Blog Archives – MJRyder.net

Category Archives: Blog

Reflections on my Masters degree – 10 years on

1st October 2024 Mike Ryder Comment

October 2024 marks the 10 year anniversary of what is perhaps the proudest achievement of my academic life.

In 2014 I submitted my Masters dissertation after what had been a trying two years of studying part-time while holding down an extremely stressful full-time job as a senior writer at a healthcare PR agency based in Whitstable. My family was also going through an intense period of trauma, the repercussions of which are still being felt to this day.

To make matters worse, I was being bullied at work by my boss (the business owner) who took quite badly to the news that I might want to leave my job, and so started a campaign of harassment against me. This culminated in the colleagues in my shared office being moved downstairs to leave me in an office on my own as some sort of ‘punishment’ for daring to suggest that I might want to leave.

It was a very tough time indeed.

The gender debate in 825 words

29th August 2024 Mike Ryder Comment

There is a debate raging at the heart of modern society. It is based on two key questions:

What is a woman?
What is a man?

There are two main perspectives in this debate:

1) Scientific view: Sex is binary. It is based on chromosomes and our ability to produce ‘gametes’ (i.e. eggs and sperm). It is based on thousands/millions of years of evolution. Our bodies are fundamentally ‘sexed’. We may be able to change certain physical appearances relating to our bodies, but we are still biologically either one sex or the other – male or female.[1]

2) Gender identity view: Sex is not binary, but a spectrum. It is not something that can be measured, but rather, it is something that we ‘know’. It is personal to us, and only we can ever know it. It is part of our personal identity. Some people may feel as though they don’t fit in their bodies – they don’t feel comfortable with the sex/gender they were assigned at birth. In these cases people may declare that they are of a different gender and so ‘change’ their sex.

A sector in crisis: a systematic analysis of care home websites in Lancashire, UK

2nd July 2024 Mike Ryder Comment

Back in 2022 I conducted some research into the digital marketing practices of care homes in Lancashire, UK. Such is the slow pace of academic publishing, I have decided to publish what I found here on my website (July 2024), in the hope that authorities might use this report as a motivator for change. While some of the examples I found in 2022 have been updated, I notice that many still have not changed some two years later. This is incredibly worrying, especially given the legal ramifications, and impact on patient choice.

What the ‘right to die’ debate tells us about sovereignty

17th May 2024 Mike Ryder Comment

Many readers will be familiar with the ongoing debate in the UK around the ‘right to die’. The campaign group Dignity in Dying is calling for a change in the law with a new assisted dying bill to give terminally ill people choice in how and when they die.

However, things aren’t as simple as they may first seem. While many people may well argue that developed nations should not treat their citizens worse than animals, there have been many dissenting voices who suggest that an assisted dying bill may put pressure on people to take their own lives; it may even be a ‘slippery slope’ of legislation that discriminates against the most vulnerable people.

The politics of knowledge

10th January 2024 Mike Ryder Comment

This is an extended version of an article published in The Conversation on 9th January 2024.

In January 1948, Life magazine published a feature showcasing the ‘102 Great Ideas’ of Western civilization, arrayed in index boxes covering topics from #1: Angel to #102: World. The project was the brainchild of Robert M. Hutchins, then chancellor of the University of Chicago and director of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Hutchins and his team had identified what they believed were the 432 ‘basic great books’, which the Encyclopedia planned to publish in a 54-volume set. To go alongside this collection, Hutchins commissioned a team of researchers to prepare an index so that readers could navigate the complex body of work. The result was displayed as part of an extended article in Life magazine, featuring a large double-page spread in which more than a dozen tired looking indexers posed alongside the output of five years’ work and nearly a million dollars of investment.

While the index was certainly an impressive achievement, at a time before computers were widely available, the results pose more questions than answers. Who exactly decides what counts as knowledge? Who decides which books should be included and which books left out? In this case, all 432 of the ‘great books’ were written by men. Indeed, the subject of ‘Man’ was even given its own chapter in the index, while ‘Woman’ only featured as a sub-category of ‘Family’, ‘Man’ and ‘Love’.