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The complexity of transnationalism: A case study of the British-Bangladeshi diaspora
No full textThis chapter from an edited book by Ajaya Sahoo will be a definitive handbook on South Asian diasporas. This chapter will focus on the British Bangladeshi experience and discuss the social, race, religious, political and social class dynamics of transnationalism
Median Line: A Century Of Border Violence and The Alluvial Geopolitics Of The Evros/Meriç/Maritsa River Border
Get PDFThe border river of the Evros/Meriç/Maritsa has been shaped during the century since its demarcation by the Lausanne peace treaty. Over this period a dense overlap of environmental, geopolitical, legal, and cultural actors have turned it into both a riverised border and a borderised river. The border regime appropriates the riverine characteristics of flow, erosion, mud, turbulence, and fog as much as it is founded on military technology, international law, agricultural and conservation practices, resource logistics, border crossing and the denial thereof. Here the river’s movement of sand and alluvium has become an agent in the policing of the river border.
Drawing on interviews with asylum seekers, locals, forensic pathologists, legal scholars and fish scientists, this paper weaves field research, primarily undertaken on the Greek side, with a historic and ecosystemic perspective of a century-old border that has become a hot-spot for violent practices. These practices themselves harness the uncertain physical conditions that the riverscape affords. In this article we argue that the disjunctures of the river’s dynamic geomorphology and the history of demarcation of the median line frame the contemporary politics of mobility of those illegalized by the border regime. In the ambiguous territorial pockets produced by the movement of the river away from the median line of 1926, islands of hyperlegality have been produced where state violence takes place with impunity
Final word: Inclusion in practice, not merely symbolic
Get PDFIn response to the government's curriculum review 2025 by Prof Becky Francis, this article for the National Education Union magazine - Educate - argues that a culturally responsive pedagogy is crucial to reflect the diverse population of students
What role can governance play in data justice? Reflections on the current AI moment
Get PDFIn translating data governance for the AI era, Taylor et al. have put forward a set of ambitious and considered benchmarks that can serve as an important vision for data justice. However, in doing so, we are also confronted with the challenges of the current ‘AI moment’. The open consolidation of powerful interests seeking to advance AI's unfettered development has also marginalised governance agendas, especially those seeking to assert publicness and avenues for resistance and refusal. In this sense, asserting benchmarks for just data governance can only garner real meaning if such benchmarks can account for the broader politics of the current AI moment and connect to the political mobilisation around data justice that might now be possible
Exploring the Effect of Explanation Content and Format on User Comprehension and Trust in Healthcare
No full textAI-driven tools for healthcare are widely acknowledged as potentially beneficial to health practitioners and patients, e.g. the QCancer regression tool for cancer risk prediction. However, for these tools to be trusted, they need to be supplemented with explanations. We examine how explanations’ content and format affect user comprehension and trust when explaining QCancer’s predictions. Regarding content, we deploy the SHAP and Occlusion-1 explanation methods. Regarding format, we present SHAP explanations, conventionally, as charts (SC) and Occlusion-1 explanations as charts (OC) as well as text (OT), to which their simpler nature lends itself. We conduct experiments with two sets of stakeholders: the general public (representing patients) and medical students (representing healthcare practitioners). Our experiments showed higher subjective comprehension and trust for Occlusion-1 over SHAP explanations based on content. However, when controlling for format, only OT outperformed SC, suggesting this trend is driven by preferences for text. Other findings corroborated that explanation format, rather than content, is often the critical factor
Creative Products in Science
No full textA deeper understanding of the emergence of creative products in science is essential, as scientific products have a profoundly impact society by driving advancements in medicine, technology, and industry. In this chapter, we examine creative products in science through the 5A framework, emphasizing the interconnectedness of the actor (the creative scientist), the action (scientific process), the audience (assessment), and affordances (material and socio-cultural resources) in the creation of scientific products (artefacts). Creative products, such as peer-reviewed publications and grant applications, are developed in an iterative cycle of divergent and convergent thinking, shaped by interactions with peers and access to resources. The audience plays an active role in assessing the value of these creative products, with peer reviewers and the broader scientific community acting as gatekeepers. Material and socio-cultural affordances, including funding, infrastructure, and intellectual freedom, further shape the development of scientific products
Man enough to kill, boy enough to cry: Liminality and irresolvability in Adolescence
Get PDFThis short article considers the television show Adolescence , using the show’s title as an entry point for analysis and critique. Adolescence is the name we give to the liminal zone between childhood and adulthood. However, the concept of an “adolescence” is conspicuously gendered and racialized; it is a strategic attempt to extend the protections and moral absolutions of childhood that is overwhelmingly reserved for white, male youth. As such, one of its primary functions—both in culture at large and in Adolescence as a cultural representation—is to selectively complicate questions of agency, responsibility, and blame. My analysis proposes that this titular sense of adolescent liminality is mirrored in Adolescence’s overall narrative ambivalence about the causes and conditions of gender-based violence. Ultimately, I find that the show harnesses the “in betweenness” of its adolescent protagonist to divorce violent misogyny from power, dodging important questions about the compounding roles of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and the digitally networked far-Right
Who studies Religious Education? Understanding young people’s perceptions of religion, religious identity and religious education in England
Get PDFThere is a growing concern over the waning religious affiliations of young people and doubt about the value of religious education in general. We employed a novel survey design, comprising paired survey questionnaires for students and their parents, to explore their perceptions about religion and religious education. The data analysis of 456 participants across six secondary schools in England confirmed that young people acknowledged attitudes towards, and values of, their own religion and religious education in general, and distinguished them from Religious Education and GCSE Religious Studies in the school setting. There were noticeable disparities amongst young people with different religious affiliations, primarily influenced by parental opinions, regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds. By arguing the importance of classroom-level teaching and school-level approaches, this study will help to advance the current debates about young people’s religious identity and religious education in general as well as in schools
Using Saliency for Semantic Image Abstractions in Robotic Painting
Get PDFWe present an adaptive, semantics-based abstraction approach that balances aesthetic quality and structural coherence within the practical constraints of robotic painting. We apply panoptic segmentation with color-based over-segmentation to partition images into meaningful regions aligned with semantic objects, while providing flexible abstraction levels. Automatic parameter selection for region merging is enabled by semantic saliency maps, derived from Out-of-Distribution segmentation technique sin combination with machine learning methods for feature detection. This preserves the boundaries of salient objects while simplifying less prominent regions. A graph-based community detection step further refines the abstraction by grouping regions according to local connectivity and semantic coherence. The runtime of our method outperforms optimization-based image vectorization methods, enabling the efficient generation of multiple abstraction levels that can serve as hierarchical layers for robotic painting. We demonstrate the quality of our method by showing abstraction results, robotic paintings with the e-David robot, and a comparison to other abstraction methods