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Claire Birkenshaw “It is my professional opinion that now is the time to PANIC!” (Human Child Expert, Monsters, Inc.) It is a television news moment that is all too familiar: after broadcasting a series of eyewitness accounts, the News 13 anchor turns to a bespectacled, bow-tied expert to provide a calm and authoritative interpretation of events…
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Claire Birkenshaw “I don’t want to survive. I want to live!” (Captain McCrea, WALL-E) The Ship of Consumption In History of Madness, Michel Foucault (1972/2009) examines how Western reason constituted itself through an evolving relationship with madness: first encountering it as an unsettling bearer of truth, then excluding it as unreason and, finally, transforming it into an…
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Claire Birkenshaw “Chopper was my first lesson in the vast difference between myth and reality” (Gordie Lachance, Stand by Me) In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Erving Goffman (1963/1990) argues that stigma is not an inherent attribute of individuals but a social relationship through which particular characteristics become discrediting. As such, virtually anyone is susceptible to…
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Mandy Pierlejewski, Guy Roberts-Holmes, Sara Hawley and Jennifer Holly In October last year, a few short weeks into the new school term, colleagues from University College London and Leeds Beckett University visited reception classes in two schools in England. This class is the final year of early childhood education which, in England, takes place in…
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Claire Birkenshaw “Hey Cameron, do you realise if we’d played by the rules right now, we’d be in gym?” (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986) Scholars Hunter and Frawley (2022, p.14) argue that use of film as a ‘pedagogical tool’ can help students better understand abstract theoretical concepts to aid their application in imaginative ways. For…
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Claire Birkenshaw “Some have suggested a barrier is immoral. Then why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences, and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside” (Donald Trump quoted in The Guardian, 2019, n.p.). Urban scholar, Leonie Sandercock,…
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Birkenshaw, C. (2024) Beckett Park: Climbing Frame [Photograph]. Leeds. © Claire Birkenshaw. Claire Birkenshaw “We [have built] playgrounds that are so monumentally boring that any self- respecting child will go and play somewhere else” (Gill, 2024, quoted in Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, 2024, p.7). Like the attending Levelling Up, Housing and Committee MPs,…
Altered States of Academia 