The art world’s response to the challenge of inequality

This paper considers the challenges which rising economic inequality poses to the art world with a special focus on museums and galleries in the UK. Based on interviews with artists, curators and managers of leading art institutions in London, we discuss how issues of economic inequality are reflected in their thinking about cultural work and how these relate to questions of spatial power, post-colonial sensibilities and diversity issues. We show how increasing economic inequality brings about deep-seated, systematic and sustained challenges which extend well beyond public funding cuts associated with austerity politics to a wider re-positioning of the arts away from its location in a distinctive public sphere and towards elite private privilege. Against this backdrop, we put forward the term ‘the artistic politics of regionalism’ and suggest that the most promising approaches to addressing contemporary inequalities lie in institutions’ reconsideration of spatial dynamics which can link concerns with decolonisation and representation to a recognition of how economic inequality takes a highly spatialised form

Medical Pluralism, mainstream marginality or subaltern therapeutics? Globalisation and the integration of ‘Asian’ medicines and biomedicine in the UK

Medical Pluralism refers to the co-existence of differing medical traditions and practices grounded in divergent epistemological positions and based on distinctive worldviews. From the 1970s, a globalised health market, underpinned by new consumer and practitioner interest, spawned the importation of ‘non-Western’ therapeutics to the UK. Since then, these various modalities have co-existed alongside, and sometimes within, biomedical clinics. Sociologists have charted the emergence of this ‘new’ medical pluralism in the UK, to establish how complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) have fared in both the private and public health sectors and to consider explanations for the attraction of these modalities. The current positioning of CAM can be described as one of ‘mainstream marginality’ (Cant 2009): popular with users, but garnering little statutory support. Much sociological analysis has explained this marginal positioning of non-orthodox medicine by recourse to theories of professionalisation and has shown how biomedicine has been able, with the support of the state, to subordinate, co-opt and limit its competitors. Whilst insightful, this work has largely neglected to situate medical pluralism in its historical, global and colonial context. By drawing on post-colonial thinking, the paper suggests how we might differently theorise and research the appropriation, alteration and reimagining of ‘Asian’ therapeutic knowledges in the UK

Hysteresis, social congestion and debt: towards a sociology of mental health disorders in undergraduates

Sociologists have done much to show that the education system, whatever its meritocratic rationale, is associated with the generation and reproduction of fundamental inequalities. This paper explores how the recent epidemic of mental illness amongst undergraduate students can be seen as part of this dynamic. Reflecting on the dearth of sociological work in this area, the paper draws together the sociologies of inequality, education, and health and illness and explores the value of Bourdieusian framework for understanding the rise of mental health disorders in the undergraduate population. The suggestion is that whilst widening participation has extended educational opportunities, it has simultaneously created a context in which a state of hysteresis (Bourdieu, 1977) can emerge which, when combined with social congestion in the workplace (Brown, 2013) and high levels of debt, serves to elevate rates of depression and anxiet

Hidden in plain sight: exploring men’s use of complementary and alternative medicine

Despite the increased attention given to the relationship between masculinity and health, the analysis of men’s use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is relatively underdeveloped compared to studies of female use. Through the thematic synthesis of existing research studies, this paper collates and analyses patterns of, and motivations for, male usage of CAM. We reveal that there are significant levels of male use of CAM which cannot be explained by recourse to general or gendered patterns of health seeking behaviour or health status. Men who use CAM tend to exhibit similar demographic characteristics to female users, but also show patterns of engagement that both reinforce and challenge hegemonic masculinity. The paper suggests that there remains a need to investigate the nuances and complexities of the motivations behind male usage patterns, and interrogate how these intersect with the performance of masculine selves

Popular but peripheral: the ambivalent status of sociology education in schools in England

This article reports the largest UK study of sociology school teachers’ views of the discipline. Drawing on the sociology of the professions, we reflect on the ambivalent positioning of sociology in schools. Despite buoyant uptake, teachers claim that sociology is perceived as dated and has lower status than other elective courses, often described as a ‘soft’ and ‘easy’ subject that anyone can teach. While many students are reported to benefit from the transformative education that sociology affords, the failure to designate the subject as facilitating entry to higher status universities serves to further marginalise the discipline. We argue that sociology in schools is weakly bounded, poorly supported and lacks strong professional coherence. While this allows sociology to have an open, critical and reflexive character, it comes at the price of not being able to control delivery in schools and make claims for high status

Object Ensemble Processing in Human Anterior-Medial Ventral Visual Cortex

Our visual system can extract summary statistics from large collections of similar objects without forming detailed representations of the individual objects in the ensemble. Such object ensemble representation is adaptive and allows us to overcome the capacity limitation associated with representing specific objects. Surprisingly, little is known about the neural mechanisms supporting such object ensemble representation. Here we showed human observers identical photographs of the same object ensemble, different photographs depicting the same ensemble, or different photographs depicting different ensembles. We observed fMRI adaptation in anterior-medial ventral visual cortex whenever object ensemble statistics repeated, even when local image features differed across photographs. Interestingly, such object ensemble processing is closely related to texture and scene processing in the brain. In contrast, the lateral occipital area, a region involved in object–shape processing, showed adaptation only when identical photographs were repeated. These results provide the first step toward understanding the neural underpinnings of real-world object ensemble representation.Psycholog

Flame self-interactions with increasing turbulence intensity

© 2018 The Combustion Institute. The topology of flame-flame interaction is analysed for single turbulent premixed flames with increasing turbulence intensity. Morse theory for critical points is used for identifying the flame-flame interaction and characterising the local topology. The interactions have been categorised into four different groups, namely reactant pocket, tunnel formation, tunnel closure and product pocket. A histogram showing the frequency of occurrence of each of these groups is presented for single flames representative of hydrocarbon-air combustion and is compared with the results of colliding hydrogen-air flames. It is observed that most interactions for a single flame occur toward the leading edge. Also, more interactions are observed for higher intensity turbulence. The cylindrical topology types are found to dominate over spherical topology types. The relative frequency of occurrence of each type of topology is observed to change with changes in turbulence intensity. With increasing turbulence intensity, the fraction of product pockets and tunnel formation events increases whereas the fraction of reactant pockets and tunnel closure events decreases. The rise in product pockets is mirrored by the drop in reactant pockets, and likewise, the rise in tunnel formation events is mirrored by the drop in tunnel closure events

Reconciling turbulent burning velocity with flame surface area in small-scale turbulence

A discrepancy between the enhancement in overall burning rate and the enhancement in flame surface area measured for high-intensity turbulence is addressed. In order to reconcile the two quantities, an additional contribution from the effective turbulent diffusivity is considered. This contribution is expected to arise in sufficiently intense turbulence from eddies smaller than the flamelet thickness. In the present work, the enhancement in diffusivity arising from these eddies is estimated based on a model energy spectrum; individual contributions from all turbulence length scales smaller the flamelet thickness are integrated over the corresponding portion of the spectrum. It is shown that diffusivity enhancement, estimated in this manner, is able to account for the measured discrepancy between the overall burning rate enhancement and flame surface area enhancement. The factor quantifying this discrepancy is formalized as a closed-form function of the Karlovitz number.G.V.N. acknowledges the funding support of EPSRC grant EP/P022286/1

Adaptation to public goods cheats in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Royal Society via the DOI in this record.Cooperation in nature is ubiquitous, but is susceptible to social cheats who pay little or no cost of cooperation yet reap the benefits. The effect such cheats have on reducing population productivity suggests that there is selection for cooperators to mitigate the adverse effects of cheats. While mechanisms have been elucidated for scenarios involving a direct association between producer and cooperative product, it is less clear how cooperators may suppress cheating in an anonymous public goods scenario, where cheats cannot be directly identified. Here, we investigate the real-time evolutionary response of cooperators to cheats when cooperation is mediated by a diffusible public good: the production of iron-scavenging siderophores by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We find that siderophore producers evolved in thepresence of a high frequency of non-producing cheats were fitter in the presence of cheats, at no obvious cost to population productivity. A novel morphotype independently evolved and reached higher frequencies in cheat-adapted versus control populations, exhibiting reduced siderophore production but increased production of pyocyanin - an extracellular toxin that can also increase the availability of soluble iron. This suggests that cooperators may have mitigated the negative effects of cheats by downregulating siderophore production and upregulating an alternative iron-acquisition public good. More generally, the study emphasises that cooperating organisms can rapidly adapt to the presence of anonymous cheats without necessarily incurring fitness costs in the environment they evolve in.The work was funded by AXA research fund, NERC, BBSRC and the Royal Society to AB and a University of Exeter PhD studentship to SOB

Grasping and Lifting Different Materials

The material from which an object is made can determine how heavy it feels (Seashore, 1899). Interestingly, a metal block that has been adjusted to have the same size and mass as a polystyrene block will feel lighter than the polystyrene block. We recently showed that participants experiencing this material-weight illusion’ (MWI) do not apply forces that match their perceptual experience of heaviness ‐ just like in the size‐weight illusion ( Flanagan & Beltzner, 2000). Our previous study showed that forces on early trials were scaled to each participant’s expectations of how much a particular block should weigh ‐ excessive force was applied to the metal block and insufficient force was applied to the polystyrene block. Forces on later trials scaled to the real weight of each block ‐ identical levels of force were applied to all the blocks. MWI persisted throughout – the polystyrene block felt the heaviest and the metal block felt the lightest.We followed this finding up with two experiments: Experiment 1 – different weight, different material: We adjusted the weight of each block slightly in the opposite direction to the illusion, predicting that we would find opposing perceptual and motor responses (e.g., Grandy & Westwood, 2006). Experiment 2 – different weight, same material: We also removed the visual differences between the blocks, keeping the slight difference in weight, predicting that the dissociation between perception and action would disappear