Photo by cottonbro at Pexels. 

I wrote an article on Chavs in 2004 for www.chavworld.co.uk The purpose of this was to quickly get across to a wide readership the awful authoritarian views which were being articulated through this underclass stereotype. It was the perfect forum, being accessed by students and those perpetrating these views. In taking this ‘democratic’ route I have been beaten to the academic finishing line by K.Hayward & M.Yar who recently published ‘The Chav Phenomenon: Consumption, Lifestyle and the Media Construction of a New Underclass’ in Crime Media Culture, 2, 1, 2006. Being the first to have a thesis published is of course the goal of all cultural theorists but sometimes principles must come before glory. Academic journals have a very small readership with an average of one and a half people reading each article – or as I prefer to imagine, one particularly tall person. So I feel vindicated in my original objective, particularly given the response I’ve received.

I have now submitted the article to a peer reviewed journal called Interstice. This has gone through its second edit/review and so I am hopeful of publication, particularly as my revised article advances Hayward and Yar’s thesis by bringing in a racial dimension to this stereotype. But academia is a s-l-o-w grind; articles on Le Parkour and the Hummer are bouncing around in the technological void trying to find a home. Boing. Bounce. Boing. Wheeee…

Photo by Asl?han Aslan on Pexels. 

Stimulus Issue: 14. Man – Woman October November 2006 For the Urban Anthropologist ISSN 1746- 8086

I have written the article ‘Free as a Bird’ for Stimulus Respond. This is a 2000 word piece on Le Parkour or ˜Street Running’ as it is also known. It examines how this new form of urban expression challenges gendered notions of the body. The article is based on a three month ethnography I did with a group of 14-22 year olds in Nottingham called NottsPK.

The remit for the magazine was: How is the relationship between genders defined by culture? Are the stereotypical ideas of man and woman true to life? How are ideas of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ influenced by biology? What is the importance of gender within society?

A word of advice for writers out there; make sure the editors include your web address or details before publication. That way you can be contacted which may lead to more work.

For those of you interested in where this odd title for a magazine comes from, read on. This was taken from Wikipedia.

The stimulus-response model describes a statistical unit as making a quantitative response to a quantitative stimulus administered by the researcher. The object of this kind of research is to establish a mathematical function that describes the relation f between the stimulus x and the expected value (or other measure of location) of the response Y:

E(Y) = f(x)

The most common form assumed for such functions is linear, thus we expect to see a relationship like

 

E(Y) = α + βx.

Statistical theory for linear models has been well developed for more than fifty years, and a standard form of analysis called linear regression has been developed.