Hilary Burrage
is a freelance sociologist, consultant, company director, writer and teacher with wide experience in regeneration, knowledge ecology and economy, sustainability, delivery of social policy, equality and diversity. This is her professional website and blog, where she shares her areas of expertise and thoughts about the realities of praxis and professional practice. Previously a college Senior Lecturer, Hilary now owns a business as a researcher, speaker and website designer/coach. Always community engaged, and with national experience of regeneration, science, health, environmental issues, politics and culture, Hilary has worked in many contexts, from Liverpool via London to Prague. A former AFS Scholar, Hilary is now a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Female genital mutilation (‘cutting’, or ‘FGM’) is a barbaric practice inflicted on young girls by their families, and often performed by their immediate women relatives. Operators rarely have medical training and FGM is expressly illegal in the UK. Nonetheless, every year some 20,000+ small children in Britain are at risk of this damaging, very dangerous ritual. But prosecutions there are none. Why are FGM perpetrators protected, rather than victims? Is FGM child non-protection on a par with the scandal of UK elder-care ‘services’?
If you have a Twitter account and would like to draw more attention to this issue, please use the hashtag #NoFGM and follow @NoFGM1. Thank you.
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Call The Midwife… Then, Now And In The Future
We might think that a book about midwifery in London in the 1950s is of little practical relevance today; but how wrong could we be? The true tales which Jennifer Worth (1935- 2011) relates in her Call the Midwife trilogy, now being televised by the BBC, are not as some suppose stories removed from the realities of the present time. They connect very directly with our current lives for at least two critically important reasons.
NB Further discussion of ‘Call The Midwife’ as a really successful BBC1 drama series (and about who wrote and performed the music for the drama) can be found on Hilary’s other website, DreamingRealist ~ Call The Midwife: A BBC1 Triumph For Real People. The blog on this website considers issues around delivering professional public service.
You are most welcome to add Comment on either post.
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Sociology In Your Career
I visited Kingston University yesterday, to talk about the many occupational routes open to Sociology graduates. The list of possibilities is in reality almost infinite. Alongside academic learning, Sociology courses instil a great many skills and a lot of knowledge which can be applied generically, so this was an excellent opportunity to exchange views and understandings of available opportunities with a new generation of Sociology degree finalists and their teachers.
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Green Hubs As Social Inclusion And Community Engagement
This paper proposes a possible framework to examine concepts of public space in relation to culture, knowledge, community engagement and inclusion. It is not a challenge to current ideas about the sustainable development of public space, but offers additional perspectives arising from wider debates about the importance of understandings in shaping resilience, cohesion and sense of place.
Teachers: The Internal Crisis (in 1981)
This article, which I wrote in Autumn 1981, was first published in the journal Social Science Teacher Vol.11, No.1. It refers to post-16 education in England immediately after the 1981 riots. As now, thirty years later, the labour market for young people was fragile, quasi-monetarist economic strategies were in force, and social unrest and concerns about the future were widespread. In these contexts it is unsurprising that teacher morale was under strain and the debate about occupational stress in education was beginning.
Let me start by saying in this Review that I’d urge absolutely everyone who has a professional concern for ageing to read this book. It offers fresh perspectives on and a very significant contribution to our understanding of difficult matters. Not only researchers (whether social or, e.g., medical) but also policy makers, practitioners, clinicians, journalists and many others will find their insights into this complex issue enriched by what Bill Bytheway, a social gerontologist and policy commentator of many years’ standing, has to tell us.
Our Community Bus Is Our Badge
Matters budgetary are pretty tight for most social enterprises right now. So is there still a case for capital spending by individual organisations on purchases such as, say, a minibus, even when a taxi account would do?
Rationally, most of us would probably say No. But with their hearts many might even now want to say Yes, there are still good reasons for acquiring and maintaining expensive capital items. But why? What does ownership offer which functional access does not?
