107 research outputs found
The Octopus
No full textAn interview with author Krissy Kneen, with critical reflections on her book 'Triptych' (Text, 2011
Sugar, A Morally Ambiguous Substance: Responsibility, Social Class and Pleasure in Scotland’s State Primary Schools
Full text linkChildren’s sugar consumption has been marked out as an important area of public health policymaking in the UK, due to connections between sugar consumption, obesity, type 2 diabetes and dental decay. Yet unlike other regulated substances (alcohol, tobacco, e-cigarettes), ‘moderate’ or ‘responsible’ sugar consumption, rather than abstinence, is the desired policy outcome. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Edinburgh in 2018–19 in two demographically mixed Scottish state primary schools, I examine how school staff navigate this space of lenience written into state health policy—whereby some sugar can be consumed, sometimes. The public health dangers of sugar consumption, coupled with its relational pleasures (through associations with kinship, nurture and celebration) help illuminate how schools—as responsible agents—attempt to care for and govern children. It is sugar’s ambiguity, I argue, that enables it to become a crucial tool for children’s socialisation. Where and how sugar can be consumed responsibly, and which pleasures are deemed permissible or excessive, vary contextually: they are shaped through social class, and depend on the school policy being enacted. Beyond being an object to regulate, children’s pleasures in sugar are central to affective, social and class-informed practices of creating morally responsible persons
Property in human body parts
Full text linkThe expanding uses of body parts in biomedicine and elsewhere has created new thinking on how we might understand the legal status of human biomaterials. This chapter examines why the question of whether property concepts apply to body parts has emerged, focusing on the numerous examples of judicial decisions in which property-based thinking has created a new way of regulating body parts, although not without giving rise to considerable debate in both the courts and scholarship. It also engages with the question of whether the law should treat human body parts as property, critically evaluating why and how the courts drew on property law concepts in addressing these challenges. It concludes by arguing the resort to property law principles is indicative of deeper lacunae in the law and in medical ethics which have created challenges and have left the courts reeling for solutions to difficult questions about who may use human biomaterials and how
Resuspended freeze-dried Nannochloropsis as a model laboratory system for concentrated fresh Nannochloropsis in ultrasound cell disruption experiments
No full textMicroalgae have rigid, complex cell walls hindering direct lipid extraction. Cell disruption techniques are used to rupture these cellular structures to increase lipid extraction. Researchers investigating the downstream processing of microalgae do not always have access to microalgal cultivation systems to generate large amounts of fresh microalgal biomass. Using resuspended freeze-dried microalgal biomass as a model laboratory system for concentrated fresh biomass during cell disruption experiments offers greater flexibility in experimental planning and omits investment costs of microalgal cultivation equipment. So far, it however remains unclear whether freeze-dried resuspended biomass can be used as a model laboratory system to represent concentrated fresh biomass during cell disruption and lipid extraction experiments. This paper thus evaluated the suitability of resuspended freeze-dried Nannochloropsis as a model laboratory system for concentrated fresh Nannochloropsis during cell disruption. Ultrasound assisted cell disruption was used as example cell disruption technique and lipid extraction efficiency and free fatty acid content were investigated. Tap water and 3% sodium chloride are both suitable resuspension media for the resuspension of freeze-dried Nannochloropsis. Resuspension duration should be limited (< 120 min) to prevent the formation of free fatty acids. The condition of the biomass (concentrated fresh, or resuspended freeze-dried) prior to ultrasound assisted cell disruption did not influence the resulting lipid extraction efficiency. Resuspended freeze-dried Nannochloropsis biomass in tap water or 3% sodium chloride can thus be used as a model laboratory system for fresh microalgal biomass during research on ultrasound assisted lipid extraction. The generalization of the results to other cultivation conditions, cell disruption techniques, components of interest or microalgal species should be carefully assessed.The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by Flanders’ Food and funded by Flanders Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VLAIO) through the cSBR
project EffSep (Grant number HBC.2019.0012)
Boycott!: Louise Imogen Guiney and the American Protective Association
No full textIrish-American poet and author Louise Imogen Guiney endured anti-Catholic discrimination in Boston during the 1890’s. Well known to contemporary Bostonians as both a writer and the daughter of an Irish Roman Catholic Civil War officer, Guiney was appointed postmaster in Auburndale in January 1894. She initially liked the job’s duties, pay, and stability. However, many residents of Auburndale, including those associated with the anti-Catholic American Protective Association, boycotted the post office by not buying stamps there. As a result, in October 1894 her salary was cut. Guiney’s friends subsequently led a counterattack that resulted in stamp purchases coming to Auburndale from Roman Catholics nationwide. Despite her reappointment to the postmaster position in 1897, Guiney’s ill health and dislike for the long hours of the job led to her resignation on 5 July 1897. In 1901 she moved to England, where she lived for the remainder of her life
Bittersweet: living with sugar and kin in contemporary Scotland
Full text linkThis thesis explores sugar consumption and kin-making in a north Edinburgh neighbourhood, and shows that sugar is central to processes of social relatedness. I argue that sugar reveals the meaning of kinship in Scotland, and that experiences of kinship reveal the material and symbolic potentialities of sugar. During 13 months of fieldwork in primary schools, homes and community groups, I traced the values and meanings attributed to sugar, and its role in processes of socialisation. Sugar poses ethical problems. It is marked out as by educational and medical institutions as publicly bad – for individual health and bodies. Yet sugar is also marked out as privately good – for social bonding, for indexing intimacy, for recognition, compensation, and for marking out the meanings of particular times, spaces, types of relationship, and the kind of authority that infuses them. Perhaps above all, sugar stands in for instances of care and particular kinds of (dangerous?) pleasure. How people and institutions resolve the ethical problems sugar poses in their everyday relationships tells us about these relationships, about the contested place of pleasure, and notions of responsibility.
This thesis is split into two parts. Part one examines sugar ‘in public’, and moves outwards from schools and medical institutions towards the home. Part two explores sugar ‘at home’, and examines the gendered nature of parenting, as well as other kinds of homes – those of grandparents for example. Both sections overlap in showing that public and private are not given but brought into being, with sugar used to generate and negotiate boundaries between the two. We see values of home brought into school – through home-baking – to mark out practices of care in school, and public health values that travel homewards. I theorise sugar as a substance of relatedness, which reveals kinship in Scotland as processual. Sugar reveals perceptions of children, and relationships with children, as fragile, and highlights the primacy of the bounded nuclear family home as the ideal site of good kinship and successful growing of children – even as kinship in Scotland unfolds in many places and possible configurations.
I use the term ‘living with sugar’ to challenge conceptions of sugar consumption as an individual choice. In showing the pervasiveness of sugar in its many forms and negative messages about sugar in this environment, I argue that sugar’s constant structural availability – and its status as a less-than-good moral option – can be rethought as a condition of life for those bringing up children. This framing of sugar as bad, yet safe to consume in moderation, expands the value attributed to sugar, increasing its specialness and the pleasures it enables. As diet becomes an arena in which good kinship can be evaluated, the management of sugar in children’s diets can become burdensome for parents – an effort often distributed along gendered lines. The common-sense, yet ambiguous, notions of balance and moderation, presented as a relatively straightforward ‘choice’, sets up many parents (especially mothers) for feelings of failure
Gray Display Typeface
No full textGray Display is a typeface based on a distinctive set of capital letters known as Oran Mor Monumental, designed by author and artist Alasdair Gray. Gray commissioned Edwin Pickstone, Imogen Ayres and Neil Mcguire to digitise and adjust his hand lettered capitals into type and to compliment these with lowercase letters, punctuation and numerals in order to create a fully functioning coherent typeface. Gray used the typeface for works such as his late partner Morag McAlpine's headstone as well as prints and other designs.
After his death it was used by BBC Scotland in a screencard to commemorate the author's passing and has gone on to be a key component in multiple works associated with the Alasdair Gray Archive such as the Alasdair Gray Stones which form a distinctive part of the Garscube Link Canal regeneration project.
The task of interpreting these artists letters into a coherent typeface was greatly aided by wise guidance from consultants Stefan Ellmer and Nicolas Sloan
Cool For You: Joan Didion, Renata Adler, and Elizabeth Hardwick
No full text© 2025 Isabella Imogen Constance Gullifer-LaurieCool is a term that defies conceptual fixity, evoking both intensity and restraint. In the latter half of the twentieth century, cool moved from being synonymous with the counterculture to the mainstream. Within the North-American cultural imaginary it signified a nonchalance and ironic rebelliousness at the same time as it summoned the effort of calculated detachment and conforming reserve. This thesis engages with this expansive, supple category of cool to consider the reception of the authorial persona and the textual production of three writers who shaped public discourse during this period: Joan Didion, Renata Adler, and Elizabeth Hardwick. Taking cool as an object of analysis, this thesis develops an embodied, biographical, paratextual literary criticism in order to produce new critical encounters with these writers, examining the relationship of style and celebrity to fiction, screenwriting, journalism, and criticism, with a focus on three novels: Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970), Adler’s Speedboat (1976), and Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (1979). This thesis elaborates on three aspects of coolness to advance its theoretical and textual engagement with each author, studying Didion’s allure, Adler’s attitude, and Hardwick’s authority
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