Widening Participation in the Neoliberal University

This is an extended version of an article I wrote for an assessment in the MSc I am doing at Queen Margaret University.  As a part of Public Sociology, I chose to write about the conflicted messaging of the university in terms of administration, bureaucracy and policy. Whilst many people in the educational sector act with values consonant to equating education to human development and as a public good essential for a society to function, the administrative structures seem captured by market driven, profit oriented values delivered increasingly by multinational companies. Read more…

Constructing Resilient Education: Social Practices Which Form Community

This is presentation is about constructing resilient education in the fractured environment examining social practices which form community. It was given to the National Education Union conference on Friday, 3rd February 2022 which was staged at The University Centre West Anglia, King’s Lynn.  Participants were invited to reflect on the theme of communities of practice. This is a copy of the presentation along with the written article which has been annotated with multimedia resources and verbatim excerpts from original sources in the grey boxes.

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The Missing Story of Mary Burns and Fred: Silences in the Story of History

Coming shortly…. This is a placeholder for an article which is to be published soon as an appendix to a peer reviewed paper submitted to the PRISM Journal and presented at the 2020 Working Class Academics conference. The paper submitted to PRISM is called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons People: A Marmot Overview’ and lays out a perspective on how ‘workingclassness’ can be interpreted as being on a spectrum of having to perform to gain access to sufficiency, the mechanics of a hierarchy of permissions and allowances, the psychology of exclusion, and the effects on life expectancy and health as drawn from Michael Marmot‘s work. Read more…