Co-creating experiences through the use of arts in social work education

The inclusion of citizens in social work education was initiated over 30 years ago and continues to travel a ‘long and winding road’. Social work education in the UK faces increasing pressure from a range of stakeholders including citizens who use services, regulatory bodies and the media to demonstrate that newly qualified social workers are competent and uphold public trust. While social work education and practice within England and Wales draw on similar traditions in theory and practice, there are important differences in the national and institutional frameworks within which they operate. This article illustrates some of these differences through a focus on social work education provision in one English and one Welsh university. Drawing on the experience and views of the student participants, we examine the benefits of creative approaches that promote citizen involvement and suggest how European traditions can contribute to this process. We define key terms and summarize the literature, followed by presentation of the results and identification of the key learning. We identify that emancipatory models of education can encourage recognition of learners’ different strengths and can help to assist social work students’ readiness for practice. Finally, we acknowledge the need for cost-benefit outcomes research into if and how citizen coproduction influences subsequent service delivery

Making Waves Film Festival: 12th Edition

The 2024 season of the Making Waves Film Festival, held in Portsmouth from March 21st to 30th, delivered an exciting lineup celebrating innovative filmmaking and community engagement. This year marked the festival's 12th edition, featuring Portsmouth's first live cinema experience, community-curated screenings, and the Future BAFTA Winners Short Film Competition. Highlights included immersive events like The Staggeringly Good Commitments, a 90s-themed live cinema at a local brewery, and The Secret of the Grain, a cinematic dining experience. The festival also offered opportunities for emerging filmmakers through the Wave Makers Talent Day, showcasing the vibrant potential of the South West's filmmaking scene

How do Legal Aid cuts in England and Wales impact LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum? Perspectives from providers and directly affected people

IntroductionLGBTQ+ people seeking asylum in England and Wales may experience disproportionate risk due to recent cutbacks in legal aid services, including inconsistent standards for determining the credibility of asylum claims and the inability to obtain essential resources.MethodsInterviews were conducted with legal, social care, and mental health professionals (n = 17) and directly affected people (n = 9) from January to April 2023 to explore how legal aid cuts shape the experiences of LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum in England and Wales.ResultsGuided by the concept of structural violence and employing constructivist grounded theory analysis, this qualitative study identified four themes demonstrating the impact of legal aid cuts: making it difficult to find solicitors with expertise in working with LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum; forcing solicitors to make difficult choices about the clients they accept; compromising the ability of solicitors to build the trust needed to work with LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum; and compounding life instabilities for LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum.ConclusionsFindings reveal that legal aid cuts contribute to structural violence against LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum by constraining the ability of solicitors to properly represent their asylum claims and thus prolonging the deleterious conditions faced by this population.Policy ImplicationsEfforts are needed to ensure access to legal aid services for LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum in England and Wales. Adequately funding legal aid services would also better enable solicitors to apply trauma-informed legal practices, which is imperative for effectively engaging with and representing LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum

Antecedents of driving customer purchase intention via AI based customer engagement strategies in the post pandemic era

This study explores the antecedents that affect customer purchase intention in the post-pandemic era, specifically through AI (Artificial Intelligence) based customer engagement strategies. By analyzing a sample size of at least 147 social media users in Sri Lanka and examining demographic profiles such as age, gender, occupation, and average monthly income, this research addresses a gap in the literature by investigating the positive impact of AI on conversion rate optimization. The study focuses on the factors of brand credibility, customer satisfaction, price sensitivity, brand attitude, and social influence, and their impact on consumer purchase intention in the context of AI-based customer engagement. This research rejects some hypotheses related to brand credibility, price sensitivity, and social influence, and accepts others related to customer satisfaction and brand attitude. It highlights the importance of customer satisfaction and brand attitude in driving consumer purchase intention in the context of AI-based customer engagement. The findings provide valuable insights for businesses and marketers seeking to optimize AI strategies for improved customer engagement and higher conversion rates

A comprehensive review of existing corpora and methods for creating annotated corpora for event extraction tasks

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to serve as a comprehensive review of the existing annotated corpora. This review study aims to provide information on the existing annotated corpora for event extraction, which are limited but essential for training and improving the existing event extraction algorithms. In addition to the primary goal of this study, it provides guidelines for preparing an annotated corpus and suggests suitable tools for the annotation task.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs an analytical approach to examine available corpus that is suitable for event extraction tasks. It offers an in-depth analysis of existing event extraction corpora and provides systematic guidelines for researchers to develop accurate, high-quality corpora. This ensures the reliability of the created corpus and its suitability for training machine learning algorithms.FindingsOur exploration reveals a scarcity of annotated corpora for event extraction tasks. In particular, the English corpora are mainly focused on the biomedical and general domains. Despite the issue of annotated corpora scarcity, there are several high-quality corpora available and widely used as benchmark datasets. However, access to some of these corpora might be limited owing to closed-access policies or discontinued maintenance after being initially released, rendering them inaccessible owing to broken links. Therefore, this study documents the available corpora for event extraction tasks.Research limitationsOur study focuses only on well-known corpora available in English and Chinese. Nevertheless, this study places a strong emphasis on the English corpora due to its status as a global lingua franca, making it widely understood compared to other languages.Practical implicationsWe genuinely believe that this study provides valuable knowledge that can serve as a guiding framework for preparing and accurately annotating events from text corpora. It provides comprehensive guidelines for researchers to improve the quality of corpus annotations, especially for event extraction tasks across various domains.Originality/valueThis study comprehensively compiled information on the existing annotated corpora for event extraction tasks and provided preparation guidelines

The Living CV project: a model of collaborative learning in third space

The Living CV project is a collaborative initiative launched at a south coast university in the UK, which aims to help students develop their employability skills and evidence their learning outcomes. The project is delivered university-wide from a third space hub, where people from different disciplines and backgrounds come together to work on shared goals. It has therefore provided a way for colleagues across the university to collaborate within third space. In this study we focus on the role of the departmental Living CV Champions and their pivotal role in driving forward this third space project. These champions are situated across the university – in academic departments, in the university’s central Learning and Teaching service and in its career service – but all are working across boundaries and drawing collaborators into the third space of the project. We suggest that the Living CV Champions are also collaboration champions for the institution, in the way in which they support the development of staff networks and knowledge sharing, and therefore the collaborative capital of the institution as a whole. We find that third space projects such as the Living CV can contribute to the development of collaborative capital, act as a gateway for staff to wider communities of practice and build confidence for those engaged in them. In this case study we illustrate one route to achieving this, through a champions model which breaks down traditional academic silos and encourages wider collaboration