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Imagining—and (Re)Imaging—peace through art education
No full textThis editorial is not available on ChesterRep.Editorial for the Special Issue PEACE—inspired by the iJADE conference of the same title held in 2024 at Liverpool Hope University
Art education and peace: Exploring the empathetic object-ive
Full text link© 2026 The Author(s). International Journal of Art & Design Education published by National Society for Education in Art and Design and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.This collaborative paper explores and exemplifies the notion of the empathetic object-ive as a vehicle for art educators to examine the possibilities for their involvement in peace education. Informed by the work of Johan Galtung, the paper begins with an explanation of the origins of a process for working the empathetic object-ive where polarities are recognised and renegotiated via processes of making. This introduction precedes five contributions that each explore their choice of empathetic object, situating their discussion within their personal, pedagogical and artistic experiences. The paper offers a range of narratives that explain the relevance of empathy and the potential usefulness of empathetic objects as concrete, transportable and relatable artefacts that offer possibilities for art educators in the context of the seemingly intractable challenge of working for peace.unfunde
Exploring suicide potential and the actualising tendency: A qualitative study of suicide notes
Full text link© 2026 The Author(s). Counselling and Psychotherapy Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.Background: This article using suicide notes to explore the reasons individuals gave to end their life, and the links between suicide and the actualising tendency (AT). Suicide remains one of the most complex and challenging presentations in the mental health field. While much research has focused on risk factors, protective factors, and epidemiological trends, relatively less attention has been paid to first-person accounts of suicidal experience. The AT, defined by Rogers (1951) as the inherent drive within all living organisms to develop, grow, and realise their full potential, provides a provocative lens through which to explore the paradox of suicidal behaviour.
Method and Findings: Using stanza and narrative analysis, 31 suicide notes were analysed which identified the reasons individuals provided for ending their life. Notes were also analysed in relation to propositions of the actualising tendency. Four predominate narratives were identified: ‘Can’t live with’, ‘Can’t live without’, ‘The other’, and ‘No other’. In addition, it was concluded that four notes indicated that suicide was an expression of the actualising tendency.
Conclusion: This research sheds light on the complex, and sometimes contradictory, nature of the AT. It shows that behaviours that appear harmful on the surface may, in fact, be driven by a deep, often unconscious, need to protect the self from greater perceived harm.unfunde
Evaluating the Pro-Environmental Strategies of Ethnic Minority Retail SMEs
Full text linkThis author accepted manuscript is deposited under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) licence. This means that anyone may distribute, adapt, and build upon the work for non-commercial purposes, subject to full attribution. If you wish to use this manuscript for commercial purposes, please contact [email protected]: Despite increasing pressure to adopt pro-environmental behaviour (PEB), limited research acknowledges the sustainability efforts of ethnic minority retail small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This is despite forming over half of all UK SMEs. Consequently, this research aims to advance our understanding of, how and to what extent, commercial gains (CG) (i.e. profit) and social embeddedness (SE) (i.e. people) impact ethnic minority retail SME’s decisions to adopt pro-environmental behaviours (i.e. planet).
Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on the theoretical lens of the value-beliefs-norm theory, this research uses survey data from 352 owner-managers. The hypothesised model is tested in a structural equation model (SEM) using maximum likelihood estimation.
Findings: Our results indicate that SE and CG have a positive direct impact on PEB. However, in contrast to previous studies, results reveal an insignificant indirect relationship between CG and values. Similar to previous studies, our results confirm that values influence PEB indirectly and directly through general beliefs to activate personal norms (PN) to predict PEB.
Original Value: This research provides a nuanced insight into the under-researched, PEB of ethnic minority retail SMEs. By incorporating SE and CG as two important antecedent constructs, we reveal that profit objectives are prioritised over both people and planet. Subsequently, we envisage that voluntary opt-in, net-zero policies towards environmental targets are unlikely to be adopted at the pace necessary to meet either industry or policy targets by 2040 and 2050, respectively.
Practical/theoretical implication: Theoretical and practical implications are discussed to assist retail owner/managers and policy makers
The modified fighting hypothesis of handedness: Evidence from sharp force injuries and further considerations
Full text link© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.The modified fighting hypothesis (MFH) proposes that most humans are right-handed because it conveyed an advantage during intraspecific fights with sharp weapons, due to the leftward location of the heart and aorta. An examination of the literature on sharp force injury showed that the thoracic region is penetrated more than any other region, and the left thorax is penetrated approximately 2.4 times more often than the right thorax. Handedness influenced the side of the thorax targeted, with most right-handers penetrating the left thorax in front of their right hand. As two thirds of the heart is in the left thorax, right-handers appear more likely to injure the heart and other vital structures, increasing their lethality when using a sharp weapon. This difference in lethality may have resulted in a survival advantage for right-handers. We discuss the possibility that increased use of sharp weapons in hominins caused evolutionary changes in anatomical traits, reducing sexual dimorphism and increasing population-level right lateralization. Similarities in lateralized fighting in humans and non-human species are considered and related to the MFH
Pollen Protein Content and Developmental Success of the Solitary Bee Osmia bicornis: Amino Acid Thresholds for Larval Pollen Resources?
Full text linkPerformance of Osmia bicornis larvae fed on six diets with different pollen species composition (one wild collected by foraging adults), each with known levels of nine essential amino acids (EAA; leucine, lysine, valine, arginine, isoleucine, phenylalanine, threonine, histidine, methionine), was investigated. Four of the pollen diets consisted of individual pollen species and two were mixtures of either four or five species (including one naturally foraged by adult O. bicornis). The diets fell into four statistically distinct groups with different EAA contents (ranked from Group I (highest EAA) to Group IV (lowest EAA; pine pollen). The highest larval survival rate was recorded with the wild-foraged diet (Group III) with no survival in Group IV. Similar survival occurred for all other diets. Where larvae survived (Group I–III), there was no effect of diet on the time to commencement of larval stages, cocoon completion or larval development time (egg hatch to pupation), or on pupal weight. The findings provide corroborative evidence of the existence of amino acid thresholds for larval success, but the need for further work is discussed in relation to their multidimensional nutritional requirements and variation of the nutritional content of pollen.Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) CASE Awar
Flags and frontiers: Linear monuments research in 2025
Full text linkProviding context and introduction to this seventh volume of the Offa’s Dyke Journal (ODJ), this article
reviews the contents as well as select recent related research published elsewhere on linear monuments. The
introduction also reviews the Offa’s Dyke Collaboratory’s activities during 2025. The context of Britain’s ongoing
public discourse focused on migration and its perceived threats to British and English identities is recognised,
with the flag fervour of the summer of 2025 illustrating the ongoing need for academic critiques and comparative
research on linear monuments, frontiers and borderlands. Specifically, it argues for the need for resesarch to take
into account ephemeral material cultures, signs and symbols as well as monumental architecture in considering
how divisions and demarcations are established and perpetuated in landscapes past and present.unfunde
Before the bloom: How pre-winter conditions influence jellyfish production
No full textData underpinning journal article, Before the bloom: How pre-winter conditions influence jellyfish production, published in the journal Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science on 23rd December 2025
Using Social Network Analysis to Study Hate Speech in English Football During the White Lives Matter Banner Controversy
No full textThis document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a published work that appeared in final form in IIM Kozhikode Society & Management Review. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1177/22779752261.431396In June 2020, a group of football supporters from Burnley FC arranged for a 'White Lives Matter' banner to be flown over Manchester City's Etihad Stadium in protest against the English Premier League's (EPL) decision to support the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Utilising a mixed methods Social Network Analysis (SNA) approach, we identified opinion leaders on X (formerly Twitter) to assess their influence in shaping the discussions and narrative. Systemic Racism Theory (SRT) was used to theoretically underpin the findings. In turn, we found that many users were critical of BLM and offered perspectives within a White supremacist frame; however, others supported football's anti-racist endeavours. We found that some users hijacked the incident to help fuel far-right agendas, demonstrating that football fans are being targeted online. Our study highlights the differences between individual and organised racism and illustrates that far-right and White supremacist groups use football to fuel racist rhetoric and potentially radicalise fans. The study emphasises the cruciality of understanding digital influence networks, information dissemination, and the role of opinion leaders in shaping online narratives in contexts that intersect sports, politics, and societal issues
Packing, BiLSTM, and attention for privacy-preserving intent classification: Practical upgrades across centralized and IID-federated learning
No full text© 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.We introduce a deployment-oriented intent classification framework that delivers a strong accuracy–efficiency–calibration trade-off without external pretraining or any changes to the data: an attentional BiLSTM coupled with four training/architecture elements: length-aware sequence packing, bidirectional recurrence, variational (locked) dropout across time, and attention pooling. The same compact architecture is evaluated in two regimes: centralized learning (CL) and federated learning with IID client partitions (IIDFL) using FedAvg, with shared hyperparameters to isolate the impact of the modeling recipe. The pipeline produces publication ready artifacts (CSV logs, learning curves, per-class F1, reliability diagrams with ECE, and round-wise confusion matrices for FL) to enable transparent, reproducible assessment. On a multi-intent dataset representative of production constraints, the model attains high Accuracy and Macro-F1, improved tail robustness (higher worst-class F1), and low Expected Calibration Error in CL; under IID-FL it exhibits smooth round-wise convergence toward the centralized reference while maintaining a modest communication budget per round (one broadcast plus m client uploads with 32-bit floats). This work contributes: (1) a principled, portable LSTM recipe: (a) packing, (b) BiLSTM, (c) locked dropout, and (d) attention—that improves recognition and calibration without additional data; 2) an IID-FL evaluation with round-wise diagnostics and communication estimates; and (3) a reference implementation that outputs all metrics and figures needed for rigorous, deployment-focused reporting in privacy-conscious assistants.unfunde
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