Moira Peelo

Framing homicide narratives in newspapers: Mediated witness and the construction of virtual victimhood:

This article identifies ways in which newspapers invite readers to identify with victims and victimhood as a route to engaging them in ‘human interest’ stories. Within this framing of homicide for readers as ‘mediated witness’, some of the authorial techniques are explored whereby newspapers engage readers in a stylized dialogue that contributes to the construction of public narratives about homicide. It is argued that researchers, as well as working at a macro level, need to research at the micro level of textual analysis when researching media (including visual media) in order to understand the framing that contributes to public narratives; hence there is analysis of techniques of (a) defamiliarization and (b) objectification of homicide victims. These are some of the means by which the reader is placed as witness, both apparently ‘experiencing’ crime for personal consumption yet, publicly, allowed to recover (unlike real victims of major crime). The recognition of a need for micro-level analysis raises questions about the functions of public narratives, particularly in expressing, exploring and containing public or social emotion, in an era in which public responses to crime have been placed at the top of a highly politicized crime agenda.

Internationalisation: its implications for curriculum design and course development in UK higher education

As the numbers of international students attending UK universities increases, so the need grows to address the internationalisation agenda in a variety of ways. Much of what has been written in this area has been focused at the level of institutional and national policy and strategy. We argue here that this focus has tended to obscure the issue at the teaching and learning level, which is where students and teachers actually experience internationalisation, and because of its central importance, teaching and learning must be addressed explicitly alongside policy and strategic perspectives; otherwise there is a danger of a gap forming between policy and implementation. We describe several ways in which an aspect of internationalisation, i.e. supporting students’ learning, is addressed through curriculum design which takes into account the international student population of many courses.

Academic Sojourners, Teaching and Internationalisation: The Experience of Non-UK Staff in a British University.

Conceptualisations of internationalisation remain limited as long as the implications for pedagogy of an increasingly international teaching staff remain unexamined. Non-UK staff securing posts that involve teaching at British universities face substantial practical, cultural and linguistic challenges that impact on and, in some cases, inhibit, teaching styles and strategies. In this paper it is argued that practices surrounding teaching are local and often assumed to be self-evident in nature, while the international nature of academe is substantially rooted in disciplinary communities of practice made up of researchers and scholars. This split in conceptualising academic endeavour perpetuates the fragmentation of research and teaching, while putting new staff under stress. We draw on research data to frame practical steps that might enable, in this case, UK higher education to benefit from the prior teaching experience of international faculty and to facilitate transnational adjustment to teaching in universities in more creative and less stressful ways.

Homicide and the Media: Identifying the Top Cases in The Times

Recent work on homicide and the media has focused on the United States. This study considers the British context and examines the coverage of homicide by a leading British newspaper (The Times) over a period of 23 years (1977 to 1999 inclusive). The focus is on the newspaper coverage of the top cases each year and over the whole period. This approach allows for an exploration of the hierarchy within ‘media–homicides’ that are distinguished in terms of ‘mega–cases’, ‘mezzo–cases’ and ‘routine cases’. Hence, this issue is shown to be a more complex social and cultural phenomenon than is usually understood through the traditional binary ‘reported–non reported’ approach. The importance of unusualness and cultural context is emphasised in fully understanding how homicides become, particularly, mega–cases.

NHS nursing: vocation, career or just a job?

There has been intense recent interest in attitudes of nurses to conditions of work within the National Health Service, and much speculation as to why nurses are leaving the National Health Service. Much of the latter discussion has concentrated on the issue of pay. Many may believe that the recent pay award for nurses will resolve the problems currently being experienced within the nursing profession. However, while most nurses, prior to the pay award, regarded pay as the most important issue (Soothill and Mackay 1988), there are a range of other concerns troubling a substantial number of nurses which we may neglect at our peril. It is to these other issues and attitudes that we principally turn in this analysis.

Understanding Deception: Disentangling Skills from Conviction

Deception is often associated with economic gain and white-collar crime. But studying deception highlights the need for criminologists and practitioners to move beyond legal definitions and conviction rates when attempting to achieve depth in understanding criminality, its motivations and possible specialisms. Further, to explore the complexity of deception requires recognition of the range of skills inherent in this modus operandi, which is better recognised as a potentially-criminal tool found in much criminal behaviour. Theories that attempt to explain specialisation need to move on from a focus on crimes committed and give appropriate attention to skills employed.