Sensory

A simple, inexpensive system for digital particle image velocimetry (DPIV) in biomechanics

by Kurt Schwenk

Multi‐sensory storytelling as an aid to assisting people with profound intellectual disabilities to cope with sensitive issues: a multiple research methods analysis of engagement and outcomes

by Hannah Young

The importance of storytelling in social, cultural and educational contexts is well established and documented. The... more The importance of storytelling in social, cultural and educational contexts is well established and documented. The extension of storytelling to people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) has in recent years been undertaken with an emphasis on the value of sensory experience and the context
storytelling provides for social interaction. The present study builds on earlier curriculum orientated research with a view to describe patterns of social and storyoriented interaction during storytelling. The stories dealt with sensitive topics raised by family carers who wished the young person with PIMD to understand. Behavioural observation during storytelling sessions explored changes in engagement while semi-structured interviews with parents and professionals explored the extent to which the experience had benefitted the young person with
respect to the sensitive topic. Positive changes in engagement with the story were shown for seven of the eight participants. For six of the seven, a parent and a professional agreed that the outcome of the experience positively enabled the participant to cope better with the sensitive topic. The specific multi-sensory
storytelling factors leading to these outcomes are discussed, as is the issue of proxy reporting and determining the nature of understanding in people with PIMD.

Towards Geographies of Speech: Proverbial Utterances of Home in Contemporary Vietnam

by Katherine Brickell

in press, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Whilst social life is discursively constituted, produced and reproduced through situated acts of speaking, this paper... more Whilst social life is discursively constituted, produced and reproduced through situated acts of speaking, this paper contends that geographers have failed to devote sustained attention to speech as a practice that provokes meanings in, and of, different spaces. Despite calls to human geographers twenty years ago by Yi-Fu Tuan to take speech seriously the paper demonstrates how geographers could benefit from greater engagement in practice; what disposes people to speak in the way they do, how and when they do, and how lived experiences and inherited knowledges are interwoven into these active moments. Interrogating spatial ontologies of speech revealed through research conducted in contemporary Vietnam, the paper reveals the repeated utterances of the proverb ‘men build the house, women build the home’ and the differentiated interpretations and etiological tales that arose in relation. The findings on normative and then transgressive usages and significations of these utterances shows how a greater sensory holism could, in part, be achieved by bringing the discipline into more committed conversation with geographies of speech both in and between the Global South and Global North. The paper signals a much broader agenda in geographical research that takes fuller heed of the spatial imaginings and meanings embedded in, and uttered through, oral cultures, folklore and speech.

Investigating prospectives of using fiber optics based sensors in dentistry

by TAREK ELSARNAGAWY