Situating Everyday First Aid: Social Practices and Settings of Incidents and Help

This project investigates the social organisation of first aid. It focuses on the social and institutional settings within which first aid 'incidents' occur and on how those settings influence the kinds of 'responses' that follow. The aim is to provide a better understanding of accidents, risks, and harms by positioning first aid incidents not as random events but as embedded in the spatial and temporal ordering of social practices.Whileparticular kinds of first aid incidents arise in and are shaped by specificsocial settings, firstaid trainingeducation and researcharenot currently informed by the specificity of place, or by the histories of accidents that occur in distinctcontexts. Theproposed project developsa novel sociological approach to the study of firstaid incidentsand responses, drawing on theoretical resources from social theories of practice (e.g. Shove et al., 2012)and
emerging empirical work in public health (Blue et al., 2016).The proposed research will bring a fresh perspective to the field of first aid education research,a field in which behavioural paradigms dominate (see, for example, Latane & Darley, 1968). One of the limitations of a behavioural approach to first aid is that by focusing on the physical, biological, and psychological 'responses' of individuals, it brackets off the social settings in which first aid incidents and responses occur. By contrast, the studentship will develop, for the first time, a 'symmetrical' analysis of first aid incidents and responses, and of how both intersect with everyday social practices. Investigation of the 'case' of first aid will, in turn, inform practice theoretical accounts of socially situated and responsive phenomena like 'help'.