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The Ethics of Open Scholarship
Get PDFA panel at Michigan State University's Ethics Week event on the ethics of open scholarshi
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
The influence of passenger rail interventions in London on relative deprivation in affected station catchment areas
Get PDFThis 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 textSympathy, 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
Paid 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
‘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
Mixing of the symmetric beta-binomial splitting process on arbitrary graphs
Get PDFWe 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
‘Who will change the world?’: Willi Münzenberg, Kuhle Wampe and the call for a united front
Get PDFKuhle Wampe, Or Who Owns the World (1932) was among the last motion pictures (partly) produced by Prometheus, the film company co-founded by the communist publisher Willi Münzenberg. Whilst the film is often cited for its use of Brechtian montage techniques, its relation to Münzenberg’s media organisation remains less well discussed. This paper explores how Münzenberg utilised the potential of film, alongside his other activities, to open creative, anti-sectarian approaches to the organisation of the working class in response to the call for a united front against the advance of the fascist threat. Here, the focus falls on the tactful ways Münzenberg highlighted the need to move beyond the isolating ‘camp mentality’ that Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge analyse in relation to the German Communist Party (KPD). The aim is to situate the production of Kuhle Wampe within a counterpublic sphere formed from a semi-autonomous media network that operated within, but presented a challenge to, the narrow and abstract public sphere constructed by the Stalinised KPD. The film is interpreted as one of the final attempts to articulate a united-front policy before the victory of German fascism in 1933 and, therefore, as an urgent contribution to the question of strategy just as the strategic debates of the interwar years appeared to be coming to an end
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