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2020 has been marked by disruption on a global scale due to a range of compounding crises including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Many community arts responses to the pandemic originated from individuals rather than by means of concerted or sustained sectoral responses. This paper uses reflections from Ireland, Australia, and Mexico to discuss the precariousness and vulnerability of the community arts sector and the artists and educators within it at this profoundly difficult time. We reflect upon some of the artistic and educational innovations and experimentations that have come about. We simultaneously examine the work of artists and arts organizations on a paradigmatic level by reflecting upon the role we play in perhaps involuntarily sustaining inequalities despite articulating a desire for change in the work that we do. We argue for the community arts sector to draw upon its imagination and bravery to reflect, assume responsibility, and recast the world into what we want it to be, rather than rebuilding the old, broken one in an attempt to return to what is perceived to be normal. Finally, in turning to arts education policy, we interrogate the barriers and enablers of change in the arts in a post-COVID world, discussing the influencing policy factors of sectoral weaknesses; individual resourcefulness and resilience; the desire for revolution; and the importance of love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthcare services face persistent barriers in reaching and improving access for marginalized or hardly reached people. This paper details the strategic use of social media among community connectors, or members of a community who address health issues in their local contexts by spanning socio-cultural boundaries within the community. Undertaking qualitative research in rural Australia and Ireland, we find evidence that through their strategic use of social media, connectors enhance the local communication infrastructure and create bridges between community and healthcare services due to their: (1) established connections with diverse hardly reached socio-cultural groups; (2) understanding of needs and opportunities for hardly reached people; (3) ability to seek out, 'translate' and pass on health information and (4) community building and health promotion practices at individual and social levels. Healthcare access and communication can be improved by identifying connectors and partnering with them to span boundaries enabling connection with the hardly reached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thousands of girls and young women migrated to Australia in the nineteenth century. Many were members of voluntary migrant families who were drawn to the colonies for new opportunities and a better life. Despite their numbers, these girls' experiences of the journey have been little studied. This article examines several extant shipboard diaries, written by girls and young women aged from 10 to 22 who travelled from Britain and Ireland to Australia. These diaries, composed between 1851 and 1884, recount girls' daily lives on board ship and lay bare their emotions as they journeyed towards a new life. Girls used writing and the physical form of a diary to work through and regulate the emotional upheavals and perils of migration. Graphite, ink and paper were employed to navigate loss, boredom, homesickness, fear and uncertainty. By centring girl-produced sources, this article gives voice to the often-overlooked migration experiences of girls and shows how analysis of age and gender draws attention to the emotions of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuing professional development (CPD) is a substantial, but hitherto largely unappreciated component of lifelong learning and education (LLL/LLE). CPD encourages analysis of the LLL/LLE of those with high education in early years. It draws attention to the influence of particular organisations, professional associations and regulatory bodies, not only as suppliers of LLL/LLE, but also as facilitators of perpetual cycles of learning and in so doing connect lifelong learning with individual identities as professionals. This study highlights the importance of bringing a sociological perspective into understanding participation in LLL/LLE through consideration of a wider range of stakeholders. Data is presented on these organisations' CPD policies from a large-scale survey carried out in the UK triennially between 2003 and 2018, in addition to interviews, focus groups and other surveys of employees of these organisations in the UK, as well as in Australia, Canada and Ireland reported in many publications. The development path of CPD and the changes this has led to for the exercise of professionals' lifelong learning and for the functioning of these organisations themselves is analysed. CPD policies and programmes are portrayed as a structured system distinct from university continuing education and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Irish migrants and their descendants who returned either permanently or temporarily to Ireland in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Data for return of Irish-born migrants is uneven, so one of the best sources for those born in Australia and living in Ireland is in the Irish censuses of 1901 and 1911. In this analysis, we use Australian-born people present on the census nights as an approximate measure of those migrants who had previously left Ireland and then returned with Australian-born children, recognising that this is also an imprecise measure. We match data points from the census returns with demographic data to fill in the background of selected returnees. Key findings are that Australian-born women were disproportionately represented in census data. In order to capture a broader sample of Irish migrants who returned to Ireland, we also analyse visiting and temporary return through a case study of one migrant group from Limerick who settled in rural colonial Victoria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes a feminist research agenda on the history of women teachers' experiences in the latter stages of their career and life. Drawing on extant histories of white women elementary and secondary teachers in the largely Anglo, western world (centred on the United States, Canada, England, Australia and Ireland), the essay explores the concept of age as a category of analysis, particularly for historians of women, by identifying three ways in which the ageing of women teachers is historically significant: the persistence of cultural stereotypes against older women teachers over time; the historical pattern of older women teachers' political activism; and historical aspects of ageing women teachers' sense of professional and subjective experience of their work. By noting the invisibility of age in the current historiography of women teachers, the essay proposes that historians of education begin to see age as a category of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]