Alan Radley
Biographic Data
| ID | 3596900 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alan Radley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alan |
| FAMILY NAME | Radley |
| SIGNATURE | RADLEY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loughborough University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 789 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
A personal reflection on health: 20 Years On
This article looks back to the origins of health: from the perspective of its Founding Editor. Reviewing the journal's original statement of aims, the terms 'refraction' and 'moment' are selected to provide a brief discussion of health and illness as defining the journal's continuing focus
Home as a hybrid centre of medication practice
This article presents research that explores how medications are understood and used by people in everyday life. An intensive process of data collection from 55 households was used in this research, which included photo-elicitation and diary-elicitation interviews. It is argued that households are at the very centre of complex networks of therapeutic advice and practice and can usefully be seen as hybrid centres of medication practice, where a pl…
The Study of the Case: Conceptualising Case Study Research
This paper recommends that the study of the case be seen as of primary analytic concern to social and community psychologists. Criticism is made of the idea that a case is merely an instance or a methodological option. Instead, we argue that psychologists should re‐direct their attention to the ‘study of the case’ as being central to issues concerning social life. There are three reasons for doing this. First, case study is basic to any procedure…
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 c…
Another way of knowing: Art, disease and illness experience
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 move…
From means to occasion: Walking in the life of homeless people
This article discusses walking by homeless people, who were asked to take photographs of their everyday lives. These individuals walked to take their pictures, and they used their photographs to explain the walking that homeless people do. Stories about photographs taken were used to explain the significance of different modes of walking, as means, as condition and as occasion. Rather than see walking as integral with a kind of method - or ready-…
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 th…
Emplacement and everyday use of medications in domestic dwellings
A sociological commentary on the refusal of treatment by patients with cancer
This paper examines the question of why patients decline treatment for cancer. Though small in number, patients with cancer who refuse treatment pose a problem for physicians and other health professionals managing their care. From the medical perspective such a decision appears irrational, and research has been conducted to try to identify features of patients and their situation that predispose this outcome. Research has also examined communica…
Ribbon Culture: Charity, Compassion and Public Awareness – By Sarah E.H. Moore
A trip to the library: Homelessness and Social Inclusion
This article explores homeless men's visits to a public library. It shows how homeless men identified the library as a space for safety and social participation, at a time when the regional newspaper published an item questioning the appropriateness of their presence in the library. The news report promotes universal narratives that would exclude homeless people, showing the intimate relationship between the symbolic space of news, the material s…
Time, space and opportunity in the outpatient consultation: The doctor's story
Considering Photographs Never Taken During Photo-production Projects
The visual medium is central to how most of us navigate daily life and come to know and interact with our social worlds. Recently, the role of visual dimensions of everyday life has surfaced in qualitative research in psychology. This paper explores some of the underlying processes foundational to participants' efforts to picture their worlds during photo-production projects. We draw on excerpts from a study of images of homelessness in London to…
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 r…
Artworks, collective experience and claims for social justice: The Case of Women Living With Breast Cancer
This article discusses the role of 'artworks' produced by women with breast cancer in the context of breast cancer activism. We argue that such works play a key role in making visible and collective the ideological issues surrounding this disease. They do this through their potential for anchoring social practices relating to its treatment and what might be done about it (Klawiter 2004, Swidler 2001). The article focuses upon the work of two wome…
Life in the shadow of the media: Imaging street homelessness in London
Media images pervading everyday life often reproduce inequitable social relations that adversely affect the lives of vulnerable people. This article explores the influence of media representations of homelessness as a source of characterizations that are used by homeless people when representing themselves. To do this, it draws on life narrative interviews, photographic exercises and phogo-based discussions with 12 single rough sleepers from Lond…
The making of health: A Reflection on the First 10 Years in the Life of a Journal
This introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Issue surveys articles that have been published in health: since its launch. Reviewing the original aims of the journal, the editors discuss some of the main issues that authors have raised, both about health and illness. Focusing upon articles that have been published in this particular journal, we discuss the way that new medical technologies - particularly global ones - have shaped ideas about disease…
Fear, romance and transience in the lives of homeless women
This paper takes up the question of what it means to be a woman who lives on the streets and in hostels as a homeless person in London. Using qualitative data from three women respondents, the analysis focuses upon their reasons for becoming and staying homeless. We address issues concerning the women's perceptions of danger and safety on the streets, the way they construct their role as women in this situation and their options for alternative w…
Visualizing homelessness: A study in photography and estrangement
This article reports a qualitative study of how homeless people visualize their life in hostels and on the streets of London. Using a photo-production technique, the research enabled participants to show their situation as well as to tell about their experiences. Participants were given cameras and asked to take photographs typical of their day as homeless people, this material being the subject of a subsequent interview. This provided both visua…
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 …
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 …
Worlds of Illness: Biographical and Cultural Perspectives on Health and Disease
Portrayals of Suffering: On Looking Away, Looking at, and the Comprehension of Illness Experience
This article addresses the question of what it is that visual depictions of illness portray, particularly images executed by or on behalf of people who have suffered serious illness. It takes up two lines of inquiry, both to do with the work that such pictures might perform. On the one hand, as works of art, there are questions about the form of signification in visual representations of this kind. On the other, as works of illness, there are iss…
Health psychology and the study of the case: From Method to Analytic Concern
Accounts of health and illness: Dilemmas and representations
This paper argues that people's views of health and illness are best understood as accounts that they give to others. In that sense, such beliefs are neither the expression of fixed inner attitudes, nor evidence for shared social representations. Instead, we emphasise the importance of seeing health talk as both ideological and dilemmatic. The paper explores the way in which individuals who speak of health (or illness) in general must also give a…
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 …
The Elusory Body and Social Constructionist Theory
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 r…
A trip to the library: Homelessness and Social Inclusion
This article explores homeless men's visits to a public library. It shows how homeless men identified the library as a space for safety and social participation, at a time when the regional newspaper published an item questioning the appropriateness of their presence in the library. The news report promotes universal narratives that would exclude homeless people, showing the intimate relationship between the symbolic space of news, the material s…
Visualizing homelessness: A study in photography and estrangement
This article reports a qualitative study of how homeless people visualize their life in hostels and on the streets of London. Using a photo-production technique, the research enabled participants to show their situation as well as to tell about their experiences. Participants were given cameras and asked to take photographs typical of their day as homeless people, this material being the subject of a subsequent interview. This provided both visua…
Style, discourse and constraint in adjustment to chronic illness
This paper discusses the problem of adjustment to chronic illness in terms of the demands of the patient's body and the constraints of culture. Criticism is offered of explanations which reduce such adjustment to a form of functional adaptation, either to symptoms or to social expectations taken separately. The argument is made that social constraints are embodied in everyday conduct, while bodily changes are made sensible through meanings engend…
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) th…
Fear, romance and transience in the lives of homeless women
This paper takes up the question of what it means to be a woman who lives on the streets and in hostels as a homeless person in London. Using qualitative data from three women respondents, the analysis focuses upon their reasons for becoming and staying homeless. We address issues concerning the women's perceptions of danger and safety on the streets, the way they construct their role as women in this situation and their options for alternative w…
Considering Photographs Never Taken During Photo-production Projects
The visual medium is central to how most of us navigate daily life and come to know and interact with our social worlds. Recently, the role of visual dimensions of everyday life has surfaced in qualitative research in psychology. This paper explores some of the underlying processes foundational to participants' efforts to picture their worlds during photo-production projects. We draw on excerpts from a study of images of homelessness in London to…
Health psychology and the study of the case: From Method to Analytic Concern
Home as a hybrid centre of medication practice
This article presents research that explores how medications are understood and used by people in everyday life. An intensive process of data collection from 55 households was used in this research, which included photo-elicitation and diary-elicitation interviews. It is argued that households are at the very centre of complex networks of therapeutic advice and practice and can usefully be seen as hybrid centres of medication practice, where a pl…
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 …
Artworks, collective experience and claims for social justice: The Case of Women Living With Breast Cancer
This article discusses the role of 'artworks' produced by women with breast cancer in the context of breast cancer activism. We argue that such works play a key role in making visible and collective the ideological issues surrounding this disease. They do this through their potential for anchoring social practices relating to its treatment and what might be done about it (Klawiter 2004, Swidler 2001). The article focuses upon the work of two wome…
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 o…
Illness as adjustment: A Methodology and Conceptual Framework
This paper describes a method for studying individual adjustment to illness. The methodology draws upon the conceptual framework offered by Herzlich (1973) and defines four modalities of adjustment - accommodation, active-denial, secondary gain and resignation. The relevance of these modalities for understanding how people come to terms with illness is indicated with reference to a variety of studies of chronic illness describing such adjustments…
Emplacement and everyday use of medications in domestic dwellings
Portrayals of Suffering: On Looking Away, Looking at, and the Comprehension of Illness Experience
This article addresses the question of what it is that visual depictions of illness portray, particularly images executed by or on behalf of people who have suffered serious illness. It takes up two lines of inquiry, both to do with the work that such pictures might perform. On the one hand, as works of art, there are questions about the form of signification in visual representations of this kind. On the other, as works of illness, there are iss…
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 c…
Health Psychology, Embodiment and the Question of Vulnerability
The topic of the body is now firmly on the agenda for psychology, as it has been for sociology for some time. What contribution will health psychology make to this debate? This article argues that the biomedical view of the physical body is inappropriate for a psychology addressing the key concerns of suffering and healing. Instead, health psychology needs to theorize what it means to be embodied in the context of illness and of health care. To d…
Life in the shadow of the media: Imaging street homelessness in London
Media images pervading everyday life often reproduce inequitable social relations that adversely affect the lives of vulnerable people. This article explores the influence of media representations of homelessness as a source of characterizations that are used by homeless people when representing themselves. To do this, it draws on life narrative interviews, photographic exercises and phogo-based discussions with 12 single rough sleepers from Lond…
Bearing illness: Study of couples where the husband awaits coronary graft surgery
Abhorrence, Compassion and the Social Response to Suffering
This article re-examines the question of ‘blaming the other’ and the stigmatization of the sick. It sets recent analyses of the stigmatization of illness within a cultural context (effectively North American) that has been concerned with the AIDS epidemic in particular. The article argues that this focus upon difference as an undesirable response to sickness in general has lead to the marginalization of expressive reactions to suffering. These re…
Styles of adjustment to coronary graft surgery
Reflections upon charitable giving: A comparison of individuals from business, ‘manual’ and professional backgrounds
This paper compares three groups of individuals in their beliefs about charitable giving. Focusing upon their preferences for different kinds of needy recipients, the paper compares the views of 49 people from (a) business, (b) professional and (c) ‘manual’ backgrounds. Their justifications of need provided the basis for comparisons on the basic themes of emotional response to requests for funds, to local versus overseas aid and to the relative r…
The effect of role enactment upon construed alternatives
Theory and data in the study of 'coronary proneness' (type a behaviour pattern)
The embodiment of social relations in coronary heart disease
Styles of adjustment to coronary graft surgery
Bearing illness: Study of couples where the husband awaits coronary graft surgery
Illness as adjustment: A Methodology and Conceptual Framework
This paper describes a method for studying individual adjustment to illness. The methodology draws upon the conceptual framework offered by Herzlich (1973) and defines four modalities of adjustment - accommodation, active-denial, secondary gain and resignation. The relevance of these modalities for understanding how people come to terms with illness is indicated with reference to a variety of studies of chronic illness describing such adjustments…
Style, discourse and constraint in adjustment to chronic illness
This paper discusses the problem of adjustment to chronic illness in terms of the demands of the patient's body and the constraints of culture. Criticism is offered of explanations which reduce such adjustment to a form of functional adaptation, either to symptoms or to social expectations taken separately. The argument is made that social constraints are embodied in everyday conduct, while bodily changes are made sensible through meanings engend…
Reflections upon charitable giving: A comparison of individuals from business, ‘manual’ and professional backgrounds
This paper compares three groups of individuals in their beliefs about charitable giving. Focusing upon their preferences for different kinds of needy recipients, the paper compares the views of 49 people from (a) business, (b) professional and (c) ‘manual’ backgrounds. Their justifications of need provided the basis for comparisons on the basic themes of emotional response to requests for funds, to local versus overseas aid and to the relative r…
The social psychology of material possessions: To have is to be
The Body and Social Psychology
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) th…
The Elusory Body and Social Constructionist Theory
Displays and Fragments: Embodiment and the Configuration of Social Worlds
This paper draws a distinction between the concepts of embodiment and the body. It focuses upon embodiment as a central condition of social life, through which individuals are able to symbolize their world. The physically bounded body is often seen as a matter relating either to individual experiences of corporeality, or to social evaluations and constraints concerning its scope of action. Embodiment, however, is fundamental to how people collect…
Accounts of health and illness: Dilemmas and representations
This paper argues that people's views of health and illness are best understood as accounts that they give to others. In that sense, such beliefs are neither the expression of fixed inner attitudes, nor evidence for shared social representations. Instead, we emphasise the importance of seeing health talk as both ideological and dilemmatic. The paper explores the way in which individuals who speak of health (or illness) in general must also give a…
The Triumph of Narrative? A Reply to Arthur Frank
Picturing Need: Images of Overseas Aid and Interpretations of Cultural Difference
The use of images by overseas aid agencies for the purpose of raising funds is common in the media in western societies. This paper reports a qualitative study of the ways that people in Britain view such photographs, how they interpret Jthem and how they respond tohthiem. The accounts given by respondents reveal that this involves individuals in making sense not just of visual material, but of a social world in which need is defined and met. Tha…
Displays and Fragments: Embodiment and the Configuration of Social Worlds
Abhorrence, Compassion and the Social Response to Suffering
This article re-examines the question of ‘blaming the other’ and the stigmatization of the sick. It sets recent analyses of the stigmatization of illness within a cultural context (effectively North American) that has been concerned with the AIDS epidemic in particular. The article argues that this focus upon difference as an undesirable response to sickness in general has lead to the marginalization of expressive reactions to suffering. These re…
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 o…
Health Psychology, Embodiment and the Question of Vulnerability
The topic of the body is now firmly on the agenda for psychology, as it has been for sociology for some time. What contribution will health psychology make to this debate? This article argues that the biomedical view of the physical body is inappropriate for a psychology addressing the key concerns of suffering and healing. Instead, health psychology needs to theorize what it means to be embodied in the context of illness and of health care. To d…
Health psychology and the study of the case: From Method to Analytic Concern
Worlds of Illness: Biographical and Cultural Perspectives on Health and Disease
Portrayals of Suffering: On Looking Away, Looking at, and the Comprehension of Illness Experience
This article addresses the question of what it is that visual depictions of illness portray, particularly images executed by or on behalf of people who have suffered serious illness. It takes up two lines of inquiry, both to do with the work that such pictures might perform. On the one hand, as works of art, there are questions about the form of signification in visual representations of this kind. On the other, as works of illness, there are iss…
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 …
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 …
Sociology (37 works) · Psychology (35 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Medicine (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Art (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Social Psychology (15 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works)