Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain

This is a monograph analysing the symbolic role played by contemporary fiction in the break-up of political and cultural consensus in British public life. This study explores how British identity has been explored and renegotiated by contemporary writers. It starts by examining the new emphasis on space and place that has emerged in recent cultural analysis, and shows how this spatial emphasis informs different literary texts. Having first analysed a series of novels that draw an implicit parallel between the end of the British Empire and the break-up of the unitary British state, the study explores how contemporary writing in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales contributes to a sense of nationhood in those places, and so contributes to the break-up of Britain symbolically. Dix argues that the break-up of Britain is not limited to political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It is also an imaginary process that can be found occurring on a number of other conceptual coordinates. Feminism, class, regional identities and ethnic communities are all terrains on which different writers carry out a fictional questioning of received notions of Britishness and so contribute in different ways to the break-up of Britain

The Developing Role of the Defense Lawyer in Mental Health Litigation

Hogg Foundation for Mental Healt

The Permanent Tourist: Guidebooks in Travel and Education

About a year ago I heard a paper presented by Gary Day at the University of York on the fate of theory in higher education. He looked at the ways in which university departments had been brought within the auspices of a culture of inspection. In a world where higher education commands a fee and is thus becoming more and more commodified, there must be some means of assuring the quality of the product on offer, as there are for other kinds of product on the market ranging from telecommunications to food safety. In particular, he references Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice (1980) and Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory (1995) as landmark moments in a drive to render the skills gleaned from English courses more quantifiable. If a Higher Education course is a commodity in which students are investing time and money, they need to feel certain that by the end of the course they will have received the skills in which they have invested, otherwise they will select another course from the market. These guidebooks to literary and cultural theory are thus an important means of providing the students with the skills they require. They minimize the students’ personal response to texts, providing instead a checklist of what various authors and critics ‘do.’ It is a scenario in which the reader is rendered entirely passive, as if he or she simply absorbs from the manual a basic sense of how they should approach a text if they want to give it a post-colonial, gay, or Marxist reading. To do this is to measure English and the human sciences against the material progress of science and technology – criteria by which they will always be judged wanting since the study of English per se does not achieve material results. Instead, the trend is to generate a set of students who will at least read and think in certain routine ways, which in this case means not thinking for themselves at all, merely consuming and absorbing passively the skills which their theoretical manuals provide. The use of guidebooks in higher education in many ways thus forestalls the possibility for really creative individual work and expression, generating instead a gradually homogenised discipline, English Literature. The production of a passive reader and routine patterns of response informs my idea of guidebooks more generally. It is in the nature of guidebooks to present stable meanings and self-contained units of information. At the same time, the construction of a guidebook means that it is not amenable to interrogation. To depend on a guidebook is not to know what questions we would need to ask in order to disavow the contents of that book. The user of the guide – whether reader or traveller – is thus in many ways a passive figure. In this paper I look both at travel guides and fictional representations of the Guide and suggest that the line dividing them might not be as clear as it seems

IMPROVING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE LIVE CATTLE FUTURES CONTRACT

Marketing,

Enhancing Creativity in Interaction Design: Alternative Design Brief

This paper offers a critique of the design brief as it is currently used in teaching interaction design and proposes an alternative way of developing it. Such a design brief requires the exploration of alternative application domains for an already developed technology. The paper presents a case study where such a novel type of design brief has been offered to the students taking part in a collaborative design project and discusses how it supported divergent thinking and creativity as well as helped enhancing the learning objectives

Using Frustration in the Design of Adaptive Videogames

In efforts to attract a wider audience, videogames are beginning to incorporate adaptive gameplay mechanics. Unlike the more traditional videogame, adaptive games can cater the gaming experience to the individual user and not just a particular group of users as with the former. Affective videogames, games that respond to the user's emotional state, may hold the key to creating such gameplay mechanics. In this paper we discus how the emotion frustration may be used in the design of adaptive videogames and the ongoing research into its detection and measurement

Artefact Ecologies: Supporting Embodied Meeting Practices with Distance Access

Frameworks such as activity theory, distributed cognition and structuration theory, amongst others, have shown that detailed study of contextual settings where users work (or live) can help the design of interactive systems. However, these frameworks do not adequately focus on accounting for the materiality (and embodiment) of the contextual settings. Within the IST-EU funded AMIDA project (Augmented Multiparty Interaction with Distance Access) we are looking into supporting meeting practices with distance access. Meetings are inherently embodied in everyday work life and that material artefacts associated with meeting practices play a critical role in their formation. Our eventual goal is to develop a deeper understanding of the dynamic and embodied nature of meeting practices and designing technologies to support these. In this paper we introduce the notion of "artefact ecologies" as a conceptual base for understanding embodied meeting practices with distance access. Artefact ecologies refer to a system consisting of different digital and physical artefacts, people, their work practices and values and lays emphasis on the role artefacts play in embodiment, work coordination and supporting remote awareness. In the end we layout our plans for designing technologies for supporting embodied meeting practices within the AMIDA project. \u

Becoming curious about cats: A collaborative writing project

Students’ interests and achievement in writing are often debated and located in theoretical and pedagogical arguments. These issues can polarise understandings of effective teaching practice. This article describes one teacher’s classroom practice in a New Zealand primary school. It outlines a collaborative project between a local teacher and a university lecturer. The two educators were concerned about political and educational changes and the influence this had on teachers’ writing pedagogy. They were concerned about the differences between the children’s reading and writing achievement evident in this year three classroom. As researchers they were keen to explore the ‘power of literature’ as a way of enriching children’s oral and written language experiences. The writers argue that by using quality literature in the classroom, with an explicit focus on authors’ literary techniques, students develop an awareness of how authors craft and construct texts. The young writers were apprenticed to experts and developed a metalanguage, which enhanced their own writing skills