A Participatory Action Research Study: Dementia & Human Rights

Dementia is considered by the World Health Organisation to be ‘a physical, psychological and economic burden’, in part due to stigmatisation maintained by barriers to participation for people given labels of dementia (PGLAD) in daily life. It is increasingly recognised visibility can be key to challenging stigma by enabling PGLAD to reclaim identities masked by power inequalities arising from negative stereotypes. This research answered a challenge from government and a call by the United Nations and the British Psychological Society for a redistribution of power in clinical, research and policy settings by sharing Participatory Action Research (PAR) with people affected by dementia labels as a tool to claim their human rights. Knowledge was generated with action taken through a collective letter disseminated to assumed power-holders in health, government and the third sector. Awareness was raised of issues related to stigma and the lived experience of PGLAD at the individual, social and structural levels. Responses from people in authority, either appointed or elected were considered, with non-responses also seen as a response. Co-researchers were commended for their insights and pledges to act were made. Pledges included change as an individual and as part of wider systems, including motivation to ensure PGLAD’s voices are heard developing policy across the region. Consequently, PAR enabled authentic participation of people with diverse abilities in research which delivered a community level intervention that achieved social and political change at a structural level, despite a pandemic as a barrier to participation. It showed the utility of anarchism as a conceptual approach that can complement a human rights-based approach to psychological research involving power dynamics. This highlights the continued importance of participation of PGLAD in research and the potential of human rights-based approaches as stigma intervention strategies

Airborne HCl - CO sensing system

A system for measuring air pollutants in-situ using an aircraft was designed, fabricated, and tested. The system is based upon a technique called Gas Filter Correlation (GFC) which provides for high sensitivity and specificity in the presence of interfering species. This particular system was designed for measuring hydrochloric acid and carbon monoxide gases emitted from rocket exhaust effluents

The Decline of MMOs

Ten years ago, massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) had a bright and exciting future. Today, their prospects do not look so glorious. In an effort to attract ever-more players, their gameplay has gradually been diluted and their core audience has deserted them. Now that even their sources of new casual players are drying up, MMOs face a slow and steady decline. Their problems are easy to enumerate: they cost too much to make; too many of them play the exact same way; new revenue models put off key groups of players; they lack immersion; they lack wit and personality; players have been trained to want experiences that they don?t actually want; designers are forbidden from experimenting. The solutions to these problems are less easy to state. Can anything be done to prevent MMOs from fading away? Well, yes it can. The question is, will the patient take the medicine

Measuring Progress; Evaluating the Strengthening of Communities

Our goal is stated; we want to strengthen communities. We feel that we have a methodology to do so, but how can we know when we have succeeded, or to what extent? What we may mean by the above question, is, How do we measure the strengthening of communities that we claim we are doing? Put in other ways, What do we mean by strengthening communities, by increasing their capacities, by empowering them? We can use these three (1 empowering, 2 strengthening, 3 capacity building) interchangeably, although one or another may be more acceptable to different people. The word empowerment, for example, seems to appear more like a political goal, while capacity building appears more neutral (a-political), thus more acceptable to technical specialists who do not want to be contaminated with anything that might appear to be ideologically tainted or political. The word strengthening may be somewhere in between