159370 research outputs found
Sort by
‘This modern Cinderella’: railway queens, mass media, and British civic culture, 1925–75
Get PDFBetween 1925 and 1975, the British railway industry elected beauty queens from the daughters of employees. Focusing upon the Railway Queens, this article will reveal the importance of beauty queens as ‘civic celebrities’, a novel role for public figures that emerged between the wars and helped to sustain a vibrant civic culture across the early to mid-twentieth century. It combined the traditional ceremonial function of ‘civic’ representative with the modern consumerist ethos of media ‘celebrity’. Despite the gendered constraints of such competitions, this article posits that serving as a beauty queen enabled young working-class women to become legitimate representatives of various civic communities for the first time, whilst also enabling participation in the media’s image-making of glamorous, consumerist femininities. As such, the role rendered civic and consumer cultures more inclusive and increasingly inextricable. This article further suggests that civic celebrities altered how communities were represented to themselves within British civic culture. If elites continued to represent hierarchical communities of authority and deference, then from the 1920s onwards, civic celebrities such as beauty queens began to represent relatively democratic communities of non-partisan inclusivity and consumer aspiration
Estimating the impact of new rail station openings on through-passenger demand: A difference-in-differences approach
No full textWhen a new rail station is built on an existing line, it causes an increase in in-vehicle time – typically, between 2 and 4 min – for all existing trips that now stop at the new station. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate the impacts of these small time penalties on through-passenger demand. Cost-benefit appraisals of new stations in the UK have proven highly sensitive to the forecasts of through-passenger demand reductions. We conduct an ex-post analysis of the effect of a new station on through-passenger demand using a Difference-in-Differences approach. We fail to find a statistically significant impact of the station opening on through-passenger demand. If there are such demand impacts, our findings suggest that these are smaller in magnitude than the standard forecasting approach implies. More research is recommended to corroborate and generalise the findings to other contexts, as these have important implications for the planning and appraisal of new stations
A survey of musical chills experiences while performing music
Get PDFMusical chills, a subjective emotional experience associated with goosebumps, shivers, and/or tingling sensations, have recently been linked to experiences of social bonding. Thus, there is some rationale for expecting music performance to afford chills, as performance can involve strong emotional responses and social bonding experiences. However, almost all musical chills research focuses on listening contexts. This study explores experiences of musical chills while performing music. Data for the study were collected through a questionnaire survey with 218 musicians about their chills experiences. Results show that chills are experienced by musicians during performance and that they are largely positive experiences. Important factors for chills in performance include various musical features, performance qualities, interpersonal connections between performers, and personal associations with the music and performance context. Findings align with links between chills and social bonding, although further research is required to understand underlying psychological mechanisms of the phenomenon. Finally, various characteristics of chills in music performance suggest that the experience may be linked to psychological wellbeing, posing a novel route for continued research
First measurement of the electron-neutrino charged-current pion production cross section on carbon with the T2K near detector
Get PDFParticipatory Q: A Collaborative Approach to Q-Methodology
Get PDFParticipatory research continues to attract attention across academia, civil society, policymaking, and research funding landscapes. Yet Q methodology has not fully explored the full potential of participatory practice, despite its well-recognised democratic characteristics. In this article, we introduce ‘Participatory Q’, a co-productive reimagining of Q methodology, offered not as a prescriptive roadmap for a perfectly participatory approach (if such a thing were even possible), but as a research orientation that challenges researchers to work more collaboratively and reflexively. We propose Participatory Q as both a methodological and epistemological intervention, one that aims to de-centre dominant knowledge systems rooted in the colonial legacy of the Academy, and to foreground pluralistic, community-informed ways of knowing. Drawing on the Queering Shelter project - which explored the meanings of ‘shelter’, ‘safe space’, and ‘home’ among LGBTQ + communities in England, UK - we describe how participatory principles were integrated across all stages of the Q methodology process: from study design and concourse development to analysis and output creation. The aim for this article is to serve as a useful starting point on which others can build, in order to advance Q methodology practice in ways that are not only participatory in technique but also disruptive of epistemic hierarchies
Community perspectives on the built environment, community stress, and the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases in Accra, Ghana
Get PDFBackground: The growing burden of diabetes and other non-communicable diseases in Africa demands greater understanding of the contextual drivers of risk factors, including the built environment. Cognitive Mapping (CM) is a participatory research approach that allows community members to visualise their environmental context through drawing. The maps express in visual form the situated knowledge of the environment from local perceptions of daily experiences. This study combines Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques and qualitative research methods to explore community perspectives on the environmental risk factors of diabetes and other cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) in a poor urban community in Accra, Ghana. Methods: Five Cognitive Map Focus Group Discussions (CM-FGDs) and four regular Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) were conducted with a total of 43 participants in Ga Mashie (Accra) in November and December 2022. Participants (25 women and 18 men) had lived in the study communities for over ten years. Community members were given paper and a pencil for the CM sessions to draw their environment. GIS maps supplemented the community drawings. We adopted geo-ethnography, a technique that combines GIS and qualitative analytical methods. The GIS was used to recreate aspects of the physical environment discussed by study participants. The FGDs were analysed thematically. Results: Participants recognised the physical and social attributes of their daily environment and how these attributes influence the risk of CVDs. Excessive heat and hazardous noise from overcrowded spaces emerged as key health risks. The social environment was equally important – participants often linked the high concentration of bars, spaces for social interaction and several social engagements at weekends to excessive consumption of alcohol and unhealthy food. Community members reported that social behaviour and diet associated with their environments were gradually deteriorating, and these accounted for observed changes in patterns of diabetes and related CVDs. Specifically, community members attributed the causes of hypertension and heart disease to hazardous noise and psychological distress associated with the built environment. In contrast, diabetes was generally attributed to the social environment. Conclusion: Cognitive maps allowed community members to participate in research and link the risk of diabetes and CVDs to their changing environment. Built environment interventions should empower communities to make large-scale behavioural modifications to improve the prevention and control of diabetes and CVDs within their community
Synthesis and depolymerization studies of biohybrid polycarbonates derived from terpenes
Get PDFWe here report the catalytic ring-opening copolymerization of 2-menthene oxide (MO), a terpene-based monomer derived from l-menthol, and CO2 to provide poly(menthene carbonate), PMC, with a maximum molecular weight (Mn) of 10.2 kg mol−1. The terpene monomer MO can also be combined with both limonene oxide (LO) and CO2 in a formal terpolymerization process providing, depending on the monomer feed ratio, different types of biohybrid polycarbonates (PLMC) with different degrees of functionality. These terpolymerizations could be extended to the use of an acyclic terpene oxide and either MO/CO2 or LO/CO2, and a previously reported xylose-derived bicyclic oxetane. A selection of MO/LO based biohybrid PLMCs were conveniently depolymerized under TBD catalysis to regenerate the original mixture (>95%) of terpene oxides thereby providing a suitable starting point for the circular use of these biohybrid macromolecules
An innovative ‘sorption-egg-hanced’ reforming approach to producing highly pure green hydrogen from biomass-derived aqueous effluents
Get PDFThe hydrothermal treatment of biomass forms large quantities of chemical-rich aqueous effluents. In the context of a zero-waste biorefinery, the latter represents a valuable resource for recovery and/or further functionalisation. This work reports for the first time the production of H2 with in-situ CO2 capture from the aqueous fraction of hydrothermally-processed almond hulls using a Ni-based catalyst coupled with a calcium-based sorbent derived from calcined eggshells. The effect of the reforming temperature and relative amounts of catalyst and sorbent (CaO) have been evaluated using a continuous reforming unit. The reaction temperature and the relative amount of catalyst directed the overall product distribution, with high temperatures favoured gas formation, and the catalyst allowed for lower temperatures to be used. Additionally, the temperature and the relative amount of sorbent significantly impacted the gas composition, with H2 enrichment as the latter (calcined eggshells) increased. Process optimisation revealed that a gas with a highly high H2 content (>95 vol%) can be obtained at 500 °C with relative amounts of catalyst and sorbent of 9 g catalyst min/g organics and 70 g CaO min/g organics, respectively. Such conditions allowed for capturing up to 90 % of the CO2, which resulted in a very high H2 production (0.12 g H2/g organics, i.e., the stoichiometric value). This represents a step ahead for developing greener processes and opens the door to exploring novel avenues for process intensification, avoiding further downstream processes to ensure holistic, zero-waste biorefineries
Managing Gender Equity and Equality across Borders – A Review and Introduction to the Special Issue
Get PDFAchieving gender equality remains a global challenge. To foster change, many organizations and multinational enterprises implement gender diversity management, defined as human resource practices aimed at improving gender equity and equality at work. Even though institutional context has been highlighted as a relevant factor driving or inhibiting success of gender diversity management only little is known about how to successfully contextualise gender diversity management and how to implement it effectively across country contexts. Against this backdrop, our Special Issue aims to provide novel theoretical insights, empirical findings, and evidence-based recommendations on how organizations can effectively tackle the challenges arising from managing gender equity and equality in and across different country contexts. In this editorial, we provide an overview on the existing literature and introduce the papers included in the Special Issue. Building on this literature, we propose future research directions how to move the field forward
Data sources:
Access Repository Dashboard
Do you manage Open Research Online? Become a CORE Member to access insider analytics, issue reports and manage access to outputs from your repository in the CORE Repository Dashboard! 👇