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Given that the expectation of the British Educational Research Association Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy Special Interest Group Scholar Lecture is to position yourself throughout the paper, I will start with sharing my academic/career biography, acknowledging that our biographies are inextricably linked to our work and life practices. I will then briefly consider sport pedagogy (SP) as an entity and what we mean by SP, before exploring apprenticeship, academia and administration. It is my intention to provide an honest expression of (i) how I have grown and continue to grow in different phases, (ii) the purpose of each phase in my development and (iii) the related implications that arise for me as a SP scholar and colleague. My focus is on the power we, as individuals and as a community, have to (i) entice and encourage individuals into the area of SP, (ii) to mentor them as they develop as scholars, (iii) to learn from and with them and (iv) to prepare them to become confident, informed and caring individuals with a continued passion for the field. In turn, those individuals who have experienced such a pathway then take on the mantle of starting the process again by enticing and encouraging new individuals into SP. This is very much a thread throughout the paper as I draw on personal experiences from my career as a researcher, teacher educator/academic and administrator, aligned with the concepts of apprenticeship, academia and administration. I draw predominantly on my time as a physical education teacher educator for the past 13 years in the same Irish university setting. My aim throughout the paper is to prompt you to consider your own academic/career development, what ‘phase(s)’ you have/are experiencing and the academic/learning groups you are connected to. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reviews the place of the 'voice' in the history of intellectual disability, drawing principally on developments in the UK, but also making reference to comparative developments in other countries. Various approaches have been used by research historians to collect and represent the voices of those involved in this history; including biographical reconstruction, oral history, institutional histories and life histories. In response to the challenge, 'Nothing About Us Without Us' the slogan of the disabled people's movement, the paper argues for the careful use of oral and biographical accounts to augment histories told through official sources and examines some of the methodological challenges associated with such approaches. However, the argument of this paper, ultimately, is in favour of what we are calling 'inclusive history', where academic historians and oral/life historians contribute to the development of a shared history of intellectual disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents research findings on practitioners working with young people on Entry to Employment (E2E) programmes in the north of England. E2E continues a long tradition of work-related learning for unemployed school leavers for whom other forms of education or training are deemed unsuitable, and is part of the UK government's strategy for reducing the numbers of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET). The paper explores the biographies of tutors and their routes into E2E teaching. It also discusses the training and development they have experienced, in the light of the expansive-restrictive continuum of workforce development introduced by Fuller and Unwin. By analysing the dispositions, interpretations and actions of practitioners and relating them to wider policy discourses, the paper also examines the learning culture of E2E. It argues that, although they demonstrate significant levels of care, enthusiasm and teaching ability, practitioners operate within a largely restrictive approach to workforce development and learning. The paper concludes that both practitioners and learners would benefit from a re-evaluation of the material and discursive relations under which E2E operates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

War memorials both inhabit and construct complex memorial landscapes. They were often added to pre-existing Victorian, Edwardian, or earlier public spaces and may share proximity with a variety of successive commemorative material cultures. The relationships between war memorials and existing commemorative spaces are most apparent however in churches, churchyards, and cemeteries. War memorials were erected not only in attempts to 'fit in' with these existing and traditional spaces of commemoration, but they also altered and created new spaces, which have determined later commemorative strategies. The importance of the church, churchyard, and cemetery as a focus for the commemoration of the war dead is also reflected in the inclusion of many of the names and biographies of those who died upon family headstones, and with memorial tablets and plaques being erected inside the churches themselves. This paper will draw upon a full range of evidence from a large sample of over 5000 war memorials in Devon, UK, focusing on those found within churches, churchyards, and cemeteries to discuss the shifting dynamics and significance of religious spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper we consider the potential of autobiographical narratives for accessing ‘storied knowledge’ in research around geographies of health voluntarism. We firstly consider what is meant by elicited autobiography and how the narrative approach has been used in research more broadly. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in Manchester, UK and Auckland, New Zealand we then demonstrate how this approach has helped us to map out and unpack the career journeys of mental health activists working within and across the voluntary and statutory sectors. Through our autobiographical narratives we illustrate how this approach has enabled us to elicit important insights into the triggers and trajectories underpinning mental health activism and how events and moments in time have provided critical junctures in these trajectories. We consider places as sites of significance in activist career paths; and as central to the researcher-participant gestalt within which the autobiography is elicited and recounted. The autobiographical process, we suggest, offers reflective insights into mental health activism that might not otherwise be gained using more conventional methodologies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article examines the potential future of political biography in Great Britain. While it is attested that the British political biography is a very well-honed and respected form of literature, this paper also posits that biography is intellectually and culturally the least confident form of political writing. Biographers are contrasted with artists in other genres, such as thriller writing, filmmaking, and wood-carving. Prominent political figures such as English author Samuel Johnson and English anarchist and biographer Lytton Strachey are discussed in relation to the topic. It is urged that complacency poses a risk to the future of British political biography.

This paper considers Olive Banks' work on charting the history and development of British feminism, and particularly her use of collective biography as a research and analytic tool. It is argued that while this has been seen as the least 'fashionable' aspect of her work, it took forward C. Wright Mills' contention for one definition of sociology as the interaction between biography and history, and predated by a decade or so similar work on prosopography by Bourdieu from the 1990s onwards. More recently other sociologists and educationists have taken up this methodological approach, including Jane Martin and Bronwyn Davies and Susanne Gannon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's opinion on the lack of a biography on Dame Margery Perham, who was an academic expert on British colonial administration. The author discusses Perham's accomplishments which include her work as a research consultant to Lord Hailey and his team on the African Survey project, her election of a Fellow of the British Academy and the first invited woman to give the British Broadcasting Corporation's Reith Lectures. Perham's books "West African Passages," and "Pacific Prelude," and the papers she left to Oxford University's Rhodes House are discussed.

The article discusses the author's emphasis on the significance of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) to illuminate aspects of the history of the academic discipline of geography in Great Britain. It is stressed that this paper concentrates on neglect of the generic form of biographical writing, specifically its narrowing of perspective on what comprises the field of geography. The author affirms that this dictionary offers geography historians an important new resource. ODNB, in its electronic form, is described as more easily accessed and debated.

This paper presents the outcome of a preliminary study of the various images of the life course that are conveyed in published obituaries. Following a review of recent developments in the obituary columns of national newspapers in the United Kingdom, we present our analysis of the 86 obituaries that were published in The Guardian in June 1995. We pay particular attention to the ways in which obituaries cover the biography, age, ill-health, death and personal relationships of the deceased. We conclude that, although the sampled obituaries as a whole feature the mid-life careers of men, they also reflect common expectations, fears and prejudices about age, illness and death. We would suggest that a more substantial study comparing obituaries in a wide range of contrasting publications and cultures would reveal important differences in dominant images of the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]