Social workers writing for publication: The story of a practice and academic partnership

This paper outlines the processes, outcomes and lessons learnt from a collaborative writing project undertaken as a partnership between academics at the Open University and eleven social work practitioners from a variety of social work settings across the UK. This partnership successfully co-produced a book of social work stories using a critical best practice approach (Cooper, Gordon and Rixon, 2015a), which describes and analyses the realities of everyday social work practice. In a context where there still appear to be many barriers to the involvement of practising social workers in research and writing, we conclude that the project's collaborative process facilitated the sharing of practitioner experience and expertise with the wider world. Drawing on lessons learned during the writing of the book, a number of practical ways of building on this initiative to support the development of practitioner writing are proposed

Near-death experience: Out-of-body and out-of-brain?

During the last decades, several clinical cases have been reported where patients described profound subjective experiences when near-death, a phenomenon called "near-death experience" (NDE). Recurring features in the accounts involving bright lights and tunnels have sometimes been interpreted as evidence of a new life after death; however the origin of such experiences is largely unknown, and both biological and psychological interpretations have been suggested. The study of NDEs represents one of the most important topics of cognitive neuroscience. In the present paper the current state of knowledge has been reviewed, with particular regard to the main features of NDE, scientific explanations and the theoretical debate surrounding this phenomenon