteers about their changing rhythms, feelings, and imagined futures. The responses were rich and raw. Some of these reflections, however, expressed a risk of harm that raised ethical issues that were not anticipated beforehand. These issues were complicated by the interstitial character of the data, being not primary and not quite secondary. This Sociology in Action paper reflects on one diary that expressed risk of harm to think through the slipperiness of the data as well as the ethical responsibility researchers have towards the well-being of participants and that of their own. I suggest a proactive ethical framework for such interstitial data that includes an ethics of care towards the participants and stimulates ethical reflexivity that prepares the researcher for potential emotional ties and investments
Using Interactive Fiction to Stimulate Metalinguistic Talk in the English Classroom
Get PDFInteractive Fiction (IF)—a digital form of non-linear narrative writing—requires readers to respond, to make choices that shape their reading experience. I argue that such choices can be put to use in the classroom, helping teachers to facilitate metalinguistic talk. In this article, I offer a clear conceptualisation of metalinguistic talk, drawing upon existing research to create a useful framework comprised of four characteristics. Using this framework, and with reference to interview data and field notes, I analyse and consider two transcripts of classroom talk in order to explore the extent to which a particular work of IF enabled me to facilitate metalinguistic talk with a class of 16–17-year-old English Literature students. The lesson in question formed part of an action research project exploring the possibilities for IF in the secondary school English classroom. I argue that the choices contained within A Great Gatsby, a work of IF which I designed via a process of critical-creative textual intervention and using Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as my source material, can help to scaffold metalinguistic talk—conversations about language
Intimacy in Ethnographic Film: Listening to How to Improve the World by Nguyễn Trinh Thi
Get PDFThis chapter explores how intimacies are mediated through ethnographic films that pay particular attention to music and sound. Numerous audiovisual strategies have been employed by filmmakers to convey a sense of intimacy across a broad spectrum of approaches, including the observational, essayistic, artistic, sensory, collaborative, experimental and multimodal. In order to reflect on different strategies across this spectrum, the chapter first discusses some intimate moments in John Baily's Amir (1985), which are achieved through an observational approach, before moving on to the experimental evocation of intimacy in How to Improve the World (2021) by Nguyễn Trinh Thi. How to Improve the World is attentive to the indigenous aural culture of the Jarai in the Vietnamese Central Highlands and addresses ethical issues in the context of stark power asymmetries between majority and minority cultures. Inspired by a collaborative ethos, the film's audiovisual experimentation challenges conventional sound-image hierarchies and rigid distinctions between human and more-than-human sounds. The analysis of How to Improve the World reveals how the film employs different types of audiovisual intimacy, aesthetic collaboration and formal experimentation as a way of engaging with the ethics of listening and ecologically oriented ways of knowing and remembering through music and sound
Methodological fitness-for-purpose in the phygital age: the case of luxury
Get PDFPurpose
This paper aims to contribute to this special issue on interpretivist research methodologies and the phygital consumerist landscape by exploring some underlying issues within the specific context of luxury consumption. The paper starts with a critique of current research, drawing particular attention to problems of reductionism, poor representativeness and weak contextualisation in research that adopts a positivist epistemology. The paper then highlights some of the contributions that interpretivist scholarship is making, and can potentially make, to our understanding of the experiential and humanistic aspects of luxury consumption, presented in a nuanced, discursive and deeply contextualised manner.
Design/methodology/approach
This commentary is informed by an in-depth examination of the methodology and approach adopted in the 327 most-recently published academic articles on luxury (from late-2021).
Findings
This opinion piece suggests the need for a sea-change in the way that scholars approach luxury research in online, offline and hybrid phygital settings to capture and convey its true complexity, diversity, contingency and contextuality and its emotional and symbolic character, and to help ensure that it delivers findings that are of relevance and value to luxury industry practitioners.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to look comprehensively and critically at the methodological approaches adopted by academics writing in the field of luxury consumption
« Élargir le cercle » Le Public théâtral au XVIe siècle et aujourd’hui
No full textDans la première partie de cette brève analyse du public, je me réfère à un certain nombre d’études faites par Christian Biet sur le public du XVIe et du XVIIe siècle. La deuxième partie de ma méditation est principalement inspirée par une série de tables rondes organisées par Olivier Neveux et Christophe Triau qui, depuis 2015, accueillent des directeurs artistiques pour parler, entre autres sujets d'importance, du public. Ces débats détaillés et pénétrants ont été publiés dans Théâtre/Public, la revue qui, après avoir été fondée en 1974, fut sauvée en 2007 lorsqu'elle était menacée de fermeture, par l’équipe de recherche « Représentation. Recherches théâtrales et cinématographiques » que dirigeait Biet à l’Université Paris Nanterre. En me référant à ces discussions, je me demande comment la définition développée par Biet, d’un public au cœur du bâtiment de théâtre, et de la cité, pourrait - ou devrait – être valable aujourd'hui