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EcoGothic: dislocations of scale
No full textBook synopsis: Today's environmental decimation and climate crises have arisen from our drive for individual material prosperity. We even appreciate nature primarily for its fulfilment of our interests, whether economic productivity, aesthetic pleasure, or personal well-being. And yet, we still ask how we have reached this dire ecological condition and what it is that has kept us from acting effectively to maintain a thriving and diverse biosphere. This collection of essays by major scholars from around the world analyzes how the industrial, imperialist Victorian era gave rise to today's unwillingness to move beyond our acquisitive drive. But it also explores the Victorians' initiation of the modern environmentalist movement, formulation of the first legislation defending rights of nonhuman animals, and invention of literary forms for contesting environmental degradation. In this most unlikely of eras, the volume uncovers both valuable insights into the limitations of our own environmentalism and innovative suggestions for overcoming them
Martin Paul Eve in conversation with Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
No full textThe inaugural SHARPIES, a global book history festival celebrating work in book history from around the world, will take place from July 7–9, 2026 (although these dates vary according to time zone). All the events are free for SHARP members, but registration is required. Registration will open in March 2026.
On the Tuesday of the festival, at UTC 13.00-14.00, I will be interviewed by/in conversation with Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, with time for audience questions. Matthew Kirschenbaum was the Chair of the SHARP Board of Directors from 2021–25 and is Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence and English at the University of Virginia and the 2009 winner of the George A. and Jeanne S. DeLong Book History Book Prize for Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). He is, in short, one of my academic heroes; an intellectual with a consistently fresh way of looking at and understanding technology and its histories. My recent book was sincerely indebted to his work as an intellectual foundation for thinking about technologies and reading them (I hope he thinks this is a good thing). I am absolutely thrilled that we will be having this discussion. I hope many of you can join us
Sympathy, grief and contagious emotions in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton
No full textThis chapter argues that Mary Barton sets out both to represent the beneficial effects of grief on its characters and to engender similarly mournful thoughts in its readers, through which they might develop their own virtuous potential. With its reiterated representations of death and mourning, Gaskell’s first novel might be read as an idiosyncratic form of death-centric Bildungsroman—a TrauerArbeitsroman, perhaps, or novel of the work of mourning. Mary’s education into the processes of grief, and Gaskell’s faith in the beneficial power of shared narratives of loss and recovery, determine both the novel's content and form. Grief is depicted as a highly communicable, even contagious, emotion, capable of being passed on both through the consumption of mournful narratives and through a process of intersubjective affective contagion. Identifying a source of these ideas in Wordsworth, this chapter sets out Gaskell’s belief that the circulation and consumption of these narratives might contribute to a wider project of national renewal – thus justifying the novel’s intervention in the condition of England question
The influence of passenger rail interventions in London on relative deprivation in affected station catchment areas
Full text linkThis paper investigates the relationship between passenger rail interventions in Greater London and deprivation indices in affected station catchment areas. Interventions were selected for study only if they were associated with a significant change in jobs accessibility. It makes use of the difference-in-difference (DiD) research technique to test if these interventions have been associated with improvements in the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) ranking for the Lower-layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) within a 15-minute walking time of a station affected by the intervention. Though the study finds that a positive relationship is observed in all three case studies, in none is this relationship statistically significant. These findings illustrate the difficulties in demonstrating a relationship between passenger rail interventions and reductions in social and material deprivation, with consequences for future directions of policy and the practice of transport appraisal
Growing Up and Going Out: Youth Culture, Commerce, and Leisure Space in Post-War Britain by Sarah Kenny (review)
No full textPaid to play: football club owner ambitions on promotion to the English Premier League and impact on the league
No full textPurpose: What can be inferred about the financial and sporting ambitions of football club owners when promoted to the English Premier League (EPL)? Does this effect the competitive balance of the league? Do parachute payments effect sporting outcomes in the EPL?
Design/methodology/approach: The expected financial gain and additional expenditure on talent for clubs promoted to the EPL are calculated and compared to a hypothetical scenario where clubs spend at least the full gain. The league competitive balance is compared to a hypothetical league without newly promoted clubs.
Findings: More owners are concerned with retaining expected gains than with avoiding relegation. This did not significantly adversely affect competitive balance in the EPL. Clubs promoted without parachute payments were more successful in avoiding relegation from the EPL.
Originality/value: Owners of clubs promoted to the EPL are less “win oriented” than their financial gain would allow but more successful if not promoted with a parachute payment
Beauty, ugliness and ideas of difference
No full textUgliness and beauty have become politicized in the modern period – used to marginalize and silence, and also to empower. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current climate of “body shaming” and “body positivity,” in which feeling empowered and attractive has become a marketable commodity. This chapter charts the mobilization of aesthetics: within the eugenics movement and “unsightly beggar” ordinances in the early decades of the twentieth century; through the politics of commemoration and protest following World War I, and in the new discourse of rights starting in the 1960s and 70s. Aesthetics becomes a battleground in the Black is Beautiful movement, second-wave feminism, and in attempts to destigmatize homosexuality, disability and non-normative bodies generally. Bodily difference in the modern world is routinely subject to legal definition, professional scrutiny, photographic documentation, and medical correction. But as the universality of aesthetic categories wanes it becomes possible to think of beauty and ugliness as fluid and contested terms open to creative and political re-appropriation
Mixing of the symmetric beta-binomial splitting process on arbitrary graphs
Full text linkWe study the mixing time of the symmetric beta-binomial splitting process on finite weighted connected graphs G = (V,E,{re}e∈E) with vertex set V , edge set E and positive edge-weights re > 0 for e ∈ E. This is an interacting particle system with a fixed number of particles that updates through vertex-pairwise interactions which redistribute particles. We show that the mixing time of this process can be upper-bounded in terms of the maximal expected meeting time of two independent random walks on G. Our techniques involve using a process similar to the chameleon process invented in [18] to bound the mixing time of the exclusion process
‘Give PhD archive attention it deserves,’ British Library urged
No full textScholars criticise lack of progress on restoring repository of 600,000 PhD theses more than two years after it was felled by cyberattac
Social networking site use, depressive and anxiety symptoms in adolescents: evidence from a longitudinal cohort study (SCAMP)
Full text linkBackground: The growing and pervasive use of social network sites (SNS) has raised concerns about their impact on adolescent mental health during this sensitive developmental phase. Existing longitudinal studies are constrained by methodological limitations and limited exploration of underlying mechanisms. We investigated the longitudinal associations between SNS use and depressive and anxiety symptoms in adolescents and whether sleep mediated these associations.
Methods: We analysed longitudinal data from 2350 adolescents from 31 schools in London, participating in the Study of Cognition, Adolescents, and Mobile Phones (SCAMP). The exposure was self-reported duration of SNS use at baseline (aged 11–12 years). Outcomes were depressive and anxiety symptoms at follow-up, analysed as symptom severity and clinically significant symptoms (aged 13–15 years). The associations between SNS use and depressive and anxiety symptoms were assessed via multi-level ordinal logistic regression (symptom severity) and logistic regression (clinically significant symptoms). The mediation effects of insufficient sleep, sleep onset latency, and sleep disturbance were assessed by mediation analysis.
Results: Compared to 0–30 min per day, more than 3 h per day of SNS use at baseline was associated with higher severity levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms (adjusted odds ratio (OR) = 1.47, 95% CI 1.12, 1.93 and OR = 1.40, 95% CI 1.06, 1.83, respectively) and clinically significant depressive and anxiety symptoms at follow-up (OR = 1.70, 95% CI 1.19, 2.42 and OR = 1.60, 95% CI 1.11, 2.31, respectively). The associations between total and weekend SNS use and depressive symptom severity were stronger in girls than boys. Other associations were similar by gender. Insufficient sleep duration (particularly on weekdays) and sleep onset latency at baseline partly mediated the associations of SNS use and depressive and anxiety symptoms (proportion of mediation ranged between 11.1% and 33.1%). The mediation effects of sleep disturbance were less marked.
Conclusions: In a large longitudinal cohort, we found that SNS use exceeding 3 h per day is associated with increased risks of depressive and anxiety symptoms in adolescents. Findings from mediation analysis suggest that addressing poor sleep hygiene in relation to SNS use might mitigate the negative impact of high SNS use. Our findings may inform the development of early secondary school curricula incorporating digital literacy and sleep hygiene education
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