Staging Posts:Thinking through the Orkney archipelago

The Orkney Archipelago, around 10 miles off the north coast of Scotland, has seen 6000 years of human settlement, with many archaeological artifacts offering significant insights into the formation of a deep-rooted island culture. The various transfigurations of this island culture to present-day Orkney indicate how external influences shape cultural inheritances, yet how this culture retains fundamental qualities; of imagination, resourcefulness, and territorial interconnections. This issue of how we negotiate the complexity of archipelagic relations is presented through a framework of process-based terms, of formations, transfigurations, constellations, aggregations, and tensions. This framework offers a degree of conceptual specificity, bringing focus to processes of relation change, movement, and interaction, across varying spatial and temporal scales. Underpinned by observational fieldwork, what emerges in this study is a sense of island life, bringing light to cultural and environmental processes, often most intensively manifest around strategic staging posts

Weapon-Carrying Among Young Men in Glasgow: Street Scripts and Signals in Uncertain Social Spaces

Our work contributes through a cultural criminological perspective to a contextualised knowledge of street violence and its constructed meanings; uncertainty, familiarity and strangeness in spaces of urban disadvantage as perceived by Scottish white youths are examined. Youth criminal and anti-social behaviour associated with knife-carrying is widely reported and structures political and media discourses which classify street culture. In our article we argue that a particular symbolic construction of social space, as experienced and constructed by weapon-carrying young white men in Glasgow, informs the landscape of violence judged in terms of official statistics and fear of crime. Signal crime theory as a particular type of cultural criminology affords insights about why weapons are carried. Links with a hierarchical codification of consumer culture inform the findings and resonate with the penetration of capitalism in the lives of the marginalised street youth

A Survey of University Policy Makers' Preferences and Expectations for Provincial Examinations

A survey was conducted of persons responsible for making undergraduate admission policies at Ontario universities to ascertain their preferences and expectations for provincial examinations. Fifty-eight individuals, at least two from each university, responded to a series of questions by telephone interview or questionnaire. Strong support was expressed for the reintroduction of provincial examinations for mathematics and first language (English or français) courses in the final year of the secondary school program. Most respondents rejected the use of scores on province-wide examinations for rating secondary schools and adjusting school marks. Instead, they expressed a preference for having applicants report both teacher-assigned course marks and provincial examination scores.Nous avons mené une enquête auprès des personnes responsables des règlements d'admission au premier cycle dans les universités de l'Ontario afin de connaître leurs attentes et préférences au sujet des examens provinciaux. Cinquante-huit personnes, dont au moins deux de chaque université, ont répondu à une série de questions par voie téléphonique ou par questionnaire. Les répondants ont montré une forte tendance en faveur de la ré-introduction d'examens provinciaux pour les mathématiques et la langue première (l'anglais ou le français), examens qui seraient administrés à la fin de la dernière année d'école secondaire. La plupart on rejeté l'idée de se servir des résultats de ces examens pour l'évaluation des écoles secondaires et pour le réajustement des notes scolaires. En fait, ils préféreraient que les candidats présentent les notes accordées par leurs enseignants ainsi que les résultats de leurs examens

New and Revised Llandovery (Early Silurian) Rugose Corals from Central Western New South Wales

Revision of some of the early Silurian rugose coral faunas from central western New South Wales and study of additional new collections warrants the introduction of a number of new taxa and some previous generic assignments need to be updated. The new cystiphyllinid genus Gephyrelasma  McLean is proposed, comprising type species  Dentilasma ramosum  McLean and  G. stevensi  McLean sp. nov. The new kodonophyllid genus  Vitiliphyllum   McLean, with type species  V. jenkinsi   McLean sp. nov., and the new arachnophyllid genus  Latomiphyllum  McLean, with type species  Arachnophyllum  ?  epistomoides  Etheridge, are introduced. Additional new species include the tryplasmatids  Aphyllum ulahense  McLean and  A. picketti  McLean, as well as the ptychophyllinid  Ptychophyllum sutorense  McLean.  Grewingkia neumani   McLean is now regarded as a probable representative of the kodonophyllid  Cyatholasma  Ivanovskiy, while  Dentilasma honorabile  Ivanovskiy sensu McLean is now only tentatively assigned to that species. Since the original studies of the coral faunas, there has been considerable revision of the lithostratigraphy and biostratigraphy of the relevant sequences. The most current interpretations are reviewed and summarized here

Putting the 'street' in gang:place and space in the organisation of Scotland's drug selling gangs

Street gangs, by definition, enjoy a special relationship with the street. Prior research shows that some communities are synonymous with gangs and that turf holds a combination of expressive and instrumental value for gang members. As gangs evolve over time and through different levels of organization, however, gangs’ relationship with the street changes. This shifting street dynamic is underexplored in prior research, thus, drawing on qualitative data from Scotland and Bourdieu’s theory of social field, the current study presents three cases of gangs at different stages of evolution and examines how levels of gang organization affect spatial relationships. As gangs accumulate sufficient street capital to evolve, we find territory is defined less physically and more relationally, with implications for gang research and practice