Rachael King – författare

How the concept of improvement came to dominate and direct British thinking about social change during the eighteenth centuryImprovement had a specific environmental meaning during the eighteenth century, referring primarily to the development of land. Its application, however, grew to encompass almost every arena of social life: agriculture, trade, infrastructure, morality, literature, language, the law, the arts, the sciences, the self. Rather than understanding improvement as a set of ideas, Rachael King shows for the first time how the concept developed in and through new forms of early interactive media, such as before-and-after flaps, printed diaries, and magazines and periodicals.While we now understand improvement as generally “making things better,” the idea played a key role in colonial, racist, sexist, and classist undertakings in the period, as colonized peoples, the enslaved, women, and the working classes were sometimes forcibly “improved.” Drawing on extensive archival research and bringing together methodologies of media studies, literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the digital humanities, King shows how certain genres of writing elicit a level of interaction that blurs the boundaries of the book, enabling the transformation of an idea into a cultural keyword.

Traditionally, the most socially and academically selective UK universities expected students to move from the family home to the institution during term time. More recently, there has been a growing trend for students to live at home and commute to university, with the proportion commuting driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.Examining commuting through a social justice lens rather than focusing solely on the way in which commuters navigate home and university identities, Living and Studying at Home: Degrees of Inequality explores the social characteristics, experiences, and outcomes of commuting students in an old Scottish university, highlighting the social class dimension of commuting. To redress the social inequalities identified, the authors consider what universities can do to meet the needs of commuter students who are currently highly marginalised.Drawing on findings of recent research undertaken by the authors, chapters discuss why commuting is socially structured by a range of factors including social deprivation, caring responsibilities, ethnicity, disability, and being a mature student, and suggest future policy, cultural and pedagogical changes which challenge the systemic inequalities experienced by living at home students.

The same evening Josh Underhill went missing, the black horse appeared on the hill above the house. Ella knows that words are powerful. So she should have known better than to utter a wish and a curse on the same day. Who is Gus, the boy with the impish grin, who seems to appear in answer to her wish? And what does the black horse want? When Ella finds that her grandmother's warnings of creatures that dwell in the lake are more than just stories, she and her pony Magpie are drawn into a dangerous, life-saving mission.