Food tourism and events as tools for social sustainability?

Purpose: Food tourism and events are often prefaced as tools for sustainability within national and intra-national food and agricultural policy contexts. Yet, the realities of enhancing sustainability through food tourism and events are problematic. Sustainability itself is often conceived broadly within policy proclaiming the benefits of food tourism and events, with a need for further deconstruction of the ways each dimension of sustainability – economic, environmental, social and cultural – independently enhances sustainability. The lack of clarity concerning the conceptual utilisation of sustainability works to compromise its value and utilisation for the development of food tourism and events in peripheral areas. In recognition, this paper turns attention to social sustainability within the context of a local food festival, to ask: in what ways is social sustainability enhanced through a local food festival, who benefits from this sustainability, and how? Design: The paper examines the development of a local food festival in a rural coastal community, on Scotland’s west coast. The concept of social capital is utilised to examine the unfolding power relations between committee members, as well as the committee and other social groups. Observant participation undertaken over a 10 month period, between December 2015 and September 2016, renders insights into the ways event planning processes were dependent on the pre-existing accruement of social capital by certain individuals and groups. Findings: Local food festivals have the potential to enhance social sustainability, in offering opportunity to bridge relations across certain diverse groups and foster an environment conducive to cohabitation. Bridging, however, is dependent on preconceived social capital and power relations, which somewhat inhibits social integration for all members of a community. The temporally confined characteristics of events generates difficulties in overcoming the uneven enhancement of social sustainability. Care, thus, needs to be upheld in resolutely claiming enhancement of social sustainability through local food events. Further, broad conceptualisations of ‘community’ need to be challenged during event planning processes; for it is difficult to develop a socially inclusive approach that ensures integration for diverse segments without recognising what constitutes a specific ‘community’. Originality: This paper is situated within the context of a peripheral, yet growing body of literature exploring the potential of events to develop social sustainability. In extending this work, the paper turns attention to the gastronomic - examining the extent to which social sustainability is enhanced through a local food festival, for a rural coastal community – Mallaig, on Scotland’s west coast

Findings from the University of East Anglia's evaluation of the Ipswich/Suffolk multi-agency strategy on prostitution following the five murders in 2006

This paper provides a summary of the main findings of an evaluation of a new multi-agency Strategy set up to tackle on-street sex-working, after five prostitutes were murdered in the English county town of Ipswich. It focuses on the outcomes of the Strategy’s four objectives, including their cost-effectiveness. It also offers an insight into the lives of the women who were previously involved in street sex-working, the means by which the Strategy helped them to move towards exiting this work, and the ways in which younger people identified as being at risk of entering it might be prevented from doing so

Giving Voice to People With Dementia and Their Carers: The Impact of Communication Difficulties on Everyday Conversations

People living with dementia are an under-served group, whose voices are often excluded from research studies due to their speech, language and communication difficulties. As part of a larger study into language processing in dementia, we invited five people with dementia and their carers to tell us about how dementia impacts on their everyday conversations. We also wanted to gain insights into their views on communication strategies to circumvent these difficulties. Aware of the limitations of a standard focus group methodology for this population, we adapted this approach to provide people with dementia the opportunity to be active research participants. To amplify their voices and to enable carers to be as open as possible we ran the groups separately. Each was facilitated by a speech and language therapist. Both groups used communication accessible materials, to create an inclusive environment that valued contributions from all participants. The topic guide remained the same for all participants, ensuring equity in posing the same core questions. Focus groups were video recorded and transcribed. Reflexive thematic analysis was selected as the most appropriate method to ensure overarching themes identified were based in the data. In our analysis the main theme was sense-making; participants experienced and tried to make sense of dementia through the lens of interaction. Four subthemes were also identified, 1. It’s a journey, 2. You have to make the most of things, 3. Ask the right questions and it just flows-strategies in conversation, and 4. Dealing with people. Multimodal adaptations to a focus group methodology have given voice to people with dementia as well as their carers. They characterise dementia and identify useful strategies based on observations of what changes for them in everyday conversations

Benefit of visual speech information for word comprehension in post-stroke aphasia

Aphasia is a language disorder that often involves speech comprehension impairments affecting communication. In face-to-face settings, speech is accompanied by mouth and facial movements, but little is known about the extent to which they benefit aphasic comprehension. This study investigated the benefit of visual information accompanying speech for word comprehension in people with aphasia (PWA) and the neuroanatomic substrates of any benefit. Thirty-six PWA and 13 neurotypical matched control participants performed a picture-word verification task in which they indicated whether a picture of an animate/inanimate object matched a subsequent word produced by an actress in a video. Stimuli were either audiovisual (with visible mouth and facial movements) or auditory-only (still picture of a silhouette) with audio being clear (unedited) or degraded (6-band noise-vocoding). We found that visual speech information was more beneficial for neurotypical participants than PWA, and more beneficial for both groups when speech was degraded. A multivariate lesion-symptom mapping analysis for the degraded speech condition showed that lesions to superior temporal gyrus, underlying insula, primary and secondary somatosensory cortices, and inferior frontal gyrus were associated with reduced benefit of audiovisual compared to auditory-only speech, suggesting that the integrity of these fronto-temporo-parietal regions may facilitate cross-modal mapping. These findings provide initial insights into our understanding of the impact of audiovisual information on comprehension in aphasia and the brain regions mediating any benefit

From flesh to food: exploring consumers’ fluctuations in hysteresis

Bourdieu’s interrelated concepts of habitus and field have been deployed to theorise the unreflexive consumption practices characterising much of consumers’ everyday lives. Less is known, however, about the disruptive experience when habitus and field suddenly misalign- which Bourdieu terms ‘hysteresis’. We address this lacuna by studying smalahove (sheep’s head) consumption involving participant observation at a Norwegian smalahove farm—an unsettling space within the food consumption field that may challenge many consumers’ habitual ways of seeing, smelling, hearing, touching and tasting meat. Our core contribution lies in introducing a dynamic conceptualisation of hysteresis, demonstrating how it fluctuates in consumption environments; intensifying and diminishing in intensity as the gaps between habitus and field open and close

‘We’re passengers sailing in the same ship, but we have our own berths to sleep in’: Evaluating patient and public involvement within a regional research programme: An action research project informed by Normalisation Process Theory

© 2019 Keenan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Background: Patient and public involvement (PPI) is a requirement for UK health and social care research funding. Evidence for how best to implement PPI in research programmes, such as National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaborations for Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRCs), remains limited. This paper reports findings from an action research (AR) project called IMPRESS, which aims to strengthen PPI within CLAHRC East of England (EoE). IMPRESS combines AR with Normalisation Process Theory (NPT) to explore PPI within diverse case study projects, identifying actions to implement, test and refine to further embed PPI.Methods:We purposively selected CLAHRC EoE case study projects for in-depth analysis of PPI using NPT. Data were generated from project PPI documentation, semi-structured qualitative interviews with researchers and PPI contributors and focus groups. Transcripts and documents were subjected to abductive thematic analysis and triangulation within case. Systematic across case comparison of themes was undertaken with findings and implications refined through stakeholder consultation.Results:We interviewed 24 researchers and 13 PPI contributors and analysed 28 documents from 10 case studies. Three focus groups were held: two with researchers (n = 4 and n = 6) and one with PPI contributors (n = 5). Findings detail to what extent projects made sense of PPI, bought in to PPI, operationalised PPI and appraised it, thus identifying barriers and enablers to fully embedded PPI.Conclusion:Combining NPT with AR allows us to assess the embeddedness of PPI within projects and programme, to inform specific local action and report broader conceptual lessons for PPI knowledge and practice informing the development of an action framework for embedding PPI in research programmes. To embed PPI within similar programmes teams, professionals, disciplines and institutions should be recognised as variably networked into existing PPI support. Further focus and research is needed on sharing PPI learning and supporting innovation in PPI.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

The language network is not engaged in object categorization

The relationship between language and thought is the subject of long-standing debate. One claim states that language facilitates categorization of objects based on a certain feature (e.g. color) through the use of category labels that reduce interference from other, irrelevant features. Therefore, language impairment is expected to affect categorization of items grouped by a single feature (low-dimensional categories, e.g. "Yellow Things") more than categorization of items that share many features (high-dimensional categories, e.g. "Animals"). To test this account, we conducted two behavioral studies with individuals with aphasia and an fMRI experiment with healthy adults. The aphasia studies showed that selective low-dimensional categorization impairment was present in some, but not all, individuals with severe anomia and was not characteristic of aphasia in general. fMRI results revealed little activity in language-responsive brain regions during both low- and high-dimensional categorization; instead, categorization recruited the domain-general multiple-demand network (involved in wide-ranging cognitive tasks). Combined, results demonstrate that the language system is not implicated in object categorization. Instead, selective low-dimensional categorization impairment might be caused by damage to brain regions responsible for cognitive control. Our work adds to the growing evidence of the dissociation between the language system and many cognitive tasks in adults

More-than-food tourism

Food tourism researchers are increasingly seeking to question why tourists eat animals, and the ethical dimensions of such encounters. The tourist experience has largely been taken as the starting point in this research, influenced by the anthropological origins of this research field. In effect, human-animal relations, for the most part, remain absent from such interrogations. In this paper we seek to engage with critical tourist scholars who are increasingly turning to post-humanist and more-than-human framings, to move beyond a fixation with human agency in understanding how and why we eat animals in tourism settings. Multi author participant observation is utilised to examine a touristic encounter with smalahove, a traditional Norwegian dish of smoked and boiled sheep’s head. Through this case study we argue that future food tourism research ought to shift focus beyond the tourist experience, so as to fully understand the processes through which animals become eaten. In exploring the ways that human-smalahove entanglements provoke consideration for how humans and animals might be-together-otherwise, we call on other food tourism researchers to consider what sorts of other food tourism encounters might prompt reflection and how such ethical reflections might be leveraged in food tourism ventures

Benefit of Visual Speech Information for Word Comprehension in Post-stroke Aphasia

Aphasia is a language disorder that often involves speech comprehension impairments affecting communication. In face-to-face settings, speech is accompanied by mouth and facial movements, but little is known about the extent to which they benefit aphasic comprehension. This study investigated the benefit of visual information accompanying speech for word comprehension in people with aphasia (PWA) and the neuroanatomic substrates of any benefit. Thirty-six PWA and 13 neurotypical matched control participants performed a picture-word verification task in which they indicated whether a picture of an animate/inanimate object matched a subsequent word produced by an actress in a video. Stimuli were either audiovisual (with visible mouth and facial movements) or auditory-only (still picture of a silhouette) with audio being clear (unedited) or degraded (6-band noise-vocoding). We found that visual speech information was more beneficial for neurotypical participants than PWA, and more beneficial for both groups when speech was degraded. A multivariate lesion-symptom mapping analysis for the degraded speech condition showed that lesions to superior temporal gyrus, underlying insula, primary and secondary somatosensory cortices, and inferior frontal gyrus were associated with reduced benefit of audiovisual compared to auditory-only speech, suggesting that the integrity of these fronto-temporo-parietal regions may facilitate cross-modal mapping. These findings provide initial insights into our understanding of the impact of audiovisual information on comprehension in aphasia and the brain regions mediating any benefit

Implementing telephone triage in general practice: a process evaluation of a cluster randomised controlled trial

Background: Telephone triage represents one strategy to manage demand for face-to-face GP appointments in primary care. However, limited evidence exists of the challenges GP practices face in implementing telephone triage. We conducted a qualitative process evaluation alongside a UK-based cluster randomised trial (ESTEEM) which compared the impact of GP-led and nurse-led telephone triage with usual care on primary care workload, cost, patient experience, and safety for patients requesting a same-day GP consultation. The aim of the process study was to provide insights into the observed effects of the ESTEEM trial from the perspectives of staff and patients, and to specify the circumstances under which triage is likely to be successfully implemented. Here we report perspectives of staff. Methods: The intervention comprised implementation of either GP-led or nurse-led telephone triage for a period of 2-3 months. A qualitative evaluation was conducted using staff interviews recruited from eight general practices (4 GP triage, 4 Nurse triage) in the UK, implementing triage as part of the ESTEEM trial. Qualitative interviews were undertaken with 44 staff members in GP triage and nurse triage practices (16 GPs, 8 nurses, 7 practice managers, 13 administrative staff). Results: Staff reported diverse experiences and perceptions regarding the implementation of telephone triage, its effects on workload, and on the benefits of triage. Such diversity were explained by the different ways triage was organised, the staffing models used to support triage, how the introduction of triage was communicated across practice staff, and by how staff roles were reconfigured as a result of implementing triage. Conclusion: The findings from the process evaluation offer insight into the range of ways GP practices participating in ESTEEM implemented telephone triage, and the circumstances under which telephone triage can be successfully implemented beyond the context of a clinical trial. Staff experiences and perceptions of telephone triage are shaped by the way practices communicate with staff, prepare for and sustain the changes required to implement triage effectively, as well as by existing practice culture, and staff and patient behaviour arising in response to the changes made. Trial registration: Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN20687662. Registered 28 May 2009