Are UK undergraduate Forensic Science degrees fit for purpose?

In October 2009 Skills for Justice published the social research paper ‘Fit for purpose?: Research into the provision of Forensic Science degree programmes in UK Higher Education Institutions.’ The research engaged employers representing 95% of UK Forensic Science providers and 79% of UK universities offering Forensic Science or Crime Scene degree programmes. In addition to this, the research collected the views of 430 students studying these degrees. In 2008 there were approximately 9000 people working in the Forensic Science sector in the UK. The research found that the numbers of students studying Forensic Science or Crime Scene degrees in the UK have more than doubled since 2002–03, from 2191 in to 5664 in 2007–08. Over the same period there were twice as many females as males studying for these degrees. The research concluded that Forensic Science degree programmes offered by UK universities were of a good quality and they provided the student with a positive learning experience but the content was not relevant for Forensic Science employers. This echoed similar research by the former Government Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills on graduates from wider science, technology, engineering and mathematics degree programmes. The research also found that 75% of students studying Forensic Science or Crime Scene degrees expected to have a career in the Forensic Science sector, meaning that ensuring these courses are relevant for employers is a key challenge for universities. This paper reflects on the original research and discusses the implications in light of recent government policy.     

Understanding the workings of interstate cooperation in defence: an exploration into Franco-British cooperation after the signing of the Lancaster House Treaty

Cooperation occurs more often than conflict in the international system. However, its practicalities have been little conceptualised in International Relations. Through an empirical study of the workings of contemporary Franco-British cooperation in defence, this article offers a multidimensional analysis of interstate cooperation taking into account organisational, political, material and cognitive factors. By studying their centripetal and centrifugal effects, this article shows why each factor is relevant for understanding what favours and impedes the emergence and continuation of intergovernmental cooperation. It notably demonstrates how domestic interorganisational dynamics have an impact on relations with foreign partners. This article also shows how bridging the traditional divide between approaches based on interests and approaches based on beliefs allows us to identify the evolutionary dynamic of cooperation.     

Immigration,intermarriage and the changing face of Europe in the post war period

In this article we compare the propensity to intermarry of various migrant groups and their children who settled in Germany, France, England, Belgium and the Netherlands in the post-war period, using a wide range of available statistical data. We try to explain different intermarriage patterns within the framework of Alba and Nee's assimilation theory and pay special attention to the role of religion, colour and colonial background. We therefore compare colonial with non colonial migrants and within these categories between groups with ‘European’ (Christian) and non-European (Islam, Hinduism) religions. First of all, religion appears to be an important variable. Migrants whose faith has no tradition in Western Europe intermarry at a much lower rate than those whose religious backgrounds correspond with those that are common in the country of settlement. The rate of ethnic endogamous marriages in Western Europe are highest in Hindu and Muslim communities, often regardless if they came as guest workers or colonial migrants. Whereas differences in religion diminish the propensity to intermarry, colour or ‘racial’ differences on the other hand seem to be less important. This is largely explained by the pre-migration socialisation. Furthermore, the paper argues that the attention to institutions, as rightly advocated by Richard Alba and Victor Nee, needs a more refined and layered elaboration. Institutions, often as barriers to intermarriage, do not only emanate from the receiving society, but also—be it less formalized—within migrant communities. Especially religions and family systems, but also organized nationalist feelings, can have a profound influence on how migrants think about endogamy. Finally, strong pressures to assimilate, often through institutionalized forms of discrimination and stigmatization, not only produce isolation and frustrate assimilation (with resulting low intermarriage rates), but can also stimulate assimilation by 'passing' mechanisms. These factors, together with a more comparative perspective, are not completely ignored in the new assimilation theory, but—as this study of Western European intermarriage patterns stresses—deserve to be included more systematically in historical and social scientist analyses.     

王国礼仪公共性的扩展——简论古代华夏族群的形成途径

古代华夏融合由夏商周三代王国政治推动完成,这一点已为学界公认。但华夏融合的具体途径是什么,仍有待深入研究。三代王国皆耗费大量物资建设象征权力的王国礼仪,王国礼仪为王族独占,但在长期发展中也形成某种公共性,即由各姓族集团贵族分享,可以在前后不同王族之间传递,由之而渐成跨越姓族藩篱的文化圈,此文化圈便是春秋“诸夏”认同的基础。古代华夏融合不同于现代民族认同,后者是社会全体成员参与的过程,前者主要是社会上层贵族参与的过程。     

Avoiding another Brexit: the subsidiarity principle,the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Following a number of controversial judgments, the British government has been pushing for some time for a limitation of the supervisory powers of the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg. On a British proposal, the member states of the Council of Europe agreed in 2012 to include a reference to the subsidiarity principle into the Preamble of the European Convention on Human Rights. This paper describes these developments and explores the possible role of subsidiarity considerations in the context of international human rights protection.     

Do opportunistic snap elections affect political trust? Evidence from a natural experiment

Snap elections, those triggered by incumbents in advance of their original date in the electoral calendar, are a common feature of parliamentary democracies. In this paper, I ask: do snap elections influence citizens’ trust in the government? Theoretically, I argue that providing citizens with an additional means of endorsing or rejecting the incumbent – giving voters a chance to ‘have their say’ – can be interpreted by citizens as normatively desirable and demonstrative of the incumbent's desire to legitimise their agenda by (re)-invigorating their political mandate. Leveraging the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May's, shock announcement of early elections in April 2017 with the fieldwork for the Eurobarometer survey, I demonstrate that the announcement of snap elections had a sizeable and significant positive effect on political trust. This trust-inducing effect is at odds with the observed electoral consequences of the 2017 snap elections. Whilst incumbent-triggered elections can facilitate net gains for the sitting government, May's 2017 gamble cost the Conservative Party their majority. Snap elections did increase political trust. These trust-inducing effects were not observed symmetrically for all citizens. Whilst Eurosceptics and voters on the right of the ideological spectrum – those most inclined to support the incumbent May-led Conservative government in 2017 – became more trusting, no such changes in trust were observed amongst left-wing or non-Eurosceptic respondents. This study advances the understanding of a relatively understudied yet not uncommon political phenomenon, providing causal evidence that snap elections have implications for political trust.     

Long-term income trajectories and the evolution of political attitudes

Income and political attitudes are powerfully correlated in cross-sectional data, yet research based on panel data finds at most a weak correlation. In this paper, we examine this puzzling pattern by exploring the long-term evolution of attitudes over the life cycle. We evaluate the predictions of five different explanations on the relationship between attitudes and income experiences. These explanations focus on, respectively: socialization, anticipation, myopic self-interest, learning and status maximization. We employ accelerated longitudinal design models using data on core political values that span up to sixteen years from the British Household Panel Survey. Our findings reconcile the mixed evidence in the literature: the correlation between income and political attitudes, strong in cross-sectional studies but weak in short panel studies, emerges because attitudes crystallize – slowly but systematically – as income evolves over the life cycle. This pattern is most consistent with the learning explanation.     

Double Melancholy: The (Class) Politics of Loss in Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

In his essay ‘The “Uncanny”’, Sigmund Freud claims that ‘the double was originally an insurance against the extinction of the self’. The author suggests that literary writing, particularly memoir, can perform a kind of doubling, enacting this ‘self-preservation’ through ‘self-observation’. In her memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, Jeannette Winterson seeks to convey a ‘doubleness at the heart of things’. The author argues that this ‘doubleness’ functions on two levels, both of narrative and of politics—Winterson’s preoccupation with her subjectivity is informed by politics and her politics are structured around her subjectivity. In order to think through the text’s focus on what the author deems maternal melancholy and ambivalence, the author considers how political melancholy works through and against Winterson’s desires for self-creation. Attending to the themes of writing, loss, adoption and depression throughout, the author sustains a class analysis that is motivated by a queer feminist approach. The author argues that the text works to recall the poor/working-class body into the narrative of the bourgeois subject in order to legitimate the present self—the double—both as exceptional and as different from the other.     

Different by Design? Analyzing How Governments Justify GMO Liberalization through the Lens of Strategic Communication

GMO liberalization can be seen as politically risky for policy actors; it confronts them with policy‐specific strategic challenges and incentives regarding their policy communication. This perspective has received much more attention in association with two other kinds of policies, welfare state retrenchment and foreign policy. The aim of this paper is thus to situate GMO liberalization within a larger framework and to examine how governments deal with this kind of policy through their communication. The analysis looks at the liberalization of GMOs in Norway and the UK to examine how their communication depends on policy characteristics as well as country‐specific conditions. The findings suggest that the communication of GMO liberalization differs markedly from the communication of welfare state retrenchment and foreign military interventions and that the typical features of GMO policies as well as the sociocultural context of the two countries mattered for how the governments have communicated GMO liberalization.     

Defeat of the People's Army? The 2015 British general election and the UK Independence Party (UKIP)

The 2015 general election in Britain saw a major attempt by a relatively new party - the UK Independence Party (UKIP)- to secure elected representation. While UKIP received nearly four million votes, the party left the 2015 general election with just one Member of Parliament. Our evidence, drawn from analysis of British Election survey data and in-depth qualitative interviews with activists, suggests that UKIP's campaign was a major factor in its inability to translate widespread support into elected representation. While the party pursued a targeted campaign, this had only a modest impact on its own vote. UKIP's lack of resources, inexperience and inability to operationalize highly effective, targeted local campaigns severely hamstrung the party and prevented it from converting support into MPs at Westminster.