Educational policy debates are no longer occurring exclusively in academic or governmental settings. Intermediary actors are promoting research using a variety of traditional and non-traditional media to advance and oppose policy agendas. Given the current policy arena, it is useful to re-examine the research underlying current reforms, and to determine whether there is an “echo-chamber” effect, where a small, or unrepresentative, sample of studies is repeatedly cited to create momentum around a policy proposal. In exploring the echo-chamber hypothesis, we focus on two distinct methodologies. Using bibliometric methods and examining social media activity by intermediary organizations, our preliminary evidence suggests the presence of an echo-chamber effect in policy debates.

At the beginning of her 2007 article, "Adapting Children's Literature", Deborah Cartmell encouraged us to remember the complementarity and mutual admiration that should exist between cinema and literature as two narrative arts. At this time, adaptation theorists such as Brian McFarlane and Linda Hutcheon had done much to temper an oppositional point of view when comparing film and literature. Seeking to find other ways of studying adaptations than merely by the question of fidelity, they had argued strongly for intertextual analysis. Cartmell thus supported this approach to adaptation studies at the beginning of the article, but she quickly recognized that there still was a degree of tension between cinema and literature, especially from the point of view of the audience. Framing her own case studies in the metaphorical context of a 'battle' between the arts, she stated that the winner was the one which appeared dominant on screen. Cartmell seemed to argue that children's literature was a particular field in this respect since fidelity remained especially important to this audience. Among her examples she quoted the case of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001), deciding that, here, literature had won.This may not be so sure. This contribution aims to reconsider Cartmell's evaluation of this film, as well as to examine how the discussion of fidelity discourse has developed in recent years. We will ask if the Harry Potter (2001-11) series invites us to think about adaptation differently. We will also question the validity of the 'battle' notion in this case and consider what developments Henry Jenkins' 2006 concept of 'transmedia storytelling' has brought to the debate since.

Will ye stop yer tickling, Jock?': Modern and postmodern Scottish comedy Will ye stop yer tickling, Jock! Oh, stop yer tickling, Jock! Dinna mak' me laugh so hearty, Or you'll mak' me choke. Harry LauderOne of the classic low-culture formulations of Britishness used to be found in a joke that began,`There was an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman . . .' This joke, as it was typically told, offered a microcosmic (perhaps microcomic) reaffirmation of England's rationalising superiority over its Celtic cohabitants of the British isles. Us Scots tended not to object to it too much because we were spared its worst excesses: we might be mocked, but we laughed because we weren't being ridiculed. In a way that cemented our economic and cultural place within the United Kingdom, we were content to play out the role of copula between England and its full-fig Celtic other because we'd much rather be in on the joke than be its butt, no matter how subtly it might subordinate us. This relation plainly has a historical basis in the politics and economics of union and can be seen to go back at least as far as the nineteenth century. A place where we might start to look for some kind of barometric measure of the relative status of the Scots and the Irish in the comic climate of nineteenth-century Britain is Punch magazine. As L. Perry Curtis and R. F. Foster have argued, Punch's depiction of Irishness in the nineteenth century, especially after the Anglophobic radicalism of the Young Ireland movement, frequently resorted to an aggressive stereotyping in which the Irishman tended to be caricatured in bestial form. 1 There were modes of caricature that played on Irish gentility and civility, but the mode which worked its way into twentieth-century comic representation was that of the low-browed navvy, predisposed towards violence, profligacy, and stupidity. If the Irish were, as Foster argues, caricatured, prognathous jaws and all, as a Caliban to England's Prospero, the Scots resembled something more like a kind of lugubrious Ariel. Not without an implicit savagery and threat, but endowed with an enviable canniness, they were seen as more compliant than the Irish and were caricatured with a corresponding amiability. Although they might lack Ariel's mercurialism they were seen to be an alien yet biddable subordinate ally.The perceived canniness, dourness, and low cunning of the Scot were, then, in the Punch universe, occasionally allowed to shade into shrewdness, wit, and intelligence. The importance of the ambitious Scot to the imperium is tacitly acknowledged in one cartoon, in which a young Mac on the make in England is asked on his return,`And what dae ye think o' the English noo', to which he replies,`Oh, I didn't have much of a chance to study them. You see, I only had to do with the heads of departments!' The phlegmatic, sombre Scotsman also had his uses in undercutting what George Orwell would describe as`the silly ass tradition in modern English humour'. 2 In another Punch cartoon an immaculately attired flapper, golf ...

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