This week, we continued writing our literature review. As part of this, I read the National Youth Strategy white paper. I found this rather interesting, as it demonstrated the government's desire to enrich young people's lives, and not solely for the sake of having the byproduct of better academic attainment, as Ofsted reports sometimes imply. What I found most heartening was the focus on community-oriented integration - the government claimed to have big investment targets for building youth facilities and other areas for young people to gather.
On Monday, we had a talk from two people who had worked in the Foreign Office. I found this very interesting, especially being a PPE student, since they talked quite a lot about their experiences working with various Prime Ministers and during the 2003 Iraq war. I found the conversation especially engaging as they both had notably differing views on leadership (specifically, whether someone needs expertise to be a good leader), and yet they were able to surmount that and lead an ambitious organisation together. Their project itself is also very interesting to me, given that they're trying to surmount voter apathy and make people more involved in policy-making, which I find valliant given the principle and practical importance of democracy.
Most of this week was spent on reading and - importantly - organising our literature more systematically. This made it nice to get a more bird's eye view of our progress so far and the topics we need to consider. With the methodology, we mostly summarised the work we had done so far and used it as a sort of plan for moving forwards as well. The talk we got on methods and methodology was also very thought-provoking, as I hadn't considered that so many different factors had to be taken into account. It was also useful in that it helped explain some terms that I had encountered previously but hadn't fully understood!
Moving forward, we need to set clearer goals for what we want to read. We're reaching a point where we've read a lot of the literature that's easy to find or intuitive to think to read. We've received some suggestions from our project supervisors and Ben, so we're planning to split up those suggestions and follow up on more in-depth.