A context is needed to get a sense of the ways in which contemporary discourses of Widening Participation have emerged and have in turn shaped the discourses over who has the right to higher education, and who does not. This has become increasingly associated with the acceptance of the inevitably large amounts of debt after graduation. Read more…
This piece of writing came about through being asked by Dr Drew Whitworth to present at University of Manchester Policy Week on Information Inequalities. The Ragged University started as a project to foster existing communities and improve people’s lives by bringing people together around knowledge building. It occurred that there was a need to be met beyond the formal spaces, not as an alternative, but as a complement to them which belonged and was shaped by the community which participated in the knowledge sharing.
Rather than taking an organisational route which involved administrating interpersonal interactions, and forms of bureaucracy which had a formalising influence on the social activities, the Ragged project aimed to authentically reflect the needs of the community without the creation of an administrative superstructure. Read more…
The creation of social opportunities makes a direct contribution to the expansion of human capabilities and the quality of life. Expansion of health care, education, social security, etc., contribute directly to the quality of life and to its flourishing. Read more…
Before the core settings of an informal public life can be restored to the urban landscape and re-established in daily life, it will be necessary to articulate their nature and benefit. The core settings of the informal public life must be analyzed and discussed in terms comprehensible to these rational and individualistic outlooks dominant in thought. We must dissect, talk in terms of specific payoffs, and reduce special experience to common labels. We must urgently begin to defend these Great Good Places – as Professor Ray Oldenburg calls them – against the unbelieving and the antagonistic, and do so in terms which are clear to all.
Oldenburg introduced the term “the third place” to describe articulately “the core settings of informal public life”. The third place is a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work. Read more…
David Roberts is an edinburgh based singer/songwriter who has been working in theatre for the last 11 years.(particular forum theatre ) now returing to his roots of music and especially singer/songwriting david is playing at radical, informative and educational events through-out edinburgh to promote the use of creative arts and music especially, in helping individuals to achieve their own personnel goal. Read more…
Many understand intuitively the notion of education as a public good. Broader approaches to societal development are often harder to “sell” than narrowly focused reforms that try to achieve “one thing at a time”. This may help to explain why the powerful intellectual leadership of Manmohan Singh in bringing about the needed economic reforms in India in 1991 was so concentrated on “liberalization” only, without a corresponding focus on the much needed broadening of social opportunities. Read more…
I am outraged, apathetic, empowered, disenfranchised, cynical and optimistic. I am all of these things, contradictory feelings that are equal outcomes to a mindset that I doubt I experience alone; A product of the modern era and the human condition.
In my youth I believed that we were heading to a period of enlightenment, the information era. An era where at our fingertips we had access to the most beautiful theory and experience that humanity could possibly offer. That the pure infection of its positivity would overwhelm previously negative constructs and push us towards a direction that would see an end to the ‘evils’ in the world. Read more…