Theorising disability: a practical and representative ontology of learning disability

This article contributes to the ongoing development of the theorisation of learning disability, focusing on the value of the ontological turn. We argue that while social theory has influenced understandings of disability within academia, particularly within disability studies, it has had a limited impact on the discursive and practical use of the term ‘learning disability’. How ‘learning disability’ is constructed is of direct consequence to the lives of people with learning disabilities. Owing to this, we present a practical and representative ontology of learning disability in order to progress the ontological turn into everyday understandings of disability. To do this, disability theory is discussed, critically appraised and progressed. We then outline how this new theorisation could be re-contextualised within policy, with a view to further re-contextualisation into practice and the everyday. It is hoped that this article will spark discussion regarding how the ontological turn can be used for change

Fabrication and characterization of smart fabric using energy storage fibres

Fibre supercapacitors were designed and manufactured using a dip-coating method. Their electrochemical properties were characterized using a VersaSTAT 3 workstation. Chinese ink with a fine dispersion of carbon and binder was coated as the electrode material. The specific capacitance per unit length of a copper fibre supercapacitor with the length of 41 cm reached 34.5 mF/cm. When this fibre supercapacitor was bent on rods with a diameter of 10.5 cm, the specific capacitance per length was 93% of the original value (without bending). It showed that these fibre supercapacitors have good flexibility and energy storage capacity. Furthermore, the fibre supercapacitor in the fabric showed the same capacitance before and after weaving.The European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement no. [281063]

Building an evidence base for adult safeguarding?: problems with the reliability and validity of adult safeguarding databases

This article considers current adult safeguarding policy guidelines for England, which require local authorities to collect adult safeguarding data for the purposes of research and service development. It then moves on to report some of the findings from an evaluation of adult safeguarding in one English local authority, focussing on how the adult safeguarding database was populated from case records and how the resultant data was utilised. It found that, although the annual number of adult safeguarding alerts more than tripled between 2002 and 2008, this clear evidence of an increase in workload had not resulted in increased resource allocation. The evaluation further noted that only half of the designated ‘adult safeguarding managers’ who were interviewed were able to correctly define the meanings of the recommended terms under which adult safeguarding outcomes are recorded, i.e. ‘substantiated’, ‘not substantiated’ and ‘not determined’. Changes to the terminology used to record the outcomes of safeguarding investigations are proposed as one of a number of measures to enable the creation of valid and reliable information upon which to base future practice developments, including allocation of resources. Ke

A study of the electrochemical performance of strip supercapacitors under bending conditions

© 2016 The Authors. In recent years, much effort has been spent developing thin, lightweight and flexible energy storage devices to meet the various requirements of modern smart electronics. In this work, thin strip supercapacitors were successfully developed using activated carbon as the active electrode material. The electrochemical performance of these strip supercapacitors has been studied under mechanical bending conditions. The results indicate that the strip supercapacitor was functional under bending conditions between the bending angles of 30° to 150°. The capacitance of the sample was still about 70% of the original capacitance at different bending angles. This suggests the strip supercapacitor developed has a reasonable flexibility. Simulation model of equivalent circuit was established to analyze the charge transfer resistance (CTR) and equivalent series resistance (ESR) results in electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) testing. The correlation between the capacitance and the resistance of the strip supercapacitor under bending conditions was investigated and obtained.The European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 28106

Improving the inclusivity and credibility of visual research: interpretive engagement as a route to including the voices of people with learning disabilities in analysis

Visual methods are often used in social science because of the potential for inclusivity and accessibility. In disability studies in particular, inclusive research is widely viewed as best practice and visual methods are often considered more accessible than traditional research methods. However, visual methods can encounter challenges at the stage of analysis: it is at this stage that either rigour or inclusivity are most likely to be compromised. This paper focuses on the use of interpretive engagement to overcome such challenges in the analysis of photovoice findings. Drawing on experience of using this method of analysis with 16 people with learning disabilities in the England, we first briefly outline some of the tensions that can emerge when attempting to improve inclusion in research, before going on to describe the analytic process used as way of addressing some of these tensions. The inclusiveness of interpretive engagement contributed to the rigour and meaningfulness of the findings by revealing layers of meaning which gave access to a multi-dimensional understanding of the phenomenon in question

A study of the electrochemical performance of strip supercapacitors under static and dynamic mechanical tests

© 2017 The Authors. Flexible and stretchable supercapacitors have a big potential of being used in portable and wearable electronics because of their high power density, high reversibility, fast charge/discharge rates and long life cycles. In this study, strip supercapacitors were fabricated by a blade coating process using low-cost materials. The electrochemical performance of the strip supercapacitors was studied under both static and dynamic tensile stress conditions in order to evaluate their suitability for use in wearable textiles. The results showed strip supercapacitors under static and dynamic mechanical tensile process worked well: the capacitance and specific capacitance for this strip supercapacitor sample with the static loading of 100 N or 200 N was bigger than that of this sample without loading, with an increase of 22% and 9%, respectively. The mechanical compression was applied vertically from the top of the strip supercapacitor sample to further investigate the reason for the capacitance increase under loading conditions.European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) grant agreement no. 281063

My Marriage My Choice. Summary of Findings

The My Marriage My Choice project (a two-year study funded by the National Institute for Health Research, School for Social Care Research) has been conducted with a view to exploring forced marriage of adults with learning disabilities1 from a safeguarding perspective. Its aim was to develop knowledge, policy and practice to support professionals in their work of safeguarding vulnerable children and adults. Forced marriage is defined as a marriage without the consent of one or both parties and where duress is a factor (UK Government Forced Marriage Unit). In a forced marriage one or both spouses do not consent, or due to lacking capacity, cannot consent to the marriage. The research project has also been conducted to raise awareness of forced marriage in order that all of those who are involved in the education, care and support of individuals who cannot effectively consent to any such undertaking, might be empowered to recognise forced marriage as such and respond appropriately

My Marriage My Choice. Case Study Collection: Learning from case studies of forced marriage of people with learning disabilities

This document tells the stories of people with learning disabilities who have been forced to marry, to raise the profile of a little understood issue and contribute to a shift in thinking that will improve safeguarding policy and practice. Forced marriage of people with learning disabilities is different to forced marriage of people without learning disability. As such, it is often not recognised as forced by families, faith leaders or professionals. Some professionals see it as a ‘cultural issue’ and fear being seen as racist or culturally insensitive. This all impacts upon safeguarding policy and practice

'I was just gobsmacked': care workers responses to BBC Panoramas 'Undercover care: the abuse exposed': invoking mental states as a means of distancing from abusive practices

This paper draws upon discourse analytic techniques and discursive psychology to examine how care workers build accounts of viewing the BBC Panorama programme “Undercover Care: The Abuse Exposed” which graphically documented the abuse of people with learning disabilities in a residential care setting. 56 interviews were conducted as part of a project concerning adult safeguarding. The analysis considers how careworkers report their reactions and the interactional strategies they use to construct themselves as shocked and disbelieving and thus, as oppositional to the extreme practices in the programme. Their role as careworkers, and therefore as ‘insiders’ of the industry that allowed such abuse to happen, makes matters of stake and agency live issues for this particular group; and constructions of ‘shock’ and ‘disbelief’ are potential ways for participants to distance themselves from the abuse shown in the programme. More broadly, these data show how the invocation of mental states contributes to the management of other discursive business, namely, that of fending off any association with the aforementioned extreme practices

The Structure of the EU Mediasphere

Background. A trend towards automation of scientific research has recently resulted in what has been termed “data-driven inquiry” in various disciplines, including physics and biology. The automation of many tasks has been identified as a possible future also for the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in those disciplines concerned with the analysis of text, due to the recent availability of millions of books and news articles in digital format. In the social sciences, the analysis of news media is done largely by hand and in a hypothesis-driven fashion: the scholar needs to formulate a very specific assumption about the patterns that might be in the data, and then set out to verify if they are present or not. Methodology/Principal Findings. In this study, we report what we think is the first large scale content-analysis of cross-linguistic text in the social sciences, by using various artificial intelligence techniques. We analyse 1.3 M news articles in 22 languages detecting a clear structure in the choice of stories covered by the various outlets. This is significantly affected by objective national, geographic, economic and cultural relations among outlets and countries, e.g., outlets from countries sharing strong economic ties are more likely to cover the same stories. We also show that the deviation from average content is significantly correlated with membership to the eurozone, as well as with the year of accession to the EU. Conclusions/Significance. While independently making a multitude of small editorial decisions, the leading media of the 27 EU countries, over a period of six months, shaped the contents of the EU mediasphere in a way that reflects its deep geographic, economic and cultural relations. Detecting these subtle signals in a statistically rigorous way would be out of the reach of traditional methods. This analysis demonstrates the power of the available methods for significant automation of media content analysis