Learning to Escape: Prison Education, Rehabilitation and the Potential for Transformation

This article examines motivations behind participation in education based on interviews with Irish prisoners. It begins by considering the relationship between education and rehabilitation, especially the latter’s re-emergence in a more authoritarian form. Drawing on results from the research, this article argues that the educational approach, culture and atmosphere are particularly important in creating a learning environment in prison. It makes the case that educational spaces which allow students to voluntarily engage in different types of learning, at their own pace, at a time of their choosing, can be effective in encouraging prisoners to engage in critical reflection and subsequently, to move away from criminal activity. It locates education in prison within a wider context and concludes that while prison education can work with, it needs to distinguish itself from, state-sponsored rehabilitation programmes and stand on the integrity of its profession, based on principles of pedagogy rather than be lured into the evaluative and correctional milieu of modern penality

The emptiness of this stage signifies nothing: the material as sign in modern theatre

Analysing the materiality of theatre, Cormac Power uses Brecht to analyse the modernist idealisation of the (supposedly) direct perceptual relationship between audience the material immanence of the actors onstage. Power’s essay closes the chapter on textual materiality but also provides insights into the discussion which follows on aspects of immateriality, which covers the translation of the intangible to the tangible

The contribution of VM Slipher to the discovery of the expanding universe

A brief history of the discovery of the expanding universe is presented, with an emphasis on the seminal contribution of VM Slipher. It is suggested that the well-known Hubble graph of 1929 could also be known as the Hubble-Slipher graph. It is also argued that the discovery of the expanding universe matches the traditional view of scientific advance as a gradual process of discovery and acceptance, and does not concur with the Kuhnian view of science progressing via abrupt paradigm shifts.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the conference "Origins of the Expanding Universe: 1912-1932", M. J. Way & D. Hunter, eds., ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 471 in pres