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Adultery as a defence: the construction of a legally permissible violence, England 1810
Get PDFThe Mawgridge’s case in 1707 set the precedent where adultery was recognised as a justified trigger for the husband’s killing of his wife’s lover; this crystallised a partial defence for provocation. However, in an 1810 case, the killing of the unfaithful wife followed a manslaughter conviction rather than murder for the first time. This study aims to investigate the shaping of a legally permissible violence, that is, the mitigation of the husband’s culpability in killing his adulterous wife. This provides the opportunity to question the (ir)rationality behind the judiciary’s discourse in the case of R v Clinton 2012; here, despite infidelity being abolished in 2009 in England and Wales as a defence for murder, the judges still insisted on its relevance in our culture and hence on legal culpability. The theoretical framework in this paper draws upon the scholarship of masculinity, the family, and the law. This paper discusses the contribution of the hegemonic male identity in creating this legal violence and fortifying social-hierarchical structure
Why do households repay their debt in UK during the COVID-19 crisis?
Get PDFIn this paper, the authors investigate whether coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) impacts household finances, like household debt repayments in the UK.
Design/methodology/approach: This paper employs a vector autoregressive (VAR) model that nests neural networks and uses Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) techniques. The authors use data information related to COVID-19, financial markets and household finances.
Findings: The authors' results show that household debt repayments' response to the first principal component of COVID-19 shocks is negative, albeit of low magnitude. However, when the authors employ specific COVID-19-related data like vaccines and tests the responses are positive, insinuating the underlying dynamic complexities. Overall, confirmed deaths and hospitalisations negatively affect household debt repayments. The authors also report low persistence in household debt repayments. Generalised impulse response functions (IRFs) confirm the main results. As draconian measures, the lockdowns are eased and the COVID-19 shocks are diminishing, and household financial data converge to the levels prior to the pandemic albeit with some lags.
To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that examines the impact of the pandemic on household debt repayments. The authors' findings show that policy response in the future should prioritise innovation of new vaccines and testing
Authority on the border of work and play: Oakeshott and Democratic Theory
Get PDFThe distinction between work and play is a defining feature of the modern world. But the border between them has been a site of major political contestation, giving rise to new forms of authority. I turn to the work of Michael Oakeshott to examine the distinction between work and play and how it relates to the idea of authority. I argue that reading Oakeshott on work, play, conduct, and authority can give us important insights into key questions of democratic theory at a time when socio-economic and technological changes are once again transforming the border of work and play
The Bay: Radio Times article
No full textArticle about the writing of The Bay for the Radio Times, March 2023
Bridge-building between communities: Imagining the future of biomedical autism research
Get PDFA paradigm shift of research culture is required to ease perceived tensions between autistic people and the biomedical research community. As a group of autistic and non-autistic scientists and stakeholders, we contend that through participatory research we can reject a deficit-based conceptualisation of autism whilst building a shared vision for a neurodiversity-affirmative biomedical research paradigm
'My Village': organising the world and structuring the colonial architectural archive
No full textThe problems of archives accumulated under colonialism are now well known. This paper uses aspects of the Percy Johnson-Marshall Collection at the University of Edinburgh to reflect on how to interpret the archive not only through what it records, or the relation between what survives and what does not, but in terms of alternative ways of understanding the archive’s conceptual structure. As an influential post-Second World War architect and planner, active in Britain and in international organisations, Percy Johnson-Marshall’s (1915–1993) attitudes towards the work of the welfare state were significantly formed by his colonial background and his reactions against that background. This article draws out the deeper meanings of his archive by deploying A. J. Greimas’ ‘semiotic square’, as interpreted by Fredric Jameson. Explaining it first via the legal thriller Dark Waters (2019), which has an archive as its narrative pivot, the semiotic square is then used to map the conceptual structure of the Johnson-Marshall Collection. Finally, the article focusses on ‘My Village’, a set of papers in the collec- tion documenting a pedagogic project preparing Indian soldiers to reform their villages following wartime service. Here themes of organis- ation and disorganisation (good and bad villages) are specific articula- tions of the archive’s epistemology while the idea of collectivity is problematically related to them
Seismic tomography of Nabro Caldera, Eritrea: insights into the magmatic and hydrothermal systems of a recently erupted volcano
Get PDFUnderstanding the crustal structure and the storage and movement of fluids beneath a volcano is necessary for characterizing volcanic hazard, geothermal prospects and potential mineral resources. This study uses local earthquake traveltime tomography to image the seismic velocity structure beneath Nabro, an off-rift volcano located within the central part of the Danakil microplate near the Ethiopia-Eritrea border. Nabro underwent its first historically documented eruption in June 2011, thereby providing an opportunity to analyze its post-eruptive state by mapping subsurface fluid distributions. We use a catalog of earthquakes detected on a temporary seismic array using machine learning methods to simultaneously relocate the seismicity and invert for the three-dimensional P- and S-wave velocity structures (VP, VS) and the ratio between them (VP/VS). Overall, our model shows higher than average P- and S-wave velocities, suggesting the presence of high-strength, solidified intrusive magmatic rocks in the crust. We identify an aseismic region of low VP, low VS, and high VP/VS ratio at depths of 6–10 km b.s.l., interpreted as the primary melt storage region that fed the 2011 eruption. Above this is a zone of high VS, low VP, and low VP/VS ratio, representing an intrusive complex of fractured rocks partially saturated with over-pressurized gases. Our observations identify the persistence of magma in the subsurface following the eruption, and track the degassing of this melt through the crust to the surface. The presence of volatiles and high temperatures within the shallow crust indicate that Nabro is a viable candidate for geothermal exploration
Real-time monitoring of infant theta power during naturalistic social experiences
Get PDFInfant-directed speech and direct gaze are important social cues that shape infant’s attention to their parents. Traditional methods for probing their effect on infant attention involve a small number of pre-selected screen- based stimuli, which do not capture the complexity of real-world interactions. Here, we used neuroadaptive Bayesian Optimization (NBO) to search a large ‘space’ of different naturalistic social experiences that system- atically varied in their visual (gaze direct to averted) and auditory properties (infant directed speech to nonvocal sounds). We measured oscillatory brain responses (relative theta power) during episodes of naturalistic social experiences in 57 typically developing 6- to 12-month-old infants. Relative theta power was used as input to the NBO algorithm to identify the naturalistic social context that maximally elicited attention in each individual infant. Results showed that individual infants were heterogeneous in the stimulus that elicited maximal theta with no overall stronger attention for direct gaze or infant-directed speech; however, individual differences in attention towards averted gaze were related to interpersonal skills and greater likelihood of preferring speech and direct gaze was observed in infants whose parents showed more positive affect. Our work indicates NBO may be a fruitful method for probing the role of distinct social cues in eliciting attention in naturalistic social contexts at the individual level
The effects of typical ageing on cognitive control: recent advances and future directions
Get PDFCognitive control is one of the most fundamental aspects of human life. Its ageing is an important contemporary research area due to the needs of the growing ageing population, such as prolonged independence and quality of life. Traditional ageing research argued for a global decline in cognitive control with age, typically characterised by slowing processing speed and driven by changes in the frontal cortex. However, recent advances questioned this perspective by demonstrating high heterogeneity in the ageing data, domain-specific declines, activity changes in resting state networks, and increased functional connectivity. Moreover, improvements in neuroimaging techniques have enabled researchers to develop compensatory models of neural reorganisation that helps negate the effects of neural losses and promote cognitive control. In this article on typical ageing, we review recent behavioural and neural findings related to the decline in cognitive control among older adults. We begin by reviewing traditional perspectives and continue with how recent work challenged those perspectives. In the discussion section, we propose key areas of focus for future research in the field
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