Strategies used by Health Scrutiny Committees to Influence Decision-makers

The scrutiny function, designed to enhance and provide a counterbalance to executive decision-making, is a key element in the modernisation of public service delivery in England. Early research expressed concerns about the effectiveness of scrutiny however, with lack of responsiveness by local decision-makers being suggested as one of the main difficulties. This paper applies a model of political influence strategies drawn from the business sector to analyse the strategies which health scrutiny committees in eight local authorities adopted in order to influence decision-makers. The relevance of the model to health scrutiny is assessed, and possible implications for enhancing health scrutiny in the future are discussed.     

Vulnerability as a Regulatory Category in Human Subject Research

This article examines and critiques the use of the term "vulnerability" in U.S. and international regulations and guidelines on research ethics. After concluding that the term is currently used in multiple, often inconsistent, senses, it calls on regulators to differentiate between three distinct types of vulnerability: "consent-based vulnerability,""risk-based vulnerability," and "justice-based vulnerability."     

Inventive Feminist Theory: Representation,Materiality and Intensive Time

Abstract

This article examines key arguments on the relations between bodies and images developed in the context of the discursive turn to consider what light a feminist materialist approach might shed on them. Rather than set the discursive and materialist ‘turns’ in opposition to each other, the author tries to draw connections between different theories of the relations between bodies and images, and unpack how certain feminist concerns are approached from different angles in different historical and intellectual contexts. To do this, the author focuses on the prevalence of images of transformation in contemporary visual culture and analyses them in terms of how both ‘new materialist’ and feminist theories grapple with the worlds they engage with, where change and transformation are seen as key. The author takes up three specific and related points that are currently being debated in feminist materialisms: (1) the concept of representation and, more widely, representational thinking; (2) the concept of causation and an understanding of time as non-linear, intensive and inventive; and (3) the understanding of theory as immanent and inventive. Drawing on insights developed in both the discursive and materialist ‘turns’, the author focuses on how bodies and images are entangled together as material assemblages and, in Barad's terms, how theories are performative of the phenomena they seek to understand. The article concludes by suggesting that such an understanding of theory as inventive might be a way of continuing to ensure the animation of feminism's transformative nature.     

Structures of feeling: contemporary research in women’s film and broadcasting history

ABSTRACT

This special issue is the second volume originating from the ‘Doing Women’s Film and Television Histories III’ international conference held at the Phoenix Cinema, Leicester, England, in May 2016. It connects with concerns and questions of women’s production histories related to the constructed nature of history and how we write a ‘history from below’ to foreground the hidden, marginalised or forgotten histories of our women ancestors. This collection captures something of the dominant ‘structures of feeling’ of women’s film and broadcasting history scholarship in the contemporary period ranging from considerations of women working in both above and below-the-line roles in film, television and radio, to those whose labour fell outside of mainstream cinema production, as in the instance of the amateur film in the UK between the 1930s and 1980. Together, these case studies span from 1926 to the contemporary period, providing particular flashpoints of women’s history across the UK, North America, Italy and Australia.     

Thwarted ambitions: the biography of Auvergne Doherty,an aspiring female barrister

ABSTRACT

Auvergne Doherty was the first woman from the Commonwealth to be admitted and called to the Bar of England and Wales.?In the first part of this article, Doherty's family background, education, legal training, and post-Bar experiences are set out. The second part analyses her profile compared with the other women called to the Bar in 1922 and considers why Doherty may not have gone on to practise as a barrister. This article argues that Doherty’s biography is important because it evidences how vital it was to have the necessary financial means and networks to be able to forget a career at the Bar. It was precisely the lack of these factors that impeded Doherty to fulfil her career as a barrister.