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In the field of higher education, there are two dominant strands of interpretation of criticality, either as a decontextualized skill of logical reasoning, or a sense of action within larger contexts more than mere cognition. This research offers a reclaiming and reimagining of criticality in universities as an affective process, highlighting the entanglement of social, discursive and material perspectives. This research takes a comparative lens to investigate undergraduate students' perceptions of criticality and institutional cultivation of it in a Sociology undergraduate degree in China and the UK, adopting a qualitative interview method. Differences were found between cultures regarding the level of engagement with a range of criticality-embedded practices, including field work, critical inquiry in class, group work, etc. Through the development of criticality in various activities, students' feelings towards it shifted with contexts. While placed within physical and discursive universities that convey a sense of professionalism, students in the study acknowledged the importance of criticality and proactively demonstrated it. However, the feeling towards showcasing criticality outside campus was two-fold. Whereas criticality can be associated with negativity in social interactions, its value is appreciated as it enabled students to reconstruct their identities into a more rational, tolerant and caring one.

Providing evidence that can inform awarding is an important application of Comparative Judgement (CJ) methods in high-stakes qualifications. The process of marking scripts is not changed, but CJ methods can assist in the maintenance of standards from one series to another by informing decisions about where to place grade boundaries or cut scores. The research described in this article set out to increase understanding of the risks associated with this use of CJ. Specifically, the research explored how robust the outcomes of CJ-based awarding activities would be to mismarking in the script evidence. In this article, the author explores the extent to which the simplified pairs (SP) method would be robust to mismarking in the sample of scripts used for the comparison exercise. The research has two main conclusions: (1) The SP method appears robust to single large marking errors and to fairly large marking errors in quite high proportions of sampled scripts; and (2) The SP method is more vulnerable to a general degradation of marking quality.

This essay offers a broken narrative concerning the early history of anti-oppressive practice as an approach in the U.K. to youth and community work and the struggles over this in the context of UK higher education between the 1960's and the early 2000's. Educating informal educators as youth and community workers in the UK has been a site of contestation. Aspects of a genealogy of that struggle are presented in ways which link publicly available histories with personal memories and narratives, through the use of a personal archive developed through collective memory work. These are chosen to illuminate the links between theory and practice: on the one hand, the conceptual field which has framed the education of youth and community workers, whose sources lie in the academic disciplines of education and sociology, and, on the other hand, the social movements which have formed the practice of informal educators. Six have been chosen: (1) The long 1968: challenging approaches to authority; (2) the group as a source of learning; (3) The personal and political: experiential learning from discontent; (4) Paolo Freire and Critical Praxis; (5) A critical break in social education and the reality of youth work spaces as defensive spaces; (6) New managerialism: ethics vs. paper trails. The approach taken, of linking memory work with present struggles, is argued to be a generative form for current critical and enlivening practice.

In the context of the distinction between normative and descriptive approaches to the relationship between science and religion, this article discusses the recent work of the sociologist Elaine Ecklund. It reviews four of her published outputs, summarising her data concerning the views of religious people and professional scientists, including their positions on the relationship between science and religion and on cognate issues, and discusses her attempt to show the relevance of these data in a particular formational context. It seeks to evaluate and extend her work from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to discuss the "Q-Step in the Community" programme, part of the Q-Step Centre based in the Sociology Department at Manchester Metropolitan University, designed to help address the skills gap in quantitative methods (QM) that is evident across parts of the UK higher-education sector. "Q-Step in the Community" is a data-driven work-based learning programme that works in partnership with local organisations to provide placement opportunities for final year undergraduates and postgraduates. Students conduct a quantitative research project, which is typically identified by the placement provider. Design/methodology/approach: The authors use quantitative and qualitative feedback from students and placement providers, along with our own reflections on the process to evaluate the placement programme. Data were collected through a focus group and email interviews with placement providers, along with a questionnaire, which was distributed to "Q-Step in the Community" alumni. Findings: Data-driven work-based learning opportunities allow students to develop and demonstrate their quantitative skills and support networking opportunities whilst also developing valuable soft-skills experience of the workplace that develops their career-readiness. In addition, those opportunities provide valuable research for placement providers, which support their sustainability and enhance their service delivery. Research limitations/implications: The research focusses solely on one programme at one university offering quantitative data driven work-based learning opportunities at undergraduate and post-graduate level. It is not possible to make valid comparisons between those who do a placement with those who do not. Originality/value: Views of key stakeholders in the process have been sought for this research, which can be useful to consider for others considering developing similar programmes for their students.

Religious education was established as a compulsory curriculum requirement in all schools by the 1944 Education Act. It was intended to provide instruction to all pupils in the basic tenets of the Christian faith and ensure that every successive generation of pupils understood the role of Christianity in British history and the national sense of British identity. In examining the sociohistorical context in which this groundbreaking education act emerged it is evident that at that time religious education had a very clear purpose and unambiguous raison d'être. It was a key element in the socialisation process of children which familiarised them with the prevailing societal norms of behaviour, social values and dominant beliefs. By the second decade of the twenty-first century this certainty about a rationale for RE had been lost. Widespread confusion had developed about what the point of religious education actually was, and inspections of RE teaching revealed the subject to be in a parlous state (OFSTED in: Religious education: realising the potential, 2013; in: School inspection handbook, 2019). In 2016 the Religious Education Council of England and Wales established the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) in an attempt to bring some clarity back into the subject. In the years between 1944 and 2021 social norms, values and beliefs had changed significantly and consequently the world RE teachers were seeking to socialise children into was and is very different. The solution proposed by the CoRE is to concentrate on teaching 'worldviews' to prepare pupils to respect the diversity of beliefs in contemporary society. Far from saving the subject, however, this shift of focus can be seen in many ways which are explored in this paper to be more likely to hasten the end of RE as a curriculum subject and to accelerate its replacement by an enhanced form of citizenship education.

This essay suggests an alternative accountability process on the basis of critiques of current evaluation practice in higher education. Using cases in the British university system, with some international commentary and thinking through experience in Asian universities in four countries in the wake of 'audit culture', the work of Thorstein Bunde Veblen is revived. With Veblen, the current structures and mechanics of the corporate and fully-monetised university might once more be challenged. The risk of importing the metrics and audit culture of Britain, and the neoliberal managerialist administration-led university of North America, wholesale into Asian universities is questioned by acknowledgment that exiting hierarchies are persistent, and competing on Euro-American terms is a recipe for disaster. Due recognition is curtailed, hard work and standards are ignored, prospects for junior staff are constrained to a kind of intellectual and social penury. Resources based on research skills more robust than the current axiomatic research assessment calculus are suggested from within the university. The solution is not to emulate a declining system, but to innovate and invent new horizons and terms of engagement. The proposals offered here are only a suggestion for reflexive inquiry and informed self-examination--criticism-self-criticism from co-research sociology, ethnographic film and urban geography, among others--offered as alternate concurrent paths to accountability.

This article is concerned with student engagement and understanding in large group teaching in Higher Education (HE). Specifically, it is concerned with the application of Multimedia Learning (MML) methods in Politics, History, International Relations, Sociology, Social Work, and Business and Economics teaching that privilege the use of images to complement text in lecture presentations. This 'visual' method, it is claimed in the literature, generates engagement and understanding better than text alone. This article develops, applies and empirically tests with students, MML methods across a range of Higher Education disciplines over three years. The research deploys Participatory Action Research (PAR) methods engaging students as active agents of investigation and change. It finds evidence to support the hypothesis that apposite images combined with reduced text increases students' engagement and understanding with academic content, but that much formal research needs to expand on the range of demographics tested.

Both educational policies and academic literature assume that students take an instrumental approach to their studies at university. However, despite wide-ranging discussions in the academic literature about contemporary arrangements and practices in higher education, empirical examinations of these conditions are notably scarce. This article reports on a comparative qualitative study into undergraduate students' accounts of studying business or sociology at universities in Britain and Singapore. Drawing on Eric Fromm's distinction between learning as 'having' and 'being,' the article demonstrates that--regardless of national context--those studying business displayed many elements of passive, instrumentalised, or 'having' orientations to learning, whilst those studying sociology showed clear signs of the more active and less instrumental 'being' mode of learning. By examining subject allegiance across national borders, this article underscores the importance of recognising subject choice, alongside other important contextual factors, in moving towards a nuanced understanding of student dispositions.

There is continuing concern about the paucity of social science graduates who have the quantitative skills required by academia and industry. Not only do students often lack the confidence to explore, and use, statistical techniques, the dominance of qualitative research in many disciplines has also often constrained programme-level integration of more quantitative material. However, whilst the topic of statistical literacy is relatively well researched within the more general educational literature, the evidence-base with respect to the effectiveness of teaching and learning of quantitative research methods in the social science remains somewhat limited. This paper describes the development, integration and evaluation of a series of student-led inquiry-based quantitative workbooks within a sociology/social policy undergraduate degree. It outlines how the workbooks were constructively aligned within a "methods spine" and offers some insight into quantitative teaching and learning generally. The paper also discusses some of the opportunities and challenges of taking both an aligned and IBL approach to the teaching of quantitative methods. In doing so it adds to growing evidence that 'problem-based pedagogies' tend to increase educational gain over and above more didactic approaches to learning and teaching. It highlights three key findings: programme-level approaches to curriculum design can be crucial in improving quantitative skills, particularly where they are tailored to student needs; a general indifference to quantitative methods is likely to be due to a process of disenfranchisement that happens before and during students' engagement with university; and, meaningfully engaging students as partners in the process of designing, integrating and evaluating curricula can help to overcome some of the barriers associated with the learning and teaching of quantitative skills.

The issue of poor statistical literacy amongst undergraduates in the United Kingdom is well documented. At university level, where poor statistics skills impact particularly on social science programmes, embedding is often used as a remedy. However, embedding represents a surface approach to the problem. It ignores the barriers to learning that students bring to class, which may not always be addressed solely through embedding, such as, mathematics anxiety. Instead, embedding can only work within a much deeper pedagogic model that places students at its heart, as active participants in learning. This paper examines the development of such a model within a large sociology programme, where there was an implementation of a range of pedagogic strategies to support the development of students' statistical literacy.

Drawing on the experiences of a novel collaborative project between sociologists and computer scientists, this paper identifies a set of challenges for fieldwork that are generated by this "wild interdisciplinarity. Public Access Wi-Fi Service" was a project funded by an 'in-the-wild' research programme, involving the study of digital technologies within a marginalised community, with the goal of addressing digital exclusion. We argue that similar forms of research, in which social scientists are involved in the deployment of experimental technologies within real world settings, are becoming increasingly prevalent. The fieldwork for the project was highly problematic, with the result that few users of the system were successfully enrolled. We analyse why this was the case, identifying three sets of issues which emerge in the juxtaposition of interdisciplinary collaboration and wild setting. We conclude with a set of recommendations for projects involving technologists and social scientists.

Dissertations are positioned as the capstone of an undergraduate degree, bringing together what students have previously learned from their programmes through a piece of independent research. However, there is limited research into the ways in which engaging in a dissertation has an impact on students' understandings of disciplinary knowledge. In this article, we explore the relations between students' accounts of sociological knowledge in their second and third years and how they engage with sociological knowledge in their dissertations. We argue that for the work of the dissertation to have an impact on students' understanding of sociological knowledge, students need to see their discipline as providing a way of answering their research questions. We explore the implications of this argument for both our understanding of the role of dissertations and research-based learning in universities more generally.

Using data from 15 semi-structured interviews with UK-based early/mid-career academics, this paper offers an empirically informed assessment of how lecturers teaching/researching the sociology of sport are managing their careers in a changing higher education landscape. Those interviewed were involved in the delivery of sociological content to a range of sports-themed courses with the interviews focusing on the changing fashions in studying sport (including a rapid increase in enrolment on certain sports-themed courses), and on the nature of the relationships with colleagues working in the same area (i.e. sport), but who teach/research it from a different discipline. The paper draws upon the processes of individualisation which lay at the root of reflexive modernisation to better understand the lived experiences of those interviewed. Using the metaphors of tribes, doors and boundaries, I assess the extent to which those interviewed felt there were opportunities for an interdisciplinary pedagogic approach to "sport." The paper explores the relationship between the sociology of sport and its parent discipline (i.e. sociology) and where it might feature in a future (post-disciplinary?) landscape.

This article comprises some critical reflections on the teaching of a second year undergraduate module called "Children's Cultural Worlds" in which students are required to engage with original studies which are then used to stimulate self-reflection and engagement with wider issues relating to our understanding of children's place in the social world. It will be argued that when individual memories are shared, it is possible to identify continuities and discontinuities in childhood experiences as well as the intersections between childhood and other social divisions such as gender, class and ethnicity. The requirement that students recall and reflect on their childhood memories and share them with others is a way of students learning through their own experiences, reflecting on their views and values. Furthermore, as it will be shown, it opens up spaces for alternative values and viewpoints to emerge about how we might 'regulate' early childhood because 'When we tell stories and process them, using reflective dialogues, we create the possibility of change in ourselves and others'.

This article places itself in conversation with literature about how the experience and outcomes of university education are structured by intersections between social class, ethnicity, gender, age and type of university attended. It addresses undergraduate students' acquisition of sociological knowledge in four diverse university settings. Basil Bernstein's concepts of pedagogic identity, pedagogic rights, classification and framing are employed to analyse curriculum and interviews with 31 students over the period of their undergraduate degree. The nature of a sociology-based disciplinary identity is described and illustrated, and it is shown how the formation of this identity gives access to pedagogic rights and the acquisition of valuable capabilities. Addressing the question of whether pedagogic rights are distributed unequally in a stratified university system, it was found that they were not distributed, as might be expected, according to institutional hierarchy. It is argued that the acquisition of university sociological knowledge can disrupt social inequality.

Initiatives, like the UK ESRC's RDI/CI programmes and the Q-Step Centres, have a long-term aim of addressing the well-documented decline in the pool of academics able and willing to teach quantitative methods (QM). However, these initiatives will take time to make an impact; therefore, the upskilling of current staff is a vital strategy if we want to maintain QM in curricula. This paper draws on findings from the ESRC RDI project, 'No More Pointy Clicky, numbers stuff; building staff quantitative skills'. This project focussed on upskilling staff in a large Sociology department. The project was committed to delivering training to develop staff competence in QM; however, it became clear that this alone would not be sufficient to build staff confidence. Therefore, the project rolled-out a more complex strategy that addressed a range of central issues, including, pedagogy, infrastructure, Departmental resourcing and strategy, and staff worldviews, which this article explores.

This paper examines the temporal and ethical affordances of commercial social media platforms, such as Twitter, as tools for engaging in social research and knowledge exchange. Drawing on activity that took place during the "New Frontiers in Qualitative Longitudinal Research" seminar series, the article reports on using Twitter and other social media platforms to document, share and archive 'data' from a series of research events. It also experiments with new modes of research writing, using fragments of 'data' from Twitter to distil research knowledge and ideas, whilst also capturing the pace and form of this live method of social documentation and knowledge exchange. Bringing together conversations within digital sociology about how to 'do' time in digital research, with methodological debates among qualitative longitudinal researchers about how to research social and biographical continuity and change, the paper argues that the presentist focus in digital research is far from inevitable. Attending to time in digital media demands that we are alert to questions of authorship, audience and co-production, recognizing the labour of research and the provenance of research knowledge, 'data' and ideas.

This paper takes up issues raised in two articles by Nick Zepke and portrayed here as "the Zepke thesis". This thesis argues that the literature on, interest in and practices around student engagement in higher education have an elective affinity with neo-liberal ideology. At one level this paper counters many of the assertions that underpin the Zepke thesis, challenging them as being based on a selective and tendentious interpretation of that literature. It also points out the misuse of the concept of "elective affinity" within the thesis. However, more significantly the paper argues that an understanding of how ideas are taken up and used requires a more sophisticated ontological understanding than the Zepke thesis exhibits. That thesis has strayed into the territory of the sociology of knowledge while ignoring the accounts and debates in that area developed over more than a century.

This article critically evaluates the attempt of the authors to develop a sociological imagination within first-year undergraduate students studying the discipline of sociology at a British university. Through a sociological analysis of biography and autobiography (of both teachers and students), we attempted to create a quality of mind that would provide our students with the necessary sociological skills to critically interrogate different sociological forms, and allow them not simply to understand the subject as an academic discipline but also as a personally transformative experience. It was evident from the feedback from a number of student cohorts that the connection between sociology and the lived experience and personal consciousness had a profound and empowering impact on those who came to develop that quality of mind.

This paper presents a research-based, theoretically-informed contribution to the debate on "impact" in educational research, and specifically a response to Gardner's 2011 presidential address to the British Educational Research Association. It begins by discussing the development of the research "impact" agenda as a global phenomenon, and reviews the current state of debate about "impact" in the UK's Research Excellence Framework. It goes on to argue that a radical alternative perspective on this agenda is needed, and outlines Bourdieu's sociology--including his much-neglected concept of "illusio"--as offering potential for generating critical insights into demands for "impact". The term "illusio" in particular calls us to examine the "stakes" that matter in the field of educational research: the objects of value that elicit commitment from players and are "worth the candle". This framework is then applied first to analyse an account of how an ESRC-funded project that I led was received by different research "users" as we sought to generate impact for our findings. Second, it is used to show that the field of educational research has changed; that it has bifurcated between the field of research production and that of research reception; and that the former is being subordinated to the latter. The paper concludes by arguing that, despite many educational researchers' commitments to "make a difference" in wider society, the research "impact" imperative is one that encroaches on academic freedom; and that academics need to find collective ways in which to resist it.

This paper investigates alcohol consumption within cultures of football fandom through the innovative combination of theories of the carnivalesque and Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field, and capital. Focus groups (n = 79) were conducted with football supporters in England and Scotland. Semi-structured interviews (n = 15) were also conducted with key organizational stakeholders. Research explored the importance and role of alcohol consumption for supporters when watching or attending matches.. Participants confirmed the cultural significance, perceived normalcy and historical links between football and alcohol consumption. Supporters highlighted the importance of the sociability, friendship, and social capital aspects of alcohol consumption. Participants believed football supporters are perceived differently in comparison with supporters of other sports, arguing that legislation surrounding alcohol consumption at other sports allowed supporters to enhance the carnivalesque by drinking alcohol, whereas football fans were more restricted. Participants agreed the habitus of excessive drinking and violence associated with football supporters led to a bad reputation, however, this view was outdated. Participants also recognized a growing drug culture in football. The findings draw attention to the alcohol-sport relationship and the contested relations, and diverging interests and influences, within the social field of football. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mindfulness is increasingly offered in schools around the UK, as well as internationally. Previous research has focused on the efficacy, the implementation, and the wider meaning of mindfulness in education, rather than sociological interests, such as matters of equality and social justice. This article draws on qualitative data from the 'Mapping Mindfulness in the UK' study, to investigate how mindfulness practitioners discuss and address issues of equality and diversity in relation to school-based mindfulness. Lynch and Baker's key dimensions of equality are used to analyse participants' accounts, including on adjustments to curriculum and pedagogy to accommodate diversity, practitioners' responses to socio-emotional vulnerability, and the dynamics of choice and compulsion in the classroom. By highlighting several issues of concern in these areas, the research makes original contributions to sociological understandings of mindfulness and other similar initiatives in schools, whilst offering new insights on theories of equality in education more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horses in Great Britain are living into increasingly older age and are often regarded as friends or family members by their owner. The horse is reliant on their owner to meet their needs and this paper discusses how horse owners frame an issue that becomes a matter of veterinary concern within the context of the older horse. Qualitative methods were used to explore the experiences of owners and veterinarians. Data were collected and analysed using a grounded theory approach during the period 2019-2022. Analysis identified that owners undertook an ongoing and iterative process of assessment, monitoring and decision making in relation to the animal and any changes they observed. Matters that became a veterinary concern required the owner to formulate the issue as something that fell within the knowledge domain of the veterinarian. Veterinarians had a medicalised view of older horse health and their perspectives on socially acceptable care were shaped by their understanding of speciesspecific needs, and whether owners were providing appropriately for those needs. The formulation of a matter of veterinary concern was itself shaped by an owner's experiential knowledge of both veterinary matters and their horse. The extent to which owners felt like they and their individual horse mattered during interactions with veterinarians affected whether they adopted veterinary advice and the nature of future veterinary employment. Findings demonstrate how matters of health, disease, and the role of professionalised forms of medical knowledge, are not static but constantly changing and interacting over time. An issue that became a matter of veterinary concern was contextual, and rooted in individual relationships. The significance of veterinarian-owner interactions in shaping future consumption of veterinary health care may be underestimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite over a decade of development, smart cities remain at a stage of visions and expectations. There is a dualist attitude in the smart cities literature, whereby the research either studies the content of visions or compares the visions with the innovation outcomes. What expectations actually do in a smart city innovation process is often neglected. This article addressed this gap by adopting an ethnographic approach and applying conceptual tools from the sociology of expectations and strategic niche management to study a UK smart city project – the Open Programmable Harbour City (OPHC). This study enriches the literature on smart city vision by showing that expectation played four complex and paradoxical roles in making the OPHC: (1) It tidied up the messy past and prescribed a future. (2) It provided limited coordination for innovation activities. (3) It helped to attract attentions to the OPHC, but it also caused disappointments. (4) It provided protection for the negative experimental results, but the overprotection also impeded innovation. This article concludes with four valuable lessons about expectation management for smart city innovators and some fresh theoretical insights for the sociology of expectations and strategic niche management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though Geography began as a tool of empire and war, now some of us are using this master's tool to dismantle the master's house. But we are tweaking the tool in various ways to make it more liberatory. People's geography aims to take Geography to the streets, and the streets to the ivory tower. It works to popularize radical geography, and radicalize popular geography. Community geographies focus on collaborations between academics and public scholars to co-produce knowledge that serves social change. This term has grown in use recently in the US, where there is a new community geographies specialty group. The term public geography has perhaps been more often used in the UK, where the focus on "impact" by the REF has given it more weight. That sort of push from funding agencies is a growing trend internationally, though the terms used vary. Participatory research aims to foster civic engagement and look alongside research subjects, rather than looking at them. It is a strong influence on both community and public geographies, though the overlap is not exact. Other terms used are engaged research and reciprocal research. This work takes longer and is often undervalued as simply service, rather than research. Too often it has been done despite, rather than with support from, academic policies. That is beginning to change. Some terms and traditions have more resonance in some contexts than in others, but whatever the label used, it is important that we organize to honor and nurture this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines a novel conceptual framework to examine English society's ruling institutions. Usually called 'The Establishment', the term has been a thorn in the side of analyses of class, status and power in British sociology as it stands between polemic and an explanation for England's peculiar exaggeration of status over class. Drawing upon Lévi-Strauss's concept of a 'house-society', the article rethinks how England's ruling institutions are called upon to do two things at once: disguise political-economic interests through the language of kinship and naturalise status and belonging. English society's ruling institutions are overdetermined in the call to create legitimate and exclusive membership to something, perhaps anachronistically, called ' Great Britain'. Tracing this to the origins of English class nomenclature in early modern political thought, the article applies this framework to a discussion of Eton College and the Etonians' relationship to our present political crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the structure and substance of the Core Content Framework (CCF), a controversial document which stipulates content that providers of teacher education in England must incorporate in their programmes. We identify both a concept of instrumental trainability and a lack of coherence in the CCF which suggests it is unsuitable as a guide to a curriculum for teacher education. Drawing on Bernstein's work and its application by other sociologists of educational knowledge, we identify how the CCF embeds a 'generic mode' in teacher education that has roots outside of disciplinary structures of knowledge production and therefore foregrounds a type of official pedagogy that sees teaching as a technical performance and leaves gaps in the knowledge and understanding a new teacher requires to make sound educational judgements. Employing Muller's distinction between conceptual and contextual coherence, we argue that the CCF is based upon an imaginary notion of instructional practice that does not fully grasp the context of teachers' work. We illustrate the argument via an analysis of the language, structure, and three of the eight sections in the CCF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To discuss nurses' use of networks to address nursing recruitment and retention in London, UK. Design: Qualitative evaluation of the Capital Nurse programme reporting on 30 narrative interviews with executive, clinical and student nurses in 2019. Results: Executive nurses within the Capital Nurse programme recognized the importance of sociomaterial contexts in the health and social care system in London and worked strategically across these contexts to achieve change. Supported through the Capital Nurse programme, executive nurses from health organizations across London initiated collaborative working to improve recruitment and retention. Primarily by designing and delivering sociomaterial products (organizational and educational) to support nurses to build a career in London. Drawing on ideas from actor network theory, in particular sociomaterial contexts, nurses' actions at all levels to develop and sustain networks to address nursing recruitment and retention across the NHS in London are described. Conclusions: Capital Nurse supported collaborative working both within single organizations and across organizations in London. There is evidence of change in how nurses across the capital work together to improve patient care, improve recruitment and retention. Findings may resonate with nurses in other settings who seek to address the problem of recruitment and retention. They show how nurses coming together in networks to effect changes in practice can work successfully. Impact: Nurses' use of networks led to novel models of communication and action to address the problems of recruitment and retention in London. We argue that sociomateriality should be considered outside the clinical practice setting, as part of nurses' professional development and organizational practice, that is how they plan their career, how they address recruitment and retention, how they communicate across organizations about nursing issues. No Patient or Public Contribution: This was an evaluation of a staff development project in London, which sought to elicit nurses' experiences of participation in Capital Nurse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did the Norwich Union, a life and general insurance company, come to see itself as a 'local developer with people always at the centre of our planning'? This article explores how a small number of insurance companies, capitalising on their long history of property investment, used their investment funds, or 'life funds', to transform the built environment of UK in the twentieth century. In the postwar period life funds were contracted by local governments to finance, plan and develop solutions to urban issues that paralleled those targeted by post‐war welfare reforms. This involved companies in developing expertise, working practices, instruments and collaborative arrangements that are not adequately represented as financial investment. Ventures into development on this scale had also to be ventures in futures planning, calculated bets on how people would – and how they should – live, work and spend. These are enterprises that I characterise as 'experimental practices of financial sociology' as a provocation that acknowledges first, that non‐sociologists sometimes devise huge sociological experiments and second, that the separation of economics from sociology, and of finance from society, is a disciplinary move that is far less strictly enacted outside the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The authors explore the under-researched area of post-decision evaluation in PPPs (public–private partnerships), focusing upon how and whether Post-decision Project Evaluation (PdPE) is considered and provided for in United Kingdom (UK) public infrastructure projects. Design/methodology/approach: The authors' research design sought insights from overviewing UK PPP planning and more focused exploration of PPP operational practice. The authors combine the extensive analysis of planning documents for operational UK PPP projects with interviews of different stakeholders in PPP projects in one city. Mobilising an open critical perspective, documents were analysed using ethnographic content analysis (ECA) and interviews were analysed using thematic analysis consistent therewith. The authors theorise the absence and ambiguities of PdPE drawing on the sociology of ignorance. Findings: The authors find a long-standing absence and lack of PdPE in PPP projects throughout planning and operational practice, reflecting a dynamic, multi-faceted ignorance. Concerning planning practice, the authors' documentary analysis evidences a trend in PdPE from its absence in the early years (which may indicate some natural or genuine ignorance) to different levels or forms of weak inclusion later. Regarding this inclusion, the authors find strategic ignorance played a substantive role, involving "deliberate engineering" by both public sector and private partners. Interview findings indicate lack of clarity over PdPE and its under-development in PPP practice, deficiencies again suggestive of natural and strategic ignorance. Originality/value: The authors draw from the sociology of ignorance vis-à-vis accounting's absence and ambiguity in the context of PPP, contributing to an under-researched area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: While screening uptake is variable, many individuals feel they 'ought' to participate in screening programmes to aid the detection of conditions amenable to early treatment. Those not taking part in screening are often presented as either hindered by practical or social barriers or personally at fault. Why some people choose not to participate receives less consideration. Methods: We explored screening nonparticipation by examining the accounts of participants who chose not to participate in screening offered by a national research trial of atrial fibrillation (AF) screening in England (SAFER: Screening for Atrial Fibrillation with ECG to Reduce stroke). AF is a heart arrhythmia that increases in prevalence with age and increases the risk of stroke. Systematic screening for AF is not a nationally adopted programme within the United Kingdom; it provides a unique opportunity to explore screening nonparticipation outside of the norms and values attached to existing population‐based screening programmes. We interviewed people aged over 65 (n = 50) who declined an invitation from SAFER and analysed their accounts thematically. Results: Beyond practical reasons for nonparticipation, interviewees challenged the utility of identifying and managing AF earlier. Many questioned the benefits of screening at their age. The trial's presentation of the screening as research made it feel voluntary—something they could legitimately decline. Conclusion: Nonparticipants were not resistant to engaging in health‐promoting behaviours, uninformed about screening or unsupportive of its potential benefits. Instead, their consideration of the perceived necessity, legitimacy and utility of this screening shaped their decision not to take part. Patient or Public Contribution: The SAFER programme is guided by four patient and carer representatives. The representatives are embedded within the team (e.g., one is a co‐applicant, another sits on the programme steering committee) and by participating in regular meetings advise on all aspects of the design, management and delivery of the programme, including engaging with interpreting and disseminating the findings. For the qualitative workstream, we established a supplementary patient and public involvement group with whom we regularly consult about research design questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article addresses the broad research aim of understanding migrants’ experiences of homelessness during the Coronavirus Disease of (COVID-19) pandemic through a novel combination of linguistic and sociological analysis. In our analysis of life story interviews, we find that the United Kingdom (UK) Government’s Everyone In initiative, which suspended eligibility criteria to provide support and accommodation to those experiencing homelessness or deemed to be at risk of rough sleeping, was hugely beneficial for migrants. This indicates what is possible when there is the political will to end rough sleeping. In its analysis of life stories gathered during the pandemic, the article proceeds to identify deeper-rooted problems relating to the weak and restricted structural position of migrants experiencing homelessness. Having spent time in the UK with an ‘inferior status’, with limited access to work and welfare, economic and social capital, and often with experiences of trauma in the UK and/or in their countries of origin, many of our research participants express a lack of control and a sense of being controlled in their conditions of existence. Further, their isolation and loneliness in the individual rooms provided in the emergency accommodation is indicative of a deeper-rooted sense of separation deriving from years spent sleeping rough or living in temporary and insecure accommodation. Experiences of isolation and the sense of a lack of control are corrosive to mental health, and during the pandemic, mental health problems were also exacerbated by welfare checks and other rule-based practices that are potentially re-traumatising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disability benefits function by demarcating categories of need (the administrative category of disability) and determine eligibility using assessments of functioning. In the UK, these assessments are the Work Capability Assessment and PIP assessment. Inherently technical and abstruse processes, these assessments have been opportune sites for welfare reform in recent years. Disability benefits have also been a central point of contention between disability studies and sociology. Sociology has traditionally favoured an 'incomes approach' and called for more adequate financial support from the state. Early figures in the disabled people's movement rejected this position, and aligned with an oppression paradigm, argued for a more radical economic and social inclusion. We contend that this divide, set out in the Fundamental Principles of Disability, remains relevant for researching welfare reform today. This article treats benefits assessments as epistemic practices—interactional processes wherein claimants, their personal health professionals and commercial assessment providers come together in the production of knowledge about disability. Data include 50 in‐depth interviews with benefit claimants and a discourse analysis of official texts directed at claimants, personal health professionals and commercial assessment providers. We outline a phenomenon we term 'epistemic sabotage', whereby the knowledge claims of claimants and their health professionals are systemically disqualified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws attention to the health‐related work that disabled people do when engaging with rehabilitation services. Medical sociology has a rich history of looking at the 'illness work' that patients do, while disability studies scholars have explored the cultural value placed upon paid work and the effects on social status of being unable to work. Yet, a longstanding froideur between these two disciplines, which have fundamentally opposed ontologies of illness and disability, means that neither discipline has attended closely to the rehabilitation‐related work that disabled people do. The concept of 'adjusting' to illness highlights seemingly irreconcilable disciplinary differences. Yet this article argues that the notion of 'adjustment work' can elucidate the socio‐political character of the work disabled people do in their rehabilitation, which could create a more substantial and sustainable dialogue on this subject between disability studies and medical sociology. To make this case, we discuss interview data from the Rights‐based Rehabilitation project, which sought to explore disabled people's lived experiences of rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) COVID-19 contact tracing app was announced to the British public on 12th April 2020. The UK government endorsed the app as a public health intervention that would improve public health, protect the NHS and 'save lives'. On 5th May 2020 the technology was released for trial on the Isle of Wight. However, the trial was halted in June 2020, reportedly due to technological issues. The app was later remodelled and launched to the public in September 2020. The rapid development, trial and discontinuation of the app over a short period of a few months meant that the mobilisation and effect of the discourses associated with the app could be traced relatively easily. In this paper we aimed to explore how these discourses were constructed in the media, and their effect on actors – in particular, those who developed and those who trialled the app. Promissory discourses were prevalent, the trajectory of which aligned with theories developed in the sociology of expectations. We describe this trajectory, and then interpret its implications in terms of infectious disease public health practices and responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are approaching Ken Plummer's work from the standpoint of our shared history in interactionist sociologies of sexuality and interest in sexual storytelling. Plummer was truly a trailblazer in the study of sexuality. He was one of the first in the UK to approach sexuality from a distinctively sociological and interactionist perspective which, while innovative, was out of tune with the Marxist and psychoanalytical mood of the time and was later further sidelined by more fashionable poststructuralist and postmodern theorising. Yet, Plummer's approach was incredibly productive in focussing attention on sexuality as always socially situated and relational – themes which were carried into his influential work on narrative and storytelling. Also significant was his longstanding commitment to a radical critical humanism, even at times when humanism was very much out of favour. These are the aspects of Plummer's work that we will take up in this evaluation, arguing for its continuing value as a flexible and open approach with a potential applicability beyond 'western' contexts in extending our understanding of the variability and diversity of human sexuality as always situated in specific historical, social, cultural, political and relational settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary reflects on the strengths of the paper by Warde et al. entitled "Situated drinking: the association between eating and alcohol consumption in Great Britain". It suggests that practice-theoretical approaches towards studying contemporary connections between foods, food events and alcoholic drinks provides an excellent basis for overcoming the analytical limits of fields such as food studies, drinks studies, alcohol studies and related areas. This is especially so if Warde et al.'s quantitative methodology were to be yoked to two further sources of inspiration, namely Mary Douglas's structuralist analysis of food combinations within food events and Stephen Mennell's utilisation of the concepts and concerns of Norbert Elias to produce a systematic historical sociology of food. An extended inter-paradigmatic approach to the study of how alcoholic drinks relate to foods and eating practices emerges as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a detailed account of how surgeons perceived and used a device‐procedure that caused widespread patient harm: transvaginal mesh for the treatment of pelvic floor disorders in women. Drawing from interviews with 27 surgeons in Canada, the UK, the United States and France and observations of major international medical conferences in North America and Europe between 2015 and 2018, we describe the commercially driven array of operative variations in the use of transvaginal mesh and show that surgeons' understanding of their hands‐on, sensory experience with these variations is central to explaining patient harm. Surgeons often developed preferences for how to manage actual and anticipated dangers of transvaginal mesh procedures through embodied operative adjustments, but collectively the meaning of these preferences was fragmented, contested and deferred. We critically reflect on surgeons' understandings of their operative experience, including the view that such experience is not evidence. The harm in this case poses a challenge to some ways of thinking about uncertainty and errors in medical sociology, and calls for attention to a specific feature of surgical work: the extent and persistence of operative practices that elude classification as right or wrong but are still most certainly better and worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, U.K. universities have increasingly sought to involve publics in research as active participants in the construction of academic knowledge. Sociologists of health have largely welcomed this enthusiasm for engaged and participatory ways of working, including methodologies long in use in the field such as patient‐led research and co‐creation. Despite the strong interest in engaged research, however, we argue that funding patterns, bureaucratic structures and an overreliance on people employed on casual contracts make it extremely difficult, often impossible, to do engaged research in British universities. Drawing on our own experiences, we show how our attempts to practise and deepen accountability to variously situated publics were constrained by the way our institution imagined and materially supported engagement. We argue that it falls to individual researchers to mitigate or work around structural barriers to engagement, and that this process creates dilemmas of complicity. If engaged research is to fulfil its remit for inclusion and its radical potential, researchers need to think carefully about how the U.K. engagement agenda entwines with processes of casualisation, acceleration and projectification, and how institutional recuperations of engagement can undermine its political and epistemic objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, in order to improve outcomes for children from ethnic minority backgrounds and to speed up the adoption process, the UK government changed the Children and Families Act. The legal requirement on adoption agencies to consider ethnicity in the decision around 'matching' was removed, thus clearing the way for transracial placements. This article interrogates the impact of the change in law on social work practice around adoption, using the experiences of diverse Muslim-heritage children as a case study. Grounded in the sociology of religion, the findings presented here are based on semi-structured qualitative interviews (n  = 28) with those involved in the care of Muslim-heritage children. In discussing qualitative findings, all adopters and prospective adopters interviewed in this research insisted on adopting children who 'look like them', and social workers continued to look for the 'best' possible matches. Children from minoritised backgrounds continue to wait for long periods before finding permanent homes. Our evidence raises questions about the efficacy of policy guidance. Based on this evidence we conclude that greater strategizing is needed around the recruitment of adopters from diverse backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Clinicians' fears of taking away patients' hope is one of the barriers to advance care planning (ACP). Research on how ACP supports hope is scarce. We have taken up the challenge to specify ways in which ACP conversations may potentially support hope. Methods: In an international qualitative study, we explored ACP experiences of patients with advanced cancer and their personal representatives (PRs) within the cluster‐randomised control ACTION trial. Using deductive analysis of data obtained in interviews following the ACP conversations, this substudy reports on a theme of hope. A latent thematic analysis was performed on segments of text relevant to answer the research question. Results: Twenty patients with advanced cancer and 17 PRs from Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom were participating in post‐ACP interviews. Three themes reflecting elements that provide grounds for hope were constructed. ACP potentially supports hope by being (I) a meaningful activity that embraces uncertainties and difficulties; (II) an action towards an aware and empowered position; (III) an act of mutual care anchored in commitments. Conclusion: Our findings on various potentially hope supporting elements of ACP conversations provide a constructive way of thinking about hope in relation to ACP that could inform practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic and the ideology of intensive mothering through analysis of posts on lockdown learning in an online mothering community. It is argued that although the school closures seemed to constitute an endorsement and normalisation of intensive mothering ideology [Hays (1996). The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press] by the machinery of government, and increased the pressure upon many women, some mothers resisted these expectations in this online forum. The online community served as a space in which intensive mothering expectations were articulated [Lehner-Mear (2020). "Good Mother, Bad Mother? Maternal Identities and Cyber-Agency in the Primary School Homework Debate." Gender and Education 33 (3): 285–305] but also offered an arena for cyber-agency, enabling women to express negative emotions, and normalising the rejection of expert constructions of mothering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key concepts and theories that are taught in order to develop cultural competency skills are often introduced to medical students throughout behavioral and social science (BSS) learning content. BSS represents a core component of medical education in the United Kingdom. In this paper, we examine, through (auto)ethnographic data and reflections, the experiences of BSS in medical education. The empirical data and insights have been collected in two ways: (1) through long-term ethnographic fieldwork among medical students and (2) via autoethnographic reflexive practice undertaken by the co-authors who studied, worked, examined, and collaborated with colleagues at different UK medical schools. Our findings indicate that despite BSS constituting a mandatory, essential component of the medical curriculum, medical students did not always perceive BSS as useful for their future practice as doctors, nor did they find it to be clinically relevant, in comparison to the biomedical learning content. We suggest that it is paramount for all stakeholders to commit to cultivating and developing cultural competency skills in medical education, through robustly embedding BSS learning content across the undergraduate medical curriculum. We conclude with recommendations for a wide range of educational practices that would ensure a full integration of BSS in the medical curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilising Abbott's work on professions and disciplines we trace the broad development of Social Policy in UK universities over the past 50 years. As with all subjects, Social Policy is enmeshed in continuous boundary protection, and at the same time may seek to extend jurisdiction by laying claim to areas and activities undertaken by others. We draw on a range of sources to inform our analysis including: overviews of contributions to Journal of Social Policy; reviews of selected available UK Social Policy Association documents such as newsletters; reviews of research quality (Research Assessment Exercise/Research Excellence Framework) submissions; and student numbers data. In conclusion we consider whether reassessment of some of the jurisdictional battles of the past 50 years might provide routes forward for the subject to flourish in the current environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to recent calls to further incorporate the study of animal health care into the sociology of health and illness. It focuses on a theme with a long tradition in medical sociology, namely clinical communication, but explores matters distinctive to veterinary practice. Drawing on video recordings of 60 consultations across three small animal veterinary clinics in the United Kingdom, we explore how clients and veterinarians (or "vets") fashion fleeting "coalitions of touch," that aptly position the animal to enable the performance of medical work, often in the face of physical resistance. Building on recent developments in the study of haptic sociality, we analyse how care and emotional concern for animal patients is communicated through various forms of embodied action; thus, how the problematics of forced care and restraint are mitigated through distinctive ways of touching and holding animal patients. Moreover, while prior studies of small animal veterinary work have highlighted the significance of talk within the clinician–animal–client triad, we reveal the fundamentally embodied and collaborative work of managing and controlling patients during sometimes intense and fast‐moving episodes of veterinary care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rationale and objectives: Medical humanities are becoming increasingly recognized as positively impacting medical education and medical practice. However, the extent of medical humanities teaching in medical schools is largely unknown. We reviewed medical school curricula in Canada, the UK and the US. We also explored the relationship between medical school ranking and the inclusion of medical humanities in the curricula. Methods: We searched the curriculum websites of all accredited medical schools in Canada, the UK and the US to check which medical humanities topics were taught, and whether they were mandatory or optional. We then noted rankings both by Times Higher Education and U.S. News and World Report and calculated the average rank. We formally explored whether there was an association between average medical school ranking and medical humanities offerings using Spearman's correlation and inverse variance weighting meta‐analysis. Results: We identified 18 accredited medical school programmes in Canada, 41 in the UK, and 154 in the US. Of these, nine (56%) in Canada, 34 (73%) in the UK and 124 (80%) in the US offered at least one medical humanity that was not ethics. The most common medical humanities were medical humanities (unspecified), history, and literature (Canada); sociology and social medicine, medical humanities (unspecified), and art (UK); and medical humanities (unspecified), literature and history (US). Higher ranked medical schools appeared less likely to offer medical humanities. Conclusions: The extent and content of medical humanities offerings at accredited medical schools in Canada, the UK and the US varies, and there appears to be an inverse relationship between medical school quality and medical humanities offerings. Our analysis was limited by the data provided on the Universities' websites. Given the potential for medical humanities to improve medical education and medical practice, opportunities to reduce this variation should be exploited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the connections between subculture theory, symbolic interaction and the work of David Matza with a special focus on exploring alcohol consumption by young adults in the UK. We apply Matza ideas of the "techniques of neutralization," "subterranean values," and "drift" within an ethnographic study on alcohol to suggest that young people's "calculated hedonism" can be understood as a strategy of agency in the context of a subcultural setting. This article adds to the literature of symbolic interaction, subculture and the discipline of sociology by critically focusing on the work of David Matza from its reception in the 1960s to today as a central element of the new paradigm of cultural criminology. For us the sociological imagination is "alive and well" through Matza's advocacy of naturalism whereby he sought to integrate the work Chicago School under Park and Burgess with his assessment of the so-called Neo-Chicago School. In the literature Matza's work is often defined as symbolic interactionist we see his ambition in a wider sense of wanting sociology to recover human struggle and the active creation of meaning. Our approach is to understand the calculated hedonism of young adult use of alcohol through their humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lived experience of returning to work after a bereavement remains relatively under researched. Within sociology, the notion of emotional labour has been explored at length, but the place and experience of grief in the workplace is less well understood. This research, framed by Hochschild's work on feeling rules, focuses on professional individuals working in UK companies who agreed to discuss their experiences of returning to work after a bereavement, in terms of dealing with their own emotions and those of their colleagues, as well as navigating company policy in the area of compassionate leave. Qualitative data from seven semi-structured interviews were analysed, exposing key common emotional and experiential themes, particularly regarding disenfranchised grief, comfort in the familiarity of the work environment, and the impact of silent or awkward responses from colleagues. The emergent themes from the data were used to address the research objective of examining the relationship between grief, emotional labour, and the lived experience of returning to work after a bereavement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]