Challenging the traditional power basis of the policy decision-makers in education, this text illustrates the use of a critical and feminist lens in the creation of policies to meet the needs, aspirations and values of women and girls. Focus is on the primary and secondary sectors of education.

The Victorian era was one that teemed with multitudinous and sometimes opposing visions of polity yet rarely questioned the very existence of the State. What might be called the pragmatism of the elite gave rise to a form of democratic compromise, allowing the growth of political ideas that may still be found in contemporary political thought.
Have reformist, socialist, liberal or utilitarian ideas avoided the dogmatism of twentieth century politics or paved the way to other forms of ideology? To what extent has the organization or gradual obliteration of the State been influenced by...

Commemorative projects, born out of conflicting memories, can be problematic. Catherine Marshall challenges the coarsening of history by the construction of commemorative monuments that are thought to provide closure over the events that they mark. She explores how imaginative artists help us to work into and through the past. Through the vitality of her artists, at home and abroad, Ireland and the diaspora have attempted to come to terms with some of the inherited legacies of the Great Hunger, the most devastating event in modern Irish history.

This text sets out to challenge the traditional power basis of the policy decision makers in education. It contests that others who have an equal right to be consulted and have their opinions known have been silenced, declared irrelevant, postponed and otherwise ignored. Policies have thus been formed and implemented without even a cursory feminist critical glance. The chapters in this text illustrate how to incorporate critical and feminist lenses and thus create policies to meet the lived realities, the needs, aspirations and values of women and girls. A particular focus is the primary and...

Developments over the last twenty years have fueled considerable speculation about the future of the book and of reading itself. This book begins with a gloss over the history of electronic books, including the social and technical forces that have shaped their development. The focus then shifts to reading and how we interact with what we read: basic issues such as legibility, annotation, and navigation are examined as aspects of reading that ebooks inherit from their print legacy. Because reading is fundamentally communicative, I also take a closer look at the sociality of reading: how we...

This book examines Irish art over the last hundred and twenty years or so, from 1900 to now, considering key examples and developments and how visual expression can be read for what it reflects and reveals of art and society during this time. Art in Ireland was peculiarly shaped on one hand by the country's geographic isolation, political upheaval, religious repression and its post-colonial history, and on the other by the interconnections with the world as a consequence of factors, including diaspora, location (between Europe and America), and cultural aspirations. Alongside all the changes...