26729 research outputs found
Sort by
Palestinian stand-up comedy: making and breaking myths under occupation
No full textThis paper explores the potential and limits of Palestinian stand-up comedy as autobiographical and collective storytelling, reflecting on a collaborative performance project in the region, May-August 2022. Six Palestinian performers and a UK academic/director worked together to devise a 90-minute ensemble comedy show which toured six cities and facilitated comedy workshops for Palestinians, including in women's centres and refugee camps.
The paper considers the potency of stand-up comedy as individual and shared storytelling in this context and its impacts on performers, audiences, and workshop participants. The blend of UK/US stand-up approaches with traditional Palestinian storytelling techniques resulted in the evolution of a collective and particularly Palestinian comic performance style. A priority for the performers, as they established their comic voices and devised material about often difficult subjects as comedy, was a shared desire to dismantle limiting perceptions of Palestinians and prevalent myths – emerging from both within and outside the region – about their lives under occupation. This resulted in a combination of autobiographical stand-up and collective comedy performances tackling everyday social, religious, and political realities and imagining possible Palestinian futures.
Given the limits on Palestinians’ freedom of movement, touring the show enabled these comedians to share their stories with audiences who are often unfamiliar with each other’s situations and have little experience of stand-up comedy as a form of entertainment. Issues of censorship and self-censorship which arose in some cities and the mixed range of audience responses to the comedy and the comedians are also considered
Striking the right balance and supporting social aspirations: how agency and choice play out in a recovery-oriented mental health service
Get PDFIntroduction
There has been an increasing drive for a transformation of the mental health system towards recovery orientation, with research identifying a series of key recovery principles. It has been argued that these principles remain rhetoric rather than routine practice, and it remains unclear how these are operationalised and promoted within inpatient settings.
Aim
To address the knowledge gap of how staff and service-users enact recovery principles during the daily workings of an inpatient mental health service.
Method
Twenty-one interviews were conducted with staff and service-users at a recovery-oriented inpatient service in the United Kingdom. Data was analysed using framework analysis.
Findings
Analysis of research interview data identified three subcategories grouped under the category of choice. These categories were: a delicate balancing act, acceptability of choices, and social issues impacting choice.
Discussion
Staff were uncertain of their role in promoting choice, resulting in service-users feeling unsupported in their recovery. Staff had to adopt a titrated approach to social inclusion, to protect service-users from discrimination and rejection.
Implications
Mental health professionals need to take a more proactive role in enabling service-users to realise their social aspirations, as well as managing any adverse impacts of stigma and discrimination
Using Hidden Markov Chain for improving the dependability of safety-critical WSNs
Get PDFWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are distributed network systems used in a wide range of applications, including safety-critical systems. The latter provide critical services, often concerned with human life or assets. Therefore, ensuring the dependability requirements of Safety critical systems is of paramount importance. The purpose of this paper is to utilize the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to elongate the service availability of WSNs by increasing the time it takes a node to become obsolete, via optimal load balancing. We propose an HMM-algorithm that, given a WSN, analyses and predicts undesirable situations, notably, nodes dying unexpectedly or prematurely. We apply this technique to improve on the Randomized coverage-based scheduling algorithm (RCS) by C. Lius, a scheduling-based algorithm that has served to improve the lifetime of WSNs. Our experiments show that our HMM technique improves the lifetime of the network, achieved by detecting nodes that die early and rebalancing their load. Our technique can also be used for diagnosis and provide maintenance warnings to WSN system administrators. Finally, our technique can be used to improve algorithms other than the RCS
Feedback encounters: towards a framework for analysing and understanding feedback processes
Get PDFThere is growing agreement that feedback should be understood as a contextual and social process, rather than as receipt of teacher comments on students’ work. This reframing brings with it new complexities, and it can be challenging for researchers and practitioners to adopt a process perspective when making sense of feedback practices in naturalistic settings. This paper takes the nascent notion of feedback encounter and proposes it as an analytical lens for understanding and analysing feedback processes. Based on a rich dataset from a cross-national digital ethnographic study of student feedback experiences, the paper identifies three categories of feedback encounters - elicited, formal and incidental - and explores how they are experienced by students, in relation to perceived usefulness, control and self-exposure. Furthermore, the paper investigates how individual feedback encounters may interconnect to form simple and complex sequences, revolving around distinct uncertainties or dilemmas. This operationalization of feedback encounters builds the foundations of a framework that can help researchers and practitioners make sense of authentic feedback processes in naturalistic settings. Such a framework is useful because it offers a structured way of analysing processes that are inherently complex and unfolding
Immigrant business in transnational contexts: a multifocal understanding of the breakout process
Get PDFPurpose
This paper contributes to the development of an enhanced understanding of the breakout strategies of immigrant entrepreneurs within a transnational context. It develops a dynamic notion of breakout through placing it within a wider understanding of immigrant entrepreneurial strategy characterised by multifocal embeddedness within transnational space.
Design/Methodology
This study adopted a qualitative research methodological approach. In-depth interviews were completed with 30 first- and second-generation UK-based Nigerian entrepreneurs and key informants, to provide data on business growth strategies of individual immigrant entrepreneurs in the context of opportunity structures across host, home and third countries.
Results
Nigerian immigrant entrepreneurs adopted distinctive entrepreneurial strategies related to the complex and diverse transnational context within which they were embedded. Findings demonstrated how the realisation of diversification and differentiation strategies was particularly influenced by locational and spatial strategies, the specific contextual embeddedness of the entrepreneur, and generational differences across entrepreneurs.
Originality
Conceptualising immigrant entrepreneurship from a standpoint of transnational, multifocal embeddedness produces a complex and multi-layered understanding of business breakout as a dynamic process. Drawing together the unifocal, bifocal and multifocal dimensions of embeddedness with findings on the breakout strategies being pursued by immigrant entrepreneurs, an original typology is presented which identifies different approaches to breakout across varied contexts. This has significant policy and practice implications for the content, targeting and access of business support and wider social issues, relating to the identities, social mobility and integration of immigrant entrepreneurs
The role of avatar: how do we create the positive consumer experience in the era of metaverse?
No full textConsumers are in the era of the Metaverse. The changes in the consumption environment lead to a change in consumer behavior. Therefore, it is time to understand and respond to consumer behavior in the world of the Metaverse. Creating positive consumer experience has been a critical marketing issue until now. In this paper, we adapted self-concept to identify the consumer experience with avatar in the Metaverse. Consumers should use their avatars whenever they experience a brand in the Metaverse. However, research on the features and consumer experiences with avatar provided by the Metaverse has only just begun. Therefore, this study contributed to the academia by identifying the consumer experience with an avatar based on the self-concept in the virtual world. To examine the role of avatar in the Metaverse, we divided the consumer experience with avatar using two types: actual-self avatar vs. virtual-self avatar. Consumers who experienced actual-self avatars had a higher brand attitude than virtual-self avatars. Results of this study provide practical contributions in terms of brand management. While many brands are now using the Metaverse to host brand events, there are no guidelines for using the Metaverse, specifically avatars, to manage and promote the consumer experience. Consumer participation in the Metaverse has a two-way interaction when using avatars that can be characterized as having real-time interaction that justifies as providing a high degree of customer engagement. Thus, brand managers need to know how to make experiencing consumers use their avatars effectively to enhance brand engagement. Our findings show that brand manager who run the Metaverse events should encourage consumers to create avatars that look like real people. The Metaverse experiences revolved around the actual-self can increase consumers' brand attitudes
Fancy a Fag(?)
No full textCollage printed onto fabric with aspects replaced with silk douppion. This work reclaims homophobia and discriminative discourse in all of its manifestations. This work was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2023 by world renowned artists Helen Cammock, Sunil Gupta and Heather Phillipson
Sustainable urban waste management through the lens of service users
Get PDFThe Westminster City Council (London, UK) recycling rate has been fluctuating between 19% and 25% over a ten-year period from 2011 to 2021, which is below the 50% threshold target for household waste set by the UK government. This research aimed to investigate the issues surrounding the low recycling rate to inform the design and implementation of an effective waste management policy. The key research questions are: what are the barriers to achieving a high recycling rate in the City of Westminster and how can these barriers be removed? The research used mixed methods to collect data through residents’ online surveys, residents’ interviews, and council staff interviews. The quantitative analysis revealed that age, education, and type of residence have an impact on the survey respondents’ recycling activities. While the results of the merged qualitative analysis of the residents’ interviews and the staff interviews indicate that the following factors are affecting the council recycling rate: physical factors, communication, public engagement, human factors, service constraints, and policy constraints. Findings from the research allowed a sustainable recycling indicator (simplified model) to emerge as a functional tool to increase the council recycling rate. It is concluded that despite positive human behaviours, most of the residents surveyed or interviewed continued to face situational barriers bordering on physical factors and the level of recycling service provided by the council has affected the council recycling rate. The sustainable recycling indicator provides opportunities for the council and other urban local authorities to increase their recycling rate. Suggestions to improve the recycling rate were categorised into three groups under the local waste planning policy, recycling service, and national waste legislation. These recommendations are mainly centred on improving the council recycling service and implementing new local planning policies to increase recycling storage capacities in new and refurbished developments
Towards an applied health musicology: Aesthetic music therapy and beyond
No full textThe last decade has witnessed considerable growth in the fields of music therapy and music, health, and well-being. Music therapy has set new professional standards of practice, defined modern principles of education, diversified its practices, and established new protocols for supervision. Performers and composers are also giving music a higher profile in other healthcare settings. Ongoing work in health musicking and community music therapy, for example, attest to the broader ways in which
music and musical thinking can interrelate with, and serve, health-centred aims. The coronavirus pandemic, meanwhile, raised urgent questions about the relationship between music and health, and about music as a means to support society during a time of crisis. Virtual music-making was a lifeline for many musicians, a bleak reminder of lost freedoms for others. Clips of family members and other musicians serenading patients through hospital windows were shared and lauded. Live-streamed
rehearsals and concerts kept fragile musical communities connected. Each of these examples, from regulated music therapy to amateur choirs reluctantly resorting
to Zoom, underscores the significance of music in our lives, and especially of its power to comfort
and heal. This chapter contends that, taken together, these various spheres of enquiry and activity
point to the emergence of an applied health musicology. We do not intend to examine this field sector-by-sector, although our conclusion will reflect further on its possible ramifications. Rather, the chapter brings together a music therapist and a public musicologist to examine how musical judgements benefit (or might benefit) music therapy, and, conversely, what musicologists can learn when music is used in such a direct, public-oriented way. While music’s therapeutic effects have
been known for centuries, and music therapy has existed as a formalised profession since the 1940s, neither the aesthetic context and value of clinical practice, nor music therapy’s specific relationship with musicology, have received sufficient attention. Discussion has instead tended to focus on the replicable outcomes of music therapy as an empirical science. Quantitative, evidence-based research is the standard method by which most music therapy studies are evaluated. This is understandable; music therapists, after all, use music to help evaluate and create interventions for individual, clinical needs. Yet, this focus discourages music therapy from being understood or examined as an act of applied musicology and creates an unhelpful schism between empirical and creative practice. It also limits our ability to describe and understand music qualitatively as an open, creative modality between client and therapist. This situation probably explains why the fields of musicology and music therapy rarely coalesce (including their pedagogy and training being entirely separate in the majority of educational settings) and why links between musicology and therapeutic processes are established or scrutinised so rarely. Nevertheless, this suppresses our ability to ask certain questions. For example, in what ways can musically informed decision-making benefit music therapy? Are there established genres or emerging subgenres that have latent impact
in clinical-artistic processes? And if we accept that co-creating music with clients has artistic and clinical value, then what are the implications for longstanding musicological categories such as performance, audience, and even criticism? To address these questions, this chapter will examine how different types of modern and minimalist music have been, and could be, used in music therapy. Although it may seem unnecessary to suggest that music therapists should be receptive and responsive to the influence of contemporary musical trends in their work, even the most open-minded and musically informed therapist must navigate several paths if they are to do so: to gain awareness of such music; to assess its potential for clinical practice; to form strategies for its use; and, ultimately, to deliver these in a personalised way. This chapter continues, then, by addressing the relationship between musical style and music therapy in greater detail. It will chronicle the clinical embedding of improvisation and specially written materials, before considering the use, and prospective use, of pre-existing music, including Jóhann Jóhannsson’s IBM 1401, A User’s Manual (2006) and Max Richter’s Sleep (2015)
Supporting neurodivergent midwives in the workplace
No full textIn 2022 the RCM received a proposal from an autistic member and midwifery academic who wished to co-develop an e-learning module with a team of neurodivergent midwives, students, and academics to provide an overview and practical solutions for supporting neurodivergent colleagues and students working in the NHS.
The Royal College of Midwives has been developing e-learning modules for their iLearn platform for several years, but this provided an exciting opportunity for the RCM eLearning developer to work closely with and neurodivergent academic and clinical midwives. This allowed the content to be developed from the viewpoint of neurodivergent professionals and the RCM to develop the team’s knowledge on creating resources that better meet the needs of neurodivergent members.
The excellent feedback from the e-learning module has encouraged neurodivergent workers to come forward, and we are establishing a neurodiversity network in Wales, in addition to developing a Neurodivergence Acceptance toolkit