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Arts and health initiatives can make a valuable contribution to the ongoing recovery of stroke survivors. This article focuses on a study of the ‘About Being’ project, which provides dance and movement sessions for stroke survivors in the Cumbrian city of Carlisle, United Kingdom. The study evaluated the model of practice applied to the community project and how the sessions supported the ongoing recovery of stroke survivors. The methodology involved observations of the sessions and qualitative interviews. A unique feature of this project is that it brings together the fields of education, arts and health by engaging practitioners, academics and student volunteers, along with the stroke survivors who participate in the sessions. It is proposed that the success of the ‘About Being’ project is attributed to its interdisciplinary and collaborative practice, person-centred approach and multidirectional learning environment, which is beneficial for all those involved.

PurposeNHS 111 is a non-emergency telephone triage service that provides immediate access to urgent care 24 h a day. This study explored the recruitment, retention and development of one integrated urgent care (IUC) workforce in England, specifically the NHS 111 service and Clinical Hub.Design/methodology/approachAn online survey was distributed to the NHS 111 and Clinical Hub workforce. The data from 48 respondents were summarised and analysed thematically.FindingsThe survey respondents held a variety of clinical and non-clinical roles within NHS 111 and the Clinical Hub. The findings indicate that the IUC workforce is motivated to care for their patients and utilise a range of communication and cognitive skills to undertake their telephone triage roles. In total, 67% of respondents indicated that their work was stressful, particularly the volume and intensity of calls. Although the initial training prepared the majority of respondents for their current roles (73%), access to continuing professional development (CPD) varied across the workforce with only 40% being aware of the opportunities available. A total of 81% of respondents stated that their shifts were regularly understaffed which indicates that the retention of IUC staff is problematic; this can put additional pressure on the existing workforce, impact on staff morale and create logistical issues with managing annual leave entitlements or scheduling time for training.Originality/valueThis small-scale study highlights some of the complexities of telephone triage work and demonstrates the challenges for IUC service providers in retaining an appropriately skilled and motivated workforce.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the methodological challenges to evaluating one of the 50 vanguard sites of the new care model (NCM) programme for integrated care in England, and make the case for a modified realist approach to this kind of evaluation. Design/methodology/approach The paper considers three challenges to evaluating the NCM in this particular vanguard: complexity, strategy and rhetoric. It reflects on how the realist approach negotiates these philosophical challenges to delivering integrated care, in order to provide contextualised accounts of who a programme works for, in what context, and why. Findings The paper argues that, in the case of this particular vanguard site, the tangible benefit of the realist approach was not in providing a firm epistemological basis for evaluation, but rather in drawing out and articulating the ontological rhetoric of such large-scale transformation programmes. By understanding the work of the NCM less as an objective “system”, and more as a dynamic form of persuasion, aimed at securing the “adherence of minds” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 2008, p. 8) in multiple audiences, the paper suggests that realist evaluation can be used to address both the systematic issues and localised successes the NCMs encountered. Originality/value The paper identifies a number of aspects of new models of integrated care for evaluators to consider. It offers ways of negotiating the challenges to conventional outcome-focused evaluation, by drawing attention to the need for contextualised, time-situated and audience-sensitive value of NCMs.

The Abbott FreeStyle Libre® flash glucose monitoring system is a novel sensor‐based, factory‐calibrated device that allows individuals with diabetes to monitor their interstitial glucose levels, capture up to 8 hours of interstitial glucose data, and predict future changes in interstitial glucose by scanning a temporary implantable glucose sensor with a reader device or compatible mobile phone. The study aim was to determine whether use of a flash glucose monitoring system had an impact on quality of life and to explore why this was the case. Raw data were collected as part of a brief semi‐structured interview supported by the ABCD FreeStyle Libre Follow‐Up Visit Data Collection form. Data were collected pragmatically at outpatient clinic follow‐up visits, and the first 40 patients to complete six months of continuous use were included in the study. Feedback on use of the device was overwhelmingly (although not unanimously) positive. A number of basic themes were identified independently by the investigators, which were then grouped into four organising themes: Contrast with capillary blood glucose monitoring; Impact on hypoglycaemia experience; Glycaemic control and complications; and Improved wellbeing and quality of life. These themes are analysed and illustrated in the article.

A number of writers have recently challenged the notion of the demonic as mere superstition, arguing for a need to understand the demonic in terms of the often-obscured ways in which it operates in relation to contemporary thought and critique. Building on this, this paper offers an analysis of the demonic as a rhetorical concept. Moving beyond the notion of the demonic as simply a trope at the disposal of a speaker or writer, the paper explores how the expression of the demonic performs a more foundational, repetitive, and indeed, deceptively banal role in shaping the discourses it inhabits. This precedes and frames the ethico-political discourses on evil commonly associated with demonology today.

What does urgency mean for social work today? It seems that whichever way one turns, a sense of urgency is prevalent: whether the persistent time pressures exerted in day-to-day practice, or the recurrent themes of impending crisis confronting the profession itself. Frequently, these strains on time and resource perpetuate a division of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. In some cases, this is simply a re-assertion of the view that a social worker should get the practice done, and think about the theory later. But there is also a sense in which, under the neoliberal governance of social provision, urgency has become far more of an inherent feature of social work. This suggests a need to re-think the ways of acknowledging and representing this urgency, the problem of time that underlies the relationship between social work practice and theoretical inquiry, and the models of critique that can be applied to it. This paper applies an interdisciplinary approach to considering the impact of urgency on practice, by drawing together social work research with the tools of classical rhetoric and philosophy, in order to continue the growing discussions around the conceptual basis of social work, and in particular the concept of time itself within neoliberal social care.

A term deriving from the sound of the mechanical printing process able to provide cheap and fast reproductions of literary works, the cliché is at once both a foundation of modern culture and its constant adversary. Denoting a lack of originality, thought, or effort, clichés appear to be the very opposite of literature’s aspirations, and there is no end to the warnings for writers to avoid them at all costs. However, few theorists have spent sustained time detailing the workings of the cliché outside of criticizing their use. Indeed, the cliché seems to resist being thought about too much. At the same time, this resistance to theory can also obscure a range of issues that the cliché raises as a problem for literature. Unpacking these problems suggests that the cliché is not simply an issue of unoriginal thought, but arises from, and is perpetuated by, a number of tensions within the production and circulation of writing itself. These include tensions between artistic worth and literary ownership; between organic creation and technologies of reproduction; between localized communications and universal truth; and concerning the status of the intellectual in relation to the masses and the place of authenticity in late-modern culture.

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. This paper presents a literature review into the use of technology in healthcare education. A search of three electronic databases resulted in 20 articles for inclusion in the review. The articles were synthesised into a narrative review. The review identified four key themes across the literature: the types of technologies used in healthcare education; the integration of technology into the healthcare curriculum; the skills and knowledge of the healthcare educators; and the benefits of using technology for the learners. The literature demonstrated that a wide range of technologies are now used within healthcare education, and this requires educators to adapt their practice and develop their technical skills to be competent users. The successful integration of technology into healthcare curriculums can be beneficial for healthcare learners by developing their clinical and professional skills, and enhancing their learning experience.

This paper draws on Ian Bogost’s argument that video games constitute a form of ‘procedural rhetoric’, in order to re-examine the representation of heroic madness First-Person-Shooter games. Rejecting the idea that games attempt to recreate the experience of madness to the player through linear representation, the paper instead identifies two persistent commonplace figures which appear within the genre: the monstrous double, and the reaching tentacle. While Bogost’s notion of procedural rhetoric allows analysis to move away from the more facile interpretations of gameplay, the paper argues that these figures also demand an account of the commonplace itself – the rhetorical ‘topic’ – which links the technical structure of gaming procedures with the tropes and figures that enable them to make sense within their wider cultural context and tradition. While the figures of the double and the tentacle purposefully draw on existing tropes and processes associated with the cultural meanings of mental health, a rhetorical analysis of their use of commonplaces suggests that they are not simply recycling older clichés, but constitute a creative ‘reobjectification’ of madness.

With this first part of the eleventh volume, Bruce Kirmmse et al.’s monumental task of translating Soren Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks begins to draw to a close. The journals and notebooks t...

There is no shortage of 19th, 20th and 21st century literature condemning the generic, the formulaic, and the banal as not simply bad writing, but as a broader symptom of cultural stagnation; a topic which has recently re-ignited in debates over ‘anti-critique’ or ‘post-criticism’. But is it possible to write a history of the cliché, which the cliché itself is not automatically excluded from? Is it possible to critically think through that which expresses the absence of critical thought? This paper pursues this question by exploring what is meant by the ‘time’ of clichés. It builds on Boris Groys’ concept of ‘anti-philosophy’ to suggest that a straightforward ‘history’ risks privileging a particular critical viewpoint that mistakenly insists on the cliché as a mark of difference, rather than a peculiar and perturbing sameness which is both superfluous and tyrannical in equal measure. Instead, the paper suggests that, the time of clichés should be viewed through particular sites where the boundaries between philosophical meaning and non-meaning – and, in turn, technological and human, archival and visible, intellectual and everyday – are contested and underdetermined. The paper explores the concept of the rhetorical ‘commonplace’ as one such site where the marking of cliché exposes a range of specific material and contextual configurations that shape the conditions for the suspicion of cliché as tyrannical, stupid or stagnant.

The order of influence from thesis to hypothesis, and from philosophy to the social sciences, has historically governed the way in which the abstraction and significance of language as an empirical object is determined. In this article, an argument is made for the development of a more reflexive intellectual relationship between ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and the social sciences that it helped inspire. It is demonstrated that, and how, the social scientific traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (CA) press OLP to re-consider the variety of problematic abstractions it has previously made for the sake of philosophical clarity, thereby self-reinvigorating.

In a recent article in The European Legacy, Mark Cortes Favis argued that the figure of Kierkegaard expressed a tension between two aspects of writing—the Socratic and the Platonic. While Favis is correct to see a duality in Kierkegaard's writing, his article does not fully answer the problem of how we can account for our interpretation of this tension. Given that the duality within Kierkegaard's writing transgresses the boundaries of author and reader, we cannot easily circumscribe any claims on his writing without considering its effect on our reading. Rather, the characteristic duality of his authority manifests itself in a number of ways in the task of identifying the philosophical meaning of his texts. Kierkegaard's relationship to Socrates is thus symptomatic of a number of figural dualities that pervade interpretations of his work. By surveying the ways in which these interpretations draw on the axiom of duality in order to ascribe an authority to Kierkegaard's texts, I suggest Favis's argument tha...

iven that, for the past thirty years or so, there has appeared a seemingly limitless range of approaches to the “problem of woman” in Nietzsche’s writing, it is somewhat surprising that his oft-cited philosophical mentor, Arthur Schopenhauer, has largely escaped the same scrupulous attention. Indeed, the idea that Schopenhauer despised women has gone relatively unchallenged in general philosophical literature from around the 1930’s onwards. Schopenhauer’s role as an “arch-misogynist” serves as an unproblematic background figure or frame of reference to the more unsavoury elements of texts by the likes of Nietzsche, Freud and so on. For example, in Francis Nesbitt Oppel’s recent work on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s texts are cited as a means to interpreting Nietzsche’s “misogyny” as ironic: in order to analyse Nietzsche’s writing on women as an ironic play on misogyny, there is a need for an “original” misogyny to supply the object of such an irony. Schopenhauer, in brief citation, serves as a ready example of such “original” misogyny, without the need for direct interpretative engagement.2 On closer inspection, there remains a notable absence of detailed analysis of Schopenhauer’s misogyny, and his infamous essay “On Women.”3 Along with his poodle Atma, it is common to find “On Women” as defining a certain caricature of Schopenhauer, but a caricature that would seem of little constructive interest to scholarship. Christopher Janaway’s argument that Schopenhauer’s views on women hold “no very interesting connection with his philosophy,”4 and D. W. Hamlyn’s claim that it is possible to ignore the misogynistic comments of Schopenhauer completely, as they bear no relevance

This article provides a broad overview of the problem of irony to contemporary hermeneutics. It offers a thematic account of the effects of irony on interpretation, and argues that the problems of irony are embedded within the relation between the free play of irony and the regulative role of interpretative discourse. It argues, against hermeneutic theories such as that of Hans‐Georg Gadamer, that the “problems” which irony poses for interpretation can be seen as symptomatic of irony's identification: that irony is, essentially, problematic. It argues that any account of irony needs to account for the value of irony as a problem, rather than subsuming such problems into larger models of understanding. The article explores this notion by looking at the interpretative “discourse of irony” and noting its thematic features. It is argued that the account of irony as a negation of meaning is intrinsically tied to the construction of a sovereign economy in response to the excesses of ironic possibility, but that...

Referencing ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ is to reference a stage in the history of feminist philosophy; when one cites the name ‘Simone de Beauvoir’, as the signature of The Second Sex, one is also citing ...

In order to practice effectively in today’s complex and changing environment, social workers need to have an understanding of how contemporary cultural and philosophical concepts relate to the people they work with and the fields they practice in. Exploring the ideas of philosophers, including Nietzsche, Gadamer, Taylor, Adorno, MacIntyre, Zizek and Derrida, this text demonstrates their relevance to social work practice and presents new approaches and frameworks to understanding social change. Key Debates in Social Work and Philosophy introduces a range of concerns central to social work and social care, with chapters looking at questions such as: What is the ‘self’?; How are communities formed?; Why is ‘choice’ important?; Are certain rights really applicable to all humans?; What are the political and ethical implications of documenting your practice?; What does it mean to be a professional social worker? Each chapter focuses on a particular area of dispute, presenting the relevant philosophical theories, and considering how relevant social work examples and research can be used to further inform theoretical debate, and includes questions to prompt discussion and reflection. The only book to examine the philosophical ideas that underlie and inform contemporary issues for social work and social care practitioners, this is a useful resource for those studying social work theory, policy and practice.

This article argues that reading the life of Catherine of Siena can fall into passive models of feminine agency that stifle the potential such a life has to offer. By investigating the way passivity is imposed by both traditional and feminist writers on her life, this article argues that new ways of conceptualizing asceticism are possible through the affirmation of Catherine of Siena’s agency as active. This involves viewing the relation of the ascetic body to its explanatory texts (both historical and contemporary) as something more than literal. Using recent interpretations of Paul, this article argues that Catherine of Siena can be read as a performative exposition of the hidden oppressiveness of the dualistic framework ascetics are often taken to be mere ‘victims’ of.

The impact of J.L. Austin’s Speech-Act Theory has resonated throughout the social sciences over the last three decades, not least in its catalysis of the so-called linguistic turn and the rise of cultural studies. Since this original shockwave, a great deal of innovation and progress in the study of ordinary language itself has emanated from these social sciences, not least among which is Harvey Sacks’ Conversation Analytic approach (see Sacks 1972, 1984, 1992a, 1992b). Pioneered by Sacks, and strongly influenced by1 the methods of ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel (1967, 1996, 2007), Conversation Analysis (henceforth CA) has, over the last four decades, built on many of the foundational principles of Austin’s work in developing a working corpus of research addressing how ordinary conversation works in concrete, empirical situations. The flow of intellectual influence with respect to the understanding of how ‘ordinary language’ works has, however, been largely monodirectional; ideas have moved steadily from philosophy into the realms of the social sciences, with very little converse drift. In this chapter it is argued that, despite this historically-ingrained disciplinary tide, there is much that CA can ‘give back’ to Austin scholars — particularly in terms of how dialogue might be pragmatically conceptualized. As a thematic lynchpin, focus falls chiefly upon Sacks’ criticisms of the persistent employment of invented and ‘ideal’ cases of language-use endemic to the Speech-Act tradition.

We who live in large towns know only too well that the people are perishing for the lack of beauty quite as much as for the lack of knowledge. … Having for three centuries worshipped a God of gloom, having had Manichaeism and Puritanism established over us by the state, we have learned to think that there is some contradiction between the love of beauty and the love of God. Counteracting all this the Theatre has been at work with its heavenly mission; there the contemplation of beauty has been made possible for the people; there, in spectacular drama, pantomime, ballet, comic opera, burlesque; there, with the art of the scene painter and the musician and the dancers with their poetry of vital motion, their artistic and unconventional dress, and the harmonious blending of beautiful colours; there the people have been educated, i.e., taken a little out of themselves, received hints of how beautiful this world will be when at last order has overcome chaos and when God is seen in perfect beauty. (Stewart Headlam)1

By Karla Mallette (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 328 pp. $65.00/£42.50 cloth.Karla Mallette’s book seeks to analyse the methods and findings of those Orientalists who...