A Generation of Promise: The 1908 Junior National Scholarship Candidates - Education, Occupation, and the First World War

The Junior National Scholarship examination was introduced in the early twentieth century to encourage able children to continue at school through to secondary level. This article investigates the extent to which successful candidates of 1908 took the opportunity for further education beyond primary school. The main focus is on those who went on to university study and pursued successful careers, but those who ended up in less enviable circumstances are also of interest. Also highlighted are the differing vocational opportunities available to girls and boys, the importance of teaching as a career for girls, and the effect on the boys of the First World War

Poster boys and the rehabilitative dream: using a temporal lens to explore severe brain injury rehabilitation

Context: The future comes into the present and acts upon the now. Understanding how engagement with the future shapes today and how actions taken in the now affect a time yet to come is important in understanding and improving brain injury rehabilitative practice. Objective: This paper examines the way in which futures of different types of brain-injured residents residing in long-term neurological care settings are imagined by health and care professionals and the role a ‘rehabilitative imaginary’ has in how residents’ futures are imagined or go unimagined. Methods: Over 500 hours of ethnographic observations and 49 interviews with staff members in two neurological rehabilitation and long-term settings in England were analysed using situational analysis, drawing out key rehabilitative narratives presented here. Findings: Residents were primarily categorised by their abilities to rehabilitate successfully (or not) and their futures imagined (or not) in line with their rehabilitative journey. Key residents who successfully rehabilitated and fulfilled a rehabilitative ideal were held up as ‘poster boys’ (or girls), providing a positive advertisement for the organisation, engendered dedication to the specialism of neurological rehabilitation and reinforced rehabilitation-as-process. Limitations: Data was collected in two English care settings. Applicability to international care settings is unknown. Extraneous factors restricting health care professionals’ future imaginings were not explicitly studied. Implications: The paper concludes by considering the implications of rehabilitative imaginary-fuelled narratives in these settings. It argues that predominant rehabilitative narratives bracket out how and if the futures of those unable to rehabilitate successfully are imagined by health care professionals and questions whether non-imagining leads to inaction around those not rehabilitating. Potential organisational and structural reasons for constrained health care professionals’ imaginings is discussed, and broader applicability of the reification of particular patient types in other areas of health care is considered

ICT-based Learning Networks and Communities of Practice(<Special Issue>Technology-based Learning Networks and Communities of Practice)

The following paper discusses information and communications technology-based learning networks and communities of practice and how these are serving groups and individuals in developed and developing countries. It suggests that \u27information age\u27 organizations are service rather than product oriented, often use temporary configurations and linkages, and are typically organized around networks, teams and processes rather than traditional management and organizational structures. It illustrates how Web-based networks are used to link learners, trainees and professionals nationally and internationally, and how telecentres bring technology, learning and information to remote and disadvantaged communities. It concludes by addressing the issues of technology, cost, evaluation, effectiveness and efficiency in such devel- opments

A Generation of Promise: The 1908 Junior National Scholarship Candidates - Education, Occupation, and the First World War

The Junior National Scholarship examination was introduced in the early twentieth century to encourage able children to continue at school through to secondary level. This article investigates the extent to which successful candidates of 1908 took the opportunity for further education beyond primary school. The main focus is on those who went on to university study and pursued successful careers, but those who ended up in less enviable circumstances are also of interest. Also highlighted are the differing vocational opportunities available to girls and boys, the importance of teaching as a career for girls, and the effect on the boys of the First World War

The Art of Justice: Reconfiguring the Courtroom Object

Ph. D. ThesisThis research intervenes in the material culture of the courthouse to establish new rituals that inform public understandings of the law. Art installations installed in the courtroom critique the symbolic materiality of law’s historical artifacts. The creation of objects, and their roles in new embodied courtroom performativities, challenge existing courthouse rituals and expose the need for new ones to convey revised messages to the public. The courtroom object at the centre of my research is the Admiralty’s silver oar. It has its origins in the earliest admiralty court, during the reign of King Edward III in the 1360s. It was the only courtroom object processed to the gallows and it is still processed and displayed in courtrooms in the UK and globally today. The PhD extends to the courthouse environment. Data gathered on courtroom acoustics revealed how the architecture and acoustics of the historic court silenced, or facilitated, those involved in judiciary processes. These datasets, along with visualisations of the sound movement within the space and archival research, were employed as a source for producing site-specific artwork. My work also examines representation and responsibility in contemporary public art in the courthouse and the woman’s voice in historic sites of law and order. My PhD is cross-disciplinary, drawing on methods and approaches from Fine Art, Art History, and History. There is a ‘moral value’ approach to some western public courthouse commissions by artists and commissioners and evidence of a tendency for artists working site specifically in the courthouse to refer to established symbols of justice that are still widely recognised. My work is distinct from this, focusing an historic symbol of justice that has become largely redundant and, yet, is still in use today when so few of its viewers know what it represents.The Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute (NUHRI), the Catherine Cookson Foundation and the Newcastle Student Innovation Fun

Caring relations at the margins of neurological care home life: the role of 'hotel service' staff in brain injury rehabilitation

Context: Domestic staff in hospitals and aged long-term care have been shown to perform a range of caring roles alongside their cleaning work. Objective: This paper explores the roles these people and other ‘hotel service staff’ (catering, domestic, maintenance, finance and administrative) play in the rehabilitation of people with brain injuries residing in long-term care settings. Methods: This research draws on in-depth ethnographic data collected in 2014–15 over five months at two neurological long-term care settings in the UK; including interviews and observations of day-to-day happenings in the lives of around 60 brain injured residents and the work of 16 hotel service staff. The data was subject to a situational analysis – underpinned by grounded theory and discourse analysis. Findings: Hotel service staff contribute to and compliment the rehabilitation of patients’ cognitive skills, communication and physical functioning, and provide opportunities for occupation and interaction. The therapeutic accomplishments achieved by involving patients in mundane tasks of everyday life (e.g., gardening, managing money, sharing food), fit with the aims of more ‘formalized’ rehabilitation – to restore patients’ abilities to carry out ‘activities of daily living’. Limitations: This study has been unable to fully explicate how hotel service staff have, or gain, the skills to interact so positively with brain injured residents. The study was confined to two sites and may not be reflective of practice elsewhere. Implications: The study findings highlight how the work and interactions of hotel service staff contribute not only to care but to the rehabilitation of people with severe brain injuries. This has implications for service design as well as health and social care education

Shaping and sharing futures in brain injury rehabilitation

The future is a tricky issue for the sciences because it has not happened yet and therefore is not 'fact' (see Adam and Groves 2007) to be studied. Nonetheless the future in and by its intangible nature acts upon us and is brought into the present, shaping both interactions and actions taken in the now. At the same time, futures are continually in the making and already made as actions past shape future lives to come. How futures are made then, how people’s lives to come are shaped, is both a social and political issue which requires attention. This thesis focusses on the lives of one particular group of people - those who have severe brain injuries. It explores how their futures are being shaped and negotiated, made and constrained by and through rehabilitation in a context of every day care delivery within independent neurological rehabilitative settings. This research draws on in-depth ethnographic data collected over five months at two neurological rehabilitation settings in England which includes interviews and broad and close observations of day-to-day happenings in the lives of around 60 brain injured residents, families and health care staff. The data was subject to a situational analysis (Clarke 2011), which is underpinned by grounded theory and discourse analysis, to foreground the collective multiplicity of actors in context. The findings highlight how patients’ futures are imagined depends upon their ability (or not) to demonstrate rehabilitative progress and are imagined in line with their fit to a ‘rehabilitative imaginary’. The dominance of this imaginary simultaneously negates the futures of those unable to fulfil it but enables the ‘good care’ of all in the present. Those that are considered marginal to care - ‘hotel service staff’ (cleaners, cooks, maintenance and administrative staff) are shown to be central to the making of futures of brain injured residents and how differences in the way in which patients’ futures are imagined by patients, their families and HCPs are shown to contribute to tensions between them. It contributes to the sociological literature by extending temporal analysis to this under-researched condition (brain injury), process (rehabilitation) and place(s) (independent neurological rehabilitation settings in the independent sector) and by illuminating how futures of brain injured residents are imagined and shaped by brain injured residents themselves, by families and HCPs working with them