Two boys can't remember the last time they had a hug. Meet Finlay. He's studying for his nursing degree at Glasgow University, against all the odds. But coming straight from care means he has no support network. How can he write essays, find paid work and NOT fall for the beautiful boy at uni, when he's struggling to even feed himself? Meet Banjo. He's trying to settle in with his new foster family and finish high school. But he can't forget all that has happened, and his anger and fear keep boiling over. How can he hold on to the one good person in his life, when his outbursts keep threatening his already uncertain future? Can Finlay and Banjo let go of the past before it drags them under?

In Disrupting Boundaries in Education and Research, six educational researchers explore together the potentialities of transdisciplinary research that de-centres human behaviour and gives materiality its due in the making of educational worlds. The book presents accounts of what happens when researchers think and act with new materiality and post-human theories to disrupt boundaries such as self and other, human and non-human, representation and objectivity. Each of the core chapters works with different new materiality concepts to disrupt these boundaries and to consider the emotive, sensory, nuanced, material and technological aspects of learning in diverse settings, such as in mathematics and learning to swim, discovering the bio-products of 'eco-sustainable' building, making videos and contending with digital government and its alienating effects. When humans are no longer at the centre of the unfolding world it is both disorienting and exhilarating. This book is an invitation to continue along these paths.

Whistler was one of the most original, if also tirelessly self-promoting artists of the later 19th century. After his disastrous run-in with John Ruskin, the greatest critic of the previous generation, Whistler poured his thoughts and feelings about art into this lecture, which made him if anything more notorious, but was also widely admired for its insights and wit. It is reproduced here exactly as he had it printed, with an essay by the leading scholar Margaret MacDonald putting it into the context of Whistler's career and times.

In 1994 as a result of their alcoholism, Lilian and Murdoch MacDonald were down and out, sleeping rough in the streets and parks of Cambridge, the English university town where, a quarter of a century before, Murdoch had studied for an honours degree. Refusing to accept what they consider to be the outmoded myths and dogma of Alcoholics Anonymous, Lilian and Murdoch set about searching for the underlying causes of their self-harming behaviour problem, which they discovered lay in childhood. Although Lilian and Murdoch's upbringing caused their problems, they themselves take full responsibility for their drinking, most importantly because taking responsibility for one's own actions is the starting point on the road to recovery. As a result of their endeavours, the couple are today back home in Ayrshire, Scotland, leading normal lives again, with their problems of alcoholism and Lilian's associated eating disorder well and truly behind them. Controversially, they are also now able to drink alcohol responsibly again, if and when they so wish. This book is the inspiring story of their journey.

"At Work in the Field of Birth" is an ethnographic study of midwifery in Canada in the wake of its historic transition from the margins as a grassroots social movement devoted to low-tech, woman-centered care to a regulated profession within the public health care system. In January 1994, after decades of lobbying by midwives and their supporters, the province of Ontario recognized midwifery as a profession for the first time in more than a century.

Through stories about becoming and being a midwife and stories about receiving midwifery care, this book describes how fundamental tenets of midwifery philosophy and practice--the meaning of tradition, natural birth, and home birth, and the place of medical technology in midwifery--are being reworked by the practical and ideological challenges of midwifery's new place within the formal health care system. MacDonald presents contemporary midwifery as a complex cultural system in which "nature" and "tradition" emerge as dynamic rather than esssentialized social categories of meaning and experience.

STORY EXCERPT:
Martina, another rural midwife, tells me "My great-grandmother was a midwife . . . so I sort of have this idea that there is still a bit of that in my blood. But at the same time-I mean, we don't just get called during labour-it's much more clinical. We are doing blood work that my grandmother wouldn't have done and more lab work and tests. But I want to hold on to some of that. I don't want to become a techno midwife. It's not what I want to do at all. It doesn't mean tat we don't use technology or are not willing to-we certainly do, all the time. But I think that one thing that attracts women to midwives and certainlyattracts women to become midwives is the sense of the neighbour, the friend, having a cup of tea. It is more friendly, you've got time to spend with women."