Keith Sharp

Cyberpunters and cyberwhores: prostitution on the internet

About the book: Cyberspace opens up infinitely new possibilities to the deviant imagination. With access to the Internet and sufficient know-how you can, if you are so inclined, buy a bride, cruise gay bars, go on a global shopping spree with someone elses credit card, break into a banks security system, plan a demonstration in another country and hack into the Pentagon -- all on the same day. In more than any other medium, time and place are transcended, undermining the traditional relationship between physical context and social situation. This book crosses the boundaries of sociological, criminological and cultural discourse in order to explore the implications of these massive transformations in information and communication technologies for the growth of criminal and deviant identities and behaviour on the Internet. This is a book not about computers, nor about legal controversies over the regulation of cyberspace, but about people and the new patterns of human identity, behaviour and association that are emerging as a result of the communications revolution.

Assessment, Disability and the Problem of Compensation

The number of disabled students within higher education in the UK is thought to have increased significantly in recent years and is expected to increase further in the next few years. The practice of permitting disabled students to take an alternative form of assessment is commonly used as a means of providing them with an equality of opportunity. However, whilst these aims are commendable, this widely used practice raises a number of issues and is open to several criticisms. This paper examines the implications of allowing the use of alternative forms of assessment in the light of the principles by which we assess. It suggests that the use of alternative assessments is compensatory in nature and, as a result, ultimately threatens to subvert the equality of opportunity it aims to provide. The authors conclude that this widely used practice violates the principles of assessment and undermines the validity of assessment in higher education.

Equal opportunities and the use of language: A critique of the new orthodoxy

ABSTRACT The proliferation of equal opportunities policies in institutions of higher education in recent years has resulted in a number of institutions introducing policies which aim to regulate the use of language. Our aim, in this paper, is to explore the philosophical foundations of such policies, and to pose the question of whether they can be justified on the grounds that they promote equality of opportunity. In the first part of the paper, we examine various conceptions of equality of opportunity, and advance the argument that this is best understood as the avoidance of unfair discrimination, or in other words as a form of procedural justice. In the second we consider the claim, advanced by various feminist linguists and philosophers, that the use of certain words can lead to unfair discrimination. Our conclusion is that such views are based on untenable theories of meaning, and therefore that policies aiming to regulate the use of language are impossible to defend.