ABD Promos, June 2011, Vol. 11, no. 6

weekly newslette

Guidance on school attendance codes

"The Welsh Assembly Government launched “Behaving and Attending: the Action Plan for Responding to the Behaviour and Attendance Review” on 30 March 2009. A key action in it was: “To produce an All-Wales Attendance Framework which would include revising current school attendance codes and producing guidance”... This document sets out the list of revised codes for use in all schools in Wales." - introduction

Mobilising spatial risks: reflections on researching Venezuelan and Australian fairground people's educational experiences

[Abstract]: One approach to conducting educational research is to strive for ‘risk minimisation’. This is presumably on the assumption that risk is always and inevitably dangerous and harmful (see also McDougall, Jarzabkowski, Mills & Gale, Moore, Danaher and Walker-Gibbs, this volume), and to be avoided at all costs. Following the theme of celebrating ‘strategic uncertainties’ (Stronach & MacLure, 1997), we prefer a different approach, one grounded in the recognition of risk as the prerequisite of new conceptual, methodological and empirical understandings. Rather than being minimised or avoided, risk should be mobilised and enthusiastically pursued – carpe diem transposed to an educational research framework. Our conviction of the utility, even the necessity, of mobilising risk derives in part from our ongoing research into the educational experiences of Venezuelan and Australian fairground people (Anteliz & Danaher, 2000; Anteliz, Danaher & Danaher, 2001). In multiple ways, the fairground people routinely enter the spaces of permanently resident communities, and in so doing they challenge the stereotypes attached to mobile groups (McVeigh, 1997). From this perspective, their physical mobility becomes allied with their mobilisation of spatial risks in order to earn their living and to sustain their cultural heritage. We see this process of mobilising spatial risks as potentially both a template and a metaphor for educational researchers. Space can be conceptualised as the site of multiple and often conflicting beliefs, discourses and values. In the context of an educational research project, space can indeed be risky and unpredictable, yet it can also become the place in which transformational educational practices are conceived and developed. This is precisely why spatial risks need to be mobilised – and why ‘strategic uncertainties’ need to be celebrated

That Undisclosed World: Eric Shipton’s Mountains of Tartary (1950).

Mountains of Tartary (1950) recounts Eric Shipton’s mountaineering and travels in Xinjiang during his two postings as British Consul-General in Kashgar in the 1940s. An accomplished Himalayan mountaineer of the 1930s, Shipton was a successful author of mountaineering travel books. During the 1930s his work with the Survey of India saw him increasingly drawn into the workings of the imperial security state in the geopolitically sensitive border regions of the Karakoram. Shipton’s proven ability to travel in arduous mountain terrain and gather geographical intelligence led to his posting to Kashgar. Details of his diplomatic work are almost entirely absent from Mountains of Tartary and only became known in outline in 1969, with the publication of his autobiography. With unparalleled knowledge of the geo-political situation in Xinjiang in the 1940s, Shipton was prevented from publishing anything that revealed the details of his role in Great Game politics in 1950, not least by the fact that he still held a consular position in Kunming, Yunnan. Thus at the heart of Mountains of Tartary is an occlusion. This paper will examine the rhetorical strategies Shipton employed in writing a book in which so much had to remain undisclosed. He was aware that the roles he played, as mountaineer, explorer and traveller had multiple meanings on the borders of British India, that to situate his narrative within an Orientalist and Great Game tradition risked unwanted disclosure. The essential unreliability of the narrative emerges as a consequence of writing under such constraints. Intentionally aporetic, the text is riven by chronological and biographical voids, unintentionally reveals the strain of inhabiting multiple personas and keeping track of the competing demands of different audiences. Shipton’s failure of self-censorship erupts in transgressive revelations, concealed messages to certain sections of his readership able to read between the lines, revealing Mountains of Tartary to be a steganographic text, one that needs not just decoding but looking beyond, to what is undisclosed and unsaid