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Assessing habitat quality parameters and sand properties on sand lizard 'Lacerta agilis' breeding sites to inform the creation of receptor sites. Quarry Life Award final project report
No full textResearch shows that the internationally protected sand lizard Lacerta agilis L. has specific habitat requirements,
especially when occurring at the edge of its distribution range. Quarrying for sand and gravel deposits when the
occurrence of sand lizards and other rare species has been confirmed necessitates the translocation of the
animals to a suitable receptor site to preserve breeding populations and to avoid legislative penalties. The aim of
this research project was to compare habitat quality and sand quality parameters in one such receptor site, Hyde
Pit at Masters Quarry in Dorset, with nearby known sand lizard breeding sites to inform the future creation of
suitable receptor sites within the context of planned resource extraction, and climate change. We were able to
confirm that the receptor site features many of the known key habitat parameters essential for sand lizards, both
in terms of vegetation structure and floral composition, as well as sand quality. Specifically, multivariate
ordination techniques using a comprehensive set of environmental variables confirmed that Hyde Pit clusters in
considerable overlap with the other known L. agilis breeding sites but features more extensive areas of bare
sand and early successional habitat, which is known to be particularly crucial for breeding activity. Managed
removal of dense coniferous woodland releases suppressed and fragmented heathland, and existing low
numbers of sand lizards, supplemented by animals translocated from planned sand reserves, can form viable
populations under these conditions. Receptor areas may represent important foci for sand lizard population
expansion under conditions of climate change and heathland succession. Focusing management on improving
conditions for the sand lizard on these newly created heathland mosaic sites may also prove to be important for
maintaining populations of other specialist heathland organisms
The postdigital-biodigital revolution
No full textThis article is based on a conversation between Alex, Amy, Petar, Derek, Michael, and Sarah conducted online on July 16–17, 2022 for Collective Intellectualities podcast led by Alex Means and Amy Sojot. The conversation revolves around themes and insights covered in two edited books recently published in the Postdigital Science and Education book series: Bioinformational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies (Peters et al. 2022) and Postdigital Ecopedagogies: Genealogies, Contradictions, and Possible Futures (Jandrić and Ford 2022)
Beliefs about worry and pain amongst adolescents with and without chronic pain
No full textObjective:-
To explore beliefs about worries, beliefs about pain, and worries about pain held by adolescents with and without chronic pain.
Methods:-
Adolescents with and without chronic pain aged 14–19 completed an online survey with free text questions about pain and worry. We collected demographics and used the Penn State Worry Questionnaire and Pain Catastrophizing Scale for Children to contextualize the qualitative data, which was analyzed with reflexive thematic analysis.
Results:-
Eighty-one participants completed the survey, 36 with chronic pain and 45 without (mean age: 16.73). Compared to adolescents without chronic pain, adolescents living with chronic pain reported significantly higher general worry and pain catastrophizing. Thematic analysis generated two themes, “Worry changes perceptions of selfhood” and “Pain changes perceptions of selfhood.” Each theme comprised two sub-themes showing how current and future identity trajectories were distorted by worry and pain. The theme “Pain changes perceptions of selfhood” also included a third sub-theme: “Pain impedes future working choices.” Worry content as well as process was problematic in all adolescents. Adolescents experiencing chronic pain had specific, additional worries that pain reduces future career progression. These worries appeared highly salient and challenging.
Conclusions:-
Adolescents may need greater support in recognizing worry as part of normative development. Adolescents in pain may benefit from specific support identifying and reducing how pain-related worries interact with their futures and careers, and from school-based and vocational interventions to reduce the realistic risks they face negotiating modern labor markets
Conformist 1970
No full textAnna Lucas and Alice Walton collaborated to make use of Walton's studio space as a backdrop for re-considering ideas and material they had been unable to enact within their earlier exhibition 'Together With Them She Went' at Tintype Gallery 2020. The studio provided a space of focus and companionship intermittently as they devised and revisited performed gestures for the camera
The Wastemakers on Cornucopia Street [group exhibition]
No full textNewhaven Art Projects commissioned artist Ian Dawson to curate 'The Wastemakers on Cornucopia Street' which transformed the Newhaven Art Space venue into an exhibition and workshop environment.
Taking its title from Vance Packard's pioneering book, 'The Waste Makers' from the 1960s, which exposes the demise of the environment through the growth of disposable consumer goods, the exhibition asked us to think about themes around waste and how we might interpret, rework and re-examine them.
How do we arrive at waste? Is it matter out of place? What is the difference between dirt and waste? And what is digital waste? Searching for new perspectives on this subject brings a set of diverse artists together to discuss their work in relation to waste.
The exhibition presented work from North America and India, representing the globalised nature of waste. From the global south, the Compound 13 lab presented the work that this experimental art space has made through working with citizens from the informal settlement, Dharavi, the centre of the recycling trade in Mumbai.
From North America, Miguelzinta Solis challenges ideas about how the cornucopia of the West creates both a belonging and un-belonging and how we might repair broken communities that have previously been laid to waste. Each artist represented in the exhibition brought a different and thoughtful response to 'matter out of place'.
Exhibiting artists: John Walter, Donna Mitchell, Jasone Miranda Bilbao, Aqui Thami, Louisa Minkin, Sharmila Samant, Ben Parry, Compound 13 Lab, Miguelzinta Solis, Andrea Mason, Amanda Jobson, and Ian Dawson
Transports of delight [group exhibition]
No full textIn the 1830s, East London doctor and amateur naturalist Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward invented a sealed glass case, an ecosphere in which plants could survive heavily polluted air. The Wardian case was soon being used for the transport of plants by sea around the world. From garden plants such as jasmine and rhododendrons to cash crops like bananas and tea, this simple invention transformed global economies and environments and shaped the world we live in.
Transports of Delight will explore the impact of this simple but world changing invention which links themes of colonialism, environment and the collection and display of plants associated with broader historical narratives.
Participating Artists:
Anna Barriball, Daphne Wright, David Cotterrell, Edward Chell, Gerard Ortín Castellví, Günther Herbst, Harun Morrison, Helen Maurer, Joseph Banks, Joy Gregory, Laure Prouvost, Lee Maelzer, Leelou Gordon-Fox, Maria Thereza Alves, Mariele Neudecker, Nick Laessing, Nils Norman, Owen Griffiths, Peter Hofer, Pia Östlund, Rosa Nguyen, Stephen Lee, Uriel Orlow
A leaflet featuring a commissioned essay by Bergit Arends, curator of contemporary art, museum professional and academic, will be available during the exhibition.
A publication will be launched during the exhibition with writings from Edward Chell, artist, writer and curator; Luke Keogh who published in 2020 The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World (Chicago University Press) and Ros Gray, writer, researcher and Programme Leader, MA Art & Ecology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Cerebellar modulation of memory encoding in the periaqueductal grey and fear behaviour
Get PDFAnxiety disorders are a cluster of mental health conditions characterised by persistent and excessive amounts of fear and worry. They affect millions of people worldwide, but treatments can sometimes be ineffective and have unwanted side effects. Understanding which brain regions are involved in fear and anxiety-related behaviours, and how those areas are connected, is the first step towards designing more effective treatments.
A region known as the periaqueductal grey (or PAG) sits at the centre of the brain’s fear and anxiety network, regulating pain, encoding fear memories and responding to threats and stressors. It also controls survival behaviours such as the ‘freeze’ response, when an animal is frightened.
A more recent addition to the fear and anxiety network is the cerebellum, which sits at the base of the brain. Two-way connections between this region and the PAG have been well described, but how the cerebellum might influence fear and anxiety-related behaviours remains unclear.
To explore this role, Lawrenson, Paci et al. investigated whether the cerebellum modulates brain activity within the PAG and if so, how this relates to fear behaviours. Rats had electrodes implanted in their brains to record the activity of nerve cells within the PAG. A common fear-conditioning task was then used to elicit ‘freeze’ responses: a sound was paired with mild foot shocks until the animals learned to fear the auditory signal. In the rats, a subset of neurons within the PAG responded to the tone, consistent with those cells encoding a fear memory. But when a drug blocked the cerebellum’s output during fear conditioning, the timing of the PAG response was less precise and the rats’ freeze response lasted longer.
Lawrenson, Paci et al. concluded that the cerebellum, through its interactions with the brain’s fear and anxiety network, might be responsible for coordinating the most appropriate behavioural response to fear, and how long ‘freezing’ lasts.
In summary, these findings show that the cerebellum is a part of the brain’s survival network which regulates fear-memory processes. It raises the possibility that disruption of the cerebellum might underlie anxiety and other fear-related disorders, thereby providing a new target for future therapies
A thousand intertwinings: an exploration of embodied artistic processes made in collaboration with an estuarine landscape and its vibrant matter
Get PDFThis doctoral research project is practice-based, artistic research. It proceeds through the development of a series of explorations of embodied, sensorial processes and emergent artworks made in collaboration with place, its materiality, entangled more-than-human and non-human worlds through the often-overlooked stuff of the everyday; from the earth underfoot, to human debris in the form of abandoned structures, daily washed-up plastic and discarded metal detritus. These artworks are thought of as "matter maps" with the embodied making as experimental re-mapping activities. The project asks the question: "How can slow and collaborative artistic mapping processes generate careful records through touch and a close engagement with the vibrant matter of 'place'?"
The artistic work/processes as "matter maps" are framed through contextual writing that aims not to replace the work with words, but to offer insights through the lens of Karen Barad's 'agential realism', exploring entangled intra-actions with matter (2007); Donna Haraway's diffractive exploration of matter as a mode of 'making kin' (2016); and Jane Bennett's 'vibrant matter' and 'thing-power' (2010). Contemporary writers including David Abram, Edward Casey, Gilles Deleuze, Tim Ingold, Brian Massumi, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Isabelle Stengers, and Rebecca Solnit will provide additional contextual insights in relation to care, embodiment, slow attunement, repetition, horizontal ontologies and the anarchive.
Writers exploring contemporary artists working with place, materiality, trace and mapping are highlighted to attend to current trans-disciplinary discourse and artistic research within this field.
The project is the culmination of six years of frequent walks along the Taw Estuary in North Devon (UK), so this place in particular forms a case study. The emergent artworks are often fragile or in a state of flux, working with approaches to mapping human, non-human and
more-than-human traces situated within a counter-cartographical framework (Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman, 2018). This approach aims to unsettle the embodied
experience of walking in a place through the act of slowing down to form a close tuning into its matter, and to disrupt notions around what is mapped, how it is mapped, by whom and for what purpose. In this way the work and the contextual writing explores multiple strands that weave together and meander in forms that echo the experience of walking, the estuary itself and my childhood memories of this place. All are inextricably entangled with my experience of the Taw, the residue of the estuary on my walking body, and the trace of my body within the estuary
Last summer, I gave you my song: singing restrictions for amateur choirs in summer 2021 following scores of hard days
Get PDFOne of the many problems encountered during Covid restrictions related to the Government’s response to singing. While professional choirs were eventually permitted to sing together, restrictions imposed by the government remained in place longer for amateur choirs. But what does ‘professional choirs’ as opposed to ‘amateur choirs’ mean? Seeking their reasoning, I emailed the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport asking for clarity. The second of three replies to me about the definitions stated that "professional and amateur singing is distinguished by the fact that professional singers will be paid for this act as part of their livelihood, while amateur singers will not" (DCMS, 1/7/21). My response included "When amateurs are paid for singing does that mean that their payment is not part of their livelihood? Does this have tax implications?" (1/7/21)
Governments need clear-cut, simple definitions, but are the definitions they have applied to this area of musical life correct? Scholarship about professional and amateur music-makers by Ruth Finnegan, Stephen Cottrell, and Robert Stebbins, seems to point to the fact the main distinction between professional and amateur in this context is reliant on individual self-definition. My paper draws on experiences of contemporary music-makers, examining original data collected between 2020 and 2021. It teases out answers about professional and amateur music-making before replying to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, who say, in their third reply (2/8/21), that they would be "more than happy" for me to send them a copy of my work