Living in Sandwell: An Exploratory Study into the Key Issues and Challenges that Affect a Small Group of People with Mild Learning Disabilities

This paper is concerned with a small group of people with a mild learning disability; who they are and what their lives are like. This group is not typically known by the label of mild learning disability in research, social policy or in service provision, due to a lack of suitable assessment or identification methods. This small study, using focus groups as a data collection method and undertaken as a pilot study for further research, has shown this group experienced wide ranging social disadvantage, and difficulties and challenges in daily living due to their learning disability. These included travel, shopping, parenting, lack of IT skills, plus experiencing local anti-social behaviour on a regular basis. Lack of recognition and appropriate support can leave them vulnerable to a range of difficulties and issues including social isolation and harassment

Everything Must Go

Thomas Brothers' generous advice and manifold goods helped build, fix and maintain countless artworks and houses in and beyond Archway for ninety-seven years (1917-2014). 'Everything Must Go' was an exhibition of artworks organised by AIR and made by their customers, past and present, to mark the closure of Thomas Brothers, and to say thank you to the brothers and their esteemed Archway institution. The art works were bequeathed to the Thomas family. The works were placed by the artists within a certain moment of the emptying shelves. Over the next three weeks the brothers chose to continue the exhibition. It took various forms as they moved the works around their dwindling stock, eventually placing them all together in the central window

Charles Tilly as a Theorist of Nationalism

This paper considers Charles Tilly as an important but underappreciated theorist of nationalism. Tilly’s theory of nationalism emerged from the “bellicist” strand of his earlier work on state-formation and later incorporated a concern with performance, stories, and cultural modeling. Yet despite the turn to culture in Tilly’s later work, his theory of nationalism remained state-centered, materialist, and instrumentalist—a source of both its power and its limitations

The Gloves-off Economy: Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America\u27s Labor Market

[Excerpt] The goal of this volume is to map the landscape of gloves-off workplace strategies, to connect them to the erosion of norms farther up in the labor market, to identify the workers most vulnerable to these practices, and finally and perhaps most importantly, to identify the ways that the floor under job standards can be rebuilt. In what follows, we first explore conceptual tools for analyzing evasions and breaches of workplace standards and then briefly review evidence about the scope of the problem. We next trace the historical trajectory that first led to the upgrading of workplace protections, then to the partial undoing of the protective web of laws and standards—using this narrative as well to introduce the contents of the volume. We close by considering strategies to put the gloves back on in order to re-regulate work

Too many cooks?: changing wages and job ladders in the food industry

Consolidation and outsourcing in the food industry have created higher-paying food prep jobs, but also have erected barriers for lower-skilled workers trying to move up the ladder.Food industry and trade

Cell-type specific analysis of translating RNAs in developing flowers reveals new levels of control

Determining both the expression levels of mRNA and the regulation of its translation is important in understanding specialized cell functions. In this study, we describe both the expression profiles of cells within spatiotemporal domains of the Arabidopsis thaliana flower and the post-transcriptional regulation of these mRNAs, at nucleotide resolution. We express a tagged ribosomal protein under the promoters of three master regulators of flower development. By precipitating tagged polysomes, we isolated cell type specific mRNAs that are probably translating, and quantified those mRNAs through deep sequencing. Cell type comparisons identified known cell-specific transcripts and uncovered many new ones, from which we inferred cell type-specific hormone responses, promoter motifs and coexpressed cognate binding factor candidates, and splicing isoforms. By comparing translating mRNAs with steady-state overall transcripts, we found evidence for widespread post-transcriptional regulation at both the intron splicing and translational stages. Sequence analyses identified structural features associated with each step. Finally, we identified a new class of noncoding RNAs associated with polysomes. Findings from our profiling lead to new hypotheses in the understanding of flower development