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Charlotte Brontë integrated her own and her sisters' traumatic boarding school experiences into her novel, Jane Eyre (1847) as a way of expressing her anger through autobiographical fiction. The aim is to link contemporary research into boarding school trauma to the relevant events, thereby identifying what she wrote as a testimony contributing to the long history of the problematic nature of boarding schools.

Autobiographical fiction is discussed as a form of testimony, placing Jane Eyre in that category. Recent research into the traumatic experiences of those whose parents chose to send them to boarding school is presented, leading to an argument that educational historians need to analyse experience rather than limiting their work to structure and planning. The traumatic events the Brontë sisters experienced at the Clergy Daughters' School are outlined as the basis for what is included in Jane Eyre at the fictional Lowood School. Specific traumatic events in the novel are then identified and contemporary research into boarding school trauma applied.

The findings reveal Charlotte's remarkable insight into the psychological impact on children being sent away to board at a time when understandings about trauma and boarding school trauma did not exist. An outcome of the analysis is that it places the novel within the field of the history of education as a testimony of boarding school life.

This is the first application of boarding school trauma research to the novel.

The purpose of this paper is to alert students, scholars and librarians to the many recently published works of reference on the life and works of the Brontë family. The paper aims to present an account of new major reference works, which are transforming the nature of Brontë scholarship, giving an insight into the development of literary studies in a field which has reached maturity and provides a benchmark for studies with other classic authors.

The paper takes the form of a literature review set against developing scholarship.

After 150 years of scholarship, Brontë studies have reached a peak of maturity in the areas of biography, bibliography and textual transcription.

The greater reliability of recent texts necessitates a re‐evaluation of biographical and critical studies on the Brontë family. The paper indicates the rigorous standards required in author bibliography.

Librarians need to update their reference collections.

The paper brings together disparate sources to provide a coherent overview.

This paper posits that legal avoidance – employers’ search for forms of employment to which labor and employment laws do not apply – is an important driver of the restructuring of work. It examines three examples of restructuring that enable employers to avoid legal liability and compliance costs: the classification of workers as independent contractors; the use of part-time and variable-schedule work; and employers’ deskilling of jobs and reliance on vulnerable workers. None of these strategies is itself unlawful, but their impact is to limit workers’ legal protections and weaken the law itself. Employers may also experience unintended consequences of restructuring.

Drawing on Dewey’s accounts of learning the Alexander Technique (AT), this chapter explores why he found the process so powerful. As AT teachers, we explain how the technique enables practitioners to become aware of fixed, unconscious habits and to bring them under conscious control. With a new student, work begins with physical habits. However, because physical, cognitive, emotional and social functionings are interdependent, AT lessons typically enable flexibility in each of these spheres. Dewey’s writings show his strong theoretical commitment to the idea of learning as practical and experiential. His AT lessons were truly revelatory in providing him with both direct, embodied experience of the power of habit to drive human behaviour and a practical means of becoming aware of, and resisting, his own habits of thought and action.

Perceptions are shaped by habit in such a way that the senses can be unreliable in working out how to respond in a given situation. Dewey’s practice of the AT revealed to him the dissonance between his habitual self in activity and his conscious view of himself. Dewey was challenged by his AT lessons, which required an open, enquiring attitude and sense of humility. In the AT, Dewey found a means of pursuing an active, critical, self-directed process of discovery and adaptation akin to childhood learning. AT begins with the self, our ‘tool of tools’. Through fundamentally modifying the self, the AT supports the openness and flexible response to the physical and social world that characterize productive experiential learning.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how setting goals and focusing on acquisition and achievement in life can lead to disappointment and misery, whereas focusing on the guidance of one's inner wisdom can lead to happiness and fulfilment.

The limitations and drawbacks of goal setting are outlined and case studies are provided to support this. Suggestions are provided for listening to one's intuition and allowing the Universe to direct one's life.

Both the author and a client are used as case studies that support the value of allowing intuition to be the guiding force in one's life. In both instances there is greater peace and satisfaction in life and the feeling that life is working out easily for both individuals.

This approach can be successfully used in any area of one's life and is valuable to people from all walks of life. However not everyone is willing to adopt this approach as it requires a willingness to let go of the desire to control one's life and in so doing, allow in what is really meant for us.

This training to date has been presented to open audiences, executives and entrepreneurs with good results. It is clear that these ideas could also be of value to those leading larger organisations and in other key roles of leadership.

These techniques originate from the author's study of “A Course in Miracles”. The author has adopted its teaching within her own work and this, she believes, to be original ‐ although there are other coaches who may support such thinking with their clients. This thinking is of value to anyone who wishes to reduce anxiety and stress, feel more fulfilled in life and improve their relationships – both professional and personal.

In this paper I analyze Sex and the City as performances of contemporary post-modern culture of femininity and engage in a multi-modal, semiotic reading of their socio-cultural significance. In particular, I argue that the same discursive formation underlies the ideology of the show: a discourse largely coinciding with the Standard North American Family Code (Smith, 1999) and therefore a discourse that stigmatizes single women and reinforces the value of marriage as both symbolic and material capital. Drawing in part from Goffman, I argue that an oppositional reading of the show also yields another interesting connotation: the show offers its viewers techniques and scripts of stigma resistance.

I ALL READERS TALK ABOUT BOOKS but how many stop to consider how books talk about them? The choice of a book is a very personal matter and inevitably tells something of the mind, the interests and the character of the reader. This applies not so much to books selected from a public library where readers are encouraged to be adventurous in their reading and to try a wide variety of books, but it does apply to those books which we buy and keep as our chosen friends and companions.

Hazel Kyrk, one of the first women economists at the Economic Department of the University of Chicago and author of A Theory of Consumption (1923), conducted groundbreaking research for the Bureau of Home Economics of the US Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Kyrk made a considerable contribution to the development of standards for a “decent living,” the Consumer Price Index, and the conceptualization of what would later turn into the definition of the poverty line. This chapter evaluates Kyrk’s use of eugenic notions of gender and race that were widely used in Kyrk’s day. This chapter shows that eugenic reasoning impacts Kyrk’s theoretical work only superficially but does structure her research on consumption standards through her focus on the white middle-class family as the unit of analysis for consumer behavior. This chapter also makes clear that the American Institutionalist approach to consumer behavior, rather than marginalized and side-tracked due to a lack of theoretical progress, was relegated to the margins of economics science together with the research of women economists into Home Economics departments and policy research at government institutions.