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Introduction to the special issue on social media influencers: performance, authenticity, and social media visibility [guest editor]
No full textSocial media influencers, content creators and micro-celebrities can be read as new forms of contemporary celebrity, and yet their rise to fame can be traced back to a century-old film star system. With this in mind, this introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Social Media Influencers’ offers a brief overview of pre-existing fame cultures, the importance of public curiosity and the significance of authenticity, or at least the perception of authenticity, to old and new forms of fame alike. The article concludes by offering an overview of each original contribution in the volume
Teachers as researchers: understanding the lived experience of engagement in research through collaborative close-to-practice enquiry
Get PDFIn the context of the long-standing discourse of the teacher as researcher and the recent deprofessionalising of teachers to consumers of specific research of ‘What Works’, this thesis explores what it could mean to be both teacher and researcher. It seeks insight into the experiences of teachers in England and Wales as they engaged in separate small scale research projects and is the focused examination of their research experience as it was lived through engagement in small scale research activity.
In seeking to understand this lived experience this thesis is phenomenological. It is also hermeneutical in exploring teachers’ interpretations of their experience. It assumes a Longitudinal Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (LIPA) approach and, throughout their engagement in the research process, participants engaged in semi-structured interviews where they shared their experience as they lived it. Analysis of these interviews moves from the descriptive to the increasingly interpretative to shed light on research questions which focus on the experience of engaging in small scale research, participants’ views on collaborative inquiry and potential influences on sustained engagement in research.
Findings indicate that the process of engagement in research could be an empowering-challenging-enticing form of professional development but that this is a fragile, affective experience that requires careful support. Further, the reality, or lived experience of research, can be different to a perception of it as an ‘extensive’ and ‘overwhelming’ activity. This thesis therefore argues for a reframing of teacher research as inquiry, specifically Collaborative Close-to-Practice Inquiry (CCtPI), to support teacher engagement in research as a form of professional development: collaborative to provide support, partnership and reassurance, close-to- practice to facilitate the relevance to practice and referred to as ‘inquiry’ to facilitate a perception of the activity being accessible to teachers. Engaging both with research and in CCtPI can support the teachers as professionals, moving beyond the role of technicians to be both consumers and producers of research
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast: conservation histories, policies and practices in north-west Namibia
No full textThis book examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and conservation practitioners, working on topics ranging from colonial histories to water management, perceptions of ‘wildlife’ and the politics of belonging. Together, these essays confront a critical question: how can the conservation of biodiversity-rich landscapes be reconciled with historical injustices of social exclusion and marginalisation
Climate change implies mass migration. How do we prepare for and manage this? [panellist]
No full textTime to play, time to think: meaningful moments in the forest
Get PDFThis paper reports on a study carried out by tutors and students on Early Childhood Studies degree courses at a University in England. The research explored perspectives of three to six-year-old children’s outdoor play in Danish forest kindergartens with the aim of troubling and informing approaches to outdoor pedagogy. Inspired by Somerville and Powell’s ‘deep hanging out’ ([Somerville, M., and J. Powell. 2018. “Thinking Posthuman with Mud: And Children of the Anthropocene.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 51 (8): 829–840. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1516138, 1) with data, researchers visited the kindergartens for a full day at a time during annual week-long field visits. This provided opportunities to notice the children’s journeys and possibilities over time. Findings showed that, given time and space to play in the forest, children were able to pursue their interests, engage in extended periods of concentration and thinking while working together as they played and explored with each other, with the educators and with the materiality of their surroundings. Implications for practitioners highlight the need to provide uninterrupted time for children to develop their curiosities and enjoyment of the outdoor environment
Skin deep: a review of early childhood policy affordances for anti-racist practice in England and Scotland
Get PDFThe role of anti-racism in early childhood remains a salient concern for many educators working with young children. Yet to what extent, and through what socio-political paradigms, government guidance supports proactive engagement remains an area to be mapped and explored. In this article, through a critical scoping review we aim to consider the context and policy landscape for anti-racist practice in Scotland and England and examine confluences and divergences between each country
Coastal lagoonal evolution within the Early Holocene Humber Estuary, eastern England
Get PDFRapid sea‐level rise during the Early Holocene around the North Sea coastal lowlands provided conditions under which estuarine and coastal features, with no modern equivalents, could be created. Investigation of nearshore sediments within the Outer Humber Estuary, UK, has identified a tidal lagoonal system, created between c. 9000 and 7800 cal a bp. These sequences show the initial flooding of a carr woodland, prior to the establishment of more saline conditions as the tidal lagoonal system developed. Inter‐core comparisons, based on diatom and pollen analyses, suggest variations in the structure of a tidal lagoon setting, which probably lasted for only a brief period before being submerged by rising sea levels. The absence of an erosive contact in several of the sequences studied has permitted the creation of the oldest sea‐level index points for the Outer Humber Estuary, providing validation for the current glacial isostatic adjustment models for the region
Tennyson, Dickens, Poe, Browning, and the Brontës: 'Blackwood’s Magazine' and "the foreheads of a new generation"
No full textFollowing its explosive debut in October 1817, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine reached the heights of its notoriety in the following four years, and while it moderated its ferocity as the 1820s progressed, it continued to exert a powerful influence on British political, literary, and popular culture. Its early assaults on poets such as Percy Shelley and Lord Byron typically combined truculence with insight, and in the early 1830s it took the same approach to the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. Most notably, Blackwood’s writers like John Wilson, William Maginn, and Samuel Warren produced innovative terror fiction that rejected the ominous suggestions and careful evocations of ‘atmosphere’ in the late eighteenth-century Gothic in favour of the precision and the more direct realism of chapbooks, broadsheets, ‘true crime’ narratives, and newspaper accounts of executions, murders, and suicides. These fictions inspired Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and the three Brontë sisters, all of whom emulated and transformed the Blackwood’s tale of terror
Lost in wonder: a response to Schinkel’s ‘deep' wonder in education
Get PDFIn this paper, I aim to carve out some points of clarification with regards to the plausible role of ‘wonder’ in education. I do so, largely, in unison with the general intention, values and interest in how the concept of wonder might have a place in education. Most of us who work in education want to provide valuable experiences for our students, and we want them to be driven by intrinsic values such truth and recognition of the dignity of human existence. However, whilst I echo many of the sentiments espoused by advocates of the utility and ethical dimensions for engaging with conceptions of wonder, I’d like to suggest that some recent developments, in particular, Schinkel’s argument that ‘deep’ wonder has a ‘fundamental’ role in education is misconceived. This is, I suggest, because any concept deployable within educational spaces (formal or informal) must pay due to regard to the conceptual constraints of the concept of ‘education’; that is, primarily, they must attend to the role of ‘learning’. Schinkel’s proposals are, I suggest, vulnerable to a critique of sentimentalism, excessive romanticism, even nonsense. As such, it seems to offer little in terms of practical import for educators. As I will suggest, if we are to take ‘wonder’ seriously in educational contexts, we must pay attention to the very purpose of wonder as an epistemic emotion, namely: aiming for knowledge and understanding; getting there requires sensitivity to practical know-how and conceptual competence