Ambiguous Bodies, Biopower and the Ideologies of Science Fiction

Contemporary Hollywood film narrates the fear of monstrous science; attending to the modulations of medicine, capital and the body. The filmic body is employed to illustrate the power of the new biotechnologies to create and sustain life and the new sets of social relations which are a consequence of the marriage of capital and medicine. In the Hollywood film, persons who do not fit the ideal healthy persona have a moral duty to pursue repair and transformation. Constructed as inherently lacking, the unhealthy body becomes a repository for social anxieties about control and vulnerability, vis-à-vis the enormous and exponentially expanding science and technology fields. Hierarchies of embodiment are played out on the Big Screen as imperfect bodies are excluded from public life, power and status and urged to strive for “optimization”. Late modern societies present the possibility of new technologies which have the potential to radicalize bodies. However, these potential modulations are ultimately derived from a set of ideologies around the body and the power of the individual to enact an individualized solution. Contemporary narratives circulate around ownership of capital and the price of “repair.” This marriage of science and capital in popular narratives may be indicative of concerns for our future, as the power to make and repair life seems to rest increasingly in the hands of an elite

Longitudinal photo-documentation: Recording living walls

This working paper advocates a methodological approach to the study of street art and graffiti that is based on the documentation of single sites over time. Longitudinal photo-documentation is a form of data collection that allows street art and graffiti to be examined as visual dialogue. By capturing everyday forms of public mark making alongside both more recognizably ‘artistic’ images, and more visually ‘offensive’ tags, we aim to attend to graffiti and street art’s existence within a field of social interaction. We describe a relevant analytic tool drawn from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis – the next turn proof procedure – which may be adapted in order to study street art and graffiti as a form of asynchronous, yet sequential, communication. This form of analysis departs from existent forms of analysis in that it is not concerned with the semiotics or iconography of decontextualized individual photographs of street art or graffiti. We present a worked analytic example to demonstrate the utility of longitudinal photo-documentation in making visible the dialogue amongst artists, writers and community members, and we employ the principles of the next turn proof procedure to illustrate the ways in which each party shows their understanding of the prior work on the wall via their own contribution to the ‘conversation.

"Darling Look! It’s a Banksy!” Viewers’ Material Engagement with Street Art and Graffiti

This chapter examines viewers’ affective encounters with street art and graffiti, with attention to the critical framework provided by Rancière (2004), whose work suggests a method for investigating our aesthetic practices of participation (or exclusion) and looking (or not looking). Viewers’ material engagements with street art and graffiti represent a disruption of the expectable order that demonstrates that what we see, according to our usual division of the sensible, could be otherwise – thus revealing the contingency of our perceptual and conceptual order. Our examination of the visual dialogue on just one city wall highlights the temporal, site-specific and participatory elements of graffiti and street art as a form of communication, or visual dialogue. We demonstrate that viewers are not passive recipients of the artist’s intentions, but are instead competent social actors capable of understanding, appreciating, and actively and materially engaging with street art and graffiti

Migration, Transnationalism and the Cultural Logic of Global Identity

Editorial; special edition of American, British and Canadian Studies

Safeguarding Adults at Risk: Critical Commentary on the Construction of the Adult at Risk in Ireland

Sociocultural constructions of the adult at risk prompt important theoretical and practical implications for adult safeguarding. Reformulations of the meaning of practice with adults at risk have been provoked by legislative, policy and procedural changes underway in the Irish context. These include the implementation of the Assisted Decision-Making Capacity Act (2015) with corresponding changes regarding informed consent and mental capacity; long anticipated ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCPRD) (United Nations, 2006); and advancement of the Adult Safeguarding Bill 2017. The concern is that procedural, legislative and policy advancement must not outpace critical accounts that critique changes underway. Therefore, this paper presents theoretically informed critical commentary, based upon an over-view of pertinent literature, concerning the notion of the adult at risk in contemporary Ireland. Context is established through discussion of the history of adult safeguarding in Ireland and development of public and policy awareness of the notion of the adult at risk. Following this, three themes are addressed. Firstly, the shift towards a more robust and detailed legislative and policy context around adult safeguarding is appraised. Secondly, the necessarily problematic nature of mediating between autonomy and protection in safeguarding work is explored. Third and finally, a perceptible paradigm shift from a medical model to social and human rights approaches to working with adults at risk is considered. To inform concluding discussion, the Habermasian notion of the “public sphere” (1962) is re-deployed for the present era as a useful conceptual framework, towards understanding the contemporary discursive construction of the adult at risk

Proficiency within Professionalisation: A Social Constructionist Critique of Standards of Proficiency for Social Care Workers in the Republic of Ireland

Major change is underway in Irish social care. Toward the professionalisation of social care workers in the Republic of Ireland, standards of proficiency were drafted and published in 2017 by the Social Care Workers Registration Board. These standards represent the threshold of what a worker must demonstrate at the point of entry to the register and as such, critical inquiry into their nature and merit is both indispensable and required, be it through stakeholders in the field, or from social care academia. Theoretically informed appraisal of standards of proficiency in this paper occurs through a composite social constructionist frame. Therein, four core conventions of social constructionism theory underpinning the framework, are critically applied in this paper, across five domains overarching the standards of proficiency. The four assumptions are as follows. Firstly, the historical and cultural specificity of standards should be considered. Here, it is imperative that the role of history and culture in developing, appraising and applying standards is scrutinized. Secondly, knowledge should be understood as sustained by social processes. Within this, knowledge surrounding social care and standards of proficiency is deemed to be socially constructed. Thirdly, knowledge and social action should be seen as occurring together, and in this way, mutually influential. Fourth and finally, one must adopt a critical stance towards taken for granted knowledge. The intention of analysis is modest. Namely, to provide fodder to fuel critical understanding of the implications of standards of proficiency, for students and practitioners, now confronted by a complex and evolving occupational milieu

The Presence of \u3cem\u3eDon Quixote\u3c/em\u3e in Music

Many musical works have been based upon Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Since the publication of the novel in 1605 (Part I) and 1615 (Part II), composers of all eras have sought to translate the story of the knight-errant into the universal language of music. The genres and the musical interpretations have varied. But the interest in Cervantes\u27 masterpiece as a topic of musical expression has endured through nearly four centuries. After a brief introduction to the references to music in the novel itself, selected Quixote compositions from each century are discussed in this dissertation. Four major musical works have been chosen for specific study -- The Comical History of Don Quixote, the seventeenth century trilogy of musical plays, by Thomas D\u27Urfey, Henry Purcell, John Eccles, et al.; the eighteenth century orchestral work, Don Quixote Suite, by Georg Philipp Telemann; the nineteenth century symphonic poem, Don Quixote, by Richard Strauss; and Man of La Mancha, the twentieth century musical play, by Dale Wasserman, Joe Darion, and Mitch Leigh. A current chronology of Quixote compositions has been compiled and is placed in the Appendixes. There are also various other tables regarding the musical references in and musical pieces inspired by Don Quixote

Psychological Adjustment and Family Experiences of Children in Foster Care Placed With or Apart From Siblings

It was hypothesized that foster children placed with a sibling would show better psychological adjustment and more embeddedness in the foster family than those foster children without such contacts. Subjects were 41 foster children between the ages of 6 and 12 years. Cognitive maturity, problem behaviors, psychological maturity, dependency, wariness, curiosity, and attention seeking were aspects of psychological adjustment. These were measured on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, Child Behavior Checklist, Tasks of Emotional Development Test, Marble-in-the-Hole Game, and Picture Game. Embeddedness in the foster family was measured with a family sculpting technique. Family Boundary Ambiguity was measured with a questionnaire based on the research of Boss and Greenberg (1984). Foster children place with a natural sibling exhibited more curiosity, a healthy developmental trait, than those children placed apart. There were no group differences on the family measures. Foster children\u27s perceptions of the structure of their foster families were confused, and did not correspond to the objective household. These responses suggested family is an arbitrary unit to these children, reflecting physical presence in the home rather than psychological relationships. Implications for policy and theory were discussed

Gender Differences in Reported Quality of Life in Cardiac Rehabilitation Patients

The purpose of this study was to explore the differences in the way men and women experience their cardiac problems, rehabilitation programs, and the resulting quality of life. A descriptive two group research design was utilized. A convenience sample produced 35 participants, 20 men and 15 women. At the participant’s first or second cardiac rehabilitation session, a pretest on quality of life was given. Posttesting was done at 5-8 weeks later. It was hypothesized that the women would have lower quality of life scores than the men. This was not supported in a data analysis using an analysis of covariance. However, there were improvements in health and functioning for both groups from pretest to posttest. Furthermore, the men had a significant improvement in overall QOL from pretest to post-test. The women did not. The results support the need for continued research on gender differences in the care of cardiac clients

Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation Engineering-a case study

This is a case study of the occupational therapy rehabilitation process of a teenage girl who presented in 1997 with a rare neurological condition diagnosed as rapid onset Dystonia Parkinsonism. She was helped to obtain some of the occupational performances of her choice by assistive technology devices tailored to her needs by the rehabilitation engineering department, and in this paper we wish to point out how collaboration between our departments can be of benefit to patients, and how essential microelectronic technology is in the occupational therapy environment