Engaging Design for Energy Conservation in Households

Energy Coac

Screening for breast cancer : medicalization, visualization and the embodied experience

Women’s perspectives on breast screening (mammography and breast awareness) were explored in interviews with midlife women sampled for diversity of background and health experience. Attending mammography screening was considered a social obligation despite women’s fears and experiences of discomfort. Women gave considerable legitimacy to mammography visualizations of the breast, and the expert interpretation of these. In comparison, women lacked confidence in breast awareness practices, directly comparing their sensory capabilities with those of the mammogram, although mammography screening did not substitute breast awareness in a straightforward way. The authors argue that reliance on visualizing technology may create a fragmented sense of the body, separating the at risk breast from embodied experience

Desire Lines: Open Educational Collections, Memory and the Social Machine

This paper delineates the initial ideas around the development of the Co-Curate North East project. The idea of computerised machines which have a social use and impact was central to the development of the project. The project was designed with and for schools and communities as a digital platform which would collect and aggregate ‘memory’ resources and collections around local area studies and social identity. It was a co-curation process supported by museums and curators which was about the ‘meshwork’ between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ archives and collections and the ways in which materials generated from within the schools and community groups could themselves be re-narrated and exhibited online as part of self-organised learning experiences. This paper looks at initial ideas of social machines and the ways in machines can be used in identity and memory studies. It examines ideas of navigation and visualisation of data and concludes with some initial findings from the early stages of the project about the potential for machines and educational work

Visualising the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’: emotion work and the representation of orgasm in pornography and everyday sexual interactions

Visual representations of orgasm – whether in the flesh or mediated through a screen –are produced in a context of intense uncertainty about whether what is being seen represents an authentically experienced bodily event. Despite detailed scientific scrutiny and close attention to bodily signs, the authenticity of women’s orgasm remains a site of cultural anxiety and contested gender politics. This uncertainty is exacerbated by the construction of female orgasm as inherently invisible or un-seeable,and ‘faking’ orgasm as a prevalent social practice. Drawing on existing literature from psychology, sociology and porn studies, this theoretical paper explores the problem of visually representing orgasm in the context of these uncertainties, and examines how the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ is structured by discourses of authenticity. Pornography and everyday sexual interactions provide ideal contexts for exploring the practices of producing and consuming visual representations of embodied experience because both necessitate a see-able orgasm which consumers/lovers can read as ‘real’. This paper demonstrates that considerable interpretative work is necessary to read the female body as authentically orgasmic in the context of cultural uncertainty, and that distinctions between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ are continuallyre worked. Drawing on the contrast between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ acting (Hochschild,1983), I argue that the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ cannot be established by recourse to unmediated bodily experience, and instead, researchers should consider how and when this distinction has traction in the world and the implications of this for gendered power relations, subjectivities and practices

Comprehension and the silent reader

Dr Elspeth Jajdelska's work on the rise of silent reading in the 18th century has shown that writers who assume a silent reader, as almost all writers do in the present day, construct their texts differently from those who write for readers to speak the text aloud to themselves or an audience, as almost all writers did before the 18th century.Elspeth Jajdelska's work explains in detail exactly which kinds of textual features are likely to be difficult for people (both now and in the past) who have learned the mechanics of reading but find it hard to follow texts written for silent readers. These findings arose in an academic field unconnected to educational studies and this knowledge exchange project was established to explore how the research can be made useful to teachers. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Mary Gartside: A female colour theorist in Georgian England

The aim of this paper was to evaluate the work of Mary Gartside, a British female flower painter, art teacher and colour theorist, active in London between 1781 and 1809. Gartside's colour theory was published privately in the guise of a traditional water colouring manual. Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. In chronological and intellectual terms Gartside can cautiously be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris and J.W. von Goethe. This paper takes a closer look at her colour theory in relation to earlier theorists she credits in her writing. It also suggests that certain elements of her theory may have pre-dated some of Goethe's ideas, thus being an indicator of changing attitudes to colour in the intellectual and artistic scene of Europe. Gartside's case is particularly interesting because it highlights gender issues with regard to publishing, self-promotion and the intellectual activity of women artists in the early nineteenth century

Regimes of Temporality: China, Tibet and the Politics of Time in the Post-2008 Era

While the politics of time are an important dimension of Chinese state discourse about Tibet, it remains insufficiently explored in theoretical and practical terms. This article examines the written and visual discourses of Tibetan temporality across Chinese state media in the post-2008 era. It analyses how these media discourses attempt to construct a ‘regime of temporality’ in order to manage public opinion about Tibet and consolidate Chinese rule over the region. While the expansion of online technologies has allowed the state to consolidate its discourses about Tibet’s place within the People’s Republic of China (PRC), they have also provided Tibetans a limited but valuable space to challenge these official representations through counter readings of Tibet’s past, present and future. In doing so, this article contributes new insights on the production of state power over Tibet, online media practices in China, and the disruptive potential of social media as sites of Tibetan counter discourses

Intersectionality, Resistance, and History-Making: A Conversation Between Carolyn D'Cruz, Ruth DeSouza, Samia Khatun, and Crystal McKinnon, Facilitated by Jordana Silverstein

A good, solid, history-writing practice is one which, I think, shakes people's ideas of the world and their place in it, compelling them to imagine new social, cultural and political formations which can provide an account of life. Kimberle Crenshaw's development of the term 'intersectionality', and the ways it has been taken up by people of colour within the academy internationally, as well as by activists, provides one example of such imaginative work. Because when you spend some time in the Australian History academic scene, at conferences, in departments, talking to other academics, it's quickly noticeable that one of its key features is its hegemonic whiteness. Even in those spaces that aspire to avoid whiteness, it's inescapable, visible daily, as well as in the themes at conferences, the keynote speakers chosen, the food served, the knowledge shared. When it came time for the Australian Women's History Network conference in 2016, which carried the theme of 'Intersections in History', it felt like this could provide a way of modelling a different kind of Australian academic History space. What would a conversation look like that skipped over the presence of white Anglo Australians, I wondered? What if we just left them to the side? What if we gathered together some of the smartest, sharpest thinkers in Melbourne academia, and spoke amongst ourselves, coming up with new formations of knowledge? And so we did: Crystal, Samia, Ruth and Carolyn gathered together, I asked them some questions, and we had a conversation that, in numerous ways, challenged white hegemonies. We've recreated some of that conversation below, as a way of continuing to think together, and to find new ways of making this thinking public

Modernity in British advertising: selling cocoa and chocolate in the 1930s

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse the evolution of 'push' marketing in the confectionery industry in Britain during the 1930s. It examines the interplay between a manufacturer and advertising agency in creating advertising for cocoa and chocolate. Design/methodology/approach: A survey of the literature examines the uses of health and well-being in the design of advertising in Britain between the wars. The records of Rowntree and its main advertising agency, J Walter Thompson, are used to examine the themes and tactics used in advertising for cocoa and Aero chocolate bars during the 1930s. Findings: The paper emphasises the different ways in which health and nutrition was used in advertising for the two products. The campaigns of the 1930s built on earlier use of these themes. J Walter Thompson looked for ways of presenting commodities as 'new and improved' and their role extended into pressing for changes to production methods and the nature of products. Themes of modernity, sexuality and lifestyles all featured, confirming conclusions of earlier studies. However targeting of mothers and of different age and gender groups indicated that market segmentation was used extensively via print media and tailored advertising messages. Research limitations/implications: . Originality/value: Although Cadbury, Rowntree and confectionery have been studied in depth before, this paper emphasises their role in applying new advertising ideas to everyday items. It points to the influence of advertising on the mass of consumers compared to the middle and upper-income groups targeted in the marketing of houses, motor-cars and new consumer durable

Efficient Image Evidence Analysis of CNN Classification Results

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) define the current state-of-the-art for image recognition. With their emerging popularity, especially for critical applications like medical image analysis or self-driving cars, confirmability is becoming an issue. The black-box nature of trained predictors make it difficult to trace failure cases or to understand the internal reasoning processes leading to results. In this paper we introduce a novel efficient method to visualise evidence that lead to decisions in CNNs. In contrast to network fixation or saliency map methods, our method is able to illustrate the evidence for or against a classifier's decision in input pixel space approximately 10 times faster than previous methods. We also show that our approach is less prone to noise and can focus on the most relevant input regions, thus making it more accurate and interpretable. Moreover, by making simplifications we link our method with other visualisation methods, providing a general explanation for gradient-based visualisation techniques. We believe that our work makes network introspection more feasible for debugging and understanding deep convolutional networks. This will increase trust between humans and deep learning models.Comment: 14 pages, 19 figure