Decolonising Congregational Music

Perusal of the Christian Congregational License International (CCLI) charts indicates that this musical worship canon, much like academic curricula, is authored by songwriters who are overwhelmingly male and white. While the CCLI is not a total representation of all congregational singing, it is perhaps the only mechanism we have of systematically assessing this area. The system is also reflective of those reaping the economic and prestigious benefits associated with incorporation. While some scholars have established that worship music has the ability to transcend geographical boundaries and connect worshippers to global networks, others such as Evans identified its deleterious impacts in undermining local contributions. Few, however, have examined this topic from a decolonial perspective. Black Majority Churches (BMC) signified by their musical practices and expertise are deemed to be amongst the fastest growing branches of Christianity in the UK and their songwriters and worship leaders are one of the groups invisible within the CCLI. Using semi-constructed interviews with members of UK BMC churches and representatives from CCLI, this chapter will explore some of the complexities in regard to decolonising congregational music in the UK

Understanding change – developing a typology of therapy outcomes from the experience of adolescents with depression

Background: Outcome measures mostly focusing on symptom reduction to measure change cannot indicate whether any personally meaningful change has occurred. There is a need to broaden the current understanding of outcomes for adolescent depression and identify whether holistic, interlinked patterns of change may be more clinically meaningful. Objective: To create a typology of therapy outcomes based on the experiences of adolescents with depression. Method: Interview data from 83 participants from a clinical trial of the psychological treatment of adolescent depression was analysed using ideal type analysis. Results: Six ideal types were constructed, reflecting different evaluations of the holistic impact of therapy: “I’ve worked on my relationships”, “With the insight from therapy, and feeling validated, I can cope with life challenges better”, “My mood still goes up and down”, “If I want things to change, I need to help myself”, “Therapy might help, but it hasn’t been enough”, and “I don’t feel therapy has helped me”. Conclusion: Assessing change using outcome measures may not reflect the interconnected experience for adolescents or the contextual meaning of symptom change. The typology developed offers a way of considering the impact of therapy, taking into account how symptom change is experienced within a broader perspective

Decadent Aesthetics in Cyril Scott’sTranslations and Song Settings

Of the early twentieth-century composers inspired by decadent and symbolist verse, Cyril Scott (1879-1970) produced the greatest number of literary translations and musical adaptations. This essay considers Scott’s literary translations of Charles Baudelaire and Stefan George alongside his song settings of Ernest Dowson’s poems within the context of the cosmopolitan aesthetic circles in which he moved. The essay argues that a productive reading of his work takes into account a “nineties” decadent aesthetics that emphasizes sensuality, mood, and interstitiality and can be read across both his literary translations and song settings

The British State, Citizenship Rights and Gendered Folk Devils: The Case of Shamima Begum

The revoking of Shamima Begum’s citizenship exemplifies much of the purposes of contemporary anti-Muslim racism and underlines its significant gendered element. Both state and media actors constructed the 15-year old as a problematic other, both to justify conditional citizenship ideologically, and to use her case to strengthen and add to the framework for making it legal. This comes in a context in which British Muslims and members of the British Windrush generation are being denied citizenship and the rights that go with it. We argue that Shamima Begum’s construction as a gendered folk devil must be understood in the context of nation states shifting their purpose and legitimacy from ‘civil rights’ to ‘national security’ and strengthening two-tier citizenship rights to control residents of colour, increase the state’s authoritarian purpose and, as part of an ongoing process, to transform the concept of ‘national security’ into legal reality, to further militarise the state and its borders against the ‘migrant crisis’ and, ultimately, to stifle dissent

Shorter night-time sleep duration and later sleep timing from infancy to adolescence

Background: Here we 1) examined the trajectories of night-time sleep duration, bedtime and mid-point of night-time sleep (MPS) from infancy to adolescence, and 1) explored perinatal risk factors for persistent poor sleep health. Methods: This study used data from 12,962 participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Parent or self-reported night-time sleep duration, bedtime and wake-up time were collected from questionnaires at 6, 18 and 30 months, and at 3.5, 4-5, 5-6, 6-7, 9, 11, and 15-16 years. Child’s sex, birth weight, gestational age, health, and temperament, together with mother’s family adversity index (FAI), age at birth, prenatal socio-economic status, and postnatal anxiety and depression, were included as risk factors for persistent poor sleep health. Latent Class Growth Analyses were applied first to detect trajectories of night-time sleep duration, bedtime and MPS, and we then applied logistic regressions for the longitudinal associations between risk factors and persistent poor sleep health domains. Results: We obtained four trajectories for each of the three sleep domains. In particular, we identified a trajectory characterized by persistent shorter sleep, a trajectory of persistent later bedtime, and a trajectory of persistent later MPS. Two risk factors were associated with the three poor sleep health domains: higher FAI with increased risk of persistent shorter sleep (OR=1.20, 95% CI=1.11-1.30, p<0.001), persistent later bedtime (OR=1.28, 95% CI=1.19-1.39, p<0.001), and persistent later MPS (OR=1.30, 95% CI=1.22-1.38, p<0.001); and higher maternal socio-economic status with reduced risk of persistent shorter sleep (OR=0.99, 95% CI=0.98-1.00, p=0.048), persistent later bedtime (OR=0.98, 95% CI=0.97-0.99, p<0.001), and persistent later MPS (OR=0.99, 95% CI=0.98-0.99, p<0.001). Conclusions: We detected trajectories of persistent poor sleep health (i.e., shorter sleep duration, later bedtime, and later MPS) from infancy to adolescence, and specific perinatal risk factors linked to persistent poor sleep health domains

The Victorian Geological Illustrations of Crystal Palace Park, London: cycles of conservation and neglect, 1993–2023

In 2023, two decades after the restoration of the Victorian Geological Illustrations by the London Borough of Bromley—and the visit of the late HRH Prince Phillip to mark the completion of the restorations—it is clear that these internationally significant sculptures are in a worse state than ever before. Although interest in them remains high, and in spite of the best efforts of the Friends of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs to protect and interpret them, it is plain that they are greatly at risk. In the year that marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the description of Megalosaurus, depicted in all its magnificence in the park, it is a matter of urgency that we promote the significance of a site that really should be recognized for what it is—world heritage—and its current state of neglect

Barthold Heinrich Brockes’ Physico-Theology of Smell

Studies on the significance of olfaction for philosophical aesthetics are justifiably interested in innovative literary explorations of links between aesthetic values and olfactory perceptions. In this context, the early Enlightenment poetry by Barthold Heinrich Brockes has remained neglected: literary historians rarely pay attention to his approaches to smell, and the few pertinent studies appeared in German only. This article introduces the English-speaking public to the valuation of smell in the theological aesthetics of Brockes’ poems, and it concludes with a sketch of his contribution to the tradition of modern cultic smelling, in which the olfactory and the aesthetic are variously intertwined. He thematises smelling as an emotional climax of human relations to external nature which are validated by a sacred essence of the experiential world, the awareness of which can be conjured up through innerworldly poetic thought. This interpretive pattern of olfactory culture has remained relevant to the present day

Biographical Fictions and the Writing of the World

This essay reflects on questions that arise when we consider fictional representations of historical lives (biofiction) as world literature. In what ways does writing about an individual life concern the world? How do the modes of biographical and autobiographical fiction explore or challenge the grounds and boundaries of nation, place, culture, language, tradition, lineage that constrain or sustain identities? How do they negotiate the continuities and fractures – psychological and emotional as much as historical and ideological – between person, home and world? How do they inform our thinking about “world literature” as literature aware of its responsibility in the world and to the world that it receives, describes, shapes, creates, passes on as legacy? I first consider Steven Price’s novel Lampedusa, which narrates the last two years of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s life as he was writing Il gattopardo (The Leopard), a novel centred, in turn, on the real-life figure of Tomasi’s great-grandfather at the time of the unification of Italy. Anna Banti’s Noi credevamo (“We believed”), narrated in the first person of Banti’s grandfather, further helps examine how the biofictional form is used to critique the concept of the nation from its periphery and to investigate the relationship between place, nation and world. John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus, revolving on the astronomer who theorized heliocentrism, enquires into our historical, scientific, philosophical and literary constructions of the world as physical planet, as place in which we live, and as the object of our representations. Finally, Dar (The Gift), the last novel written in Russian by Vladimir Nabokov, through the failures of its protagonist’s biographical and biofictional experiments, raises the question for the émigré writer of how to rebuild a relationship with the world