Fashioning a city of culture: ‘life and place changing’ or ’12 month party’?

The current trend in public policy is to valorise culture as a tool for social, economic and political transformation. This paper offers a direct contribution to debates that seek to unpack and problematise cities of culture. We adopt a more circumspect approach towards some aspects of the anticipated transformative powers of culture, and in particular the tendency to fetishize the economics of culture. Our empiricism is grounded in a detailed study of Derry~Londonderry as the inaugural UK City of Culture in 2013. We question whether City of Culture was ‘life and place changing’ or a ’12 month party’, and reveal different interpretations of success. In our view there is more potential in viewing culture as a peace resource for overcoming divisions in a socially and culturally segregated city, rather than its ability to tackle entrenched economic problems. Moving beyond the specifics of the case study we also provide lessons for future cities of culture and more generalizable insights for the academic and policy literatures.

No second chance: junior neonatal nurses' experiences of caring for babies at the end-of-life and their families

Death of an infant is acutely stressful for parents and professionals. Little is known about junior nurses' experiences providing end-of-life care in Neonatal units (NNU). This study aimed to better understand junior nurses' experiences providing end-of-life care in NNU. Neonatal nurses (n = 12) with less than 3 years experience participated in a focus group. Nominal Group Technique (NGT) was used to build consensus around the challenges faced, alongside suggested developments in improving future care provision. Primary analysis involved successive rounds of ranking and decision-making whilst secondary analysis involved thematic analysis. All issues, whether environmental, professional or social appeared driven by an awareness on the part of nurses, that there was no ‘second chance’ which created a huge pressure to ‘get if right’ for the infants and families. Regarding future care 2 areas of improvement identified were ‘Education and Training’ and Support. This paper unpacks these findings making recommendations for practice.