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This chapter investigates how we have come to know what we know, in the United States, about the terms “ability” and “disability” through the story of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy. What is the narrative of Helen Keller as told through children’s literature? How might the ways in which her life is presented contribute to stereotypes of what it means to be disabled? What, if any, are the ways in which authors of these books resist writing about her as someone who “overcame” her disabilities? How is Helen Keller’s relationship with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, portrayed and what might this representation contribute to the concepts of dependence and interdependence?

This project provides a sociological analysis of common themes through a content analysis of 20 children’s books on Helen Keller.

The theme of the widely circulating “story of the water pump moment” (when Keller realizes that hand movements signify language) depicts a one-sided relationship of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy. This informs the narrative representations of Anne Sullivan Macy as “miracle worker” and Helen Keller as “miracle child.” Another theme is the “complexities of resistance,” which shows how these narratives uphold the stereotype that Helen Keller needed to “overcome” her disabilities while also resisting this notion and showing how she also helped Anne Sullivan Macy.

This demonstrates how widely circulating stories such as those about Helen Keller shape what we know about what it means to be abled or disabled, challenges simplistic binary understandings of the disability experience, and points to the power of narratives to shape systems of beliefs.

This chapter asks, how do the decisions made by Ambridge women compare to the rest of the UK when faced with an unexpected positive pregnancy test, and will explore the decisions made by four Ambridge women when faced with the question of their own pregnancies. It will firstly present the UK context of pregnancy and family composition and go on to examine four case studies of unplanned pregnancy, the decision-making process encountered and its outcomes in BBC Radio 4’s The Archers.

This chapter explores the queasy relationship between food and sex on The Archers. For listeners, food provides an imaginative reference point; consumption of food hints towards characters embodiment and occupation of physical space. To the extent that these characters have boundaries, the way they approach and react to food reveals their rigidity or permeability, and the tones in which characters offer, provide, prepare, coax and force food upon one another tells us a lot about the sexual politics at play in Ambridge. In The Archers, women cook and men eat. Characters who rebel against this norm often subvert traditional masculinity in other ways.

Through close reading (and obsessive listening), this chapter analyses the ways in which food allows the relationships on The Archers to act as foils to one another. It also explores: food as metaphor; food used both to sustain and fortify the boundaries of the self and to besiege the ego boundaries of others; how characters are given weight in acoustic space; female emancipation; male helplessness; the hunger/satiety/aural claustrophobia of listeners.

In this chapter, we explore to what extent storylines about the internet and social media are absent or marginal in The Archers. In particular, we examine these storylines to better understand how the inhabitants of Ambridge interact online and how their online activities intersect with their real-world experiences. We compare what happens in The Archers with the moral panic that often characterises narratives of technology use and find a striking contrast that we argue supports a broader way of understanding and characterising practices of online safety and security. We analysed four social media-related Archers’ storylines from the last 24 months. Our analysis shows that The Archers storylines enable us to look at human–computer interaction in relief so that instead of only looking at how people use technology we can also see the context in which it is used and the usually unseen support structures. The Archers narratives also provide a rich picture of how the fixed space of the physical world interacts with virtual space. In the broader context, the social media storylines provide us with an understanding of how connecting, care receiving and care giving take place in both fixed space and virtual space, and how these co-connected relationships of care receiving and care giving contribute to a form of security more expansive than technologically enabled data protection.

This study investigates the impact of socioemotional wealth (SEW) on family firm entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in Saudi Arabia, and the moderating effect of generational involvement on this relationship. Our data set comprises 241 privately, wholly owned family firms. We examine EO as a strategic orientation expressed in terms of both firm behavior and how managers approach risk-taking attitudinally. Our study finds that SEW is positively related to firms’ entrepreneurial behavior, but not managerial attitudes toward risk-taking. However, the positive effects of SEW on firms’ entrepreneurial behavior diminish as the number of generations involved in the family business increases. The broader implications for enabling entrepreneurship within Arab transforming economies adhering to strong cultural tribalistic norms are discussed.

Much discussion has taken place in real life and in cyber space about the future of Henry Archer. He has been the subject of gossip, with the nature of his conception, and then gained a stepfather, seemingly a gentleman, who cared for both Henry and his mother. Coercive control came to dominate the relation between Rob Titchener and Helen Archer, giving an outward appearance of perfection in all aspects of family life. Henry experienced the gaslighting along with Helen and having seen his mum stab his new adoptive father, Henry was left without his mum, and in the care of evil Rob, effectively prevented from contact with his staid, and consistently caring grandparents. This paper will consider the impact of the trauma on Henry's potential psychological self as an older child and adolescent, looking at the impact of attachment, disparate parenting styles, social learning theory and domestic violence. There is also a comparison to a case study which could illustrate Henry's future, should he decide to begin a career in serial killing.

In March 2014, the minister responsible for public housing in the state of New South Wales in Australia announced that all 600 public housing tenants living in the historic heritage-listed adjacent inner-city neighbourhoods of Millers Point and The Rocks in Sydney were to be moved and the homes sold to the highest bidder on the open market. There were to be no exceptions, and the last public housing resident was moved from the area in July 2018. A common view is that public housing areas in countries with a residualised welfare system are characterised by attenuated social ties, anomie and bleakness. This chapter examines neighbouring, social ties, mutual assistance and sense of community among public housing tenants in Millers Point and demonstrates that this is not always the case. Drawing on 48 in-depth interviews with residents, plus observation, I show that the social connections among public housing tenants in the area were unusually strong and enduring. I argue that in order to understand why this was so, we need to look at the physical and social features of the area. Following on from the seminal work of Jane Jacobs, the New Urbanism movement argues that compactness, mixed land use and walkability are crucial enablers of social interaction and neighbourliness. These physical features were present in Millers Point. There is now a recognition by New Urbanism scholars that physical elements in themselves rarely create community and that the social features of neighbourhoods also have to be taken into account. In the case of the public housing tenants in inner Sydney, the key social features were longevity of residence and homogeneity. Another crucial aspect was a strong sense of social obligation. This was partially due to the presence of strong trade unionism in the area historically and the intermittent nature of employment at certain periods, which ensured neighbours rallied round to help those who were less fortunate.

The Archers storyline of domestic abuse has raised awareness of the phenomenon of coercive controlling behaviours and marital rape. This chapter provides some context for the occurrence of partner sexual violence and focuses on profiling the antecedents of the perpetrator. Personal and family histories identify potential risk factors and include attachment problems, childhood exposure to family violence and personality disorder. These provide markers for future violating behaviours in intimate relationships. The absence of preventative factors such as a positive mentoring adult and supportive school environment increases the likelihood of subsequent offending. Predictions about cessation, continuation and escalation of violence will also be discussed.