This research looks at using Inclusive Design as mean to bridge the age-based digital divide, by conducting Action research in a Local Council in the UK. Research on the digital divide looks at the inequality in technology access between different demographical characteristics. While this is very useful to highlight access inequality, it fails to address the steps required to bridge the gap. Some research even suggested that the digital divide is bridged and that research in this field is irrelevant. This is due to the narrow focus of some researchers about the digital divide. The focus should be not on whether older people possess Information and Communications Technology (ICT) products; it should be on how they use their products and what we can do to improve the person-technology fit. On the other hand, inclusive design has been a main driver to ensure that buildings and products do not prohibit people with disabilities from utilising the building or product. However, there is limited research about the extension of inclusive design practices in Information Systems (IS), particularly interface design and system design. Most of the current design guidelines and best practices do not provide a holistic view of the inclusive design process, thus leaving the designers on their own in terms of producing an easy interface for users, by just merely implementing the accessibility guidelines provided by the W3C to ensure inclusivity of the website or online service. Assuming that inclusivity is reached only by including screen readers and magnified modes to prospective users. The aim of the research is to provide a clear picture to discover the main challenges to Inclusive Design as well as provide a holistic and thorough inclusive design metric that allows designers to ensure that their proposed website or online service is inclusive of users from different age groups and capabilities. This design methodology can customisable according to the website or online service requirements, highlighting the important features to ensure inclusivity. Using Action research as methodology to investigate and improve design practices in a local council. The research employed a mixture of research methods to understand and intervene in the creation of an inclusive e-service during the implementation of the Care Act 2014 in the Local Council. First, semi structured interviews were conducted to provide insights of the changes that the Care Act 2014 which brought upon social care and the way that social care services are being provided in the county. Then, observations were performed during the design sessions of the online services in the Local Council to see how the design process is being carried out to ensure that the website is inclusive of all prospective users. Finally, when the website is fully developed it was tested on various users with from different age groups using the inclusivity index developed as part of the evaluation phase of the design methodology. In addition, interviews with older adults were conducted to understand the issues that make them using ICT difficult so the needs of these users were documented to help in the design process later on. The research indents to advance knowledge about inclusive design from practical and theoretical perspective. Practically, this research will help web designers and organisations looking to cater online services to as many people as possible and design methodology that fosters inclusivity. Moreover, this will help older adults to use online service by themselves, thus ensure that they can remain independent and exercise control over their needs from the government or otherwise. Theoretically, this research will help to shed the light on the digital divide and the ways to bridge this divide. By creating an inclusive design methodology that can fundamentally address the causes of the divide rather than just simply patch existing design methodologies.

No description available.

One year before my academic life began, Jim Kemeny published a book called ‘Housing and Social Theory’ (Kemeny 1992). This book has had a major impact within European housing and urban research over the last two and a half decades, not least by crystalizing its epistemic divisions into ‘mainstream’ and ‘critical’ (Webb 2012). In the face of Kemeny’s critique, ‘mainstream’ housing and urban researchers have remained wedded to ‘policy oriented’ empiricist approaches about which they have been defensive. In fact, it could even be argued that policy oriented housing researchers have been emboldened during this period. On the other hand, some housing and urban researchers have spent the last 25 years exploring the relationship between housing and social theory with a view to developing a more ‘critical’ understanding of housing and housing policy. My own work falls into this latter category and can be broken down into three phases (represented in the three parts of this thesis) which all bear the hallmarks of Kemeny’s influence, to greater or lesser degrees. Kemeny’s influence is most obvious in part I of the thesis. This contains a series of papers that represent my attempts to develop a sociology of housing and housing research. Although my initial contributions to the literature focussed on the social construction of housing problems and policy, my subsequent interventions recognise that it is not enough to focus ‘critical’ theoretical attention on policy issues alone; the context of research practice, itself, requires the same critical theoretical attention. This recognition set me on an intellectual track that resulted in published contributions to the sociology of knowledge literature, within the entrepreneurial context of the contemporary university. These contributions examine how entrepreneurial contexts shape academic subjectivities and the sociological episteme. If part I of the thesis finds sociology useful in illuminating housing policy and housing research practice then part II contains a book and two papers that call it into question. The origins of this ‘hostile turn’ towards sociology are in two pieces of research (into the lives of heroin users and visual impaired children) where sociology had hindered my attempts to develop an adequate knowledge of the phenomena under the microscope. The publications in this part of the thesis embrace phenomenology to make theoretical sense of the limits of the sociological episteme and to develop a more adequate understanding of the lives of heroin users and visual impaired children. They also set me on an intellectual path that led to my theoretical development of a more fundamental critique of housing and urban research and, eventually, a constructive and reconciliatory resolution to what I have argued are its epistemic limitations. The book and two papers contained in part III of the thesis were produced in conditions of acute conflict. The book and ‘fallacy paper’ were written in response to the controversial housing market renewal programme but were contextualised within my wider intellectual concerns about the fundamental problems of housing and urban research. They represent a full-frontal intellectual ‘attack’ on the professional enterprise of housing and urban research and its social consequences. The ‘impact’ paper was written and published 5 years later, following a ‘career break’ during which I had reflected on the fundamentally conflictual nature of housing and urban research and sought nonviolent alternatives to such conflict. It outlines a reconciliatory approach to housing and urban research that is true to the intellectual argument in the ‘fallacy paper’ whilst seeking to outline and advance the possibilities for collaboration between housing and urban researchers and their constituencies.

Aim: To investigate how diversity within the African migrant population in Scotland affects their understandings of HIV and uptake of HIV testing and treatment, in order to improve HIV-related outcomes. Background: In the UK, Africans have the worst outcomes for HIV infection, primarily due to late diagnosis. Improvement requires better understanding of the barriers to healthcare engagement. This PhD study investigates how diversity among first generation African migrants in Scotland could affect engagement with general healthcare and HIV related interventions and services. Methods: I conducted qualitative research, involving participant observation at two sites (an African religious group and an asylum seeker/refugee drop-in centre) and interviews with African migrants attending these and three additional sites (two advocacy charities and a student association). Data were collected in two cities (Glasgow and Edinburgh) and two smaller towns (Paisley and Kirkcaldy). I interviewed 27 Africans, including economic migrants (n=8), students (n=9) and asylum seeker/refugees (n=10) and 14 representatives from organisations with high levels of African attendees (e.g., country associations, community organisations, advocacy groups, commercial establishments and religious based organisations). Thematic data analysis was carried out. Results: Diversity of the population and related issues of identity: Participants were highly diverse and reported considerable heterogeneity in the African diaspora in Scotland. The identity of “African” was bound with various negative stereotypes and appeals to this identity did not necessarily have relevance for participants. Nature of African affiliated organisations in Scotland: There were a wide range of organisations that advertised their remit as catering for the African diaspora. They varied in consistency and sustainability and contributed towards healthcare engagement to different degrees. Engagement with healthcare: There were multiple experiences and understandings of the healthcare system within the sample as a whole, and to an extent by migrant type. Whilst the majority reported successful and satisfactory service use, distinct barriers emerged. These included: understandings of rights and access to care based on African models of healthcare; the interplay of religious based understandings with ideas about access to healthcare; and assumptions and anxiety about the connections between visa status and health status. Knowledge of HIV and engagement with HIV related services: Participants had good knowledge about HIV, with some notable exceptions, but there was no patterning by migrant type. They had diverse views about risk of HIV infection, most of which did not align with the HIV epidemiology that identifies African migrants as an at risk group. Most of the sample did not think targeting African migrants for HIV interventions would be successful and were hostile to the proposal for various reasons, especially because they believed it would perpetuate stigma and prejudice towards the African diaspora. There were mixed experiences of HIV related services, and prompts to test for HIV had elicited a range of reactions, the majority negative. Conclusion: Diversity within the African diaspora in Scotland should be taken into account to improve the salience and relevance of future HIV interventions. Attitudes towards current HIV testing promotion suggest that a more cooperative approach could be taken with African communities to build on existing relationships of trust and understandings of HIV.

No description available.

It is commonly observed that people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) make fewer attempts to have social contact. A recent theory suggests that reduced motivation to have social interactions might be the root for social difficulties in ASD (Chevallier, Kohls, Troiani, Brodkin, & Schultz, 2012). There are currently few simple behavioural ways to test these claims. The aim of this research was 1) to develop a measure of social seeking component of social motivation that is simple enough to be used with a large population of people with ASD; and 2) to test if there is evidence of reduced social seeking in people with ASD. As the first part of this research, I developed and tested a simple behavioural paradigm “Choose-A-Movie” (CAM) that evaluates the effort participants make to view social vs non-social stimuli hence estimating the reward value of the stimuli. It was found that typical adults prefer to watch social stimuli more but they trade-off their stimuli preference for effort. In experiment 2 I used the same paradigm with adults with and without ASD and found that unlike typical adults people with ASD prefer non-social stimuli but they too trade-off their stimuli preference for effort. Having established the efficacy of the CAM paradigm in adults with and without ASD, in experiment 3 I explored CAM’s efficacy for younger participants. A comparison between adolescents with and without ASD on CAM showed that both groups prefer choice requiring less effort, and participants with ASD prefer non-social stimuli to social. However unlike typical adults, typical adolescents did not show a preference for social stimuli. Though these experiments supported the reduced social motivation theory of ASD, they raised questions about the development of social seeking in typical people. Therefore, in experiment 4 I tested participants between ages 4-20 years on CAM. The results showed that typical individuals undergo a decline in their social seeking tendencies during pre-adolescence. This highlights the need for developmental evaluation of social seeking in both ASD and non-ASD populations. Finally, in experiment 5 the CAM paradigm was compared with an Approach-avoidance (AA) task, a frequently used measure of social seeking (Aharon et al., 2001). The findings suggested that social preference could be elicited more strongly in typical adults using CAM paradigm. Furthermore the autistic traits of participants were a reliable predictor of social seeking on CAM but not on AA task. These results raise the question of whether different tools claiming to measure social seeking target the same behaviour. Overall, this research shows that social motivation can be quantified using a simple behavioural paradigm – CAM that targets social seeking component of it, and also that social motivation is reduced in people with ASD. At the same time this research raises important questions about 1) developmental changes in social seeking in typical people, and 2) if different tools of social seeking, measure the same underlying construct. It is important to explore these questions to have a better understanding of social seeking in people with ASD.

The financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent economic collapse has helped bring scholarly attention on a sociological dimension of financial markets (Mackenzie 2009, Stark 2009, Knorr Cetina and Preda 2012). Despite recent research advancements in this area, however, the understanding of how financial markets are organised and reproduced remains limited. In particular, there is very little about the individual actors in the markets, how they think and act, and how they make sense of social context or how their experience is within it. This thesis contributes to addressing these questions by focusing on how investment bankers construct their professional identities and in particular, how did this process look like during the financial crisis of 2008. Three main areas are investigated: (i) what resources investment bankers draw on to construct their professional identities, (ii) what motivates them to do so, and (iii) how the process has been demonstrated through bankers’ lived experiences of the crash. To this end, the research integrates literature from the field of sociology of financial markets and identity. I argue that looking at professional identity construction through the lens of Honneth’s (1995) theory of struggle for recognition allows for a better understanding of the political nature of the intersubjective relationships in markets, alongside some of the pathologies that may develop in the periods of enhanced uncertainty. Methodologically, I conceptualise identities as narratives, in particular drawing on Ricoeur’s ( 1988) work on narrative identity. The analysis rests on the investment bankers’ accounts of their experiences of the crisis. By exploring how they have constructed their subjective understandings of reality and how they incorporated these into their professional identity narratives, the thesis advances the understanding of markets as political arenas of values, emotions and power games. I explore a number of frames the bankers used in order to position their identities within the workplace; including smartness, sacrifice, ambivalent status of money and temporality. I demonstrate that identity construction is inherently political and based on a fragile structure of systemic trust and interpersonal trust relationships. Threatened by the crisis, the bankers responded by creating liminal spaces in an attempt to re-align the identity narratives. The findings bear theoretical implications. Firstly , I argue that trust is a missing component in the theory of recognition when it deals with social cooperation. Secondly, I argue that as recognition normatively regulates social interactions in markets, actors are first and foremost power maximisers. I show that influencing expectations becomes, therefore, a central task for actors in the markets, leading to the development of reified identities. As a result, the emergent liminal spaces are shown to be arenas of the inherent struggle for recognition.

This research explores the functions of music by analyzing the relationship between musical and social classification. More particularly it focuses on the manifestation of this relationship during the active participation of audiences in music events where the individual and the collective, the musical and the social are argued to be experientially interwoven. The main argument proposed is that music categories as well as the ritualistic structures and expressions that shape their corresponding live performances are linked with perceptions and fantasies of the social self. Considering elements such as representations, performativity and the constitution of identity within social interaction, this study questions the class-­‐focused approaches conventionally employed to explore the subject. Contrarily it proposes that the ‘reality’ or fantasy of the social self is not ‘a given’ but it is personally configured, and relates the construction of social identities to notions of the spectacle. The interplay between the mediatized representations that shape music categories and individuals’ agency to choose and construct their identity is argued to produce different discursive and performative expressions of ‘the ideal’. In this context, music rituals are sketched as opportunities for the celebration and legitimization of their embodied values, and idealized social identities and relationships. The empirical part of this investigation focuses on Greek music audiences. Employing semi-­‐structured interviews it examines the way individuals with different music identifications construct their understandings of music categories and their rituals, as well as their perceived interconnections with social identities. Its findings suggest that music categories are perceived as naturally linked with different aspects of individuals’ social selves and realities that are expressed and actualized in music performances, verifying the performative and discursive intertwinement of the two modes of classification. However, the analysis of the data collected also indicates that the values expressed or experienced during such immersive processes, which combine social relationships, cultural categories, and multisensory experiences, necessitate widening the theorization of the ‘ideal’.

This child-centred case study, which explored the impact of parental imprisonment on children, developed from the European COPING research project (2010 - 2012). Qualitative methods and a thematic analysis were used to review data from interviews with children, their parents/carers and imprisoned parents, in 22 families, mainly from the north of England. My findings confirmed that the quality of children’s relationships with their parent/carer and other relatives is the most important protective factors for them. Children’s resilience is frequently characterised by a two-way empathetic process, children being supported by their parents/carers and supporting them in return. Time is a crucial dimension in how children experience parental imprisonment. The experience of stigma was almost universal for families in this study. Children were cautious about sharing information about parental imprisonment. Paternal and maternal imprisonment impact differentially on children. Children seem more likely to experience emotional turmoil from the imprisonment of their same sex parent. Girls tend to be more resilient and boys more vulnerable. Schools are most often the agencies best placed to help children of prisoners. Parents/carers frequently gained self-confidence from successfully fulfilling their responsibilities. They re-appraised their imprisoned partner’s role and status, and families developed either more open or more closed policies about handling parental imprisonment. Imprisoned parents can partially fulfil their parenting roles. Alongside the harm caused to children by parental imprisonment, a majority of families experienced some benefits. Further research should explore the differential impact of parental imprisonment on girls and boys in more detail.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the high point of class struggle in the twentieth-century. For the first time in world history, a social movement predicated on the overcoming of class exploitation succeeded in gaining state power. In the days and weeks following October 1917 insurrection, a self-declared Marxist government set about the task of constructing a socialist society. However the Russian Revolution was more than the mass political mobilisation of class resentments. In addition to proletarians and peasants, the Bolsheviks also mobilised national minorities, for whom October represented the opportunity to put an end to centuries of national oppression. The Bolshevik promise, therefore, entailed not just class solidarity, but national self-determination and internationalism as well. In the very moment of revolution, however, these sentiments were put to the test as mass outbreaks of antisemitic pogroms spread across the vast regions of the former Pale of Settlement. The pogroms posed fundamental questions for the Bolshevik project, since they revealed the nature and extent of working class and peasant attachments to antisemitic and racialised forms of consciousness. This dissertation has two broad aims: first, it sets out to offer the most comprehensive analysis to date of the explosive articulation between antisemitism and the revolutionary process. It reveals, for example, the extent to which class struggle and anti-bourgeois discourse could overlap with antisemitic representations of Jewishness, often with devastating consequences. Second, it offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of the Soviet government attempt to arrest this articulation between antisemitism and revolutionary politics. Contrary to existing understandings, the dissertation argues that the ‘Bolshevik’ campaign against antisemitism was led not the Party leadership, as is often assumed, but by a small grouping of non-Bolshevik Jewish socialists who worked in the Party and Soviet government throughout 1918 and 1919. Having brought into focus an almost entirely overlooked moment in the history of Jewish experiences of, and responses to, antisemitism, the dissertation concludes by reflecting on how this reframing of the Russian Revolution might offer insights for anti-racists and socialists engaged in struggles for social justice today.