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Introduction to Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture
No full textThis chapter introduces the book Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture. We reflect on the terms ‘difficult death’, ‘dying’ and the ‘dead’ and their potential meanings and we explore some of the challenges of writing about death in mediated form. We consider the difference between media and culture in the context of death studies and draw on a range of scholarship to consider the mediation of death, dying and the dead in culture. We provide a summary of each of the chapters included within the collection, and some suggestions on how you might approach the reading of the book. We argue that the terms ‘difficult death’, ‘dying’ and ‘the dead’ are contingent ones, and, for example, that what constitutes a difficult death will be culturally and socially relative, as well as dependent on a series of individual factors including life experiences and expectations. We suggest that when death is constructed as difficult, it is often so because it occurs at the nexus of myriad forms of social inequality that function as mechanisms of systemic marginalisation in life and in death
Perceived Value of Images Carrying Tourism Location Information on Social Media and Customer Brand Engagement
Get PDFIn this study, we aim to study the factors that affect the perceived value of images carrying the details of tourist locations posted on social networking sites (SNSs) and its effect on customer brand engagement in tourist locations. To empirically test the study model, we collected the data from 155 respondents and 130 were valid for further analysis. The partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was used to assess the measurement and structural model. The study results evidenced that the measurement model for study constructs were reliable and sound. Whereas, the results based on the structural model reported that the images posted on SNSs provide entertainment, credibility, and information regarding the tourist locations, which significantly determine the perceived value of images advertised on SNSs. We also found that the perceived value of images successfully predicts the customer brand engagement in images carrying the details
Internment, imprisonment, interrogation and resistance in low intensity conflict. Carceral warfare and republican paramilitaries in Northern Ireland 1968-c1988.
Get PDFThe 9/11 memorial and museum: New York, New York, USA: Crime and Contemporary Tourism
Get PDFAs was famously written, ‘[t]errorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening, not a lot of people dead’ (Jenkins, 1975: 158) and nothing invokes the theatrical nature of extreme violence as remembering the 9/11 attacks, carried out by Al Qaeda against the US in 2001. The sheer horror of 3,000-plus individuals being murdered created a spectacle the likes of which we can only hope not to see again. Like a theatrical event, the attacks attracted an audience of millions of people around the globe (The Guardian, 2001) who sat and watched the horror unfold on their television sets and millions more will have seen the footage replayed on the news, over the internet and, even, as part of university courses studying a range of topics as varied as international relations, military history, terrorism studies and law enforcement. Such a huge audience was inevitable as the attacks are indelibly stamped on the course of history and rank alongside events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of Princess Diana. Even twenty years later many people report being able to recall exactly where they were when either they saw the attacks unfold or heard about them (Hartig and Doherty 2021).
Such a traumatic event has clearly changed people’s lives and not just those who lost loved ones in the attacks themselves. First responders, who risked everything to save people on the day, have died in large numbers (Freedman 2004)9/1
Obsolescence and Renewal, Brampton Museum, Newcastle-Under-Lyme in conjunction with the 2023 British Ceramic Biennial
Get PDFObsolescence and Renewal was developed as an exhibition for the 2023 British Ceramic Biennial (BCB) in conjunction with the Brampton Museum and Art Gallery. Through multi-component works comprising ceramic assemblages, 3D prints, tapestries, and archival prints, the project critically re-engages with marginalised histories of British ceramic manufacture, in response to Newcastle-under-Lyme’s lesser-known contributions to pre- and proto-ceramic industrialisation during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Expanding upon this, it investigates the entangled histories of imitation, value and cultural translation through the historically loaded aesthetic of chinoiserie - an ornamental style that exemplified a colonial gaze and distorted East Asian culture into decorative commodities for European elites. Drawing on contemporary discourse from postcolonial theory (Said, Bhabha), material culture studies (Bennett, Edensor), the post-digital (Menkman, Betancourt) and critical craft theory (Adamson), Obsolescence and Renewals repositions chinoiserie beyond the decorative, as a politically charged site through which the legacies of colonial exploitation, cultural translation and post-industrial transformation can be re-examined.
Alongside extensive and sustained historical, archival, and collection-based analysis, Obsolescence and Renewal developed during a three-month invited research residency period in Stockholm (2022), where limited facilities implemented new strategies in exploring chinoiserie as a method of reproduction. Denied the familiar tools and materials of a ceramic studio, Brownsword began to work with 3D scan data from a group of early proto porcelains known as Pomona Wares (c.1746), from the Brampton Museum. The mesh topologies from these and other objects typical of early ceramic industrialisation (e.g. salt glazed wares c.1750, that emulated the whiteness of oriental porcelain) were interrogated to reveal the complex network of intersecting geometry which constituted the objects ‘digital skin’. A variety of planar observations of the mesh were captured and printed using a colour laser copier. Each printed image would undergo a sequence of multi-passes – superimposing new images until a palimpsestic rupture occurred, obfuscating, or obliterating original points of reference. This process of developing one material in imitation of another, aligns with the concept of skeuomorphism prevalent in ceramic history, where clays inherent plasticity allows it the advantage of mimicking the characteristics of other materials such as basketry or metal ware. Employing reiteration and error via intersections of analogue and digital processes, subverted the logic of precision and replicability that typically defines digital aesthetics. Through a conceptual deconstruction of chinoiserie, skeuomorphism served as a generative strategy for re-translation across material and temporal registers. This resulted in new forms of expression that echoed historic modes of displacement. Through this deliberate destabilisation of digital reproduction, Brownsword challenges traditional binaries between the original and the copy, the analogue and the digital, the authentic and replicated.
In extending this process, Brownsword’s purchase examples of 18th century chinoiserie via eBay enabled him to purposefully disrupt nuances of painting and print unique to early Staffordshire ceramic production. Morphic/ fragmentary images, extracted by the rotational and linear movement of objects during rudimentary scanning procedures further distorted imagery typical of Britain’s imperialist impulse to profit from the exploitation of the ‘exotic East’ via its industrial revolution. Through this process of variable replication, Brownsword embraced the deviations and errors that occur within the thresholds of image and object simulation. Scanned images were reworked, erased and superimposed upon each other, cancelling out borrowed Chinoiserie motifs, and further undermining modes of representation devoid of cultural context.
Translating elements that were themselves translations, led to further modes of replication via the digital loom, creating a series of tapestries that privileged imperfection through their amplified materialisation of the glitch. Brownsword’s ‘copies without originals’ (Baudrillard, 1981) via a deliberate use of slippage and mistranslation between materials and technologies, served as a critical framework to interrogate the processes of cultural appropriation and assimilation that has shaped the cultural identity of North Staffordshire. Obsolescence and Renewal operates in a "third space" (Bhabha) between the colonial past and contemporary critique, using hybrid strategies to expose and subvert the Eurocentric tropes embedded in chinoiserie, while critically engaging with the histories of exploitation and asymmetries of power that shaped these motifs. By fusing traditional ceramic languages with deconstructive material strategies, the research interrogates the colonial legacies embedded within chinoiserie and repositions ceramics as a critical medium of postcolonial discourse.
Obsolescence and Renewal’s engagement with historic revisionism and hauntology through its re-materialisation of historic aesthetic tropes and fractured ghosted forms, serve as a critical meditation on the entanglements of industrial, colonial, and cultural memory. From a former factory in Stoke-on-Trent that closed as a consequence of being unable to compete with high production costs and the company’s decision to manufacture their Bone China product somewhat ironically in China, Brownsword salvaged a collection of discarded rubber moulds that had been defaced to protect intellectual property and deter subsequent reproduction. Consigned to the status of waste, the poignancy of their ‘un-manufacture’ (Edensor) led to their reanimation through ‘Ghost’ (2023), with Brownsword’s remoulding and casting these objects in Bone China and putting them back into non-commercialised production. These revenant objects, positioned within the deindustrialised context of Stoke-on-Trent, where the realities of outsourcing ceramic production to east Asia are still omnipresent, critiques the ironies of the wests reliance of eastern labour by revealing the politics of labour embedded in both historic chinoiserie and its contemporary global production chains, and exposing how the aestheticization of the east was underpinned by exploitative conditions then and now. The ghost of industrial labour that resounds through the replication of these fragmentary chunks of post-industrial discard, speaking beyond their ‘use value’, and aligns with Jane Bennett’s theory of ‘vibrant matter’, where the discarded retains political agency. Using redundant industrial moulds, fragmentary chinoiserie ornamentation and reappropriated motifs, exposes the historical mechanisms through which Asian culture was commodified and translated for western consumption.
The research underpinning Obsolescence and Renewal contributes to, Glenn Adamson’s discourse on craft as a significant site of resistance and critique; an expanded discourse on post-digital materiality by demonstrating how artistic practice can excavate the unrealised potential of historic industrial artefacts, and serve as a form of ‘speculative archaeology’ (Mattern). Through a critical engagement with Chinoiserie it foregrounds the complexities of cultural hybridity and appropriation embedded in material histories through practice-led modes of enquiry. It advances discourse in craft studies, material culture and post-industrial heritage, and demonstrates how practice-led methodologies can generate new insights concerning place, identity, labour, and cultural power.
The research dimensions underpinning Obsolescence and Renewal have been presented at conferences, symposia and public talks both nationally and internationally, including a keynote presentation at the Jingdezhen National Ceramic Culture Inheritance and Innovation Pilot Zone, China. It has been disseminated through public platforms in Sweden and the Czech Republic, and via a documentary film for People’s Daily Online (a subsidiary company of the largest media platform in China) underscoring Brownsword’s efforts to foster enhanced collaboration between the West and China. It has influenced new scholarly research (Goodby) who have redressed Newcastle-Under-Lyme’s important contribution to pre-industrialisation, and in doing so raised the profile of the Brampton Museums and facilitated deeper understanding of its ceramic collections. A further iteration of Obsolescence and Renewal curated by Dr Stephen Knott for the Craft Study Centre, aimed to negate the anti-industrialism prevalent amongst the centre’s founders and evident in its collections. Brownsword’s commissioning of leading craft historian Dr Tanya Harrod for the opening essay of the exhibition catalogue, has influenced critical perspectives that reposition industrial craft heritage within broader critical cultural discourse challenging historic studio/industry binaries.
Obsolescence and Renewal was funded by a consortium of funders that include, Arts Council England (£15,000), British Ceramics Biennial (£500). Initial research for the project was undertaken via a prestigious three-month residency at IASPIS in Stockholm, following Brownsword’s nomination by Maj Sandell, director of Konsthantverkscentrum in recognition of ‘artistic excellence’ – securing funding (£9224) from the government agency of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. It was supported by museum partners including the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Spode Museum Trust and Brampton Museum and Art Gallery
Integrated solar-driven hydrogen generation by pyrolysis and electrolysis coupled with carbon capture and Rankine cycle
Get PDFReduction of carbon emissions from conventional gray Hydrogen (H2) production is a promising option in moving towards much greener H2 generation. To minimise carbon emissions and improve plants’ efficiencies of conventional gray H2 production, this study focused on process simulation of hybrid CSP, catalytic Methane (CH4) and biomass pyrolysis and Water (H2O) electrolysis plants with 1000°C HTF output temperature. This integrated system differs from current pyrolysis and electrolysis technologies for H2 production because of the involvement of CSP as a thermal energy source; the use of part of recovered heat from the reactor to power downstream units including thermolysis of Sulphuric Acid (H2SO4) and steam generation for both H2O electrolysis and Rankine cycle; the use of H2O as a reaction media and carbon looping to promote biomass decomposition; anodic oxidation of SO2 in AEC to promote hydrogen evolution reaction. In that regard, CSP systems were modelled and simulated in SAM and MATLAB software. The output result of the simulated CSP system got exported to the Simulink to feed simulated CH4 and biomass pyrolysis coupled with TES and Rankine cycle from Aspen plus. In addition, simulated thermal disassociation of H2SO4, electrolysis of H2O with SOEC and AEC from Aspen plus was also exported to the Simulink to feed the CSP system. Both integrated systems were fed with CH4 as the working fluid of the solar furnace. About $1.7/kg is estimated to be a H2 selling price for simulated pyrolysis of CH4 and biomass plant which is cheaper than SMR with a CCS system. While between 4.6 - 10.48 is also estimated to be a H2 selling price for another simulated CH4 pyrolysis and H2O electrolysis. Just like existing CSP systems for electricity generation, both simulated hybrid systems generate electricity for up to 200 minutes in the absence of the Sun. Similar to SMR with a CCS system, CO2 by-product from biomass pyrolysis was captured. Due to coking issues related to catalytic pyrolysis, noncatalytic pyrolysis of CH4 was investigated. Results of the research work show that a return on investment within a period of 6 years is possible with the adoption of these new innovative technologies while reducing carbon footprints in H2 generation plants
Privacy, Security And Forensics in The Internet of Things (IoT)
No full textThis book provides the most recent security, privacy, technical and legal challenges in the IoT environments. This book offers a wide range of theoretical and technical solutions to address these challenges. Topics covered in this book include; IoT, privacy, ethics and security, the use of machine learning algorithms in classifying malicious websites, investigation of cases involving cryptocurrency, the challenges police and law enforcement face in policing cyberspace, the use of the IoT in modern terrorism and violent extremism, the challenges of the IoT in view of industrial control systems, and the impact of social media platforms on radicalisation to terrorism and violent extremism.
This book also focuses on the ethical design of the IoT and the large volumes of data being collected and processed in an attempt to understand individuals’ perceptions of data and trust. A particular emphasis is placed on data ownership and perceived rights online. It examines cyber security challenges associated with the IoT, by making use of Industrial Control Systems, using an example with practical real-time considerations. Furthermore, this book compares and analyses different machine learning techniques, i.e., Gaussian Process Classification, Decision Tree Classification, and Support Vector Classification, based on their ability to learn and detect the attributes of malicious web applications. The data is subjected to multiple steps of pre-processing including; data formatting, missing value replacement, scaling and principal component analysis.
This book has a multidisciplinary approach. Researchers working within security, privacy, technical and legal challenges in the IoT environments and advanced-level students majoring in computer science will find this book useful as a reference. Professionals working within this related field will also want to purchase this book
Prescription practices for rigid ankle-foot orthoses among UK orthotists
Get PDFObjective:
The purpose of this study was to investigate rigid ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) prescription practices for adult men among UK orthotists.
Design:
A cross-sectional study using a survey was distributed online to UK orthotists by the British Association of Prosthetists and Orthotists to its members and through social media and orthotic networks. The survey was completed between November 1, 2020, and November 29, 2020.
Main outcome measures:
Descriptive statistics of survey results include information related to the material used, the thickness of the material, positive cast rectification, AFO reinforcement, footplate design, padding, strapping system, and height of AFO.
Results:
One hundred participants completed the survey, which equates to a response rate of 30.5% of the British Association of Prosthetists and Orthotists members targeted. A clear consensus emerged on the design of a bespoke rigid AFO for the hypothetical patient in this study, which is detailed as follows: 1) 4.5 mm copolymer polypropylene, 2) no additional reinforcement, 3) full-length footplate with mediolateral trimlines terminating behind the metatarsal heads, 4) 3-point correction with parallel sides, 5) padded VELCRO straps with D-rings at the calf and heel, 6) no forefoot or other additional strapping, 7) 3-mm PORON (international Ltd) padding at the malleoli, and 8) AFO height that finishes 2 cm below the fibular head.
Conclusions:
This study has highlighted a consensus on AFO prescription/design among UK orthotists surveyed, based on the hypothetical patient described in this study
Beyond Simulation: Establishing First Principles of Fidelity in the Design of Digitalised Abstract Learning Content
Get PDFAs the remote delivery of digital learning content gains prominence, specifically following the Covid-19 pandemic, the design of learning materials provides for expanded areas of research. An aim of this study is to establish whether first principles of fidelity can be established for designing and developing abstract learning content – namely content that cannot be learned via direct simulation – and where these first principles may be derived from. The initial experiment consists of the creation and deployment of a game that will be used to teach an abstract scientific principle and assess the potential for the design of further such experiment from the experiences and results. The initial experiment has recently completed the build phase and is at the beginning of the deployment phase, with results generated from late April 2022-onwards
What can young Social Entrepreneurs tell us about Environmental Leadership? Perspectives from Brazil and India
No full textIn the face of extreme environmental degradation, environmental leadership has become both more important and more contested. It has too often been considered akin to environmental activism. Thus, this chapter aims to explore the definition of the term theoretically and empirically, to determine who can be considered as an ‘Environmental Leader.’ Further, it deliberates on the role of social enterprises measured against the Triple Bottom Line concept. It uses interviews with two young social entrepreneurs working in the environmental space and based out of India and Brazil to show using the RBV view of strategy, how Environmental Leadership and Social Enterprise come together around social entrepreneurship
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