IFF Blog
Baroness Stern on Women’s Imprisonment: this has gone on too long
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| The Hopeless (Situation), Eva Merz, You, Me, Us and Them project, 2008/09 |
We were fortunate to welcome Baroness Vivien Stern as our guest speaker at Ramsay Garden last month. Stern is a lifelong campaigner for prison reform, with a particular interest in women in prison.
She last spoke at an IFF event in the summer of 2009, alongside the then Governor of Cornton Vale women’s prison, Ian Gunn and former First Minister Henry McLeish (who had then just published Scotland’s Choice, a report for the Scottish Prisons Commission on ‘the purpose and impact of imprisonment in contemporaryScotland’).
Stern returned to address the subject on the day the Chief Inspector of Prisons delivered another ‘unsatisfactory’ report on conditions at Scotland’s only women’s prison, and the Scottish Parliament debated the report of Elish Angiolini’s Commission on Women Offenders that recommends its closure amid a raft of other much-needed reforms.
Posted in: Events, Kitbag, Prisons no comments yet
Post-Creative Scotland
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Award-winning poet, writer and musician Don Paterson was our guest at Ramsay Garden this month. He chose as his topic ‘post-creative Scotland’. He began with the simple observation that he had ‘yet to meet any serious artist who does not privately hold the words ‘creative Scotland’ in anything but contempt’ – and went on to deliver an impassioned plea for artistic expression and professional judgement over spurious ‘creativity’, judged by bureaucrats, in the service of insidious state ends.
This was a challenging presentation, but with a positive message at its core – a plea for trust in the ambition of Scotland’s artists and a suggestion that they gather together in an Academy of Arts and Letters in order to find their own voice and escape the perils of state patronage and parochialism.
Posted in: Cultural leadership, Arts, Events, Governance 2 comments
Learning for Wellbeing Conference
The purpose of the event was to share a new “glossary” setting out a common language for Europeans to conceptualise a holistic, living framework for learning. The day was organized by the Universal Education Foundation (UEF), a small not-for-profit based in Brussels which is championing a holistic approach to raising children in Europe and around the world. They...
Posted in: Uncategorised no comments yet
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