Coming of age: report on the euro area

This report surveys the economic performance of the euro area and gives recommendations about six policy challenges of major importance for the future of EMU.

Coming of age

Copyright at Demos 2011. This work is made available under the terms of the Demos licence.Britain’s ageing population is often described as a demographic time-bomb. As a society we often view ageing as a ‘problem’ which must be ‘managed’ – how to cope with the pressure on national health services of growing numbers of older people, the cost of sustaining them with pensions and social care, and the effect on families and housing needs. But ageing is not a policy problem to be solved. Instead it is a normal part of life, which varies according to personal characteristics, experience and outlook, and for many people growing older can be a very positive experience. Drawing on the Mass Observation project, one of the longest-running longitudinal life-writing projects anywhere in the world, Coming of Age grounds public policy in people’s real, lived experiences of ageing. It finds that the experience of ageing is changing, so that most people who are now reaching retirement do not identify themselves as old. One-size-fits-all policy approaches that treat older people as if they are all alike are alienating and inappropriate. Instead, older people need inclusive policy approaches that enable them to live their lives on their own terms. To ensure that older people are actively engaged, policy makers should stop emphasising the costs posed by an ageing population and start building on the many positive contributions that older people already make to our society.The Research Support and Development Office (RSDO) at Brunel University and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Coming of Age: an Analysis of a Young Adult Character Development in Ellen Hopkins' Crank

The present research entitled Coming of Age: An Analysis of a Young Adult Character Development in Ellen Hopkins' “Crank” is a textual analysis of Ellen Hopkins' young adult fiction focusing on the issue of coming of age in the novel. The discussion focuses on the main female character in the story to reveal the ways coming of age issue is addressed in the novel. Therefore, the discussion is framed within the theories of the characteristic and development of young adult (Bucher and Hinton, 2010), coming of age (e.g. Millard, 2007 and Fox, 2010) and identity (Barker, 2002). The research utilizes a qualitative method particularly textual analysis. The result of the present research shows that coming of age describes a progress shift which is experienced by the main character, Georgia, from a teenage girl who is simple-minded to a mature adult with higher-level of thinking. In other words, coming of age issue shows the process of adolescents from immaturity to maturity

Re-appropriating abjection: feminism, comics, and the macabre coming-of-age

Julia Kristeva’s theories on the abject have proven fruitful for feminist criticism, which has produced a huge body of research on the representation of motherhood and femininity as macabre. More recently, the concept of abjection has been blamed for supposedly legitimising, instead of questioning, hetero-patriarchal erasure of women’s subjectivity. Despite this theoretical controversy, a growing number of comics and graphic novels, where the abject is used as a technique to illustrate the formation of women and girls’ gendered identity, have been published in the last decade. This article contends that the study of graphic narratives that are concerned with a macabre coming-of-age is a crucial site for the re-appropriation of abjection. This position sees abjection as a productive critical category that reflects an ongoing effort by feminist authors to portray the troubled construction of a female Self. To corroborate this idea, the article engages with previous scholarly close readings of comics/graphic novels on girlhood and the macabre. Further recognition of the fecundity of the abject category in the realm of graphic narratives is guaranteed by the in-depth analysis of the comic zine Fundo do nada (2017), by the Portuguese artist Ana Caspão. This comic zine, which has been so far ignored by critics, serves as case study given its ability to describe, by means of the medium-specific features of comics, a young woman’s coming-of-age, in which the abject functions as a tool to express the disquieting process of negotiating subjectivity from a feminine positioning.This work is supported by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the project UIDB/00736/2020 (base funding) and UIDP/00736/2020 (programmatic funding)

Coming of age

This year Hong Kong\u27s Business of Design Week celebrated its tenth anniversary with its eleventh and biggest show yet creating an exciting roster of international design masters, including many from Denmark, the partner country for 2012. As Daniel Jeffreys reports, the event has grown in authority and scope over the last decade and now represents one of the most important dates on the creative industry\u27s global calendar