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‘Una desenfrenada danza irlandesa’:Brendan Behan’s <i>The Hostage</i> in Spain
No full textDrawing on Irish and Spanish theatre scholarship, translation studies and the censorship files held at the Archivo General de la Administración in Alcalá de Henares, this article considers the case of Irish writer Brendan Behan and the staging of his play The Hostage/El rehén by various independent theatre groups in Spain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were attracted to Behan because of his subversive themes and his notoriety as a working-class militant republican. The reception of his work by critics and authorities, however, was not always as harsh as might be expected. This case study, though focused on a single play and author, contributes to our understanding of the place of foreign drama in the history of Spanish political theatre
Old and new censorship in contemporary Spanish theatre
No full textThis chapter focuses on three aspects. Firstly, the longevity of dictatorship-era censorship in Spanish society and the persistent hold of old orthodoxies; secondly, the way a previously silenced past is remembered through contemporary performance; and, thirdly, the continuing existence of cultural control in the present. Although the Franco regime ended in the 1970s, its legacy lives on in the cultural sphere and the chapter looks at how old orthodoxies retain a hold on dramatists, practitioners and the public. It also considers how the legacy of past censorship interacts with current debates about cultural and historical memory. As Spain continues to experience an often-painful reckoning with its past, the theatre is once again a site of collective exploration, contestation, and hope. This chapter shows how versions of history that the Franco regime sought to censor are being reimagined and enacted on the contemporary stage. Finally, and whilst understanding censorship to operate on a continuum and as a practice that always exists in society and culture in some form, the chapter briefly considers the presence of new forms of censorship in the Spanish theatre and the difficulty this poses for contemporary practitioners wishing to bring innovative and provocative theatre to the stage. <br/
Kant and the Supposed Right of Necessity
No full textA study of Kant's rejection of the 'right' of necessity to kill innocent people in emergency situations (as proposed by the natural law tradition) and his curious argument that the murderer, though guilty, should yet go unpunished
More to the picture than meets the eye:ecocinema, landscape, and James Benning's Deseret
No full textA central conceit of theories of ecocinema is that moving-image works can provide immersive experiences of place that cultivate more ecologically attuned forms of life. It has recently been argued, however, that such experience also tends to prompt viewers to master the places viewed by ascribing specific meaning and value to them. This perspective is tied to the persistent assertion that landscape is inherently ideological in ways that confound attempts to use it to model care for the natural world and critique ecologically destructive activities. Against this position, this article argues that work at the intersection of ecocinema and the landscape film can maintain a commitment to providing an instructive experience of place while also making space for 15 viewers to reflect on encultured responses to landscape and human histories that have shaped and defined the places pictured. It also cautions against making overly broad claims about landscape’s embodiment of utilitarian vision, while affirming the need to situate ecocinema and the landscape film within a lineage of visual culture beyond the moving image. These arguments are 20 pursued through a case study of James Benning’s Deseret (1995), which is situated against the history of landscape photography in the American West
Israel, as hurt-geography
No full textIn this autobiographical narrative, Nigel Rapport recounts how his time as a volunteer at Kibbutz Yas'ur in Israel in 1975 profoundly affected his identity and sparked a deep emotional connection to the country. Despite initial reluctance to visit Israel and engage with his Jewish heritage, Rapport's experiences living and working on the kibbutz - including labouring in the citrus groves, bonding with the kibbutz youth and being embraced by the community - instilled in him a strong sense of belonging, pride, and loyalty to Israel. The essay conveys Rapport's newfound understanding of the precariousness and preciousness of life in Israel, constantly under threat of war and violence. It also expresses his anxiety and protective concern for the country's survival against what he perceives as the hatred and prejudice of its enemies. Rapport's connection to Israel is further cemented by the normalcy of Jewish life there, a stark contrast to the marginalization he felt growing up in Britain. The recent Hamas attacks in 2023, with their devastating loss of life, underscore the enduring ‘hurt geography’ of Rapport's relationship with Israel. The essay ultimately presents a highly personal account of the author's transformative encounter with Israel and Zionism and the complex emotions and loyalties it engendered
Generation of iterated wreath products constructed from alternating, symmetric and cyclic groups
No full textLet G1, G2, … be a sequence of groups each of which is either an alternating group, a symmetric group or a cyclic group. Let us construct a sequence (Wi) of wreath products via W1 = G1 and, for each i ≥ 1, Wi+1 = Gi+1 wr Wi via the natural permutation action. We determine the minimum number d(Wi) of generators required for each wreath product in this sequence
Mosaic: composite projection pruning for resource-efficient LLMs
No full textExtensive compute and memory requirements limit the deployment of large language models (LLMs) on any hardware. Compression methods, such as pruning, can reduce model size, which in turn reduces resource requirements. State-of-the-art pruning is based on coarse-grained methods. They are time-consuming and inherently remove critical model parameters, adversely impacting the quality of the pruned model. This paper introduces projection pruning, a novel fine-grained method for pruning LLMs. In addition, LLM projection pruning is enhanced by a new approach we refer to as composite projection pruning — the synergistic combination of unstructured pruning that retains accuracy and structured pruning that reduces model size. We develop Mosaic, a novel system to create and deploy pruned LLMs using composite projection pruning. Mosaic is evaluated using a range of performance and quality metrics on multiple hardware platforms, LLMs, and datasets. Mosaic is 7.19 faster in producing models than existing approaches. Mosaic models achieve up to 84.2% lower perplexity and 31.4% higher accuracy than models obtained from coarse-grained pruning. Up to 67% faster inference and 68% lower GPU memory use is noted for Mosaic models
A woman's work:women soldiers, masculinities and binary panic in documentaries of the East German army
No full textThe East German National People's Army employed women in uniformed and civilian roles from its inception, yet in its self-presentation it strongly associated military service with masculinity and cis male bodies. Documentaries and newsreels from the military's own Army Film Studio, the DEFA documentary 'Gabi - Switchboard Position 12' (Uwe Belz, 1985) and the amateur film 'Trying and Prevailing' (Dietmar Schürtz, 1988) provide insights into women's negotiations of gender in the East German armed forces. Army Film Studio productions position women's military jobs as work like any other. To avoid disrupting the link between the military, masculinities and cis male bodies, though, these films overemphasise and stereotype women's femininity to minimise unsettling effects on military masculinities. These documentaries and newsreels constantly foreground and reinforce binary gender in ways that reveal it to be under pressure: I call these reactions to women's presence in uniform a form of 'binary panic'. Both 'Gabi' and 'Trying and Prevailing', by contrast, make space for women soldiers' own words and show how their presence in military training influenced their male comrades. The films show the work that goes into reinforcing binary gender and demonstrate how women embodied military masculinities and forced cis male comrades to reflect on what masculinity meant to them and to the army
Two years in the making:co-learning insights from the CSEAR’s Education Community of Practice
No full textAs the imperative to address unsustainability grows, higher education institutions, individual academics, scholarly networks, and professional bodies are calling for sustainability to be (more prominently) embedded in curricula. Over the past 30 years, a strong body of work has been published related to social and environmental accounting education such as textbooks, academic articles, and teaching cases. Yet, the individual and collective endeavours scholars undertake to develop and embed social and environmental accounting education within their respective institutional contexts often remain invisible. Insights may be gleaned thanks to corridor conversations, informal networks, one-off workshops, or panel discussions. To further strengthen capacity to undertake such education, a community of practice approach might help connecting individuals and sharing experiences. This commentary outlines the aims of the CSEAR Education of Community of Practice, the process of establishing and running this community, and offers preliminary reflections following the first two years of its existence. Finally, we consider the next steps in the development of this initiative as means to enhance collective efforts to mobilize social and environmental accounting education to enable a more sustainable society.</p