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Purpose: This chapter proposes narrative allyship across ability as a practice in which nondisabled researchers work with disabled nonresearchers to co-construct a process that centers and acts on the knowledge contained in and expressed by the lived experience of the disabled nonresearchers. This chapter situates narrative allyship across ability in the landscape of other participatory research practices, with a particular focus on oral history as a social justice praxis.

Approach: In order to explore the potential of this practice, the author outlines and reflects on both the methodology of her oral history graduate thesis work, a narrative project with self-advocates with Down syndrome, and includes and analyzes reflections about narrative allyship from a self-advocate with Down syndrome.

Findings: The author proposes three guiding principles for research as narrative allyship across ability, namely that such research further the interests of narrators as the narrators define them, optimize the autonomy of narrators, and tell stories with, instead of about, narrators.

Implications: This chapter suggests the promise of research praxis as a form of allyship: redressing inequality by addressing power, acknowledging expertise in subjugated knowledges, and connecting research practices to desires for social change or political outcomes. The author models methods by which others might include in their research narrative work across ability and demonstrates the particular value of knowledge produced when researchers attend to the lived expertise of those with disabilities. The practice of narrative allyship across ability has the potential to bring a wide range of experiences and modes of expression into the domains of research, history, policy, and culture that would otherwise exclude them.

By introducing readers to the educational turn in contemporary art, this chapter shows how contemporary artworks and exhibitions can offer educational experiences in themselves. Furthermore, that such artworks constitute a radically expanded or situated form of art teaching. The author argues that educational turn art issues an important challenge to conventional methods of education which are still rooted in the classroom. The first section of this chapter surveys the art of the educational turn, demonstrating its pedagogic effects and innovations. The second section of this chapter draws on some of the lessons of these artworks, alongside some of the ideas from critical pedagogy (Dewey, 1916; Freire, 1996 [1970]; Rancière, 1991, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2010) which complement them. In conclusion, the author attempts to synthesize both into the outlines of a pedagogy of the pedagogical turn, based on principles of humanism, institutional critique, and democracy.

A great deal of contemporary research in education, and in the social sciences more generally, is conducted through interviews. Interview-derived accounts and narratives have been used as data for many decades. We argue that, despite their popularity and their long history, such data are not always subjected to rigorous analysis. Researchers too often treat interviews as sources of insight about informants’ experiences and feelings, but pay insufficient attention to the forms and functions of such accounts. We argue that they need to be approached through the analytic lens of accounting devices and narrative structures. We exemplify this approach through ‘academic’ narratives: scientists’ discovery accounts and accounts of doctoral supervision. We emphasise how such accounts need to be examined in terms of the discursive construction of reality. Such an approach is an important corrective to the selective reporting of ‘atrocity stories’ about postgraduate education.

In a recent paper entitled “On Lateral Thinking,” Atkinson (2011) argued that Economics has benefited not only from borrowing ideas from other disciplines such as physics (e.g., Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947) or psychology (e.g., the growing importance of behavioral economics) but also from applying ideas that appeared in one subfield of Economics to another domain of Economics. As examples of such a cross-fertilization, Atkinson cites duality theory where cost functions were applied to consumer theory or Harberger's (1962) model of tax incidence that was borrowed from international trade theory. Atkinson in fact cited a sentence from his famous 1970 (Atkinson, 1970) article: “My interest in the question of measuring inequality was originally stimulated by reading an early version of the paper by Rotschild and Stiglitz (1970, 1971)” The same parallelism between uncertainty and inequality had been drawn previously by Serge Kolm in his well-known presentation at the meeting of the International Economic Association in Biarritz, France (see Kolm, 1969), which was inspired by his previous work on uncertainty (Kolm, 1966). Atkinson, however, stressed also the need for care in drawing parallels.

The distributional impacts of replacing an income tax that has graduated marginal rates by a flat tax are complex. Typically the flat tax rate will be less than the top marginal rate under the pre-existing tax, leading to gains for the wealthiest. On the other hand, real-world proposals generally combine this with increases in personal exemptions that benefit some of the lowest income taxpayers. The result is that flat tax proposals usually redistribute from the middle to the extremes.

Distribution concerns who gets what. But does “who” refer to the personal distribution of income among individuals or the functional distribution of income among suppliers of productive factors? For nearly 150 years, Anglophone distribution theory followed the Ricardian emphasis on functional distribution – the income shares of labor, land, and capital. Only beginning in the 1960s, and consolidated by a research outpouring in the early 1970s, does mainstream economics turn to the personal conception of distribution. This essay documents Anglophone (primarily American) economics’ move from functional to personal distribution, and tries to illuminate something of its causes and timing.

I completed a degree in classics at Cambridge and entered the British Civil Service. After a moderately successful, if unremarkable career, I took an early retirement and now live in London, spending my now free time at the opera and the theatre …. No, that's not right. Start again. Having decided to become a social anthropologist, I had my first experience of fieldwork on the island of Crete. I went on to specialise in the anthropology of modern Greece, and also wrote several popular books about people and places in Greece. I now live in one of the picturesque hill-towns of the Peloponnese …. No, not that either. Try once more. My father, who was a gifted amateur photographer, gave me a classic Rolleiflex camera for my 21st birthday, and I became a professional photographer, specialising in documentary photographic essays on social conditions in rural Europe. No, not that either …. I combined my first degree in social anthropology with a postgraduate training in linguistics. I went on to research and publish on discourse and social interaction, bringing together interactionist sociology, anthropology and semiotics. Well, not quite …. As you will see, all of these – and other – lives might have been mine. The actual life seems no more coherent than those shreds of unrealised possibilities.