Aimed at those who have a responsibility for policy and practice in relation to education, health improvement and community, this position paper explores how the corporatization of the modern university has arguably shifted how students see themselves – and how academics see students and how students see academics. Increasingly, education is being economized in an age of neo-liberalist ideology. Universities spend considerable resources on recruiting students, promoting why students should attend university but arguably spend far less on how they enable students to be effective learners. The author argues that it is time to pay attention to two key responsibilities in higher education: well-doing and well-being. However, it is argued in this paper that universities are far too focused on behavioural well-doing agendas and not sufficiently focused on experiential wellbeing of staff and students. This paper concludes that there is an urgent case for realigning higher education through acknowledging the fundamental importance of communitas – defined as “inspired fellowship” to enable human, personal, spiritual and social well-being. It is argued that universities must take seriously the mental health of their staff and students, and in so doing, the role of the arts may provide plausible answers in realigning the culture of higher education.

‘Change’ is the locus of the avant-garde’s revolutionary character. Historical claims and contemporary theorizations of the avant-garde enforce methodological distinctions between radical and conforming attitudes that fluctuate according to existing political agendas. This process of instrumentalization renders the avantgarde susceptible to the conformity of institutionalization. More importantly it prescribes the avant-garde with a subservient role that controls its operational means and deflates its capacity to produce politics. What is to be done, if the avant-garde achieves its goal for socio-political change? Are we to abandon the spirit of critical reflection and surrender to the conditions of the next system? How can there be an avant-garde after capitalism if its ends are solely confined in the substitution of one system with another? This article traces out this problem, assessing what kind of emancipatory potential we might expect, or hope for, from a post-capitalist avant-garde, by advancing a critical examination of recent theories of political subjectivity, the dialectics of change and the reconciliation of the institution.

Recently there has been renewed academic interest in co-operatives. In contrast, media accounts of co-operatives are relatively scarce, particularly in the UK, where business reporting usually focuses on capitalist narratives, with alternatives routinely marginalised until a scandal pushes them into the public eye. This paper analyses media coverage of the UK’s Co-operative Bank (2011-15), tracing its transformation from an unremarkable presence on the UK high street to preferred bidder for Lloyds Bank branches, and its subsequent near collapse. The paper charts changes in reporting and media interest in the bank through five discursive frames: member and customer service; standard financial reporting; human interest, personality-driven journalism; the PR machine; and political coverage. Our analysis discusses three points: the politicisation of the story through covert and overt political values; simplification and sensationalism; and media hegemony. We argue that although moments of crisis provide an opening for re-evaluating the dominant reporting model, established frames tend to reassert themselves as a story develops. This produces good copy that reflects the interests of the publishers, but does not extend understanding of co-operative organisations. Thus the paper identifies the role of the media in delegitimising organisations with alternative governance structures, thereby promoting ideological and economic conformity. http://mc.

This article employs an interdisciplinary approach to evaluate the role of the political slogan in Communist Czechoslovakia, with reference to Bakhtin’s concept of hierarchically superior texts, as developed by Alexei Yurchak and Michal Pullmann. It argues that the slogan performed a much wider range of temporally specific functions than has been generally recognized, and that its repetitive and ritualistic character had a major psychological effect on people’s memory and perception of reality (see C. Atkinson and R.M. Shiffrin, and David I. Kertzer). A clear distinction is drawn between denotative and connotative meaning, with detailed attention paid to J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, as elaborated by John R. Searle. The first two sections of the article define the concept and the functions of the ‘political slogan’, with special significance accorded to the use of language to establish a binary opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (à la John B. Thompson’s notion of fragmentation). The third part identifies the sources and methodology adopted, and lists the principal word tokens identified. Following a brief contextualization of the slogan in the next section, the main body of the study uses corpus-assisted statistical analysis to evaluate the development of different thematic, lexical and semantic referents over three broad time spans (1948 to the mid-1950s, the mid-1950s to 1968, and 1969 to 1989).

The article explores the extent to which ‘pictorial art’ resists legibility, transparency and coherence. The analysis of three artistic case studies, Idris Khan, Maria Chevska and Jane and Louise Wilson, serves to investigate established hierarchies in our perception of visual referents. In the discussion, the article inquires the means of erosion, veiling and dissemblance as ways to critique assumption of the homogeneity of the image. All artists cast a view of the external world by diverting it, defacing it and distancing themselves from the external environment. However, the distancing is never disconnected from the everyday and never succumbs to abstraction. The article argues that the crisis of the image offers a productive framework that allows artists to draw attention to the absence of logical structure and the instability of the visual sign.