Renegotiating Democracy in Public Space

Dissent is intricately linked to the qualities of public space. While the First Amendment protects dissent, historical legal and social mechanisms have regulated protest and its relationship with public space. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a rigorous legal framework has emerged to both protect and regulate protest. Yet free speech rights are highly contested. The media are complicit in relating protesters to violence. This perception has been thoroughly constructed in the media since the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999. The September 11th terrorist attacks have further amplified concerns for security in public spaces. The increased securitization of the city during times of mass protests has been verbally and visually presented in both local and national media. This thesis focuses on the media\u27s rationalization of the securitized city and the potential violence of protesters and questions the implications for free speech rights

Conditioned by Dress – The Relationship between Mind, Fashion, Film & Performance.

This is the first monograph in the Pocket Book Series Practices of Transdisciplinarity, a co-publishing collaboration between the ArtEZ Academy in the Netherlands and the London College of Fashion. 'Practices of Transdisciplinarity' examines creative research practices that cross the traditional boundaries assigned to art and design disciplines. Anna-Nicole Ziesche's: Conditioned by Dress - The Relationship between Mind, Fashion, Film and Performance' opens the series. This combined visual and text-based publication is the first book to present an overview of Anna-Nicole Ziesche’s films. Her early work investigates methods for composing fashion ‘looks’, using simple film editing techniques to manipulate, magnify and repeat the decorative details of cloth onto the body. We discover her unique research process that uses story telling and performance to explore the relationship between self-perception and dress. Anna-Nicole is also a sculptor; she re-constructs her dreams, building installations in which she subjects the body to poetic narratives inspired by her experiences of fashion. Within these installations Anna-Nicole and her ‘dressed’ characters perform both physically and psychologically. Film and photography are mediums where "to dress" takes on a new meaning. [from the Foreword, by Lucy Orta

Evaluating the impacts of new walking and cycling infrastructure on carbon dioxide emissions from motorized travel: A controlled longitudinal study

Walking and cycling is widely assumed to substitute for at least some motorized travel and thereby reduce energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. While the evidence suggests that a supportive built environment may be needed to promote walking and cycling, it is unclear whether and how interventions in the built environment that attract walkers and cyclists may reduce transport CO2 emissions. Our aim was therefore to evaluate the effects of providing new infrastructure for walking and cycling on CO2 emissions from motorized travel. A cohort of 1849 adults completed questionnaires at baseline (2010) and one-year follow-up (2011), before and after the construction of new high-quality routes provided as part of the Sustrans Connect2 programme in three UK municipalities. A second cohort of 1510 adults completed questionnaires at baseline and two-year follow-up (2012). The participants reported their past-week travel behaviour and car characteristics from which CO2 emissions by mode and purpose were derived using methods described previously. A set of exposure measures of proximity to and use of the new routes were derived. Overall transport CO2 emissions decreased slightly over the study period, consistent with a secular trend in the case study regions. As found previously the new infrastructure was well used at one- and two-year follow-up, and was associated with population-level increases in walking, cycling and physical activity at two-year follow-up. However, these effects did not translate into sizeable CO2 effects as neither living near the infrastructure nor using it predicted changes in CO2 emissions from motorized travel, either overall or disaggregated by journey purpose. This lack of a discernible effect on travel CO2 emissions are consistent with an interpretation that some of those living nearer the infrastructure may simply have changed where they walked or cycled, while others may have walked or cycled more but few, if any, may have substituted active for motorized modes of travel as a result of the interventions. While the findings to date cannot exclude the possibility of small effects of the new routes on CO2 emissions, a more comprehensive approach of a higher 'dosage' of active travel promotion linked with policies targeted at mode shift away from private motorized transport (such as urban car restraint and parking pricing, car sharing/pooling for travel to work, integrating bike sharing into public transport system) may be needed to achieve the substantial CO2 savings needed to meet climate change mitigation and energy security goals. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Neural stem cell dynamics: the development of brain tumours.

Determining the premalignant lesions that develop into malignant tumours remains a daunting task. Brain tumours are frequently characterised by a block in differentiation, implying that normal developmental pathways become hijacked during tumourigenesis. However, the heterogeneity of stem cells and their progenitors in the brain suggests there are many potential routes to tumour initiation. Studies in Drosophila melanogaster have enhanced our understanding of the tumourigenic potential of distinct cell types in the brain. Here we review recent studies that have improved our knowledge of neural stem cell behaviour during development and in brain tumour models.This work was funded by: Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award (103792 to A.H.B.), The Royal Society Darwin Trust Research Professorship (to A.H.B.) and Wellcome Trust PhD Studentship (102454 to A.E.H.). A.H.B acknowledges core funding to The Gurdon Institute from the Wellcome Trust (092096) and CRUK (C6946/A14492)