Groupoids and an index theorem for conical pseudo-manifolds

We define an analytical index map and a topological index map for conical pseudomanifolds. These constructions generalize the analogous constructions used by Atiyah and Singer in the proof of their topological index theorem for a smooth, compact manifold $M$. A main ingredient is a non-commutative algebra that plays in our setting the role of $C_0(T^*M)$. We prove a Thom isomorphism between non-commutative algebras which gives a new example of wrong way functoriality in $K$-theory. We then give a new proof of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem using deformation groupoids and show how it generalizes to conical pseudomanifolds. We thus prove a topological index theorem for conical pseudomanifolds

'Mine's a Pint of Bitter': Performativity, gender, class and representations of authenticity in real-ale tourism

Leisure choices are expressive of individual agency around the maintenance of taste, boundaries, identity and community. This research paper is part of a wider project designed to assess the social and cultural value of real ale to tourism in the north of England. This paper explores the performativity of real-ale tourism and debates about belonging in northern English real-ale communities. The research combines an ethnographic case study of a real-ale festival with semi-structured interviews with organisers and volunteers, northern English real-ale brewers and real-ale tourists visiting the festival. It is argued that real-ale tourism, despite its origins in the logic of capitalism, becomes a space where people can perform Habermasian, communicative leisure, and despite the contradictions of preferring some capitalist industries over others on the basis of their perceived smaller size and older age, real-ale fans demonstrate agency in their performativity

Popular music, psychogeography, place identity and tourism: The case of Sheffield

Tourism and cultural agencies in some English provincial cities are promoting their popular music ‘heritage’ and, in some cases, contemporary musicians through the packaging of trails, sites, ‘iconic’ venues and festivals. This article focuses on Sheffield, a ‘post-industrial’ northern English city which is drawing on its associations with musicians past and present in seeking to attract tourists. This article is based on interviews with, among others, recording artists, promoters, producers and venue managers, along with reflective observational and documentary data. Theoretical remarks are made on the representations of popular musicians through cultural tourism strategies, programmes and products and also on the ways in which musicians convey a ‘psychogeographical’ sense of place in the ‘soundscape’ of the city

Impossible protest: noborders in Calais

Since the closure of the Red Cross refugee reception centre in Sangatte, undocumented migrants in Calais hoping to cross the border to Britain have been forced to take refuge in a number of squatted migrant camps, locally known by all as ‘the jungles.’ Unauthorised shanty-like residences built by the migrants themselves, living conditions in the camps are very poor. In June 2009, European ‘noborder’ activists set up a week-long protest camp in the area with the intention of confronting the authorities over their treatment of undocumented migrants. In this article, we analyse the June 2009 noborder camp as an instance of ‘immigrant protest.’ Drawing on ethnographic materials and Jacques Rancière's work on politics and aesthetics, we construct a typology of forms of border control through which to analyse the different ways in which the politics of the noborder camp were staged, performed and policed. Developing a critique of policing practices which threatened to make immigrant protest ‘impossible’, we highlight moments of protest which, through the affirmation of an ‘axiomatic’ equality, disrupted and disarticulated the borders between citizens and non-citizens, the political and non-political

Events in the affective city: Affect, attention and alignment in two ordinary urban events

In a representational regime, planned urban events are used by urban planners to render urban projects visible and acceptable. As a corollary of the focus of urban studies on their representational dimension and in spite of a burgeoning literature on the notion of affective urbanism, the experiential character of events remains surprisingly unexplored. This paper argues that an ordinary regime of events is mobilised by city-makers to act on the embodied, affective experience of the city and on the ways urban dwellers know and act upon the city. By analysing planned urban events in their embodied, experiential dimension, we focus on the ways in which, through the design of ephemeral material dispositives, urbanists attempt to encourage citizens to incorporate ways of knowing and acting on space and on the modalities of knowing and acting that are at play. We stage an encounter between critical event studies and Ingoldian approaches to affect and attention, examining two urban events in a Swiss canton. We show how intense encounters with urban matter are staged in an attempt to modulate affects, guide attention, and produce alignment with a specific political project, asking urban dwellers either to embody a project still in the making or to cultivate expectations regarding an already-written future

The eventization of leisure and the strange death of alternative Leeds

The communicative potential of city spaces as leisure spaces is a central assumption of political activism and the creation of alternative, counter-cultural and subcultural scenes. However, such potential for city spaces is limited by the gentrification, privatization and eventization of city centres in the wake of wider societal and cultural struggles over leisure, work and identity formation. In this paper, we present research on alternative scenes in the city of Leeds to argue that the eventization of the city centre has led to a marginalization and of alternative scenes on the fringes of the city. Such marginalization has not caused the death of alternative Leeds or political activism associated with those scenes—but it has changed the leisure spaces (physical, political and social) in which alternative scenes contest the mainstream

Large emergency-response exercises: qualitative characteristics - a survey

Exercises, drills, or simulations are widely used, by governments, agencies and commercial organizations, to simulate serious incidents and train staff how to respond to them. International cooperation has led to increasingly large-scale exercises, often involving hundreds or even thousands of participants in many locations. The difference between ‘large’ and ‘small’ exercises is more than one of size: (a) Large exercises are more ‘experiential’ and more likely to undermine any model of reality that single organizations may create; (b) they create a ‘play space’ in which organizations and individuals act out their own needs and identifications, and a ritual with strong social implications; (c) group-analytic psychotherapy suggests that the emotions aroused in a large group may be stronger and more difficult to control. Feelings are an unacknowledged major factor in the success or failure of exercises; (d) successful large exercises help improve the nature of trust between individuals and the organizations they represent, changing it from a situational trust to a personal trust; (e) it is more difficult to learn from large exercises or to apply the lessons identified; (f) however, large exercises can help develop organizations and individuals. Exercises (and simulation in general) need to be approached from a broader multidisciplinary direction if their full potential is to be realized

Anti-Nirvana: crime, culture and instrumentalism in the age of insecurity

‘Anti-Nirvana’ explores the relationship between consumer culture, media and criminal motivations. It has appeared consistently on the list of the top-ten most-read articles in this award-winning international journal, and it mounts a serious neo-Freudian challenge to the predominant naturalistic notion of ‘resistance’ at the heart of liberal criminology and media studies. It is also cited in the Oxford Handbook of Criminology and other criminology texts as a persuasive argument in support of the theory that criminality amongst young people is strongly linked to the acquisitive values of consumerism and the images of possessive individualism that dominate mass media

Thermoelectric La-doped SrTiO3 epitaxial layers with single-crystal quality: from nanometer to micrometer and mosaicity effects

High-quality thermoelectric LaxSr1-xTiO3 (LSTO) layers (here with x = 0.2), with thicknesses ranging from 20 nm to 700 nm, have been epitaxially grown on SrTiO3(001) substrates by enhanced solid-source oxide molecular-beam epitaxy. All films are atomically flat (with rms roughness < 0.2 nm), with low mosaicity (<0.1{\deg}), and present very low electrical resistivity (<5 x 10-4 ohm.cm at room temperature), one order of magnitude lower than commercial Nb-doped SrTiO3 single-crystalline substrate. The conservation of transport properties within this thickness range has been confirmed by thermoelectric measurements where Seebeck coefficients of around -60 microV/K have been found for all films, accordingly. Finally, a correlation is given between the mosaicity and the (thermo)electric properties. These functional LSTO films can be integrated on Si in opto-microelectronic devices as transparent conductor, thermoelectric elements or in non-volatile memory structures