The internationalisation agenda continues to be one of the key influences on the patterns of work of UK higher education institutions. In order to enhance cultural competencies for healthcare students, provisions are made by several UK universities for students to complete a clinical placement abroad, referred to as ‘international clinical placement’ (ICP) in this thesis. Previous studies on ICP have examined the experiences of students but research on the long-term influence of these experiences on students’ careers is still scant. The research reported here represents an initial attempt to capture accounts of these influences. This study was designed to gain a holistic understanding of the long-term influences of ICP on students’ careers drawing on the multiple perspectives of healthcare graduates and employers. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first study that has gained employers’ views as well as the views of graduates, when exploring the impact of ICP on employability. Qualitative in-depth semi-…
This thesis adopts an anthropological perspective and an ethnographic approach to explore the following research question: ‘What do university graduates aspire to do with their lives, and how are such aspirations produced, negotiated, and revised over time?’. The research examines the aspirations of students and graduates from a prestigious university in New York City. Los Angeles emerged as a popular destination for graduates from this university and so two periods of fieldwork were conducted with graduates there. Data collection lasted 18 months spread over two calendar years (2017-18). The conceptual framework is person-centred and longitudinal, and the prime source of data is semi-structured interviews. The thesis features 16 of the 30 participants involved. Graduates in the study are shown to reckon with the compatibility of finding fulfilment through work and attaining future financial security. There was a tendency to perceive careers in terms of mutually exclusive extremes of either artistic expressio…
Higher education (HE) has a long association with many professions and industries yet the demand for professional-facing HE provision has never been greater with public services, such as nursing and policing, now requiring mandatory HE qualifications (Bekhradnia and Beech, 2018) in parallel with a rapid growth in degree apprenticeships (Universities UK, 2019). Consequently, there has been an expanding need for experience-rich professionals to transition into full-time academic roles. These practitioner academics (PAs) are not in themselves a homogenous group as they span a range of professions that may not have been traditionally associated with HE. This thesis adopts an ethnographic, narrative, interpretivist approach to capture the experiences of sixteen full-time neophyte and established PAs from multiple UK based higher education institutions (HEIs) from a diversity of professional backgrounds. Through conversational-expository methods – blog posts and comments, semi-structured interviews, and conversatio…
This practice-based PhD project encompasses a self-experiment in ‘social sculpture’ – a phrase coined by German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) to designate an expanded concept of art. Emancipatory and transformative in nature, it involves developing the perceptive, imaginative, reflective, and communicative capacities associated with art in a more traditional sense and applying those to navigating life itself. To me, this implies living with the attitude of an affected, socially engaged researcher: one who, with curiosity and care, seeks to understand and, where possible, improve the world they find themselves in, confronting internalised and external forms of oppression. My interest in social sculpture intersects with questions around the scope of human agency, as well as what helps and hinders creativity and learning. Therefore, I have been drawing on a number of theoretical angles, from Transformative Learning theory, psychoanalysis, and pragmatism to feminism, queer theory, and systems theory, to inform …
This commentary is a record of my research into the spatial characteristics in my composition and its relationship with the concepts of spectromorphology and space-fonn as proposed by Denis Smalley. My research is also info1med by the ideas of oneiric phenomenological experience of place (the home) in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space and the way Brandon Labelle extends those ideas in parts of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. I contextualise my research with reference to composers who use space as a primary concept in their work. Phil Niblock, Steve Roden, Theodo1is Lotis and John Luther Adams have all informed my work with their differing expositions of spatial detail. My works manipulate sound to create spaces in compositions that reference ideas of human experience by Bachelard and Labelle using the tool-kit that Smalley provides. In my original contribution to knowledge I identify Smalley' s concept of transcontextuality in its ambiguous and acousmatic setting (to create imagi…
There has been a surge of interest in team coaching in the last fifteen years with dyadic coaches adapting their approaches to meet this demand and an ever-increasing array of team coaching courses and accreditations on offer. A review of the salient literature highlights that understanding of the process of team coaching, based on the first-person perspective of team coaches, is lacking and is needed to provide this perspective on this emerging practice. A qualitative study was conducted with ten highly experienced and qualified coaches using heuristic inquiry methodology, featuring in-depth interviews and reflective logs. Heuristic inquiry methodology was enhanced by the inclusion of three focus groups, spaced over an eleven-month period, enabling shared learning, expanded thinking and knowledge development amongst the co-researchers. Team coaching emerges as a process that comprises three distinct stages: preparation, intervention and evaluation, with particular importance placed on giving time and attenti…
Southeast Asia is experiencing unprecedented biodiversity declines brought about by human population growth and economic development leading to unsustainable use of natural resources and loss of natural habitat. The scientific community has emphasized this biodiversity crisis in the past decade, calling for immediate action. In this context, I set my research as a case study in Nakai-‐Nam Theun National Protected Area (NNT NPA), central eastern Laos where wildlife hunting has been rampant and management strategy failing to prevent wildlife declines. This research aimed (1) to re-‐assess and bring forward the importance of NNT NPA for wildlife conservation, (2) to identify the key species for which NNT NPA is a priority for their conservation, (3) to use the data collected to develop a long-‐term project in the area for research and conservation. In addition to this local-‐level case study, I aimed (4) to identify the National near-‐future priorities for …
This PhD by Publication explores the evolution of the British hotel industry from the mid-18th to the early 21st century. The thesis is constructed around five published articles. The five articles comprise: two that research the diffusion of innovation and British hotel industry evolution in the 19th century (Bowie, 2015; Bowie, 2018); two that investigate the adoption of management innovations in British hotel brands between 1998 and 2008 (Osman, Hemmington, and Bowie, 2009; Wang and Bowie, 2009); and a methodological article that evaluates the role of contextual analysis in management history research (Bowie, 2019). All five articles primarily adopt an interpretive philosophy using qualitative research methods that yield contextual depth and rich data to facilitate detailed analysis. Two of the articles employ the historical method to analyse text in newspaper archives and trade directories. Two of the articles adopt a phenomenological strategy with the main focus on internal document analysis, non-partici…
International migration to the EU Member States has increased signicantly over the past decades. Economists have tried to explain the effect of migration by looking at labour market outcomes such as income differentials and wage gaps between migrants and natives. However, few papers have investigated the impact of migration on economic growth. To address this gap, this thesis aims to make a contribution to knowledge by assessing whether there is any long-run relationship between migration and GDP per capita, and vice versa. In addition, this thesis examines the impact of migration on the European economies, taking into account their level of education and the effects of skill-based migration programmes on high-skilled migrants. First, to pursue these aims, we explore the long-run co-integration relationship as well as the short-run dynamics of 22 European countries by applying the ARDL bounding tests and the Granger causality tests. Results suggest that the associated equilibrium does not always conrm the exi…
While place and movement are central to much of my published work, this critical appraisal concentrates on two non-fiction travel books: Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey (Attlee, 2007/2020) and Station to Station (Attlee, 2015), as well as one locative digital fiction, The Cartographer’s Confession (Attlee, 2017). The appraisal is structured around key statements by the geographer Fi-Fu Tuan, particularly from his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1981) and his Farewell Lecture, delivered in 2014. I will be examining how undifferentiated space can be transformed into meaningful location in life and on the page, as well as in the emerging form of locative digital fiction; how place itself can become a prison to which space offers an escape; and how the new dimension offered by digital technology can, when harnessed for literary ends, expand rather than detract from our engagement with the world around us. Investigation of my own work will be contextualised through reference to authors, …