Employee wellbeing in the higher education workplace: a role for emotion scholarship

This article has dual aims. First, it proposes an explicit focus on emotion as a means of enriching thinking about employee health and wellbeing in the higher education (HE) sector. Second, in order to bring conceptual clarity to a highly complex area, it presents and illustrates (using a fictional scenario) a framework for understanding emotion. The article begins with an overview of recent published research relevant to the HE workplace as an affective domain and argues that research with an explicit focus on emotion is a so far little exploited means of investigating aspects of working life in HE that have implications for health and professional practice. It then presents a conceptualisation that views emotion as a system within which individual and environmental factors interact in highly intricate ways in emotional experience (Lazarus in Emotion and adaptation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991, 1999). Viewed from this perspective ‘emotions’, as opposed to less powerful ‘affects’ (such as attitudes, beliefs and opinions), are uniquely relevant to physical and mental health. The article concludes by considering implications arising from this perspective on emotion for researchers and other practitioners in HE with an interest in how the university workplace impacts on the wellbeing of an increasingly diverse workforce.     

Asking more of Siri and Alexa: feminine persona in service of surveillance capitalism

This paper illuminates how gendered stereotypes can be leveraged to assuage anxieties surrounding artificially intelligent virtual assistants (AI VA). In particular, the analysis shows that these AI objects routinely traffic in normative gender roles of the feminine as caretaker, mother, and wife in order to obfuscate modes of surveillance, and mediate the relationship users and potential users have with late-capitalist market logics in the platform economy. Mobilizing essentialist feminine personas characterized in this paper as “digital domesticity,” artificially intelligent objects orient users to engage productively with surveillance capitalism as natural. To illustrate this relationship between femininity and surveillance, this paper focuses on two case studies of AI VA. The essay turns to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa as emblematic of AI VA that perform a stereotypically feminine persona that invites users to participate in increasingly intimate forms of data exchange that in turn contribute to surveillance capitalism. The study of AI VA, like Siri and Alexa, demonstrates the significant rhetorical capacities of the feminine persona as they are applied to objects with weak (that is, limited) artificial intelligence.     

Queer London in Literature1

In literature about queer men, London's parks, squares, streets and ‘public conveniences’ have figured more significantly even than bars and clubs, let alone bedrooms. What matters more than where men eventually make love has been where they meet. Some do so in great national spaces and thoroughfares—Piccadilly Circus principal among them—others in more obscure corners. The queer presence in them emerges, often in the weighty moment of cruising's backward glance, as an ‘open secret’. Notwithstanding the changing pressures of wars and laws, the queer subculture is represented as continuously occupying the same public social spaces as the culture that abhors and attacks it.     

When rewards and sanctions fail: a case study of a primary school rule‐breaker

Positioning theory provides a lens through which to view the narrative accounts of working‐class parents as dynamic, intentional acts of positioning intended to gain the recognition of school personnel as full partners in the education of their children. Knowing that school personnel will not treat them with the kind of respect given middle‐class parents, but refusing to allow themselves to be viewed as if they were lower‐class parents, analysis of the accounts of working‐class parents reveals intentional acts of positioning that serve to: (1) fight against stereotypes, (2) guard against being made to feel inferior by maintaining vigilance and involvement, and (3) build cultural and social capital through dialog and deliberation. These acts of intentional positioning are also understood as knowledge‐generating activities where people come together in dialog to work toward a mutually acceptable solution. Implications for the development of dialog‐oriented parental involvement practices are offered.     

Responding to the Consumer: Parental Choice and School Effectiveness

This article reports on aspects of the PASCI (Parental and School Choice Interaction) Study which is investigating the interaction between school decision‐making and parental choice of school. The article focuses on findings concerning how schools in a pilot case study area (part of the PASCI Study's exploratory fieldwork) are responding to parental choice and competition between schools.     

Choice,Class and Effectiveness

There continues to be strong international interest in reforms enhancing choice and competition between schools as a means of improving school effectiveness. The United Kingdom is one of the countries where such reforms have been taken furthest. The paper reports further data from the PASCI (Parental and School Choice Interaction) study, which is investigating over a period of years the impact of choice and competition in England and Wales. The paper focuses on social class differences amongst parents and their relationship to choice. Issues arising for the effectiveness movement are outlined.     

Achieving inclusion of students with disabilities in Turkey: current challenges and future prospects

Developing inclusion in schools has been an objective for many countries in recent decades, giving rise to a variety of definitions, policy -making activities and school practices. This paper focuses on the attempts made towards inclusion of students with disabilities in Turkey. We start by introducing inclusive education and its parameters, and continue with recent trends in education in Turkey. Next, we discuss current progress in including students with disabilities within mainstream schools, and continue with the legislative attempts made to improve this position. After that, we discuss recent developments and challenges in the education and inclusion of students with disabilities, and conclude by noting several recommendations for realising their inclusion in Turkey. While the purpose of this paper is to investigate the inclusion of students with disabilities in the Turkish context, there is much of relevance to other international contexts going through similar developmental processes in terms of inclusion.     

A Model of Effective Fieldwork Supervision for Trainee Educational Psychologists

This study seeks to provide current survey data from qualified psychologists about effective supervision, in view of increased fieldwork supervision demands, due to restructured initial professional training. A model of effective fieldwork supervision emerges in which a well‐managed and communicative partnership between trainee psychologist and supervisor is formed, in the context of the psychological service, its partners and clients. The authors anticipate that this may support the supervision needs of qualified colleagues, and speculate upon what additional provisions might be relevant in Years 2 and 3 when trainee psychologists will have a dual role as university students and practitioners within services.