Teaching London’s Past Today: An Experiential Approach to a Global City

This article provides an account of teaching London’s cultural history on a semester-long, first-year undergraduate study-abroad course at Northeastern University London (NUL) using a multi-authored, case-study approach. It consists of an extended introduction by the course leader and a course instructor followed by seven contributions from current and former instructors, most of whom are still working at NUL, discussing examples of best practice in experiential learning in the humanities. Its intended audiences are teachers and lecturers of English and visual culture, of London, of pedagogy, and of other kinds of learning with a local, place-bound scope, as well as readers interested generally in transmitting London’s cultural past to learners and citizens in the present

"The rewarding mystery of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye"

An article on a single painting, entitled 'Man Science', by the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. It explores my changing understanding of her famously mysterious work over the past twelve years, since I first encountered it

A DFT assessment of the activation barrier for concerted proton transfer in cyclic water clusters (H2O)n where n = 3–8

Currently the proton mobility in water clusters is an area that is relatively unexplored and very important for biochemical and catalytic processes occurring in water. We therefore investigate the barrier for proton transfer in a concerted fashion in water clusters where n = 3–8. Our findings at the B3LYP/aug-cc-pVDZ level of theory indicate that protons can transfer in a low barrier process of 15.5 kJ/mol per H-bond. This is still larger than the average thermal energy at 298 K and therefore suggests that proton tunneling is also happening in water. We reveal the dynamic behavior of protons in cyclic water clusters in which concerted proton transfer occurs through an intermediate Zundel cation. We also offer the proton transfer barrier per H-bond in cyclic water clusters as a function of the size of the water cluster. This study helps in the understanding of the dynamic properties of protons in water

Honour, Competition and Cooperation across 13 Societies

Effectively addressing societal challenges often requires unrelated individuals to reduce conflict and successfully coordinate actions. The cultural logic of ‘honour’ is frequently studied in relation to conflict, but its role in competition and cooperation remains underexplored. The current study investigates how perceived normative and personally endorsed honour values predict competition and cooperation behaviours. In an online experiment testing preregistered hypotheses, 3,371 participants from 13 societies made incentivized competition decisions in a contest game and cooperation decisions for coordination in a step-level public goods game. Perceived normative honour values were associated with greater competition and greater cooperation at both societal and individual levels. Personally endorsing values tied to defence of family reputation was associated with greater coordinative efforts, whereas endorsing self-promotion and retaliation was associated with weaker engagement in coordination. These findings highlight the role of honour as a cultural logic (in its different forms) in shaping competition and cooperation across societies

Fortress Wapping

Multi-media poetry collection responding to the 1986 Wapping Disput

Garbage in garbage out? Impacts of data quality on criminal network intervention

Criminal networks such as human trafficking rings are threats to the rule of law, democracy and public safety in our global society. Network science provides invaluable tools to identify key players and design interventions for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), e.g., to dismantle their organisation. However, poor data quality and the robustness of criminal networks make effective intervention extremely challenging. Although there exists a large body of work building and applying network scientific tools to green intervene criminal networks, these work often neglect the problems of data incompleteness and inaccuracy. Moreover, there is thus far no comprehensive understanding of the impacts of data quality on the downstream effectiveness of interventions. This work investigates the relationship between data quality and intervention effectiveness based on classical graph theoretic and machine learning-based targeting approaches. Decentralization emerges as a major factor in network robustness, particularly under conditions of incomplete data, which renders intervention strategies largely ineffective. Moreover, the robustness of centralized networks can be boosted using simple heuristics, making targeted intervention more infeasible. Consequently, we advocate for a more cautious application of network science in disrupting criminal networks, the continuous development of an interoperable intelligence ecosystem, and the creation of novel network inference techniques to address data quality challenges

1970s transvestite taxonomies and the new queer frontier

According to Kadji Amin, vernacular discourses in recent years have “exploded Butler’s heterosexual matrix in a way hitherto unimaginable” (2023: 91–2). Yet neither queer nor transvernacular taxonomies are new, and the separation of sex, gender and sexuality has been a contested topic among trans subcultures since at least the 1950s. Combining original archival research with feminist, queer and trans philosophes of gender, this paper argues that, despite being almost entirely unhistoricized, the identity category of “transvestite” represented one of the most highly organized, internally differentiated, and intellectually significant identity formations of the 20th century. We can learn a lot about possible futures for queer studies by turning our attention to the recent past and the untheorized archive of 1970s trans community print culture is full of lists of the constantly evolving identity categories available for members of these early trans communities. From the 1960s onward, united through mailing lists and a burgeoning periodical culture, a complex ecosystem of transvestite subcultures emerged throughout the Anglosphere. Trans people used correspondence, newsletters and magazines, to connect across nations and continents. Through these formats, they discursively constructed how to understand transness, queering prevailing understandings of sex, gender and sexuality. Examining the impulses behind and effects of these complex categorical formations historicizes and enriches understandings of the ambivalence of trans taxonomies today

Virginia Prince, Robert Stoller and the Trans Feminist Intellectual History of the Sex/Gender Distinction

Scholars have begun to genealogize the sex/gender distinction, pointing out that it was not a second-wave feminist invention, but in fact has its roots in the clinical research of US sexologists. However, the influence of trans individuals on the development of these clinicians’ thought tends to go unacknowledged. Beginning with correspondence between Virginia Prince, a trans pharmacologist, and Robert Stoller, an influential psychiatrist, this paper demonstrates that Prince was a highly significant influence in the development of the sex/gender distinction. Revisiting Prince’s rationale for distinguishing between sex and gender historicizes the inbuilt conservatism and weaponizable currency of the heuristic