A class act: an interview with Julie Hesmondhalgh on casting, representation and inclusion in British television drama

In this interview, actor Julie Hesmondhalgh reflects on her rich body of work in British TV drama, connecting her own career trajectory with a consideration of wider industry developments in casting and representation, diversity and inclusion. With extended reference to Coronation Street (1960–) and Doctor Who (1963–1989, 2005–), Hesmondhalgh discusses how far UK TV drama production has come in tackling systemic inequalities and exclusions, while also stressing the progress still required, particularly in relation to capturing the complexities of class identity. More broadly, the insights offered within this piece illustrate the value of industry interviews as a methodological approach for TV studies, in revealing the experiences and perspectives of key creative agents within the production process

Catchment-scale vulnerability assessment of groundwater pollution from diffuse sources using the DRASTIC method : a case study

The catchment-scale groundwater vulnerability assessment that delineates zones representing different levels of groundwater susceptibility to contaminants from diffuse agricultural sources has become an important element in groundwater pollution prevention for the implementation of the EUWater Framework Directive (WFD). This paper evaluates the DRASTIC method using an ArcGIS platform for assessing groundwater vulnerability in the Upper Bann catchment, Northern Ireland. Groundwater vulnerability maps of both general pollutants and pesticides in the study area were generated by using data on the factors depth to water, net recharge, aquifer media, soil media, topography, impact of vadose zone, and hydraulic conductivity, as defined in DRASTIC. The mountain areas in the study area have “high” (in 4.5% of the study area) or “moderate” (in 25.5%) vulnerability for general pollutants due to high rainfall, net recharge and soil permeability. However, by considering the diffuse agricultural sources, the mountain areas are actually at low groundwater pollution risk. The results of overlaying the maps of land use and the groundwater vulnerability are closer to the reality. This study shows that the DRASTIC method is helpful for guiding the prevention practices of groundwater pollution at the catchment scale in the UK

Unsteady turbulent buoyant plumes

We model the unsteady evolution of turbulent buoyant plumes following temporal changes to the source conditions. The integral model is derived from radial integration of the governing equations expressing the conservation of mass, axial momentum and buoyancy. The non-uniform radial profiles of the axial velocity and density deficit in the plume are explicitly described by shape factors in the integral equations; the commonly-assumed top-hat profiles lead to shape factors equal to unity. The resultant model is hyperbolic when the momentum shape factor, determined from the radial profile of the mean axial velocity, differs from unity. The solutions of the model when source conditions are maintained at constant values retain the form of the well-established steady plume solutions. We demonstrate that the inclusion of a momentum shape factor that differs from unity leads to a well-posed integral model. Therefore, our model does not exhibit the mathematical pathologies that appear in previously proposed unsteady integral models of turbulent plumes. A stability threshold for the value of the shape factor is identified, resulting in a range of its values where the amplitude of small perturbations to the steady solutions decay with distance from the source. The hyperbolic character of the system allows the formation of discontinuities in the fields describing the plume properties during the unsteady evolution. We compute numerical solutions to illustrate the transient development following an abrupt change in the source conditions. The adjustment to the new source conditions occurs through the propagation of a pulse of fluid through the plume. The dynamics of this pulse are described by a similarity solution and, by constructing this new similarity solution, we identify three regimes in which the evolution of the transient pulse following adjustment of the source qualitatively differ.Comment: 41 pages, 16 figures, under consideration for publication in Journal of Fluid Mechanic

Introduction: Trans TV dossier, III: Trans TV re-evaluated, part 2

This is the second more substantial part of the introduction to the final Trans TV special issue, distributed across issues 15.2 and 15.3 of this journal. As well as introducing the contents of this issue, we reflect in this introduction on the Trans TV project as it has developed since 2017, via an engagement with two key televisual texts namely Transparent (2014–2019) and Pose (2018–). We argue that this certainly reflects positive developments in terms of transgender representation and authorship but this progress is more complex when considered in terms of television aesthetics and politics. We also propose, drawing on the work of Koch-Rein et al (2020), a shift form representation towards the concept of ‘transing’ as a reading strategy, and argue that this has been at the heart of the Trans TV project all along

Streaming intersectionality: Queer and trans television aesthetics in post-medium transformation

Following on from the first Trans TV dossier, this dossier shifts the focus from transformations of television industries, institutions, fans and audiences, to questions of queer and trans* aesthetics and representation on contemporary television. This entails a necessarily intersectional approach, but one that looks at what happens to intersectional genealogies in the era of streaming, Internet-distributed television: do the post-network or even post-medium transformations examined in the first dossier facilitate the opening of queer and trans spaces in the contemporary television landscape? Or is the evolution of television more cyclical than linear, offering both moments of transgression and emergence, as well as reaction, in relation to new technological and institutional configurations. While the focus of most of the work contained within this dossier is on the level of representation and aesthetics, the questions raised are pertinent for understanding the new configurations of technologies, production, distribution and consumption that characterise Internet-distributed television, which in turn need to be seen in relation to the complex intersectional genealogies of televisual content presented here

Introduction: Trans TV as Intervention into Contemporary Television, Trans TV Dossier 1: Platform Television, Netflix and Industrial Transformations

This dossier is the first of two to emerge out of the Trans TV conference held at the University of Westminster in September 2017. The focus of this specific dossier is in tracking the latest developments and emergent trends affecting contemporary television production, especially as delivered via new online streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon. The article and series of interventions within this dossier set out to challenge both popular and scholarly discourse around these contemporary transformations, pointing not only to technological shifts in television but also to changes in terms of branding, regional and transnational delivery of content, viewing practices, mobile consumption and ‘transfandom’, amongst other factors. The dossier poses the key questions that if television is undergoing a process of transformation as the title 'Trans TV' suggests, what is 'television' becoming and to what extent and in what aspects can we still recognise it as 'television'? While there are a variety of answers to these questions within the dossier, there is a consensus that in the light of these multiple transformations of television, many of the key concepts and assumptions of Television Studies now require thorough reconsideration

Trans TV dossier, III: Trans TV re-evaluated, part 1

When we organised the conference on Trans TV at the University of Westminster in 2017, our aims were both to bridge frequently fragmented discussions of contemporary televisual industries, audiences, fandom, representation and content, and to probe whether in the age of internet-distributed streaming television there were more spaces for expressions of diversity than had previously been the case during the network television era, or even in the still recent but already surpassed rise of cable channels like HBO and AMC as producers of original content. Had we, in fact, passed from the age of ‘Difficult Men’ (Martin, 2013) – to use Brett Martin’s term to capture both cable anti-heroes and showrunners associated with the rise of cable TV original programming – to a much more diverse set of difficulties traversing multiple ethnic, gender and sexual identities. Certainly this is not a question of leaving behind the troubling or problematic questions, as numerous critiques of these shows have indicated, including in previous dossiers; it is rather a question of going beyond the normative, both in terms of models and concepts of broadcast television and in the sense of heteronormative narratives and characters

Optimising image quality for medical imaging

OPTIMAX 2016 was held at the University of Salford in Greater Manchester. It is the fourth summer school of OPTIMAX with other renditions having been organized at the University of Salford (2013), ESTeSL, Lisbon (2014) and Hanze UAS, Groningen (2015). For OPTIMAX 2016, 72 people participated from eleven countries, comprising PhD, MSc and BSc students as well as tutors from the seven European partner universities. Professional mix was drawn from engineering, medical physics/ physics and radiography. OPTIMAX 2016 was partly funded by the partner universities and partly by the participants. Two students from South Africa and two from Brazil were invited by Hanze UAS (Groningen) and ESTeSL (Lisbon). One student from the United Kingdom was funded by the Nuffield Foundation. The summer school included lectures and group projects in which experimental research was conducted in five teams. Each team project focus varied and included: optimization of full spine curvature radiography in paediatrics; ultrasound assessment of muscle thickness and muscle cross-sectional area: a reliability study; the Influence of Source-to-Image Distance on Effective Dose and Image Quality for Mobile Chest X-rays; Impact of the anode heel effect on image quality and effective dose for AP Pelvis: A pilot study; and the impact of pitch values on Image Quality and radiation dose in an abdominal adult phantom using CT. OPTIMAX 2016 culminated in a poster session and a conference, in which the research teams presented their posters and oral presentations. This book comprises of two sections, the first four chapters concern generic background information which has value to summer school organization and also theory on which the research projects were built. The second section contains the research papers in written format. The research papers have been accepted for the ECR conference, Vienna, 2017 as either oral presentations or posters