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No full textThe music of this piece was inspired by a visit to Inchcolm Abbey on Inchcolm island in the Firth of Forth, Scotland. The choice of words, and to an extent the structure, was informed by Bruckner's famous setting of this liturgical text. The neo-medieval soundworld with its organum-like parallelisms was suggested by the abbey ruins
Unravelling rituals, examining biases: a Christian’s inquiry into the Cambodian Buddhist custom of Pchumben
Get PDFThis thesis addresses an issue of cross-cultural understanding, focusing on the Cambodian ancestral practice of Pchumben as its central case. To mitigate preconceptions and prejudices and uncover local interpretive frameworks, this research develops a unique practice of embodied reflexivity (ER), drawing on the Buddhist discipline of anupassanā and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied perception. ER reflexively examines sensory and affective experiences and traces them into their embodied past, disclosing topologies of embedded narratives and their contextual constructions. This East-meets-West method enables comprehension at deep phenomenological structures, fostering more nuanced and empathic understandings of other religious cultures.
In this phenomenological ethnography, semantic and gestural resemblances were deconstructed, offering multivalent interpretations of Cambodian perspectives on worship, food offerings to deceased loved ones and hungry ghosts, and reciprocal relationships between the living and the dead. This study also highlights ritual’s epistemic roles in forming worldviews, shaping moral sensibilities, and constructing identities, via aesthetic pathways beyond conscious rationality. Additionally, this analysis articulates a non-dualistic conception of sasna (‘religion’), distinct from the Western Christian construct. For Cambodians, sasna is founded on tradition, an integrated socio-cosmological imaginaire, ethnic-national identity, and moral practice. Faith is a communal rather than personal affair, manifested in affective virtues rather than doctrinal beliefs. The thesis contributes to discourses in the anthropology of ritual and religion, Theravada studies, and Christian mission
Poetry versus colonialism: holding onto pedagogies of love and justice, despite everything
No full textIn his essay that which is held (1992) emigré writer John Berger wrote that “in every form of love a past and a future are grasped as if present. The momentary “holding”, seized by the imagination through the energy of love, realises a whole, which is outside time”. As Berger reflected, “what is ahistorical is the need to hope. And the act of hoping is inseparable from the energy of love, from that which “holds,” from that which is art’s constant example.”
Defining, contextualising and applying the intersectional theoretical frameworks of Berger, Hannah Arendt, Freire and bell hooks’ “ethics of love,” across their shared focus on the arts, this chapter’s method is an arts-practice based, qualitative, conceptual analysis of an educational initiative called Poetry versus Colonialism that works with museum, gallery and educational settings to explore British colonial history through creating poetry.
Decolonising pedagogies are necessarily contentious and emotional, high in tensions and cultural cracks, requiring both Frieire’s dialogue-based encounter of love to overcome oppression through knowledge, self-knowledge and empowerment and Arendt’s notion of self as an endless becoming- through doing, rather than being. Critically analysing ‘doings’ of the pedagogic process and poetry (as creatively constructed data) produced within the project, the chapter will explore what Poetry versus Colonialism ‘holds’ under hooks conviction that there can be “no love without justice” in Bhanot’s decolonising context of “radical resistance, love, healing and the demand for justice” when “navigating the cracks between worlds is difficult and painful” (2021)
Early childhood sustainable pedagogy into and beyond the 21st century
No full textIntroduction of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) (UNESCO 2015) and the subsequent Education for Sustainable Development: a roadmap (UNESCO 2020) has been seen to present challenges for Early Childhood Education in creating a path to support how young children see the world and themselves (Chapman & Gorman 2022). These challenges include: How adults’ view and understand children’s abilities and learning styles, and the empowerment of children’s voice. In this chapter we will investigate levels of sustainability awareness and adult confidence levels to engage with SDGs in practice. But how can we embrace this challenge to ensure that Early Childhood Education survives and flourishes into the 21st century and beyond? The call for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) (UNESCO 2020) and the Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy (DfE, 2023) highlights the need for children and adults to be active in becoming more sustainable, to challenge and be agents for all ecological participants. However, understanding and knowledge of ESD in Early Childhood practice has been left wanting, therefore confidence to embrace and embed it requires attention. In the following chapter we will be exploring the historical and contemporary impact of Sustainability in Early Childhood whilst also discussing the ways forward including an emphasis on the need to develop a Sustainable Pedagogy (Scollan, Boyd & Lee 2024)
Comparative assessment of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and human reviewers for full-text screening in systematic reviews on the impact of air pollution in respiratory diseases
No full textLarge language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in scientific research, education, and healthcare. Their roles in data searching, screening, extraction, and quality assessment hold promise for improving the systematic review process. However, concerns remain about their accuracy in literature research. This study aimed to compare the accuracy of LLMs and human reviewers in full-text screening for a systematic review. We searched for relevant studies from databases and registers. Full-text screening was performed by human reviewers, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek based on predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. We observed that ChatGPT had 73.6% agreement with human reviewers (κ = 0.43), while DeepSeek had 70.3% (κ = 0.35). Moreover, ChatGPT showed 73.6% accuracy, high sensitivity (0.923), but low specificity (0.487) compared to the human consensus. Similarly, DeepSeek had 70.3% accuracy, higher sensitivity (0.962), but lower specificity (0.359). Both ChatGPT and DeepSeek show promise for assisting full-text screening in systematic reviews but require further evaluation with well-defined prompt engineering
Diversity and urban economic growth
Get PDFAcross the world, increasing migratory flows of multiple sorts and directions are making cities ever more diverse and complex. Within this evolving urban context, population diversity manifests itself not only in a multiplicity of nationalities, citizenships and ethnicities but also in a diversity of cultures, traditions, languages, ages, genders, religions, sexual orientations, social classes and other forms of identity - a phenomenon that Vertovec (2007) refers to as the ‘diversification of diversity’ or ‘superdiversity’. Our focus here is upon migrant and ethnic population diversity, which has become an ever more significant characteristic of contemporary urban centres around the world and a defining feature in the emergence of a number of ‘superdiverse’ global cities such as London and New York (Sassen, 1991)
Bulgaria's Eurozone games
No full textThe circumstances surrounding a proposed initiation of a referendum on Bulgaria’s entry date to the Eurozone are symptomatic of the country’s rule of law decay
International security studies: theory and practice (3rd edition)
No full textFully revised to incorporate recent developments, this third edition of International Security Studies provides students with a comprehensive and accessible textbook on security with a particular emphasis on the use of case studies to illustrate theoretical debates.
In addition to presenting the major theoretical perspectives, the book examines a range of important and controversial topics in covering both traditional military and non-military security issues such as nuclear proliferation, humanitarian intervention, food security and environmental security. Unlike most standard textbooks, the volume also offers a wide range of case studies – including chapters on the US, China, the Middle East, Russia, East Africa and the Arctic – providing detailed analyses of important global security issues and the application of theoretical debates to major contemporary issues
The Staircase
Get PDFVron Harris's three part film, The Staircase, investigates cinematic subjectivity and whether a film can simultaneously immerse us in a character's inner world while highlighting the inevitable chasm between their internal experience and outward presentation. By grappling with this fundamental tension between inner feeling and external facade, the film explores our understanding of human psychology as portrayed through characters on screen
Assessment of linear speed and change of direction ability in elite male soccer: a systematic review of test protocols used in scientific literature
No full textLinear sprinting and turning actions are frequently performed in a soccer game, linked with crucial game moments. A comprehensive and systematic search in linear speed and change of direction (COD) ability assessment procedures in elite soccer is needed. The aims of the systematic review are (1) to identify the tests and outcome variables used to assess linear speed and COD ability of elite male soccer players, (2) to provide normative values for the most common tests of linear speed and COD ability, and (3) to report the reliability values of the identified linear speed and COD tests. For linear speed testing, sprint distances ranged from 5-50 m, with 10 m (72 studies), 20 m (54 studies), 5 m (46 studies), and 30 m (46 studies) being the most frequently assessed. For COD testing, the zig-zag test (14 studies), the agility T-test (11 studies), and the 505 COD test (8 studies) represented the most frequently performed tests. Distances shorter than 30 m prevailed in linear speed testing. COD tests employed a wide range of distances, modes of travel, angles, and number of turns, with no gold-standard protocol being evident. Standardized methods are imperative for accurate benchmarking and transferability of the results