Search

Death Café is a not-for-profit international social franchise founded in 2011 in London. This paper is based on the most extensive empirical research of Death Cafés to date, examining the content of Death Café conversations. I interrogate the finding that, alongside talking directly about death and dying, people at a Death Café consistently talk about the value of being at a Death Café and about the value of talking about death. I introduce three main ways that talking about the value of conversations about death appears in a Death Café and, most importantly, I argue that talking about the value of conversations about death is an enjoyable part of the conversation in its own right. I use neo-tribal theory and its concept of aesthetics as ‘a way of feeling in common’ and ‘a means of recognising ourselves’ to examine this further. When talking about the value of conversations about death, Death Café participants reflexively consider the activity they are engaging in= together, which strengthens the feeling of collectivity, and bonds them into a neo-tribe. This paper demonstrates that Death Café is a valued form of social interaction, moving it away from the current academic attempts to discover Death Café’s instrumental utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are multimodal communicators. However, in classroom interactions involving children and staff, achieving mutual understanding and accomplishing task-oriented goals by attending to the child's unaided AAC can be challenging. This study draws on excerpts of video recordings of interactions in a classroom for 6–9-year-old children who used AAC to explore how three child participants used the range of multimodal resources available to them – vocal, movement-based, and gestural, technological, temporal – to shape (and to some degree, co-control) classroom interactions. Our research was concerned with examining achievements and problems in establishing a sense of common ground and the realization of child agency. Through detailed multimodal analysis, this paper renders visible different types of practices rejecting a request for clarification, drawing new parties into a conversation, disrupting whole-class teacher talk-through which the children in the study voiced themselves in persuasive ways. It concludes by suggesting that multimodal accounts paint a more nuanced picture of children's resourcefulness and conversational asymmetry that highlights children's agency amidst material, semiotic, and institutional constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the current crisis in education research and how we might confront it. It begins by arguing that the 'coming crisis' facing empirical sociology identified by Savage and Burrows (2007) applies equally – if not more so – to empirical education research. Education researchers can no longer lay claim to specialist expertise in the analysis of social institutions and our 'tools of the trade' are increasingly unviable. These developments are compounded by the dominance of the 'cultural turn' within British education research which has made it difficult for education researchers to develop a cumulative evidence base, leading to a lack of traction with policymakers and a privileging of cultural inequalities in education over economic inequalities. The paper discusses how the education research community might respond to the challenges and considers whether we might do worse than follow the suggestion offered to sociologists that they should take 'a descriptive turn'. Taking such a turn will not be easy, but the alternative may be that education research in the UK will be even more marginalised as it becomes increasingly out-of-step with the developments in data, evidence and analysis being fostered outside the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Signs of Safety is a strengths-based approach to work with children and families where there are concerns about abuse or neglect. Signs of Safety is widely used in the UK and internationally, and there is a growing range of empirical research exploring its use within statutory children's social work. However, there is little research exploring how, and to what effect, Signs of Safety is being used by other childcare professionals. This paper reports on an independent evaluation of the use of Signs of Safety by an early help agency in the South West of England. At time of evaluation, the agency was commissioned by the local authority to support children and families with multiple and complex needs who did not meet the threshold for statutory children's social care involvement. The study was multiple methods with two strands. To better understand the work that the agency did, data were collected from case files, to develop a profile of families engaging with the agency. Interviews were undertaken with five practitioners about their experiences of using Signs of Safety. Saliency analysis was used to explore the qualitative data. Overall practitioners felt that Signs of Safety was accessible, supported clear communication with children and families and aided critical reflection. However, existing tensions—relating to statutory threshold decisions and multi-agency relationships—were reflected and magnified via the Signs of Safety tools. The implications of these findings are discussed, providing original insights about an issue highly relevant to national and international audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The latest issue of Rural Theology includes a review of a book that advocates for a research-based approach to rural ministry. The review highlights the relevance of this approach for further reflection in the UK. The issue also features three papers that explore the impact of empirical studies on specific areas of ministry and mission. These papers examine the relationship between fostering a relational culture and faith development, the contribution of rural church schools to a sense of belonging, and the attraction of intuitive types to rural churches shaped in the Catholic tradition. Additionally, the issue includes a discussion of the Christian poetry of Andrew Young and its place in the tradition of rural parson poets. [Extracted from the article]