25 research outputs found
Pre-conditioning for success: characteristics and factors ensuring a safe build for the Olympic Park
This research has looked to identify factors which have contributed to the London 2012 Olympic Park being delivered on time, on budget and with an exemplary health and safety record. Where other research has captured 'how' things were done, this research has explored 'why' and focused on the underpinning human and organisational interactions.
The research has tapped in to the close-out and lessons learnt activities for six of the venue and infrastructure projects. In addition interviews were conducted with executives from the Olympic Delivery Authority as client, their Delivery Partner and contractors. Emerging findings were triangulated with observations from other health and safety research teams and evidence from diverse aspects of the build programme contained in the London 2012 learning legacy publications.
Findings centre on the underpinning role of human characteristics like respect, trust, clarity, pre-emption, challenge, consistency, collaboration, motivation, empowerment, communication, open-ness, fairness and assurance. Their practical influence on approaches to, and effectiveness of, leadership, worker involvement, cultural change, communication systems, risk management, monitoring and assurance are brought out.
It is concluded that many of the principles offer potential benefits across a wide range of construction projects, with implementation scalable to suit the simplicity or complexity of the work. Corresponding recommendations are presented for different parties in the construction supply chain.
This report and the work it describes were funded by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Its contents, including any opinions and/or conclusions expressed, are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect HSE policy
Heritage Futures
Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management. 'I suspect this book will prove to be a revolutionary addition to the field of heritage studies, flipping the gaze from the past to the future. Heritage Futures reveals the deep uncertainties and precarities that shape both everyday and political life today: accumulation and waste, care and hope, the natural and the toxic. It represents a uniquely impressive intellectual and empirical roadmap for both anticipating and questioning future trajectories, and the strange, unfamiliar places heritage will take us.’ - Tim Winter, University of Western Australi
Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices
Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management
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Community uses of maritime heritage in Bermuda: a heritage ethnography with museum implications
PDF of thesis revised on 18th August 2012 to correct an error in the BibliographyThis research contributes to the fields of heritage and museum studies with a threefold objective: conceptualise heritage as a process, using an appropriate research method, with implications for museums. The work correspondingly helps to redress the undertheorisation of heritage, the inadequacy of methods for grasping heritage as an ethnographic object of study, and the disconnection between communities and their museums – and, underlying and linking these issues, the widespread incorrect and damaging presumption that individuals, or the communities they constitute, are heritage deficient. In doing so, the presumption of public heritage deficiency underlying and linking these theoretical, methodological and museological ‘problems’ is challenged and countered.
Drawing on my heritage ethnography of maritime Bermuda, I examine how and why people of this mid-Atlantic island use maritimity to formulate identity and community, and thereby generate maritime heritage. This contextualised case study engages with current thinking and key debates about heritage and museums to conceptualise heritage cross-culturally. Introductory chapters review heritage and museums across the relevant scholarly, maritime, and Bermuda scales and reflect upon my methodological choices during the research design, fieldwork and analysis. Five chapters of ethnographic analysis subsequently interpret community uses of heritage in terms of Bermudian relationships with the sea. Specifically, this analysis identifies and explores maritime heritage as: relationships with past and present maritimes; negotiations of ‘race’ and its legacies; beliefs in authenticity; curatorial practices of community museology; and aspirational remedies to social crisis.
With this rich ethnographic yet analytic account of maritime heritage in Bermuda, I expand the framework for understanding heritage as a phenomena and concept, offer a heritage model to museums – and maritime and Bermuda’s museums specifically – so they may better connect with their communities, and utilise and innovate heritage ethnography as a specialised method for heritage research, museum curation and wider community use
TASTE
Taste usually occupies the bottom of the sensorial hierarchy, as the quintessentially hedonistic sense, too close to the animal, the elemental and the corporeal, and for this reason disciplined and moralised. At the same time, taste is indissolubly tied to knowledge. To taste is to discriminate, emit judgement, enter an unstable domain of synaesthetic normativity where the certainty of metaphysical categories begins to crumble. This second title in the ‘Law and the Senses’ series explores law using taste as a conceptual and ontological category able to unsettle legal certainties, and a promising tool whereby to investigate the materiality of law’s relation to the world. For what else is law’s reduction of the world into legal categories, if not law’s ingesting the world by tasting it, and emitting moral and legal judgements accordingly? Through various topics including coffee, wine, craft cider and Japanese knotweed, this volume explores the normativities that shape the way taste is felt and categorised, within and beyond subjective, phenomenological and human dimensions. The result is an original interdisciplinary volume – complete with seven speculative ‘recipes’ – dedicated to a rarely explored intersection, with contributions from artists, legal academics, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists
Heritage Futures
Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management. 'I suspect this book will prove to be a revolutionary addition to the field of heritage studies, flipping the gaze from the past to the future. Heritage Futures reveals the deep uncertainties and precarities that shape both everyday and political life today: accumulation and waste, care and hope, the natural and the toxic. It represents a uniquely impressive intellectual and empirical roadmap for both anticipating and questioning future trajectories, and the strange, unfamiliar places heritage will take us.’ - Tim Winter, University of Western Australi
Our Land Is Not Just Soil: Knowing, Feeling, and Doing Environmental Activism in the Arkansas Ozarks
The Ozarks is a holey place, an ancient plateau formed from ancient rocks and the sediment of millions of years of living things. The Ozarks is also, from another perspective a place made from a mesh of overlapping lines, lines of migration, lines of living things, lines of water movement over and through the land. This dissertation engages with the practice of conservation and environmentalism as it is performed and lived by Ozarkers and Arkansawyers, natives and transplants. Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, Save the Ozarks, Arkansas Master Naturalists, and with Hobbs State Park-Conservation Area, this dissertation examines how emotion, affect, enacted knowledge through performance, and strategic reinterpretations of the nature of political engagement are all part of a local system of conservation. In this dissertation, I seek to analyze links between individual emotion, social performance of expertise, political organization, and conceptual understandings of the physiogeography of the land
Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1
The writers in the volume ask, implicitly, how the 21st century horizons that exceed any political, economic, or conceptual models alters or redefines a series of key topoi. These range through figures of sexual difference, bioethics, care, species invasion, war, post-carbon thought, ecotechnics, time, and so on. As such, the volume is also a dossier on what metamorphoses await the legacies of -humanistic- thought in adapting to, or rethinking, the other materialities that impinge of contemporary -life as we know it.- With essays by Robert Markley, J. Hillis Miller, Bernard Stiegler, Justin Read, Timothy Clark, Claire Colebrook, Jason Groves, Joanna Zylinska, Catherine Malabou, Mike Hill, Martin McQuillan, Eduardo Cadava and Tom Cohen
Shifting Interfaces: art research at the intersections of live performance and technology
Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/809 on 08.20.2017 by CS (TIS)This collection of published works is an outcome of my practice-led inter-disciplinary
collaborative artistic research into deepening understanding of creative process in
the field of contemporary dance. It comprises thirty written works published from
1999 to 2007 in various formats and platforms. This collection is framed by a
methodological discussion that provides insight into how this research has
intersected over time with diverse fields of practice including contemporary dance,
digital and new media arts and non-art domains such as cognitive and social
science. Fields are understood in the context of this research to be largely
constituted out of the expert practices of individual collaborators.
This research starts from an interest in the Impact of new media technologies on
dance making/ choreography. The collection of works show evidence, established in
the first two publications, of an evolving engagement with two concepts related to
this interest: (1) the 'algorithm' as a process-level connection or bridge between
dance composition and computation; (2) the empirical study of movement
embedded as a 'knowledge base' in the practices of both computer animation and
dance and thus forming a special correspondence between them.
This collection provides evidence of this research through a period of community-building
amongst artists using new media technologies in performance, and
culminates in the identification of an emerging 'community of practice' coming
together around the formation of a unique body of knowledge pertaining to dance.
The late 1990s New Media Art movement provided a supportive context for
Important peer-to-peer encounters with creators and users of software tools and
platforms in the context of inter-disciplinary art-making. A growing interest in
software programming as a creative practice opened up fresh perspectives on
possible connections with dance making. It became clear that software's utility
alone, including artistic uses of software, was a limited conception.
This was the background thinking that informed the first major shift in the research
towards the design of software that might augment the creative process of expert
choreographers and dancers. This shift from software use to its design, framed by a
focus on the development of tools to support dance creation, also provided strong
rationale to deepen the research into dance making processes. In the second major
phase of the research presented here, scientific study is brought collaboratively to
bear on questions related to choreographic practice. This lead to a better
understanding of ways in which dancers and choreographers, as 'thinking bodies',
interact with their design tools and each other in the context of creation work.
In addition to this collection, outcomes of this research are traceable to other
published papers and art works it has given rise to. Less easily measureable, but
just as valuable, are the sustained relations between individuals and groups behind
the 'community of practice' now recognised for its development of unique formats for
bringing choreographic ideas and processes into contact, now and in the future, with
both general audiences and other specialist practices