Unofficial truths and everyday insights:understanding voice in visual research with the children of accra's urban poor

This article draws upon the use of photography to research the lives of children living in Accra, Ghana. Its aim is to consider method in visual research, and to reflect upon those modes of explanation and understanding that any consideration of method must require. It suggests a role for photography as a 'vector', as something capable of connecting our knowledge and understanding of the everyday with the everyday experiences and reality of others. Drawing upon the photographs and spoken testimonies of children who live and work on the street, and of children who live in a large informal settlement, the article advances an intimate connection between photography and knowledge of the everyday reality of children's lives, most evident in the capacity of children's photographs to surprise and highlight the fallibility of our understandings. © 2010 International Visual Sociology Association.

Medical error:a discussion of the medical construction of error and suggestions for reforms of medical education to decrease error

Introduction: There is a growing public perception that serious medical error is commonplace and largely tolerated by the medical profession. The Government and medical establishment's response to this perceived epidemic of error has included tighter controls over practising doctors and individual stick-and-carrot reforms of medical practice. Discussion: This paper critically reviews the literature on medical error, professional socialization and medical student education, and suggests that common themes such as uncertainty, necessary fallibility, exclusivity of professional judgement and extensive use of medical networks find their genesis, in part, in aspects of medical education and socialization into medicine. The nature and comparative failure of recent reforms of medical practice and the tension between the individualistic nature of the reforms and the collegiate nature of the medical profession are discussed. Conclusion: A more theoretically informed and longitudinal approach to decreasing medical error might be to address the genesis of medical thinking about error through reforms to the aspects of medical education and professional socialization that help to create and perpetuate the existence of avoidable error, and reinforce medical collusion concerning error. Further changes in the curriculum to emphasize team working, communication skills, evidence-based practice and strategies for managing uncertainty are therefore potentially key components in helping tomorrow's doctors to discuss, cope with and commit fewer medical errors.

Inner screens and cybernetic battlefields:Paul Virilio and RoboCop

Padilha’s new Robocop film can be read in the light of Paul Virilio’s theoretical work, notably Desert Screen. Robocop serves as the city’s warrior but also as a munition in the hands of global media forces. Still, even if the film presents the fallibility of robotic technology, its true failure is in sustaining the progressivist myth of technology perfectly under human control.