‘The fieldworker not in the head's office’: an empirical exploration of the role of an English rural primary school within its village

This paper presents the findings of a project exploring the role of an English primary school inside its rural village. The fieldwork discovered that the school had lacked a full-time head teacher for a number of years and the paper explicates three dynamics to unravel why: (1) interpersonal issues (high staff turnover and the legacy of a former head); (2) the political–economic development of the village and its shifting local ‘squirearchy’; and finally (3) the construction of the spatial environment of the village (post-war expansion and the situation of amenities). These three dynamics possessed a synergy and this was key in seeing the complexities of this rural environment and its bearing upon social relations such as the absent head. It therefore supports recent theorising positioning interpersonal power alongside the temporal and spatial character of a local environment. The paper concludes by using this insight to consider what problems the school—and any new head teacher—might face in the immediate future. The research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2009–2011.Using a multi-strategy research approach, the paper draws upon participant observation, interview, documentary, visual and historical material in support of its analysis.     

Improving energy literacy through student-led fieldwork – at home

“Energy literacy” is of great interest to those researching sustainable consumption, particularly with regard to its relationship to domestic energy use. This paper reflects on the pedagogic aspects of fieldwork recently carried out by undergraduate geography students in their own homes to assess energy-related technologies and practices, and how these come together into a singular, aggregated number produced by the energy meter. Conceptualising energy literacy as comprising cognitive, affective, and behavioral domains, we evaluate the experiences reported by the students, and discuss next steps in expanding the exercise and learning.     

Tackling gender inequalities in music: a comparative study of policy responses in the UK and Sweden

Cross-disciplinary research has highlighted the persistence of gender inequalities across music scenes. However, the way in which cultural policy shapes responses to gender inequalities in music has been relatively underexplored. This article draws on research from Swedish and UK contexts, supporting analysis with reference to 9 key-stakeholder interviews from both. Comparing perspectives from ‘more’ and ‘less’ gender-equal contexts, with sufficiently different cultural policy traditions, the article explores how responses to gender inequalities in music are influenced by ‘cultural democratic’ and ‘arm’s length’ approaches. It demonstrates that, as a result of these traditions, there is a comparatively more interventionist approach in Sweden at a national level, whereas the lack of central government response in the UK has encouraged more market-oriented solutions. It suggests that this ‘arm’s length’ approach necessitates different grassroots organisational strategies in order to affect change but notes that these, alongside austerity agendas, are insufficient in the long term.     

Major Fallacies Surrounding Stone Artifacts and Assemblages

While lithic objects can potentially inform us about past adaptations and behaviors, it is important to develop a comprehensive understanding of all of the various processes that influence what we recover from the archaeological record. We argue here that many assumptions used by archaeologists to derive behavioral inferences through the definition, conceptualization, and interpretation of both individual stone artifact forms and groups of artifacts identified as assemblages do not fit squarely with what we have learned from both ethnographic sources and analyses of archaeological materials. We discuss this in terms of two fallacies. The first is the fallacy of the “desired end product” in stone artifact manufacture, which also includes our ability to recognize such end products. The second fallacy has to do with the notions that lithic assemblages represent simple accumulations of contemporary behaviors and the degree to which the composition of the depositional units we study reliably match the kinds of activities that took place. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a comprehensive set of new methodologies and theoretical perspectives to solve these problems, our goal here is to stress the importance of rethinking some of our most basic assumptions regarding the nature of lithic objects and how they become part of the archaeological record. Such a revision is needed if we want to be able to develop research questions that can be addressed with the data we have available to us.