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Recovery for professional and elite amateur golfers: a scoping review of evidence-based methods
No full textThe lifestyle and athletic demands of a professional or elite amateur golfer are both physically and mentally challenging. Players need to withstand large forces during the swing, frequently travel between time zones, and often cycle through a variety of training and competition environments for large portions of the competitive season. Thus, with numerous factors contributing to physical and cognitive stress, optimizing recovery for golfers is paramount. The primary objective of this scoping review was to evaluate different evidenced-based recovery methods for professional and elite amateur golfers and assess where the current research gaps lie. A 3-step search strategy identified relevant primary and secondary articles, in addition to grey literature, using a total of five online databases (SPORTDiscus, Scopus, Web of Science, ProQuest Central, and PubMed), which retrieved articles from January 2000 to May 2024. Data were extracted using a standardised tool to create a descriptive analysis and a thematic summary. Studies were included if they focused on nutritional and hydration methods, laboratory and controlled environment methods, sleep and jet leg management, independent methods, or adjunct recovery methods, in relation to golf or other sporting populations. The initial search found 4862 relevant articles from the selected databases, with 39 studies meeting our criteria for the scoping review. Limited investigations have been conducted examining effective recovery methods for golfers. However, some preliminary evidence supports the use of targeted nutrition and hydration strategies, massage, and regular mobility and flexibility exercise. In addition though, a more fundamental focus on sleep and jet lag management strategies are required, given the lifestyle challenges often faced by professional and elite amateur players. If golfers want to improve their chances of consistently competing at the highest level, strategies that focus on optimising recovery for superior health and wellbeing are essential for helping to sustain performance over time
Continuous improvement of consulting practices – humanising approaches to the challenges
No full textThis critical analysis charts my journey from my initial foray as an engineer, more comfortable with numbers and processes, to my role as a leader who needed to embrace the humanity and uncertainty of practice.
My early years gave the gift of streetwise – needing to read situations and people very quickly through the need to survive. My education gave me the gift of technical understanding, how the world, machines, and organisations work. My need for professional growth gave me my agency. These have all been gifts that have contributed to my practice, however through this work I realise that the gift of academia was not as present.
This thesis sets out core lessons for the new small consultancy owner/leader, and academics who are interested in the professional application of theory into practice and practice into theory, based upon the critical reflection of three significant transformation programmes that changed the shape of organisations in the public domain, each having a profound impact on society.
My realisation throughout is that the human aspect is just as important as the technical, with elements of Autoethnography, Practice Theory and Hermeneutics being vital concepts to inform effective leadership and facilitation.
Mistakes were made throughout the course of creating these public works. Hard lessons in the management of a consulting firm, the development of practice, and my own evolution are drawn out through this critical work and enable me to draw new learning, set out in the manner of hard-won advice for those who follow in the same path.
Two critical lenses are applied to the three public works:
• Autoethnography – Research based on my own lived experience, looking at the macro, meso and micro aspects of the works, myself, the era, and the environment in which they were created.
• Shewhart Cycle – A framework for root cause problem solving and continuous improvement that is close to my own personal practice that enables me to draw out explicit practical improvements in the management of consulting firms.
This assessment revealed new learning and insights, contributing to the field of management consulting through core practical advancements: Resourcing, Professional & Personal; Evolution of Practice, Evolution of Me; Becoming a Long-term Strategic Partner, and My Own Strategic Partnerships. The issues have been studied to identify root causes, and finally the root causes have been resolved through new insights and development of new practice, particularly a new concurrent public work – my consulting firm’s new value proposition.
I conclude with a surprising outcome. This programme has enabled me to further examine how academic research mirrors my own practical solutions that were born through necessity. I had been implementing academic concepts in isolation inadvertently. Doctoral research has drawn out similarities from scholarly works. Opportunities are clear for the operationalisation of academic theories into professional practice and how practice can inform academic preoccupations bringing them to life, showing that a stronger bridge can be forged between academia and industry
Dissertation (literature review)
No full textThroughout your nursing degree you will need to undertake a broad range of assessments, each requiring a different skill set in order to pass. Taking an assessment literacy approach that explains the purpose and process behind each assessment, this book offers practical tips and guidance to help you feel confident, demonstrate learning and application to practice and achieve success
Realising visions: means and meaning in Études de Concert 1 for solo recorders
No full textA conference paper presenting two compositions from Etudes de concert 1: Paraphrase on 'O virga mediatrix' and Tema con trasformazioni, focussing on microtonal content. Illustrated with live musical examples performed by recorder player collaborator Elizabeth Knatt (with the complete pieces also performed in concert). The paper explores microtonality and the recorder from historical and technical perspectives, citing research and practice by Peter Bowman, Walter van der Hauwe and Michael Vetter. It proceeds to discuss their rationale and meaning in the pieces in question, with reference to Hildegard of Bingen's visionary religious poetry and William Butler Yeats's esoteric prose book 'A Vision' (1937)
Hurricane Katrina and a curious closet for queers: a short story
No full textThis vignette is a fictionalised account of how the pressures young queer people experience in their everyday lives are magnified under disaster conditions. The vignette highlights the importance of storytelling in presenting the complexities and subjective particularities of young queer people’s everyday lives that may be missed or glossed over in more traditional academic research. Storytelling, the author argues, is messy and can disrupt many of the certainties of accepted academic conventions
Effective student communications as a route for boosting engagement in student surveys – a National Student Survey case study
Get PDFThe National Student Survey (NSS), introduced in 2005, provides an opportunity to comprehensively gather feedback from UK undergraduate students. Given the survey results feed into league tables and how the Office for Students regulates universities, the survey is generally taken seriously by higher education institutions. This article provides a case study of how partnership working by student communications professionals at a London-based university contributed to improvements in the response rates and student voice scores within the NSS. The case study, reporting thematic enhancements over a six-year period, discusses how partnership working led to the creation of an institution-wide Student Voice Action Group, and how communications approaches adjusted the focus of messaging, incentives and channel-mix. The case study provides provocations to practitioners seeking to improve student engagement with feedback mechanisms beyond just the National Student Survey; including efficiently utilising digital student communications channels to save on staff resources and campaign costs
Solving the paradox: the social semantics of children’s right of self-determination
Get PDFCentred on a critical examination of the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989), this article proposes an approach to children’s right of self-determination as social semantics, to illuminate the dynamic and paradoxical coupling within discourses on childhood between a fundamental social process, the reproduction of generational order, and a fundamental social institution, human rights as codified in European modernity.
The article presents the result of a three-stages study, articulated in: a systematic review of literature around the theme of children’s right of self-determination; a discussion of children’s right of self-determination as social semantics; the use of Early Childhood Education as a significant case-study to observe the development of children’s self-determination as a tenet of the mainstream semantics of childhood in society. It is argued that the semantics of children’s right of self-determination: 1) describes a paradoxical coexistence between intergenerational order and human rights; 2) is capable of maintain its viability as a cultural form because it is coupled with another semantic distinction, between human rights and personal rights.
It is hoped that the scholarly debate will benefit from the contribution of an article exploring the intersection between social ontology of childhood and children’s right of self-determination
The role of the advocate for the detained patient: a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective of advocacy in psychosis
No full textWhat is the role of advocacy in psychosis? This is an important question but complex to give a straightforward answer. In an attempt to approach this question for the first time in the field of psychoanalysis, this thesis examines the possibilities of advocacy for the detained patient who may have a psychotic structure through the lens of the Lacanian psychoanalytic theory on the approach to psychosis. From the time when advocacy was introduced as a right in 2009 under amendments to the Mental Health Act (1983, 2007), detained patients who are diagnosed with a serious mental illness and deemed to be a danger to themselves or others can utilise advocacy as a means to express their own views, obtain information, secure and exercise their rights and participate in decisions about their care and treatment. The current approach of the literature on advocacy focuses mainly on its effectiveness to safeguard patient’s rights and promote patient’s views, involvement and wellbeing. In contrast, a review of the literature from the Lacanian orientation shifts the focus towards stabilisation and the creation of a social bond. Furthermore, the Lacanian emphasis on the importance of language is of particular interest to those charged with ‘speaking on behalf of one’ when, in psychosis, there is a withdrawal from shared language.
This thesis argues that Lacan’s writings on psychosis provide a framework to discuss the relationship between advocacy and psychosis. In light of the Lacanian theory, the advocate, through effective listening and noting of the patient’s speech, can hold a stabilising function for the psychotic, notwithstanding the effects of the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father that keep the psychotic disconnected from the Other and imprisoned in their private discourse. To illustrate this argument, I offer qualitative vignettes drawing on cases from the advocate’s practice. Additionally, advocacy’s ultimate goal, that of self-advocacy, is approximated as a potential sinthomatic possibility that is traced back to Schreber’s case, which demonstrates, clearly and powerfully, the impact of self-advocacy in psychosis. Based on the argument that the role of the advocate, like the role of the analyst, is to be the secretary, which means to support the transition from ‘being spoken for’ to ‘speaking up for oneself’, the prospect of the psychotic’s acquisition of the ability to self-advocate can pave the way for creating a link with the Other. Finally, by bringing together the two disciplines (advocacy and Lacanian psychoanalysis), and despite their differences, I develop the idea of a ‘psychoanalytic advocacy’ that can be a factor of stabilisation for psychotic subjects
A taxonomy of trust in education: with a lens to magnify the limitations of hierarchical foundations of trust, and a key to solve the puzzle of children’s trust in teaching
Get PDFThis article discusses a taxonomy of trust in education, against the challenge of a paradoxical relationship between inclusiveness and selectivity of the education system. From the 17th century, the cultural form of “childhood” has appeared in European modernity and its global ramifications. No other social system has been more fascinated by the child’s journey into adulthood than education. The first part of the article discusses the social construction of the pupil as educational persona replacing the child as the reference for curricula based on the intersection between standardised stages of development, standardised contents and standardised teaching techniques. The article continues proposing a reflection on the implications of the invention of the pupil for children’s trusting commitments in education, arguing that a hierarchical positioning between teachers and pupil based in unequal epistemic status supports types of trust, trust based on expertise and trust based on categorical inequalities that are conducive of pupils and teachers’ trust, but fail to support children’s trusting commitments, because the hierarchical positioning between teachers and pupil is component of a semantic of education centred on role performances, rather than expectations of personal contributions. Developing Giddens and Luhmann’s sociological work on trust, the article introduces of a third type of trust, personal trust. The viability of personal trust in education is discussed in the context of the ongoing transformation of the intergenerational order towards the recognition of children’s self-determination as a resource, rather than a risk, for education. As educationalists from a wide range of disciplines are challenging top-down models of transmission of knowledge, a position of children as authors of valid knowledge in the education system allows trust-building processes that are relational and based on the promotion of active citizenship, reducing the risk of alienation intrinsic to trust based on expertise and trust based categorical inequalities