And I half turn to go: invocatio and negation of the Public

This writing is the result of a practice-as-research project that I have undertaken as a poet, performance and sound artist. The works that I have produced dwell thematically and formally on themes of broken temporality, abject subjects, waste time and spaces, and are a response to the period coincident (London and the UK, 2010-2017) with this research. The writing is intended to create a context, or map, of where and when I made the performances and recordings, the pressures and atmospheres they responded to. During this time, broadly welfare-statist senses of “public” as polity, institutions and space have contorted under pressure from a rapacious neoliberalism and the rise of nativist and racist right-wing politics, exemplified by the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. Both forces are hostile to the model of rights-bearing citizenship as the universality embodied in “stranger relationality”, which Michael Warner describes as a necessity for a sense of public (2002, p.7). This struggle feeds into debates concerning what both "public" and “citizen” mean as political concepts. I use relational aesthetics as an example of a communitarian tendency that superficially might seem to be opposed to dominant political tendencies hostile to the idea of a universal public. In this, it follows both nativist and neoliberal tendencies; in its artistic strategies it also prioritises voluntaristic “engagement” over contemplation. In both these matters, it replicates certain neoliberal models of ideal subjecthood, in which rights are replaced by privileges. This is, for me, a parallel to the tension between the Romantic lumpenprole figure of “artist” and the valorised, entrepreneurial “creative worker”. As a counterbalance, I look at a waste ground fly-tipping site in east London that I have called the Bike Cemetery. This place had at one time been occupied by an anonymous bricoleur who left an extraordinary mural comprising of collaged detritus and text on a wall supporting a motorway embankment. I take the rubbish strewn site, the mural and its creator as a constellation in themselves, a manifestation of stranger-relationality and the now abjected temporality of social democracy. In keeping with my approach to my artistic work, I use Walter Benjamin’s concept of allegory (Benjamin, 1998) as a tool for looking at the ways in which ideas can present through constellations of images and detritus, making the experience of hermeneutic labour almost haptic — a wandering across and through fragments. I use materials such as “scalies” (the figures that populate the architects’ renderings printed on the hoardings put up around the sites of speculative housing developments), UK public order legislation and the history of the temperance movement. Central to this mapping which attempts to delineate an emergent form of contemporary subjectivity, is an idea of “public”, in the dual and related sense of a political collectivity that can be addressed or appealed to and the political/social artefacts of public “space” and “services” in a welfare state. This response also necessitates, for a vocal and verbal artist such as myself, a consideration of the rhetorical structures at play: much that presents as in-vocation in political discourse, the “will of the People”, for example, is actually e-vocation — allegory to the invocation’s symbol, belonging to the temporality of waste (see Viney, 2016), ruptured or halted teleology (Agamben, 2009), the time of addiction, the time of performance. I consider and have developed my work as an artist in relation to these questions: Is a performer “being public”? Is the audience an instantiation of the public? Where are “we” and what are “we” when (in) public? How can a performance address the public-as-public, which is to say, as strangers; what rhetoric, what form of address can be used? Can “public” be in-voked or e-voked by a performer? What part does my voice play as a vehicle of “in” or “e” vocation? What appropriate temporality can performance occupy or evoke at this time? How are tropes (turns, postures, images) of “national abjects” to be used without rendering them as decorative motifs for the creative class

Brazil's sugarcane sector : a case of lost opportunity

The Brazilian sugar and ethanol story goes like this: direct market intervention overrides market forces. Markets undergo dramatic change. Intervention establishes vested interests. Rent-seeking blocks adjustment to market change. Economic objectives become blurred behind political objectives. Opportunities go begging. Industry profitability suffers. And national income is forgone. The authors use a simple economic model of the Brazilian sugarcane sector and policy interventions to measure the costs of existing policies and to develop better policies. Brazil is an efficient producer of sugar, but policy intervention has caused: (a) underproduction of sugar cane (too much ethanol, not enough sugar); (b) missed opportunities to market ethanol in high-value uses (as an octane enhancer and clean fuel); (c)missed opportunities to make the world sugar market more competitive. Adopting more market-based policies could be worth billions of additional dollars annually to Brazil.Environmental Economics&Policies,Crops&Crop Management Systems,Economic Theory&Research,Transport and Environment,Access to Markets

Reflections on peer facilitation of graduate teaching assistant training

This paper outlines a recently designed programme of training for graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), focusing on peer elements embedded in the programme. In particular, we describe our approach to co-facilitation of training, with sessions facilitated by the GTA programme lead and an experienced Peer GTA. Peer GTAs have at least one year of teaching experience and are able to provide practical, contextualised and discipline-specific input, which helps to address the challenge of balancing generic and discipline-specific training in GTA programmes. We describe a small case study of co-facilitation and reflect on the benefits of this approach for new GTAs and for the Peer GTAs themselves. The paper is co-authored by the GTA programme lead and a Peer GTA, who provides first-hand reflections on her experiences

Hierarchical strategies for efficient fault recovery on the reconfigurable PAnDA device

A novel hierarchical fault-tolerance methodology for reconfigurable devices is presented. A bespoke multi-reconfigurable FPGA architecture, the programmable analogue and digital array (PAnDA), is introduced allowing fine-grained reconfiguration beyond any other FPGA architecture currently in existence. Fault blind circuit repair strategies, which require no specific information of the nature or location of faults, are developed, exploiting architectural features of PAnDA. Two fault recovery techniques, stochastic and deterministic strategies, are proposed and results of each, as well as a comparison of the two, are presented. Both approaches are based on creating algorithms performing fine-grained hierarchical partial reconfiguration on faulty circuits in order to repair them. While the stochastic approach provides insights into feasibility of the method, the deterministic approach aims to generate optimal repair strategies for generic faults induced into a specific circuit. It is shown that both techniques successfully repair the benchmark circuits used after random faults are induced in random circuit locations, and the deterministic strategies are shown to operate efficiently and effectively after optimisation for a specific use case. The methods are shown to be generally applicable to any circuit on PAnDA, and to be straightforwardly customisable for any FPGA fabric providing some regularity and symmetry in its structure

Not in my back yard! Sports stadia location and the property market

In recent years sports stadia have been built in the UK, not only for their intended sporting purpose but with the twin aim of stimulating economic and physical regeneration. However, proposals to locate stadia in urban areas often prompt a negative reaction from local communities, fearing a decline in property prices. This paper will use a case study of the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and the City of Manchester Stadium to illustrate that in contrast to this widely held belief, sports stadia can actually enhance the value of residential property. Furthermore, it will argue that stadia also contribute indirectly to property value through the creation of pride, confidence and enhanced image of an area.</p

Electrostatic Turbulence and Debye-scale Structures in Collisionless Shocks

We present analysis of more than 100 large-amplitude bipolar electrostatic structures in a quasi-perpendicular supercritical Earth's bow shock crossing, measured by the Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft. The occurrence of the bipolar structures is shown to be tightly correlated with magnetic field gradients in the shock transition region. The bipolar structures have negative electrostatic potentials and spatial scales of a few Debye lengths. The bipolar structures propagate highly oblique to the shock normal with velocities (in the plasma rest frame) of the order of the ion-acoustic velocity. We argue that the bipolar structures are ion phase space holes produced by the two-stream instability between incoming and reflected ions. This is the first identification of the ion two-stream instability in collisionless shocks