The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the lives of people all over the world. In particular, an unprecedented educational crisis has occurred due to the circumstances of physical distancing and remote learning. This article focuses specifically on the meaningful learning experiences in the everyday lives of adolescents during the pandemic. 72 meaningful learning experiences were identified from 11 participants who recorded their specific learning experiences for a week by a means of a journal recorded by themselves. A content analysis was (...) undertaken in order to identify the ecology (what, how, where, and who with) of the different learning experiences. The results show a prevalence of personal and conceptual learning, a presence of both formal and specifically informal, everyday activities among the meaningful learning experiences detected, the importance of peers, teacher and “learning experiences while alone,” and the use of digital technologies as learning resources; they also reveal the assistance of others in the learning process. The main contribution of this study illustrates how students in everyday life during pandemics are involved in a whole range of different activities both at school and at home. (shrink)

The concept of autonomy is central to many debates in aesthetics. However, exactly what it means to be autonomous in our aesthetic engagements is somewhat unclear in the philosophical literature. The normative significance of autonomy is also unclear and hotly debated. In this essay, I propose a method for clarifying this elusive concept by distinguishing three distinct senses or varieties of aesthetic autonomy: experiential autonomy, competence-based autonomy, and personal autonomy. On this taxonomy autonomy is a context-sensitive concept and autonomy applies (...) to several different moments or stages of aesthetic appreciation. Throughout this critical discussion, important issues concerning the nature of aesthetic appreciation are also explored. (shrink)

The aim of this article was to obtain an understanding of what is experienced as human dignity by nurses in surgical practice. In order to obtain experiences from practice, the critical incident technique was chosen. A total of 11 nurses from surgical practice wrote 49 stories about positive and negative incidents. The text was analysed using hermeneutical text interpretation. The findings revealed patient dignity in terms of preserved dignity, that is, healthcare professionals paid attention to the patient. Nurses experienced preserved (...) dignity when healthcare professionals allowed the patient to tell their story, allowed themselves to get close to the patient and in turn received the patient’s trust. Violated dignity included circumstances when the nurses were forced to see what they did not want to see. Nurses experienced violated dignity when healthcare professionals behaved rudely towards the patient, acted as if he or she was invisible or humiliated the patient at the end of life. (shrink)

Background: Food is an important part of nursing care and recognized as a basic need and a human right. Nutritional care for older adults in institutions represents a particularly important area to address in nursing education and practice, as the right to food can be at risk and health personnel experience ethical challenges related to food and nutrition. Objective: The present study investigates the development of coursework on nutritional care with a human rights perspective in a nursing programme for first-year (...) nursing students and draws upon reflections and lessons learned. Research design: The study utilized educational design research. The coursework, developed through two rounds, combined on-campus learning and clinical placement in nursing homes. Nursing studentsʼ perspectives and experiences gathered through focus groups and a written assignment informed the development and evaluation of the coursework. Participants and research context: In the first round, multistage focus group interviews were conducted with 18 nursing students before, during and after placement. In the second round, four focus group interviews with 26 nursing students were conducted shortly after placement. Ethical consideration: The study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Findings: Three main ʽlessons learnedʼ emerged regarding introducing a human rights perspective in nursing education: 1) the contribution of the human rights perspective in changing the narrative of ʽvulnerable and malnourished patientsʼ, 2) the importance of relationships and experiences for learning about human rights and 3) the benefit of combining development of ethical competence with a human rights perspective. Conclusion: A human rights perspective enabled the students to give meaning to nutritional care beyond understanding of food as a basic physical need. Incorporating human rights in nursing education can support nursing students and nurses in recognizing and addressing ethical and structural challenges and being able to fulfil the right to food for patients. (shrink)

The aim of the Nordic Network for the Archaeology and Archaeobotany of Gardening (NTAA), as it was phrased those first days in Alnarp in the beginning of March 2010, is to: ”bring researchers together from different disciplines to discuss the history, archaeology, archaeobotany and cultivation of gardens and plants”. We had no idea, then, how widely appreciated this initiative would become. The fifth seminar in five years was held on Visingsö June 1-3, 2014 and the sixth seminar will take place (...) in Kristiansand, Norway, June 12-14, 2015. We are very pleased to be able to publish this report, Sources to the History of Gardening: Four Interdisciplinary Seminars 2010–2013, Arranged By the Nordic Network for the Archaeology and Archaeobotany of Gardening (NTAA), based on the first four themes and seminars, in total 26 articles. Most of them origins from one of the seminar contributions 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively. However, the editorial group has taken the opportunity, with the aim of the network in mind, to add supplementing contributions on some subjects. The articles are arranged in four themes according to the themes of the seminars. The first theme Archaeological Sources to the History of Gardens and the Cultural Landscape is linked to the first seminar in Alnarp, Sweden, 2010 which had a focus on method, the important connections between archaeology and archaeobotany and the interesting progress within garden archaeology during the last decade. The second theme Cabbage Patches and Kitchen Gardens deals with the second seminar in Norrköping, Sweden, 2011. Its focus was on historical, cultural geographical, archaeological and archaeobotanical research concerning utility gardens or kitchen gardens as well as the concept ‘kålgård’ (cabbage patch or kale yard), its shape and content over time. The third theme Cultural and Garden plants: Under Ground, Above Ground, In Herbariums and Archives connects to the third seminar in Uppsala, Sweden, 2012. It focused on sources, source criticism and interdisciplinary research to gain knowledge on the history of garden cultivation and cultural plants. The articles discuss, among other things, herbariums, written sources, DNA and molecular markers, pollen analysis and georadar. The fourth theme for NTAA’s annual seminar was Cultural Relict Plants and was held on Bornholm, Denmark, 2013. The focus on the seminar was on research and conservation of cultural relict plants, that is cultural plants which have survived in the same place for a long time after the actual cultivation has ceased. We dedicate this report to Kjell Lundquist (1955-2011) who were one of the initiators to this network and we hope it will inspire continuous research and new methodological discussions. (shrink)

This article investigates a series of additions made to JRL Gaster MS 2037, a newly identified copy of Peter of Poitier‘s Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi. Following a detailed description and dating of the manuscript, it investigates two sets of additions to the roll in depth. It establishes that the first motive behind the inclusion of such additions was educative – serving to extend the historic information given in the Compendium, while the second motive was devotional – elevating the status (...) of the Virgin Mary through the enhancement of her genealogical record. Given the fact that the manuscript was produced in the mid-fifteenth century, this focus on the Virgin likely had a polemic purpose, situating the manuscript in the context of debates over the Immaculate Conception, and using Alexander Nequams Expositio super Cantica canticorumto this end. In identifying the sources used, as well as the limits on the compiler imposed by the physical form of the roll, this examination of Gaster MS 2037 offers an insight into the later reception of this popular text. (shrink)

In her 1999 article ‘The Scent of Memory’, Avtar Brah maps the ways in which gendered, classed and racialised identities and subjectivities are produced in the diaspora space of Britain. ‘The Scent of Memory’ begins, repeatedly returns to and ends with the figure of a mother — Jean, a white English woman in the Southall of the 1970s and 1980s. One way of reading this article is as a series of interruptions, each of which allows us to see Jean differently, (...) to replace her in what Brah has memorably termed the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of staying put. In this article, I stage my own set of speculative interruptions, through which recent feminist theorising of maternal subjectivities confronts the ways in which the maternal and the reproductive are conceptualised, metaphorised and mobilised in contemporary accounts of community cohesion, Britishness and belonging. At stake is our ability to challenge those still-dominant discourses that naturalise repetition and sameness as the necessary ground of belonging, obscuring and ignoring the gendered, racialised and other differences that mark Britishness, and which thereby reproduce the migrant and the minoritised as a problem for the stability of British identities. Following on from and extending Lisa Baraitser's claim that thinking about the relationship with the other ‘might just as well start with the mother’, I ask whether rethinking the reproductive can enable a more complex account of the ways in which ‘the native’ is transformed in diaspora spaces. (shrink)

BackgroundResearch proactively and deliberately aims to bring about specific changes to how societies function and individual lives fare. However, in the ever-expanding field of ethical regulations and guidance for researchers, one ethical consideration seems to have passed under the radar: How should researchers act when pursuing actual, societal changes based on their academic work?Main textWhen researchers engage in the process of bringing about societal impact to tackle local or global challenges important concerns arise: cultural, social and political values and institutions (...) can be put at risk, transformed or even hampered if researchers lack awareness of how their ‘acting to impact’ influences the social world. With today’s strong focus on research impacts, addressing such ethical challenges has become urgent within in all fields of research involved in finding solutions to the challenges societies are facing. Due to the overall goal of doing something good that is often inherent in ethical approaches, boundaries to researchers’ impact of something good is neither obvious, nor easy to detect. We suggest that it is time for the field of bioethics to explore normative boundaries for researchers’ pursuit of impact and to consider, in detail, the ethical obligations that ought to shape this process, and we provide a four-step framework of fair conditions for such an approach. Our suggested approach within this field can be useful for other fields of research as well.ConclusionWith this paper, we draw attention to how the transition from pursuing impact within the Academy to trying to initiate and achieve impact beyond the Academy ought to be configured, and the ethical challenges inherent in this transition. We suggest a stepwise strategy to identify, discuss and constitute consensus-based boundaries to this academic activity. This strategy calls for efforts from a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, advisors from the humanities and social sciences, as well as discussants from funding institutions, ethical committees, politics and the society in general. Such efforts should be able to offer new and useful assistance to researchers, as well as research funding agencies, in choosing ethically acceptable, impact-pursuing projects. (shrink)

Person‐centred care is founded on ethics as a basis for organizing care. In spite of healthcare systems claiming that they have implemented person‐centred care, patients report less satisfaction with care. These contrasting results require clarification of how to practice person‐centred ethics using Paul Ricoeur's ‘Little ethics’, summarized as: ‘aiming for the good life, with and for others in just institutions’. In this ethic Kantian morality is at once subordinate and complementary to Aristotelian ethics because the ethical goal needs to be (...) critically assessed and passed through the examination of the norm in each care situation. This paper presents examples that describes a person‐centred care practice that balance a critical review of care activities based on a conviction of aiming for patients' wellbeing. In contrast to patients' experiences of person‐centred care in real life, research projects have shown that if the clinical performers comprehend and apply the practice of person‐centred ethics, patients report positive outcomes. The implementation of person‐centred care therefore demands that stakeholders and managers enables and requires that healthcare staff study ethics in the same way as studying for example pharmacology is required when handling patients' medicines. (shrink)

Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...

This article is a contribution to the existing debate about the marketization of higher education and offers a detailed study of the way the practices of marketization manifest themselves at the level of discourse in higher education. Taking its point of departure in Critical Discourse Analysis and using a text-driven procedure for genre analysis, the article describes and analyses the international student prospectus as an instance of a highly promotional genre which clearly reflects the values and forces of the free (...) market. The article contains two analyses. The first analysis compares four instances of the international student prospectus genre from Finland, Scotland, Australia and Japan and tries to establish genre membership and genre characteristics by considering the overall text structure, and by looking for similarities in content and `rhetorical moves'. The second analysis is an in-depth analysis of the language use in the international student prospectus from the University of Stirling, Scotland. This analysis pays particular attention to the way the rhetorical moves and visual and lexico-grammatical features in the text are used to represent the two main participants in the text: the university and its students. Both analyses show that the student prospectus is trying to construct an image of the University of Stirling and its students which goes hand in hand with the new trend in higher education — namely that of offering innovative products to `demanding' clients on the look-out for the best possible `university experience'. (shrink)

As contemporary socio-ecological challenges such as climate change and biodiversity preservation have become more important, the three pillars concept has increasingly been used in planning and policy circles as a framework for analysis and action. However, the issue of how culture influences sustainability is still an underexplored theme. Understanding how culture can act as a resource to promote sustainability, rather than a barrier, is the key to the development of cultural sustainability. This book explores the interfaces between nature and culture (...) through the perspective of cultural sustainability. A cultural perspective on environmental sustainability enables a renewal of sustainability discourse and practices across rural and urban landscapes, natural and cultural systems, stressing heterogeneity and complexity. The book focuses on the nature-culture interface conceptualised as a place where experiences, practices, policies, ideas and knowledge meet, are negotiated, discussed and resolved. Rather than looking for lost unities, or an imaginary view of harmonious relationships between humans and nature based in the past, it explores cases of interfaces that are context-sensitive and which consciously convey the problems of scale and time. While calling attention to a cultural or 'culturalised' view of the sustainability debate, this book questions the radical nature-culture dualism dominating positive modern thinking as well as its underlying view of nature as pre-given and independent from human life. (shrink)

The United Nation’s (UN) 3rd Annual Multi-stakeholder Forum on ‘Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (STI Forum) - Transformation Towards Sustainable and Resilient Societies’ was held at the UN Headquarters in New York on 5th and 6th of June, 2018. This STI Forum set out to discuss a suit of the sustainable development goals, namely sustainable management of water and sanitation for all (SDG 6), sustainable consumption and production patterns (SDG 12), and sustainable terrestrial ecosystems (SDG 15). (...) It also discussed how to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all (SDG 7) and how to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable (SDG 11). I participated in the panel debate on ‘Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Terrestrial Ecosystems (SDG 15)’ – emphasizing the importance of food systems in the context of SDG 15. My statement is summarized below. The panel debate aimed at helping to identify good practices and policy recommendations, as well as challenges and needs, especially as they relate to international cooperation, innovation and capacity-building, with a view to facilitate the development, scaling up adoption and dissemination of relevant technologies for SDG 15. A food system can be described as a system that embraces all the elements (environment, people, inputs, processes, institutions, infrastructure, markets and trade) and activities that relate to the production, processing, distribution and marketing, preparation and consumption of food and the outputs of these activities, including socio-economic and environmental outcomes. A sustainable food system delivers food and nutrition security for all in such a way that the economic, social and environmental bases to generate food security and nutrition for future generations are not compromised. (shrink)

Background: In spite of a national strategy for reducing coercion in the mental health services, Norway still has a high rate of involuntary treatment compared to other European countries. It is therefore crucial to study various parties involved in involuntary treatment in order to reduce coercion. Research question: How do patients and staff in a Norwegian locked psychiatric ward experience coercion? Research design: Participant observation and interviews. Participants: A total of 12 patients and 22 employees participated in this study. Ethical (...) considerations: This study is accepted by the National Committee for Medical Health Research Ethics. Findings: The participants experienced coercion in different ways. Patients often felt inferior, while many of the staff felt guilty for violating patients’ dignity, although they ascribed responsibility for their actions to the “system.” The main themes are (1) corrections and house rules, (2) coercion is perceived as necessary, (3) the significance of material surroundings, and (4) being treated as a human being. Discussion: The discussion draws upon the concepts of vulnerability, guilty conscience, and ethical sensitivity, related to the staffs’ divergent views on coercion. Conclusion: Especially among staff, there are divergent views of coercion. Professionals being physically and emotionally close to the patient are more likely to understand him or her as a unique person with individual needs. If patients are kept at a distance, professionals as a group change to understand patients as members of a group with common needs and common restrictions. (shrink)

The present article aims to scrutinize publishing ethics in the fields of paediatrics and paediatric nursing. Full-text readings of all original research articles in paediatrics from a high-income economy, i.e. Sweden, and from all low-income economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, were reviewed as they were indexed and stored in Web of Science for the search period from 1 January 2007 to 7 October 2009. The application of quantitative and qualitative content analysis revealed a marked discrepancy in publishing frequencies between the two (...) contrasting economies. Authors from 16 low-income economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, with at least one article stored, were obviously closely linked to co-authorships and foreign funding sources, predominantly from Europe and the USA. Statements concerning conflicts of interest were frequently missing (both regions), even when multiple financial sources, including companies, were involved. It is necessary to be aware of possible systematic bias when using electronic databases to search for certain topics and regions. Further research regarding publishing ethics in paediatrics and paediatric nursing is emphasized. (shrink)

The right of access to documents is constitutionally based in Sweden and has a long history. The right of access is considered crucial to Swedish democracy. On entering the EU in 1995, Sweden declared that public access to official records forms part of Sweden’s constitutional, political and cultural heritage. The members of the EU for their part declared that they took it for granted that Sweden would fully comply with Community, now Union, law with respect to openness and transparency. Sweden (...) continues to push for transparency when EU legislation potentially containing secrecy clauses is negotiated in the EU. It turns out, however, that the EU membership does pose challenges to the strong Swedish right of access to documents. The protection of personal data is controversial in Sweden to the extent that the stricter EU legislation clashes with the traditionally weak protection of privacy in Swedish law; the right of access to information has largely overridden the right to privacy. Large amounts of publicly available personal data, amassed in data bases by private actors, for commercial reasons but under the protection of the Swedish constitution, is causing problems especially since the Swedish constitutional law is considered, by Sweden, to precede EU legislation in the field. Sweden will somehow have to solve the dilemmas caused by the differing traditions of transparency between itself and other members of the EU and of other international organizations. Many answers – perhaps converging - will be provided in 2016 by Swedish official inquiries and the EU Regulation.Article first published online: 22 MARCH 2016. (shrink)

The theory of formal spaces is developed in terms of presentations, in order to study effectivity.

When a child is hospitalized, the parents find themselves in an unfamiliar environment and their parental role changes. They are in a stressful and often anxiety-filled situation and it may be difficult for them to participate in decisions. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which parents participate in decisions during the course of events when their child is hospitalized. Thirty-five parents of 24 children (aged 5 months to 18 years) were followed by mobile observation during (...) their child’s hospitalization in a paediatric department in Sweden. Three researchers analysed field notes in three steps, using manifest and latent coding. In step 1, 119 situations that included a decision process were identified. In step 2, the situations were assessed according to a five-level scale concerning how the parents’ wishes, desires or values had been respected. In step 3, each situation was scrutinized with respect to factors influencing the extent of the parents’ participation. The results showed that parents have varying ability to be involved in decision making. Professionals need to communicate more openly with them in order to identify and satisfy their needs because some parents are unwilling or incapable of expressing them. (shrink)

Patients are supposed to be given care according to their needs. This concept is, however, difficult to define and patients and caregivers may have different opinions about a patient’s needs. Twenty patients were interviewed and asked to give a definition of need, describe their needs while hospitalized and depict what they do to make sure their needs are fulfilled. Ten groups of needs were identified: communication, basic care, contact with other people, behaviour of staff, empathy, competent caregivers, continuity, integrity, participation (...) in decision making, and pain relief. The descriptions patients gave of how they ensured their needs were met could be divided into two groups: openly seeking attention; or not wanting to disturb the staff. Interviews with patients emphasized the importance of recognizing that they have individual needs and varying abilities to see that their needs are fulfilled. (shrink)

This comment challenges essentialist “brain biased” interpretations of emotions from a historical perspective. (Digital) humanities research shows that the embodying of emotions is historically contingent. Emotion metaphors do not so much reflect what is happening in our brain or in other parts of the body: they reflect what people think/thought is/was happening in and outside their body.

Although using different labels, genre theorists from different traditions have generally given privilege to the communicative purpose, in this article referred to as rhetorical objective, as genre determinant. Genre analysts who have studied press releases in particular tend to share this view, but nevertheless categorize communicative events conveyed through the press release as belonging to one genre despite variation in rhetorical objectives. This article argues that although the press release may be seen as a genre on the basis of textual (...) form, it does not qualify for the genre label if analysed in terms of content and rhetorical objective. To substantiate my claim, I shall discuss a small corpus of press releases, all focusing on a specific biotechnological issue. In my analyses I shall discuss staging in terms of content as well as logico-semantic relations between stages, patterns of stage combinations and their linguistic realizations with the aim of identifying variation in rhetorical objective. (shrink)