The mismeasure of a young man: an alternative reading of autism through a co-constructed fictional story

The combination of academic article and the fictional story it contains represents an attempt to convey our combination of qualitative participatory research and collaborative creative writing, as used in a project with a group of young people with disabilities. Through our story involving the fictional character Jasper, we have tried to distil some of the essence of his real-life inspiration, Peter, a young man with autism. At the same time, we recognise the impossibility of ‘pinning down’ any character as a representation of any psychological condition. By questioning the boundaries between science and art, and by considering alternative ways of creating ‘research reports’, we present the story as an alternative reading of autism. We suggest that the value of fiction in this context is that it allows a reframing of ‘problems’ while presenting readers with an accessible means of connecting with others across disciplinary, methodological and social divides

For “getting it”: an ethnographic study of co-operative schools

The marketisation of the educational sector continues to shape educational provision, policy and practice on a worldwide scale (Apple, 2001; Ball, 2008; Giroux, 2004), ostensibly providing ‘freedom’ through the conflation of consumer ‘choice’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ via the invisible hand of the market. The assumption that competitive markets will produce better schools and outcomes for their students veils the extent to which a large proportion of the world’s population are positioned as marginal actors, unable to ‘compete’ or ‘choose’ as equals, as they engage on a significantly uneven playing field (Mills & McGregor, 2014; Reay, 2012). Historical and global (cf. Fielding & Moss, 2011; Neill, 1990; Wrigley et al., 2012) examples of democratic alternatives to the traditional institution of ‘the school’ have provided rich evidence of the radical possibilities for social change in the form of case studies and academic critique. However, the absence of a cohesive platform which allows a multiplicity of voices and diverse contexts to collaborate together and develop a more effective voice, risks positioning these more radical models at the fringe of educational reform. This represents a significant challenge for extending democracy within educational contexts. The co-operative movement represents a possible solution to this, especially in terms of developing its capacity to create a powerful alliance of partners which can reorient the means and ends of public education towards social justice. Indeed, in just six years co-operative schools have come to represent the third largest grouping within the English public education system (Munn, 2013) and in January 2014, there were just over 700 schools in the UK which have committed to adopting co-operative values (self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, solidarity, openness and honesty, social responsibility and caring for others) within the very heart of their school’s ethos (Shaw, forthcoming, 2015). Although the first English co-operative trust school opened in 2008, sustained analysis of this model has not been undertaken to date. Therefore, this research project attempts to offer the beginnings of a critical conversation that considers the possibilities and challenges that such a model of schooling might have to offer by undertaking a systematic examination of the recent emergence of a ‘co-operative’ model of public schooling from within the socio-historical context of decades of neoliberal educational ‘reforms’. This piece of research maps out how this model is variously conceived as a more ethical brand by some, and as a radical project which creates the necessary conditions for democracy and social justice to flourish by others. This research therefore, seeks to understand how tropes of “getting it” both constitute and confuse readings of freedom and equality in education as nascent understandings of co-operative school membership become slippery subjects of cooperative school discourse. By undertaking a critical discursive analysis of claims that co-operative school governance structures allow everyone to ‘have a say’, this thesis develops a theoretical engagement and provocation of ‘voice’ in education as it becomes increasingly troubled with and by attempts to answer the question, ‘what is a co-operative school?’ and ‘what can it do?’ In order to answer these questions, data drawn from critical ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at three co-operative trust and academy schools during 2012-13 was considered alongside discourse analysis of an emerging body of ‘texts’ that sought to inform and promote ‘co-operation’ in school. As a result of exploring the accounts of Others who offered a range of narratives that reflect the ‘making up’ (Hacking, 1990) of the co-operative subject, these different versions of events brought into view both the challenges and the possibilities that ‘cooperative’ schools and their members face; as the values and principles of cooperation are also shaped (but not necessarily determined) by claims made for equality which reflect the messiness of everyday school life. Furthermore, this piece of research highlighted the extent to which students’ experiences of “getting it” (cooperative schooling) troubled corresponding rights to be included in decision-making processes as the conditions of co-operative school membership are intersected by multiple axes of difference and inequality, both within educational discourse and in wider society. This research suggests that despite the promising emergence of a model of schooling that places a collective approach to civil society at its core, historical asymmetries of power and entrenched marketisation of educational provision and practice tended to prevail. This severely limited the extent to which schools were able to create the conditions of possibility for everyone to “get it” and ‘have a say’. I thus argue that, in order for co-operative schools to resist the neo-liberal appropriation of freedom through the lens of the ‘rational’ individual consumer of education, significant restructuring of governance arrangements is required alongside considerable advocacy work that addresses students’ rights to be included and protected as full members of the school community. This thesis closes with a number of observations and recommendations that contribute to reinvigorating the debate about what cooperative schooling can do, in addition to highlighting how this research project offers further insight about the conceptual and methodological dilemmas that work to shape the construction of children’s agency and subjectivities as students are variously positioned as heterogeneous subjects of co-operative education and educational research

Stories as findings in collaborative research: making meaning through fictional writing with disadvantaged young people

Working in a participatory research project with young people who are disabled, care-experienced or otherwise disadvantaged, collaborative fiction writing was a core method of hearing and amplifying their voices. We discuss how meanings were made in this iterative process of capturing resonances in the different stages of the research, resulting in the creation of stories filtered through many different participants. Through individual and joint reflections on the complex processes of constructing the 48 short stories, we demonstrate how collective storytelling can address criticisms of fictional research outputs as (in)valid social science, and argue instead that the resulting stories can be considered rigorous and faithful research findings. We suggest that these research outputs preserve and proliferate the meanings of marginalised young people, and challenge the absence or distortion of existing narratives about their lives as experienced by themselves

Working back to the future: strengthening radical social work with children and young people and their perspectives on resilience, capabilities and overcoming adversity

Using data from participatory story-telling research with 65 young people this paper provides a co-created theoretical grounding for radical social work with children and young people. The problems and solutions social work should be seeking are explored in the light of resilience theories and the Capability Approach. The young people’s perspectives echo but extend existing resilience interventions and definitions of Capability Approach, highlighting structural and historical patterns of inequality. They call for a collective response to adverse experiences, which become obvious in one zone of experience but have consequences and roots in other places. Social work could usefully employ expanded understandings of socio-ecological resilience and the Capability Approach (CA) to focus interventions more clearly on the root causes of adversities and shape interventions which highlight capability sustainability and co-created solutions. This would involve professionals working alongside children and young people, their families and allies, to confront enduring patterns of disadvantage

Blockchain Native Data Linkage

From Frontiers via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: collection 2021, received 2021-02-12, accepted 2021-04-29, epub 2021-10-29Publication status: PublishedData providers holding sensitive medical data often need to exchange data pertaining to patients for whom they hold particular data. This involves requesting information from other providers to augment the data they hold. However, revealing the superset of identifiers for which a provider requires information can, in itself, leak sensitive private data. Data linkage services exist to facilitate the exchange of anonymized identifiers between data providers. Reliance on third parties to provide these services still raises issues around the trust, privacy and security of such implementations. The rise and use of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies over the last decade has, alongside innovation and disruption in the financial sphere, also brought to the fore and refined the use of associated privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols and techniques. These techniques are now being adopted and used in fields removed from the original financial use cases. In this paper we present a combination of a blockchain-native auditing and trust-enabling environment alongside a query exchange protocol. This allows the exchange of sets of patient identifiers between data providers in such a way that only identifiers lying in the intersection of sets of identifiers are revealed and shared, allowing further secure and privacy-preserving exchange of medical information to be carried out between the two parties. We present the design and implementation of a system demonstrating the effectiveness of these exchange protocols giving a reference architecture for the implementation of such a system

Collaborative Fiction Writing with Community Groups: A Practitioner Guide

This guide aims to provide some insight into the ways two projects have approached writing with community groups, and a starting-point for others who may want to engage in similar projects. One project, Life Chances, produced a co-written fictional novel, and the other project, Stories2Connect, produced 48 short stories. Both projects also produced a range of other outputs, but the focus here is on the co-production of fictional stories. These were seen as a means of conveying research findings to a wider audience than might normally be reached through more conventional academic outlets. In addition, both projects aimed to encompass and amplify voices that are usually talked over or distorted by those in more powerful positions. The use of fiction allowed freedom and creativity in the process, while also enhancing accessibility and longevity of the product. Both projects endeavour to address issues of inequality, inaccessibility, and lack of understanding around social issues. Both have used fiction to convey different perspectives, particularly the voices of marginalised groups and individuals, in an attempt to highlight the need for social change