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This article critically reads a Personal Independence Payment Claim Form. All agents implicated in this form (e.g. the Department of Work and Pensions, assessors, an Office Manager and health professionals) are contemplated although of central concern is the positioning of claimants—or the persons filling in the form on their behalf—and social workers, and the constructions of social work practice resulting from such positioning. This article investigates discourse in the form itself, the discourse claimants are obliged to supplement and the discursive formations this text registers/generates. To read this form, I distinguish between overt, declarative and manifest content and the covert, descriptive, latent, perhaps unintentional but violent content, accessing the latter through a symptomatic reading, which draws upon my interpretation of principles associated with deconstruction, critical discourse analysis, decentering and positioning. Conceiving of PIP-related practice as possessing the dynamic qualities of an ‘episode’, this article argues that although the text provides help with costs, a corollary or side-effect, is that claimants and social workers are made to inhabit problematic positions within discourse/practice. Textual analysis may, nevertheless, unsettle, and re/position and de/re/construct relations, thereby decentering institutionalised ways of being.

Several studies and interviews of the Chinese students studying in an international foundation program in Beijing are conducted to explain the ambivalence that exists in the students with regards to their experiences towards secondary education. The Chinese youth are shown to undergo various sufferings while undergoing their secondary education but consider all these sufferings to be positive and worth it at the end.