Seasons in the sun: the battle for Britain, 1974-1979

Seasons in the Sun is a lively and attractively written account of Britain in the mid to late 1970s, covering all the political and cultural highlights and low days that readers might expect. Paul Brighton notes that although it shouldn’t be taken as the last word on the era of Wilson and Callaghan, it is witty, wide-ranging and much more than a “book of the TV series”. Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979. Dominic Sandbrook. Allen Lane. April 2012

Book review: enemies of the American way: identity and presidential foreign policymaking

Why do presidents, when facing the same circumstances, focus on different threats to national security? Enemies of the American Way attempts to answer this question by investigating the role of identity in presidential decision making. The book explains why presidents disagree on what constitutes a threat to the US security via the study of three US presidencies in the 19th century (Cleveland, Harrison, and McKinley). Paul Brighton values the author’s contribution for reminding us of how individual presidents’ own preconceptions shape global foreign policy

Book review: Taking our country back: the crafting ofnetworked politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama

Through a detailed history of new media and political campaigning, Taking Our Country Back contributes to an interdisciplinary body of scholarship from communication, sociology, and political science. The book theorizes processes of innovation in online electoral politics and aims to give readers a new understanding of how the internet and its use by the Howard Dean campaign have fundamentally changed the field of political campaigning. Reviewed by Paul Brighton

Coping Skills for Students with ADHD

Students diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are often seen as problem students with little hope for academic success. It is common for these students to be medicated with a daily dosage of stimulants to help them function more appropriately in the classroom. This meta-synthesis identifies multiple ways to work with students with ADHD; effective interventions can help students with ADHD cope with their disorder and become more successful students

Disability, spinal cord injury, and strength and conditioning: sociological considerations

Little knowledge is available for strength and conditioning coaches' (SCCs) to develop strength and conditioning (S&C) programs with athletes with a disability. Knowledge that is available is 'bioscientific' with scant consideration of how dominant understandings of disability are constructed or how disability is experienced. In response, this paper provides a conceptual overview of disability and reflections from the authors published research into disability sport and spinal cord injury (SCI) to question the tacit knowledge used in S&C and the influence this has on SCC/athlete relationships. Guidelines to develop more reciprocal and empowering practices with athletes with a disability are advocated

Yet another missed opportunity to develop the Common Law of Contract? An analysis of Everfresh Market Virginia (Pty) Ltd v Shoprite Checkers (Pty) Ltd [2011]ZACC 30

Courts are under a general obligation to develop common law by applying constitutional values as mandated by sections 8(3), 39(2) and 173 of the Constitution. There have been attempts by part of the judiciary and calls from legal commentators to develop the common law contractual doctrine of good faith. In particular, the question that has occupied judicial decision making and academic writing for some time now is whether the spirit, purport, and objects of our Constitution require courts to encourage good faith in contractual dealings or whether the Constitution insists that good faith requirements are enforceable. The Constitutional Court had an opportunity to settle this question in Everfresh Market Virginia (Pty) Ltd v Shoprite Checkers (Pty) Ltd1. This article argues that the Court wrongly decided that it was not in the interests of justice to grant leave to appeal. Consequently, the Court’s misdirection and its refusal to refer the matter to the High Court to develop common law to require parties who undertake to negotiate a new term in a lease agreement to do so reasonably and in good faith resulted in the loss of a great opportunity to develop the common law.Department of HE and Training approved lis

(Dis)ability by design: Narratives of bodily perfectionism

Much academic research into disability sport has been accused of reinforcing ableist attitudes, treating disability as a homogenous construct, suffers from theoretical impoverishment, and has failed to listen to the voices of disabled people themselves in providing critical insight (e.g. Brittain, 2004; Moola and Norman, 2012). Excluding a few notable exceptions (Huang and Brittain, 2006; Berger, 2009; Lindemann, 2010; LeClair, 2011; Peers, 2012) there is still a dearth of empirically based research in understanding how disabled athletes construct and negotiate senses of embodied identity. Taking this into consideration, we draw on data generated from a four year ethnographic study into wheelchair sport in England to examine the ways in which disabled athletes engage in self-reflexive “body projects” (Shilling, 1993) in making strong personal statements about their identity amongst contemporary somatic cultures that idealise and “relentlessly promote the body beautiful” (Thomas, 2007: 132). A structural narrative analysis of the ‘big’ and ‘small’ stories (Bamberg, 2006) told by the disabled athletes in the field revealed three dominant ‘body projects’ in action: 1) in developing malleable bodies participants either altered the comportment of their bodies conservatively by building muscle and losing body fat in attempting to become ‘perfectly disabled’ in relation to able-bodied ideologies of body perfectionism, or more radically through desiring amputation of impaired body parts in ways that contest these dominant beliefs 2) in engaging in tattooing and piercing practices that transform the appearance of the skin, participants artfully constructed modified bodies, affording them a sense of control and expression over their identities in a number of ways and 3) cyborg bodies were imagined where participants played with the possibilities of evolving technologies on their senses of corporeality. Taking an inter-disciplinary approach to interpretation, findings suggest that additional significance is held amongst participants living these bodies than exclusively as forming part of a ‘body project’ alone. Indeed, the identities that disabled athletes embodied and performed should not be thought of as singular, homogeneous, passive, and static but should be better seen as plural, heterogeneous, active, and evolving. We provide reflections that question if identity construction in disability sport is policed by medicalising and ableist discourses with the expectation that disabled athletes should reject their own ‘flawed’ bodies and align themselves to the carnal norms of non-disabled people (Hughes and Paterson, 1999), or if wheelchair athletes are able to demonstrate agency in relation to these norms and express empowering and proud senses of disabled identity that subvert the “non-disabled gaze” (Hughes, 1999) offering a challenge to contemporary tyrannies of bodily perfectionism