34028 research outputs found
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Learning ‘to Studio’: The Role of Creative Pedagogy in Delivering Future Skills and How to Make It Happen
No full textThis chapter redefines the Fine Art studio as a transferable pedagogic model for cultivating creativity and future skills across disciplines. It introduces the concept of ‘studio-ing’—a verb describing active, collaborative, and process-led learning—arguing that studio-based education fosters critical attributes such as curiosity, resilience, and co-agency, which align with global educational priorities. Drawing on research with academics and students, the authors identify five key conditions for meaningful creative learning: Time and Space, Valuing Process, Co-Learning, Quality, and Inclusion. These themes challenge neoliberal pressures that reduce education to measurable outputs, advocating instead for environments that support risk, reflection, and uncertainty. The chapter positions studio practice not as a luxury but as a vital infrastructure for interdisciplinary problem-solving and equitable access to creative futures. Ultimately, it calls for recognition of the studio as both a physical and conceptual space essential for sustaining creativity in higher education.</p
Boston Recovery Pathways Evaluation: 2025 Report
No full textEvaluation of the final year of Double Impact's Boston Recovery Pathways project, funded by the National Lottery Community Fund.</p
Time in the city: Long-term urban exposure predicts greater exploration and problem-solving in wild red foxes
No full textUrbanisation is one of the most important forms of human-driven landscape change, creating novel situations in which some species thrive. Greater likelihoods of touching, exploring, and solving novel challenges, such as exploiting unfamiliar resources, are thought to be key behavioural characteristics of urban populations compared to rural areas. However, little is known about the impact of spatiotemporal patterns of urbanisation, particularly historical patterns of change, on these behaviours. We tested this in the world’s most urbanised carnivore, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes), using novel tasks deployed at 284 sites throughout Great Britain. We compared tactile and problem-solving behaviours in rural populations, recently colonised urban populations, and long-established urban populations (>40 years). Foxes from 27.4% of locations touched the tasks, foxes from 12.4% of locations solved them. Urban foxes were more likely to touch tasks compared to rural populations. Exploration time, exploratory diversity, and latency to touch tasks did not significantly differ across urban and rural locations. Urbanisation rate from 1994 to 2020 (26 years) did not significantly predict the likelihood of foxes touching or solving tasks across locations. Older urban populations – particularly from London – spent more time exploring tasks and displayed greater exploratory diversity and higher problem-solving success, despite more recent urban populations being equally likely to touch them. Collectively, our findings suggest that certain population characteristics, such as the likelihood of touching/engaging with novelty, potentially emerge early in urbanisation while other characteristics, such as greater exploratory and innovative behaviours, may emerge after long-term urban exposure across many decades.</p
Kind Locals
No full textLocal-only surf culture is a term used to describe the practice of limiting access to certain surfing spots only to those who are members of the local surfing community. This practice is often seen in places where surfing is popular, and the spots are limited, such as in crowded urban areas or in small coastal towns.The importance of this local-only surf culture is rooted in the idea of community and a sense of ownership and stewardship over the surf spots. Many surfers feel that the experience of surfing is heightened by sharing it with like-minded individuals who are also invested in protecting the environment and the culture of the sport.However, the practice of local-only surfing has also led to conflicts between surfers who are not part of the local community and those who are. In some cases, tensions have arisen when non-locals have accessed and surfed at these secret surf locations, leading to acts of aggression or violence.In response to these conflicts, some surfers have protested against the practice of keeping secret surf locations private. They argue that these locations should be accessible to all, regardless of whether they are part of the local community. This has sparked a larger conversation about the ethics of sharing surf spots and whether they should be kept secret or made public.Ultimately, the decision to share or keep secret surf spots is a personal one, and surfers must weigh the benefits of protecting the environment and the culture of the sport against the desire to share it with a wider community. It is important to remember that everyone who surfs shares a love for the ocean and the sport and that respect and understanding are key to creating a harmonious surfing community.The kind message project is a visual approach to the social commentary. The protest boards are located and photographed in a number of key locations within the east coasts surf scene.</p
Race on Screen
No full textThis book examines how audience ‘wants’ were envisioned in the twentieth century in relation to race on film and television by a range of interested parties, including film producers, television executives, scriptwriters and researchers in the nascent field of ‘audience research.’ It details how British audiences were repeatedly imagined as racially innocent by these parties, even as they were offered highly racialized content on screen and even as emergent fields like audience research were uncovering consistent evidence of racial prejudice among viewers. It further examines how Black and south Asian audiences worked to counter the dominant narratives of race on screen by claiming their own roles as overlooked audiences and authoring alternative notions of success in twentieth century Britain. </p
‘Perhaps only Children’s Corners’: spaces for children in British museums from c. 1900 to 1939
No full textThis article examines the brief flowering of spaces for children in British museums in the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that managing museum space for both adults and children became an important issue for curators, merging with and to an extent replacing nineteenth-century concerns with managing space to accommodate different class groups. It investigates the children’s galleries, ‘corners’ and museums which emerged between 1900 and 1950, comparing them with fuller provision in the US. In the UK, children’s museum spaces were constrained by lack of space, expertise and money, and a concern not to make the museum childish; and by an association of children’s provisions with slum areas and women experts. Curators were unsure how far to adopt a child-focused approach, or for which age groups they should provide. For a few commentators, children’s presence was seen as incompatible with adult use of museums, to the point where they should be totally barred. Thus, children’s spaces were partly a way of separating children and adults in museums, and reinforced a sense of difference between adult and child visitors.Most children’s spaces disappeared after the Second World War, as slums and unaccompanied child visitors declined, and a focus on more ‘professional’ curating emerged. Fewer children seem to have visited, a trend accelerated by the wider context of familial and leisure change. The development of more engaging display for all, not just children, served to narrow the apparent intellectual gulf between adult and child.</p
Bandwidth characteristics optimisation and matching for surface texture measurement of ultra-precision diamond turned structured surfaces
No full textUltra-precision diamond turning facilitates flexible fabrication of functional structured surfaces with nanometric surface texture. However, due to its complex multi-scale generation mechanism, optimisation and matching of bandwidth characteristics are still challenging for surface texture measurement. In this work, simulation analysis of single-/dual-scale sine waves was first designed to reveal and optimise bandwidth characteristics for surface texture measurement. Next, the cumulative power spectral density (CPSD) scale threshold method at 90% was proposed for bandwidth matching. Next, a series of ultra-precision machining experiments were conducted on end-face turning of polycrystalline aluminium and oxygen-free copper, as well as slow-tool-servo turning of multi-scale micro-structured surfaces. Finally, ultra-precision surface measurements at various bandwidths were carried out with two different white-light interferometers (WLIs). Surface texture characterisation was performed by height parameters (Sq and Sz) according to ISO 25178-2. The results indicated that the experiments were consistent with the simulations for optimising the bandwidth characteristics of surface texture measurement. In addition, bandwidth characteristics matching for multi-scale micro-structured surfaces verified the proposed CPSD scale threshold method. Under the scale limitation by zero-order Gaussian regression filter, the relative deviations of scale and surface texture parameters were less than 5% and 6%, respectively, for the two WLIs used in this work. From the perspective of surface texture metrology, this work provides guidance on bandwidth characteristics optimisation and matching for ultra-precision diamond turning.</p
Physically Realistic Digital Replica of Strawberry Plants for Robotic Harvesting
No full textIn agricultural robotics, creating realistic simulation environments is essential for developing and testing computer vision and control algorithms used in tasks like fruit detection, localisation, and harvesting. However, most existing digital plant models are designed only for visual purposes and lack the physical properties needed to simulate realistic robot–plant interactions. This limitation is particularly significant for strawberry harvesting, as these plants have complex, flexible structures that are prone to damage, which directly affects the success of automated picking. To address this gap, we introduce a methodology for generating physically accurate, harvestable, randomised strawberry plant models compatible with the common robotic simulator Gazebo Classic and Open Dynamic Engine (ODE), the high-performance library for simulating rigid body dynamics, within the ROS2 framework. The proposed models simulate dynamic behaviour using a simplified Euler–Bernoulli beam formulation, which approximates plant bending and vibration. These models are discretised into a simulation-ready format, with each plant segment represented as a rigid body, where joint properties define stiffness and damping. Our pipeline enables users to generate randomised yet biologically plausible strawberry plants, incorporating variations in leaf count, stem branching, fruit positioning, and biomechanical characteristics. According to our findings, the fracture plug-in accurately reproduced fruit detachment once normal and shear stress thresholds were reached, while stiffness validation tests yielded mean deflection errors of 32−40%, confirming the model’s reliability for robotic harvesting simulations.</p
Psychological correlates of motivation and burnout in adult exercisers: Gender differences in the role of body appreciation, appearance-contingent self-esteem, and social perfectionism
No full textWhilst exercise is a healthy endeavour, struggles with body image appear increasingly common amongst exercisers, being potentially intensified by perfectionistic body ideals portrayed online. Exercisers who negatively evaluate their body may be at greater risk of experiencing burnout, yet few studies have directly explored exercise burnout. The present study investigated whether body appreciation, appearance-contingent self-esteem (APP-CSE), and social perfectionism may be differentially related with exercise-related motivations and burnout. A total of 791 adult exercisers from the United Kingdom (women, n =538; men, n = 253) completed self-report measures. Separating women and men, a multi-group structural equation model revealed that, for both genders, body appreciation was associated with autonomous exercise motivations and negatively associated with burnout. APP-CSE was positively related to both autonomous and controlled motivations for both genders, however, only related to higher burnout in men. Conversely, social perfectionism was associated with controlled exercise motivations for both genders but only corresponded with higher burnout in women. The findings highlight the value of body appreciation as a protective factor against exercise burnout. For women, exercise burnout may be uniquely related to external perfectionistic expectations, whereas self-esteem being tied to appearance seemed linked with men’s exercise burnout. Such evidence may hold practical value by informing targeted interventions to promote sustainable exercise engagement and reduce exercise burnout. </p
Affirmative action in recruitment decisions: do penalties mitigate recruitment bias?
No full textThis paper presents a laboratory experiment modelled on recruitment decisions of firms, incorporating gender and productivity as variables. The primary objective of this study is to investigate whether affirmative action policies contribute to an increase in the representation of women in higher-level positions and to analyse the impact of these policies on team productivity. Furthermore, we have designed the experiment to compare binding and non-binding affirmative action policies to ascertain their relative effectiveness in addressing recruitment bias. The findings indicate that, although both male and female team leaders demonstrate bias against female candidates, the implementation of a monetary penalty is the most effective strategy for mitigating gender bias among team leaders. Additionally, the results suggest that affirmative action policies do not have a detrimental effect on team productivity.</p