By Neil Cocks, Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, University of Reading
At Shrewsbury train station, there is a poster advertising The Cure’s new album, Songs of a Lost World. The confident, monochrome minimalism of the art is at odds with the rambling Victorian brickwork, yet there is a kind of sympathy there also.
At ten on a November morning, the station isn’t the most joyful of locations and so is a suitable home for a record praised for its wintery desolation. The poster helps here.
The cover art features a sculpture called Bagatelle…
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By Michael Connors, Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry, UNSW Sydney
Peter W Halligan, Hon Professor of Neuropsychology, Cardiff University
Beliefs are convictions of reality that we accept as true. They provide us with the basic mental scaffolding to understand and engage meaningfully in our world. Beliefs remain fundamental to our behaviour and identity, but are not well understood.
Delusions, on the other hand, are fixed, usually false, beliefs that are strongly held, but not widely shared. In previous work,…
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By Libby Payne, Forensic Psychologist & Senior Lecturer in Forensic Psychology, Cardiff Metropolitan University
Prisons and the justice system often make headlines for issues like overcrowding or sentencing, but there’s a quieter, more transformative side to life behind bars that rarely gets attention.
While offending behaviour programmes are well established in prisons, research from my colleagues and I has focused on the rehabilitative potential of a very different aspect of prison life – prison dairy farm work.
At HMP Prescoed, an open prison near Usk in south-east Wales, prisoners are getting their hands…
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By Daniel Brayson, Lecturer, Life Sciences, University of Westminster
Toning down the intensity of your workouts – and even taking a week off from working out entirely – is important for allowing your muscles to recover.
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By Jonquil Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Economics and Personal Finance, The Open University
The UK chancellor Rachel Reeves talks a lot about achieving better growth. And the latest figure – economic expansion in the last quarter of just 0.1% – suggests plenty of room for improvement.
The evening before that gloomy figure was announced, Reeves…
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By Neil Ward, Professor of Rural and Regional Development at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research , University of East Anglia
Just months after Labour won the UK general election and ended a prolonged period of Conservative rule, rural protesters are once again taking to the streets of London. The threat to fox-hunting triggered the countryside marches of the late 1990s. This year, it is the agricultural inheritance tax reforms set out in the new government’s first budget that are troubling those farmers planning to pass on assets to their children.
Agricultural…
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By Miriam Sorace, Associate Professor in Comparative Politics, University of Reading
The British public has moved beyond wanting to relitigate the Brexit referendum, making now a good time to reset relations with Brussels.
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By Alex Heffron, PhD Candidate in Geography, Lancaster University
In villages across the country, irate farmers have accused the government of trying to end the tradition of the family farm by scrapping agricultural property relief, a measure which previously sheltered farms from having to pay inheritance tax on farmland.
Since Brexit a consensus has emerged that farmers should have to produce public goods in order to receive public payments. These “goods” include enhanced biodiversity, which could oblige…
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By Catherine Wynne, Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise, Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education, University of Hull
Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for his creation of the eccentric detective, Sherlock Holmes. But he was also interested in architecture and worked on several projects throughout his life, from his home in Surrey to a golf course in Canada. Now, a building designed by Conan Doyle, the Lyndhurst Park Hotel in Hampshire, is under…
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By Jacquie Gahagan, Full Professor and Associate Vice-President, Research, Mount Saint Vincent University
Dale Kirby, Professor, Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Margaret Robinson, Associate Professor, Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University
Rasnat Chowdhury, Doctoral Student, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto
Former youth in care deserve equitable educational opportunities. Better longitudinal data is needed around how youth and adults successfully transition to and complete post-secondary education.
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