Thoughts of a Psychology Student

If there's two things I'm passionate about, its Education and trying to combat poverty. So when the Psychology department at Bath emailed its students about a 'Psychology in the Pub' talk entitled 'The Educational Binds of Poverty' I didn't really have an excuse not to go... Ceri Brown, a lecturer in the department of education at the University of Bath gave the talk, which was based on the content of her latest book:  ‘Educational Binds of Poverty: The lives of school children’. The talk was fantastic and insightful, and did a brilliant job of demonstrating the intimate relationship between poverty and educational achievement, and how they directly effect eachother. The first section of the talk highlighted how the government and current policy adopt a punitive approach to truancy, and often blame the parents for supposedly allowing school absence, and for the child's apparent lack of aspiration. The government's introduction of fines for

Okay so this blog post moves away from politics and social justice, and more towards literature and philosophy. I hope that's okay. If it's not, then come back next time for more political shenanigans.  I've decided to write a blog post about a book I recently read. The book in question is called "On The Other Side" by Carrie Hope Fletcher. Carrie is a Youtuber who I've watched for a few years now, and like me, is particularly partial to a good book and a cup of tea. So when I found out she was writing her own fiction novel, I decided to pre-order it. The first half of this post will be musings about the book and the second half will be a kind of review. Musings I was captured the most by the premise of this book. The protagonist Evie Snow, who died at the ripe old age of 82, finds herself in Heaven's 'waiting room'. Evie finds that she can't enter Heaven because her soul is too heavy. The idea is that throughout ones life,

The refugee crisis has always bothered me. The thought of families fleeing their homes for their own safety, the journey across the sea deemed safer than the land, upsets me - as it would any other ordinary human being. And I've even blogged about it before >> (http://thoughtsofapsychologystudent.blogspot.com/2015/09/how-dare-they.html ).  But if I'm honest, it's only been over the past week that I've begun to realise the scale of upheaval and atrocity that these people have experienced, and the sorrow that I feel for them has been made that much more tangible through the genuine realisation that they are just like us. Bloggers, and activists, and human rights advocates have been screaming it from the rooftops for months. They are just like us. I knew it in theory, but after visiting 2 exhibitions, 1 event and reading a book about refugees over the past week (see list below), I feel compelled to write this post. Book: Human Cargo : A Journey Among Re