6,487 research outputs found

    Beam scanning by liquid-crystal biasing in a modified SIW structure

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    A fixed-frequency beam-scanning 1D antenna based on Liquid Crystals (LCs) is designed for application in 2D scanning with lateral alignment. The 2D array environment imposes full decoupling of adjacent 1D antennas, which often conflicts with the LC requirement of DC biasing: the proposed design accommodates both. The LC medium is placed inside a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) modified to work as a Groove Gap Waveguide, with radiating slots etched on the upper broad wall, that radiates as a Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA). This allows effective application of the DC bias voltage needed for tuning the LCs. At the same time, the RF field remains laterally confined, enabling the possibility to lay several antennas in parallel and achieve 2D beam scanning. The design is validated by simulation employing the actual properties of a commercial LC medium

    Tourism and heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone

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    Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) uses an ethnographic lens to explore the dissonances associated with the commodification of Chornobyl's heritage. The book considers the role of the guides as experience brokers, focusing on the synergy between tourists and guides in the performance of heritage interpretation. Banaszkiewicz proposes to perceive tour guides as important actors in the bottom-up construction of heritage discourse contributing to more inclusive and participatory approach to heritage management. Demonstrating that the CEZ has been going through a dynamic transformation into a mass tourism attraction, the book offers a critical reflection on heritagisation as a meaning-making process in which the resources of the past are interpreted, negotiated, and recognised as a valuable legacy. Applying the concepts of dissonant heritage to describe the heterogeneous character of the CEZ, the book broadens the interpretative scope of dark tourism which takes on a new dimension in the context of the war in Ukraine. Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone argues that post-disaster sites such as Chornobyl can teach us a great deal about the importance of preserving cultural and natural heritage for future generations. The book will be of interest to academics and students who are engaged in the study of heritage, tourism, memory, disasters and Eastern Europe

    BEYOND THE MYTH: Screenwriting Approaches to Biographical Films

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    This PhD submission comprises an original screenplay on the relationship between African American activist Paul Robeson and the mining community of south Wales titled Robeson: They Can’t Stop Us Singing, and the accompanying exegesis. The aim is to explore, by academic study (gnosis) and creative practice (praxis), the previously overlooked field of writing biographical films, or biopics, and to acknowledge the role of the screenwriter in telling a person’s life story on film. The script is the experiment; the exegesis is the analysis and methodology. The role of the screenwriter is underrepresented across cinema studies, but no more so than in the discussion of biopics. My exegesis begins by exploring what academic and popular writing already exists on English-language biopics, highlighting that amidst auteurist approaches prevalent in cinema studies, little credit has been afforded to screenwriters. I seek to address this by examining how screenwriters have responded to historiographical and socio-political contexts while balancing the needs of the audience with factual integrity (or sometimes not), before using the case studies of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Lindbergh to explore how American hero figures have been represented on screen. How does a script written on Lincoln in 1939, for example, differ in terms of tone and political philosophy to one delivered in the 21st century? Using historical approaches, the exegesis then examines the life of Paul Robeson and the Welsh miners he knew, to observe the meticulous choices required by the screenwriter researching and writing a biopic script. Using primary sources (interviews with living dramatic writers, including the BAFTA-nominated screenwriter of the biopic, Good Vibrations) and secondary sources (screenplays, films, audio, interviews, other academic writing), I question where and when to begin and end a biographical story, which parts of a person’s life to include or jettison, how to make a historical figure’s events pertinent to a contemporary audience, and how to utilise fictionalised elements in a drama while adhering to a central truth. My own screenplay on Robeson and Wales is the embodiment of this research. The script demonstrates the myriad artistic decisions that need to be made to present the qualities and flaws of the historical figure. It shows why fictionalised moments and composite characters contribute to an understanding of a real person’s motives and feelings in a way documentary and historical writing cannot. And it stands as a record of the screenwriter’s previously overlooked contribution to creating biographical films

    The Palaces of Comfort, Consolation and Distraction - The Pie and Mash shop as a performative space of a contested London working class memory

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    This thesis seeks to interrogate and clarify the history and culture of London’s traditional but fading and largely forgotten eel, pie and mash shops. In doing so the work examines their cultural conduit, the adjacent and evolving identity of the cockney whose contested memoryscapes have, I suggest, great contemporary political and cultural relevance in an age of populism and Brexit. The work excavates a tracing around the shops’ absences in historical literature. It situates their establishment within the dying breath of an older, popular street culture and the birth of a new London working class, centred around unofficial street markets and in a synchronous dance with the ideological accession of the bourgeoisie. The thesis employs the biological notion of a taxon to illustrate the shops’ evolution largely defined by the class-demotion of their clientele that mirrored the changing cartography of the city. By the late nineteenth century, this work argues, the eel and pie shops had become a pillar of a respectable London working class culture whose hyper-local solidarities revolved around micro-class divisions of work and negotiated bourgeois codes of propriety as part of a ‘culture of consolation’ that has remained largely impenetrable to outsiders. The study explores this concomitant cockney identity which became, partly through bourgeois theatrical ventriloquising, a figure of imperial incorporation. This eventually came to represent a particular type of ‘ordinariness’, subsequently reconfigured around the gains of a Welfare State and a national economy that continues to be periodically valorised according its usefulness to capital at times of political stress. Utilising sensory ethnography and memory studies the work explores the landscape and territoriality of the contemporary eel, pie and mash shop. It interrogates the rituals and complex, often competing and polyphonic memory inscriptions which memorialise a largely post-colonial nostalgic melancholia around the loss of fantasy of a British omnipotence. The thesis argues that the shops and their simulacra-like reincarnations amongst the cockney diaspora in the Essex new towns offer an insight into the changing notions of taste and class within the convivialities of a unique but broadly closed heritage of proletarian culture as a zone of resistance in the neoliberal city

    The place where curses are manufactured : four poets of the Vietnam War

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    The Vietnam War was unique among American wars. To pinpoint its uniqueness, it was necessary to look for a non-American voice that would enable me to articulate its distinctiveness and explore the American character as observed by an Asian. Takeshi Kaiko proved to be most helpful. From his novel, Into a Black Sun, I was able to establish a working pair of 'bookends' from which to approach the poetry of Walter McDonald, Bruce Weigl, Basil T. Paquet and Steve Mason. Chapter One is devoted to those seemingly mismatched 'bookends,' Walt Whitman and General William C. Westmoreland, and their respective anthropocentric and technocentric visions of progress and the peculiarly American concept of the "open road" as they manifest themselves in Vietnam. In Chapter, Two, I analyze the war poems of Walter McDonald. As a pilot, writing primarily about flying, his poetry manifests General Westmoreland's technocentric vision of the 'road' as determined by and manifest through technology. Chapter Three focuses on the poems of Bruce Weigl. The poems analyzed portray the literal and metaphorical descent from the technocentric, 'numbed' distance of aerial warfare to the world of ground warfare, and the initiation of a 'fucking new guy,' who discovers the contours of the self's interior through a set of experiences that lead from from aerial insertion into the jungle to the degradation of burning human feces. Chapter Four, devoted to the thirteen poems of Basil T. Paquet, focuses on the continuation of the descent begun in Chapter Two. In his capacity as a medic, Paquet's entire body of poems details his quotidian tasks which entail tending the maimed, the mortally wounded and the dead. The final chapter deals with Steve Mason's JohnnY's Song, and his depiction of the plight of Vietnam veterans back in "The World" who are still trapped inside the interior landscape of their individual "ghettoes" of the soul created by their war-time experiences

    Strategies for Early Learners

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    Welcome to learning about how to effectively plan curriculum for young children. This textbook will address: • Developing curriculum through the planning cycle • Theories that inform what we know about how children learn and the best ways for teachers to support learning • The three components of developmentally appropriate practice • Importance and value of play and intentional teaching • Different models of curriculum • Process of lesson planning (documenting planned experiences for children) • Physical, temporal, and social environments that set the stage for children’s learning • Appropriate guidance techniques to support children’s behaviors as the self-regulation abilities mature. • Planning for preschool-aged children in specific domains including o Physical development o Language and literacy o Math o Science o Creative (the visual and performing arts) o Diversity (social science and history) o Health and safety • Making children’s learning visible through documentation and assessmenthttps://scholar.utc.edu/open-textbooks/1001/thumbnail.jp

    Metaphors of London fog, smoke and mist in Victorian and Edwardian Art and Literature

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    Julian Wolfreys has argued that after 1850 writers employed stock images of the city without allowing them to transform their texts. This thesis argues, on the contrary, that metaphorical uses of London fog were complex and subtle during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, at least until 1914. Fog represented, in particular, formlessness and the dissolution of boundaries. Examining the idea of fog in literature, verse, newspaper accounts and journal articles, as well as in the visual arts, as part of a common discourse about London and the state of its inhabitants, this thesis charts how the metaphorical appropriation of this idea changed over time. Four of Dickens's novels are used to track his use of fog as part of a discourse of the natural and unnatural in individual and society, identifying it with London in progressively more negative terms. Visual representations of fog by Constable, Turner, Whistler, Monet, Markino, O'Connor, Roberts and Wyllie and Coburn showed an increasing readiness to engage with this discourse. Social tensions in the city in the 1880s were articulated in art as well as in fiction. Authors like Hay and Barr showed the destruction of London by its fog because of its inhabitants' supposed degeneracy. As the social threat receded, apocalyptic scenarios gave way to a more optimistic view in the work of Owen and others. Henry James used fog as a metaphorical representation of the boundaries of gendered behaviour in public, and the problems faced by women who crossed them. The dissertation also examines fog and individual transgression, in novels and short stories by Lowndes, Stevenson, Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad. After 1914, fog was no more than a crude signifier of Victorian London in literature, film and, later, television, deployed as a cliche instead of the subtle metaphorical idea discussed in this thesis

    Building body identities - exploring the world of female bodybuilders

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    This thesis explores how female bodybuilders seek to develop and maintain a viable sense of self despite being stigmatized by the gendered foundations of what Erving Goffman (1983) refers to as the 'interaction order'; the unavoidable presentational context in which identities are forged during the course of social life. Placed in the context of an overview of the historical treatment of women's bodies, and a concern with the development of bodybuilding as a specific form of body modification, the research draws upon a unique two year ethnographic study based in the South of England, complemented by interviews with twenty-six female bodybuilders, all of whom live in the U.K. By mapping these extraordinary women's lives, the research illuminates the pivotal spaces and essential lived experiences that make up the female bodybuilder. Whilst the women appear to be embarking on an 'empowering' radical body project for themselves, the consequences of their activity remains culturally ambivalent. This research exposes the 'Janus-faced' nature of female bodybuilding, exploring the ways in which the women negotiate, accommodate and resist pressures to engage in more orthodox and feminine activities and appearances
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