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Relations as Immunity: Building Community Resilience
No full textResilience—a term that originated in mathematical ecology—now commonly refers to the ability to thrive in the face of trauma and adversity. This Position Piece reflects on both the charisma and political lability of resilience in the early 21st century. On the one hand, resilience is easily compatible with neoliberal discourses that demand that individuals protect themselves in the absence of state or community support. On the other hand, resilience can be an important corrective to narratives about the damage caused by trauma, focusing attention on our innate ability to heal. We argue that the ambivalence of resilience requires theoretical and empirical attention to both the wider appeal of the term and the situated definitions deployed by diverse actors. In particular, we look at the rise of the term ‘community resilience’ popularised by academics, community leaders, and activists, which seeks to avoid the pitfalls of the neoliberal definition of resilience and argues that strong interpersonal relationships can support health equity. Despite the ambivalence of resilience, we find “community resilience” to be promising in a time when collective visions of health and immunity are desperately needed
The Political Life of Research Ethics Committees And What It Means for Ethnographic Research
No full textThis review discusses three pieces of work, that is, a conference panel and two books, that deal with the role of research ethics committees (RECs) in regulating biomedical research and medical anthropological research. We summarise the papers and conversations of a panel we convened on this topic during the 2020 European Association for Social Anthropologists (EASA) conference. We review two relatively recent books which discuss the role of RECs in biomedical research: Adam Hedgecoe’s (2020) Trust in the System: Research Ethics Committees and the Regulation of Biomedical Research, and Salla Sariola and Bob Simpson’s (2019) Research as Development: Biomedical Research, Ethics, and Collaboration in Sri Lanka. Finally, we consider how the review that RECs outside academic institutions perform is inadequate for ethnographic research, including that involving prospective participants who may lack capacity to consent. We conclude that undertaking the research ethics review internally (i.e., under university RECs) would be a first step forward in reclaiming ethnographic research ethical conversations. 
Assemblages as Ecologies: Sculptural Collaborations with Subterranean Bodies
Get PDFIn this essay I draw on my art research and installation ‘Earthly Bodies, Subterranean Rhythms’ to posit assemblages as ecologies: platforms where specific agencies and interactions occur at different scales, including microscopic levels. Based on documentation images of my creative process, I delve into my experience exploring sculptural building and creative possibilities in more-than-human collaboration. This research involved observing subterranean bodies and temporalities, rhizomatic growth and mycorrhizal interactions as well as working in interspecies cooperation with oyster mushroom mycelium and wheatgrass roots.
As spatial practices, architecture and sculpture have developed specific building methods. I expand on assemblage, the building method I worked with, seeking to articulate three lenses: sculptural, material and philosophical. Technically, an assemblage is a piece made by bringing together disparate elements. In this case it consisted mainly of ceramics, different earthly substrates, mycelium spawn, soil and seeds. Borrowing from Bennet’s ‘Vibrant Matter’ (2010) and Tsing’s ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ (2015) I reflect on living sculptures as interspecies assemblages: spaces of collaboration, cooperation and contamination between living and non-living bodies, matter and forces, human and more-than human agencies. From this perspective, assemblages are more than the sum of their parts as they have the capacity to re-make and transform us through encounters.
A polyphony of worlding processes makes the collective architecture we live in: our shared world. Working in interspecies assemblages may enable more respectful and enjoyable ways of collective dwelling
Cosmopolitanism and Affect in Henry James’ The Ambassadors
Get PDFThis essay explores the interplay between cosmopolitanism and affect in Henry James’ The Ambassadors. It reads the novel’s protagonist, Strether, as an embodiment of the cosmopolitan flâneur and examines how he complicates and challenges this identity as conceptualised by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Due to his evasive cosmopolitan identity, Strether fails to maintain affective bonds with other characters. As such, The Ambassadors challenges James’ own sense of cosmopolitanism by staging various iterations of affect, most notably grief, guilt and loss, as undermining the cosmopolitanism the novel at first seems to promote. I conclude that Strether’s acute emotional responses can be read as a critique of the cosmopolitan flâneur who possesses a level of detachment that is not desirable. The novel levels a critique against cosmopolitanism’s seeming universalism. This tends to promote an abstract ideal that disregards the cosmopolite’s individual emotions and sensations – in The Ambassadors, cosmopolitanism is a fundamentally unethical way of living
The new digital archive at the Neanderthal Museum
Get PDFThe management and publication of digital data on online repositories constitutes a task that is becoming more and more relevant for museums and cultural heritage institutions alike. Not only is it important to archive the growing volume of data produced on a daily basis, but also to make this data available and reach out to old and new audience targets, such as fellow researchers, students, enthusiasts, in new and meaningful ways. The Neanderthal Museum, since two decades engaged in the development and establishment of a diversified digital offer, profiting from the recent completion of the DISAPALE project and its hundreds of newly scanned 3D models, has created a brand new online portal, planned as the core of its digital activity. The history of development (specifically the NESPOS portal), the issues encountered in the planning and realization phases (e.g. requirements for efficiency and long-term maintainability, freedom from previous dependencies on proprietary software), as well as the design decisions and technical solutions are critically discussed, highlighting strengths, weaknesses and possible future improvements. An introduction to the client-server architecture is provided, detailing the development of the back-end using a lightweight Java server component with integrated PostgreSQL relational database and the user-facing front-end built with modern web technologies to create a tailor-made, flexible and clutter-free web application. Finally a short look at the current status of scientific enterprises in digital archaeology is given, with a specific focus on the entanglements between museums, cultural heritage institutions and government entities
Fostering training of research staff through Replicating Open Science Hardware MRI: A Southeast Asian Initiative
No full textFostering training of research staff through Replicating Open Science Hardware MRI: A Southeast Asian Initiativ
Open Research & Research Cultures at Edinburgh
Get PDFResearch cultures are built and maintained by the actions, interactions, behaviours and processes that we all encounter and perform while undertaking or supporting research. These cultures are felt and influenced by us at individual, team, department, university and wider discipline level. Research cultures can be experienced differently at each level and within each discipline, which is why University of Edinburgh’s approach to our Research Cultures improvement work acknowledges that we experience and contribute to multiple research cultures, and that a University the size of Edinburgh will have many research cultures.
Alex Peden is the recently appointed Head of Research Cultures at University of Edinburgh, she will provide an overview of this new role at University of Edinburgh, update on progress on the activities outlined in the Research Cultures Delivery Plan published in 2023, why an Open Research approach is important in improving cultures and share details of an upcoming UoE research cultures funding opportunity
Who gets credit? Fair attribution and publishing for technicians at the University of Cambridge
Get PDFTechnicians have long been an underserved community within research, with limited opportunities for career development and a lack of acknowledgement for the vital role they play. The University of Cambridge was a founding signatory of the Technician Commitment in 2017, which aims to address these issues. Fair attribution for technicians through either co-authorship or direct acknowledgement in research publications is a key component of the Visibility and Recognition aspects of this initiative. Technicians are also increasingly being recognised as a vital part of the research process by bodies such as UKRI and BBSRC, and in the next REF. However, there is currently no standard practice in the University for crediting the role of technicians in research, who thus experience great disparity in their recognition and visibility in scholarly outputs.
During September 2023, we piloted two instances of an interactive workshop for technical staff within the School of Biological Sciences. The session aimed to introduce the publication process and the concepts of acknowledgement and authorship, empowering technicians to recognise when their work should be credited, and how tools such as ORCID and the CRediT taxonomy can help. The workshop also provided an opportunity for technicians to meet each other and share their varying experiences with authorship and attribution.
The project has begun to diversify the audience of Cambridge University Libraries’ education and skills training, helping to develop a research culture that addresses the changing expectations around acknowledgement and authorship. Supporting technicians to be appropriately credited for their contributions to academic work will help develop more equitable research assessment and a healthier research culture in which technical careers are better respected.
This presentation discussed the content and outcomes of the workshops, which are now informing draft institutional guidance on fair acknowledgement and attribution for staff in roles that support research. It will explore our work in progress as we look to include the wider technical community within Cambridge, including those in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. This paper is of relevance to those working within research support, particularly in STEMM disciplines, but we hope the principles are more widely applicable for anybody interested in positive culture change in research
