Consultancy project: Identifying the availability of LD relevant training for psychologists working in Learning Disability Services

Accessible summary:Psychologists need to be trained how to work best with people with learning disabilities, but it is not always clear what training is available to them. This project asked different psychologists what training they have completed or know about, and what training they need. Psychologists’ answers will be used to make recommendations to try and improve future training for psychologists working with people with learning disabilities

Best practice when working therapeutically with people with learning disabilities: A brief review

Accessible summary:There are different ways of helping people who experience mental health problems. Psychologists need to know the best ways of working with people with learning disabilities who have mental health problems. To help psychologists know what works best, this paper has a summary of what we know about how to work with people with learning disabilities. It tells us what sort of changes psychologists may need to make to best support people with learning disabilities with mental health problems. This paper will be helpful to psychologists work in learning disability services, especially those who are new to working with people with learning disabilities

Porridge and misogyny:rationalising inconspicuous misogyny in morning television shows

While in the last decade we made strides in the pursuit of gender equality, women's rights, dignity, and safety continue to be under threat around the world. There is a growing body of research documenting contemporary misogyny, mainly focused on extreme manifestations found in online environments. Conversely, we know less about how misogyny features in other spheres of our daily lives. The current study focuses on such an environment, namely segments from the British show This Morning in which guests are invited to take opposing stances on a variety of topics related to women's appearance, behaviour, competencies, and experiences with sexual harassment. Using discursive psychology, we identified two sets of argumentative discursive practices employed by guests who espoused misogynist views. First, when guests were prompted to present their controversial views, they constructed them as reasonable, strategically differentiating them from established misogynist tropes. By contrast, when guests’ views were challenged, they doubled down on their positions by drawing on scientific explanations for human behaviour that ostensibly justified bigoted views. This study sheds light onto the discursive mechanisms through which misogyny escapes eradication, and through which it mutates into subtler forms that are increasingly difficult to identify and denounce

Categorisation and the negotiation of similarity and difference : identity construction in expatriate blogs

Expatriates are individuals who have moved abroad and settled into a new sociocultural environment. Many keep a personal blog, in which they reflect on their experiences and in the process engage in identity construction. Whilst online directories list a multitude of expatriate blogs, little research has examined how identity is linguistically produced in such sites. Adopting a sociocultural linguistic approach, this paper investigates identity construction in twelve expatriate blogs written in English through membership categorisation analysis (Sacks 1992) and the similarity dimension of tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall 2004a,b). Key features are being a person in transition, adopting English practises and portraying relocation as a shared experience

"Facebook's about to know, Karen":mobilising social media to sanction public conduct

This paper explores the social action of sanctioning an interlocutor’s conduct in public spaces through social media. Using membership categorisation analysis (Hester and Eglin 1997), we examine how, in offline face-to-face disputes filmed by one party, interactants deploy the name ‘Karen’ to sanction someone and threaten the transposition of the recording onto social media to impose accountability to the public at large. Our findings show how sanctioning through categorising an individual as a ‘Karen’ is interactionally achieved through framing conduct as entitled or otherwise problematic, distinguishing in-situ production of ‘Karen’ from a delivery that is perceptually unavailable to an interlocutor. We explore how social media functions as a resource to shape the ongoing encounter by orienting to the camera, and thus the online audience, as an external authority

The linguistic construction of identity in transnational relocation narratives: Examining discursive practices in expatriate blogs

This research examines the linguistic construction of identity in personal narratives of transnational relocation to England in expatriate blogs. These constitute a form of transition during which individuals engage with who they are. Adopting a sociocultural linguistic approach to identity, the analysis draws on the frameworks of tactics of intersubjectivity (ToI) and membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to show how identity is constructed along the relational dimensions of likeness, realness and power, and how individuals engage in category negotiations throughout their first year abroad. Most commonly, individuals create similarity and difference with regard to both their country of origin and of residence, as well as to other expatriates with whom they share joint foreignness. Less frequently yet more prominently, they authenticate identity, which involves sharing personal experience, displaying expertise, as well as positioning themselves as able to provide unadorned accounts of life abroad and as finding fulfilment through relocation. However, they also denaturalise identity through expressions of rupture, challenges and being out of place. Issues of power revolve around individuals’ process of obtaining necessary documents and of legitimising their blogging. Category negotiation extends from the initial challenge of not yet having moved whilst already sharing relocation narratives, as well as experiencing liminality, to adopting category membership as expatriates, exploring its predicates and challenging non-members’ assumptions. This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge in two ways: empirically by exploring linguistic identity construction in online transnational relocation narratives, which is relevant for an understanding of how individuals discursively engage with transition more generally, and methodologically and theoretically by employing and critiquing two diverse approaches which to the researcher’s knowledge have not been combined in research on linguistic identity construction. Ultimately, this thesis contributes towards the consideration of how identity and transition can be theorised and investigated using linguistic frameworks

Picking fights with politicians dataset

This is the dataset for the paper 'Picking fights with politicians' paper. This includes two recordings, one taken by the BBC, and the other by a YouTuber. The BBC recording has been transcribed. Data is open for secondary reuse

The banality of education policy : Discipline as extensive evil in the neoliberal era

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this articlePeer reviewedPostprin