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Boundaries and transcendence: a tale of a newly qualified Chinese language teacher teaching in a UK school
Full text linkTeacher professional development (PD) is shaped by context in a complex way. Teachers encounter diverse challenges and take personalised and situated actions for their PD. Previous studies have mainly focused on teachers’ difficulties in general but have rarely explored how they overcome these difficulties and how their negotiations fluctuate. Adopting the framework of boundary crossing for teacher PD, this study examines a newly qualified Chinese language teacher’s professional boundaries while teaching in a UK school, and approaches of boundary crossing. Using a longitudinal approach and a single-case design, and following the four boundary-crossing mechanisms – identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation – this study argues that new boundaries present a challenge to reflection, leading to a new cycle of boundary-crossing mechanisms. This study contributes to understanding of how newly qualified language teachers navigate professional challenges and provides insights into effective strategies for teacher PD in diverse educational contexts
De-Provincialising Media and Communications: Frictions in the New World Disorder
No full textWhat was at one time envisaged as the dawn of a digitally enabled and friction-free era of constant and globalised productivity nowadays looks rather more like having merely been a passing phase of peaceful post-World War II economic boom-time, largely specific to the world’s North-Western Temperate Zone. In the shadows of the Covid pandemic, the burgeoning climate/energy crisis and the resurgence of military conflict following the collapse of the Cold War settlement, that era now seems to be grinding towards a halt. In this context, global trading systems are increasingly shifting from an emphasis on maximisation of speed of delivery to a more cautious emphasis on security, involving a recognition of the inherent fragility of these systems` claims to eliminate the`friction of distance`. The actual forms of mobility and the virtual modes of connectivity are both, increasingly being redefined as unevenly distributed privileges. Meanwhile, populist campaigns to “take back control” of national borders articulate the xenophobia of fearful indigenous populations. In these circumstances, both the geographical `provinciality` and the ahistorical ‘presentism’ of the largely unacknowledged assumptions underlying our field are in serious need of reformulation
The Force of Laughter and a Minor Jurisprudence of Refusal: A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982)
No full textMarleen Gorris’ feminist classic A Question of Silence (1982) features what may be one of the most powerful fictional court scenes ever filmed, offering us an occasion to think through modes and gestures of feminist refusal: an extended scene of wild laughter that grows and grows to eventually engulf all the women in the courtroom. There are other scenes: a 15th century image depicting Calefurnia as it pops up in Julie Stone Peter’s Law as Performance; the bacchants in ecstasy tearing apart the son/king as figured in Bonnie Honig’s reading of Euripides’s play in A Feminist Theory of Refusal; Nancy Spero’s Sheela na gigs... Juxtaposing these and yet other scenes, this essay returns to critical legal themes of rupture and minor jurisprudence in an attempt to further populate the feminist heterotopia that is the elsewhere of law’s mediation. Something of a counter-forum emerges in the collective laughter of A Question of Silence, but where and what is it
Sleep Series: ‘art by sleepers, for sleepers and art as sleep’
No full textThis text reflects on a series of works, Sleep 48 (Stadtwerkstadt, Linz, 2018), Sleep 79 (C-Lab, Taipei, 2018-19) , Sleep 1237 (Performa Biennale, NYC, 2019), and Sleep 7 (Malmo Konstmuseet in collaboration with MFK, Metood För Konstnärlig frihet, 2021) that build on the idea of an aesthetics of sleep. The claim of these projects has been that it is possible to make ‘art by sleepers, for sleepers and art as sleep’
Le devenir littéraire du clitoridien : l’inclination de la différence sexuelle d’après Artemisia Gentileschi
Full text link‘[…] the austere moral subject does not incline, not even on itself.’
– Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, 2016
‘Why must we stop painting the portrait of the clitoris just as it appears, its ink still wet, so to speak?’
– Catherine Malabou, Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought [2020] 2022
How do ‘we’ stand before the law? After Derrida’s dazzling response to Freud’s indictment of ‘emancipated’ literary women as the worst or best exemplars of penis envy, I take erection as my subject. Direction, moral rectitude, rights and writing are organised by Freud within the defensive formation of the fictional phallic stance, eternally erect. Rather than counter Freud in modes that would retain the same logic, through denial (there is no castration) or a false equivalence (everyone is castrated), Derrida welcomes the changes in size quietly admitted in Freud’s parenthesis. Thus, an inherent variability displaces the binary of presence or absence of penis (sexual difference reduced to sexual sameness for Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman). The fort/da of detumescence/tumescence is our general condition. The blood that Derrida follows in the Death Penalty seminars - blood constrained to cruelty, to being made to flow and/or disappear into the concept – now pulses within the vicissitudes of erection ‘in men and in women,’ both situated as sites of sexual differences.
In critical dialogue with Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s Inclinations, this essay leans away from Freud’s appropriation of the bloody encounter of Judith and Holofernes, a scene more famously expressed by the painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and reanimates another of Gentileschi’s works: her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638). Catherine Malabou’s own advice in Pleasure Erased takes an ironic turn since her book contains no trace of the 1998 revelation of the extent of clitoral anatomy through urologist Helen O’Donnell’s scans (bar a passing comment in the English translator’s introduction) and indeed her clitoral ‘portrait’ is barely touched upon. Brush in one hand, palette held perpendicular to the viewer in the other, this paper turns towards Gentileschi’s self-portrait of herself painting herself in auto-affective anticipation of flaring clitoral structure, dismantling our binary preconceptions of scale, of visibility and sex before the law. By means of a poetic emphasis on the sound ‘cli-’ the essay assembles a phonic climate that can perhaps put rectitude to bed
The menopausal subject at work: gendered embodiment and neoliberal management in the UK
Full text linkIn this paper, we examine five key UK policy documents that aim, inter alia, to address the concerns of ageing women in the workplace at a time when an estimated 900,000 women in the UK have left their jobs due to symptoms associated with menopause. Our analysis reveals that menopause has become a key site through which the contemporary struggle over how we (should) perceive gendered embodiment is being played out. This is evident in how these documents expand the menopausal subject: from exclusively cisgendered women to include trans, intersex and genderqueer people. Examining two key tensions that emerge—the invocation of menopause as natural and biological alongside a more inclusive menopausal subject, and the perceived naturalness of menopause alongside the construal of menopausal symptoms as abnormal, we maintain that expanding the menopausal subject is linked to a neoliberal managerial desire to address the challenges of all employees who experience menopause. Our findings thus point to a striking conjuncture between feminist and LGBTQI+ struggles to debunk binary understandings of sex and gender and the neoliberal State’s desire to keep all older people experiencing menopause in the workforce, contributing to our understanding of the increase in menopause talk
D3X: Dependency Driven, Decentralised Execution for Scalable AI Teams
No full textCurrent agent frameworks such as OpenAI Deep Research and Manus AI rely on centralised planner–executor–verifier loops that re-append growing scratchpads at each step. While feasible for small pipelines, this pattern scales poorly: prompt load grows superlinearly (often quadratically) with the number of subtasks, and execution tends toward sequential behaviour, increasing cost and latency. We introduce a Dependency–Driven, Decentralised eXecution (D3X), a protocol that compiles a user request into a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of subtasks. Control is event-driven via a lightweight Operations Manager that activates nodes as soon as parents complete; execution is decentralised across workers that receive only dependency-local context and can run local self-review loops without blocking peers. When new information emerges, a Subtask Refiner edits only the affected subgraph, preserving progress elsewhere. An Aggregator then combines leaf artifacts into the final result. Under bounded parent summaries and dependency only routing, D3X reduces total prompt load from quadratic to near-linear in n - d (for fixed summary budget), and wall-clock time approaches the critical path with sufficient parallelism. More generally, latency follows Θ( τ[L + (n−L)/ w ]) plus low, event-driven scheduling overhead and linear-time aggregation. In our evaluation, we observe mean speed-ups up to 4.00× and input-token reductions up to ∼ 83% (37–83% across tasks)
Personality disorder diagnoses in UK Autistic people: evidence from a matched cohort study
Full text linkClinical accounts and cohort studies suggest that Autistic people are disproportionately likely to be diagnosed with personality disorder. We conducted a cohort study of adults diagnosed Autistic drawn from the IQVIA Medical Research Database, with follow-up from Jan 1, 2000 to Jan 16, 2019. We included a comparison group without diagnosed autism, matched (1:10) by age, sex, and primary care practice. We included 22,112 Autistic adults, of whom 6,437 (29.1%) had a diagnosis of intellectual disability. Median age was 20.36 (IQR: 18.0-28.5), and 16,881 (76.3%) were men. The rate of new personality disorder diagnosis in Autistic people without intellectual disability was 4.8 (3.5-6.7) times higher for Autistic vs. comparison men, and 4.6 (3.1-6.8) times higher for Autistic vs. comparison women. For Autistic participants with intellectual disability, the rate was 2.0 (1.0-3.7) times higher for Autistic vs. comparison men and 8.3 (4.0-17.2) times higher for Autistic vs. comparison women. The estimated rate of new personality disorder diagnosis for Autistic people aged 20 increased from 14.67 (95% CI 10.4-20.8) per 10,000 person-years in 2009 to 22.43 (95% CI 13.9-36.3) in 2019. The findings indicate that personality disorder diagnoses are more common in Autistic people and increased overall in women from 2000-2019
Attitudes, Time Pressure, and Behavior Change Techniques Affect Route Journey Planning Decisions: Evidence from an RCT
Full text linkTransport emissions are a major contributor to global CO2 emissions, requiring interventions to promote sustainable travel behaviors. This study examines how behavior change techniques (BCTs), attitudinal and behavioral segmentation, and time pressure influence green route selection in a simulated journey-planning app. Using a randomized 2 × 3 × 3 factorial design, 600 UK participants completed travel booking tasks under three time-pressure scenarios (low, moderate, high) using either a control app or a BCT-enhanced intervention app. Participants were segmented based on environmental attitudes, public transport preferences, and travel needs. Multilevel logistic regression showed significant main effects for condition, segment, and time pressure. Participants using the intervention app were more likely to select green routes (5.39, p < 0.001). Segments with a more positive attitude to public transport demonstrated higher baseline green route selection compared to those with low public transport attitudes (odds ratio [OR] = 0.31, p = 0.020). Moderate time pressure facilitated the highest likelihood of green route selection, while low (OR = 0.16, p < 0.001) and high (OR = 0.48, p < 0.001) time pressures reduced green bookings. Interaction effects were non-significant, potentially reflecting the sample size. The findings highlight the potential of BCT-enhanced apps to promote sustainable travel, particularly when tailored to user segments and designed to address time pressure. Future research should explore real-world applications and intervention durability
Consumer feedback: ethicising with humour in a product review workshop
Full text linkThe use of irony and humour to articulate concerns related to the ethics of design is evident in some of the consumer reviews on e-commerce websites including Amazon. Although these reviews have become a viral sensation on the internet, the use of such irony and humour in discussions concerning design ethics is only briefly mentioned in academic design literature. In this article, I reflect on a product review workshop that I hosted at an academic conference in which the participants reviewed a consumer product using a similar form of irony and humour. I conclude by suggesting that the workshop can be understood as methodologically useful to provoke discussions concerning design ethics whilst enabling the study of the use of irony and humour during such discussions in design settings. I also claim that such a workshop encourages the application of an ironic and humorous approach to discussing design ethics beyond design workshops, and the immediate aims and objectives of the workshops irony and humour is explored within