Joan Ryan – författare

Award-winning sportswriter Joan Ryan whisks readers from the sports field to the research lab on an ambitious quest to understand the seemingly indefinable phenomenon called team chemistry. Nearly ten years in the making, Intangibles is packed with stories and characters from the usually hidden subculture of locker rooms worldwide, and threaded with fascinating insights about the human mind and human relationships. Ryan pulls from a range of science disciplines – neuroscience, sociology, psychology and more – to debunk the notion that team chemistry is just a throwaway explanation for every fun-loving, underdog team that wins. Instead, she makes the case that team chemistry is a biological construct with a single function: to elevate performance.Ryan introduces us to the seven archetype characters who seem to emerge on almost every team with good chemistry, and two outlier archetypes she describes as ‘Super-Carriers’ and ‘Super-Disruptors’ of chemistry. Along the way, the author finds herself having to challenge her assumptions about situations and people, leading, for example, to the surprising discovery that difficult star players are not the Super-Disruptors one often imagines they are. She finds, too, that dysfunctional, contentious teams that still manage to win do have team chemistry, just a different variety.A ground-breaking examination that promises to transform how sports and business leaders think about high performance, Intangibles finally proves how all of us affect one another, profoundly influencing who we are and how we function within our own teams of colleagues, friends and family.

This reader contains a mixture of new narratives on suffrage, together with reinterpretations of some long-established "truths" about the campaign by British women for the vote. Some chapters shift the focus from "the great and the good" based in London, and explore the issues which motivated supporters in other parts of Britain. Other chapters illuminate the lengths some men were prepared to go to see women become voters - and the lengths others were prepared to go to stop them. A variety of topics is covered by the contributors, who include both established scholars and writers relatively new to the field. "A Suffrage Reader" provides an opportunity to push back the boundaries of suffrage history, enabling us to think again about the diverse and sometimes contraditory motives for, and outcomes of, involvement in the long campaign by women for the vote in Britain. The book also makes it possible to pause and reflect upon recent developments in writing on suffrage history, and the extent to which this has been bound up with developing attitudes towards politics in the latter decades of the 20th century.

Joan Ryan and her research team have carefully documented Dogrib traditional justice as it has been practised over the past century. Relying upon information received from the elders of Lac La Martre, Northwest Territories, they have unearthed a sophisticated body of Dogrib law, the understanding of which has important implications for contemporary ways in which the Dogrib people and the department of justice can deal with social control. The material is organized and presented in a way that makes it accessible to both Dene and non - Dene readers alike. The methodology of the book is one of "participatory action research," in which the community itself owned and directed the research, training, and outcomes.By exposing the very different values and legal systems of the Dene and non - Dene, this book sets the framework for the possibility of a Dene-controlled and culturally appropriate justice system. The book will be of value to those interested in native self - government, constitutional rights, and aboriginal law, as well as to all those involved with First Nations peoples.