The Worktown Photographs of Mass-Observation: from Anthropological Data to Digitalised Images

Mass-Observation was created in the 1930s; this was an era that began with an economic slump and concluded with a world war. The founders of Mass-Observation, the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, journalist and poet Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, aimed to record everyday life in Britain. This ‘anthropology of ourselves’ culminated in the union of two disparate projects: Harrisson’s Worktown in the north of England and Madge and Jennings’s National Panel based in London. Their methods of research were innovative and mostly relied on a system of observers. Harrisson’s anthropological research in Worktown included photography as a form of data collection. The principal photographer was the photojournalist Humphrey Spender who took around 900 photographs for Harrisson’s Worktown project. At the time of taking the photographs were largely ignored and remained in obscurity until the 1970s when Harrisson began exploiting the Mass-Observation archive. Although the Worktown photographs are predominantly understood in a documentary context, little attention has been given to the photographs as anthropological data or their place in the development of visual research. Hence, this study is part of a small body of research into their use as a form of visual anthropology. The main emphasis is on the production and contemporary use of the Worktown photographs but extends to their afterlife up to their latest trajectory as digital images. It will be argued that the methodology in Worktown was flawed, undermining the photographs as anthropological data. Moreover, that the best explanation for the photographs not being published contemporaneously was fear of litigation. Furthermore, that even if published, the evidence suggests that Harrisson would have imposed his own meaning onto the photographs

William Faulkner and alcoholism : distilling facts and fictions.

Opinions about alcoholism as a construct, and opinions about William Faulkner’s alcoholism as a fact, have varied. By considering carefully the role alcohol plays in human society, and by looking at these matters of concern through several different lens models, we can explain both why Faulkner was attracted abnormally to alcohol and why others around Faulkner have responded ambivalently to him, to his drinking and to his fiction. Faulkner’s alcoholism was rumored and denied during his life (1897-1962), evaded and contested after his death, and consistently affirmed after 1980. Attention to David Minter and Joseph Blotner, biographers, reveals much about the shifted opinion. Evolutionary psychology establishes origins of alcoholism, and medical science of heredity, genetics, and neurophysiology describes the problem. Theoreticians such as Wayne Booth, Harold Bloom, Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek provide tools to explain why we vary in our narratives about our favored writers, their personal problems, and the quality of their works. Narrative and rhetorical choices such as telling vs. showing, framing, and word-choice determine focus in biographies. Likewise, Faulkner’s use of doubled-characters both conceals and reveals his own alcoholism in his fictions. The project argues for practice of simultaneity in the application of multiple perspectives. Links connect survival advantages, intoxication, divergent thinking, and heightened creativity, as well as chronic alcoholism, anhedonia, and impaired creativity. The project explains why Faulkner, early in his career, received a creative spark from drinking, was able to sustain this creative flame for a few years even as other bad consequences emerged, and then found his creativity extinguished in alcohol. His rise to fame, however, began exactly at the time that his creativity was waning; a fact that is not so much ironic as it is determined by a drive for others to cling to a creative leader beyond the height of his or her powers. Readers are ardently prone to persist in their attachments to favored writers who no longer function well, paralleling alcoholics who are ardently prone to drink after alcohol no longer benefits them. Both tendencies are coded in our genes

Mirror - Vol. 32, No. 14 - December 14, 2006

The Mirror (sometimes called the Fairfield Mirror) is the official student newspaper of Fairfield University, and is published weekly during the academic year (September - May). It runs from 1977 - the present; current issues are available online.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/archives-mirror/1696/thumbnail.jp

Essays on the Economics of Education

The contributors provide an economic perspective on a wide range of education-related issues related to K-12 and higher education.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1199/thumbnail.jp

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference

From Corporal to Corporate: Defining the Body Politic in the Twenty-First Century

The following research project illustrates a transition of the body politic metaphor from the second century AD. to present day. From this historical perspective it can be shown that a new body politic exists within Western, capitalist systems with the corporation serving as the head of the body and its buyers, the appendages. This paper claims that as with the previously accepted analogies of the body politic ( The Lord\u27s Two Bodies, The King\u27s Two Bodies, and the body politic composed by consent of the governed) this corporate driven body possesses four key features that define all three previous manifestations: a sovereign head, an immortal sense of power possessed by the sovereign, an intangible body and a sacrifice required of members in order to join the body. Through a historical examination of the corporation, as well as a case study of Apple, Inc., it can be shown that the modem corporate body politic not only exists but possesses immense power. This power creates complex interactions between consumer and corporate, as well as corporate and laborer. Such relationships shed light on not only the authority of the global corporation but the overall power structure of the late capitalist system.

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference