Panoramic Still-Lifes: Art, Perception, and Being in the Works of Virginia Woolf

This project is an interdisciplinary study of Virginia Woolf’s artistic representation of perception in her writing and in particular in her early short story prose experiments, her posthumously published memoir, and three of her major novels. I use a phenomenological framework, drawing primarily from the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to identify Woolf’s philosophical aesthetic, and to trace how she presents in her fiction an immersive and intersubjective form of realism through vivid descriptions of the object world. The first part of the project analyzes Woolf’s stylistic aims within the context of Post-Impressionism, examining, through interpretive comparisons between visual art and literature, how her approaches and artistic sensibilities aligned with those of Bloomsbury Group members, most notably, the art critic Roger Fry and her sister, Vanessa Bell, a distinguished avant-garde painter. The second part of the study engages in close readings of three of Woolf’s novels — Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Years — to reveal how Woolf’s understanding of time, perception, and embodiment prefigures and engages with early to mid-twentieth century phenomenological and materialist trends of thought in its articulation of the intervening spaces and interactions between humans and the object world

Fifa-isation: Spatial security, sponsor protection and media management at the 2010 World Cup

This paper presents a case-study of spatial brand protection and media management and security strategies at the 2010 Football World Cup (FWC) in South Africa (RSA). This focus stems from the realisation that commercially designated event spaces are very important environments for the interests of FWC sponsors, and that the media has a pivotal role in conveying messages about desirable conduct in such environments. In these respects, stakeholder organisations are concerned about safeguarding core event spaces, and with promoting positive messages about the FWC via the media. The paper therefore investigates the interests of key stakeholders at the 2010 FWC: the event owner Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the FWC sponsors and the host city (Cape Town). It is concerned with identifying various surveillance strategies to manage public spaces at the FWC, albeit with a particular emphasis on protecting the interests of sponsors and their brand integrity. It is also concerned with strategies to manage the media at the FWC, with a particular emphasis on how FIFA stymies dissent and forces compliance among reporters and news outlets that undermine critical surveillance into these practices of spatial management. Taken together, these hyper-protectionist appr oaches demonstrate what we have described as the FIFA-isation of the FWC, where commercial risk is outsourced to the event host, while the commercial benefits flow back to the event owner. Concomitantly, FIFA makes enormous surveillance demands on the event hosts and those residing in the country and city where it is to be held, and upon the media that broadcast and report on the world's biggest sports mega events. © The author(s), 2014

Submission to the Senate Select Committee on Administration of Sport Grants Should there be a $100 million federal community sport grants program at all?

It is questionable whether national funds designed to be allocated in small amounts paid directly to local community organisations have a part to play in a federal system. Apart from the clear temptation for pork-barrelling, they make no sense in terms of efficiency and rational policy, particularly when, as is the case with sport and recreation, there is already a system in place to assess local community needs

Exploring Sport and Intergroup Relations in Fiji: Guidance for Researchers Undertaking Short-Term Ethnography

There is a key tension associated with ethnographic explorations into the lives of people in the Global South – ‘outsider’ researchers from the Global North who lack experience of the environments they are seeking to understand. A considered response, therefore, is for scholars to seek physical immersion in a field—to live among those they are trying to understand. Such ethnographic inquiries are optimal when researchers have the capacity to engage over long periods of time. However, in some circumstances, this may not feasible. Thus, questions arise about the veracity of field work investigations that are not only temporally brief but undertaken by scholars who lack local experience. This paper reflects on the experiences of a researcher who was faced with those challenges. It provides guidance as to how scholars might prepare for short-term ethnography (STE) in field work, along with the limitations and constraints of such an approach. The research centered on a sport for development and peace study into intergroup relations and ethnic separatism in Fijian sport

Preclinical correction of human Fanconi anemia complementation group A bone marrow cells using a safety-modified lentiviral vector.

One of the major hurdles for the development of gene therapy for Fanconi anemia (FA) is the increased sensitivity of FA stem cells to free radical-induced DNA damage during ex vivo culture and manipulation. To minimize this damage, we have developed a brief transduction procedure for lentivirus vector-mediated transduction of hematopoietic progenitor cells from patients with Fanconi anemia complementation group A (FANCA). The lentiviral vector FancA-sW contains the phosphoglycerate kinase promoter, the FANCA cDNA, and a synthetic, safety-modified woodchuck post transcriptional regulatory element (sW). Bone marrow mononuclear cells or purified CD34(+) cells from patients with FANCA were transduced in an overnight culture on recombinant fibronectin peptide CH-296, in low (5%) oxygen, with the reducing agent, N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC), and a combination of growth factors, granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF), Flt3 ligand, stem cell factor, and thrombopoietin. Transduced cells plated in methylcellulose in hypoxia with NAC showed increased colony formation compared with 21% oxygen without NAC (P<0.03), showed increased resistance to mitomycin C compared with green fluorescent protein (GFP) vector-transduced controls (P<0.007), and increased survival. Thus, combining short transduction and reducing oxidative stress may enhance the viability and engraftment of gene-corrected cells in patients with FANCA

Symptom Differences by Gender for Outpatient Clients as Measured by the SCL-90-R

It has been well accepted that women demonstrate a significantly higher prev-alence for mood disorders than their male counterparts. This study included the administration of the Symptom-Checklist 90-Revised (SCL-90-R) over the course of a one-month period to a sample (n = 243) of females (66%) and males (34%) receiving treatment from an outpatient community mental health clinic. Descriptive statistics, a MANOVA, and subsequent ANOVAs revealed that women scored higher on every sub-scale of the SCL-90-R, except the psychoticism sub-scale, however, only the difference on the somatization sub-scale was statistically significant. Implications of these results for mental health providers are explored