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An exploration of mock juror experience during the deliberations of a defendant diagnosed with a personality disorder
Get PDFPurpose:-
The purpose of this study is to investigate how mock jurors’ experiences of deliberations are impacted by the defendant having a personality disorder.
Design/methodology/approach:-
This study used a qualitative approach to explore mock jurors’ experiences during the deliberations of a fictional defendant, Sarah Priest. Ten participants formed two mock juries, and each mock jury were given two case studies to deliberate. Case study one described Priest as having “Severe Personality Disorder, Borderline Pattern” whereas case study two described Priest as having “Complex Mental Health Problems”. There were no changes to the content of the case studies aside from the change in language used to describe the defendant.
Findings:-
An inductive thematic analysis identified two main themes relating to juror experience: “Interaction with Other Mock Jurors” and “Language as a Barrier to a Verdict”. Participants constructed that prosocial interactions with other mock jurors in the deliberations helped them make a verdict decision, but some of these interactions led to disagreements between participants due to a wide variation of opinion. Second, the different description of the defendant in each case study were constructed to have made the deliberations and decision-making difficult, but for different reasons. In case study one, a lack of knowledge surrounding BPD was the reason for this difficulty, and in case study two, participants thought that the applicability of diminished responsibility criteria were unclear, making it hard to reach a verdict.
Practical implications:-
The findings have key implications for the judicial system; common experiences can be identified and recorded to implement procedures to protect jurors from adverse experiences.
Originality/value:-
There is a lack of studies that have investigated juror experience in the UK, and the few studies available have used a quantitative methodology. The approach taken in the current study is, therefore, unique in a UK context. The findings have key implications for the judicial system; common experiences can be identified and recorded to implement procedures to protect jurors from adverse experiences
"These signs forerun the death or fall of kings": renegotiating masculinities and centrality in Shakespeare's second tetralogy through adaptation, direction and performance
Get PDF‘Fall of Kings’, ‘Between the Armies’ and ‘The Breach’ were a series of adaptations that formed the practice-based elements of a project exploring and challenging contemporary
representations of gendered power and repetitive narratives of hegemonic victory in post-1980’s performances of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy. ‘Fall of Kings’ is an adaptation of Richard II, staged at Burdall’s Yard, Bath in March 2018; ‘Between the Armies’ is adapted from Henry IV Part 1 and Henry IV Part 2 and performed at The Rondo Theatre, Bath in September 2018; and ‘The Breach’ is adapted from Henry V, performed at The Rondo Theatre, Bath in June 2019 before touring to The Cotswold Playhouse, Stroud and The Alma Tavern, Bristol in July 2019. The productions were developed by three professional companies, engaging public audiences through live performances in theatres across the South West.
The adapting and directing practices employed to stage the productions are informed by a sociological analysis of the plays, drawing on a number of theoretical studies that consider performance, gender and power from sociological or sociologically attuned perspectives. Foremost of these is Raewyn Connell’s masculinities, which informed decisions on how the texts would be cut, edited and approached in performance. In conjunction with Catherine Silverstone’s consideration of how trauma may be sustained through performance, Connell’s framework is applied in the reflection and analysis of the project’s practical elements,
contributing to knowledge of how gendered power is held and enacted through practice, and the implications this may have for performance and performers. With this progression
towards a trauma-informed and actor-centred approach to direction, the project later incorporates James C. Scott’s observations of hidden speech and action from and within
social margins, which outline ways power might be claimed through the rejection of hegemony. In bringing together these considerations in practice, guided by the overarching
framework of Connell’s masculinities, the project seeks to explore how adaptation and direction might intervene to disrupt, relocate or alter dynamics of power in rehearsal and performance processes.
Reflecting on the adaptation, direction and performance of ‘Fall of Kings’, ‘Between the Armies’ and ‘The Breach’, the study considers how these practices contributed to the
disruption of narratives depicting gendered hegemony, complicity, subordination and marginality in the performance of the second tetralogy. Chapter 1 will introduce the approach to masculinities’ practical applications in ‘Fall of Kings’, exploring how the introduction of a Narrator in the textual adaptation, and the use of physical performance techniques informed by Connell’s concepts enabled a subversion of masculine-feminine dichotomies and gendered
power. Chapter 2 will examine the ways the re-embodiment of selected characters in ‘Between the Armies’ affected a displacement of the play’s hegemonic masculinities and, in
doing so, disrupted the representation of hegemonic victory in Henry IV Part 1 and 2. The chapter will discuss how Silverstone’s exploration of performance as a site in which trauma can be both represented and sustained informed the reflection on white and heteropatriarchal hegemonies in ‘Between the Armies’, onstage and in rehearsal. Continuing with this line of enquiry in relation to Scott’s concept of hidden transcripts of resistance, Chapter 3 considers
how approaches to performing class and gender in ‘The Breach’ contributed to disrupting working-class and feminine marginality, guided by the use of directorial understandings of gender. Referring to the productions as they are documented in the appendices, the thesis draws conclusions on how adaptation and direction might disrupt the centrality of Shakespeare’s kings in the narratives and processes of working with the plays. In doing so, theatre and performance can intervene in the potentially violent functions of narrative, embodiment and performance context. Centrality may be refocused, remaining flexible and responsive to actor experiences of social power, feeling and identity
Kitambaa: a convivial future-oriented framework for Kinangop’s learning hub
Get PDFThe aim of this paper, and more generally, our project “Impact from the ground” (a multi-stage ongoing project), is to reimagine education so that it transcends the walls and harsh constraints of a “universal one size fits all” education. To achieve this, we propose a framework that will inform the design of a participatory approach to co-create a learning hub (an informal lifelong learning opportunity) with and within the community. To weave this framework, we explore the current landscape of education, looking at the challenges that youth from rural settings face to complete their studies in urban universities, and the difficulties they experience when looking for jobs after having done so. We briefly explain our research project and contextualize it in Kinangop, a small region in the Nyandarua County in Kenya, where we explored the enablers and constraints people face to engage in social innovation. We proceed to imagine an alternative education that is local and organic, with different principles and theories weaved into a fabric kitambaa (in Swahili) that serves as the ground for an education intervention that is meaningful, binding, and bonding for the community members. In so doing, we aim to center matters of knowledge production as multi-epistemic conversations, situating those at the margins of epistemic divisions at the center of productive and creative debates
A Bayesian active learning approach to comparative judgement within education assessment
Get PDFAssessment is a crucial part of education. Traditional marking is a source of inconsistencies and unconscious bias, placing a high cognitive load on the assessors. One approach to address these issues is comparative judgement (CJ). In CJ, the assessor is presented with a pair of items of work, and asked to select the better one. Following a series of comparisons, a rank for any item may be derived using a ranking model, for example, the Bradley-Terry model, based on the pairwise comparisons. While CJ is considered to be a reliable method for conducting marking, there are concerns surrounding its transparency, and the ideal number of pairwise comparisons to
generate a reliable estimation of the rank order is not known. Additionally, there have been attempts to generate a method of selecting pairs that should be compared next in an informative manner, but some existing methods are known to have created their own bias within results inflating the reliability metric used within the process. As a consequence, a random selection approach is usually deployed.
In this paper, we propose a novel Bayesian approach to CJ (which we call BCJ) for determining the ranks
of a range of items under scrutiny alongside a new way to select the pairs to present to the marker(s) using active learning, addressing the key shortcomings of traditional CJ. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the entire approach may provide transparency by providing the user insights into how it is making its decisions and, at the same time, being more efficient. Results from our synthetic experiments confirm that the proposed BCJ combined with entropy-driven active learning pair-selection method is superior (i.e. always equal to or significantly better) than other alternatives, for example, the traditional CJ method with differing selection methods such as uniformly random, or the popular no repeating pairs where pairs are selected in a round-robin fashion. We also find that the more comparisons that are conducted, the more accurate BCJ becomes, which solves the issue the current method has of the model deteriorating if too many comparisons are performed. As our approach can generate the complete predicted rank distribution for an item, we also show how this can be utilised in probabilistically devising a predicted grade, guided by the choice of the assessor. Finally, we demonstrate our approach on a real dataset on assessing GCSE (UK school-level) essays, highlighting the advantages of BCJ over CJ
"Maybe that makes a difference actually": attuning to praxis for anti-racist social justice leadership among nursery school head teachers in the UK
Get PDFIn light of ongoing inequalities within society, the role of social justice leadership in educational spaces remains a central arena amongst research and practice. It is widely recognised that clear recognition and understanding of social justice among educators can offer the capacity for meaningful change against inequalities that continue to saturate both the profession and the experiences of children themselves. Yet, as argued with most clarity by Furman, recognition and understanding alone remain limited strategies in the absence of examples of practice and the development of capacities needed to advance social justice. Furman’s model of social justice leadership offers an avenue to consider the more precise nature of anti-racist practice praxis in the early childhood field. This article will evaluate the effectiveness of the model as applied to anti-racism. It will draw on data from a qualitative study on ethnicity and the early years workforce to consider the extent to which nursery school head teachers may be becoming attuned towards anti-racist social justice leadership praxis, inclusive of reflection and action. Our data reveal that, in more and less structured ways, leaders are already cognisant of the need to engage in anti-racist social justice leadership. The production of this framework offers a stepping stone towards more formalised anti-racist praxis for leaders in the early years profession
Fifth of July: hybrid genre texts and a story in a mind: on hybridity as creative practice
No full textThis project explores modes of hybridity in creative and critical writing. Fifth of July is a collection of hybrid genre texts: prose forms that range from short lyrics to longer narrative essays. The backbone of the book is a sequence that unfolds over the course of a single day (the speaker's 30th birthday), while shorter, interleaved texts spin off to examine the speaker's relationship with her obsessions and her own mind. A Story in a Mind engages both with the craft of the creative work and, through exploring the relationship between hybridity and creative practice, the mind that produced it. The introduction orients the reader to a lineage of hybrid genre writing and proposes the idea of the author's mind as the self-referential arbiter of the project. The subsequent three essays examine three kinds of relationships in hybrid genre writing: between writer and reader, in 'Lecture Halls and Labyrinths: On Digression'; between form and tone, in 'Anyway, Back to the Critic: On Metaphor.' In addition to the creative artefact itself (by which is meant both Fifth of July and the essays comprising A Story in a Mind), this project contributes to new knowledge in the field of creative writing by providing a model for writers to access and employ hybridity not just at the level of content and form, but at the level of creative practice. This research (by which is meant both A Story in a Mind and the texts comprising Fifth of July) suggests that perceiving, naming, and even insisting on relationships is the foundational exercise of hybridity in writing. Further, this exercise of bringing together seemingly disparate genres, modes of expression, tonal registers, ideas, images, and disciplines is a type metaphorical thinking. Ultimately, this work contends that the act of metaphor-making is more than craft strategy; it is a creative practice that is central to the impetus of the mind to understand itself
The scale of water [group exhibition]
No full textThe scale of water was an exhibition held at the Michael Pennie Gallery, Bath from 18 March to 12 May 2024.
A panel discussion and multiple screenings took place on Friday 10th May. The screenings included:
Kathy Hinde, River Traces (16mm film - screening with 16 mm Projector, 9 minutes). River Traces 1 was created in collaboration with the River Frome in Bristol, by exposing samples of river sediment and algae directly onto 16mm film, and developing using eco-processing techniques such as coffee and plant developers. Physical traces are generated through a direct encounter between the material qualities of the river and the film itself, effecting both the visual and audio track.
Emma Critchley : Common Heritage, 2010 (HD video, 25 mins)
The drive to explore and exploit the sea floor means this once seemingly infinite landscape is now being carved up into territorial space. Common Heritage is an urgent response to the gold rush of deep-sea mining for rare earth minerals, exposing how reverberant layers of industrialisation have affected the way we relate to our environment
Siobhan MacDonald - Methane Lake (video, 8:39 mins)
As our worlds ice disappears-out boglands are exposed. These massive landscapes hold many toxic gasses, like methane. And also many clues to the past in seds and matter buried deep in the past. Methane Lake brings together themes spanning locations form the Arctic tundra to Irish bogland that explores the slow workings of geological processes found deep in the permafrost, meditating on the sentience of ice.
Evgenia Abergueva: Haulout (documentary film, 25 mins)
A lone scientist on the coast of the Siberian Arctic finds that warming seas have taken a toll on the walrus migration, as documented in a film by Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev. "Haulout" was nominated for Best Documentary Short at the 2023 Oscars Academy Awards
The effectiveness of COURAGE in promoting the mental health of domestic abuse survivors
No full textThe rates of domestic abuse in the UK are high, especially since the pandemic, with significant consequences for the survivors’ health and wellbeing. While there are services in place to provide practical and legal guidance for women who are going through domestic abuse, much is still needed to develop therapeutic interventions to support their mental health as well as to make them feel less isolated.
This study is set in this context, and it aims to explore the effectiveness of COURAGE, a narrative therapy group intervention developed to support individuals who experience multiple levels of trauma, to fit the specific needs of domestic abuse survivors.
Five women who experienced domestic abuse participated in the study. They took part in eight weekly COURAGE sessions of two hours each. The sessions followed the manualized version of COURAGE, and they embedded artmaking activities such as mapmaking and storytelling. The structure of the sessions includes group and individual activities based on the principle of narrative therapy.
A multiple case study design was adopted to collect and analyze the data. This was done by combining participants’ pre and post-COURAGE individual interviews, as well as the artmaking produced during the sessions, and the researchers’ observational notes.
The findings indicated that participants’ main motivation to take part in the study was to ease their sense of solitude as well as to build strength while they were experiencing the abuse. Participants benefited from COURAGE in terms of building cohesiveness and a sense of belonging, reframing disempowering stories to build positive self-narratives, strengthening resilience, and building hope for the future.
Implications and future directions will be discussed
A sociomaterial approach to teacher resilience
No full textCurrent theoretical developments around resilience as systems thinking require a shift in research methodology and an acknowledgement of the range of theories that are employed. Resilience theory has moved away from a focus on the individual towards a ‘fourth pillar’ which considers resilience as part of societal and collective structures. Individualist approaches are critiqued in the literature as limiting, and instead resilience is considered as the interplay between the individual and the environment. The chapter presents the initial findings of a systematic review of methodologies used to investigate resilience in teachers and makes the case for the sociomaterial as a development from systems thinking (specifically, actor-network theory and the idea of [NET] from Latour’s (2013) An inquiry into modes of existence) to broaden knowledge through a focus on localised and everyday practices of education practitioners. The authors draw on their own experience of resilience in the educational workplace as a point of departure from adherence to dominant discourses of teacher resilience