30472 research outputs found
Sort by
Labour market regulations and efficiency in tourism industry
Get PDFThis study examines the effect of the labour market regulations on Greek tourism industry performance. The tourism industry, the steam engine of the Greek economy, always drives to enhance efforts to reach further savings in operating costs. However, the labour regulations that influence the tourism sector’s ability to adjust costs have not been thoroughly investigated. We present a novel methodology that permits the evaluation of the effect of labour market regulations on technical and allocative efficiency in one step. The empirical results demonstrate the complexity of the relationship between labour regulations and efficiency. Labour market liberalization is associated with improvements in allocative efficiency but may have opposite effects on technical efficiency. Policymakers should pay attention to these complicated interactions when planning reforms on labour market
Jewish women in comics: bodies and borders
No full textBook synopsis: In this groundbreaking collection of essays, interviews, and artwork, contributors draw upon a rich treasure trove of Jewish women’s comics to explore the representation of Jewish women’s bodies and bodily experience in pictorial narratives. Spanning national, cultural, and artistic borders, the essays shine a light on the significant contributions of Jewish women to comics.
The volume includes major figures such as Miriam Katin, Emil Ferris, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Rutu Modan alongside works by artists translated for the first time into English, such as artist Rona Mor. Exploring topics such as family, motherhood, miscarriages, queerness, gender and Judaism, illness, war, Haredi and Orthodox family life, and the lingering impact of the Holocaust, the contributors present unique, at times intensely personal, insights into how Jewishness intersects with other forms of identity and identification. In doing so, the volume deepens our understanding of Jewish women’s experiences
Public survivors: the burdens and possibilities of speaking as a survivor
Get PDFThis chapter will explore the narrative politics of survivor memoirs and autobiographical accounts of sexual violence. I argue that, particularly from the 1980s onwards, these public interventions, largely from otherwise unknown women, have played a significant role in shaping public discourses around survivors and sexual violence more generally. In telling their stories, these women become what I call ‘public survivors’, granted a limited form of authority to speak as experts on sexual violence in the public sphere.
I argue that while, overall, these narratives have helped to construct more overtly ‘pro-survivor’ or less ‘victim-blaming’ public responses, these attitudes have not extended to all survivors or all narratives. Individual public narratives that achieve recognition tend to feature white women able to mobilize narratives of blamelessness in response to stranger rape. In considering the absences within this genre I ask how and why some narratives continue to be less tellable within the public sphere. Additionally, survivor memoirs, and the survivors who author them, have a complicated relationship to feminist politics more broadly. While the need to listen to and believe survivor accounts of sexual violence is a core tenet of contemporary feminist politics, survivor attitudes to feminism, and particularly its institutional manifestations, range from identification to ambivalence and even overt hostility.
Overall, I argue, that the genre of memoirs offers an insight into the complicated relationship between feminism and survivor politics, as well as the strengths and limitations of speaking out about sexual violence as a tool for social and cultural change
Spiritual form: Walter Pater's encounters with William Blake
Get PDFThe relationship between the arts was central to Pater’s literary criticism. His interest in the poet-painters Blake and Rossetti offers an ideal corpus for thinking about form within and across the arts. Although Pater never devoted a whole essay to Blake, his name surfaces in discussions about form and style, image and meaning, soul and mind, in which literature is defined within a classical and European aesthetic tradition. Artistic examples and analogies shape a comparative and complementary understanding of literature and art through exercises in appreciation and interartistic lines of cultural influence that present Blake and Hugo as the ‘true sons’ of Michelangelo. This chapter traces Pater’s engagement with Blake through Swedenborg and Swinburne, and then focuses on Blake’s function in Pater’s poetics. Pater’s explicit references to Blake bring to view his illustrations to Job and Robert Blair’s The Grave, revealing the role played by visual invention in his attempts to define the organic interfusion of form and matter in literary writing. In his essays on Demeter and Dionysus, he mentions Blake as a ‘ “survival” from a different age’, who can articulate an aesthetic politics for the present through the experience of ‘spiritual form’, a concept he attributes to Blake. Blake had used this formula satirically in the titles of his dystopian allegorical portraits of Pitt, Nelson, and Napoleon to denounce their political imposition as a satirical yoking of opposites. These paintings were exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club’s Blake retrospective when Pater developed his own idea of ‘spiritual form’ in 1876. In a strong act of misreading and revaluation, Pater repurposes the term to signal the utopian potential of an ancient embodied aesthetic to heal the separation between form and content and to restore the prelapsarian eternal body celebrated in Blake’s prophetic writings. Comparison with Blake’s discussion of Chaucer shows how both writers look to sculpture to develop an embodied ideal of the human form divine and to define how it might be achieved, restored, reformed through an embodied aesthetic. Engagement with Blake illuminates the inter-art dynamics of Pater’s critical practice, providing insight into the role of art criticism in developing his writing about literature. Pater’s Blake brings out a discipline of literary form that is shaped by a multisensorial aesthetic
Cleaning up UK politics: what would better lobbying regulation look like?
No full textThe UK has a fragmented, partial and weak system of lobbying regulation. The system creates a self-reinforcing cycle of ‘exposure’ and worsening public attitudes. In order to make the case for reform and indicate possible paths, this article, first, reviews the system’s faults and weaknesses. Second, it analyses how
the lack of political will for reform in Westminster has contributed to a transparency and integrity regime below international standards. Finally, it examines how this cycle can be broken. While the UK lobbying law needs reform, we must look beyond the letter of regulation, taking into account the levels of use
and political support, as well as the transparency and ethics ecosystem in which lobbying sits. Only by improvements to all of these areas can there be the possibility of stronger, more positive feedback loops, which can shift behaviour and, ultimately, attitude
Passivity and gender: psychical inertia and maternal stillness
Get PDFWho is afraid of passivity? Historically, women and minoritized people have had good reason to be, given that passivity has been a way to keep them out of the world of “reason.” Freud’s move from the activity/passivity binary as the principle of all instinct, to its gendering as femininity/passivity and masculinity/activity, leads him to assert the “repudiation of femininity” as the bedrock of psychic life (Freud, S. 1937. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 23, 209–254. London: Hogarth Press). This has led to a generative history of feminist, queer and Black psychoanalytic scholarship that constantly re-opens the question of female subjectivity and sexuality, and what we mean by psychic femininity and masculinity. However, what does remains as “bedrock,” even in this theorizing, is the figure of the mother in the internal world of the infant – supposedly castrated yet all-powerful, and requiring that the infant defend itself against what is stirred up as a result of dependency on her. After reviewing some of the psychoanalytic debates about femininity, I turn to “stillness” rather than passivity to suggest that we can identify a maternal element that is on the side of development, a figuration of psychical inertia that holds the capacity for waiting, stopping, ceasing and withdrawing in a world in which these mental functions are sorely missing
Learning a deep-feature clustering model for gait-based individual identification
Get PDFGait biometrics which concern with recognizing individuals by the way they walk are of a paramount importance these days. Human gait is a candidate pathway for such identification tasks since other mechanisms can be concealed. Most common methodologies rely on analyzing 2D/3D images captured by surveillance cameras. Thus, the performance of such methods depends heavily on the quality of the images and the appearance variations of individuals. In this study, we describe how gait biometrics could be used in individuals’ identification using a deep feature learning and inertial measurement unit (IMU) technology. We propose a model that recognizes the biological and physical characteristics of individuals, such as gender, age, height, and weight, by examining high-level representations constructed during its learning process. The effectiveness of the proposed model has been demonstrated by a set of experiments with a new gait dataset generated using a shoe-type based on a gait analysis sensor system. The experimental results show that the proposed model can achieve better identification accuracy than existing models, while also demonstrating more stable predictive performance across different classes. This makes the proposed model a promising alternative to current image-based modeling
A year of looking in on academia
No full textAs many of you know, I took secondment from my academic role this year to work on research and development at Crossref. A variety of factors inspired this, not least my health and wanting to be able to work from home. After a year, I have reflected on my experience of transferring to a very good employer outside of academia. If you did the same, your mileage might vary, because it all depends where you end up working and for whom. Crossref turns out to be a most excellent organisation to work for. YMMV. I should also say that I still remain a Professor at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, and that is not planned to change. Rather, I will be moving onto a research-only contract for the longer term
Data sources:
Access Repository Dashboard
Do you manage Birkbeck Institutional Research Online? Access insider analytics, issue reports and manage access to outputs from your repository in the CORE Repository Dashboard!