scholarly journals Understanding Online Safety Through Metaphors: UK Policymakers and Industry Discourses About the Internet

2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110420
Author(s):  
Marina Dekavalla
Keyword(s):  
The Internet ◽  
Internet Safety ◽  
Policy Documents ◽  
Online Safety ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Players ◽  
Uk Government ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Direct Regulation

This article explores how metaphors about what the internet is inform policymaker and industry discourses, when they propose solutions on internet safety. More specifically, it analyzes documents by key players in this debate during a period when the UK government proposed direct regulation of online harms. The study finds that policy documents construct the internet primarily as a “place” that is separate from offline experience; and to a smaller extent as a “tool” that can be abused if it falls in the wrong hands. The article argues that these constructions obscure any links between online and offline risk, and that they legitimize solutions which may not take into account the social roots of online harms. It also suggests that the discourses of policymakers and SNS companies differ in the degree of agency they attribute to users, indicating a discrepancy in their approaches as direct regulation is introduced in the UK.

Children’s Internet Safety Websites

2012 ◽  
pp. 96-104
Author(s):  
Ryan Alan Moreau ◽  
Howard Richard Hershorn
Keyword(s):  
The Internet ◽  
Common Goal ◽  
Or Education ◽  
Internet Safety ◽  
Online Safety ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Do So

Children’s Internet safety websites come in many varieties, each with a focus on providing resources or education to help children learn to stay safe while using the Internet. Seven websites that have a focus on children’s online safety are reviewed: (1) WiredSafety.org (2) WebWiseKids.org, (3) Netsmartz.org, (4) KidsInTheKnow.ca, (5) KiwiCommons.com, (6) TextEd.ca, and (7) DefineTheLine.ca. While each of these websites share a common goal of helping children remain safe they do so in unique ways and focus on a variety of Internet safety topics. To date, scholarly material on the subject remains largely unwritten. Nevertheless, the need for additional websites of this type, particularly for children, is expressly supported by government bodies worldwide.

scholarly journals Equity/Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Universities: The Case of Disabled People

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Gregor Wolbring ◽  
Aspen Lillywhite
Keyword(s):  
Academic Staff ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Disabled Students ◽  
Policy Documents ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Diversity And Inclusion ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact

The origin of equity/equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiatives at universities are rooted in the 2005 Athena SWAN (Scientific Women’s Academic Network) charter from Advance HE in the UK, which has the purpose of initiating actions that generate gender equality in UK universities. Since then, Advance HE also set up a “race charter” to deal with equality issues that are experienced by ethnic staff and students within higher education. Today “equality, diversity and inclusion” and “equity, diversity and inclusion” (from now on both called EDI) are used as phrases by universities in many countries to highlight ongoing efforts to rectify the problems that are linked to EDI of students, non-academic staff, and academic staff, whereby the focus broadened from gender to include other underrepresented groups, including disabled students, disabled non-academic staff, and disabled academic staff. How EDI efforts are operationalized impacts the success and utility of EDI efforts for disabled students, non-academic staff, and academic staff, and impacts the social situation of disabled people in general. As such, we analysed in a first step using a scoping review approach, how disabled students, non-academic staff, and academic staff are engaged with in the EDI focused academic literature. Little engagement (16 sources, some only abstracts, some abstracts, and full text) with disabled students, non-academic staff, and academic staff was found. This bodes ill for the utility of existing EDI efforts for disabled students, non-academic staff, and academic staff, but also suggests an opening for many fields to critically analyse EDI efforts in relation to disabled students, non-academic staff, and academic staff, the intersectionality of disabled people with other EDI groups and the impact of the EDI efforts on the social situation of disabled people beyond educational settings. The problematic findings are discussed through the lens of ability studies and EDI premises, as evident in EDI policy documents, EDI academic, and non-academic literature covering non-disability groups, and policy documents, such as the 2017 “UNESCO Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers” and the 1999 “UNESCO World Conference on Sciences” recommendations that engage with the situation of researchers and research in universities.

The Police Act and the Recruitment of Offenders: Towards the Limits of Social Exclusion?

10.1068/c0126 ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 757-773 ◽  
Author(s):  
Del Roy Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Job Applicants ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
Criminal Records ◽  
The Social ◽  
Uk Government ◽  
The Uk

The social exclusion agenda has been enthusastically embraced by policymakers across Europe. A key feature of this agenda is the emphasis on paid work as a mechanism of social inclusion. However, the UK government is about to implement the Police Act (1997) which will increase the access of employers to the criminal records of job applicants. The author investigates how employers currently respond to job applications from offenders, and examines the likely impact of this new legislation on their recruitment. The key findings are that the Police Act will heighten discrimination against offenders, undermining the policy focus on combating social exclusion. This contradiction reflects the increasingly punitive response of successive UK governments to those committing criminal acts, and the narrow way in which social exclusion has been defined.

scholarly journals COVID-19 and the temporary transformation of the UK social security system

2021 ◽  
pp. 026101832098679
Author(s):  
Richard Machin
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Social Security System ◽  
Security System ◽  
The Self ◽  
Vulnerable Groups ◽  
The Social ◽  
Uk Government ◽  
The Uk

This commentary discusses the implications of the changes made to the social security system by the UK government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government did not veer from its programme of welfare reform. However, emergency legislation made significant concessions including: an increase in the value of the UK’s main means-tested benefit Universal Credit, more favourable eligibility rules for the self-employed, a reduced conditionality regime, and an increase in the level of housing support. This paper argues that although the UK government’s COVID-19 social security response was necessary, it did not go far enough. A temporary lifting of some prejudicial elements of the social security system was welcome but this still leaves an overly complex system characterised by unacceptable delays in payment, inadequate support for many vulnerable groups, and inconsistent experiences for recipients of different benefits.

scholarly journals On the transformation of children at-risk into an investment proposition: A study of Social Impact Bonds as an anti-market device

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 492-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Neyland
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Third Sector ◽  
Children At Risk ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Impact Bonds ◽  
Intractable Problems ◽  
Uk Government ◽  
The Uk

Following the financial crisis of 2008, the UK government accelerated a number of market-based interventions into public problems. Experimenting with new forms of intervention provided a moment to effectively problematize the public sector as a whole and its budgets, opening up for discussion the basis for making an intervention, and the methods and costs involved. Questions were posed of the apparently irreducible costs associated with supposedly intractable problems of government (such as homelessness, vulnerable children or crime). In particular, crisis and austerity became a means to give new momentum to a series of experimental ways to shape the social investment market that had been under discussion in various forms since at least 2000. Social Impact Bonds form one particular type of intervention. They involve drawing together investors with delivery agencies, the third sector and national and local government, coordinated by a commissioner. In the recent move by the UK government to set up and use Social Impact Bonds, much has been made of the opportunity they represent to introduce competition, efficiency, efficacy, private sector thinking and investment to a range of different social problems. As the first results of these experiments are now emerging, this article reports on a study conducted into a market-based intervention that experiments with the transformation of ‘children at-risk’ into an investment proposition through a Social Impact Bond. The article suggests that the Social Impact Bond can be usefully explored by drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) treatments of markets as collective, heterogeneous assemblages. However, in contrast to scholars who focus on market devices, the article argues that the Social Impact Bond in practice operates as something akin to an anti-market device. The article begins with an introduction to Social Impact Bonds. It then explores the means through which market-based competition and an investment proposition were anticipated, but did not emerge through the composition and enactment of the Bond. It concludes with an assessment of the anti-market device and the future of Social Impact Bonds.

scholarly journals Modelling Capacity on London Underground Carriages in Light of UK Government Mandated Social Distancing Rules in Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Marley
Keyword(s):  
Carrying Capacity ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
The Social ◽  
London Underground ◽  
Uk Government ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Transport For London ◽  
The Impact

ConsultantThe UK has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and London in particular has experienced a large number of cases. The London Underground is a key part of the transport for London. The UK Government has implemented social distancing rules meaning that people should be 2 metres from each other. The current paper models the impact of the social distancing on the carrying capacity of 10 different underground and overground carriages. The model determines the optimal standing and seating capacity for the different carriages and identifies logistical approaches to the seating and standing arrangements.

Making Connections: Children, Technology, and the National Grid for Learning

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 46-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Moran-Ellis ◽  
Geoff Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Information Superhighway ◽  
Learning Society ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Uk Government ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk

Late in 1997 the UK Government launched ‘Connecting the Learning Society’ (CtLS) as the first concrete step in instituting a ‘National Grid for Learning’ which will connect schools (and other sites and institutions) to an ‘information superhighway’. This paper presents a textual analysis of CtLS which examines the ways in which technology and the child are presented. We find that CtLS relies on conventional constructions of children as learners and future adults and that, in parallel with this, its treatment of technology is schematic and articulated with and in terms of ‘the future’. The transformation of society, and the arrival of a new socio?technical future, are taken as certain. We argue, on the one hand, that a vision is propounded in which the Grid is seen as transcendent, in that it will have a major impact regardless of the social relations in the context of use; but on the other, that a careful reading of the text reveals a concern with generating alliances, enrollments and trajectories which act as a kind of infrastructure for this vision. We conclude with some thoughts on the wider set of cultural assumptions that frame the document and which help to buttress its plausibility.

Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the British Sunday Night Television Serial

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Older Women ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Mature Female ◽  
Older Woman ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Popular Television

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.

Modern Problems of Teaching Disciplines in the Social and Humanitarian Sphere

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Е.Н. Юдина
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
The Real ◽  
Additional Resource ◽  
The Social ◽  
Use Of The Internet

интернет-пространство стало частью реального мира современных студентов. В наши дни особенно актуальна проблема активизации использования интернета как дополнительного ресурса в образовательном процессе. В статье приводятся результаты небольшого социологического исследования, посвященного использованию интернета в преподавании социологических дисциплин. Internet space has become a part of the real world of modern students. The problem of increasing the use of the Internet as an additional resource in the educational process is now particularly topical. The article contains the results of a small sociological study on the use of the Internet in teaching sociological disciplines.

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