The need for biokineticists in the South African public health care system

Background: Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are increasingly prevalent within South Africa. Physical inactivity is a significant, independent and modifiable risk factor increasing the prevalence of NCDs.Discussion: The integration of physical activity programmes into the primary health care system through multidisciplinary platforms is thus advocated for and envisioned to be more cost-effective than current practices. However, currently within the primary health care setting of South Africa, there is an absence of health care professionals adequately equipped to develop and implement physical activity programmes. Biokineticists, whose scope of practice is to improve physical functioning and health through exercise as a modality, are ideally suited to developing and implementing physical activity programmes in the public sector. Yet despite their evident demand, the role of the biokineticist is not incorporated into the national public health care system.Conclusion: This short report calls firstly, for the inclusion of biokinetics into the public health care sector, and secondly, for the funding of multidisciplinary community health programmes supporting education, healthy eating and physical activity levels.Keywords: noncommunicable disease, physical activity, community health programme, primary health car

Madness decolonized?: Madness as transnational identity in Gail Hornstein’s Agnes’s Jacket

The US psychologist Gail Hornstein’s monograph Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness (2009) is an important intervention in the identity politics of the mad movement. Hornstein offers a resignified vision of mad identity that embroiders the central trope of an “anti-colonial” struggle to reclaim the experiential world “colonized” by psychiatry. A series of literal and figurative appeals make recourse to the inner world and (corresponding) cultural world of the mad, as well as to the ethno-symbolic cultural materials of dormant nationhood. This rhetoric is augmented by a model in which the mad comprise a diaspora without an origin, coalescing into a single transnational community. The mad are also depicted as persons displaced from their metaphorical homeland, the “inner” world “colonized” by the psychiatric regime. There are a number of difficulties with Hornstein’s rhetoric, however. Her “ethnicity-and-rights” response to the oppression of the mad is symptomatic of Western parochialism, while her proposed transmutation of putative psychopathology from limit upon identity to parameter of successful identity is open to contestation. Moreover, unless one accepts Hornstein’s porous vision of mad identity, her self-ascribed insider status in relation to the mad community may present a problematic “re-colonization” of mad experience

Rethinking the sociology of stigma

Stigma is not a self-evident phenomenon but like all concepts has a history. The conceptual understanding of stigma which underpins most sociological research has its roots in the groundbreaking account penned by Erving Goffman in his best-selling book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). In the 50 years since its publication, Goffman's account of stigma has proved a productive concept, in terms of furthering research on social stigma and its effects, on widening public understandings of stigma, and in the development of anti-stigma campaigns. However, this introductory article argues that the conceptual understanding of stigma inherited from Goffman, along with the use of micro-sociological and/or psychological research methods in stigma research, often sidelines questions about where stigma is produced, by whom and for what purposes. As Simon Parker and Robert Aggleton argue, what is frequently missing is social and political questions, such as 'how stigma is used by individuals, communities and the state to produce and reproduce social inequality'. This article expands on Parker and Aggleton's critique of the limitations of existing conceptual understandings of stigma, through an examination of the anti-stigma campaign Heads Together. This high-profile campaign launched in 2016 seeks to 'end the stigma around mental health' and is fronted by members of the British Royal Family. By thinking critically with and about this campaign, this article seeks to both delineate the limitations of existing conceptual understandings of stigma and to begin to develop a supplementary account of how stigma functions as a form of power. We argue that in order to grasp the role and function of stigma in society, scholarship must develop a richer and fuller understanding of stigma as a cultural and political economy. The final part of this introduction details the articles to follow, and the contribution they collectively make to the project of rethinking the sociology of stigma. This collection has been specifically motivated by: (1) how reconceptualising stigma might assist in developing better understandings of pressing contemporary problems of social decomposition, inequality and injustice; (2) a concern to decolonise the discipline of sociology by interrogating it

A novel method of determining the active drag profile in swimming via data manipulation of multiple tension force collection methods

Abstract A novel method aimed at evaluating the active drag profile during front-crawl swimming is proposed. Fourteen full trials were conducted with each trial using a stationary load cell set-up and a commercial resistance trainer to record the tension force in a rope, caused by an athlete swimming. Seven different stroke cycles in each experiment were identified for resampling time dependent data into position dependent data. Active drag was then calculated by subtracting resistance trainer force data away from the stationary load cell force data. Mean active drag values across the stroke cycle were calculated for comparison with existing methods, with mean active drag values calculated between 76 and 140 N depending on the trial. Comparing results with established active drag methods, such as the Velocity Perturbation Method (VPM), shows agreement in the magnitude of the mean active drag forces. Repeatability was investigated using one athlete, repeating the load cell set-up experiment, indicating results collected could range by 88 N depending on stroke cycle position. Variation in results is likely due to inconsistencies in swimmer technique and power output, although further investigation is required. The method outlined is proposed as a representation of the active drag profile over a full stroke cycle