The monster and the police: Dexter to Hobbes

On 25 February 2002, Rafael Perez, a former officer of the LAPD’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unit (CRASH), appeared in court accused of various crimes: covering up a bank robbery, shooting and framing an innocent citizen, stealing and selling cocaine from evidence lockers, being a member of the Los Angeles gang called the Bloods, and murdering the rapper The Notorious B.I.G. In his statement to the court he pointed out that above the threshold of doors that lead to CRASH offices there are philosophical mottos such as ‘Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall’ and ‘We intimidate those who intimidate others’. Perez commented: ‘To those mottos, I offer this: “Whoever chases monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself.”

Feeding the three headed monster of Higher Education

The integrated Taught Postgraduate framework (PGT) at Northumbria University supports a range of postgraduate programmes in design disciplines, design management and design practice by distance learning as well as professional doctorates. The framework provides rigorous taught modules dealing with subjects including creative thinking, research principles, intellectual property, design strategy, commercialisation, reflective practice, contemporary influences on design, design value and cross cultural communication. These theoretically grounded modules have been developed over a ten year period and provide the foundation for the PG provision at Northumbria. Students value the content of these modules but have in the past struggled to connect them and develop a mutually enforcing relationship between theory and practice. Northumbria, like many other UK universities, manages its Schools under three portfolios: Research, Enterprise and Teaching and Learning. Most academic roles operate within one of these ‘silos’ and it is often structurally problematic for academics to move between portfolios to combine their respective aims. This paper examines the difficulties faced by academics whose activities span research, enterprise and teaching and learning. It documents the recent evolution of the PGT framework at Northumbria to support the integration of these portfolios of activity for the benefit of the students, academics and school as a whole. The authors have developed a taught PG ‘lattice’ structure that maps theoretical modules of study against industry-based practice. Multidisciplinary teams of students carry out technology led projects for commercial clients supported by experts and specialists in the field. Hence the same theoretical concepts are applied from the standpoint of different disciplines within the same team. This structure has enabled the integration of distinctly theoretical areas of design expertise with their application in practice through industry based projects that: Provide teaching resources including materials, new technologies, industry specialists and commercially realistic parameters Create income and develop intellectual property leading to royalties, equity and spin off consultancy Generate research papers, publications and exhibitions. These outcomes align with teaching and learning, enterprise and research respectively. This paper presents an innovative PG model and describes case study material from strategic commercial projects with companies and consortiums

To Ruin the Repairs: Milton, Allegory, Transitional Justice

International legal theorists posit historical moments when conceptions of justice are “constituted by, and constitutive of, the transition” (Teitel). This article uses the framework of transitional justice to understand the cultural work of political allegory in the spring of 1660 on the eve of the English Restoration. Insights from transitional justice (1.) help explain how Anglican royalists convinced wary Presbyterians to assent to a restoration of the monarchy; (2.) permit a new reading of Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost; and (3.) facilitate a more critical history of the framework of transitional justice itself

An Ethiopian-Headed Serpent in theCantigas de Santa María: Sin, Sex, and Color in Late Medieval Castile

An unconventional portrayal of the serpent of the Temptation in the Florence codex of the Cantigas de Santa María (Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, MS B.R. 20) manifests significant developments in the visual and epistemic norms of late medieval Castile. The satanic serpent’s black face and stereotyped African features link to cultural traditions well beyond Iberia, most notably the topos of the “Ethiopian,” which blended the actual and fantastical in deeply symbolic ways. Most crucial to the reading of the motif in the cantiga were the Ethiopian’s long-standing associations with sin and diabolism, rooted in early monastic Christianity but preserved in later medieval monastic and romance literature as well as in visual images found in Iberian contexts. Yet the otherwise conventional femininity of the serpent’s head must have connected still more specifically to medieval stereotypes of black women as hypersexual, distasteful, and dangerous. Iberian awareness of these stereotypes, attested by the caricatured black women of medieval Castilian exempla, poetry, and historical texts, surely facilitated recognition of the complementary binaries central to this cantiga, in that Satan’s blackness and sensuality invert Eve’s whiteness and erstwhile purity, foreshadowing her capitulation to the darkness of sin and sex as an antitype of the faultless Virgin. The innovative image thus reveals both its artist’s sensitivity to broad European cultural trends and the resonance of skin color in a region where both color and race would soon become inescapably concrete concerns

In the (oral) territory of the Mangie

Neste artigo o autor explora a figura do ogre no folclore de uma minoria étnica no nordeste da China, os Daur. Mangie são os seres antropomórficos, antropófagos e de muitas cabeças, que parecem estar intimamente relacionados com o Mangus dos Mongóis, uma criatura com características semelhantes. A discussão compara os ogres dos Daur e dos Mongóis, com base nos poemas épicos, nas histórias tradicionais e em descrições feitas por estudiosos

Between Scylla and Charybdis: Environmental governance and illegibility in the American West

In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew must navigate the Strait of Messina between two great hazards: the six-headed monster Scylla on one side, and the whirlpool Charybdis on the other. This conceit here guides a critical engagement with scientific knowledge and state power, grounded in the positionality and practices of government agents charged with the management of controversial species and processes in the American West. Based in ethnographic and archival research on wolf-livestock conflict and public lands grazing in Central Idaho, I relate how agents with the U.S. Forest Service and Idaho Department of Fish and Game navigate conditions not of their own choosing. Sailing the “choppy seas” of complex systems and multiple-use mandates, with the “whirlpool” of cuts to capacity on one side and the “monster” of political controversy and litigation on the other, agents appear to collect less or more ambiguous information on their charges, resulting in a partial “blindness” or illegibility. Although a rational adaptation to unrealistic expectations, this ignorance is not bliss but rather symptom and source of dysfunction, limiting agents’ ability to carry out monitoring, collaboration, and effectively conduct on-the-ground management. Understanding patterns of illegibility requires that we attend both to broader contextual pressures and situated motivations. In so doing, we might account for the seeming disconnect between agencies’ stated aims and practices, complicate traditional assumptions of evidence-based scientific management and analyses of bureaucratic rationality and state power, and make sense of the apparent dysfunction around environmental governance in the American West today

"Plays thus at being Prosper" : Caliban and the colonised savage in mid-nineteenth-century Britain : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English at Massey University

Representations of Caliban in Victorian Britain took the form of plays, performances, reviews, poems, paintings, cartoons, sketches, and commentaries. These representations predominantly involved an ambivalence between portrayals of Caliban as human, and as non-human. A similar ambivalence is apparent in Victorian representations of the savage. Taking Robert Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos" as an initial example, this thesis applies Homi Bhabha's model of colonial mimicry to these representations of Caliban in order to show that the ambivalence in them is continuous with the ambivalent aim of the colonial mission, which is both to suppress and to enlighten. This ambivalent colonial mission leads Caliban to be constructed within Victorian colonial discourse in an ambivalent fashion, and he is hence both contained within and subversive against that discourse. Caliban acts as a conceptual site at which colonial ideology can be both defended, by those interpretations of Caliban which are continuous with stereotypical Victorian representations of the savage, and challenged, by those representations which are subversive to the colonial ideology which is the basis of this stereotype. The challenges to colonial ideology come from interpretations of Caliban as an evolutionary figure and as a satirical figure. It is in the process of defending the colonial interpretation that the ambivalence inherent in the colonial model is made clear. Thus Caliban can be seen to be, in these interpretations, a representation of this stereotype of the colonial savage, functioning to justify the ambivalent colonial mission