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Maps to Arkham
No full textBlurb from Publisher: Prepare to embark on an extraordinary voyage through the enigmatic realm of H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham in this innovative chapbook. Crafted through a unique blend of artistic expression and technology, this daring work introduces readers to a captivating fusion of maps—concrete poems created by Lovecraft’s texts—and fragments of original poetry.
This isn’t your typical homage to Lovecraft; it’s a profound investigation into the mysteries surrounding his most infamous fictional city. While it offers insights into the city’s mythos, it also fearlessly challenges and satirizes the legacy of the renowned writer. Rather than celebrating Lovecraft, this exceptional sequence of poems delves into his idiosyncrasies, unconventional love life, and career failures, shedding new light on his persona and the world he created.
Maps to Arkham is a must-read for anyone intrigued by Lovecraftian lore and those who crave a fresh perspective on the enigmatic author himself
Complexity of Choice in Asylum Seeker Decision-making
Get PDFAsylum seekers may make choices about when and how they travel in search of protection, but these choices are constrained by various factors, including context, time, and rapidly shifting and evolving circumstances. An asylum seeker from Cameroon, for example, may have the United Kingdom as their destination of choice but end up settling in Germany, and vice versa. An economic migrant may become a refugee during the migratory journey and a refugee may become an economic migrant due to an inability to support themselves and their family in the country where they first seek protection. The interplay between the individual actions of asylum seekers, the collective actions of others, and institutions (such as government policies) influence the journey of an asylum seeker from country of origin to country of destination. This interplay means that asylum seekers are part of complex social systems in which their beliefs, expectations, and decision-making adapt and change dynamically. Complex systems cannot be understood by only analysing an individual’s decision-making process. Instead, they require a study of the wider components and the social dynamics of the system in which asylum seekers operate.
In this policy brief, we draw on an extensive review of academic and policy literature, as well as the authors’ engagement with asylum seekers in the United Kingdom and in North Africa, to propose that policymakers adopt “complexity theory”- identifying and explaining patterns of change and feedback effects across dynamics systems - to understand the decision-making process of asylum seekers. A complexity approach could help improve policies towards asylum seekers, countering assumptions that policymaking can directly control the number of people arriving to claim asylum without taking into account the interconnected elements of the broader social system within which their decisions are made. It stresses the need for both a more nuanced as well as a more holistic engagement with asylum seekers that recognizes the expectations, cognitive processes, and biases that influence their decision-making, in addition to the role of other stakeholders.
Such an approach would also help challenge simplistic portrayals of asylum seekers as opportunistic individuals driven by a desire to “jump the queue.” The current political discourse in several Western countries (including Australia and the United Kingdom, for example) continues to be stuck in the dichotomous view that refugees are either good by “waiting for resettlement,” or bad for taking their own action and “coming by boat,” even though international law does not make this distinction
Ghosts of Archaeology - The journey of archaeological knowledge from science to science fiction.
Get PDFThe paper aims to evaluate the boundaries between science and pseudo-science in the public understanding of archaeology. It uses the legacy of T.C. Lethbridge as a case study to illustrate the process of transitioning from a scientific to a pseudo-scientific realm. It establishes the relationship between Lethbridge and the academic community based on archival documents, while it aims to glimpse the parapsychological communities’ narratives by the distant reading of dowsing forums, using data parsing and topic modelling techniques. The paper claims that the role Lethbridge represented as the late antiquarian polymath, opposing the institutionalisation and processual methods of archaeology, is still an appealing model for some members of the public, who prefer interacting with the local past outside the institutional formulas of professional archaeology. However, Lethbridge’s rediscovery in the parapsychological world carries the danger that an outdated version of archaeology is becoming reinforced in times when misinformation is a global challenge
Does ‘hot interpretation’ depend on time? New ways of understanding why some heritage is not hot
No full textThe International Conference of Heritage and Affect is organized as a complement to The International Handbook of Heritage and Affect, invited by Routledge.
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Can digital humanities rewrite concepts from non-digital heritage studies? With the help of distant reading, my chapter aims to re-evaluate why some heritage sites do not evoke hot
cognition in visitors. The term 'hot interpretation' was introduced by David Uzzell, who suggests that there is a direct emotional way in which we can interpret experiences before or without thinking them over. This emotional engagement can be fired if the experience resonates with our personal past, nationalist feelings, community values, and ideological beliefs and convictions. According to Uzzell, the same is true when visitors meet heritage sites. Uzzell found
that our emotional engagement is reduced as time separates us from past events. In other words, the likelihood of emotional reactions in response to a heritage site depends on the time
passed between the original traumatic event and the visit. He thought this was why the Clifford Tower in York, the scene of a 12th c. pogrom and massacre, did not affect the visitors. However, I argue that the exhibition's curation, the site's authenticity, the story-telling, and levels of immersion play a more critical role in the hot cognition than the time that has passed since the actual tragic event. To test my hypothesis, I have analysed more than 10.000 TripAdvisor reviews about heritage sites commemorating temporally distant but culturally available tragedies and conflicts using
different exhibition techniques, such as the Clifford Tower in York, the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, the Medieval Massacre exhibit at the Swedish History Museum, and the Memorial Garden of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in Paris. Distant reading methods (Natural Language Processing, word embedding, sentiment analysis, topic modelling, etc.) allow researchers to approach large datasets that would be impossible to analyse manually. With the help of machine learning algorithms, scholars can extract patterns and trends from thousands of pages of text. This large-scale view can bring insights that might not be immediately apparent. In our case, it highlighted how the ten thousand visitors reacted to these sites of atrocities and answered whether the sites’ affect on the visitor indeed depends on temporal distance or if other factors are more important.
I expect my chapter to demonstrate how interdisciplinary approaches and digital humanities methods can contribute to revisiting foundational theories accepted as axioms in heritage studies, thus opening up new ways of interpreting heritage affect. As this chapter assesses new methods for evaluating visitors’ experiential outcomes in heritage environments that are designed to elicit intense sensory experiences, it can make a valuable contribution to Section 5:
Emerging Methodologies
Collective Resilience in Constrained Environments: Entrepreneurship in a Sub-Himalayan Community and the COVID-19 Pandemic
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Chapter 5: Collective resilience in constrained environments: entrepreneurship in a sub-Himalayan community and the COVID-19 pandemic
Sanjay Bhowmick and Prasoom Dwivedi
Category: Chapter
Published: 14 Jul 2023
Page Range: 64–84
Collection: Business 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781802203929.00012
Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; Vulnerability, Resilience; Micro business; Women’s self-help group; Community entrepreneurship
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic that started in early 2020 has exposed the thin line between the resilience and vulnerability of businesses. Two-and-a-half years on, this is evident not only for businesses but also for individual and collective health and survival. As is the case for countries around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted the Indian economy which contracted 6.6% in 2020 and lost much of the poverty reduction gains made over recent decades. The impact on rural regions already operating in constrained environments was particularly instructive in socio-economic terms. This chapter explores the livelihood generating entrepreneurial activities in a poor village community in the sub-Himalayan region of India. Qualitative data findings show that the community’s income generation was normally planned around sharing work between men and women with the men in daily wage labour and the women running micro businesses. They organized themselves in a women’s Self-Help Group which was the vehicle they used to engage with external agencies, i.e government departments for income generation schemes, resources and selling their produce. Importantly, they also engaged closely with a civil society non-governmental organization to access training, resources and the market. In their entrepreneurial journey, they often displayed an ability to pivot across activities with agility to survive routinely constrained environments. Notably, they also avoided loan funding. They continued this practice during the pandemic, using pivoting to stay afloat by picking up opportunities wherever possible - even if these were short-term. They juggled several initiatives and sometimes kept their original ones barely alive. They innovatively resourced their diverse activities with finances from various sources that avoided debt; they used bootstrapping and pooled resources for some of the functions while pursuing other business functions individually. The community, operating under the constrained environment of a continuous series of crises, used such techniques routinely to keep precarity at bay. These business techniques of survival under a constrained environment gave these entrepreneurs a crisis-preparedness to face the COVID-19 pandemic more as an additional constraint in their lives. This is also an important cue to understanding constrained environment community entrepreneurship generally
Towards a Global Urban Geopolitics: Inhabiting Violence
Get PDFThis introduction to the special section explores geopolitical dimensions of conflict and violence in cities, pointing at the need to continue learning from marginal urban settings. It broadens the scope across differentiated approaches, such as the francophone and anglophone urban geopolitical traditions. By opening up a wider perspective, the emphasis is not on cities as part of a matrix of global hierarchies of geographical power but on the multiscalar relational significance of urban geopolitical inquiry. The introduction positions the special section articles within a wider review of urban geopolitical provocations outlining a new political vocabulary of urban conflict and violence. It concludes with a general call for a methodological and empirical broadening of the field of urban geopolitics as part of a broader de-colonial social and spatial science research agenda bridging the disciplines of political geography, urban studies, architecture and planning
Migrant Access to Public Urban Infrastructures
Get PDFThe MAPURBAN report brings to light differences in access to urban resources across the socio-economic and ethnic profile of three major cities. By comparing migrant arrival and settlement in Stockholm, Berlin and London, the project will integrate existing data on spatial inequality and urban segregation, and show how these affect migrant mobility and integration. Taken together, this is argued to have an impact on newly arriving people’s participation in urban society and in expanding their ‘right to the city’. MAPURBAN will utilise interdisciplinary multinational research findings to produce new knowledge that will inform government strategies towards urban migration, re-framing immigrant integration as a multi-scalar (national, urban and local) process that contributes to sustainable urban development. We will consider: Regional public transport mobility and access to urban resources, Urban policies promoting local migrant infrastructure and policy formation, and Neighbourhood interventions undertaking co-creative projects with local communities. By comparing multi-scale social and spatial data across three cities, MAPURBAN will provide new findings on access to urban resources through the application of different participatory tools, to promote equal living conditions, enhance accessibility and mobility, and ultimately, integration, especially for new arrivals to the city
COVID-19 is linked to changes in the time-space dimension of human mobility
Get PDFSocio-economic constructs and urban topology are crucial drivers of human mobility patterns. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these patterns were re-shaped in their components: the spatial dimension represented by the daily travelled distance, and the temporal dimension expressed as the synchronisation time of commuting routines. Leveraging location-based data from de-identified mobile phone users, we observed that during lockdowns restrictions, the decrease of spatial mobility is interwoven with the emergence of asynchronous mobility dynamics. The lifting of restriction in urban mobility allowed a faster recovery of the spatial dimension compared to the temporal one. Moreover, the recovery in mobility was different depending on urbanisation levels and economic stratification. In rural and low-income areas, the spatial mobility dimension suffered a more significant disruption when compared to urbanised and high-income areas. In contrast, the temporal dimension was more affected in urbanised and high-income areas than in rural and low-income areas