"Things that stay":feminist theory, duration and the future

Taking up Grosz's proposal for the `complexities of time and becoming' to be considered seriously, this article explores the status of time and the future within feminist theory through empirical research in which teenage girls describe things `staying'. Focusing on these `things that stay' and drawing on Bergson's concepts of duration and the virtual, the article argues that time is dynamic and heterogeneous; things endure through divergence and transformation. It argues that if the relations of temporality are understood as both continuous and discontinuous, enduring and changing, feminist theory orients to the future in `novel' ways

Exploratory Practice: Researching the Impact of Songs on EFL Learners' Verbal Memory

Traditionally popular songs have been used as a way of enhancing listening and auditory perception skills and teaching vocabulary, but not necessarily for memory recall. Popular song gap-fills are already commonplace within the EFL (English as a foreign language) field; however, this study found that more attention needs to be given, to the lexical, grammatical and phonological items that learners are instructed to retain. The results of this study suggest that, verbal memory is a vital part of language learning that should be incorporated into popular song gap-fills and that EFL teachers, theorists and textbook authors need to review the way language in popular songs is encoded, stored and retrieved, by incorporating memory strategies, following guidelines on gap-selection, including a phonological aspect and using a recycling activity. In this article traditional and contemporary understandings of verbal memory and popular song are outlined and comprehensively analysed within relevant fields that embrace ELT (English language teaching), Biology, Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics and Cognitive Psychology perspectives and discusses their pedagogical implications

The becoming of bodies : girls, media effects and body image.

The relations between women's bodies and images have long interested and occupied feminist theoretical and empirical work. Recently, much feminist research has focused on the relations between girls' and young women's bodies and images in “the media.” Underpinning much of this research, I argue, is an oppositional model of subject/object onto which bodies and images are mapped. Developing Deleuze's concept of becoming and exploring my own research with a small number of white British teenage girls, I develop an alternative model of the relations between bodies and images. I suggest that while the subject/object model relies upon a notion of media effects, an understanding of bodies as becoming opens up feminist research to consider the ways in which bodies are not separate to images but rather are known, understood and experienced through images. If feminist research takes seriously this conception of bodies as becoming, its task is to account for how bodies become through their relations with images; what becomings of bodies do images limit or extend

The symplectic-N t-J model and s±_\pm superconductors

The possible discovery of $s_\pm$ superconducting gaps in the moderately correlated iron-based superconductors has raised the question of how to properly treat $s_\pm$ gaps in strongly correlated superconductors. Unlike the d-wave cuprates, the Coulomb repulsion does not vanish by symmetry, and a careful treatment is essential. Thus far, only the weak correlation approaches have included this Coulomb pseudopotential, so here we introduce a symplectic N treatment of the t-J model that incorporates the strong Coulomb repulsion through the complete elimination of on-site pairing. Through a proper extension of time-reversal symmetry to the large N limit, symplectic-N is the first superconducting large N solution of the t-J model. For d-wave superconductors, the previous uncontrolled mean field solutions are reproduced, while for $s_\pm$ superconductors, the SU(2) constraint enforcing single occupancy acts as a pair chemical potential adjusting the location of the gap nodes. This adjustment can capture the wide variety of gaps proposed for the iron based superconductors: line and point nodes, as well as two different, but related full gaps on different Fermi surfaces.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Spins, electrons and broken symmetries: realizations of two channel Kondo physics

Adding a second Kondo channel to heavy fermion materials reveals new exotic symmetry breaking phases associated with the development of Kondo coherence. In this paper, we review two such phases, the "hastatic order" associated with non-Kramers doublet ground states, where the two-channel nature of the Kondo coupling is guaranteed by virtual valence fluctuations to an excited Kramers doublet, and "composite pair superconductivity," where the two channels differ by charge 2e and can be thought of as virtual valence fluctuations to a pseudo-isospin doublet. The similarities and differences between these two orders will be discussed, along with possible realizations in actinide and rare earth materials like URu2Si2 and NpPd5Al2.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures. Prepared for Comptes Rendu Physiques, Emergent phenomena in actinide

Hidden and Hastatic Orders in URu2Si2

The hidden order developing below 17.5K in the heavy fermion material URu2Si2 has eluded identification for over twenty five years. This paper will review the recent theory of ``hastatic order,'' a novel two-component order parameter capturing the hybridization between half-integer spin (Kramers) conduction electrons and the non-Kramers 5f^2 Ising local moments, as strongly indicated by the observation of Ising quasiparticles in de Haas-van Alphen measurements. Hastatic order differs from conventional magnetism as it is a spinor order that breaks both single and double time-reversal symmetry by mixing states of different Kramers parity. The broken time-reversal symmetry simply explains both the pseudo-Goldstone mode between the hidden order and antiferromagnetic phases and the nematic order seen in torque magnetometry. The spinorial nature of the hybridization also explains how the Kondo effect gives a phase transition, with the hybridization gap turning on at the hidden order transition as seen in scanning tunneling microscopy. Hastatic order also has a number of new predictions: a basal-plane magnetic moment of order .01\mu_B, a gap to longitudinal spin fluctuations that vanishes continuously at the first order antiferromagnetic transition and a narrow resonant nematic feature in the scanning tunneling spectra.Comment: Invited talk at SCES 2013 (Tokyo, Japan