Alan Radley

Images of Recovery: A Photo-Elicitation Study on the Hospital Ward

The authors attempted to discover the part the physical setting of the ward plays in patients’ recovery by asking patients to take photographs of their ward, its spaces and objects, and then interviewing them about these images in hospital and subsequently in their homes. Photography allowed the patients to identify and capture aspects of the setting that they found salient and provided the photo-elicitation material for the interviews. Based on these data, the authors present (a) a critical discussion of the use of photography as method and its implications for qualitative analysis, (b) an overview of the kinds of image taken with respect to the ward and the course of patients’ recovery, and (c) a theoretical analysis, employing Walter Benjamin’s use of the concept of mimesis, that understands recovery as a bodily act in response to the shock to the senses that hospitalization and surgery produce.

Charitable Giving by Individuals: A Study of Attitudes and Practice

Charitable giving is a topic that has received little attention in the literature to date, in spite of the recent growth of the voluntary sector in the U.K This paper uses data from interviews with 49 people about their preferences for ways of giving, for kinds of causes, and their beliefs about the role of charity in society. Two main themes are selected for analysis: (a) the kinds of experience that people have had of others in need, and (b) the organization of giving, formally or informally, within social institutions. These themes are used to construct a conceptual framework showing that charitable giving reflects variations in the relationship of individuals to the community of which they are a part. This is a critical alternative to explanations of charity based upon either individual motive, social norms, or the setting in which the solicitation of gifts occurs.

Walking across disciplines: from ethnography to arts practice

While walking has long been implicated in ethnography and arts practice, in recent years it has become increasingly central as a means of both creating new embodied ways of knowing and producing scholarly narrative. This introduction explores this cross-disciplinary coalescence of interest in peripatetic practice. It raises a series of questions inspired by the walking/arts event, which was the starting point for this collection, as well as by the articles and works published in this special issue.

Remembering One’s Stay in Hospital: A Study in Photography, Recovery and Forgetting

This article addresses the question of how people remember their time as a hospital in-patient, and what place this remembering has in the work of recovery. It is based upon a study in which patients took photographs during their time on a hospital ward, using them later on as the basis for an interview in their homes. Using one woman’s data we discuss how the photo-based interviews made legible the images of her hospital experience and the part these images played in the respondent’s account of her recovery. The use of photographs is particularly useful in showing how remembering involves an ongoing transfer between different kinds of representation, including the narrative exploration of the movement of objects between hospital and home.

‘Near and Far’ Social Distancing in Domiciled Characterisations of Homeless People

For domiciled individuals, homeless people provide a disturbing reminder that all is not right with the world. Reactions to seeing homeless people frequently encompass repulsion, discomfort, sympathy and sometimes futility. This paper considers domiciled constructions of homeless people drawn from interviews with 16 participants recruited in the central business district of a New Zealand city. It documents how, when trying to make sense of this complex social problem, domiciled people draw on shared characterisations of homeless people. The concept of ‘social distance’ is used to interrogate the shifting and sometimes incongruous reactions evident in participant accounts. ‘Social distancing’ is conceptualised as a dynamic communal practice existing in interactions between human beings and reflected in the ways that domiciled people talk about their experiences with homeless individuals.

The aesthetics of illness : narrative, horror and the sublime

First-person accounts of life-threatening or terminal illness appear frequently in the academic literature and in the media. This paper takes up the question of how these accounts might provide, for their authors, a sense of coherence and freedom, and for their readers a grasp of suffering and its potential. By focusing upon the ‘horrors’ integral to such accounts, the argument is made that such horrors are basic to the sufferer’s symbolisation of an illness-world. This world, rather like the adventure, is torn from life, grounded in the sensuous fragments through which its elusory powers are expressed. Seen as the problematisation of life as a work of freedom, the illness account can then be analysed as an aesthetic project. The paper discusses this proposal, distinguishing between aesthetics and aestheticisation as social phenomena. It uses this distinction to make a critical observation upon attempts to understand suffering in the modern world in terms of power or of myth.

Health inequalities and homelessness : Considering material, spatial and relational dimensions

Homelessness is a pressing health concern involving material hardship, social marginalization and restrained relationships between homeless and housed people. This article links relational aspects of homelessness, and its health consequences, with material and spatial considerations through the use of photo-elicitation interviews with 12 rough sleepers in London. We highlight the relevance of embodied deprivation for a health psychology that is responsive to the ways in which social inequalities can get under the skin of homeless people and manifest as health disparities.

The mobile hermit and the city: considering links between places, objects, and identities in social psychological research on homelessness.

This article explores aspects of a homeless mans everyday life and his use of material objects to maintain a sense of place in the city. We are interested in the complex functions of walking, listening and reading as social practices central to how this man forges a life as a mobile hermit across physical and imagined locales. This highlights connections between physical place, use of material objects, imagination, and sense of self. Our analysis illustrates the value of paying attention to geographical locations and objects in social psychological research on homelessness.

Styles of adjustment to coronary graft surgery

Using Herzlichs descriptions of styles of adaptation to illness a conceptual scheme is offered which sets out four potential modes of adjustment to illness (ACCOMMODATION, ACTIVE-DENIAL, RESIGNATION, SECONDARY GAIN). A study is reported in which a group of 40 patients attending for CABGS were interviewed to assess their adjustment style, their expectations of surgery and their pattern of activities. A second group of 40 patients who had received CABGS approx. 11 months previously were also interviewed regarding their course of recovery, activity pattern and style of adjustment to illness. Results indicate that the same adjustment styles may not be employed prior to surgery as are adopted during recovery. Specific findings indicate that different styles of adjustment are consistent with different expectations of surgery; with changes in patterns of activity; and with particular courses of recovery. These differences were not explicable in terms of the degree of angina reported by patients either prior to or following CABGS. Discussion of these and related findings point to the explanatory potential of the conceptual system outlined in the paper, within which scheme further questions of adjustment to illness can be addressed.

What people do with pictures

This article argues that there is no single ‘voice’ that picturing makes audible, nor any single image that it makes visible. It examines how members of two different groups – hospital in-patients and homeless people – talk about photographs they had taken using cameras supplied by the researcher. Examples of these photographs are used in the article to examine conventions of picturing, different ways of narrating content and production, and movement of pictures through space and time. The argument is made that these features are variously deployed in explanations of what photographs mean. This leads to the conclusion that what pictures portray and what stories narrate are better thought of as versions of our experience of the world than as constructions of the world that we experience.