'What with your grades?': Students motivation for and experience of vocational courses in further education

In this article we seek to explore the motivations for studying a vocational qualification of 40 students currently in further education. We consider student decision making, in terms of the support and guidance received, and examine the value these students place on their training, particularly with respect to their future employment. Drawing on qualitative data from 40 students we argue that a student’s sense of their educational identity is important in understanding their motivations for vocational training in the first instance as well as a lack of good careers information and guidance.

Affective trajectories: locating diegetic velocity in the cinema experience

Films that feature high-speed diegetic motion, and present those high speeds through fast mobile framing and fast cutting, are frequently charged with generating a sensory overload which empties out meaning or any sense of spatial orientation. Inherent in this discourse is a privileging of optical-spatial intelligibility that suppresses consideration of the ways cinema can represent diegetic velocity, and the spectator’s sensory experience of the same. This paper will instead highlight the centrality of the evocation of a trajectory for movement for the spectator’s experience of diegetic speed, an evocation that does not depend on optical-spatial legibility for its affective force.