Browsing by Author "Baker, Sally"

Now showing 1 - 16 of 16
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Conflicting philosophies of inclusion: the contestation of knowledge in widening participation
    (Taylor and Francis, 2007) Sheeran, Yanina; Brown, Brian J.; Baker, Sally
    This paper explores the conflicting philosophies within the widening participation debate. Two categories of inclusive educators are identified, \'meritocrats\' and \'democrats\'. Among the democratic educators, a subgroup, \'transformative\' educators, exists, which seeks to invoke changes in society and the education system. The positions taken by some of these authors are weakened by their neglect of sociological theory. For the debate to progress and for inclusion to be successful, a renewed understanding of sociological theory is needed. This will help those contributing to the debate to grasp fully the political and economic constraints on students and institutions that have limited inclusion.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Habitus and homeland: Educational aspirations, family life and culture in autobiographical narratives of educational experience in rural Wales
    (Wiley Blackwell, 2008) Baker, Sally; Brown, Brian J.
    We use the concept of habitus to illuminate the autobiographical narratives of participants from disadvantaged backgrounds in mid-twentieth century rural Wales who were successful at university. The participants' constructions of their habitus and aspirations drew upon a number of themes that intersected with their ideas of Welsh culture. Images of Welsh culture, history and national identity played a significant role in their accounts. The participants' 'aspirational habitus' involved a rich blend of images and symbolic resources and a sense that they had a right to be at university. This has implications for how we conceive of habitus and its role in guiding people from rural to largely urban intellectual cultures. The participants' experiences were made possible by virtue of the isolation of their rural communities and the corresponding significance of their social milieu, which consolidated their value system by attaching considerable significance to ! educational achievement.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Harbingers of feminism?: Gender, cultural capital and education in mid-20th century rural Wales
    (Routledge, 2009) Brown, Brian J.; Baker, Sally
    This paper reports the results of a small scale narrative study of men and women who grew up in mid-20th rural Wales and their reminiscences regarding women and education. Although the dominant image of Wales during that era is of a male dominated society, all of our participants remembered influential independent women and educational aspiration for both girls and boys. We use Bourdieusian notions of types of cultural capital and the role of women in transmitting this to illuminate our participants' narratives. Accounts of family life disclosed themes of sacrifice concerning education, poverty during childhood and the role of school teaching as a career for women. Yet at the some time, there were forms of exclusion in operation. In conclusion, we suggest that in many ways, the women remembered by our participants could be seen as forerunners of the second wave of feminism.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Higher learning: philosophies of research into higher education
    (Continuum International Publishers, 2007) Baker, Sally; Brown, Brian J.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Illuminating a Resilient Rural Culture in Twentieth Century Y Fro Gymraeg Using Bourdieu's Bearn
    (Wiley, 2013) Baker, Sally; Brown, Brian J.; Williams, E.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Images of excellence: Constructions of institutional prestige in the university choice process.
    (Taylor and Francis, 2007) Baker, Sally; Brown, Brian J.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Individualization in the widening participation debate
    (Taylor and Francis, 2006) Baker, Sally; Brown, Brian J.; Fazey, John
    We provide an analysis of some recent widening participation literature concerning the barriers preventing non-traditional students accessing higher education. This literature criticizes higher education institutions and staff, opening up the academics' attitudes and skills to inquiry. We follow the genesis of four themes in the literature and these are visited in turn to provide substantive arguments. Students' accounts of their experiences are taken as if they were a systematic analysis of higher education institutions and result in an individualistic analysis of the problems related to access and progression. Beck described such assumptions and devices as individualization. We question the use of such pervasive individualism in the widening participation debate.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Lives beyond suspicion: Gender and the Construction of Respectability in Mid Twentieth Century Rural North Wales
    (Wiley Blackwell, 2011-10-01) Brown, Brian J.; Baker, Sally; Day, Graham
    This paper explores and extends the field of historical rural sociology using the idea of respectability via a biographical study of twenty older adults from north Wales (UK) for whom the performance of respectability represented a form of social, symbolic or cultural capital. It entailed the active negotiation and management of barriers between differing constituencies of opinion, generations and family members. Key to this situated respectability in practice was the notion that harsher systems of exclusion for transgressors were located elsewhere, rather than in the present or immediate community. The sense of the past evoked by participants highlights an historical, diachronic dimension to respectability. A particularised, carefully constructed image of the past was present in participants’ evocations of respectability, providing a way of talking about identity and historical progression, as well as a means of managing potentially contentious events to preserve the dignity of the people concerned.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemOpen Access
    Mental health and higher education: mapping field, consciousness and legitimation
    (Sage, 2006) Brown, Brian J.; Baker, Sally; Fazey, John
    Some UK academics have declared that they do not want higher education to become part of the social welfare system. In this article we review aspects of policy and practice that suggest that this has already happened. Explicit encouragement of people with mental health problems to undertake courses has proceeded alongside a number of initiatives to make higher education institutions better able to support students in difficulty, and new responsibilities are being unfolded for the staff. There is growing evidence that students' mental health problems are increasing. To make sense of the transformations in the topography of policy and in the consciousness it encourages, we make use of theoretical frameworks such as Bourdieu's notion of field and the generative work of Foucault and Rose, to examine the implications this has for the conceptualization of politics under New Labour and the implications this has for a newly recapitalized notion of responsible individuals.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Mothers, wives and changing lives.
    (University of Wales Press, 2011-02-20) Brown, Brian J.; Baker, Sally
    Women have made a major contribution to Wales as it is today, but so far there have been few authors who have brought the story of their struggle to light. This book fills that gap in our knowledge. With historical examples and richly-detailed accounts from people reminiscing about their own and their families’ histories, this volume brings the hidden history of women in Wales to light. Wales has often been thought of as a traditional place where gender was concerned, yet we describe here how women took leading roles in a number of important events such as religious revivals. In their tens of thousands women promoted education, a love of learning and culture and a sense of ambition which has taken the current generation of Welsh men and women into the sciences the arts and into public life. This desire for knowledge and aspiration towards ‘better things’ has characterised community life in homes, schools, chapels and Eistedfoddau and in the last century women have played a vital yet under-appreciated role in fostering it. This book unearths the hidden debt owed to Welsh women in laying the foundation for feminist advances and present day cultural, professional and political achievement in Wales.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Responsible citizens: Individuals, health and policy under neoliberalism
    (Anthem Press, 2012-06-01) Brown, Brian J.; Baker, Sally
    At the time of writing that the individual has never been more important. In politics, education, the workplace, health and social care, leisure and almost every other sphere of public and private life the individual is sovereign. Yet this importance and apparent power assigned to the individual is not all that it seems. It has gone hand in hand with a subtle authoritarianism which has insinuated itself into the government of the population. Whilst it is present throughout the public services, this is most conspicuous in health and social welfare such that a kind of ‘governance through responsibility’ is enforced upon the population. In the 21st century, individualism has come to pervade the body politic, especially where health and social care are concerned. Clients who may be at their most abject and vulnerable are urged to take responsibility for themselves rather than further burden the health and social care services. In some healthcare trusts, prosecutions are mounted against clients who have lost their temper or who act inappropriately as a result of their disorientation under the guise of ‘making them take responsibility for their actions’. Citizens on the street are likely to have responsibility thrust upon them through mechanisms such as electronic surveillance and the burgeoning new cohorts of community enforcement officers, local authority officials with powers to issue fixed penalty notices, as well as the police themselves.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Rethinking universities: The social functions of post compulsory education
    (Continuum International Publishers, 2007) Baker, Sally; Brown, Brian J.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    The rise of the service user: Are some service users more equal than others?
    (Lawrence and Wishart, 2008) Baker, Sally; Gwilym, Hefin; Brown, Brian J.
    Our authorship of this article reflects our standpoints as a long term service user with bipolar disorder (SB), her carer (BB) and a social work practitioner turned educator (HG). During the course of SB's struggle with complex and enduring mental health needs, both BB and SB became social scientists who are now working in UK universities. Our experience reflects our engagement with a diverse range of institutions and styles of delivery, including hospital, community and primary care. Most of our experience has been in North Wales, and the events reported in this article reflect the historical progression of services there over the past three decades as a greater emphasis has been placed upon service user involvement and consultation. Our ongoing interest in this topic has led to our discovery of many more accounts from other parts of the UK, so the experiences reported here have a broader resonance with the provision of mental health care elsewhere and a! spects of what we witnessed have also emerged from inquiries into a number of high profile tragedies in the sectors.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemOpen Access
    The social capitals of recovery in mental health
    (Sage, 2018-09-28) Brown, Brian J.; Baker, Sally
    In this paper we examine the process of recovery in people who have undertaken treatment for mental health problems, based on interviews with 34 participants. We describe their experiences through the lens of social capital, focusing on the social networks and relationships within which they are embedded and which they utilise to give purpose and meaning to their lives. The accounts give sense of movement from relationships, institutions and networks which were provided through their engagement with services towards relationships outside the health care system which were more freely chosen and which provided a sense that they were able to achieve recognition and make a contribution. The latter included such activities as art, theatre and sport. The relationships and institutions with which they were engaged via the statutory services were described as burdensome and inappropriate, whereas those which were freely chosen appeared more emancipatory and positively constitutive of identity. We have called this latter experience one of ‘intentional social capital’ because the participants were deliberately choosing and orienting to these networks, and were able to derive pleasure and a sense of self from them. The findings have implications for how we see the situation of people recovering from mental health problems inasmuch as professional attitudes and practices could usefully be extended to more fully recognise and encourage wider patterns of social engagement and fulfilment occurring outside the limited contribution of clinical definitions and clinical interventions.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Struggling for subversion: Service user movements and limits to the impact of client led accountability
    (Gylphi, Canterbury, 2012-09) Brown, Brian J.; Baker, Sally; Baker, Charley
    Since the invention of the service user as a medico-political category, service user involvement has been advocated by policymakers and researchers as a way of empowering clients and ensuring service responsiveness and accountability in mental health care in the UK. However, our experience of involvement in this field over the past three decades suggests that these initiatives may have limited emancipatory impact. Service providers may be adept at ensuring that only certain kinds of service user voices are legitimated and heard, and more critical transgressive voices are sidelined. Moreover, service user involvement has implications which are seldom appreciated, such as the opportunities for patronage, co-optation of tame users and nepotism within the service user organisations themselves. The experiences we relate here suggest that as presently constituted, service user involvement and empowerment does not necessarily make users powerful. Indeed, without a careful reconsideration of the present arrangements for service user representation, it may well consolidate notions of passivity, medical models of human distress and deflect the liberatory potential of transgression. The implicit and sometimes explicit stipulations of what it means to be a ‘good patient’ attenuate the potential for meaningful change and obscure the exercise of power within the mental health system.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemOpen Access
    ‘We Always Invite Residents to Come Along...’ Discourses of Citizenship Among Local Government Stakeholders
    (University of Wales Press, 2014-10-01) Baker, Sally; Brown, Brian J.; Davies, H.
    This paper explores the ways in which managers of organizations delivering services to the public in Wales talk about and conceptualize the publics using these services. Topics covered in interviews with these stakeholders include: local democracy; responsibility; behavioural shifts; citizen participation; local specificities; responses to devolution. The themes are analysed in the context of neoliberal welfare reform and the impending financial crisis. The authors review the implicit assumptions in the data. They compare the results of the analysis with wider debates about the erosion of state accountability in relation to rights of citizens and explore the degree to which the views of the stakeholders equate with John Clarke's (2005) 'New Labour's Citizens: activated, empowered, responsibilized, abandoned? ' The discussion engages with the question of whether policies in Wales since devolution have promoted a more positive approach to citizenship and participation than in Clarke's dystopian description.