Workshop at Torpoint Community College

Expectations

LinkedIn and 'weak ties'

Financial Times magazine article today on Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is all about networking and work. He has been influenced by sociologist Mark Granovetter and the idea of 'weak ties'.... In other words people on the edge of your social and professional radar screen....he suggests these connections can really help to open up new opportunities. LinkedIn aims to help you connect with them.

A new pastoral

Very interested in different visions of pastoral England since we've been working on I Packed This Myself.
At the David Hockney show at the Royal Academy last night - was stunned by the whirlwind of colour and the excitement with which he re-engages with British landscape (after the California years). Colour and line transform the Yorkshire hills and dale. This is a new way of looking at the world.  Double East Yorkshire 1998 was painted after six months in Yorkshire with a terminally ill friend.

There is a lot of emotion in these paintings.

A few years later, colours become more subdued and traditional. 

Mid Summer East Yorkshire 2004 reminds me of the tapestry created by my local church in Cornwall to mark the millennium. There's a sense of stitching things together to try and make sense of them.

For the church tapestry, women in the congregation each designed a square and sewed them together into a huge wall hanging. Will have to take some pictures this week. That was a vision of rural life at the time, as was this. 

Very notable that there are no figures in any of these landscape paintings.

Thoughts from a couple of years ago on the 'new pastoral'.

The next steps

A workshop at Torpoint College next Thursday on I Packed This Myself with Inga (who worked with us in January) ... looking forward to it, and also to developing our new project which naturally arises from the work with migrant workers.Will be in Cornwall all week. It will be key, of course, to build partnerships - and first and foremost follow up the leads and foundations built with Migration Impacts Funding via Inclusion Cornwall and Cornwall Council. Really would like to meet Inclusion Cornwall and Cornwall Works manager Andrea Gilbert - but she is an extremely busy person. She does have the morning of 17th April free - and we arrange a conference call. At least this is a start.

Worklessness: a definition

I've mentioned the term 'worklessness' to people a few times recently (as I started to hear the word when we embarked on work with migrant workers in Cornwall). It's been surprising to find that it's not a familiar term to anyone outside the employment sector. The word has been buzzing around my mind ever since I first heard it. Here's a definition I found with Google's trusty assistance:

Worklessness is a less familiar term than unemployment to describe those who are economically inactive. The economically inactive are people of working age who are not working, not in full-time education or training and are not actively seeking work.

Source: http://www.idea.gov.uk/

Understanding the Migrant Experience

It's taken me a while to post this up! But click here for the briefing paper including my presentation on I Packed This Myself for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Seminar Series, 'Understanding the migrant experience'. This all took place at Swansea University.