Not Another Hillbilly Salvation: Reading Welfare Assessment As Confession In Five Appalachian Counties

With the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRA) in 1996, the welfare system became more invasive through requirements for multiple assessments. In this thesis, I analyze seventeen qualitative interviews with welfare participants and workers in five Appalachian counties to examine the role of assessment processes in creating deserving and undeserving welfare subjectivities. Combining postmodern theory and qualitative research, I ask the question: how do local policies and practices produce "the Appalachian welfare participant"

Promotional approaches to undergraduate recruitment for marginalised courses and marginalised students

This research challenges the norms of undergraduate recruitment promotion practice responding to political, economic, social and technological drivers in a competitive environment. The practical problem is defined from a marketing practitioner standpoint working with core approaches which do not represent nuanced subject and audience needs, instead leaving them on the margins of the institutional recruitment offer. Marginalised students are represented by those who did not attend private or high-achieving state schools, including, but not restricted to, those identified by widening participation policy. Marginalised subjects are represented by selected arts and humanities courses without overt links to specific professions. These aspects of marginalisation triangulated from an elite institution perspective create a framework for investigating the problems created by core promotional practice, and for developing solutions. The use of a case study supported by design-based research methods allows for practical research outputs in a live environment. Mixed methods are employed to gather data from a small sample of insider sources (nine students and seven tutors) and general public sources (1,923 online reader responses to 31 news articles and forum posts). The insider and public accounts provide an alternative marketing intelligence corpus to normative large-scale quantitative data. This is used to inform design principles incorporated into a prototype package of three promotional resources and a sustainable strategy. The success of the challenge to promotional practice norms materialises not simply through public-facing practical solutions as initially anticipated, but also though the collaborative processes of the enquiry, improving professional relations between marketing administrative and academic staff. The alternative approaches realised through this research can be summarised as a move towards small-scale market intelligence gathering and resource production to meet the nuanced needs of marginalised subjects and audiences, and an alteration to professional practice which acknowledges academics as marketing partners. These outputs are now employed within routine practice within the boundaries of the original study, and have the potential to be generalisable through wider discussions among HE marketing practitioners

A multi-method evaluation of a community initiative intended to improve the quality of healthcare in the Gypsy and Traveller communities

Although small-scale initiatives have taken place attempting to address the inequality in health of Gypsies and Travellers, these have had little impact nationally, being isolated and lacking impartial evaluation. Consequently, healthcare access and health status of UK Gypsy/Travellers remains very poor. This thesis is a multi-method evaluation of a complex intervention designed to improve the healthcare of Gypsies and Travellers in Wrexham. An ethnographic method was used providing both 'insiders' and 'outsiders' perspectives. Participant observations and a series of interviews with Gypsy/Travellers and service providers were undertaken, together with a study of Gypsy/Travellers' coronary and mental health status. The combination and interaction of these studies provide an overall evaluation of the community health initiative. Gypsy/Travellers' culture, lifestyle, health beliefs and experiences of healthcare are described. Gypsy/Travellers hold a strong sense of cultural identity and their lives are governed by strict rules and cultural expectations. To break the rules risks being ostracised from the community. Family life is all important and religion is fundamental to Gypsy/Traveller lives. Also, they experience wide spread discrimination which results in defensive, mistrust of non- Gypsy/Travellers. Gypsy/Travellers' CHD and mental health status have been described. Results suggest that they engage in higher CHD risk behaviours than the general population and high levels of depression and anxiety were found. The community health initiative consisting of a full-time Project Health Worker who provides an outreach service by means of a mobile health unit is described. The aim is to increase access to healthcare and develop culturally acceptable methods to improve CHD health of this group. The strengths and weaknesses of the initiative are explored and the complex interactions between culture, health and the initiative are discussed. Finally, several key elements are identified which contribute to the success of the initiative and the continuation of the initiative is discussed

Technological uncertainties and popular culture

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis is an inquiry into possibilities and problems of a sociology of translation. Beginning with a recognition that actor network theory represents a sociological account of social life premised upon on recognition of multiple ontologies, interruptions and translations, the thesis proceeds to examine problems of interpretation and representation inherent in these accounts. Tensions between sociological interpretation and social life as lived are examined by comparing representation of nonhuman agency in both an actor-network and a science fiction study of doors. The power identified in each approach varies from point making to lying. A case is made for considering fictional storytelling as sociology and hence, the sociological value of lying. It is by close examination of a fictional story that this study aims to contribute to a sociology of translation. The greater part of the thesis comprises an ethnographic study of a televised children's story. Methodological issues in ethnography are addressed and a case is made for a complicit and multi-site ethnography of story. The ethnography is represented in two particular forms. Firstly, and unusually, story is treated as a Storyworld available for ethnographic study. An actor network ethnography of this Storyworld reveals sociologically useful similarities and differences between fictional Storyworld and contemporary, social life. Secondly, story is taken as a product, a broadcast television series of six programmes. An ethnography of story production is undertaken that focuses attention on production performances, hidden storytellers and politics of authorship. Story is revealed as an unfinished project. A prominent aspect of this thesis is a recognition that fictional storytelling both liberates and constrains story possibilities. This thesis concludes that, in addressing critically important tensions in sociological representation, fictional stories should be included in sociological literature as studies in their own right

Promotional approaches to undergraduate recruitment for marginalised courses and marginalised students

This research challenges the norms of undergraduate recruitment promotion practice responding to political, economic, social and technological drivers in a competitive environment. The practical problem is defined from a marketing practitioner standpoint working with core approaches which do not represent nuanced subject and audience needs, instead leaving them on the margins of the institutional recruitment offer. Marginalised students are represented by those who did not attend private or high-achieving state schools, including, but not restricted to, those identified by widening participation policy. Marginalised subjects are represented by selected arts and humanities courses without overt links to specific professions. These aspects of marginalisation triangulated from an elite institution perspective create a framework for investigating the problems created by core promotional practice, and for developing solutions. The use of a case study supported by design-based research methods allows for practical research outputs in a live environment. Mixed methods are employed to gather data from a small sample of insider sources (nine students and seven tutors) and general public sources (1,923 online reader responses to 31 news articles and forum posts). The insider and public accounts provide an alternative marketing intelligence corpus to normative large-scale quantitative data. This is used to inform design principles incorporated into a prototype package of three promotional resources and a sustainable strategy. The success of the challenge to promotional practice norms materialises not simply through public-facing practical solutions as initially anticipated, but also though the collaborative processes of the enquiry, improving professional relations between marketing administrative and academic staff. The alternative approaches realised through this research can be summarised as a move towards small-scale market intelligence gathering and resource production to meet the nuanced needs of marginalised subjects and audiences, and an alteration to professional practice which acknowledges academics as marketing partners. These outputs are now employed within routine practice within the boundaries of the original study, and have the potential to be generalisable through wider discussions among HE marketing practitioners

Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media’s adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come

Palliative care as progressive journey : the interplay of hope and social death in nurse-patient encounters across three care settings

In this study I examine the care trajectory of terminally ill patients across three different sites in the hospice setting: home care, day therapy unit and in-patient unit. I will focus on the patients' journey and the nurses' ways of working in each setting as the continuum of care progresses towards the end of life. Much of this work is accomplished through talk, so by focusing the analysis on nurse-patient encounters, this study aims to fill a gap in this sensitive area of health and social care. The study is rooted in the prevailing philosophy of palliative care which aims to address 'total pain', that is, social, emotional, and spiritual, as well as physically occurring phenomena. Upon diagnosis of terminal illness, it will be argued, the patient undergoes a shift in the conceptualisation of 'self. The focus of my analyses will therefore be the interlocking themes of social death and hope vis-a-vis the biological event. I will argue that the concept of social death mediates the interactional trajectories, while hope and 'healing', in the palliative sense, may be seen as counterpoints to the inevitability of the end-of-life journey. The process of social death can be viewed as a continuum as patients experience physical losses and deterioration that will in most cases lead to the institutional setting of the in-patient unit. Palliative care nurses and patients have the opportunity to intersect the continuum with interactional strategies that have the potential to promote hope in order to deflect from the suffering of total pain. The main findings can be captured in terms of the contextual differences across the three care settings as the care process occurs at different stages of the patient's terminal journey. For the purposes of demonstrating the complex interplay of these experiential domains, I adopt a theme- oriented discourse analysis