4,995 research outputs found

    Northern Powerhouses: the homes of the industrial elite, c.1780-1875

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    This thesis explores the world of the industrial elites of Manchester and Liverpool in the period c.1780-1875, through their houses. The homes of the industrial elites, namely merchants and manufacturers, were extremely important tangible communicators of wealth, taste, and comfort. Whilst status-building was closely connected to the house, this thesis argues that the industrial elites carved their own identities into their domestic spheres and that emulation was not solely linked with aspiration. The findings of this thesis are based around its three research aims regarding the changing location of houses in Manchester and Liverpool in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the appearance and use of houses, and the daily routines and involvement of the industrial elite in their domestic routines. An analysis of elite residential patterns in Manchester and Liverpool across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has created a more nuanced look at urban geographies of the region in this period. Though some residential patterns differed because of economic and political structure, a key finding has been that the process of suburbanisation in and around Manchester and Liverpool commenced earlier than previous scholarship has suggested. Suburbanisation among the elites began in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and into the early decades of the nineteenth century, with elite suburban communities being firmly established by the 1820s. This thesis discovered that despite socio-economic and political differences, the industrial elites of Manchester and Liverpool used their houses, gardens, and landed estates in very similar ways. This was a result of conformity which arose from emulation at both a community-based level and the emulation and aspiration of elite, gentrified lifestyle. Also, the merchants and manufacturers analysed within this work were involved in their home at every level of domesticity, from the construction of the house to the financial management of the household, although this latter theme was often a cooperative effort between spouses and family members, adding more to our understanding of gender, domesticity, and familial relations. Through detailed case studies and a combination of sources, the private lives of the industrial elites have been revaluated and redefined, including showing how their houses functions metaphorically and in reality

    The Angel of Art Sees the Future Even as She Flies Backwards: Enabling Deep Relational Encounter Through Participatory Practice-Based Research.

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    This research addresses the current lack of opportunity within interdisciplinary arts practices for deep one-to-one relational encounters between creative practitioners operating in applied arts, performance, and workshop contexts with participant-subjects. This artistic problem is situated within the wider culture of pervasive social media, which continues to shape our interactions into forms that are characteristically faster, shorter, and more fragmented than ever before. Such dispersal of our attention is also accelerating our inability to deeply focus or relate for any real length of time. These modes of engaging within our technologically permeated, cosmopolitan and global society is escalating relational problems. Coupled with a constant bombardment of unrealistic visual images, mental health difficulties are also consequently rising, cultivating further issues such as identity ‘splitting’, (Lopez-Fernandez, 2019). In the context of the arts, this thesis proposes that such relational lack cannot be solved by one singular art form, one media modality, one existing engagement approach, or within a short participatory timeframe. Key to the originality of my thesis is the deliberate embodiment of a maternal experience. Feminist Lise Haller-Ross’ proposes that there is a ‘mother shaped hole in the art world’ and that, ‘as with the essence of the doughnut – we don’t need another hole for the doughnut, we need a whole new recipe’ (conference address, 2015). Indeed, her assertion encapsulates a need for different types of artistic and relational ingredients to be found. I propose these can be discovered within particular forms of maternal love; nurture; caring, and through conceptual relational states of courtship; intercourse; gestation, and birth. Furthermore, my maternal emphasis builds on: feminist, artist, and psychotherapist Bracha Ettinger’s (2006; 2015) notions of maternal, cohabitation and carrying; architect and phenomenologist Juhani Pallasmaa’s (2012) views on sensing and feeling; child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s (1971) thoughts on transitional phenomena and perceptions of holding. Such psychotherapeutic and phenomenological theories are imbricated in-action within my multimodal arts processes. Additionally, by deliberately not privileging the ocular, I engage all my project participants senses and distil their multimodal data through an extended form of somatic and artistic Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin, 2009). IPA usefully focuses on the importance of the thematic and idiographic in terms of new knowledge generation, with an analytical focus on lived experience. Indeed, whilst the specifics of the participants in my minor and major projects are unique, my research activates and makes valid, findings that are collectively beneficial to the disciplines of applied and interdisciplinary arts; the field of practice-based research, and beyond. My original contribution to new knowledge as argued by this thesis, comprises both this text exposition and my practice. This sees the final generation of a new multimodal arts Participatory Practice-Based Framework (PartPb). Through this framework, the researcher-practitioner is seen to adopt a maternal role to gently guide project participants through four phases of co-created multimodal artwork generation. The four participatory ‘Phases’ are: Phase 1: Courtship – Digital Dialogues; Phase 2: Intercourse – Performative Encounters; Phase 3: Gestation – Screen Narratives; Phase 4: Birth – Relational Artworks. The framework also contains six researcher-only ‘Stages’: Stage 1: Participant Selection; Stage 2: Checking Distilled Themes; Stage 3: Location and Object Planning; Stage 4: Noticing, Logging, Sourcing; Stage 5: Collaboration and Construction; Stage 6: Releasing, Gifting, Recruiting. This new PartPb framework, is realised within a series of five practice-based (Pb) artworks called, ‘Minor Projects 1-5’, (2015-16) and Final Major Project, ‘Transformational Encounters: Touch, Traction, Transform’ (TETTT), (2018). These projects are likewise shaped through action-research processes of iterative testing, as developed from Candy and Edmonds (2010) Practice-based Research (PbR) trajectory. In my new PartPb framework, Candy, and Edmonds’ PbR processes are originally combined with a form of Fritz and Laura Perl’s Gestalt Experience Cycle (1947). This innovative fusion I come to term as a form of ‘Feeling Architecture,’ which is procedurally proven to hold and carry both researcher and participants alike, safely, ethically, and creatively through all Phases and Stages of artefact generation. Specifically, my new multimodal PartPb framework offers new knowledge to the field of Practice-Based Research (PbR) and practitioners working in multimodal arts and applied performance contexts. Due to its participatory focus, I develop on the term Practice-Based Research, (Candy and Edmonds, 2010) to coin the term Participatory Practice-Based Research, (PartPbR). The unique combination of multimodal arts and social-psychological methodologies underpinning my framework also has the potential to contribute to broader Arts, Well-Being, and Creative Health agendas, such as the UK government’s Social Prescribing and Arts and Health initiatives. My original framework offers future researchers’ opportunities to further develop, enhance and enrich individual and community well-being through its application to their own projects, and, in doing so, also starts to challenge unhelpful art binaries that still position community arts practices as somehow lesser to higher art disciplines

    Living with churches in the Borders: mission and ministry in rural Scottish parish churches

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    Is there a sustainable future for mission and ministry in rural Scottish parish churches? In this thesis I use autoethnographic fieldwork within practical theology to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities facing parish churches in rural contexts in Scotland. My research investigates the lived realities of two rural parish churches in the Scottish Borders over twenty-seven months of immersive fieldwork. It engages with existing research on rural churches along with broader discussions of congregational studies, church renewal and missiology, recognising the dearth of existing research into rural Presbyterian churches in Scotland. Throughout my thesis I use a combination of ethnographic ‘thick’ description, autoethnographic reflexivity and critical theological reflection to evaluate the sustainability of current models of mission and ministry as a foundation for discussions of possibilities for the future. My thesis acknowledges the unsustainability of traditional clergy dependent models of rural ministry and argues that a creative and sustainable future is possible if churches are willing to embrace a process of faithful change. I use the Five Marks of Mission as a framework for developing a rural missiology, arguing that rural parish churches have the potential to engage in embodied, creative missional practice as worshiping communities in rural Scotland. I conclude by addressing specific challenges facing the Church of Scotland in 2021, using the lens of rural experience to offer practical insight in looking towards the future

    The Digital Continent:Placing Africa in Planetary Networks of Work

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    Only ten years ago, there were more internet users in countries like France or Germany than in all of Africa put together. But much has changed in a decade. The year 2018 marks the first year in human history in which a majority of the world’s population are now connected to the internet. This mass connectivity means that we have an internet that no longer connects only the world’s wealthy. Workers from Lagos to Johannesburg to Nairobi and everywhere in between can now apply for and carry out jobs coming from clients who themselves can be located anywhere in the world. Digital outsourcing firms can now also set up operations in the most unlikely of places in order to tap into hitherto disconnected labour forces. With CEOs in the Global North proclaiming that ‘location is a thing of the past’ (Upwork, 2018), and governments and civil society in Africa promising to create millions of jobs on the continent, the book asks what this ‘new world of digital work’ means to the lives of African workers. It draws from a year-long fieldwork in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Uganda, with over 200 interviews with participants including gig workers, call and contact centre workers, self-employed freelancers, small-business owners, government officials, labour union officials, and industry experts. Focusing on both platform-based remote work and call and contact centre work, the book examines the job quality implications of digital work for the lives and livelihoods of African workers

    SEMKIS: A CONTRIBUTION TO SOFTWARE ENGINEERING METHODOLOGIES FOR NEURAL NETWORK DEVELOPMENT

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    Today, there is a high demand for neural network-based software systems supporting humans during their daily activities. Neural networks are computer programs that simulate the behaviour of simplified human brains. These neural networks can be deployed on various devices e.g. cars, phones, medical devices...) in many domains (e.g. automotive industry, medicine...). To meet the high demand, software engineers require methods and tools to engineer these software systems for their customers. Neural networks acquire their recognition skills e.g. recognising voice, image content...) from large datasets during a training process. Therefore, neural network engineering (NNE) shall not be only about designing and implementing neural network models, but also about dataset engineering (DSE). In the literature, there are no software engineering methodologies supporting DSE with precise dataset selection criteria for improving neural networks. Most traditional approaches focus only on improving the neural network’s architecture or follow crafted approaches based on augmenting datasets with randomly gathered data. Moreover, they do not consider a comparative evaluation of the neural network’s recognition skills and customer’s requirements for building appropriate datasets. In this thesis, we introduce a software engineering methodology (called SEMKIS) supported by a tool for engineering datasets with precise data selection criteria to improve neural networks. Our method considers mainly the improvement of neural networks through augmenting datasets with synthetic data. SEMKIS has been designed as a rigorous iterative process for guiding software engineers during their neural network-based projects. The SEMKIS process is composed of many activities covering different development phases: requirements’ specification; dataset and neural network engineering; recognition skills specification; dataset augmentation with synthetized data. We introduce the notion of key-properties, used all along the process in cooperation with a customer, to describe the recognition skills. We define a domain-specific language (called SEMKIS-DSL) for the specification of the requirements and recognition skills. The SEMKIS-DSL grammar has been designed to support a comparative evaluation of the customer’s requirements with the key-properties. We define a method for interpreting the specification and defining a dataset augmentation. Lastly, we apply the SEMKIS process to a complete case study on the recognition of a meter counter. Our experiment shows a successful application of our process in a concrete example

    An exploration of the role of nursing in the inpatient treatment of anorexic adolescents: Reworking the infantile feeding relationship as a template for recovery

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    The aim of this study is to explore how nursing professionals, working in a specialist adolescent inpatient eating disorder setting, experience their role in emotionally supporting the young people in their care and managing the demands of their working role. Data was gathered using semi-structured interviews of two nurses and five nursing assistants and this was analysed using IPA (Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis). Six emergent themes will be considered: Regulating appetite for life; Active waiting; Digesting experiences; Cleaning up; Connecting as a team; Preparing for an ending and letting go Comparison will then be made to the infantile feeding relationship and how, through reworking this, the nursing staff facilitate the patients to develop a healthier approach to relationships, experience and life. Recommendations are made regarding how nurses can be supported in their work and the importance of recognising and valuing the difficulty of the emotional aspects of the work

    Challenging the "crime of silence": subsistence harms and their recognition within and beyond conventional law

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    Human existence determines that we are vulnerable not only to attacks on physical integrity, but also to harms which militate against the means of subsistence. Deprivations of subsistence needs in the form of attacks on homes, land, livelihoods and basic resources have been widely perpetrated throughout history and are a particularly significant feature of contemporary conflict and political repression. However, international law is yet to fully recognise these harms as a discrete form of injustice and thus to address them within the mechanisms of international criminal and transitional justice. The thesis defines deprivations of subsistence needs, when perpetrated with knowledge of the possible consequences of such attacks, as "subsistence harms". It argues that subsistence harms constitute a particular and devastating type of violence, which involves interrelated physical, mental and social harms and is inherently gendered. While the existing legal framework acknowledges some aspects of subsistence harms, the failure of law to understand them as discrete, yet also multifaceted, means that its approach remains partial and fragmented; often resulting in continued marginalisation or silencing of these harms. The thesis examines both the potential and the pitfalls of using international law to begin to fully recognise subsistence harms. It argues that international law could and should play an important role in promoting their recognition. Nevertheless, the thesis also problematises the role of law and draws on critical approaches, in order to analyse alternative understandings of harm and spaces for recognition; especially the praxis of non-governmental tribunals and of social movements. Although law can provide a language for recognition of harms, which can be drawn on by such movements, it also imposes barriers to recognition due to its narrow conceptions of harm and violence. The relationship between subsistence harms and legal recognition is therefore complex and thus requires much greater attention within legal discourse, if such harms are ever to be fully addressed

    Perth’s Wartime Catalinas, 1942–1945: How the United States Navy and Qantas Catalina Flying Boats Protected Western Australia, Broke the Japanese Air Blockade, and Created a Post-War Legacy

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    This thesis analyses and assesses the wartime roles of Qantas’ Indian Ocean Service and the United States Navy’s Patrol Wing 10 from1942 to 1945. Throughout this period both operators faced extraordinary challenges in establishing and completing their missions. Flying from the Pelican Point area on the Swan River both Qantas and the US Navy contributed greatly to Australia’s wartime defence, protecting Perth and Western Australia until war’s end in 1945
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