Publications

What in the digital era is knowledge? Who has knowledge and whose knowledge has value? Postmodernism has introduced a relativist flavour into educational research such that big questions about the purposes of education have tended to be eclipsed by minutiae. Changes in economic and financial markets induce a sense that we are also experiencing an…

The division of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ is one of the oldest ideas in Geography and is deeply engrained in our culture. Throughout history, the rural has been attributed with many meanings: as a source of food and energy; as a pristine wilderness, or as a bucolic idyll; as a playground, or a place of escape;…

While accepting that the concept of restricted code has a troubled history that resulted in Bernstein being associated with deficit models of working-class life, it is argued that the concept should be re-imagined rather than abandoned. Bernstein’s early work refers to restricted code as a form of condensed shorthand established through familiarity that was not…

Debating Human Genetics is based on ethnographic research focusing primarily on the UK publics who are debating and engaging with human genetics, and related bio and techno-science. Drawing on recent interviews and data, collated in a range of public settings, it provides a unique overview of multiple publics as they ‘frame’ the stake of the debates…

This book, the third in ippr’s Devolution in Practice series, explores how devolution has changed the United Kingdom, identifying where policy is diverging and converging across the four nations, and the implications of this for the future of the Union.

Contemporary approaches to adult education are dominated by the role that lifelong learning plays in human capital formation, especially in the context of theories of the knowledge-based economy (KBE). These argue that a shift to high-skills production provides the most effective pathway for the more developed economies to sustain economic growth in globalized markets. In reality,…

The aim of this contribution to the discussion of Anglo-German agricultural and rural themes is to analyze conceptually issues surrounding multifunctional agricultural pathways in the UK and Germany, and to propose a framework for closer investigation of multifunctional agriculture in the two countries. First, we will discuss recent debates on the conceptualization of what “multifunctional…

This chapter is concerned with exploring the lived experience of welfare-to-work policy in rural Wales through the lens of participant observation with young people undertaking the initial course that represents their first encounter with the New Deal for Young People (NDYP).1 I wish to respond to calls for qualitative explorations into marginalised rural life through discussing…