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In the 1988 film The Accused, a young woman named Sarah Tobias is gang raped on a pinball machine by three men while a crowded bar watches. The rapists cut a deal with the prosecutor. Sarah's outrage at the deal convinces the assistant district attorney to prosecute members of the crowd that cheered on and encouraged the rape. This film shows how Sarah Tobias, a woman with little means and less experience, intuits that according to the law rape victims are incredible witnesses to their own victimization. The film goes on to critique what the “right” kind of witness would be. The Accused, therefore, is also about the relationship between witnessing and testimony, between seeing and the representation of that which was seen. It is about the power and responsibility of being a witness in law – one who sees and credibly attests to the truth of their vision – as it is also about what it means to bear witness to film – what can we know from watching movies.

In interviews, Jamie Lee Curtis positions Halloween (2018) as a #MeToo film. As merely self-serving publicity, this reading is far too simplistic. In Halloween (1978) Laurie Strode is victimised; she then assumes the role of quintessential Final Girl as described by Carol J. Clover, providing the template for the entire sub-genre of horror slasher films birthed in its wake. However, in the similarly titled 2018 film, Laurie is no longer a victim. Instead of following the role of the stereotypical Final Girl of slasher films, she falls more in line with one of Yvonne Tasker's Warrior Women.

This chapter investigates Laurie Strode's transformation throughout the Halloween franchise. Once passive and victimised, Laurie has evolved: No longer the Final Girl – or victim – her position and behaviour in this film is much more in line with the neoliberal Warrior Woman of action films. Thus, the film assigns her the role of action heroine as a vehicle for responding to the concerns of the #MeToo era – and in this era, women are no longer victims. Women can and will fight back.

This paper aims to explore how online experiential learning can help bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and real‐world competencies.

The paper is a joint opinion piece by Anne Llewellyn, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences, Leeds Metropolitan University and Sarah Frame, EMEA Business Development Director, Toolwire. In the aftermath of several high‐profile failures in child protection in the UK, educators at Leeds Metropolitan University tasked with finding solutions have turned to immersive Digital Media Simulations. The impetus for introducing an experiential learning solution – covering the highly complex and sensitive topic of safeguarding vulnerable children – comes both from a desire to provide the most engaging and effective learning experience to students and a need to deliver competent social work professionals in line with the most recent guidelines.

The paper reveals that an increasing number of organizations are recognizing that online experiential learning sits at the intersection of several strategic learning needs of today's organizations and are prepared to make the investment in moving from traditional e‐learning to using Digital Media Simulations to help staff build these essential skills.

Experiential learning provides alternative and relevant ways of improving complex skills.

The paper aims to improve professional social work practice in child safeguarding and child welfare to improve the lives of vulnerable children.

This joint paper by Leeds Metropolitan demonstrates the value of experiential learning.

The purpose of this paper is to set out the results of research which showed the gender pay gap among graduates and outline some of the steps being taken to combat this. In particular, it outlines the Sprint programme, developed for women undergraduates. This programme aims to add value to the overall student experience at university, improve employability and help to ensure that each undergraduate – regardless of her subject, department or career aspirations – can develop to her fullest potential.

This paper comprises results of research carried out by Oxford University’s Careers Service. It also contains the results of interviews with the developers, deliverers, sponsors and users of the Sprint programme – a programme which was developed as a response to these research findings.

The Sprint programme helps women focus on their studies at university, achieving results such as improved visibility and effectiveness in tutorials, better time management, less study stress, a boost in confidence and self-esteem. They also use Sprint to sharpen their career goals, raise their aspirations, explore possibilities and to take advantage of the work shadowing, internships and mentoring often offered by corporate sponsors. Participants in the Sprint programme also tend to find it also helps them to achieve results in their personal lives – such as sorting out difficult relationships, improving fitness and gaining a better study/life balance.

It is possible to bridge the gender pay gap as well as benefit women in other ways via learning and development activities, such as those promoted via the Sprint programme.

With help from programmes such as Sprint, women can achieve improved work visibility and effectiveness, better time management, reduced stress, increased confidence and self-esteem. This helps them achieve their career goals, raise their aspirations and generally develop their careers.

Women can be helped to compete effectively with men in the workplace as well as be successful in their personal lives (in terms of sorting out difficult relationships, improving fitness and gaining a better study/life balance). This offers many benefits for women – and for the well-being of society in general.

The Sprint programme, along with the approach of The Springboard Consultancy, is unique. Although the Sprint programme is relatively new – having started in 2013 – it is already bearing positive results.

The purpose of this paper is to underline the importance of taking work practices into account for quality improvement (QI) purposes, highlight some of the challenges of doing so, and suggest strategies for future research and practice. Patient status at a glance, a Lean-inspired QI intervention designed to alleviate nurses of their knowledge mobilisation function, is deployed as an illustrative case.

Ethnographic data and practice-based theories are utilised to describe nurses’ knowledge mobilisation work. The assumptions about knowledge sharing embedded in patient status at a glance white boards (PSAGWBs) are analysed drawing on actor network theory.

There is a disparity between nurses’ knowledge mobilisation practices and the scripts that inform the design of PSAGWBs. PSAGWBs are designed to be intermediaries and to transport meaning without transformation. When nurses circulate knowledge for patient management purposes, they operate as mediators, translating diverse information sources and modifying meaning for different audiences. PSAGWBs are unlikely to relieve nurses of their knowledge mobilisation function and may actually add to the burdens of this work. Despite this nurses have readily embraced this QI intervention.

The study is limited by its focus on a single case and by the inferential (rather than the empirical) nature of its conclusions.

This paper illustrates the importance of taking practice into account in healthcare QI, points to some of the challenges of doing so and highlights the potential of practice-based approaches in supporting progress in this field.

In this paper, readers are introduced to the stories of Sarah, Ashley, and Chanelle, who represent different racial categorizations, class backgrounds, entryways into sex work, and histories of sexual victimization. These three women were each convicted as sex offenders because of their involvement in the prostitution of women or girls. This paper demonstrates that these women did not view their actions as sex offenses because their perceptions of themselves, men, women, sexuality, and prostitution were profoundly influenced by interconnecting experiences in their life histories. Child sexual abuse, economic needs, and abusive interpersonal relationships all impacted how these women viewed themselves and their actions. This paper briefly reviews the historically divisive and ultimately detrimental debate between feminists who frame all prostitution as sexual violence and feminists who advocate for full legalization of sex work. Sarah, Ashley, and Chanelle’s stories illustrate the complexities that exist within the lives of women who become involved in prostitution due to a variety of circumstances and social inequalities. Sarah, Ashley, and Chanelle were not completely hapless victims disenfranchised by their pimps, nor were they fully agentive sexual entrepreneurs unfairly targeted by the state. These women made a series of decisions based on their needs for survival, their personal economic desires, and their beliefs about men, women, and sexuality. This paper provides ample room for the women’s voices, and documents their explanations for why and how they became involved in prostitution, as well as the prostitution of other women and girls.

Current top-down literacy reform mandates have reenergized attention to professional development (PD) outcomes. Still, questions remain about why English teachers struggle to apply their learning. Refocusing attention on understanding the complex yet critical relationship between professional development (PD) facilitators and teachers offers one explanation.

Using a telling case from an interactional ethnography, this paper illustrates how through their language-in-use teachers and facilitators can productively resolve conflicts that, if left unaddressed, can prevent teachers from acting on their professional learning.

A set of discursive moves – flagging, naming, soliciting and processing – provide a toolkit for surfacing and successfully resolving conflict in PD interactions.

These moves offer a way of prioritizing the importance of teacher–facilitator relationships in future research aimed at addressing the longstanding conundrum of how best to support English teachers’ ongoing professional learning.

Teaching facilitators and teachers how to collaboratively address inevitable conflicts offers a needed intervention in supporting both teacher and facilitator learning.

Previous research has affirmed that facilitators, like teachers, need support for navigating the complexity of professional learning interactions. This paper offers a language for uncovering why teacher–facilitator interactions can be so challenging for teachers and facilitators as well as ways of responding productively in-the-moment. It contributes to a more capacious understanding of how these relationships shape diverse English teacher learning.

The purpose of this paper is to foreground non-conformity in organisational life as it relates to black female managers. My intervention here is to problematise organisational theory in relation to its limited ability to engage with affect and to point to a more generative framework. Through centering the body, the author also seeks to offer a counter narrative to the field of Positive Organisation Scholarship and its drive to primarily engage with happy feelings and harmony.

The author gives a close reading of four black women's interview-based narratives to engage with the ways in which they refuse to conform to organisational scripts of happiness. The author makes a case for using both critical discourse-based and affective readings of everyday experience which social science readings cannot readily account for.

Non-conformity has a number of local effects including negotiating the present from a position of alternative histories of struggle and cultural values, and holding different and conflicting realities and subject positions. Moreover, a reading of these women's accounts suggests that affect is both personal and social and can manifest in multiple, embodied, transformative, and potentially destructive ways. The author comes to new ways of understanding organisations and resistance when the author uses affect as an investigative lens.

By virtue of the close reading necessitated by the nature of the study, the sample of this research is small. While the intention is not generality, the findings of the research have to be understood in context and applied within different settings with caution. The implications of this research are that there remains an urgent need for critical-orientated research which centers affect in order to counter the growing positive psychologies which relegate asymmetries to the margins.

In South Africa where black women constitute the numerical majority, there is an urgent need to understand and reverse their status as a minority in management and social life. This research goes some way in explicating this process.

While there is well-developed body of feminist research which seeks to study black women in South Africa, there is a dearth of research into black women in the workplace. This paper therefore presents an original look at black female managers by applying international theoretical tools to a context that is under theorised. This research presents new methodological and theoretical tools and analysis to the South African workplace.