Why 'science for all' is only an aspiration : staff views of science for learners with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

Teacher and support staff perceptions of science learning, and specifically engagement with science outreach, by pupils with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) were ascertained through questionnaires. The responses indicated that science is seen as serving distinctive learning purposes when undertaken by learners with SEND. Staff who accompanied SEND pupils to science outreach events expressed more positive views about separate outreach events for SEND pupils than other respondents, in line with current policy expectations of differentiated classroom practice. The desire for different provision for SEND learners also appeared to be associated with the staffs' pastoral concerns about their pupils and their reluctance to let their pupils 'fail'. The data suggests that, despite policy and legislative reform in the UK, curriculum science is still viewed primarily as a means to career progression for an able minority, rather than as an educational and cultural entitlement for all

Towards a literary account of mental health from James’ Principles of Psychology

YesThe field of mental health tends to treat its literary metaphors as literal realities with the concomitant loss of vague “feelings of tendency” in “unusual experiences”. I develop this argument through the prism of William James’ (1890) “The Principles of Psychology”. In the first part of the paper, I reflect upon the relevance of James’ “The Psychologist’s Fallacy” to a literary account of mental health. In the second part of the paper, I develop the argument that “connotations” and “feelings of tendency” are central to resolving some of the more difficult challenges of this fallacy. I proceed to do this in James’ spirit of generating imaginative metaphors to understand experience. Curiously, however, mental health presents a strange paradox in William James’ (1890) Principles of Psychology. He constructs an elaborate conception of the “empirical self” and “stream of thought” but chooses not to use these to understand unusual experiences – largely relying instead on the concept of a “secondary self.” In this article, I attempt to make more use of James’ central division between the “stream of thought” and the “empirical self” to understand unusual experiences. I suggest that they can be usefully understood using the loose metaphor of a “binary star” where the “secondary self” can be seen as an “accretion disk” around one of the stars. Understood as literary rather the literal, this metaphor is quite different to more unitary models of self-breakdown in mental health, particularly in its separation of “self” from “the stream of thought” and I suggest it has the potential to start a re-imagination of the academic discourse around mental health

Making space for co-produced research ‘impact’: learning from a participatory action research case study

There is growing emphasis in the UK on promoting research that creates a positive impact on society. Research Councils UK, the major national research funding agencies, have recently defined a framework for promoting and measuring this impact. This paper contributes to current debates about this developing agenda and, particularly, the problematic intersection of the impact agenda and co-production research approaches. I argue that processes of negotiating values, aims and power relations are essential to creating relevant, ethical impacts with research participants. In contrast to the emphasis placed on linear and top-down change by the impact agenda, my experience doing participatory action research with a UK community group shows that co-produced research produces different kinds of impacts: co-produced impacts are emergent and non-linear; responsive and relational; and empowering when rooted in reciprocal collaboration with research partners. This paper questions the implicit values the impact framework imposes on academic researchers and community partners, calling for continued critical engagement with the impact agenda to encourage the value-rational reflection, deliberation and collaboration needed for creating socially transformative research

The Global Political Economy of Race and Gender in Private Military and Security Company Labour Chains: Interviews with Gurkhas and Their Families, 2017

This dataset is from detailed ethnographic semi-structured interviews I conducted with Gurkhas wives, whose husbands now work in the private security industry. The interviews took place throughout Nepal and the main objective was to glean insight into their everyday lives, how they experience the security industry as the wives who support their husbands and to better account for all the emotional and reproductive labour they do. At times the husbands were present during the interviews and sometimes children. The main focus of these interviews were on the wives though. I have protected their identities by using alternative names and at times not disclosing where in Nepal the interviews took place. The interviews took place in 2017 between April and September. The transcripts uploaded are the only ones that I was given explicit consent to share publicly via open access, the but issues and themes raises are reflective of all the interviews I conducted with wives of armed and unarmed security contractors coming from Nepal for work in Afghanistan and throughout the Gulf.Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) are having a profound impact on the ways in which security governance is organised globally. Taking on roles of consultancy to armed contracting these companies are altering how war and security is practiced. The economic scale of their operations is also noteworthy. These companies are apart of a multibillion dollar industry that is involved in international security operations in, for example, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya as well as in prisons in the UK and the US. Their clients include the private commercial sector, government bodies and non government organisations. The growth of their operations is matched by a plethora of academic inquiries and journalist reports, which have demonstrated the ways in which these companies are changing security-from a state driven practice to a shared assemblage with private companies, and the associated legal and practical issues. Yet connecting PMSC to political economy of labour has been so far absent. Such a gap misses the significant ways in which these companies are changing how global labour is being organised in preparation for and support of security operations. It also misses the ways in which global South labourers are increasingly called upon to not only provide armed and unarmed security protection, but to conduct the necessary logistics roles that support such operations. This study seeks to address this empirical and theoretical gap in research on private security. It asks: 1) How are the recruitment and management practices of security chains in Qatar informed by race and gender relations? 2) How does race and gender shape the migrant and their families' experiences? and, 3) What are the coping strategies migrant communities and their families adopt and how can they inform corporate social responsibility (CSR) in labour recruitment companies and government policies on labour management? It is an ambitious and timely research project that works directly with two international recruitment and labour management companies that recruit on behalf of PMSCs and other international commercial entities. It compares two Nepalese labour chains that support PMSCs' global operations; the security and logistics labour chains that are being recruited for work in Qatar. Qatar and Nepal are both important countries to study. Qatar, a small Gulf State with large scale development plans and the host of the upcoming 2022 World Cup, relies heavily upon foreign labour to meet its logistics and security needs. Nepal, is a country that has 200 years of foreign migration history and exporting its population for work abroad is a key economic development strategy. By working directly with the migrants, their families, the recruitment companies, government bodies and the &quot;end users&quot; of the logistics and security services, this study will gain a sophisticated and holistic insight into how security and logistics labour is constructed and sustained and where best practices are located. Planned outputs include both academic and nonacademic deliverables. Academic deliverables are 2 specialised workshops for cross sharing of knowledge and networking, 1 manuscript and 3 academic journal articles in top ranked peer reviewed journal. Non-academic deliverables include 1 toolkit aimed at commercial and government users of foreign labour to identify better auditing mechanisms, 1 toolkit aimed at migrants and their families to promote informed decisions in which companies to work with and which recruitment agencies to go through, 1 ethical recruitment accreditation document to be built into Qatar's tender processes, 3 professional podcasts on migrant labour from perspectives of the migrants, the recruitment agencies and government to be used as a teaching tool in universities and commercial social marketing, 1 short animation on migrant labour to be used as a teaching tool for migrant communities and in universities.</p

Empowering women: Inheritance rights and female education in India 2010-2015

This project used the 1999 wave of the Rural Economic and Demographic Survey (REDS), which is a representative survey of rural households in the 17 major states of India.18,19 The REDS 99 contains detailed retrospective information on individual characteristics of all members of the household, including daughters who have married and left the household, provided by the household head. I focus on women who are daughters of the head of the household and at least 22 years of age at the time of survey (this ensures that women in the sample have completed their education). In addition, I restrict the sample to Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Jain women (i.e. those who were governed by the original HSA 1956 and thereby were affected by the reform), since almost 92% of the women in this dataset belong to these religions. I also restrict the sample to only landed households, since land is the most commonly held form of joint family/ancestral property in India. Finally, some of the mothers of these women may themselves have been young enough to have been exposed to the reform. To avoid any confounding impact on outcomes of daughters through their mothers, I restrict the sample to only those mothers who were unexposed to the reform i.e. were 44 years or older at the time of survey.20 Hence my sample comprises of daughters who were at least 22 years old at survey and whose mothers were at least 44 years old at survey in landed, Hindu households. This leaves me with a sample size of 4207 women