Search results

This chapter outlines the contextual factors that define an impoverished northern town in the UK called Blackpool, and the implications of this are drawn out through social reproduction theory. Following this, the equalities literacy framework is used to abductively analyse the narratives of six young people. This provides the reality of the young people's lives situated within this context and draws out recommendations for how young people's lives in Blackpool and beyond might be improved by frontline staff, organisations, policy makers and governments.

HelpAge International carries out work on issues of ageing and development across a worldwide network. Experience suggests that older people are struggling to be seen, heard and understood, and are still excluded from action to improve their situation. This paper also reports on the Madrid Plan, the first international agreement to recognise the potential of older people to contribute to the development of their societies.

The potential afforded by contemporary forms of surveillance to monitor vast amounts of information raises a number of problems, including ‘who or what’ should be distinguished as the subject of surveillance and how is the extension and intensification of surveillance to be legitimated without encroaching on the sensibilities of those who deem themselves innocent. It is argued that the ‘chav’, one of the latest variants of an underclass discourse to emerge in the United Kingdom, provides an example of how an ideological figure can be employed both to justify the introduction of disciplinary surveillance technologies and become the proposed identification of targets for such apparatus. Following an outline of the term underclass and a guide to the language and imagery of the ‘chav’, the argument presented in this chapter is developed and represented through an examination of a range of media representing and responding to anti-social behaviour. The utilisation of media to render visible and represent those seen as responsible for anti-social and criminal behaviour is both an application of new technologies of surveillance and a re-invention of older forms of collective and communal punishment, control and regulation. What these examples share is the communication of a frame that equates ‘chavs’ with ‘anti-social’ behaviour and surveillance as a central component of any strategy for community safety. Thus, rather than the existence of ‘chavs’, or any allegedly threatening ‘other’ requiring surveillance, it is argued that it is surveillance that requires the existence of the ‘chav’. Put another way, if ‘chavs’ did not exist, then, for the exponents of surveillance at least, they would have to be invented.

Back in 2005 lawyers for the Milwaukee school board decided to exclude Viagra and similar erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs from health coverage for the teachers’ union because, well, they were simply too expensive.¹ And besides, so the school board explained, such drugs are used primarily for recreational sex and are not a medical necessity.

James J. Chriss received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. He is currently Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Cleveland State University. His latest book is Beyond Community Policing: From Early American Beginnings to the 21st Century (Paradigm Publishers, 2010).

The purpose of this paper is to examine student learner perceptions of benefits, barriers and enablers in learning whilst working, specifically focussing, on learning transfer from a university MSc in human resource management to students’ professional roles as human resource practitioners.

The study used in-depth semi-structured interviews with alumni of the programme who had graduated between one to three years previously.

The study found benefits (increased self-confidence, credibility and networking skills) as well as unanticipated challenges relating to individual learner characteristics, organisational culture and work-related support that hindered learning transfer.

The study contributes to understanding the mechanisms required to support part-time learners on continuing vocational education programmes from a variety of stakeholders including students, their managers, their university and work colleagues, and academic staff. It highlights the benefits of activities designed to help students relate theory to practice and facilitate the transfer of knowledge between academic and practitioner environments.

The study highlights learner perspectives that are focussed on how organisational culture and line managers might play a more central role in influencing how people learn at work and facilitate the transfer of learning from formal educational interventions.

The study is valuable to academics and practitioners interested in improving learning transfer from formal educational to professional settings.

DUBLIN DID NOT LACK literary talent in 1924. When Francis Stuart, his wife Iseult, and Cecil Salkeld decided to bring out a new periodical devoted to the arts, they found little difficulty collecting material. W. B. Yeats and Joseph Campbell contributed poems, Liam O'Flaherty a short story. Lennox Robinson—dramatist, director of the Abbey Theatre and secretary of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust's Irish office—was too busy to write anything specially, but offered a story written years previously in New York, ‘The Madonna of Slieve Dun’. The first issue of To‐morrow: a New Irish Monthly (price sixpence) appeared in August. Within six months the Carnegie Trust's Irish Advisory Committee was suspended and Robinson, its secretary, dismissed.