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Odd One Out: the European Union-United Kingdom Trade and Cooperation Agreement
No full textLet us reach for a wide-angle lens and employ it to look at a plethora of agreements concluded by the European Union with its neighbouring countries and states (or groups of states) afar. The picture is full of perfectly rounded dots of different sizes and colours. Some agreements are of holistic nature; others are more on the sectoral side of the equation. We have a patchwork quilt of exclusive competence and mixed agreements with varied levels of ambition behind them. Notwithstanding the differences, they all have a common meta-aim: to create platforms for deeper cooperation between the parties. In other words, to move things forward. But then, on a closer inspection, there is a handful of equally colourful but much less rounded dots. Squares, perhaps? A quick glimpse through a telescope will confirm this preliminary finding. We do, indeed, have a few odd ones out – nicely shaped squares but surely not dots. Swapping the telescope for a microscope will quickly reveal that one of them is the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Looked at out of the context it may seem to be, prima facie, rather standard. A reasonably fat beast it is, both in terms of its substance and the number of pages it fills. And yet, things are way more nuanced. To begin with, the EU-UK TCA was negotiated in a peculiar political climate and under serious time constraints. It’s legal character of an association agreement is nicely disguised as if the words “association with the European Union” were a poisoned chalice. But, above all, its main aim is to provide a legal framework for managed downgrade of bilateral relations between the European Union and the United Kingdom. It is aimed to navigate a journey backwards and against strong currents. Furthermore, numerous locks and caveats, primarily resulting from the EU’s lack of trust in the UK following the acrimonious Brexit, make the arrangements potentially quite vulnerable.
All these idiosyncrasies, which make the EU-UK TCA stand out, are analysed in this chapter. The exegesis commences with the specificities of negotiations of the EU-UK (section 2). This paves the way to section 3, which provides an insight into the legal character of the Agreement in question. The idiosyncratic aims of the EU-UK TCA are analysed in turn (section 4). A wide variety of caveats and locks spread throughout the Agreement come next in section 5. The post-Brexit EU-UK institutional framework is presented in section 6. Section 7 offers conclusions
Transcriptome-driven Health-status Transversal-predictor Analysis for health, food, microbiome and disease markers for understanding of lifestyle diseases
No full textWe developed a novel artificial intelligence (AI) approach based on machine-learning to predict general health and food-intake parameters. This approach, named Transcriptome-driven Health-status Transversal-predictor Analysis (THTA) is relevant for markers of diabesity and is based on a non-transcriptomic, mathematics-driven approach. The prediction was based on values derived from food consumption, dietary lipids and their bioactive metabolites, peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) mRNA-based transcriptome signatures, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), energy metabolism measurements, microbiome analyses, and baseline clinical parameters, as determined in a cohort of 72 subjects. Our novel machine learning approach incorporated transcriptome data from PBMCs as a “one-method” approach to predict 77 general health-status markers for the broad stratification of the diabesity phenotype. These markers would usually necessitate measurements using 16 different methods. The PBMC transcriptome was used to determine these 77 basic and background health markers with very high accuracy in a transversal-predictor establishment group (Pearson correlations are r = 0.98 ranging from 0.94 to 0.99). These collected variables provide valuable insides into which individual factor(s) are mainly target diabesity. Based on the “establishment group” prediction approach a further “confirmation group” prediction approach was performed, achieving a predictive potential r = 0.59 (ranging from 0.19 to 0.98) for these 77 variables. This “one-method” approach enables the simultaneous monitoring of a large number of health-status variables relevant to diabesity and may facilitate the monitoring of therapeutic and preventive strategies. In summary, this novel technique, which is based on PBMC transcriptomics from human blood, can predict a wide range of health-related markers
Not Just Bona Rags: Rethinking Menswear and Collecting through Vince Man’s Shop
No full textOver the past eight years, the Westminster Menswear Archive (WMA) has collected garments from Vince Man’s Shop, a Soho boutique founded in 1954 by physique photographer Bill Green, which specialised in casual and leisurewear for men. While menswear historians have long acknowledged Vince’s influence on post-war British fashion, very little survives in institutional collections. To date, we have identified around 20 extant garments, ten of which are now held by the WMA. This paper outlines the challenges of locating and interpreting these pieces and argues that the process of collecting and analysing material culture allows us to move beyond recycled anecdote. Vince is often described as a niche ‘gay boutique’ known for flamboyant design. However, our research suggests it employed a more complex strategy, what we term sartorial passing. While catalogues used homoerotic language and photography, the garments themselves remained plausible within conventional menswear. This dual coding allowed Vince to signal queerness to those attuned, while appearing fashionable to others. Like the use of the Polari, the coded form of slang used by gay men in 1950s Britain, Vince’s garments functioned through plausible deniability: present, legible, yet deniable within mainstream society
Digital illusions, political delusions: Israel’s Hasbara propaganda revisited in a time of genocide
No full textDebates about digital technologies absorbing old political conflicts have intensified in recent years. In an ebb and flow between optimistic promise and pessimistic anxiety, discussions regarding the transformative abilities of technology include cyber warfare; digital activism during the 2011 Arab uprisings and the Black Lives Matter movement; the impact of ‘fake news’ on elections; and more recently the domination of Artificial Intelligence. This article discusses Hasbara, a mixture of propaganda and diplomacy that operates mostly through digital media. I offer a longitudinal and return to earlier analyses and assertions. On the surface, the professionalisation of Hasbara was completed with Israel’s formation of an informal Ministry of Hasbara that expanded under the influence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and additional investment in a social media strategy. The evolution of Hasbara has nurtured discontent regarding Palestine and consent for Israel. Yet this has deformed into a major paradox where Israel is executing a military war and actively influencing opinions through racism and violence, and simultaneously highlights Western complicity with settler colonialism through regional alignment with (Western) imperialism. Digital infrastructures afford an ecology in which genocide cannot be hidden away: with every publicly live-streamed urban bombing and assassination, its moral neglect is laid bare
Street space reallocation under austerity: the case of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in the UK
No full textStreet space reallocation measures, such as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), have attracted substantial controversy in the UK and elsewhere, for instance around reported poor engagement with residents and local actors. However, limited attention has been given to the political-economic context shaping scheme implementation, such as the impacts of reduced resources or the use of short-term, contingent funding. Based on 37 interviews with officers and councillors who implemented or sought to implement LTNs in 12 English local authorities, and part of a larger project investigating the impacts of LTNs in London, this paper addresses the gap. It shows how challenges to design, engagement and delivery are often linked to funding scarcity and processes of projectification, advancing the literature on transport governance and controversy
The Tremulous Hand Lifting Spirits: Contending Tongsu and Vulgarisation in Yearnings
No full textthe landmark television drama Yearnings (Kewang 渴望, 1990). As the first widely popular series of the postsocialist era, Yearnings became a flashpoint in debates over tongsuhua (popularisation), with state authorities promoting it as xiwenlejian—“pleasurable to hear and enjoyable to watch”—while cultural elites condemned it as disu (vulgar) and ideologically suspect. Drawing on the phrase “the tremulous hand lifting spirits,” this chapter explores how censorship operated not merely through prohibition but via affective orchestration and political rehabilitation. Elevated within the Anti-Pornography Campaign as a morally upright tongsu work, Yearnings was positioned as a remedy for “yellow” culture. Mapping the discourse on tongsuhua, this chapter shows how Yearnings and other commercially successful dramas became sites for negotiating new aesthetic and ideological norms. In the aftermath of Tiananmen, tongsu emerged as a criterion for exemplary television—emotionally resonant yet ideologically disciplined. If censorship is justified by fears over social instability, then the state’s enthusiastic endorsement of Yearnings despite its mass fervour calls into question the regime’s strategic willingness to permit, and even harness, forms of collective fanatic excess
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Youth: Disciplining Foreign Influences in Garrison's Gorillas
No full textThis chapter examines the censorship and social discourse surrounding the American television series Garrison’s Gorillas in early reform-era China. Despite its popularity following its 1980 broadcast, the series was abruptly pulled after 16 episodes, amid official claims that it incited youth violence. Through a close reading of how Gorillas was blamed for criminality, and how audiences transgressed by viewing it in socially undesirable spaces such as video halls, this chapter demonstrates how censorship operates productively by generating categories of risk in society: impressionable youth and low-suzhi viewers. These concerns fed into broader disciplinary campaigns, in which foreign media were scapegoated for systemic problems such as youth unemployment and inequality. Against Mao’s iconic praise of youth as “like the sun at eight or nine in the morning,” the series’ alternative portrayals of leadership and heroism rendered youth a potential threat to order. By analysing the intersections of fears surrounding susceptible audiences and the performativity of campaigns to instil social order, this chapter reveals how worrying about “big bad youth” underpinned broader anxieties over post-Cultural Revolution rehabilitation and the ideological limits of reform
Sensing Chennai from the Air with Barad
No full textThis paper offers a relational strategy for approaching the urban as elemental, focusing on the airs of Chennai in south India. It contributes to the field of elemental urbanism, which is concerned with how earthly forces pervade and come to matter in and shape contemporary cities. It approaches these questions through a performative, Baradian methodology, whose analytical starting point is the author’s immersion in Chennai’s airs, from which what unfolds is then traced. After reviewing recent literature on the elemental and the atmospheric, the paper is divided into four sections that correspond with the aerial phenomena the author encountered in Chennai - breezes, cyclones, waves, and particulates. The paper incorporates two modes of writing – one embodied and intimate, the other historical and analytical. They link the personal to the political and are meant to be read diffractively through one another, to engender new insights and understandings of the relations between the two. The paper concludes by revisiting Barad’s methodology, drawing out its ethical implications and suggesting an avenue for future elemental urban research
