The haunted paddock: exploring the roots of an ambiguous urban green space

Research on public access to urban green space tends to focus upon access-takers’ motives and meaning-making. The motives and meaning-making of the owners and managers who control such spaces are rarely examined. To address this deficit this article presents a longitudinal case study examining how an owner's ambivalent stance over public access to his public house’s exterior 'beer garden' area arose from its (and his) habitus. The case study shows how the owner came to unwittingly present this as an uninviting and ambiguous urban green space by inheriting and perpetuating a preexisting, habitual encoding of territoriality at his struggling, city-fringe commercial premises. In interpreting this ambivalence, the article examines the influence of both local and wider structural factors showing how both material traces of prior ordering and the owner’s pragmatic understandings of liability and risk shaped this place, and made it simultaneously appear both open and closed to public access

Marjorie Gullan: Speech Teacher, Lecturer, Public Reader, and Pioneer in Choral Speaking (Scotland, England).

Historians of oral interpretation and speech education acknowledge Marjorie Gullan as a pioneer figure. However, they limit their discussion to Gullan\u27s activities as a pioneer in popularizing choral speaking and neglect her other professional involvements as a speech teacher, lecturer, and public reader. This study traces Gullan\u27s career from the earliest years in Scotland to her death, and illustrates the interdependence between her experiences as a speech teacher and her experiments with choral speaking as an educational and artistic technique. Born in the late nineteenth century, Gullan witnessed the waning days of elocution, and throughout her lengthy career, which extended into the 1950\u27s, she encouraged the revival of verse-speaking and the inclusion of speech courses as part of the standard curriculum in the public schools and teacher training institutions. As the author of eight textbooks and anthologies; a pioneer and practitioner of choral speaking with the Glasgow Nightingales and the London Verse Speaking Choir; the sponsor of a professional speech journal entitled Good Speech and later called Speech News; the president of the Speech Fellowship, an association formed to promote speech training in the schools; a popular lecturer and public reader; and a successful teacher in the public schools, teacher training colleges, and in her own private studio and schools in Scotland and England, Gullan\u27s diverse activities contributed to her lifelong goal, the promotion of speech training in the schools and the advancement of the spoken word. Primary sources for this study include interviews with members of Gullan\u27s verse-speaking choirs; materials from Gullan\u27s personal papers housed in the local history collection of the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, Scotland; professional correspondence, programs, and newspaper clippings from the archives at the University of London and the London Regent Street Polytechnic; and letters from and interviews with a number of Gullan\u27s former students and friends

The pear tree. A study of Greek-Australian families 50 years after migration

The nation’s story of the migration of Greeks to Australia is immensely rich, but the everyday voices of migrant families are largely missing. Through the use of personal stories and case studies of families who originated from the region of Florina in Greece, my research examines the impacts of migration on Greek transnational families and how conflicting ideas of home and identity are mediated and transitioned over three generations. Central to my research is the idea that family is at the core of Greek life, and during the 1950s–1970s, when Australia experienced an immense wave of post-war migration from Greece, the tapestry of Greek family units and traditional way of life was profoundly changed. This paper forms part of a wider oral history research project examining intergenerational changes within Greek-Australian migrant families from the region of Florina, and how families narrate and mediate the complexities of identity

On not becoming an agent of the state: church-related social welfare agency tactics in an era of government contracting

Identifies a range of possible tactics that are available to church-related agencies in their engagement with government. Abstract  United States, United Kingdom and Australian literature on the potential, and actual, impacts on not-for profit social welfare and human services agencies of contracting with government highlight the risk that such agencies will become ‘agents of the state’ without remainder, substantially losing their identity and character in the process. ‘ Church‐related’ agencies are now playing a significant role in the delivery of social welfare and human services in Australia, in a distinctive pattern of involvement with respect to the history and structure of service delivery, and the pattern of policy, political settlement and the constitutional basis when compared to that of both the United Kingdom and the United States. Against this background paper identifies a range of possible ‘tactics’ that are available to church-related agencies in their engagement with government. Using this framework the paper draws on interviews with a range of senior managers and staff and independent experts, from a purposive sample of church-related agencies and denominational coordinating bodies to explore the possibility that church-related agencies are exercising a degree of agency in their response to the contracting environment to resist, or deflect at least to some degree the impact of the sociological processes associated with the contracting environment. &nbsp

Spartan Daily, September 8, 1995

Volume 105, Issue 6https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/8721/thumbnail.jp

An Analysis of Factors Affecting the Royal Air Force Contribution to the Raid on Dieppe, 1942

This paper seeks to explain the limited options available to Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory when planning the Royal Air Force (RAF) portion of the combined operation raid on Dieppe in 1942. It proposes that a number of constraining influences, some self-imposed, reduced the air support options, so that only an air umbrella over the attacking forces could be provided. It argues that these influences were a consequence of the RAF’s cultural and conceptual environment, which perpetuated Trenchardian notions of offensive spirit in RAF doctrine, together with the refusal to consider options to extend the range of its fighter aircraft. The paper rejects claims that the RAF’s effort at Dieppe was the natural evolution of combined operations doctrine and demonstrates that preemptive bombing of Dieppe was politically unacceptable

The introduction and evaluation of Community Care Orders following the Mental Health (Patients in the Community) Act 1995

Community Care Orders (CCOs) were introduced in Scotland in the Mental Health (Patients in the Community) Act 1995, which also saw the reduction of leave of absence. The aim of the study was to evaluate the use of CCOs in the first 33 months of their availability and to assess psychiatrists' and patients' views on their usefulness. Three data sources were used: (1) Mental Welfare Commission; (2) a named patient survey to consultant psychiatrists; (3) interviews with patients. Forty-five CCOs were used between 1 April 1996 and 31 December 1998. Half of these were judged successful by consultants. Conditions were varied and the impact on patients' lives could be extensive. There is confusion over the ability of CCOs to enforce medication but 77% implicitly or explicitly mentioned medication. CCO use has been low but set against the negative expectations of psychiatrists might be judged more successful than expected

In the name of parliamentary sovereignty: conflict between the UK Government and the courts over judicial deference in the case of prisoner voting rights

New archival evidence reveals how UK governments, since the 1970s, have been concerned primarily with domestic courts encroaching on executive powers rather than those of the legislature. Alongside the Human Rights Act 1998, a mechanism of judicial ‘deference’ to Parliament evolved to justify courts deferring to an act of Parliament, or to decisions of the legislature, or executive. As this article argues, failure to clarify which of these three is at play has served as a helpful vehicle for Governments to convey the powerful narrative of courts using human rights frameworks to usurp the democratic powers of Parliament as legislature at times of conflict between the courts and the executive. In the prisoner voting debate, actors thus successfully invoked ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ to generate an emotive narrative that the European Court of Human Rights was usurping the powers of ‘Parliament’ when instead the Court, supported by the UK legal community, was challenging the dangerous precedent set by the UK Divisional Court’s deference, in 2001, to the executive. Interview data demonstrate how the 2011 backbench parliamentary debate to flout Strasbourg’s judgments was largely manufactured to curtail the ECHR mechanism which empowers domestic courts to effectively hold the government to account

From Storytelling to Storylistening: How the Hit Podcast S-Town Reconfigured the Production and Reception of Narrative Nonfiction

The 2017 hit podcast S-Town has been hailed for inaugurating a new genre, the audio nonfiction novel. Drawing from the recent evolutions in the field of media-conscious narratology (Ryan and Thon; DeMair), this article envisions creative nonfiction podcasts as narrative constructs. Previous research has thus far tended to assimilate such original podcast productions to conventional radio programs, seldom taking into account the specificity of the podcast as a new medium. This article explores the implications of this innovation through the case study of S-Town. By reclaiming the model of the novel, S-Town’s innovative load paradoxically relies on a return to traditional written forms. But in terms of broadcasting and reception, the podcast introduces a change of paradigm insofar as it offers a more immersive and interactive listening experience. This experience is in turn embedded in the creative process, and narrative nonfiction becomes as much storytelling as storylistening

Health policy and hospital mergers: how the impossible became possible

This study seeks to explain major shifts in health policy. It takes as case studies two governmentally-led hospital mergers in the 1990s - one in London and one in Reykjavik - when national governments, as part of broader administrative reforms, decided to merge teaching hospitals in their capitals. The decision to merge, and the implementation of the decision, followed a long history in both cities, in which the mergers had been repeatedly held up as highly desirable but had always been blocked or abandoned. The merger decisions in the 1990s represent “the impossible becoming possible”. And they stand out as defining moments because of the way they shape the successive course of events in the health care systems. By answering the empirical question why it was possible to merge these hospitals in the 1990s but not in the 1980s, the research aims to contribute to a body of literature that seeks to improve theoretical understanding about how health care systems are shaped by national governments. It carries out two sets of analysis: historical analysis of the main explanatory factors within the health care arenas in both cities; and political analysis of the degree of political authority and will for action of the governments of Britain and Iceland in the 1980s and 1990s. The research concludes that in both cases the merger decisions in the 1990s are best understood as resulting from a confluence of three main factors: 1) weakening cohesion inside the health care arenas; 2) national governments with a long-term hold on power providing an opportunity to consolidate political authority and will through which the wider context of the reform agenda was adopted, 3) the prolonged continuity of executive forces in the governments providing specific political actors with scope for action. In bringing these factors together, ideas which had once united and divided groups of actors in the health care arenas and caused fragmentations in the old order, became glue to the new structure. Theoretical interpretations of the findings suggest that public policies “happen”, as opposed to being made. The merger decisions can be seen more as indicative of past development within the health care systems than as directive themselves. Political interventions, however, changed the balance between groups of actors in the system resulting in strengthening of influence of particular groups of actors, who now possess ever greater control over where, how, when, how much and at what price medical services are provided