Images of hospices on social media: The #notdingy campaign

In June 2015, hospices were described as ‘dingy’ on two popular British television dramas. This spurred a social media protest using the hashtag #notdingy. Images were a central component of the #notdingy campaign, which asserted that hospices are positive places in which to be cared for, in many cases until death. In this essay I analyse both the formal qualities of these images as well as their encoded meanings and symbolism (Pauly 2005). I argue that the value of these kinds of images lies less in what is actually depicted than in the images’ affective or emotional force, which can absorb particular meanings and symbolism in the context of a social media campaign

Social Death

This review will outline various ways in which the notion of 'social death’ can be understood, and how they can be related to clinical practice. The idea of social death is used to analytically represent how someone can be identified and treated as if they are ontologically deficient – meaning that they are not seen as being 'fully human.' This impacts on their position within society and how they are interacted with. This review will consider three examples of social death - often distinguished from physical or biological death - that are important for clinical practice: loss of agency and identity; treating people as if they are already dead; and, rituals and bereavement. Recognising that a distinction between social and biological death may not always be helpful, this review will suggest ways in which healthcare practitioners can minimise the likelihood of inadvertently treating someone as 'socially dead'

Social death in end-of-life care policy

Social death denotes a loss of personhood. The concept of social death is engaged with in English end-of-life care policy that sees social death before physical death as a problem. Policy-makers posit that dying persons are likely to be subject to a social death prior to their physical death unless they play an active and aware role in planning their death, facilitated through communication and access to services. Such a view foregrounds a vision of agency and does not address Sudnow's critique of how care of the dying focuses on the body

What’s in a name? From pathways to plans in end of life care

It is not surprising that the independent reviewers of the Liverpool care pathway suggested removing the term “pathway” from discussions about end of life care. Language influences the way people perceive the world and shapes the way we live

Variety in Second Language Instruction: Student Engagement in SLA

This portfolio is a collection of works completed by the author during her time as a student in the Master of Second Language Teaching program at Utah State University. It highlights important aspects and experiences of foreign language education that represent the author’s personal journey of learning and teaching. The first section is comprised of the author’s teaching perspectives which are represented through the author’s desired professional environment, her teaching philosophy statement, and the author’s professional development through teaching observations. The second section presents the author’s pedagogical research pertaining to foreign language pragmatics and music integration in the classroom. The final section is an annotated bibliography that highlights current research and implementation strategies of using technology in the foreign language classroom

Cerebral Lateralization and Cognitive Function

Eighty-seven undergraduate students were given the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, two dichotic listening tasks, and a paired-associate task to assess the relationship between visuo-spatial/verbal abilities and cerebral lateralization. It was hypothesized that well lateralized subjects, as measured by the handedness inventory and dichotic listening tasks, would score higher in the visual imagery condition of the pairedassociate task than less well lateralized subjects * and would score about the same as the less well lateralized subjects on the verbal mediation condition. According to the Levy-Sperry hypothesis the less well lateralized subjects should have experienced difficulty using visual imagery mneumonics on the paired-associate task due to the interference from language processes in the left hemisphere. The results failed to support the Levy-Sperry hypothesis in that there were no significant differences between handedness or cerebral dominance groups. The differences between the hypotheses and results were attributed to defects in experimental i procedure and several possible improvements in procedure were discussed

‘We come in as “the nothing”’

In our ethnographic study of palliative care in a UK medical setting, we concerned ourselves with instances when medical staff chose not do something, which we came to call ‘noninterventions’. Such instances raised an obvious question: how does one study something that is not happening? In this Position Piece, we outline three ways in which we have tried to engage with this methodological question, from the initial grant application process to the point we are at now: first, a somewhat positivist approach, which allowed us to delineate the phenomenon of our study; second, a following technique, adopted to understand noninterventions as and when they are conceived by our informants; and third, an approach that tries to trace enactments of ‘not doing’ by mapping the range of different practices and, in so doing, elucidates how ‘not doing’ invariably occurs alongside other forms of doing. We describe what these approaches have taught us so far and reflect on the limits of each. We do so in the hope of providing others with starting points for studying nothings, ‘not doings’, and absences

‘We come in as “the nothing”’: Researching non-intervention in palliative care

In our ethnographic study of palliative care in a UK medical setting, we concerned ourselves with instances when medical staff chose not do something, which we came to call ‘noninterventions’. Such instances raised an obvious question: how does one study something that is not happening? In this Position Piece, we outline three ways in which we have tried to engage with this methodological question, from the initial grant application process to the point we are at now: first, a somewhat positivist approach, which allowed us to delineate the phenomenon of our study; second, a following technique, adopted to understand noninterventions as and when they are conceived by our informants; and third, an approach that tries to trace enactments of ‘not doing’ by mapping the range of different practices and, in so doing, elucidates how ‘not doing’ invariably occurs alongside other forms of doing. We describe what these approaches have taught us so far and reflect on the limits of each. We do so in the hope of providing others with starting points for studying nothings, ‘not doings’, and absences