Narrative Account Research Articles

Impact assessment of the Centre for Research Excellence in Stroke Rehabilitation and Brain Recovery

BackgroundResearch impact is an emerging measure of research achievement alongside traditional academic outputs such as publications. We present the results of applying the Framework to Assess the Impact from Translational health research (FAIT) to the Centre for Research Excellence (CRE) in Stroke Rehabilitation and Brain Recovery (CRE-Stroke, 2014–2019) and report on the feasibility and lessons from the application of FAIT to a CRE rather than a discrete research project.MethodsData were gathered via online surveys, in-depth interviews, document analysis and review of relevant websites/databases to report on the three major FAIT methods: the modified Payback Framework, an assessment of costs against monetized consequences, and a narrative account of the impact generated from CRE-Stroke activities. FAIT was applied during the last 4 years of CRE-Stroke operation.ResultsWith an economic investment of AU$ 3.9 million over 5 years, CRE-Stroke delivered a return on investment that included AU$ 18.8 million in leveraged grants, fellowships and consultancies. Collectively, CRE-Stroke members produced 354 publications that were accessed 470,000 times and cited over 7220 times. CRE-Stroke supported 26 PhDs, 39 postdocs and seven novice clinician researchers. There were 59 capacity-building events benefiting 744 individuals including policy-makers and consumers. CRE-Stroke created research infrastructure (including a research register of stroke survivors and a brain biobank), and its global leadership produced international consensus recommendations to influence the stroke research landscape worldwide. Members contributed to the Australian Living Stroke Guidelines: four researchers’ outputs were directly referenced. Based only on the consequences that could be monetized, CRE-Stroke returned AU$ 4.82 for every dollar invested in the CRE.ConclusionThis case example in the developing field of impact assessment illustrates how researchers can use evidence to demonstrate and report the impact of and returns on research investment. The prospective application of FAIT by a dedicated research impact team demonstrated impact in broad categories of knowledge-gain, capacity-building, new infrastructure, input to policy and economic benefits. The methods can be used by other research teams to provide comprehensive evidence to governments and other research funders about what has been generated from their research investment but requires dedicated resources to complete.

Power and the perception of pregnancy in the academy

AbstractBecoming pregnant as an academic is risky. Many who want to become or find themselves pregnant structure their lives and careers to try to mitigate the potential negative effects of pregnancy on their future careers. Yet research continues to suggest that having been pregnant or being a mother significantly reduces the likelihood of career success compared to either being child‐free or a father. While in some cases success is defined as research productivity, in many cases, it is defined as simply remaining in academia. Governments, societies, and institutions bemoan the resulting “leaky pipelines” and speculate as to the causes of seemingly reinforced glass ceilings. Yet, underlying so many of the formal and informal conversations, norms, and policies surrounding pregnancy and academia is an implicit assumption that pregnancy and pregnant people are the problem to be solved and solutions thus require repairing some deficit created in the individual by pregnancy. In this article, I argue that pregnancy discrimination in academia is in large part a problem resulting from power and how it is wielded against pregnant people, both by institutions and by individuals. Using both a personal narrative account of the process, experience, and outcomes of pregnancy in the academy resulting in filing a formal Title IX complaint and a review of contemporary research on power, discrimination, and pregnancy, I explore how academic structures and systems nominally tasked with supporting equity can instead serve to exaggerate power differences and foster discrimination.

Locked Within.

Description In this work, Locked Within, I examine my relationship with Western and alternative medicines, exploring how both areas can provide holistic treatment when used together. Seen here through the medium of photography, my illness relates to common experiences in Western medical care. Through images that consider themes of time, choice, faith, the effects of illness, the medical gaze, and health as a commodity, this series provides commentary on medical experiences and the influence of the American healthcare system. With a nod toward scientific documentation, this photographic study documents my journey toward health. The element of typology in my work forms a narrative account of a journey through different medicines to find the ideal state of healthiness. By considering each medicine, I gain a new understanding of myself.

Online ethnography of activist networks of interpreters: an “ethnonarrative” methodology for socio-political change

ABSTRACT Narrative theory in translation studies has been mostly used to examine how translators mediate and refract meaning as they contribute to circulating political agendas across contexts and audiences. Building on this heritage but extending narrative theory beyond cross-language analysis, this paper proposes an ethnonarrative methodology to enquire and write about contemporary activist networks. It provides an epistemological-theoretical framework to explore identity, action and space in prefigurative transnational social movements, and a set of narrative methods and analytical techniques to conduct an ethnography of communication. Drawing on my on-site and online ethnography of Babels, the international network of volunteer interpreters, the paper first discusses the ethical and political questions raised by my practice in, and by my writing about Babels, in the interdisciplinary context of social movement studies and interpreting studies in the first decade of the 21st century. It then exposes the ethnonarrative methodology developed in this context and illustrates its use through a detailed narrative account of how Babels constructed and negotiated its financial structure in and out of Babels.org. Finally, it discusses the extension of the methodology beyond 2.0 (so called participatory) web, as activist networks increasingly communicate through social media and videoconferencing platforms.

When They Saw Me

The current project is an autoethnographic narrative account of memorable moments that affected (and, one might argue, effected) elements of the author’s identity as an African American man. The project includes several autobiographical anecdotes that span over four decades and include interactions with educators, relatives, and strangers. The author reconsiders the ways in which others’ perceptions of him, often linked to race, have affected his lived experiences in school, at work, on a summer afternoon walk, and online. Taken together, the anecdotes illustrate ways in which the social construction of race affects the author’s perception of self and others.

Unpromising Futures: Early-Career GPs’ Narrative Accounts of Meaningful Work during a Professional Workforce Crisis

Over the past few decades, the intensification and reorganisation of work have led to growing precarity, insecurity and uncertainty for employees, affecting even professionals tied to traditionally model employers. Doctors, in particular, have seen substantial changes to their work: having to work harder, longer and more intensely with reductions in expected autonomy, deference and respect. This article focuses on how early-career GPs make sense of and navigate meaningful work in the context of a current workforce crisis. Drawing on 15 narrative interviews and 10 focus groups with early-career GPs, the findings show that meaningful work during a crisis is understood temporally, with imagined futures perceived as increasingly impossible due to changes to the structure and orientation of medical work, leading to different career plans. Utilising Adam and Groves’ approach to futures as a conceptual lens, the article focuses on how multiple, often clashing, future orientations impact meaningful work.

Psychosocial impact of pyoderma gangrenosum: a patient perspective.

This report provides a narrative account of one patient’s experience with pyoderma gangrenosum.

Digital remediation and visual manipulation: Blogs as breathing spaces for Chinese tattoo wearers and enthusiasts

Abstract Digital remediation increasingly plays a pivotal role in delivering political messages. This study examines postings of corporeally mediated tattoos in a China-based blog, focusing on in what sense blogs can provide a breathing or even emancipating space for Chinese tattoo wearers and enthusiasts to control the viewer’s perceptions of tattooing and negotiate long-standing stigmatized associations of tattoos there. The study analyzes 305 postings collected from the blog covering a period between 24 April 2020 and 3 May 2021, taking a quantitative approach. Methodologically, it first analyses the distribution of the signs across body parts as displayed. By applying multimodal perspectives, this study also investigates photographic techniques such as distance, angle, gaze, and modality harnessed and exploited for visual manipulation during digital remediation of turning body narratives into digital narratives. Findings of the study suggest that digital remediation facilitates personal expression of tattoo wearers and photographic techniques play a critical role in introducing ready alignment of the viewer with the postings. The study thus adds quantitative inquiries to existing, mostly qualitative, studies of tattoos which usually rest on interviews with tattoo wearers, enthusiasts, and artists for an account of tattoo narratives in connection to personal expression and self-definition. Its findings would be inspiring to socially stigmatized and marginalized groups to circumvent social, cultural, and political barriers to communicate and make their stories heard to more people.

Global overview of pharmacy support personnel training programmes: a scoping review protocol

IntroductionA global variation in the pharmacy support personnel training programmes has been observed. The objective of this scoping review is to map out global evidence available on the pharmacy support...

Temporal textures: Time, meaning, and the good life

AbstractIn the debate on meaning in life as part of a good human life, the role of time still needs to be worked out in greater detail. This paper argues that making the role of time in a specific sense explicit allows for the development of an account that leaves behind some of the objections with which current accounts are confronted. To show this, I will reconstruct two accounts of meaning in life and critically discuss them—the account of meaning by valuable activities and the account of meaning by intelligibility. The first one struggles with how to distinguish the value of meaning from the values of happiness and morality and neglects the common understanding of meaning in other contexts; the second one at least partly falls back into the older discussion about the meaning of life with undesired theoretical consequences. A new account, called the account of meaning by temporal textures, focuses on narrative intelligibility, showing that meaning in life builds on temporal relations between events. This time focused narrative account avoids some misleading associations and enables one to answer some pertinent questions concerning the relevance of meaning for the good life as a whole.

War in Ukraine and dialysis treatment: human suffering and organizational challenges.

In January 2021, there were 9648 patients in Ukraine on kidney replacement therapy, including 8717 on extracorporeal therapies and 931 on peritoneal dialysis. On 24 February 2022, foreign troops entered the territory of Ukraine. Before the war, the Fresenius Medical Care dialysis network in Ukraine operated three medical centres. These medical centres provided haemodialysis therapy to 349 end-stage kidney disease patients. In addition, Fresenius Medical Care Ukraine delivered medical supplies to almost all regions of Ukraine. Even though Fresenius Medical Care's share of end-stage kidney disease patients on dialysis is small, a brief narrative account of the managerial challenges that Fresenius Medical Care Ukraine and the clinical directors of the Fresenius Medical Care centres had to face, as well as the suffering of the dialysis population, is a useful testimony of the burden imposed by war on these frail, high-risk patients dependent on a complex technology such as dialysis. The war in Ukraine is causing immense suffering for the dialysis population of this country and has called for heroic efforts from dialysis personnel. The experience of a small dialysis network treating a minority of dialysis patients in Ukraine is described. Guaranteeing dialysis treatment has been and remains an enormous challenge in Ukraine and we are confident that the generosity and the courage of Ukrainian dialysis staff and international aid will help to mitigate this tragic suffering.

Self-Portrait with Parents and Footnotes: In and Out of a Postwar Jewish Childhood by Annette Aronowicz (review)

Reviewed by: Self-Portrait with Parents and Footnotes: In and Out of a Postwar Jewish Childhood by Annette Aronowicz L. Scott Lerner Annette Aronowicz, Self-Portrait with Parents and Footnotes: In and Out of a Postwar Jewish Childhood. Boston: Cherry Orchard Books/Academic Studies Press, 2021. 152 pp. 17 b&w photos. Hardcover $119. Paperback $22.95. ISBN: 1644696207, 978–1644696200, 9781644696217, 978–1644696217 Annette Aronowicz, a scholar in the field of Jewish and Religious Studies, has written an exquisitely original memoir, a book that invites and inspires our questions rather than delivering pronouncements or giving conventional answers. The text is divided into two sections, a narrative account of the first sixteen years of her life, followed by “a series of meditations on the engagements and puzzlements that stemmed from that period, in the light of the moment in which I am writing.” The latter are organized under the headings: “Communism,” “Jewish,” “Mental Illness,” “Money,” “Russian Friendships,” and “Theological Fragments.” Missing from this synopsis are her parents, yet they appear in her title and loom so large that there would be no book without them. Their absence in her synopsis of the book may evoke the concept of what is missing, along with its counterpart, what is inherited, both of which course through these pages as essential themes. A great deal of Aronowicz’s Self-Portrait calls to mind another book about Paris, the War, and the deportation: Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (Paris, 1975). Both Aronowicz and Perec write from the perspective of the French-speaking child of Polish Jews. Like W, which moves between two distinct realms, autobiographical and fictional, in alternating chapters and contrasting type, Aronowicz’s memoir may best be read with attention to the movement, as she calls it, not only between the narrative of her formative [End Page 261] years and the thematic chapters that follow, but also between Parents and Footnotes. The latter designates the many intertexts, the books and ideas of her intellectual life (Charles Péguy, Romain Gary, Sarah Kofman, Emmanuel Levinas, Blaise Pascal, I. B. Singer, and others), while the former refers to the voices that are lost in this intellectual mode and that she revives through the act of writing-remembering. Neither realm can stand of its own accord. The “footnotes” help her read the stories inherited from her parents, while the parents ground the intellectual discourses, opening a space for subjectivity and voice as a complement to analysis. Why is this necessary? Because, as she illustrates time and again, truth and theology, the transcendent, the human, reside in the density of the bonds formed with other human beings, the bonds formed in primis with one’s parents. Near the heart of the memoir lies the story of faithfulness and betrayal in the search for one’s parents and for oneself. Aronowicz summarizes the soul-wrenching story of Sarah Kofman, who, as a Jewish girl in hiding in Paris during the Occupation, was “saved” by a Christian woman (Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 1996). Kofman struggled tragically with questions of faithfulness and betrayal in relation to her mother, as well as her father, whose pen she inherited and whose legacy she was determined to live up to by writing. Like Kofman, Aronowicz wrestles with her father’s faithfulness, in this case, to a Communist ideal, and with her own faithfulness to the lone adjective that stands as a chapter title, “Jewish.” She reflects on her father’s likely infidelity to her mother, describing the resentment she felt toward her mother for corralling her, as a child, into becoming an instrument to punish her father. Her mother, who spoke to her of the death camps at a tender age, never intentionally broached with her the question of her father’s infidelity. Aronowicz turns the question round and round, addressing it no more directly than she receives, and writing about it from an emotional and intellectual distance. Then something happens. A key character in the story turns out to be her parents’ friend Boris, whom she visits as a young woman. When she recounts his role, her story unfolds, much as in her reading of Singer’s “A...

When Contraceptive Means No Pregnancy: Narrative Account of Contraceptive Use among Reproductive Women at the Tamale Teaching Hospital, Ghana

When Contraceptive Means No Pregnancy: Narrative Account of Contraceptive Use among Reproductive Women at the Tamale Teaching Hospital, Ghana

Systemic Design as Born from the Berkeley Bubble Matrix

From the early 1960s and continuing into the 1980s, an aggregation of exceptional scholars and professionals formed in the University of California, Berkeley environs, establishing a common bond amongst themselves and with other networks of scholars, students, and professionals globally. They were not in the same disciplines, specializations, or professional fields. They were colleagues sharing a common aspiration. What they shared was a deep interest in, and commitment to, the utility of systems thinking and design action as a means to secure improvements and advancements in the human condition. This common bond resulted in what I have called The Berkeley Bubble—which was internationally influential inside and outside of academia. Unfortunately, the Bubble began dissipating in the closing years of the last century, leaving generative echoes of the ideas incubated and matured in this unique crucible to influence future generations. This essay is a narrative account of the individuals involved—starting with a doctoral committee composed of some of the key people entrained in this bubble—of their influences on one another and on the world of practitioner-scholars worldwide continuing through today.

P. R. Brahmananda. Money, Income, Prices in 19th Century India. Mumbai: Himalaya Publishing House, 2001. 744 pages. Hardbound. Indian Rs 1800.00.

Money, income, and prices are important macroeconomic variables that play a crucial roles in an economy. The trends in money supply, movements in prices, changes in nominal and real income, as well as their interrelationships affect the economic life and well-being of a nation. The compilation of data on these magnitudes over long periods of time along with the supporting analysis is what constitutes monetary history. The present book by P. R. Brahmananda has carried out such an exercise for India. In presenting the monetary history of India, the author has kept the pioneering work of Milton Friedman and Anna Shwartz as a model for his work, and has comprehensively treated the 19th century events and experiences of the then Indian Subcontinent in the monetary and related areas. In the process, more than 200 time series of different variables have been brought together. The book not only contains a narrative account including the summary of the various viewpoints before the currency committees, and a detailed chronology of the period, but also examines the pros and cons of the various controversies of that period. Moreover, it subjects the empirical evidence to econometric testing of several important hypotheses of the modern-day monetary theory.

The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty; The Fall of Reza Shah: The Abdication, Exile, and Death of Modern Iran’s Founder

The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty; The Fall of Reza Shah: The Abdication, Exile, and Death of Modern Iran’s Founder

Exploring the barriers and facilitators to accessing and utilising mental health services in regional, rural, and remote Australia: A scoping review protocol.

Australians from regional, rural, and remote areas face diverse and complex challenges in accessing and utilising mental health services. Previous research has pointed to a range of individual, community, structural, and systemic barriers at play, however, limited literature has synthesised the knowledge on this topic. Parallel to this, information on the facilitators to accessing and utilising mental health services for this group is not well documented. This protocol describes the methodology to undertake a scoping review, which aims to explore the barriers and facilitators associated with accessing and utilising mental health services in regional, rural, and remote Australia. In addition, the scoping review aims to geographically map the identified barriers and facilitators. This protocol is guided by Arksey and O'Malley's methodological framework. A search strategy will be developed and implemented to identify relevant peer-reviewed and grey literature. Studies will be included if they report on the barriers and/or facilitators associated with accessing and/or utilising mental health services in regional, rural, and remote Australia. Two reviewers will independently screen the data at the title/abstract and full-text stage. One reviewer will extract the relevant data using a predetermined charting form and a second reviewer will validate the included data. A Geographical Information System program will be used to map the location of the studies; locations will be stratified according to the Modified Monash Model and relationships between barriers and facilitators will be analysed. Key findings will be presented in a narrative account and in text, tables, and maps. This scoping review will provide a contemporary account on the barriers and facilitators to accessing and utilising mental health services for regional, rural, and remote Australians. It is anticipated that the results of this scoping review will have national policy relevance and may be useful to healthcare providers.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Female Academics with Young Children in South Africa

Against the backdrop of an increase in research on the effects of COVID-19, this article uses the analysis of survey data of female academics from the 26 higher education institutions in South Africa to identify how female academics with young children coped with academic output during the pandemic-enforced lockdown. A growing body of research documents the influence of children and childcare on the careers of female academics. In this article, we see how female academics who stayed at home during the enforced lockdown period negotiated childcare and home-schooling, and how the lockdown influenced their academic output. An online survey questionnaire was administered, consisting of 12 Likert-scale questions followed by an open-ended section that solicited a narrative account of academic work and home life during the lockdown period. Data on female academics with children under the age of six years was extracted for this study. The quantitative and qualitative data that emerged from our study of 2,018 women academics at 26 universities across South Africa describes how academic mothers felt, and how they struggled to complete the academic work required by their educational institutions. Such academic work directly influences future career prospects. This study highlights the influence that the presence of young children in the home, the pressures of home-schooling, traditional gender roles, and household responsibilities have on the academic careers of women.

The APSY-SED study: protocol of an observational, longitudinal, mixed methods and multicenter study exploring the psychological adjustment of relatives and healthcare providers of patients with cancer with continuous deep sedation until death

BackgroundSince 2016, France is the only country in the World where continuous deep sedation until death (CDSUD) is regulated by law. CDSUD serves as a response to refractory suffering in palliative situations where the patients’ death is expected to occur in the following hours or days. Little is known on the psychological adjustment surrounding a CDSUD procedure for healthcare providers (HCPs) and relatives. Our study aims to gather qualitative and quantitative data on the specific processes behind the psychological adjustment of both relatives and HCPs, after the administration of CDSUD for patients with cancer.MethodsThe APSY-SED study is a prospective, longitudinal, mixed-methods and multicenter study. Recruitment will involve any French-speaking adult cancer patient for who a CDSUD is discussed, their relatives and HCPs. We plan to include 150 patients, 150 relatives, and 50 HCPs. The evaluation criteria of this research are: 1/ Primary criterion: Psychological adjustment of relatives and HCPs 6 and 13 months after the death of the patient with cancer (psychological adjustment = intensity of anxiety, depression and grief reactions, CDSUD-related distress, job satisfaction, Professional Stress and Professional experience). Secondary criteria: a)occurrence of wish for a CDSUD in patients in palliative phase; b)occurrence of wish for hastened death in patients in palliative phase; c)potential predictors of adjustment assessed after the discussion concerning CDSUD as an option and before the setting of the CDSUD; d) Thematic analysis and narrative account of meaning-making process concerning the grief experience.DiscussionThe APSY-SED study will be the first to investigate the psychological adjustment of HCPs and relatives in the context of a CDSUD procedure implemented according to French law. Gathering data on the grief process for relatives can help understand bereavement after CDSUD, and participate in the elaboration of specific tailored interventions to support HCPs and relatives. Empirical findings on CDSUD among patients with cancer in France could be compared with existing data in other countries and with results related to other medical fields where CDSUD is also conducted.Trial registrationThis protocol received the National Registration Number: ID-RCB2021-A03042-39 on 14/12/2021.

Down with This Sort of Thing: Seth Heringer and the End of the Historical-Critical Method

Down with This Sort of Thing: Seth Heringer and the End of the Historical-Critical Method