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Anger as Home Secretary ditches key review recommendations, failing Windrush scandal survivors and campaigners
Full text linkThis week, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman provided the UK parliament with an update on the government’s delivery of recommendations as outlined in the 2020 Windrush Lessons Learned Review. This included the announcement that the Home Office is dropping three of the 30 recommendations provided by the author of the review, Wendy Williams, who was appointed by the government as an independent advisor in the aftermath of the Windrush scandal
Imagining the future self through thought experiments
Full text linkThe ability of the mind to conceptualize what is not present is essential. It allows us to reason counterfactually about what might have happened had events unfolded differently or had another course of action been taken. It allows us to think about what might happen – to perform 'Gedankenexperimente' (thought experiments) – before we act. However, the cognitive and neural mechanisms mediating this ability are poorly understood. We suggest that the frontopolar cortex (FPC) keeps track of and evaluates alternative choices (what we might have done), whereas the anterior lateral prefrontal cortex (alPFC) compares simulations of possible future scenarios (what we might do) and evaluates their reward values. Together, these brain regions support the construction of suppositional scenarios
Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts and Modern Cultural Identities in England and Flanders
Full text linkThe desire to claim medieval books as objects of historic cultural significance helped to shape both collections and scholarship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This chapter explores how events in Flanders and England in the first quarter of the 20th century informed narratives about illuminated manuscripts as objects that could be associated with modern nation states. The approach taken here is Anglocentric, but it is ironic that an emphasis on English medieval manuscript illumination as distinctive from that produced on the Continent emerged, in part, in reaction to exhibitions in Bruges (at the heart of medieval Flanders) and Paris that were the results of international co- operation. The ideas about national cultural identity that were formulated in the first decade of the 20th century were entrenched by the destruction of the Great War, which particularly impacted Flanders and north-eastern France. In the 1920s, pre-war scholarship informed the creation of surveys of both Flemish and English manuscript art, which in turn laid foundations for later work. Ideas about manuscripts as items of national cultural heritage at the start of the 20th century have therefore shaped where and how we encounter many manuscripts today, and why many scholars have tended to treat the Channel as a barrier rather than a point of connection
The Falerii Novi Project
Full text linkThe Falerii Novi Project represents a newly formed archaeological initiative to explore the Roman city of Falerii Novi. The project forms a collaboration of the British School at Rome with a multinational team of partner institutions. Thanks to a rich legacy of geophysical work on both the site and its territory, Falerii Novi presents an exceptional opportunity to advance understanding of urbanism in ancient and medieval Italy. The Falerii Novi Project employs a range of methodologies, integrating continued site-scale survey with new campaigns of stratigraphic excavation, archival research and environmental archaeology. The project aims to present a more expansive and holistic urban history of this key Tiber Valley settlement by focusing on long-run socio-economic processes both within Falerii Novi and as they linked the city to its wider landscape
Pre-Industrial Western Printing Inks, c.1450-1850
Full text linkIt is often assumed that all printing inks are the same: black, inert, and stable over centuries. However, the ingredients in their recipes (or, as measurements were standardised in the 18th century, the components in their formulation) have varied enormously since their invention in the mid-1400s. This chapter offers a starting point for understanding the kind of pre-industrial oil-based printing inks that were commonly used for printing texts, images, music, and other kinds of content, mainly on paper and parchment supports, in a printing press, first in Western Europe and Central and Eastern Europe, areas under European colonial control, and other areas as the printing press spread. (Block-printing in Europe and relief printing in Asia conventionally uses a water-based ink.) This study begins with the invention of printing ink c.1450, when Johannes Gutenberg (d. 1468) created black printing ink for his first publications, and red printing ink c.1455 for the Gutenberg Bible. It ends with transformation of its production due to industrialisation and the development of synthetic constituents around1850. Relief, intaglio, and planographic (i.e. lithographic) printing inks had different pathways to industrialisation, but 1850 is a broadly indicative turning point because this timespan largely overlaps with the handpress period, c.1450–1830. Given the paucity of literature on this topic, it is believed that this chapter is the most substantial survey of the materiality of pre-industrial printing inks to date
Geographical approaches to religion in the past
Full text linkThis review assesses (anglophone) cross-disciplinary research that has used geographical methodologies to study religion in the past. It identifies three prominent themes within the existing literature: the spatalisation of religion, the intersections between religion and built environments, and the relationships between religion and physical landscapes. It argues that the application of geographical approaches to the study of religion in the past has made important contributions to feminist and postcolonial attempts to de-centre religious leaders and social elites. However, it also demonstrates that the existing literature has been fundamentally informed by inherently modern and western definitions of religion. Primarily, it identifies how the existing literature has prioritised the study of institutionalised Abrahamic religions, emphasised the analysis of sacred-secular dichotomies, and assumed that religious affiliation involves personal belief and spiritual encounter. In response, this paper calls for geographical approaches to religion in the past to engage with a more diverse range of subjects and use network or assemblage approaches to challenge modern and western assumptions about religious practices and experiences
Mapping moral language on US presidential primary campaigns reveals rhetorical networks of political division and unity
Full text linkDuring political campaigns, candidates use rhetoric to advance competing visions and assessments of their country. Research reveals that the moral language used in this rhetoric can significantly influence citizens’ political attitudes and behaviors; however, the moral language actually used in the rhetoric of elites during political campaigns remains understudied. Using a data set of every tweet
(N = 139, 412) published by 39 US presidential candidates during the 2016 and 2020 primary elections, we extracted moral language
and constructed network models illustrating how candidates’ rhetoric is semantically connected. These network models yielded two
key discoveries. First, we find that party affiliation clusters can be reconstructed solely based on the moral words used in candidates’
rhetoric. Within each party, popular moral values are expressed in highly similar ways, with Democrats emphasizing careful and just
treatment of individuals and Republicans emphasizing in-group loyalty and respect for social hierarchies. Second, we illustrate the
ways in which outsider candidates like Donald Trump can separate themselves during primaries by using moral rhetoric that differs
from their parties’ common language. Our findings demonstrate the functional use of strategic moral rhetoric in a campaign context
and show that unique methods of text network analysis are broadly applicable to the study of campaigns and social movements
‘Economic migrants’, ‘criminal smugglers’ and ‘a burden’: How people seeking asylum were portrayed in political and media discourse during pivotal moments in UK asylum policy and law 1999-2022
Full text linkThis project is an innovative piece of research which uses a timeline approach to analyse UK asylum policy from 1999-2022. The overall aim of the project is to understand how people seeking asylum have been represented throughout the development of UK asylum policy during this period. The enactment of the Nationality and Borders Act in 2022 inspired this project as it is momentous and has sparked outrage whilst questioning the UK’s commitment to international law. Initially, wider attitudes towards migration and
debates in the discourse around refugee protection were also alluded to, in order to provide some context and understanding to increasingly restrictive asylum policy in the UK. Also, to understand the development of UK asylum policy and law from 1999-2022, chapter 1 identifies five pivotal moments throughout this time period. The surrounding political and media discourse during these pivotal moments is then analysed to understand how people seeking asylum have been portrayed. Eleven codes were identified and split into three frameworks, people seeking asylum as: unacceptable, acceptable, and a political matter. Critical discourse analysis is then applied to gain a deeper understanding of each code and the language used. It is concluded that UK asylum policy and law has taken a ‘drip-drip’ approach to reduce the rights of
people seeking asylum, with the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act laying the foundations. The portrayal of people seeking asylum in political and media discourse during these pivotal moments mirrors the wider arguments surrounding refugee protection today, with the themes of threat and binaries remaining at the forefront
COST Action Blog: A Legal Identity for All?
Full text linkThe History of Identity Documentation in European Nations (HIDDEN) network unites scholars in history, migration studies, geography, sociology, law, linguistics, postcolonial studies, human rights and more to look at the history of ID regimes in Europe and beyond, drawing connections between the past and present