Search results

Purpose: To critically explore the implications of the August 2020, decision by Carleton University’s Institute for Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ) to end to its intern program with the Ottawa police, the RCMP, Correctional Services Canada and Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre starting in Fall 2021.

Findings: In contrast to the negative reaction of Kevin Haggerty to this decision, the authors offer a strong but qualified endorsement of the ICCJ’s move to put an end to its internship with coercive institutions. The ICCJ strategically mobilized discourses of anti-Blackness and inclusion in response to the murder of George Floyd and the individual and communitarian traumas of Black, First Nations and Metis and students colour in its program. The ICCJ did not, however, substantively engage with the ways that criminology, sociology and the university are complicit through the legitimation practices and processes of ideology, professionalization and research in the ‘violence work’ of the state. The critique, ethics and logical conclusion of abolitionism are obfuscated.

Methodology/Approach: The authors explicitly draw on the Black Radical Tradition, Neo-Marxism and radical neo-Weberianism to sketch research possibilities that resist the university as a space of violence work, both in criminology and in the professionalization of policing.

Originality/Value: The debate between the ICCJ and Kevin Haggerty is an important opportunity to critically analyze the limits of critical criminology and lacunae of a debate about abolitionism, anti-criminology and university-state nexus as a site for the production of ideological and hardware violence work. Grounded in the Black Radical Tradition, neo-Marxism and radical neo-Weberianism, the authors sketch a framework for a research agenda toward the abolition of criminology.

This chapter looks at the history of work from a social, economic and political perspective. It analyzes the beginning of work and of industrial relations, on a global scale. It goes on to speculate on in what way work will evolve in the immediate future, given technological change and ecological pressures.

Since the mid-2000s, there has been a marked resurgence in Hollywood action films featuring older male heroes, predominantly showcasing stars ranging from their mid-fifties into their seventies. This ‘geri-action’ cycle – a less-than-kind label that combines geriatric and action – has revitalised the careers of aged action stars such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. A core element of the cycle, beyond action franchise revivals and all-star ensembles featuring stars from the 1980s and 1990s, has been the emergence of late-career action turns by ageing Hollywood actors in globally successful French-produced, Hollywood-style action films. Part of a larger trend in French cinema towards the production of films in a distinctly commercial register, the ‘globalised’ aesthetic of French action film cannily mimics Hollywood action film style and aesthetics. These French-produced geri-action films are the roots of the cycle, represent some of its biggest box office successes and have transformed the career of several acclaimed recent-to-action Hollywood stars, exemplified by the prolific late action career of Oscar-nominated actor, Liam Neeson, most notably across three Taken films (2008–2014, EuropaCorp). Despite this, these French-produced geri-action films have predominantly been examined as a Hollywood and American phenomenon.

Geri-action quickly became synonymous with 1980s Hollywood action cinema's white male ‘hard bodies’, who are still widely understood to diagnose national anxieties and social ills – and violently embody their so-called “cures”. These French geri-action films similarly feature protagonists who forcefully struggle against perceived threats to the cultural position of traditional (white) masculinities and professional and paternal redundancy. Yet they also showcase deep-seated European anxieties about the threat of porous borders, immigration and social change, presaging a later shift in the cycle in Hollywood. Focusing on films that have received comparatively less scholarly attention, Taken 2 (2012), 3 Days to Kill (2014) and The Commuter (2018), this chapter examines the productive confluence of lower budget French-produced geri-action films and their ageing recent-to-action stars. These films depend on their stars to fortify their globalised Hollywood aesthetic and the stars' personae permit efficiencies such as clipped pacing. At the same time, budget constraints enhance the action performance of recent-to-action stars as unadorned, visceral and authentic-feeling. The films often stage fight sequences in confined, everyday spaces of work and tourism with ageing heroes who must creatively ‘make do’ with objects available to them. Equally, stunt coordination and choreography, editing and sound design make ageing and less experienced action performers appear to move faster and hit harder. Taken together, French-produced geri-action and its recent-to-action stars have transformed not only who stars in ‘Hollywood’ action cinema but who produces it.

To describe the role of teaching “the paragraph” in furthering literacy goals. The study considers one concept, the Claim-Support-Conclusion Paragraph (CSC) as a curricular and pedagogic intervention supporting writing and academic success for the marginalized students in two classrooms.

While this study corresponds to a gap in the literature of writing instruction (and paragraphing), it takes as its model the development of comprehensive collaborations where researcher-scholars embed themselves in the real practices of school classrooms. A fully-fledged partnership between researcher, practitioners, is characteristic of “practice embedded educational research,” or PEER (Snow, 2015), with analysis of data following qualitative and case study methodology.

Practice-embedded research in this partnership consistently revealed several important themes, including the effective use of the CSC paragraph functions as a critical common denominator across rich curricular choices. Extensive use of writing practice drives increased literacy fluency for struggling students, and writing practice can be highly integrated with reading practice. Effective writing instruction likely includes analytic and interpretive purposes, as well as personal, aesthetic writing, and teaching good paragraphing is intertwined with all of these genres in a community that values writing routines.

Greater academic success for the marginalized students in their classroom necessitates the use of a variety of scaffolds, and writing instruction can include the CSC paragraph as a means to develop academic literacies, including argumentation. Collaborative and innovative work with curriculum within a PEER model may have affordances for developing practitioner and researcher knowledge about writing instruction.

The field of educational leadership is very much dominated by studies of process. That is, discourses of best practice, effectiveness, efficiency, accountability, and so on, dominate the landscape. This then feeds into those working in schools in leadership positions and leadership teams coming to value style over substance. Whether a leader is working according to a particular adjectival leadership model matters little if the purpose of schooling and education is not the priority and shared. In this chapter, I argue that leaders need to have issues of social justice and equity as central to the purpose of their work, for those in disadvantaged areas and schools, and also those working in more privileged sites. Schools have unfortunately often been sites where forms of racism and social injustices have been perpetuated. A key aspect then for leaders is to work redress these practices. However, when working with large diversities in many schools, some leaders feel they are often unprepared for such challenges. In this chapter, I explore the difficulties and challenges of this kind of leadership with a particular focus on the Australian context and examine ways that leaders can think about and act in ways that recognize and acknowledge the diversity in their schools and communities, challenge their own assumptions and beliefs, and also work toward alleviating socially unjust practices.