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This chapter will focus on the use of reflective dialogues (RDs) to explore pedagogical practice in higher education. RDs allow researchers and participants to reflect on observed phenomena together, engaging in collaborative reflection that may allow both the researcher and the researched to gain from the interaction, throwing into focus different aspects of practice and a different perspective on the situation, and blurring the boundaries of research and researched into a more reciprocal relationship. Drawing on research which investigated the relationship between critical pedagogical theory and practice with 10 self-identifying critical pedagogues across eight English universities, I will explore the benefits and tensions of using a reflective dialogue approach, and the impact this methodology can have on researchers and participants. This chapter will make a case for RDs as both a practice for educators and as a methodology and explore how to do it, supported by relevant methodological literature, as well as the benefits and challenges of using RDs in social research, concluding with a discussion on how RDs might be used in other contexts to aid professional learning and reflection.

My focus in this paper is on the meaning that rock music has for fans of Lou Reed. I use the comments following his death as my primary data. These data were posted on the New York Times website in the comments section following the report “Outsider Whose Dark, Lyrical Vision Helped Shape Rock ‘n’ Roll.” From these data I develop what I call “the marginal self” in reference to how rock music helps self-identified marginalized persons to deal with their social exclusion and alienation. Drawing on Kotarba’s (2012) analytic categories of the self, I will show how these data give insight into a wide range of existential meanings related to the music of Lou Reed. For many who wrote these comments their reading of Lou Reed has been an essential transformative part of their life in similar ways to baby boomers as outlined in Kotarba’s (2012) Baby Boomers Rock ‘n’ Roll Fans: The Music Never Ends. I first show how Kotarba’s (2012) core concepts of the musical self provide insight into how fans of Lou Reed develop a sense of self through Reed’s music. I then turn to a discussion of the marginalized self as a development of Kotarba’s (2012) categories of “authenticity work” and “becoming of the self.” Suggestions for future research are noted.

This paper examines several common features that animate Stuart Scheingold's The Politics of Rights and The Political Novel. In exploring the affinities between these contrasting works, the paper takes up Scheingold's engagement with the cultural imagination – the legal imagination in The Politics of Rights and the literary imagination in The Political Novel – and shows how this engagement informs Scheingold's analysis of illusion, dualism, contingency, and agency.

Mohammad Azharuddin's arrival in professional cricket served, to quote Karl Marx, as a reform of consciousness that awakened the sport ‘from its dream about itself’. His expertise with the bat invoked the wide expanse of human sensorium, provoking reactions of shock and admiration among observers. In this chapter, I examine Azharuddin's life in cricket and public through a dialectical probing of the relationship between shock and aesthetics. Azhar and cricket appear as a productive terrain to carry out the analysis, as it pushes the possibility of what or who can be considered as a valid subject for theoretical scrutiny. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin and CLR James, I theorise the shock effects created by a cricketer most unusual. From his wristy wizardry with the bat to his appointment as captain of the Indian men's cricket team during the rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, Azharuddin's presence and popularity extended beyond the boundaries that are often imposed on a sportsperson. Through his involvement in the match-fixing scandal that was exposed at the turn of the 21st century, Azhar (the name by which he was popularly known) challenged the mores of a game that had emphasised Victorian notions of purity on and off the field. For the purposes of this chapter, I discuss how Azhar constructed a bodily discourse that pushes us to reassess our very notions of art and aesthetics.

Charles Oscar Hardy (1884–1948) was a well-known though perhaps not leading monetary and financial economist of his time. He was and is important enough, however, to be remembered and studied a half century later (see Frank G. Steindl, Monetary Interpretations of the Great Depression, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995; J. Ronnie Davis, The New Economics and the Old Economists, Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1971; and Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, 1913–1951, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Educated at Ottawa University, Kansas (AB, 1904) (a private university affiliated with the Baptist Denomination) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1916), he taught at both schools as well as at the University of Iowa. He was Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, had a long-term association with the Brookings Institution, and was a frequent advisor to government agencies. Working when the gold standard was in effect, he discerned instability as the likely consequence of excessive gold stocks and resultant credit expansion. An advocate of central-bank monetary management, he worried over limits to its power to create monetary stability because of shifts in the balance of trade and in long-term investment, and called for major reform of the gold standard. Subsequently, he advocated activist monetary and fiscal policy. Hardy also contributed to the development of the theory of risk and uncertainty, a field dominated by his colleague, Frank Knight.