Editorial – Issue 2
Welcome to the 2nd edition of the Brighton Journal of Research in Health Sciences (BJRHSc). You may notice a slight change to the name of the Journal. This local branding was done on the basis of discussions with our university Marketing and Communications advisors, because of the existence of several journals that already had the generic title.
The new edublog platform for this edition has several advantages over the more traditional format of the 1st edition of the Journal, and we gratefully acknowledge the help and advice of Nikki Marshall and Mark Higginson from Marketing and Communications who helped us make the shift. I would also like to thank David Bauckham and Simon Whiffin for the time that they have spent customising the site so that it supports the Journal’s needs.
The new platform allows readers to access previous editions of the Journal as well as the current one. Readers can also engage in academic debate on issues raised in all articles through the use of comments facility at the bottom of each (note that all comments will be moderated by the editorial team before they appear). Articles can be shared via a number of social media platforms such as Twitter and Google+, and the platform allows for media such as YouTube clips to be embedded. The content of the site will be indexed by Google and other search engines. Finally, all readers can subscribe to the Journal by email and will be alerted when any new content is published.
This second edition contains information on the SHS Seminar Programme, and contemporary and hopefully very interesting material from contributors. Nik Holland, a current mental health nursing student, makes a novel contribution to issue of the relationship between academic linguistic elitism and the nurse-patient divide. The separate mission statement, co-written with his fellow students, Zoe Hughes, Robyn-Jayne Crofton, Laura Johnstone, Chantelle Maduemezia, Sasha Marshall, Imogen Sotos-Castello and Graeme Wetherill, emerges from their relatively recently constituted Seeking Sense in Mental Health (SSiMH) student collective. As a group, SSiMH aims to create a helpful praxis forum to unite all who are interested or involved in mental health, service user groups and mental health-related organisations. It is refreshing to see such a level of engagement among nursing students, in times characterised by an urgent need for such examples of critically reflexive initiatives in nurse education, so very good luck SSiMH!
The article by Dr Tania McIntosh provides fascinating historical insights into the changing nature of relationships between midwives, the women they worked with, and the medical profession in urban England from the 1960s to the 1990s. Tania argues that the consumer movement in maternity that developed from the 1960s onwards impacted significantly on policy makers. It also contributed to the shape of a radical agenda for midwives, while constituting a threat to the sense of professional identity and confidence for some in this profession.
On the basis of her engagement in the University of Brighton’s Work, Write, Live creative writing courses, Helen Stanley has produced a very engaging short story in The Other Woman. There is a growing recognition of the utility of such stories as learning, transformational and research tools in the health, social and human sciences, and this is evidenced in the emerging Health Humanities paradigm. In this paradigm context, informed by narrative methodology, David Bauckham’s Love Not Money… article fuses leisure, health, wellbeing and community engagement with the existential meaning and significance of occupation through volunteering at non-League football clubs.
Community engagement is described as a vital component of higher education in both the University of Brighton’s current and emerging Strategic Plans. It is therefore relevant and timely to welcome the article co-written by Warren Stewart, Laura Brown and Sam Harris. This article reports of the evaluation of the impact of the experience of second year student nurses who, as part of optional module work, volunteered to engage with socially excluded groups of children and young people. The article speaks to the ways in which new skills can be imported into undergraduate nursing curricula, and to how the students’ experiences can be interpreted on the basis of educational and communication theory.
Such recognition of student contribution to pedagogy is also a vital part of our current and future strategic direction, and so it with pleasure that we have included Nicola Gentles’ article on the relevance of the Research Process in Nursing. This critical analysis of a research paper was originally submitted as her assignment for the research module, NI502 – Appreciating the Research Process in Nursing.
The new Strategic Plan emphasizes the importance of teaching informed by ongoing local, as well as national and international, research. The vital relationship between occupation and wellbeing and health is fundamental to teaching informed by the occupational science paradigm. In this context, the MSc research paper by Cathy White, a recent Occupational Therapy postgraduate student, and her tutor Dr Josh Cameron is a fascinating critical discourse analysis of the ways in which both occupational therapy and occupations have been represented in the medical media.
The Camtasia powerpoint, From lived experience to poststructural voice: Some implications for the use of autoethnography in mental health research was originally delivered to Masters in Social Work students at the University of Utah in January of this year. As an editorial and production team, we decided to include the link to it in the 2nd edition for two reasons. First, I hope that my development of this critique of some fundamental assumptions in mainstream qualitative research, and how this has informed my own research, writing and teaching, will be of interest to all readers involved in qualitative research.
The second reason is to pave the way for space in the Journal for Camtasia powerpoint teaching contributions. Camtasia powerpoint delivery is now of our time, arguably giving added value to pedagogy, the student experience, and the continuing professional development of academics.
We would therefore like to invite all lecturer readers, and relevant others, to submit their own Camtasia powerpoints for inclusion in the journal.
On behalf of the editorial and production team, we very much hope that you enjoy and are helped by the 2nd edition of the Brighton Journal of Research in Health Sciences, and we look forward to receiving your comments and contributions!
Dr Alec Grant
Reader in Narrative Mental Health
Lead Editor, Brighton Journal of Research in Health Sciences
School of Health Sciences