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Earbuds, smartphones, and music. Spiritual care and existential changes in COVID-19 times
Get PDFRooted in a Durkheimian functionalist reading of religion, in this article, we present and discuss the results of a scoping study of on-line sources on the delivery of spiritual care during the COVID-19 pandemic in England. Spiritual care highlights the bond between healthcare and religion/spirituality, particularly within the growing paradigm of holistic and humane care. Spiritual care is also an area where the importance of the physical presence of receivers and providers is exceptionally important, as a classic anthropological understanding of the religious ritual would maintain. Three themes were found, which speak to changes brought about by the pandemic. These revolve around disembodiment, solitude, and technology in spiritual care, of religious and non-religious nature. A fourth theme encapsulates the ambivalence in the experience of spiritual care delivery, whereby distant and virtual care could only partially compensate for the impossibility of physical presence. On the one hand, we draw from anthropology of the ritual and phenomenology to make the case for the inalienability of intercorporeality in being there for the other. On the other hand, relying on digital religious studies and post-human theories, we argue for an opening up to new ways of conceptualising the body, being there, and being human.
[Abstract copyright: © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2023, Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
Introduction: semiotic movements
No full textIntroduction to Vol. 4 of The Bloomsbury Companion to Semiotic
Practice of wastewater irrigation and its impacts on human health and environment: a state of the art
Get PDFThe practice of wastewater irrigation lessens the pressure on the aquatic environment by minimizing the use of freshwater resources. However, this may lead to significant damage to the human health and environments. Recycled wastewater possesses a substantial amount of nutrients that act as fertilizers for crops and facilitate the metabolic action of microorganisms. The major advantages of wastewater irrigation are increased agricultural production, nutrient recycling, reduced stress on freshwater, economical support and provision of livelihoods for farmers. However, several harmful impacts of wastewater irrigation are also prominent due to inappropriate wastewater management and irrigation practices. These include severe hazards to farmer’s health, contamination of agricultural land and crops with toxic metals, chemical compounds, salts and microbial pathogens. In addition, long-term irrigation using wastewater can significantly affect the groundwater through leakage of salty and toxic metal-rich wastewater making it unfit for human consumption. Wastewater irrigation may also alter the physicochemical properties and microbiota of soil, which in turn can disturb land fertility and crop productivity. Several factors need to be considered while using treated or partially treated wastewater for irrigation such as diversity and type of pollutants, available nutrients, pathogenic microorganisms and soil salinity. In this review paper, we assess the impact of wastewater irrigation on humans as well as on the environment based on available case studies globally, outline current use of wastewater for irrigation of agricultural crops such as cereals, vegetables, fodder crops, including agroforestry and discuss suitable management practices of wastewater reuse for irrigation
Learning to become evidence based social workers: student views on research education and implementation in practice
Get PDFProfessional guidelines for social workers in relation to research use in practice, present social workers as consumers, rather than producers of research evidence. This approach aligns with a growing emphasis on the use of evidence-based practice within social work. This paper reports on a small mixed methods study with a cohort of BA social work students (N = 38) with two aims: 1) to understand the experiences of students learning research at undergraduate level and 2) to explore how their learning and placement experiences interact and influence their development as ‘research-minded’ practitioners of the future. Descriptive statistics of the quantitative data and thematic analysis of focus groups are presented. Our findings support the existing literature relating to social work students attitudes to research, including feelings of anxiety and perceptions of difficulty, while also viewing it as important to their careers. We also found that within placement settings, students encounter negative, often dismissive views of research and experience little in the way of role-modelling of evidence-based practice. We consider these findings in light of the promotion of EBP in UK social work, and how this may influence our teaching of research and evidence use to future student cohorts
Continuing professional development for the early years workforce in England since 2015: a synthesis of survey data highlighting commonalities, discrepancies and gaps
Get PDFContinuing Professional Development (CPD) is an essential aspect of Early Years (EY) workforce planning. In understanding how CPD is currently provided, we depend largely on surveys carried out by separate sector organisations with little synthesis of the data. In this paper, we scrutinise findings relating to CPD from nine surveys of EY managers and practitioners carried out by three well-established sector organisations since 2015. We highlight commonalities, discrepancies and gaps in the data. On the basis of this analysis, we highlight the need for further investigation around what constitutes CPD in the EY sector, what are perceived to be ‘quality’ experiences, CPD accreditation and the leadership and management of CPD in settings. We recommend gathering more detailed and accurate data about CPD through practitioner logs completed as and when CPD is undertaken, as opposed to retrospective surveys
Leveraging Twitter data to analyze the virality of Covid-19 tweets: a text mining approach
Get PDFAs the novel coronavirus spreads across the world, work, pleasure, entertainment, social interactions, and meetings have shifted online. The conversations on social media have spiked, and given the uncertainties and new policies, COVID-19 remains the trending topic on all such platforms, including Twitter. This research explores the factors that affect COVID-19 content-sharing by Twitter users. The analysis was conducted using 57,000 plus tweets that mentioned COVID-19 and related keywords. The tweets were subjected to the Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques like Topic modelling, Named Entity-Relationship, Emotion & Sentiment analysis, and Linguistic feature extraction. These methods generated features that could help explain the retweet count of the tweets. The results indicate that tweets with named entities (person, organisation, and location), expression of negative emotions (anger, disgust, fear, and sadness), reference to mental health, optimistic content, and greater length have higher chances of being shared (retweeted). On the other hand, tweets with more hashtags and user mentions are less likely to be shared
Enhancing environmental practices in Khoja faith communities – a collaborative inquiry
No full textMy research project was a fascinating exploration and research journey into an intensive collaborative inquiry with six Khoja Shia Muslim faith communities based in England to improve and enhance environmental practices in the faith communities.
The knowledge landscape within which this project is located is a wide and complex one and brings together several different domains of knowledge that arise and come into play in this research. These domains are the environmental issues, global and local initiatives to deal with these issues and the religious considerations underlying these issues.
The different epistemic roots (the ways of and the process of knowing) which are used in analysing and understanding the issues in this project include science and its emergent findings, the impact of global politics on climate change and its impact on global society and its mitigation, the emergence of moral and ethical dimensions on the environment, the faith teachings on the preservation of the environment, institutional structure and practices and the process of organisational change in the faith communities covered in this project.
The purpose of my research project was to contribute to the overall social process of change in the environmental practices in these faith communities. The aim of this research was to assist in bringing about change in the current practices of the communities.
The research approach in this project was a participatory, collaborative inquiry with discussion groups in the faith communities. I opted for the collaborative inquiry framework as one providing a direct pathway for taking a research approach to practice and change-making and enabling investigation, action and reflection and reporting the learning from it in a way best suited to the project and the participants and the faith communities. The collaborative inquiry was undertaken with community discussion groups drawn from the six UK-based faith communities. I gathered the research data through initial face-to-face meetings followed by separate ongoing online WhatsApp sessions of each discussion group. These six faith communities were the Birmingham, Essex, Leicester, London (Stanmore), Peterborough and Portsmouth Khoja Shia Muslim communities.
The collaborative inquiry format provided the discussion groups with a much-needed forum to jointly develop these groups' initiatives and strategies to bring about change in the communities' problematic practices and to trial them within the communities and learn from their outcomes. The discussion groups helped to motivate the communities to think about taking steps to improve their green practices and address environmental issues within their contexts and help in making the change in the problematic activities.
The research gives an engaging insight into the structure and workings of the Khoja Shia communities, the positionality of the key stakeholders and influencers in the community, and the decision-making processes involved in changing their practices.
The research considered the aspects that played a part in influencing the change process and examined the motivating factors and the elements that posed hurdles and impediments in effecting change in these faith communities. It considered how these factors affected the practice and approach of decision-makers and members of the communities.
The study showed that improving the long-standing, entrenched practices was a complex and difficult process in the communities. The communities faced Internal institutional and organisational constraints and external constraints in changing problematic practices.
A key finding of the research was that change in the faith communities could be facilitated by adopting a change strategy involving local change agents, including women and working with community leaders and volunteers in the change-making process, securing buy-in from the donors of the community, undertaking awareness building and education and scientific studies linking the problematic practices to environmental harm locally and globally and seeking motivation from both science findings and faith teachings combining bottom-up consensus building approach and top-down policy forming approach.
The project enabled the communities to develop a deeper understanding of both the Islamic faith's position on nurturing the environment and the impact of the current scientific findings on issues of global warming and climate change, carbon emissions and pollution.
The study highlighted the importance of eco faith and eco science in changing community practices. Both are needed together, working in tandem as borne out by Holy Quran, which states that good deeds should accompany beliefs. Faith remains in the heart and soul, but science or knowledge of scientific technologies acting through the mind opens the doors to operationalizing the practice of faith teachings in modern living.
This process of change-making in the communities needs long lead times and is a continuing process. For the process to be deep, transformational, and sustainable, it requires sustained efforts of awareness raising at grassroots levels and reiterative cycles of formulating and trialling green pilot initiatives in the communities to discover and arrive at acceptable and workable solutions.
The study makes suggestions and recommendations for further study, research work and efforts in this area to be undertaken and shared in the Khoja faith communities at the communities as well as regional organisational levels to enhance ways of addressing the environmental concerns within the Khoja Shia global communal network and also with other communities worldwide
Could Mary have said “no?” a contemporary feminist analysis of consent, examined through the context of Marian representations that originate from the Annunciation
Get PDFProviding a framework for consent analysis, this research primarily focuses on Mariology derived from the Annunciation as interpreted by Mary Daly. Daly’s representations of Mary as a Model for all Women, a Marionette, a Rape Victim, and a Goddess are considered in turn. Through an exploration of these Mariological images, this research explores the intricate factors influencing an individual’s capacity to provide consent, with a focus on limitations to an agent’s autonomy and voluntariness. Specifically, this study emphasises the significance of characterising interactions between agents as competitive or non-competitive. This research indicates that in situations where interactions between agents are competitive, the ability for an agent to give consent is severely limited. In contrast, in scenarios where interactions between agents are non-competitive, the capacity for consent is higher. This research highlights the need for a movement towards non-competitive interactions to protect and empower women’s consent. Additionally, a reimagining of the Marian image as a model of non-competitive collaborative agency is proposed as a guide to further discussions of consent, moving towards a more equitable and inclusive relationality
Work exhibited in 'A “history” of photography: Agnès b.’s Collection,' Galerie du Jour Agnès B, Paris
No full textBillingham's work from the collection of Agnes B was exhibited in 'A “history” of photography: Agnès b.’s Collection,' Galerie du Jour Agnès B, Paris, (8th December 2023 - 7th April 2024).
A central idea to the exhibition was that the viewer be taken on a chronological tour of a history of photography, starting with a twelve silver gelatino-bromide negative chronophotographic plates, albumin prints, negative papers, sepia photographs and silver countertype prints dating from the second half of the 19th century to later black and white prints and onto the switch to color photography (1980s - 1990s).
The agnès b. collection comprises over seven thousand paintings, sculptures, installations, videos and 2,500 photographic works.
Agnès b's collection of contemporary art was first presented at the Abattoirs de Toulouse in 2004. Prior to this, the photographic collection comprised two exhibitions - one at the Centre National de la Photographie, Paris (2000) at the Pavillon des Arts in Nogent-sur-Marne (2002).
In 2000, Agnès B wrote about photography: "What counts is the “snapshot”, the photographer, in a gesture that’s surely spiritual, chooses the moment in his life, in life, that jumps out at him, what he chooses to say ….. In the same gesture, he can also create fictions, deceiving us for the fun of it, telling us stories that are not true, serious or light-hearted. What a freedom! And that’s why I love photography “
Besides Billingham, other artists included André Kertész; August Sander; Beat Streuli; Brassaï; Duane Michals; Eugène Atget; Helen Levitt; Henri Cartier-Bresson; Jacques-Henri Lartigue
Jonas Mekas; Man Ray; Mark Cohen; Massimo Vitali; Nan Goldin; Ralph Gibson; Ryan McGinley; Saul Leiter; Seydou Keïta; Sigmar Polke; Walker Evans; Weegee; William Eggleston and Willy Ronis.
There was a fully illustrated catalogue
Early photographic work exhibited in 'Butterflies! Arken's Collection', Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen
No full textBillingham exhibited early photographic work in the show 'Butterflies! Arken's Collection', Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Denmark, (10th February - 31st December 2023). The exhibition was curated from the Museum's permanent collection by Esben Weile Kjaer,
The viewer was invited to experience ARKEN's works against a back drop that echoed an abandoned skate park or film set. Based on his own childhood memories, Esben Weile Kjær created an environment where graffiti, skate ramps and bus sheds formed the framework for a selection of over 50 works. Besides Billingham, artists included Micha Klein, Wolfgang Tillmans, Sarah Lucas and Henrik Plenge Jakobsen.
Esben Weile Kjær was inspired in particular by 90s artists and who helped to shape his own generation. The exhibition explored two questions. What became of the optimism, radicalism and notion of freedom, that characterized art just after the fall of the Berlin wall in Europe? And how has this helped to shape our contemporary everyday life