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Ignorance, resistance, and strategy: Intersectional absences in British environmentalism
Full text linkHegemonic green philosophies have historically been dominated by accounts centring the views and experiences of (well to do) white people in the Global. This article partly addresses this by examining both the politics and language of intersectionality in environmentalism. In doing so, it speaks to debates about intersectionality as marrying theory and practice – to form praxis – in social movements by providing an analysis of ‘intersectional absences’ in modern British environmentalism. It asks: Where does intersectionality not speak in the context of British environmentalism? How can we characterise and explain these absences? What effects might these absences have on the ways that British environmentalist discourses are formed and put into practice? What do they say about the relevance of intersectionality to British environmentalism? Proposing a typology of intersectional absences (ignorance, strategic, and strategic), it argues that intersectionality – as a framework and vocabulary – can help us to understand and deepen environmentalist discourse, strategy, and praxis in Britain today
Enhancing investigative interview skills with brief educational videos
Full text linkPurpose
Gathering detailed and reliable information from victims, witnesses, and suspects is essential for effective criminal investigations. However, research has demonstrated that skills such as appropriate questioning procedures and techniques to build rapport frequently show no improvement following training (Akca et al., 2021). The goal of the current research is to test the benefits of two brief educational videos developed to present a clear and concise summary of the key psychological evidence-base underpinning these two core skills.
Methodology
A mixed design with n = 44 participants was used where education was manipulated within participants (initial pre-education interview vs. post-education interview) and practice was manipulated between participants (practice interview vs. no practice interview).
Findings
Our findings indicate significant improvements in both questioning and rapport building competencies compared to baseline performance. Importantly, these improvements were not attributable to simple practice effects.
Implications
We propose that brief educational videos can enhance investigative interview training by aiding course trainers who may not be experts in accessing or interpreting scientific research. These resources also promote standardisation in training and reducing variability in how evidence-based competencies are taught.
Value
Our research provides an efficient solution to help bridge the gap between the science of ‘what works’ in investigative interviewing and real-world practice by creating educational videos that explain the psychology behind key skills, making them easier to understand and apply. Brief educational videos offer a valuable resource that can be easily integrated into existing investigative interviewing training programmes, thus supporting the goal of translating research into best practice
Nakedness and Physical Beauty
No full textTruth, beauty, antiquity, and nature were fascinations of the Enlightenment that created a range of new cultural and intellectual possibilities for the consideration of naked beauty in different contexts and subjects. Contemplation of nakedness also became central to the study of aesthetics, art and medicine during the eighteenth century. Changing ideas about nakedness played an important but often overlooked role in the development of Enlightenment ideas of beauty, ugliness, morality, gender, status, education, nationality, empire, and race. This chapter examines a variety of texts and visual evidence to explore changing Western attitudes towards nakedness and physical beauty across the eighteenth-century
After images: technologies of the body and the archive
No full textConfabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities was a two-year series of monthly online events (2021-2023) leading up to an edited volume of texts, artworks, and documentation of artworks, to be published with Bloomsbury Academic in the series Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities
Race, by Proxy
No full textIn algorithmic culture, the problem of racism is a problem of proxies. Though racism still continues in many familiar forms — through structural exclusion and oppression, through systems and policies that serve the neocolonial and/or white supremacist state, through words, actions and attitudes that demean and dehumanise — the tools and techniques that further these racist legacies and turn bodies into racialised subjects now operate in very different registers. Focusing on algorithmic infrastructures, this chapter argues that AI and ML systems inaugurate new ways of seeing and sorting bodies that has implications for understanding what a category like race is, how it functions, and how it is felt. It draws on a range of material from disparate fields, including critical race studies, media studies, science and technology studies, critical data studies, and the technical and legal literature on large-scale data processing to argue that the logic of proxy data substitutions provides us with a framework for understanding how race functions in algorithmic culture. In these instances, race is enacted not through modes of identification grounded in the reading of phenotype or genotype, but by latent associations between features of data - or, by proxy
The Counterculture Icon: From Beat to Punk
No full textOf the three famous Beat writers, William Burroughs was the only one who could have held serious interest to the Punks of the 1970s. Burroughs was anti-spiritual voice within a spiritual school; a satirist who used obscenity as he used heroin – to drill down into rather than up and out of human cruelty. To musicians like Lou Reed, David Bowie and Patti Smith, seeking new countercultural positions at the come down end of the hippie trip, he was an example of how to challenge the establishment while refusing the con of pop cultural political idealism. To the generation who came after these three path-breakers, younger and necessarily more dramatic in their rejection of “peace and love”, “flower power” and all the slogans and values Burroughs’ friend Ginsberg had coined in the counterculture, this be-hatted older gentleman in glasses and a three-piece turned out to be a credible tonic to the fogginess and hypocrisy the punks diagnosed in “corporate rock and roll”. This article explores Burroughs' extraordinary influence on punk music as a means of understanding the history of 20th century popular countercultures and shedding light on the state of 'countercultural' expression today
What does leisure have to do with mental health – arts, creative and leisure practices and living with mental distress
Full text linkThere is a growing interest in the role of leisure, arts and creative activities in cultivating health and wellbeing across different contexts. Leisure sports have historically been considered beneficial for achieving health, and similar focus has recently been placed on arts and creativity. Recent research into the role of arts and creative engagement for wellbeing highlights the benefits of these modes of engagement on emotional wellbeing and social connectedness. In this article, we examine the ways arts, creative and leisure practices and mental health converge, co-exist and collide. We draw on feminist leisure studies scholarship and Sarah Ahmed’s work on emotion to discuss insights from our research into the everyday experiences of people living with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). We utilise qualitative methods to investigate people’s experiences of meaningful leisure practices and the dynamics between leisure practices and living well with the distress. We explore how leisure activities initiate complex processes of discovery and production of meanings, identity and wellbeing. Our discussion emphasises that leisure practices contribute to producing everyday forms of self-care and provide transformative space for self-discovery yet are simultaneously inseparable from the politics of living with mental distress while navigating accumulated effects of distress
Towards a habit-rupture model of intergroup contact in everyday settings
Full text linkAccording to intergroup contact theory, meaningful interactions between members of different social identity groups can lead to decreases in prejudice. However, the literature on intergroup contact has generally emphasized contact-based interventions that involve positive contact experiences in highly controlled environments like research laboratories or classrooms, or infrequent intimate intergroup contact experiences, like intergroup friendships. In this Perspective, we review the literature on how intergroup contact manifests in everyday settings, which challenges established views that contact is readily available, positive and leads to consistently positive within-person changes. We describe how variations in contact valence and environmental affordances for self-selection influence individual- and macro-level segregation dynamics, which create conditions for stable trajectories of contact and intergroup bias, or contact habits. We then propose a habit–rupture model of contact, according to which changes in intergroup relations through lifespan and macro-level disruptions act as ruptures, leading to the development of new contact habits. Considering contact and its effects through a habit and rupture lens identifies realistic and ecologically valid opportunities to apply intergroup contact in the service of the social good
Children's Embodiment of Non-Human Virtual Hand Forms
Full text linkAdults are known to identify their own body through a combination of multisensory cues and top-down expectations regarding its form, while children may possess a more flexible body representation. Here we use virtual reality to test how children and adults use form cues to feel ownership over a virtual hand with novel, varying degrees of corporeality and how a sense of ownership of the hand and movement fluency with it may be trained. In Experiment 1, children (N = 40, 6–8 years) and adults (N = 45) experienced four virtual hand forms (Hand, hand with a missing Thumb, crab-like Claw, Cross). Participants had to catch slowly moving virtual feathers while the virtual hand form moved in and out of synchrony with their own hand movements. In Experiment 2, we gave each child (N = 10, 6–9 years) and adult (N = 11) repeated experience with the Claw. Across studies we found that sensations of ownership over the virtual hand were facilitated by human-like forms, movement synchrony, and short-term training. For children only, we also found that human-like forms maintained a strong facilitatory influence even when movement was asynchronous. Further, for children only, training improved movement fluency and increased the sense that the virtual form was a ‘tool' rather than a hand. We suggest that children's top-down expectations regarding their body do not always interact with their multisensory inputs; their experiences are sharpened with training more than adults; and repeated short virtual experiences do not blur children's perceived distinction between the real and virtual self. Summary Both children and adults are sensitive to the corporeality of virtual hand forms, showing enhanced ownership for human-like forms. While adults rely on concurrent movement synchrony and form, children treat them independently—maintaining some ownership for human-like forms even when the movement was asynchronous. Short-term training with a non-human virtual form (crab-like claw) increased ownership and improved movement fluency particularly for children. Compared to adults, children's embodiment of moving virtual hands reflects distinct processes—showing greater flexibility, independent cue use, and functional relevance
Executing a Personal PoliticalBranding Campaign from Within Government: The Case of the UK Finance Minister Rishi Sunak and Social Media (2020–2022)
Full text linkSocial media is increasingly used by mainstream politicians to fashion their public image while campaigning and governing. As the UK’s finance minister from 2020 to 2022, and Prime Minister until 2024, Rishi Sunak was the first governing politician to employ an in-house brand consultant to run a continuous social media branding campaign. A content analysis of all 412 Tweets issued from the department’s Twitter feed, @hmtreasury over a 10-month sample period identified 80 short films fronted by Sunak that showed a consistent overall branding scheme with 17 sub-brands. His contribution to the videos included appearances, speeches, informal visits, walkabouts, documentary footage, interviews, pieces to camera, and voiceovers. In October 2022, this carefully curated branded persona helped him to become the youngest and least experienced UK Prime Minister of modern times, with a recognition factor far higher than his two closest and more experienced rivals. Less than two years later, he led the Conservative party to its worst result in the party’s 190-year history. The Conservatives were almost certain to lose anyway but did Sunak’s branded persona undermine his credibility by simplifying, even contradicting, political realities? Can personal political branding from within government be considered as a form of disinformation