Ritual, Pastoral Presence, and Character Virtues in Healthcare Chaplaincy: A study of chaplains’ support to bereaved parents following the in utero or neonatal death of their baby.

This thesis sets out to understand better how chaplains can support bereaved parents following the death of their baby. Running parallel to this, with increasing demand for evidence-based practice, it aims to evidence the benefit of chaplaincy support and the unique skills of chaplains. The thesis is based on twelve semi-structured interviews with sixteen parents. These were analysed using a form of grounded theory and compared with the findings of related research. I argue that the root of all other spiritual need is the loss of control parents experienced. Alongside this theme I identify a loss of meaning, a loss of self worth, and a desire to do something in response to their loss. Although there is not a one size fits all response, the liturgy and ritual provided by chaplains helped counter spiritual distress. I propose that, alongside the ability to perform liturgy and ritual, chaplains are viewed as having authority in both religious and spiritual matters. As liturgy and ritual was appreciated in conjunction with the presence of the chaplain, I explore a virtue-based approach to chaplaincy and recommend the increased use of shadowing and mentoring. Drawing on Fowler’s Stages of Faith, I describe how some parents found greater religious faith or increased spiritual awareness as a result of their experience. I speculate that, in order to provide the best possible support to parents, chaplains need to exhibit the characteristics of Fowler’s stage 5. Chaplains have a richness of reflection and experience and I appeal to churches to engage more profoundly with them. I also recommend the continued employment of chaplains within hospitals and argue for the narrative voice to be valued in research. Contra to current NICE guidelines, I contend that parents should be offered the opportunity to see and hold their dead baby

Magnetic Observations at International Polar Year Stations in Canada

During the First International Polar Year (1982-83) magnetic observatories were established in northern Canada at Fort Rae, Fort Conger, and Clearwater Fiord. Repeat magnetic observations made during the centenary of the First Polar Year enable a determination of the secular variation at each of these locations. During the last 100 years the declination has increased easterly by over 20 degrees at Fort Conger and at Clearwater Fiord; however, it has decreased by only 9 degrees at Fort Rae. The total intensity has decreased by over 1900 nT at Fort Rae, but at Clearwater Fiord and at Fort Conger the decrease has been about 1500 nT and 1000 nT respectively. This implies that the decrease in the non-dipole field evident over most of North America in recent times has not been as great in the high Arctic.Key words: Polar Year, Fort Conger, Fort Rae, Clearwater Fiord, Kingua Fiord, secular variation, magnetic fieldMots clés: Année polaire, Fort Conger, Fort Rae, fjord Clearwater, fjord Kingua, variation séculaire, champ magnétiqu

Slippin’: A participatory and psychocultural study of inner city youth, masculinity, race and mental health.

This is a study of youth and urban marginality set in the inner city neighbourhood of St Pauls, Bristol. The study centres on and around a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project undertaken with seven young Black British men aged 15 to 24, over eighteen months in the period immediately before August 2011, when rioting dramatically broke out in several English metropolitan cores, including St Pauls. The research belongs to a literary tradition in the human sciences concerned with oppression and resistance, and draws from ideas across anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural and critical theory more generally. It is postmodern in orientation, but engages politically with the structural inequalities and economic exclusion that shape the young subjectivities at its ethnographic heart. In its positionality, the study tests and extends theories of participation in spaces and categories of marginality under-represented in the existing literature. It also re-politicises mental health, setting in context the behaviours, emotional states, and structure of feeling experienced by a demographic of young men consistently over-represented in acute psychiatric and criminal justice settings. But because the research is dialectical enquiry by participatory ethics, this is as much a study of the oppressors as it is the oppressed, one concerned for the enduring capacity of ideology to insert itself into everyday social, professional and economic relations by various state technologies and interpersonal techniques of power. The voices of the young men in this study de-stabilise our ideas of what and who is healthy and pathological, oppressor and oppressed. In so doing they lay an ethical charge of (in)justice at the door of the state, one that unites their mental health with discourses on social class, participation, citizenship and democracy. Indeed, though marginalised, these are young masculinities made in the image of neoliberalism, and their crystallising economic and psychocultural exclusion is evidence of a social polarisation that will increasingly threaten the basic social contract if left structurally untouched

In Memoriam Patrick Chabal (1951-2014): An interview with Malyn Newitt (King’s College London)

Philip J. Havik: When did you first meet Patrick? When he joined King’s College as a lecturer in Politics and Modern History of Lusophone Africa in 1984? Or earlier? What was your first impression? Malyn Newitt: I did not have any major contact with Patrick until around 1996. Professor Helder Macedo, the Camões Professor of Portuguese at King’s College London, had completed the negotiations with a number of Portuguese financial institutions and foundations for the establishment of the Charle..

Participating in Social Exclusion: a reflexive account of collaborative research and researcher identities in the field

This paper offers a critical reflexive perspective on a Participatory Action Research project with young people at a site of ‘advanced urban marginality’ ( 2008). Its purpose is to explore the ways in which habitus based inequalities in the research field ( 1977) contributed to a parallel process of marginalisation and exclusion in the act of participating. More specifically, we examine how a particular professional academic research identity and taxonomy of participatory social research, animated by a benign intent, nonetheless exerted an ideological form of control over the enquiry, administering and recycling feelings of failure and marginalisation among participants including the ‘ researcher. To draw out the different ways this control took form, our analysis centres on a particular exchange within the group concerned with the distribution of a one off financial stipend to participants. We endeavour to draw some conceptual insights in our exploration of this exchange, and in conclusion offer some ideas for a ‘good enough’ practice of action research underta ken in comparable socio economic and psycho cultural conditions