Depravity, abuse and homoerotic desire in Billy Budd and the 'Prussian officer'

In their resonant and evocative stories – Billy Budd, Sailor and ‘The Prussian Officer’ – Herman Melville and D. H. Lawrence adopt military settings for a personal drama. In both tales, two men come into close and dangerous proximity, resulting ultimately in their deaths. Michael Squires has argued that the Lawrence story, “revealing the secret origin of abuse, shows the Captain punishing what he cannot consciously desire”. This comment could also be applied to Melville’s introspective and ambiguous novella (which has been subject to diverse interpretations), suggesting a motive for John Claggart’s persecution of the innocent Billy. Furthermore, secret abuse and subconscious desire are certainly prevalent within Benjamin Britten’s operatic version of Melville’s tale, with libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier. When it is considered that Forster had almost certainly read Lawrence’s controversial story of military insubordination, bullying, murder and repressed homoerotic desire, a fascinating and complex pattern of inter-connection begins to emerge. Below, I will attempt to tease out the most significant connections by examining both stories alongside the subsequent recasting of Billy Budd as an opera

Book review: celebrity capital: assessing the value of fame by Barrie Gunter

For readers interested in the ways that celebrities can be used to add value to products, brands or campaigns this book will be an interesting read. Readers from a more fan studies background, however, should bear in mind the author’s roots in psychology while reading, writes Bethan Jones

Book review: the Ashgate research companion to fan cultures edited by Linda Duits, Koos Zwaan and Stijn Reijnders

The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures details a range of approaches to fan studies, and examines a range of fan communities, fan texts and definitions of fandom. The questions asked and examples provided makes it an essential read for students of fan studies, academics, and those who are interested in what fandom can tell us about ourselves and the world we engage with, writes Bethan Jones

"The Walking Dead Family is a real thing, not just a hashtag": Experiencing Fan Tourism and Transmediality in Woodbury, Atlanta

The 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference took place in Atlanta. Historically important for the Civil Rights movement, the city is home to the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, but as an emerging hub for film and television production Atlanta is also home to various studios, location tours, and other sites for fan tourism. I attended SCMS 2016 because of the scholarship, but visiting Atlanta meant I was able to spend a day on the Atlanta Movie Tours’ ‘Big Zombie’ tours. The tours feature locations from The Walking Dead in and around Atlanta, and are led by actors from the show. The tours thus provide fans access to behind-the-scenes stories and information, as well as exclusive access to locations, and opportunities to ‘re-enact’ key scenes. In this paper I document my experience of the tours as both fan and academic. I began the tour from a purely fannish perspective, excited to see locations and hear stories, but during the tour I found it difficult to halt academic analysis of this particular form of transmedia tourism. The actors leading the tour spoke of the ‘AMC family’ while noting how they were instructed not to speak to primary cast members, and clips from the show played inside the tour bus before we disembarked to view them in their ‘real’ (rather than fictional) Atlanta context. I thus experienced a sense of dissonance from, rather than immersion in, the world of The Walking Dead, and suggest that this sense of liminality is currently underexplored in analyses of transmedia tourism, where transmediality is assumed to bring the tourist deeper into the storyworld, rather than highlighting their divergence from it

Patient activation in inflammatory arthritis

Patient activation covers the skills, abilities and behaviour that contribute to how able and willing someone is to take an active role in managing their health. Patient activation is currently often assessed using the Patient Activation Measure (PAM). While there is growing interest in patient activation, there has been limited research about it within inflammatory arthritis (IA). Consequently, three studies were conducted to address these knowledge gaps and better understand patient activation. The findings of these studies were synthesised into a framework reporting factors related to patient activation within inflammatory arthritis that may be amenable to intervention.A systematic literature review reported that interventions targeting patient activation in long-term conditions can be effective but that no specific format or style of delivery was more effective than others.Qualitative interviews conducted at two timepoints explored how patients who were skilled at managing their health considered patient activation to incorporate many of the ways that they already self-managed. This included knowing what techniques (both pharmacological and non-pharmacological) suited them and reduced the impact of their symptoms, and when and how to seek appropriate help, including navigating the National Health Service (NHS). They identified that the PAM did not always reflect the fluctuating nature of their conditions.A survey study administered at two time points reported associations with PAM scores and a range of clinical, demographic and psychosocial variables across a sample of rheumatology patients in England. Regression analysis confirmed that self-efficacy, health literacy, illness beliefs and health locus of control significantly contributed to variance in PAM scores.Longitudinal, mixed-methods data indicate that patient activation is more than the items listed in the PAM. It incorporates several factors including health literacy, illness beliefs, self-efficacy and health locus of control underneath a broader umbrella of skills and abilities. Training healthcare professionals about the nature of patient activation in rheumatology may contribute to conversations being more collaborative and equip them with the skills to effectively support patient activation

Completing a Ph.D. – Does it have to be a Lonely Existence?

The co-authors of this paper are current Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) students with the University of Wolverhampton. We embarked on writing this opinion piece to share our experience of the first year of our Ph.D. and suggest how higher education institutions (HEIs) can enhance the academic development of doctoral researchers and minimise the detrimental experiences which studies have shown to affect this group of students

The Draft Restatement (Third) of Conflict of Laws: A Response to Brilmayer & Listwa

This Essay responds to Lea Brilmayer and Dan Listwa’s criticisms of the Draft Restatement (Third) of Conflict of Laws. We appreciate their engagement. As a general matter, we disagree about the nature and purpose of restatements. More specifically, we disagree about the history and aims of the Restatements of Conflict of Laws. Brilmayer and Listwa’s main criticism—that the drafters of the Restatement (Third) are not authoritatively interpreting any single state’s law and therefore can be only persuasive authority as to the content of a state’s law—could apply to all restatements. But since this Draft Restatement, like other restatements, draws its rules from decided cases, the criticism makes little sense even on its own terms

Adrift on \u3ci\u3eErie\u3c/i\u3e: Characterizing Forum-Selection Clauses

Erie is one of our most famous cases, but also one of the most mysterious. It has become something of a Rorschach test, a pattern onto which scholars project their own concerns. This article presents a simple view of Erie as a case about power: first, who has the power to make certain laws and second, who has the power to interpret them. From this perspective, Erie has nothing to do with substance-procedure characterization—the topic now understood to be governed by Erie analysis. Indeed, early post-Erie cases describe Erie as concerned with power. The substance-procedure distinction enters the picture later, and only as a consequence of the conflict-of-laws rule that a forum will use its own procedural law even when deciding a case according to foreign substantive law. Yet Erie analysis, as the Supreme Court has developed it, departs from conflict of laws substance/procedure characterization and is understood as conceptually distinct. This Article argues that the distinction is a mistake: properly understood, Erie analysis really is conflicts characterization, with a few modifications. Viewing Erie from the conflict of laws perspective illuminates the actual issues at stake. As a method of demonstrating the superiority of this perspective, we turn in the last section to a particularly knotty Erie problem: the treatment of contractual choice-of-forum clauses

Adrift on Erie: Characterizing Forum-Selection Clauses

Erie is one of our most famous cases, but also one of the most mysterious. It has become something of a Rorschach test, a pattern onto which scholars project their own concerns. This article presents a simple view of Erie as a case about power: first, who has the power to make certain laws and second, who has the power to interpret them. From this perspective, Erie has nothing to do with substance-procedure characterization—the topic now understood to be governed by Erie analysis. Indeed, early post-Erie cases describe Erie as concerned with power. The substance-procedure distinction enters the picture later, and only as a consequence of the conflict-of-laws rule that a forum will use its own procedural law even when deciding a case according to foreign substantive law. Yet Erie analysis, as the Supreme Court has developed it, departs from conflict of laws substance/procedure characterization and is understood as conceptually distinct. This Article argues that the distinction is a mistake: properly understood, Erie analysis really is conflicts characterization, with a few modifications. Viewing Erie from the conflict of laws perspective illuminates the actual issues at stake. As a method of demonstrating the superiority of this perspective, we turn in the last section to a particularly knotty Erie problem: the treatment of contractual choice-of-forum clauses