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Managing Island Life:Social, Economic and Political Dimensions of Formality and Informality in Island Life

"Managing Island Life: Social, Economic and Political Dimensions of Formality and Informality in Island Life" is a significant and timely contribution to the study of islands and island life. Wide-ranging in terms of both geographical and theoretical sweep, contributions consider the conceptualisation of the island as well as social, economic and political dimensions of island life and living. Showcasing the current state of island research, contributors cover diverse areas of island life such as: informal economies in the West Indies; the effects of natural convservation policies in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland; the role of internet sites in British Isles heritage tourism, and the impact of multicultural policies in the Indian Ocean. This volume will appeal to undergraduate social scientists as well as professional anthropologists, sociologists and geographers, policy makers and islands and regional specialists.

Social work education and political conflict: preparing students to address the needs of victims and survivors of the Troubles in Northern Ireland

This paper reports on the evaluation of a European PEACE III sponsored teaching and learning project that was designed to enable social work students to better understand the needs of victims and survivors of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The paper begins with an introduction to policy, practice and educational contexts before reviewing the literature on social work, conflict and trauma. It also summarises key, innovative pedagogical approaches used in the teaching, including the use of ground rules, teaching teams consisting of lecturer and service user dyads, learning exercises and case studies. The paper then explains the evaluation methodology. This involved two surveys which returned 144 student and 34 practice teacher questionnaires. The findings revealed that
students were generally committed to this form of teaching and engagement with victims and survivors of the conflict, although some students reported that their attitudes towards this subject had were not changed. Some students also discussed how the conflict had affected their lives and the lives of families and friends; it is argued that such biographical details are crucial in developing new pedagogical approaches in this area.
Practice teachers who supervised some of these students on placement reported general levels of satisfaction with preparedness to work with conflict related situations but were less convinced that organisations were so committed. The paper concludes with a discussion of the study limitations and a recommendation for more robust methods of teaching and evaluation in this area of social work education and practice.

SOCIAL-CLASS, CLASS ORIGINS AND POLITICAL PARTISANSHIP IN THE REPUBLIC-OF-IRELAND

As Laver (1992) notes, people who write about Irish politics frequently describe Ireland as a rather peculiar place. One aspect of this peculiarity is that voters in the Republic of Ireland do not behave like their European counterparts. In particular, Irish voting patterns appear to be only weakly structured by social class. Recent contributions to the debate employing a more sophisticated categorisation of classes have led to some qualification of the 'politics without social bases' description, but still lead to the broad conclusion that any relationship which does exist between social divisions, on the one hand, and party preference, on the other, is, at most, quite marginal. In this paper we draw on data from the 1990 European Values Study to re-examine this issue. We apply a variety of models to the data, including logit regression and diagonal reference models (Sobel 1981, 1984) to explore the complex fashion in which class and political preferences are related in Ireland. We argue that the relationship between such preferences and social divisions are, in fact, greater than has been hitherto thought. In particular, we show the importance of taking into account not only social class but also class origins and class mobility in understanding the nature of political partisanship in the Republic of Ireland.