River silting, watered common: reimagining Govan graving docks

This thesis imagines an ecological future for the post-industrial landscape of Govan Graving Docks, situated on the banks of the River Clyde in inner city Glasgow. The research is framed by a context of urban renewal and at times violent change in early 21st century Glasgow which has seen the city’s riverside transformed, with centres for culture, tourism and entertainment built on its infilled docks and sites of dereliction. Prompted by the development priorities of this change, and the nostalgia for an industrial past that has become a ‘way of seeing’ the river, this research seeks to better know the material life of this landscape. On Govan Graving Docks - an abandoned ship repair and fitting facility that remains as yet ‘unresolved’ - this thesis unearths the agencies, temporalities, ecologies and material legacies of a less familiar elemental landscape, and considers how these expressions could be tended and extended in a vision for a different future, focused on fostering new kinds of environmental engagement. The research themes draw insight from emerging theories in new materialism and the environmental humanities, particularly those that are responding to the matter of the Anthropocenic landscape, and they are explored through a repertoire of creative and collaborative field methods crafted with the site of study; variations on ecological performance, landscape and ecological survey work, public consultation, material imagining and sitewriting. These methods are founded on openness and attentiveness, they are opportunist and affirmative in nature, they are practiced on site and taken into the wider estuarine landscape, and they enrol many others beyond the researcher. These methods are first used to explore the expressions of life and vitality that can be found in the Graving Docks’ new ecologies, material memory and more-than-human publics, and then to imagine the creative capacities of these agencies in new configurations of shared possibility. The researcher is another site of investigation: a distributive understanding of agency informs the emergence of an ecological sensibility through material engagement, which has implications both for the design process and the imagined landscape. These resources are used to imagine an alternative future for Govan Graving Docks: it is a vision that works with ruination, re-wilding, and the liquid dynamics of the city; a vision that honours both natural and industrial histories; a vision that is both challenging and necessary, where new experiences of ‘worlding’ in the city are made possible. Through this process of investigation and conjecture, the Clyde imaginary emerges as a space for critical and creative thought; a discursive space where the challenges facing this ecological landscape and its future are explored. This thesis is both a product of, and contribution towards, cultural geographical enquiry, but it also has an interdisciplinary reach both theoretically and methodologically speaking, which enables the research to contribute to a wider debate about environmental futures that is currently taking place across the sciences and humanities. It can be defined as ‘interdisciplinary in practice’ for the way that it brings a wider range or perspectives to bear on a precarious urban wilderness and its associated communities, and seeks to develop a broader repertoire of research methods capable of exploring it’s diverse material world, and the multiple expressions of value that exist therein. Written in a style that has been highly affected by this kind of open and inclusive style of research engagement, the emotive environmental story that is contained within this thesis is open to a wider audience. This thesis identifies the productive role that cultural geography can play in larger environmental debates concerned with the current state and play of ‘life on earth’, and by enacting and engaging ideas related to the cultural landscape, place-based identities/communities/values, and landscape practices, it also identifies the particular conceptual and methodological resources that make cultural geography’s contribution both unique and necessary to these debates

Translation and psychometric testing of the Norwegian version of the “Patients’ Perspectives of Surgical Safety Questionnaire”

Purpose To translate the Patients’ Perspectives of Surgical Safety (PPSS) questionnaire into Norwegian and to test it for structural validity and internal consistency. Design This is a methodological study. Methods The original 20-item PPSS questionnaire was translated into Norwegian using a model of translation-back translation. We assessed content validity via a pretest with 20 surgical patients. A sample of 218 surgical patients in a university hospital in Norway completed the PPSS questionnaire. Psychometric analysis included item characteristics, and structural validity was evaluated by an exploratory factor analysis. Internal consistency was calculated using Cronbach's alpha. Findings We successfully translated and adapted the Norwegian PPSS questionnaire. Completion rate was 74%. Missing values were less than 5% and all 20 items had a high skewness (≥15 %) ranging from 52.8% to 95.9%. The exploratory factor analysis yielded two significant factors that explained 45.15% of variance. The Cronbach's alpha for Factor 1 “Team interaction safety” was 0.88 and for Factor 2 “Patient's ID safety”, 0.82. Overall, most patients reported a high sense of surgical safety. Conclusions The first Norwegian version of the PPSS measuring surgical patients’ perception shows promising psychometric properties regarding structural validity and internal consistency. However, future research on PPSS should provide an examination of construct validity, validation and testing in other populations of surgical patients. To improve safety of the surgical trajectory, it is necessary to pay more attention to patients’ perceptions of surgical safety.publishedVersio