Showcase.
Volume 2
Here you can see us construct Volume 2 of Showcase. Showcase promotes the best essays and research projects written by our own Board and will be updated regularly throughout the 2024/2025 academic year.
Antonia Giles
Showcase. Volume 2 (2024): Essay 1.
Abstract
This project seeks to understand the impact that state policies have on minorities, specifically the impact that the British State’s austerity policies have had on the framing of single mothers. In this project I argue that the rhetoric used by the British Parliament in its discussion of austerity policies contributed significantly to the stigmatisation of single mothers in British society. This paper employs a qualitative approach, and uses a discourse analysis of a section of the debate around the 2012 Welfare Reform Act to examine in depth the stigmatising rhetoric of the British Parliament. This project will build on theories of social reproduction during austerity as put forward by Hall (2023), to ground aspects of the research. This project concludes that the impact of British austerity policies on the framing of single mothers was to stigmatise single mothers, using rhetoric surrounding personal, moral, and financial irresponsibility, apathy towards work and so-called ‘benefit scrounging’.
Ellen Jarrett
Showcase. Volume 2 (2024): Essay 2.
Abstract
This essay examines the rise in right-wing populism in the UK post-financial crash, and argues that the focus on a left-behind "white working class" in popular discourse is misplaced. Instead, it seeks to illustrate that populism (often fuelled by billionaire-run media empires) has become a useful facade for neoliberal economic and social policies: capitalising on alienation and resentment felt by workers, and channelling it through latent nativist frames to produce popular support for otherwise ruinous economic policies of deregulation and austerity.
Mitchell Bowcock
Showcase. Volume 2 (2025): Essay 3.
Abstract
This research project investigates the causes of institutional racism in police culture with a specific focus on the Metropolitan Police in London. The Metropolitan Police has been repeatedly criticised for maintaining a cultural environment that enables racist values to permeate operations. However, this has often been put down to ‘canteen culture’, a term which is ill-defined and inexhaustive when addressing the causes of institutional racism. This project introduces the debate around the causes of institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police, which began largely after Sir Macpherson’s Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in 1999. It then conducts qualitative thematic analysis through a relativist ontological lens of four sources, including the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, Baroness Casey’s Independent Review into the Metropolitan Police, and two recorded interviews with Neil Basu QPM, former Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This report finds that canteen culture perpetuates racism, which is maintained by political interference, organised ignorance, and interracial division. The analytical findings agree with the hypothesis but indicate a limited understanding of institutional racism. Such findings advise the concluding structural reforms proposed for the Metropolitan Police to improve its culture and eradicate institutional racism.
Mitchell Bowcock
Showcase. Volume 2 (2025): Essay 4.
Abstract
Cultural standards in the emergency services in the United Kingdom are frequently scrutinised, yet independent culture reviews identify the same issues without recognising sectoral patterns. This dissertation challenges the fragmented approach, asking how a unitary structuralist approach can propose micro-reform policies, by constructing Structural Institution Agency Theory (SIAT), a framework that explains how governance, leadership, and occupational demands inform culture. SIAT is first applied to independent culture reviews before being used to analyse primary qualitative research. Analysing the divergent experiences of emergency services workers from the Fire and Rescue Service, Police Service, Ambulance Service, NHS, and Home Office, organised by seniority and identity, indicates the sector’s structural mechanisms for cultural development, which independent reviews do not identify. This dissertation identifies three structural themes impacting organisational culture by anonymising individual organisations: poor governance, ineffective leadership, and occupational requirements. These interrelated tropes embed cultural norms, reinforcing the Winning Group’s monopoly on institutional power and limiting the effectiveness of reform efforts. The dissertation concludes with three key recommendations to address sector-wide cultural issues: (1) reform governance structures, shifting authority from local government to national councils to establish leadership consistency and accountability; (2) establish proactive emotional support for operational staff, implementing trauma-focused interventions to replace peer-led coping mechanisms; and (3) deconstruct the Winning Group, rebuilding institutional frameworks equitably to reduce inter-group tensions. Rather than relying on equation-based reform models where culture is a product of statistics and behaviours, this dissertation advocates an Action-Identity-Culture balance that ensures reform strategies are structurally embedded and widely accepted. However, the bureaucratic governance model, the Winning Group’s institutional power, and budgetary limitations remain barriers to change. Nonetheless, this dissertation concludes that reframing leaders’ understanding of cultural formation through the Action-Identity Loop can immediately improve cultural standards and receptivity to reform across the emergency services sector.