Self-Reported Facial Pain in UK Biobank Study : Prevalence and Associated Factors

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Intergenerational attitudes and experiences of older adults : a narrative analysis set within a retirement village participating in a intergenerational programme (IGP) : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

iPlayed is an intergenerational programme (IGP) taking place between residents of a retirement village in Wellington, New Zealand and preschoolers at a childcare facility nearby. IGPs have been designed to address an increasingly age segregated society and have been shown to have multiple benefits for older people, including generativity (a need to nurture and guide younger people). As no research on the IGP experience of older adults exists in New Zealand, this research aimed to not only understand this, from the older adults’ perspective, but to also understand their views and experiences of IGPs in general, and about preschool aged children. In-depth interviews were conducted with eighteen retirement village dwelling older adults about their experiences and then analysed using narrative analysis. From the eight identified narratives the iPlayed experience was found to be a brief, life affirming experience and one in which they had to adopt certain roles in order to enhance enjoyment. Beyond this, no deeper meaning was assigned to it. The influence of ageing being a time of contribution back to society was evident, and, for some, iPlayed was positioned within this narrative as an option to accomplish this. iPlayed was also located within the context of a retirement village as a means to reclaim some of the social identity lost through moving to this environment. Deep meaning was ascribed to the role of great grandparent or grandparent and familial generative exchanges were identified as operating indirectly through the parents of the preschoolers and not via an exchange of cultural artefacts, wisdom or knowledge with the young child. With non-kin children, the traditional direction of generativity was challenged, with older adults implying that the younger person’s knowledge of modern technologies was of more benefit to them compared to what they had to offer. Participants identified that, in general, interacting with preschool aged children is stimulating and beneficial, but is not for all older people. In its current design iPlayed was queried, by those not participating in it, for how this might be impacting on its ability to provide an opportunity for older people to be generative or even as a means for people to contribute to the community they live within. These findings recognise a different social milieu in operation today, the experience of ageing in New Zealand and how intergenerational exchange fits within this. Set amongst the powerful social narrative to age ‘successfully’ active today, this research has identified that IGPs can carry out an important role within this structuring force. Building on from this study, researchers should aim to further understand the views and perceptions of older people on younger people which will, in turn, help policymakers and IGP developers harness the best of what both young and old have to offer each other. Finally, for those working in the IGP field, the concept of generativity between non-kin older people and preschoolers needs further exploration

Yukichi Fukuzawa and the Making of the Modern World

My book The Making of the Modern World; Visions from the West and East was published by Palgrave in 2002. It discussed the work of two major writers who had dedicated their lives to trying to answer the riddle of how our modern world originated and what its future might be. These were F.W.Maitland and Yukichi Fukuzawa. The book was only modestly successful and never went into paperback. By combining these thinkers, the distinctive contribution of each one may have been somewhat muffled. This long and expensive book did not reach a wider audience who might be potentially interested in one or other of the authors treated, but not both of them at once. So I have decided to re-issue each part as a downloadable electronic book. This book on Fukuzawa was originally published in a section of five chapters, which have now been broken down into smaller chapters

Re-framing student academic freedom: a capability perspective

The scholarly debate about academic freedom focuses almost exclusively on the rights of academic faculty. Student academic freedom is rarely discussed and is normally confined to debates connected with the politicisation of the curriculum. Concerns about (student) freedom of speech reflect the dominant role of negative rights in the analysis of academic freedom representing ‘threats’ to academic freedom in terms of rights which may be taken away from a person rather than conferred on them. This paper draws on the distinction between negative and positive rights and the work of Sen (1999) to re-frame student academic freedom as capability. It is argued that capability deprivation has a negative impact on the extent to which students can exercise academic freedom in practice and that student capability can be enhanced through a liberal education that empowers rather than domesticates students

Here Be Monsters: Imperialism, Knowledge and the Limits of Empire

It has become a truism in discussions of Imperialist literature to state that the British empire was, in a very significant way, a textual exercise. Empire was simultaneously created and perpetuated through a proliferation of texts (governmental, legal, educational, scientific, fictional) driven significantly by a desire for what Thomas Richards describes as “one great system of knowledge.” The project of assembling this system assumed that all of the “alien” knowledges that it drew upon could be easily assimilated into existing, “universal” (that is, European) epistemological categories. This belief in “one great system” assumed that knowledges from far-flung outposts of empire could, through careful categorization and control, be made to reinforce, rather than threaten, the authority of imperial epistemic rule. But this movement into “new” epistemic as well as physical spaces opened up the disruptive possibility for and encounter with Foucault’s “insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” In the Imperial Gothic stories discussed here, the space between “knowing all there is to know” and the inherent unknowability of the “Other” is played out through representations of failures of classification and anxieties about the limits of knowledge. These anxieties are articulated through what is arguably one of the most heavily regulated signifiers of scientific progress at the turn of the century: the body. In an age that was preoccupied with bodies as spectacles that signified everything from criminal behaviour, psychological disorder, moral standing and racial categorization, the mutable, unclassifiable body functions as a signifier that mediates between imperial fantasies of control and definition and fin-de-siècle anxieties of dissolution and degeneration. In Imperial Gothic fiction these fears appear as a series of complex explorations of the ways in which the gap between the known and the unknown can be charted on and through a monstrous body that moves outside of stable classification

Māori and bicultural positions: Professional development programme for Resource Teachers Learning and Behaviour

The Ministry of Education has introduced a new and far-reaching policy initiative, Special Education 2000. One component of this policy is the provision of professional development for approximately 700 Resource Teachers [Learning and Behaviour (RTLB)]. These resource teachers will help schools to meet the needs of students experiencing mild to moderate learning and behavioural difficulties. An important aim of the professional development programme is to prepare RTLB to improve the quality of support to teachers of Māori students in conventional and Māori medium classes. The programme consists of four courses, one introducing key concepts, one focussed on class-wide interventions, one focussed on school and community, and the fourth being a professional practice folio. This paper describes the Māori and bicultural content of the first two courses within the RTLB programme. It assesses the extent to which the programme addresses critical questions (Bishop, 1994; Bishop, 1996) relating to the ownership and control of Māori content included in the first two courses