Gesture and naming therapy for people with severe aphasia: a group study

In this study, the authors (a) investigated whether a group of people with severe aphasia could learn a vocabulary of pantomime gestures through therapy and (b) compared their learning of gestures with their learning of words. The authors also examined whether gesture therapy cued word production and whether naming therapy cued gestures

Evaluating the Benefits of Aphasia Intervention Delivered in Virtual Reality: Results of a Quasi-Randomised Study

Introduction This study evaluated an intervention for people with aphasia delivered in a novel virtual reality platform called EVA Park. EVA Park contains a number of functional and fantastic locations and allows for interactive communication between multiple users. Twenty people with aphasia had 5 weeks’ intervention, during which they received daily language stimulation sessions in EVA Park from a support worker. The study employed a quasi randomised design, which compared a group that received immediate intervention with a waitlist control group. Outcome measures explored the effects of intervention on communication and language skills, communicative confidence and feelings of social isolation. Compliance with the intervention was also explored through attrition and usage data. Results There was excellent compliance with the intervention, with no participants lost to follow up and most (18/20) receiving at least 88% of the intended treatment dose. Intervention brought about significant gains on a measure of functional communication. Gains were achieved by both groups of participants, once intervention was received, and were well maintained. Changes on the measures of communicative confidence and feelings of social isolation were not achieved. Results are discussed with reference to previous aphasia therapy findings

An Alternative Ethics? Justice and Care as Guiding Principles for Qualitative Research

The dominant conception of social research ethics is centred on deontological and consequentialist principles. In place of this, some qualitative researchers have proposed a very different approach. This appeals to a range of commitments that transform the goal of research as well as framing how it is pursued. This new ethics demands a participatory form of inquiry, one in which the relationship between researchers and researched is equalized. In this paper we examine this alternative approach, focusing in particular on two of the principles that are central to it: justice and care. We argue that there are some significant defects and dangers associated with this new conception of research ethics

Engaging audiences with difficult pasts: the Voices of ’68 Project at the Ulster Museum, Belfast

Can history museums influence the relationship between divided communities? This paper explores why an initially modest collaboration between the authors and the Ulster Museum on the non‐violent Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement of 1968/69, eventually had substantial impact beyond the museum’s walls. Having placed the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement within the context of both the international protests of 1968 and the specific environment of Northern Ireland, particularly the virtual civil war known as the Troubles, the paper turns to the role of museums in responding to the legacy of this past, and the evolving practice of the Ulster Museum, as background to the project. The latter began as a limited intervention within an existing display, based on oral histories and underpinned by the theory of ‘agonism’, proposing that divided communities must learn to live with difference. It eventually included exhibitions, workshops, school study days, curricular materials and online provision. It has directly influenced the Northern Ireland GCSE History Curriculum and been held up as an example of good practice within the province’s peace process. The paper discusses why the project succeeded – location within a national museum; credibility with protagonists, academics, communities and audiences; starting small; a willingness to take risks and share control; multiple perspectives; and an acceptance that not everyone will be satisfied. With a version of the Voices of 68 exhibition now installed in the Museum’s permanent gallery, the next challenges are longitudinal studies on its impact and assessing the approach’s relevance to other museums working in post‐conflict societies

Doomsday fieldwork, or, how to rescue Gaelic culture? The salvage paradigm in geography, archaeology, and folklore, 1955–62

Amid a resurgence of interest in histories of scientific fieldwork and in the geographies of the Cold War, this paper presents a comparative history of field practice across the distinct epistemic traditions of geography, archaeology, and folklore. The paper follows the intellectual practices of three research teams attempting to ‘rescue’ Gaelic culture from the development of a missile-testing station in the Scottish Hebrides. The aims of the paper are fivefold: to extend insights from the histories of scientific fieldwork to understand the production of social knowledge, to consider the coconstitution of fieldwork and the region, to expand recent histories of geography in the mid-20th century, to draw out the lingering significance of the ‘salvage paradigm’ in geography and other social sciences, and to reconceptualise this salvage fieldwork as a way of constructing social life as much as rescuing it

Northern Ireland’s 1968 at 50: agonism and protestant perspectives on civil rights

2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the seminal events of Northern Ireland’s 1968: a milestone offering up an opportunity to reassess a pivotal moment in the province’s recent past. This article will argue that the civil rights period has fitted into a common model of the past being used to perpetuate the divisions at the heart of Northern Irish society. It will go on to demonstrate how an innovative methodological and theoretical approach, based on oral history, education and – most crucially – agonism, has facilitated the unearthing and integration of complex and hitherto marginalised Ulster Protestant perspectives

A critical psychology of the postcolonial

Of the theoretical resources typically taken as the underlying foundations of critical social psychology, elements, typically, each of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Post-Structuralism, one particular mode of critique remains notably absent: postcolonial theory. What might be the most crucial contributions that postcolonial critique can make to the project of critical psychology? One answer is that of a reciprocal forms of critique, the retrieval of a ‘psychopolitics’ in which we not only place the psychological within the register of the political, but - perhaps more challengingly - in which the political is also, strategically, approached through the register of the psychological. What the writings of Fanon and Biko make plain in this connection is the degree to which the narratives and concepts of the social psychological may be reformulated so as to fashion a novel discourse of resistance, one that opens up new avenues for critique for critical psychology, on one hand, and that affords an innovative set of opportunities for the psychological investigation of the vicissitudes of the postcolonial, on the othe

Living the punk life in Green Bay, Wisconsin: exploring contradiction in the music of NOFX

This paper studies song lyrics from three mid-period songs written and performed by Californian punk band NOFX. I discuss NOFX’s skilful exploration of contradiction in the three selected songs, two of which are character studies of a single young male individual. The questions that the songs pose in true dialectical fashion (but do not definitively answer) include: Is it possible to maintain the carefree existential existence of the archetypal punk rocker in the face of the constraints imposed by suburban life and the voices of middle-class moderation? Can a Jewish gang in Fairfax, Los Angeles simultaneously affirm group self-identity, defend its turf, and practise its (marginalized) religion? Can a young man enjoy Christianity because it makes his life ‘seem less insane’ whilst simultaneously taking control of his life and not being a Christian sheep? NOFX poses these questions in admirable dialectical fashion, allows us to reflexively examine the issues involved, and form our own conclusions. The band rarely descends into moralism but moral values underpin NOFX’s worldview. Above all, NOFX tries to maintain a sophisticated but precarious ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’ approach to each one of the questions posed in this abstract. Clever lyrics, which highlight the contradictions that a punk rocker must face whilst living in suburban America, have become one of the band’s most loved and most enduring themes