This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Open Library of Humanities, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.

This paper focuses on the academic involvement in the design and delivery of new teaching and learning spaces in higher education.The findings are based on research conducted at 12 universities within the United Kingdom. The paper examines the nature of academic involvement in the design and decisionmaking process of pedagogic space design, revealing some of the complexities and the tensions within this area of academic leadership. The research found that innovation and creativity on particular projects is often restricted by the project management decision-making processes and that broader institutional aims are often underplayed once the design process goes into project mode.The paper concludes by calling for greater academic involvement in the design process in ways that allow for critical reflexivity based on discussions around the concept of 'the idea of the university'.

‘Academic identity’ is a key issue for debates about the professionalisation of university teaching and research, as well as the meaning and purpose of higher education. However, the concept of ‘academic identity’ is not adequate to the critical task for which it is utilised as it fails to deal with the real nature of work in capitalist society. It is important to move on from the mystifying and reified politics of identity and seek to understand academic life so that its alienated forms can be transformed. This can be done by grasping the essential aspects of capitalist work in both its abstract and concrete forms, as well as the historical and social processes out of which academic labour has emerged

It is a commonplace assumption that human life has become increasingly risky, and the concept of risk has become increasingly central to social scientific investigation. In this paper the increasing riskiness of everyday life is explored through an analysis of the origins, development and crisis of the welfare state. It is argued that the development of the National Lottery is part of a fundamental recomposition of the state which reflects the decomposition of the ‘law of insurance’ as the organising principle of the Keynesian Welfare State and its replacement by the ‘law of lottery’ as the principle regulatory mechanism of the neo-liberal capitalist state

In the scary media world of abused childhoods, child labour has become a major journalistic event. The news headlines record children working in conditions thought to have been abolished by social democratic reform. In spite of this mounting documentary evidence—supported by research undertaken by trade unions and pressure groups such as the Low Pay Unit—Tory ministers argued that child labour was not a problem. The Government's interest in youth was not the demoralisation of young workers at work, but the insubordination of youth, expressed as, among other things, crime, drug-taking and classroom disorder. The problem for conservative policy is the remoralisation of young people through the imposition of a new authority and the production of guides to the virtuous life.

Written as an extended review of Peter McLaren’s 'Pedagogy of Insurrection: from Resurrection to Revolution’ published in 2015, this paper contradicts McLaren’s affirmation of political religion and the version of critical pedagogy on which it is based, claiming hate rather than Christian love as a core concept of Critical Theory. Not a personal, psychological or pathological hate, but a radical hate for what the world has become, or absolute negativity. Hate must be invoked as love-hate for the magic of dialectics to work against the holy love of McLaren’s Christian socialism. Radical hate reveals the main transcendental tenets of capitalist civilisation: God and Money, as impersonal forms of social domination that must be brought down to earth so real existence can learn, learn, learn itself. That is the educative power of the Pedagogy of Hate. Now and forever

The Home Office's emphasis on a new risk-based agenda for the Probation Service has been the hallmark of both legislation and a large number of policy documents. Yet very little is currently known about how probation officers view these changes. Here, Anthony Colombo and Mike Neary use their initial research findings to gain a clearer understanding of the practical concerns probation officers have about combined risk/needs measures, and assess the implications for future progress in the assessment and management of offender risk.

This article is about undergraduate students and young offenders working together on an education project in an Institute of Higher Education. The author argues that the ways in which the students and offenders learn together provide lessons for academics and practitioners working to develop progressive probation practices. This link between the academic and practice is pushed in new directions by the theoretical framework within which Neary situates his work. Neary presents a challenging reinterpretation of the notion that all crime is property crime, including crimes of sex and violence. Neary argues that while not all crime is motivated by money, money is the most significant form of social property; and, therefore, an understanding of the social power of money and the society it dominates is the key to any social theory that seeks to develop the most progressive forms of critical practice. In the Sort'd project money is very much the central issue, not only in terms of Neary's critical social theory, but through the provision of £500 grants that are awarded to young offenders who complete their educational projects.