Arts Management and Cultural Policy

This chapter explores the relationship between cultural policy and arts management. A connection between policy and practice is visible through initiatives within specific localities, nations and at an international scale. Yet, there is little scholarship that develops our understanding of how these two areas interact, how ideas are exchanged and implemented, and where the power is located within this relationship. The approach to arts and cultural management in the UK has a history of professionalization that has developed increasing influence internationally. As a result, this chapter takes the UK as a case study and presents new empirical work to examine how educators and individuals practicing in both fields perceive the relationship of policymaking to the work of management.

Gender, religion, and sociopolitical issues in cross-cultural online education

Cross-cultural education is thought to develop critical consciousness of how unequal distributions of power and privilege affect people’s health. Learners in different sociopolitical settings can join together in developing critical consciousness – awareness of power and privilege dynamics in society – by means of communication technology. The aim of this research was to define strengths and limitations of existing cross-cultural discussions in generating critical consciousness. The setting was the FAIMER international fellowship program for mid-career interdisciplinary health faculty, whose goal is to foster global advancement of health professions education. Fellows take part in participant-led, online, written, task-focused discussions on topics like professionalism, community health, and leadership. We reflexively identified text that brought sociopolitical topics into the online environment during the years 2011 and 2012 and used a discourse analysis toolset to make our content analysis relevant to critical consciousness. While references to participants’ cultures and backgrounds were infrequent, narratives of political-, gender-, religion-, and other culture-related topics did emerge. When participants gave accounts of their experiences and exchanged cross-cultural stories, they were more likely to develop ad hoc networks to support one another in facing those issues than explore issues relating to the development of critical consciousness. We suggest that cross-cultural discussions need to be facilitated actively to transform learners’ frames of reference, create critical consciousness, and develop cultural competence. Further research is needed into how to provide a safe environment for such learning and provide faculty development for the skills needed to facilitate these exchanges.

The working practices of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

This article offers a history of the working practices of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Based on extensive interviews with former members and on research into a new archive of the Centre, housed in the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, it argues that cultural studies as practised in the 1970s was always a heterogeneous subject. The CCCS was heavily influenced by the events of 1968 when it tried to develop a new type of radical and collaborative research and teaching agenda. Despite Stuart Hall's efforts to impose a focused link between politics and academic practice, the agenda soon gave way to a series of diverse and fruitful initiatives associated with the ‘sub-groups’ model of research.

Supervisor Continuity or Co-Location: Which Matters in Residency Education? Findings From a Qualitative Study of Remote Supervisor Family Physicians in Australia and Canada

Purpose: Changes to health care systems andworking hours have fragmentedresidents’ clinical experiences withpotentially negative effects ontheir development as professionals.Investigation of off-site supervision,which has been implemented in isolatedrural practice, could reveal importantbut less overt components of residencyeducation. 

Method: Insights from sociocultural learningtheory and work-based learning provideda theoretical framework. In 2011–2012,16 family physicians in Australia andCanada were asked in-depth how theyremotely supervised residents’ workand learning, and for their reflectionson this experience. The verbatiminterview transcripts and researchers’memos formed the data set. Templateanalysis produced a description andinterpretation of remote supervision. 

Results: Thirteen Australian family physiciansfrom five states and one territory, andthree Canadians from one province,participated. The main themes werehow remoteness changed the dynamicsof care and supervision; the importanceof ongoing, holistic, nonhierarchical,supportive supervisory relationships; andthat residents learned “clinical courage”through responsibility for patients’ careover time. Distance required supervisorsto articulate and pass on their expertiseto residents but made monitoringdifficult. Supervisory continuityencouraged residents to build on pastexperiences and confront deficiencies. 

Conclusions: Remote supervision enabled residents todevelop as clinicians and professionals.This questions the supremacy of co-locationas an organizing principle forresidency education. Future specialists maybenefit from programs that give themongoing and increasing responsibilityfor a group of patients and supportive.

Punishment, youth justice and cultural contingency: Towards a balanced approach

Reflecting developments in the broader penological realm, accounts have been advanced over the last number of decades about a ‘punitive turn’ in the youth justice systems of Western democracies. Against the background of this work, this project seeks to identify convergent and divergent trends in the youth justice systems of England, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as well as the rationalities and discourses animating these. The results lend support to research emphasising the continued salience of national, regional and local factors on penal outcomes but also suggest the need to steer an analytical path somewhere between nomothetic (convergent) and idiographic (divergent) accounts.

Auditory cueing in Parkinson's patients with freezing of gait. What matters most: action-relevance or cue-continuity?

Gait disturbances are a common feature of Parkinson’s disease, one of the most severe being freezing of gait. Sensory cueing is a common method used to facilitate stepping in people with Parkinson’s. Recent work has shown that, compared to walking to a metronome, Parkinson’s patients without freezing of gait (nFOG) showed reduced gait variability when imitating recorded sounds of footsteps made on gravel. However, it is not known if these benefits are realised through the continuity of the acoustic information or the action-relevance. Furthermore, no study has examined if these benefits extend to PD with freezing of gait. We prepared four different auditory cues (varying in action-relevance and acoustic continuity) and asked 19 Parkinson’s patients (10 nFOG, 9 with freezing of gait (FOG)) to step in place to each cue. Results showed a superiority of action-relevant cues (regardless of cue-continuity) for inducing reductions in Step coefficient of variation (CV). Acoustic continuity was associated with a significant reduction in Swing CV. Neither cue-continuity nor action-relevance was independently sufficient to increase the time spent stepping before freezing. However, combining both attributes in the same cue did yield significant improvements. This study demonstrates the potential of using action-sounds as sensory cues for Parkinson’s patients with freezing of gait. We suggest that the improvements shown might be considered audio-motor ‘priming’ (i.e., listening to the sounds of footsteps will engage sensorimotor circuitry relevant to the production of that same action, thus effectively bypassing the defective basal ganglia).