Family Migration: The Role of Children and Education in Family Decision‐Making Strategies of Polish Migrants in London

Poland’s accession to the European Union in May 2004 brought many new possibilities and opportunities for Polish migrants to the United Kingdom. However, the focus on individual migrants has underestimated the complex roles of families in migration strategies and decision making. This paper brings together data from two studies of Polish migrants in London. In 2006–2007, we carried out a qualitative study, Recent Polish Migrants in London. That research examined how families may be reconfigured in different ways through migration, for example, transnational networks and splits within families. While the study participants represented varied examples of family reunification, they also revealed the complex decision making processes about leaving, staying, rejoining and returning. In our most recent study, Polish Children in London Primary Schools, we interviewed parents, who had migrated with children, about their experiences and expectations of London schools. This study revealed that the age of children was usually a factor in family migration decision making. There was a common expectation that younger children could easily adapt to a new school and learn English quickly. Drawing on the findings of these two studies, this paper will explore firstly, the variety of family migration strategies and secondly, the factors that inform migrants’ decisions to bring their families (especially children) or to leave them back home. Finally, the paper concludes by considering some of the policy implications of our findings.     

A Rapid Review of Sexual Wellbeing Definitions and Measures: Should We Now Include Sexual Wellbeing Freedom?

An increasing number of studies refer to sexual wellbeing and/or seek to measure it, and the term appears across various policy documents, including sexual health frameworks in the UK. We conducted a rapid review to determine how sexual wellbeing has been defined, qualitatively explored and quantitatively measured. Eligible studies selected for inclusion from OVID Medline, PsychInfo, PubMed, Embase, CINAHL were: in English language, published after 2007, were peer-reviewed full articles, focused on sexual wellbeing (or proxies for, e.g. satisfaction, function), and quantitatively or qualitatively assessed sexual wellbeing. We included studies with participants aged 16–65. Given study heterogeneity, our synthesis and findings are reported using a narrative approach. We identified 162 papers, of which 10 offered a definition of sexual wellbeing. Drawing upon a socio-ecological model, we categorised the 59 dimensions we identified from studies under three main domains: cognitive-affect (31 dimensions); inter-personal (22 dimensions); and socio-cultural (6 dimensions). Only 11 papers were categorised under the socio-cultural domain, commonly focusing on gender inequalities or stigma. We discuss the importance of conceptualising sexual wellbeing as individually experienced but socially and structurally influenced, including assessing sexual wellbeing freedom: a person’s freedom to achieve sexual wellbeing, or their real opportunities and liberties.     

Contemporary Political Thought and Its Implications for Social Studies Teachers

When social studies students have a role in the processes of designing assignments, constructing rubrics, and conducting assessments, they participate in authentic democratic principles relative to their own learning. When given voice, choice, and ownership in their education, social studies students gain opportunities to strengthen their depth of engagement, expand their breadth of responsibility, and increase their degree of satisfaction. Concomitantly, incorporating genuine collaboration helps social studies teachers enhance their teaching effectiveness and improve their overall classroom assessment systems. Ultimately, these techniques help social studies teachers empower their students to live the social studies they are learning in class and apply the concepts to the contexts of their lives. Thus, the learning process becomes more meaningful, productive, and rewarding.     

The social lives of handmade things: configuring value in post‐apartheid South Africa

Taking Arjun Appadurai’s suggestive argument about the ‘social lives’ of things as its starting point, this paper traces the pathways of two commodities for sale in South Africa: a pottery bowl and a resin spoon. Both these objects acquire their value in part from the quality of being handmade. The aim of this paper is not to demystify the claim to value made by either the pottery bowl or the resin spoon, nor to judge one or the other as the more ‘authentic’ expression of a resistance to the contemporary reifications of the everyday. Instead, it explores a family resemblance between these two objects and traces the way in which, within contemporary global ‘regimes of value’, what is handmade acquires value. If, as Jean and John Comaroff suggest, neo‐liberalism ideologically constructs a world of increasing abstraction, the trajectories of these two objects reveal how both locality and work return in an attenuated form as attributes of commodities.     

Private property and the problem of the miraculous: the kramats and the city of Cape Town

This paper seeks to explore the place of kramats the graves of Muslim saints or Auliyah – in the landscape of contemporary Cape Town. The kramat sites have been proclaimed as heritage sites because of their importance as tangible signs of Islam at the Cape. At the same time, the process of the kramats becoming heritage sites has contained moments of intense, often sensational, public contestation. Offering a reading of the discourses surrounding two contested kramats in Cape Town, this paper explores the way kramats mark out a miraculous space in the prosaic modern city and introduce into the post-apartheid evaluation of heritage, alternative conceptions of space and notions of temporality. They are sites of impossibility where, it is claimed, the laws of nature themselves are interrupted to mark the intangible particularities of the site. This paper explores what happens when this miraculous space is subject to the demands of private property and municipal law and the conflicts that arise from this collision of different conceptual and experiential modalities. It considers the effects of the entanglement of legend and history that result from the production of these sites as heritage in a market-driven economy.     

Enhancing Wellbeing in Social Work Students: Building Resilience in the Next Generation

The need for social workers to be resilient is widely emphasised. Although enhancing resilience in social work trainees presents a challenge to educators, they are nonetheless responsible for developing professionals who are able to cope with the emotional demands of the job. This paper argues that building resilience in the future workforce should be a key element of social work education. However, as little is known about the competencies and support structures that underpin resilience or the extent to which resilience protects the wellbeing of trainees, an evidence-based approach is required to inform curriculum development.

Recent research conducted by the authors of this paper has highlighted the protective nature of resilience in social work trainees. Emotional intelligence and associated competencies, such as reflective ability, aspects of empathy and social confidence, were found to be key predictors of this important quality. The important role played by social support from various sources was also emphasised. The present paper summarises this research, and presents interventions based on the findings that have the potential to promote resilience and wellbeing in social work trainees. Also considered are ways in which the curriculum might be further enhanced to provide trainees with an internal ‘tool-box’ of strategies that will help them manage their wellbeing more effectively in their future career.     

‘Always up for the craic’: young Irish professional migrants narrating ambiguous positioning in contemporary Britain

This paper explores the experiences of recent Irish highly qualified migrants who, having left post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, arrive in post-‘Peace Agreement’ Britain. Our paper contributes to understanding the enduring salience of place and how expressions of identities are framed by specific place-based factors as well as by temporality. We explore how these migrants’ narratives, as ‘successful’ professionals, are framed by complex intersections of historical legacies and changing socio-economic and intra-EU migration patterns. We consider the extent to which residual anti-Irish stereotypes remain, or indeed have re-emerged since the economic recession, and how these negative perceptions may impact on expressions of Irishness. Focusing on accents and other markers of identity, we discuss how Irishness may be constructed through a spectrum of visibilities at different times and in different places. This spatial-temporal perspective may help to go beyond a simplistic, one dimensional ethnic lens by highlighting the contextualities of identities.     

Beyond I-You-Me: An Empirically Supported Formulation of the Triadic Self

This applied semiotics intends to show that the richness and complexity of Charles S. Peirce need not be lost through an empirical application to psycholinguistics, but instead enables the latter to make better informed hypothesis testing. It is proposed that Peircean semiotics can be used to ground a taxonomy of linguistic representations of the self in English, which is parsed not on the basis of semantics, but rather according to the triadic structure of the self as formulated by Peirce. This taxonomy was implemented by a language analysis computer program, SSWC (Sundararajan-Schubert Word Count), and applied to an analysis of language use in emotionally expressive writings. Results of two studies are reported to demonstrate the heuristic value of this applied approach to semiotics.