Seeing and tasting the divine: Simeon Solomon’s homoerotic sacrament

Book synopsis: Should sight trump the other four senses when experiencing and evaluating art? Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present questions whether the authority of the visual in 'visual culture' should be deconstructed, and focuses on the roles of touch, taste, smell, and sound in the materiality of works of art. From the nineteenth century onward, notions of synaesthesia and the multi-sensorial were important to a series of art movements from Symbolism to Futurism and Installations. The essays in this collection evaluate works of art at specific moments in their history, and consider how senses other than the visual have (or have not) affected the works' meaning. The result is a re-evaluation of sensory knowledge and experience in the arts, encouraging a new level of engagement with ideas of style and form

The 19th century World Exhibitions and their photographic memories. Between historicism, exoticism and innovation in architecture

Peer Reviewe

Securing By Design

This article investigates how modern neo-liberal states are 'securing by design' harnessing design to new technologies in order to produce security, safety, and protection. We take a critical view toward 'securing by design' and the policy agendas it produces of 'designing out insecurity' and 'designing in protection' because securing by design strategies rely upon inadequate conceptualisations of security, technology, and design and inadequate understandings of their relationships to produce inadequate 'security solutions' to readymade 'security problems'. This critique leads us to propose a new research agenda we call Redesigning Security. A Redesigning Security Approach begins from a recognition that the achievement of security is more often than not illusive, which means that the desire for security is itself problematic. Rather than encouraging the design of 'security solutions' a securing by design a Redesigning Security Approach explores how we might insecure securing by design. By acknowledging and then moving beyond the new security studies insight that security often produces insecurity, our approach uses design as a vehicle through which to raise questions about security problems and security solutions by collaborating with political and critical design practitioners to design concrete material objects that themselves embody questions about traditional security and about traditional design practices that use technology to depoliticise how technology is deployed by states and corporations to make us 'safe'

Are Our Racial Concepts Necessarily Essentialist Due to Our Cognitive Nature?

Mallon and Kelly claim that hybrid constructionism predicts, at least, that (1) racial representations are stable over time and (2) that racial representations should vary more in mixed-race cultures than in cultures where there is less racial mixing. I argue that hybrid constructionism’s predictions do not obtain and thus hybrid constructionism requires further evidence. I argue that the historical record is inconsistent with hybrid constructionism, and I suggest that humans may not be innately disposed to categorize people by race even though we are likely disposed to categorize people into in and out groups. So, in this paper, I show that there is an evidence set that is inconsistent with hybrid constructionism

Walter Campbell:A distinguished life

An efficient and simple synthesis approach to form stable (68) Ga-labeled nanogels is reported and their fundamental properties investigated. Nanogels are obtained by self-assembly of amphiphilic statistical prepolymers derivatised with chelating groups for radiometals. The resulting nanogels exhibit a well-defined spherical shape with a diameter of 290 +/- 50 nm. The radionuclide (68) Ga is chelated in high radiochemical yields in an aqueous medium at room temperature. The phagocytosis assay demonstrates a highly increased internalization of nanogels by activated macrophages. Access to these (68) Ga-nanogels will allow the investigation of general behavior and clearance pathways of nanogels in vivo by nuclear molecular imaging

Vulgar modernism: J.M. Richards, modernism and the vernacular in British architecture

In 1946 J. M. Richards, editor of the Architectural Review (AR) and self-proclaimed champion of modernism, published a book entitled The Castles on the Ground (Fig. 1). This book, written while working for the Ministry of Information (Mol) in Cairo during the war, was a study of British suburban architecture and contained long, romantic descriptions of the suburban house and garden. Richards described the suburb as a place in which ‘everything is in its place’ and where ‘the abruptness, the barbarities of the world are far away’. For this reason The Castles on the Ground is most often remembered as a retreat from pre-war modernism, into nostalgia for mock-Tudor houses and privet hedges. The writer and critic Reyner Banham, who worked with Richards at the AR in the 1950s, described the book as a ‘blank betrayal of everything that Modern Architecture was supposed to stand for’. More recently, however, it has been rediscovered and reassessed for its contribution to mid-twentieth-century debates about the relationship between modern architects and the British public. These reassessments get closer to Richards’s original aim for the book. He was not concerned with the style of suburban architecture for its own sake, but with the question of why the style was so popular and what it meant for the role of modern architects in Britain and their relationship to the ‘man in the street’. Jessica Kelly is Lecturer in Context and Theory of Design at the University for the Creative Arts. She studied Design History at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, with a dissertation on interwar hospital architecture in Britain and went on to complete her PhD at Middlesex University on the career of J. M. Richards as editor of the Architectural Review. She has also taught at London Metropolitan University, the University of Hertfordshire and London South Bank University. She has written for the Architectural Review and is currently contributing to the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design on the subjects of ‘Design Dissemination’ and ‘Design in Britain’