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Introduction to Natural Language Processing in High-Stakes Domains
No full textNatural Language Processing (NLP) has emerged as a critical field within artificial intelligence (AI), transforming human-computer interactions by enabling machines to understand, interpret, and generate human language. Its applications span high-stakes domains such as healthcare, finance, legal services, education, and national security, where accuracy, reliability, and ethical considerations are paramount. In these sectors, NLP enhances decision-making, operational efficiency, and service personalization by analyzing vast amounts of unstructured data, from clinical notes to legal contracts. This paper examines the role of NLP in these high-stakes environments, highlighting key technologies such as transformers, named entity recognition (NER), and domain-specific transfer learning. It also addresses the unique challenges NLP faces in these contexts, including data privacy, bias, interpretability, and regulatory compliance. Through rigorous testing and development, NLP can provide ethical, transparent, and impactful solutions that meet the critical demands of these domains
Responsible and Ethical AI in Natural Language Processing
No full textAs Natural Language Processing (NLP) becomes deeply integrated into critical decision-making areas, responsible and ethical AI principles are paramount. This chapter explores the foundational principles of responsible AI—transparency, fairness, inclusivity, and accountability—and their application in NLP. It addresses key ethical challenges in fields like healthcare, finance, and law, where NLP’s role can significantly impact individual and societal outcomes. The chapter examines practical techniques for bias mitigation, privacy protection, and explainability, offering solutions to improve ethical NLP development. By analyzing collaborative frameworks, sector-specific requirements, and emerging trends, this chapter highlights pathways to ensure that NLP systems serve all users equitably and adapt to evolving societal values
Market Constitutionalism and Social Rights: A Critical Analysis of Judicial Deference
Get PDFThis article examines the place of social rights in liberal constitutions from the perspective of critical political economy
Reframing Nonalignment: Tito, Sukarno and the 1961 Belgrade Conference
No full textDrawing on primary sources and moving beyond traditional diplomatic history, this chapter approaches the Belgrade Conference of non-aligned states in an original way, informed by methods of cultural history of diplomacy. A black and white photograph showing presidents Sukarno of Indonesia and Tito of Yugoslavia, hosts of the 1955 Bandung and 1961 Belgrade Conference (events that defined the non-alignment), respectively, serves as a departure point for analysis. Essentially, the chapter asks, What can the image, created by a Yugoslav news agency photographer on the eve of the conference, tell us beyond ‘obvious’? The photograph shows the two statesmen in an open-roofed car in front of the Yugoslav parliament building, the conference venue; the motorcade is secured by uniformed guards on motorcycles, and is observed by citizens, standing still in the background. It allows us to imagine the conference as a piece of diplomatic theatre, with actors, stage, audience, and security. And it urges us to zoom out further to explore the context in which the event captured by the photographic lens took place
"It's just the persuading bit": Children, Performance and Climate Action
No full textIn this chapter Newberry considers the relationship between environmental and ecological performance, and its engagement with, and relationship to, young people in the UK. Taking as a starting point the dearth of young voices in conventional climate-related theatre, she looks at three specific case studies to propose a reimagining of the collaborative process. Focusing on works by Cornelia Parker, Nigel Barrett and Louise Mari, and the educational theatre company Cap-a-Pie, Newberry explores ways in which the creative industries might harness the child-like qualities of playfulness, imagination and incorruptibility, to propose a more optimistic future for climate activism and creative awareness. In the face of the global climate crisis, the question we might ask is, how might children offer an opportunity for us to think differently, without being cast as our saviours or rescuers from impending climate chaos
After the last good year: trade unions and educational reform in Greece
Get PDFEducation policy research has seen a growing interest in the consequences of teacher trade unionism of global education reform. Less attention has been paid to teacher unions as strategic social actors attempting to influence both national education policy and employment relations at the school level. Addressing this topic, the article examines the challenges and dilemmas of teacher trade unions as they negotiate education policies in crisis contexts. With a particular concern for school and teacher evaluation, it focuses on reforms in Greek education, as these have played out in a period of structural adjustment and prolonged austerity (2010–2023). Drawing on interview data with leading members of the primary and secondary teacher unions, the article discusses the conditions in which reforms have emerged and the responses they have evoked from teacher unions in an education state undergoing historically significant change. It argues that the crisis provoked uncertainties of strategy in Greek teacher unionism. Nevertheless, unions maintain their identity as active components of movements for educational change and as organisations that aim to defend the status and working conditions of their members. Debates in Greece highlight a combination of economic and political aspirations, characteristic of teacher unions across Southern Europe
The Forgotten Heroes of Postman’s Park
No full textThe Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in Postman’s Park contains fifty-three memorial tablets, each dedicated to an act of life-risking bravery, undertaken by an otherwise ordinary individual, largely in the course of their everyday life, and within commonplace surroundings. The memorial’s creator, G. F. Watts, was a pivotal figure in the conception and promotion of the idea of ‘everyday’ heroism in Britain. Where he led, others followed. On this basis, the Watts Memorial has come to inform our understanding of how everyday heroism as a concept was constructed. Further research has now identified eighty-four individuals who were intended for commemoration on the memorial but who are missing. Incorporating these ‘forgotten heroes’ into the memorial radically alters how we understand it. It widens and deepens our understanding of Watts’ construction of everyday heroism and the characteristics that underpinned the Victorian conception of the idea
Remaking a sense of place: Using video methods to research a London ten-pin bowling league
Get PDFDrawing on research with a ten-pin bowling league in London, this paper seeks to add to discussions about remaking place through video methods by exploring (1) the challenges involved in presenting both the perspectives of participants and recreating a sense of place through video methods; (2) how using different forms of video methods – together and in tandem – can address this challenge. Through discussion of this example, we set out how we assembled and reassembled video data in a range of ways for different modes of presentation, providing insights on how video techniques and modes of presentation both recreate and intervene in the social worlds and places that they seek to understand. In doing so, the paper contributes to discussions of how video methods might be used in more imaginative and lively ways in social research to foreground the sensory qualities and lived experience of places
He Said, She Said
Get PDFIn recent years, popular feminist discourse has increasingly associated feminism with a cultural concept of consent. My reflection in this special section of Cultural Commons: ‘#(No)SeAcabó / It is (not) over’ discusses the Rubiales/Hermoso kiss through the lens of consent by enquiring into how the words ‘he said, she said’ attend to particular kinds of gender injustice. I suggest that ‘he said, she said’ acts as a form of representation that has the effect of reifying the cultural experience of nonconsent as an experience of relations of power. By critically assessing ‘he said, she said’ as a narrative device, we can further understand the role of representation in obscuring our encounter with and critical enquiry into the event, which I suggest we foreground in our discussions of what ‘she said’
The teacher wellbeing turn: Neuropolitics, education and the psy-complex
No full textAcross the globe, governments are responding to a ‘teaching crisis’ marked by high attrition rates and labour shortages. This crisis can be attributed to macro changes in the economy (intensified by the shift towards high inflation, low growth economies post-COVID) and micro changes to the organisation and funding of schools with teachers experiencing stagnating wages and unmanageable workloads in punishing accountability environments. In this paper we examine how government and other authorities in England seek to manage the teaching crisis through diagnostic tools and skills training designed to measure and improving teacher wellbeing. This includes inciting new teacher subjectivities, namely neuro-liberal workers who are resilient, agile or emotionally communicative. Through combining elements of policy archaeology and genealogy, this paper specifies: i. the conditions for the emergence of teaching wellbeing as a problem; ii. the knowledge claims and alliances framing the construction of said problem; and iii. the interventions made possible by these problem framings. Critically, this paper develops a new deconstructive language to address some of the limits or overreach of scientific psychology approaches to wellbeing that are central to government approaches to framing the problem of and solutions to teaching wellbeing