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The purpose of this paper is to explore the relatively hidden phenomenon of researchers who not only study dirty work but who also occupy the position of dirty workers. Drawing on the sociological debate on insider-outsider categories in research, this paper describes how these types of “dirty work/er researchers” understand and negotiate their occupational subjectivity and the methodological and epistemological resources they bring to their research practice.

Two biographical narratives from different types of “dirty work/er researchers” are analysed using a feminist epistemology of corporeality, social difference and power.

Ambivalence is an underlying dynamic of the narratives which indicate that the stigma attached to certain types of dirty work histories act to both facilitate and constrain research practice. Ambivalence disrupts strict binary categories often relied on in research such as insiders and outsiders, empowered and powerless and researcher and Other.

The experiences of “dirty work/er researchers” indicate a need to reconsider ethical, methodological, epistemological issues within social research.

Participatory research frameworks such as peer research should pay closer attention to issues of professional status, power and risk. Further research is required on what happens after peer researchers leave the field.

This paper contributes to the knowledge of the relatively hidden world of the “dirty work/er researcher”, their occupational experiences and the methodological and epistemological resources they bring to their job.

Mental health evaluation in criminal cases is a complex and challenging task. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the value of semi‐structured interviews for diagnosis, the use of literature review to increase understanding of a case, and the importance of looking “beyond” the criminal offence itself.

The author conducted a forensic mental health assessment of a man who killed his wife and two young daughters. The case is presented in the order in which information reached the psychologist, so her clinical reasoning becomes apparent. Findings from the police file are integrated with psychological test results and a literature review on familicide and uxoricide.

The case analysis illustrates the perpetrator fits a personality profile found in empirical research on male spousal killers, who often suffer from dependent, avoidant and over‐controlled personality pathology. Four mental health experts who previously reported on this case had not agreed on a diagnosis. Using a more structured approach to assessment, the current analysis sheds new light on the relationship between mental disorder and offence.

The use of semi‐structured interviews for psychiatric diagnosis increases diagnostic reliability. Since there is so much at stake for the assessed in a criminal investigation, the importance of reliability and accuracy of diagnosis cannot be overestimated. Forensic mental health experts serve the court best by integrating findings from structured assessment instruments, file information and empirical research on comparable offender types.

This paper can be useful for teaching purposes and provides guidance to both novice and experienced forensic experts.

This paper aims to examine the cultivation of anti-racist practices with pre- and in-service teachers in post-secondary contexts, and the tensions of engaging in this work for equity and justice in urban teacher education.

The paper relies on critical race theory (CRT) and critical whiteness studies (CWS), as well as auto-ethnographic and storytelling methods to examine how black in-service teachers working with a black teacher educator and white pre-service teachers working with a white teacher educator enacted strategies for cultivating anti-racist practices.

Findings indicate that for black and white educators alike, developing critical consciousness and anti-racist pedagogical practices requires naming racism as the central construct of oppression. Moreover, teachers and teacher educators demonstrated the importance of explicitly naming racism and centralizing (rather than de-centralizing) the political project of anti-racism within the current socio-political climate.

In addition to racism, educators’ racialized identities must be centralized to support individual anti-racist pedagogical practices. Storying racism provides a context for this individualized work and provides a framework for disrupting master narratives embedded in educational institutions.

Much has been written about the importance of teachers connecting to students’ out-of-school lives to increase academic achievement and advance educational justice. Strategies for forging those connections include using assets-based practices and linking school curricula to students’ community and cultural identities. While these connections are important, this paper focuses on teachers’ explicit anti-racist practices in urban education.

This paper introduces a conceptual lens for leading social change in slums and informal settlements. In line with this aim, the purpose of this case study is to describe the public problem-solving approach of a social change organization situated in an informal settlement through the lens of adaptive leadership, complexity theory and social change leadership (SCL).

This paper follows an engaged reflection tradition. First, the author-practitioners describe an informal settlement case hereafter called ISC in southeast Iran where many people have historically remained undocumented and uneducated. Using complex adaptive systems theory, adaptive leadership and SCL as the conceptual lens, the paper analyzes ISC as a complex adaptive context in which the community and the government are in tension in solving problems, particularly illiteracy. The instrumental case study draws from participant observation and document analysis to describe and examine the endeavors of a community office operating within ISC. Through this reflective analysis, the authors illustrate how a social change organization can effectively tackle public issues like illiteracy within informal settlements.

This paper applies complexity leadership theory to a social context. The study illustrates how social change organizations can support the transformation of informal spaces into adaptive spaces to enact social change.

This paper reflects on engagement activity near the insecure borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. By extending an organizational-level theory to the public sphere, this paper contributes theoretically to the complexity theory literature. Moreover, it provides a practical insight for community development and slum upgrading projects.

The current chapter outlines the process through which New Religious Movement (NRM) membership is conceptualized as facilitating the development of increased reflexivity, in particular the development of an increased ability to connect to others. Based on the narratives of a subsample of 11 former members of NRMs for whom membership signified a desire for an increased ability to emotionally connect to others, a number of factors that are understood as having facilitated or inhibited this type of change were identified and are discussed. The findings extend previous theorizing of NRM as facilitating changes in the behaviors and beliefs of their members, and conceptualizes NRMs as possible avenues through which self-change at an emotional level can occur.

Effective communication through public speaking is an essential skill for executives, and this article explains how to avoid the top eight mistakes that people make when in the spotlight.

Based on the author's experience as an executive coach and former television news anchor, the article uses real‐life examples to illustrate the mis‐steps CEOs and other leaders have made in their public communications, and offers practical tips for how to avoid repeating these eight common mistakes.

The article presents practical ways to avoid eight common and preventable errors that leaders are apt to make in public speaking situations.

In addition to having business or technical skills, CEOs and other leaders must become masterful and effective communicators. This article explains how to avoid common errors in public speaking, and how to identify the lesson in every mistake. Effective communicators don't have to be perfect, but they must be prepared.

The article's value lies in its clear and practical tips that will help leaders handle the public speaking spotlight with confidence and success.

The primary purpose of this research is to explore how the cultural context, in this case, China, influences the teaching of entrepreneurship that seeks to cultivate student entrepreneurs during their university experience.

A qualitative case study approach is adopted to explore how the cultural environment affects the delivery and application of entrepreneurship education to university students in a Chinese context. Seventeen student entrepreneurs and three lecturing staff members in three Chinese universities were interviewed using a semi-structured interview approach.

The findings suggest that while Chinese universities have been importing teaching models and methods of entrepreneurship education from the United States and other countries, both students and educators are starting to recognise the need for teaching methods to be contextualised and designed based on national conditions and cultural characteristics. Findings from this study highlight cultural fusion and collision in the process of importing and implementing entrepreneurial teaching methods. For example, teaching students how to write a business plan appears to offer limited value for students' start-up activities and their venture development. The didactic teaching method centred on teachers without entrepreneurial experience works for the teaching “about” entrepreneurship but is paradoxical to the goal of teaching “for” entrepreneurship.

Little theoretical or empirical attention has been paid to the complexity of the cultural environment of teaching approaches to entrepreneurship education. This paper provides novel empirical insight into why the cultural environment plays a critical role in teaching approaches to entrepreneurship education and how these teaching approaches can be culturally nuanced to better meet the needs of nascent student entrepreneurs in various cultural contexts.

Discusses the application of win‐win mindsets and strategy in the employment of reference graduate assistants in academic libraries. The strategy covers different stages of the employment including recruitment, training and support, and transition. It focuses on the concept of treating graduate assistants as colleagues and involving them in the whole process. Also compares the differences between the employment of reference graduate assistants who are library school students and those who are non‐library school students, and the differences between graduate assistants in libraries and contingency workers in the business world.

‘WHY MUST EVERYBODY IN IRELAND’, says Sean O'Faolain, in one of his recent flashes of inspiration, ‘live like an express train that starts off for heaven full of beautiful dreams, and marvellous ambitions and, halfway, Bejasus, you switch off the bloody track down some sideline that brings you to exactly where you began?’ Such highly coloured comment might equally well be applied to the characters and situations we find in the plays of that Dublin genius—the centenary of whose birth we are commemorating this year—John Millington Synge. The writings of both authors, incidentally, are characterized by a rueful, amusing, gently self‐mocking tone about Ireland and the Irish. Both adopt a wider, detached, almost continental view of their country. Synge, in particular, refers to Ireland as the furthermost corner of Western Europe and himself as an Irish European.