Poor school attendance and exclusion: A systematic review protocol on educational risk factors for self-harm and suicidal behaviours

This is the final version. Available from BMJ Publishing Group via the DOI in this record.Introduction Schools have an important role in recognising and preventing self-harm and suicidal behaviour in their students, however little is known about which educational factors are associated with heightened risk We will systematically review the existing evidence on two key educational performance indicators that are routinely collected by school administrative systems: School attendance and exclusion We will investigate their association with self-harm and suicidal behaviour in school-age children and adolescents Knowledge of this association could help inform suicide prevention strategies at clinical, school and population levels Methods and analysis We will conduct a systematic search of Medline, EMBASE, PsycINFO, British Education Index and Education Resources Information Centre (ERIC) from 1 January 1990, and conduct a manual search for additional references We aim to identify studies that explore the association between poor school attendance or exclusion and self-harm or suicidal behaviours in school-age children and adolescents Two independent reviewers will screen titles, abstracts and full-text documents and independently extract relevant data for analysis Study quality will be assessed using a modified Newcastle-Ottawa Scale A descriptive analysis will be performed, and where appropriate, results will be combined in meta-analyses Ethics and dissemination This is a systematic review of published literature, and therefore ethical approval will not be sought We will publish reports in health and education journals, present our work at conferences focused on school mental health and communicate our findings to practitioners and managers in public health, education and child mental health.Wellcome TrustMedical Research Council (MRC)National Institute of Health Research (NIHR

Theory and simulation of gelation, arrest and yielding in attracting colloids

We present some recent theory and simulation results addressing the phenomena of colloidal gelation at both high and low volume fractions, in the presence of short-range attractive interactions. We discuss the ability of mode-coupling theory and its adaptations to address situations with strong heterogeneity in density and/or dynamics. We include a discussion of the effect of attractions on the shear-thinning and yield behaviour under flow.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure

Psychopolitics: Peter Sedgwick’s legacy for mental health movements

This paper re-considers the relevance of Peter Sedgwick's Psychopolitics (1982) for a politics of mental health. Psychopolitics offered an indictment of ‘anti-psychiatry’ the failure of which, Sedgwick argued, lay in its deconstruction of the category of ‘mental illness’, a gesture that resulted in a politics of nihilism. ‘The radical who is only a radical nihilist’, Sedgwick observed, ‘is for all practical purposes the most adamant of conservatives’. Sedgwick argued, rather, that the concept of ‘mental illness’ could be a truly critical concept if it was deployed ‘to make demands upon the health service facilities of the society in which we live’. The paper contextualizes Psychopolitics within the ‘crisis tendencies’ of its time, surveying the shifting welfare landscape of the subsequent 25 years alongside Sedgwick's continuing relevance. It considers the dilemma that the discourse of ‘mental illness’ – Sedgwick's critical concept – has fallen out of favour with radical mental health movements yet remains paradigmatic within psychiatry itself. Finally, the paper endorses a contemporary perspective that, while necessarily updating Psychopolitics, remains nonetheless ‘Sedgwickian’

The politics of in/visibility: carving out queer space in Ul'yanovsk

<p>In spite of a growing interest within sexualities studies in the concept of queer space (Oswin 2008), existing literature focuses almost exclusively on its most visible and territorialised forms, such as the gay scene, thus privileging Western metropolitan areas as hubs of queer consumer culture (Binnie 2004). While the literature has emphasised the political significance of queer space as a site of resistance to hegemonic gender and sexual norms, it has again predominantly focused on overt claims to public space embodied in Pride events, neglecting other less open forms of resistance.</p><p> This article contributes new insights to current debates about the construction and meaning of queer space by considering how city space is appropriated by an informal queer network in Ul’ianovsk. The group routinely occupied very public locations meeting and socialising on the street or in mainstream cafés in central Ul’ianovsk, although claims to these spaces as queer were mostly contingent, precarious or invisible to outsiders. The article considers how provincial location affects tactics used to carve out communal space, foregrounding the importance of local context and collective agency in shaping specific forms of resistance, and questioning ethnocentric assumptions about the empowering potential of visibility.</p&gt

Introduction: anthropology's queer sensibilities

This special issue addresses vital epistemological, methodological, ethical and political issues at the intersections of queer theory and anthropology as they speak to the study of sexual and gender diversity in the contemporary world. The special issue centres on explorations of anthropology’s queer sensibilities, that is, experimental thinking in ethnographically informed investigations of gender and sexual difference, and related connections, disjunctures and tensions in their situated and abstract dimensions. The articles consider the possibilities and challenges of anthropology’s queer sensibilities that anthropologise queer theory whilst queering anthropology in ethnographically informed analyses. Contributors focus on anthropologising queer theory in research on same-sex desire in the Congo; LGBT migrant and asylum experience in the UK and France; same-sex intimacies within opposite gender oriented sexualities in Kenya and Ghana; secret and ambiguous intimacies and sensibilities beyond an identifiable ‘queer subject’ of rights and recognition in India; migrant imaginings of home in Indonesian lesbian relationships in Hong Kong; and cross-generational perspectives on ‘coming out’ in Taiwan and their implications for theories of kinship and relatedness. An extensive interview with Esther Newton, the prominent figure in gay and lesbian and queer anthropology concludes the collection

Clubbing masculinities: Gender shifts in gay men's dance floor choreographies

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journal of Homosexuality, 58(5), 608-625, 2011 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00918369.2011.563660This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the intersections of gender, sexuality, and dance. It examines the expressions of sexuality among gay males through culturally popular forms of club dancing. Drawing on political and musical history, I outline an account of how gay men's gendered choreographies changed throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Through a notion of “technologies of the body,” I situate these developments in relation to cultural levels of homophobia, exploring how masculine expressions are entangled with and regulated by musical structures. My driving hypothesis is that as perceptions of cultural homophobia decrease, popular choreographies of gay men's dance have become more feminine in expression. Exploring this idea in the context of the first decade of the new millennium, I present a case study of TigerHeat, one of the largest weekly gay dance club events in the United States

‘Whether you are gay or straight, I don’t like to see effeminate dancing’: effeminophobia in performance-level ballroom dance

This article discusses recent responses to performances of same-sex male ballroom dancing in order to consider the subtle difference which can exist between homophobia and effeminophobia. Given that the world of performance-level ballroom dancing is a gay-friendly environment, in which many participants are openly gay identified, this article will argue that a discourse of effeminophobia, rather than homophobia, underpins the world of performance-level ballroom dance. Performance-level ballroom dance is often read as camp not only because it represents exaggerated gender roles but because its official technique requires that the male dancer synthesise codes of masculinity and femininity in his dancing. What protects the gender-dissident male ballroom dancer from being read as effeminate is that he is paired with a female body performing excessive femininity. Without the foil of the hyper-feminine female partner, the same-sex couple draws attention to the fact that the male ballroom dancer is not dancing as a man but in accordance with ballroom’s queer construction of masculinity. Given that performance-level dance has struggled for so many years to be viewed as masculine sport, practitioners may, quite understandably, be anxious about any representation which suggests that ballroom dance may be an effeminate activity

Gay male academics in UK business and management schools: negotiating heteronormativities in everyday work life

This paper contributes to a neglected topic area about lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people’s employment experiences in UK business and management schools. Drawing on queer theory to problematize essentialist notions of sexuality, we explore how gay male academics negotiate and challenge discourses of heteronormativity within different work contexts. Using in-depth interview data, the paper shows that gay male academics are continually constrained by heteronormativity in constructing viable subject positions as ‘normal’, often having to reproduce heteronormative values that squeeze opportunities for generating non-heteronormative ‘queer’ sexualities, identities and selves. Constructing a presence as an openly gay academic can invoke another binary through which identities are (re)constructed: as either ‘gay’ (a cleaned up version of gay male sexuality that sustains a heteronormative moral order) or ‘queer’ (cast as radical, disruptive and sexually promiscuous). Data also reveal how gay men challenge organizational heteronormativities through teaching and research activities, producing reverse discourses and creating alternative knowledge/power regimes, despite institutional barriers and risks of perpetuating heteronormative binaries and constructs. Study findings call for pedagogical and research practices that ‘queer’ (rupture, destabilize, disrupt) management knowledge and the heterosexual/homosexual binary, enabling non-heteronormative voices, perspectives, identities and ways of relating to emerge in queer(er) business and management schools

Nebuliser therapy in the intensive care unit

The relationship between identity, lived experience, sexual practices and the language through which these are conveyed has been widely debated in sexuality literature. For example, ‘coming out’ has famously been conceptualised as a ‘speech act’ (Sedgwick 1990) and as a collective narrative (Plummer 1995), while a growing concern for individuals’ diverse identifications in relations to their sexual and gender practices has produced interesting research focusing on linguistic practices among LGBT-identified individuals (Leap 1995; Kulick 2000; Cameron and Kulick 2006; Farqhar 2000). While an explicit focus on language remains marginal to literature on sexualities (Kulick 2000), issue of language use and translation are seldom explicitly addressed in the growing literature on intersectionality. Yet intersectional perspectives ‘reject the separability of analytical and identity categories’ (McCall 2005:1771), and therefore have an implicit stake in the ‘vernacular’ language of the researched, in the ‘scientific’ language of the researcher and in the relationship of continuity between the two. Drawing on literature within gay and lesbian/queer studies and cross-cultural studies, this chapter revisits debates on sexuality, language and intersectionality. I argue for the importance of giving careful consideration to the language we choose to use as researchers to collectively define the people whose experiences we try to capture. I also propose that language itself can be investigated as a productive way to foreground how individual and collective identifications are discursively constructed, and to unpack the diversity of lived experience. I address intersectional complexity as a methodological issue, where methodology is understood not only as the methods and practicalities of doing research, but more broadly as ‘a coherent set of ideas about the philosophy, methods and data that underlie the research process and the production of knowledge’ (McCall 2005:1774). My points are illustrated with examples drawn from my ethnographic study on ‘lesbian’ identity in urban Russia, interspersed with insights from existing literature. In particular, I aim to show that an explicit focus on language can be a productive way to explore the intersections between the global, the national and the local in cross-cultural research on sexuality, while also addressing issues of positionality and accountability to the communities researched

Employability and higher education: contextualising female students' workplace experiences to enhance understanding of employability development

Current political and economic discourses position employability as a responsibility of higher education, which deploys mechanisms such as supervised work experience (SWE) to embed employability skills development into the undergraduate curriculum. However, workplaces are socially constructed complex arenas of embodied knowledge that are gendered. Understanding the usefulness of SWE therefore requires consideration of the contextualised experiences of it, within these complex environments. This study considers higher education's use of SWE as a mechanism of employability skills development through exploration of female students' experiences of accounting SWE, and its subsequent shaping of their views of employment. Findings suggest that women experience numerous, indirect gender-based inequalities within their accounting SWE about which higher education is silent, perpetuating the framing of employability as a set of individual skills and abilities. This may limit the potential of SWE to provide equality of employability development. The study concludes by briefly considering how insights provided by this research could better inform higher education's engagement with SWE within the employability discourse, and contribute to equality of employability development opportunity