"Give me some space" : exploring youth to parent aggression and violence

A small scale qualitative project, undertaken by an interdisciplinary domestic violence research group involving academic researchers and research assistants, with colleagues from Independent Domestic Abuse Services (IDAS), investigated youth aggression and violence against parents. Following the literature review, data was generated through several research conversations with young people (n = 2), through semi-structured interviews with mothers (n = 3) and practitioners (n = 5), and through a practitioner focus group (n = 8). Thematic analysis and triangulation of the data from parents, practitioners and young people, elicited interconnected and complex overarching themes. Young people could be both victim and perpetrator. The witnessing or experiencing of domestic aggression and violence raised the concept of ‘bystander children’. The impact of young people experiencing familial violence was underestimated by parents. For practitioners, the effects of working with domestic violence was shown to be significant - both positively and negatively

Introduction to “Binary Binds”: Deconstructing Sex and Gender Dichotomies in Archaeological Practice

YesGender archaeology has made significant strides toward deconstructing the hegemony of binary categorizations. Challenging dichotomies such as man/woman, sex/gender, and biology/culture, approaches informed by poststructuralist, feminist, and queer theories have moved beyond essentialist and universalist identity constructs to more nuanced configurations. Despite the theoretical emphasis on context, multiplicity, and fluidity, binary starting points continue to streamline the spectrum of variability that is recognized, often reproducing normative assumptions in the evidence. The contributors to this special issue confront how sex, gender, and sexuality categories condition analytical visibility, aiming to develop approaches that respond to the complexity of theory in archaeological practice. The papers push the ontological and epistemological boundaries of bodies, personhood, and archaeological possibility, challenging a priori assumptions that contain how sex, gender, and sexuality categories are constituted and related to each other. Foregrounding intersectional approaches that engage with ambiguity, variability, and difference, this special issue seeks to “de-contain” categories, assumptions, and practices from “binding” our analytical gaze toward only certain kinds of persons and knowledges, in interpretations of the past and practices in the present

Development and Testing of a Matrix for Mongoose Toxic Bait: Nontoxic Bait Acceptance Cage Trials

The only pesticide currently registered for mongoose control is a product developed for rats that consists of a hard-cereal bait block. Although the active ingredient (diphacinone) is known to be highly effective for mongoose, previous studies indicate that carnivorous and omnivorous mongooses do not readily consume the hard bait matrix designed for gnawing rodents. A palatable bait matrix with a consistency more appropriate to mongoose dentition and feeding behavior will be required to develop a more effective mongoose pesticide. We evaluated the acceptance and consumption of nontoxic versions of four candidate bait matrices: FOXECUTE® and FOXSHIELD® (Animal Control Technologies, Australia; ACTA); HOGGONE® (ACTA); and a potted pork shoulder loaf containing artificial dead mouse scent developed by WS-NWRC as a bait for invasive brown treesnakes (hereafter ‘BTS bait’). We offered test groups of six mongooses one of the candidate bait matrices alongside dry dog kibble dog food as a challenge diet for five days. Because the potential active ingredients para-aminopropiophenone and sodium nitrite require accumulation of the toxicant within a relatively brief period of time to affect lethal toxicity before they are metabolized, we conditioned mongooses to feeding within only a four-hour window rather than slowly sampling the bait throughout the day. We estimated rate and amount of consumption through review of time-lapse photography of feeding trials and measured total consumption by weighing uneaten portions of bait. From the first day offered, most mongooses readily consumed ample amounts of all four bait matrices and consumed almost no challenge diet. Overall, consumption was highest and most consistent with the BTS bait. Although this trial did not clearly discriminate an optimal bait matrix, this result is highly encouraging in that we have multiple palatable options. The final selection will be based on other characteristics of the bait matrix such as longevity in the field, compatibility with the selected toxicant, and ease of manufacture, storage, and use. We provide an overview of some of these characteristics for each candidate bait type

The Transformed Beast : Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the Gothic

After only one eight-part series, the Showtime/Sky Atlantic co-production Penny Dreadful (2014 -) has become an international success with an active and vocal fanbase. Yet the relationship of the show (which was created and written by John Logan) to the Victorian serial fiction genre, ‘penny dreadfuls’, is an oblique one, and worth unpicking. Penny Dreadful is set in a late-Victorian Gothic world in which Dorian Gray and Victor Frankenstein join central figures Vanessa Ives and Sir Malcom Murray in attempting to rescue Sir Malcolm’s daughter Mina, who is under the power of Dracula. In its embrace of anachronism and rewriting of canonical Gothic texts, the series concept seems to owe more to pastiches and fan fiction practices like crossover fiction and ‘shipping’, than to the ‘reformed’ adventure fiction published by Edward J. Brett, W.L. Emmett, and Charles Fox in the later nineteenth century. However, I argue that there are other Victorian popular fictions to which the series has a more direct bloodline, including the penny dreadfuls’ forerunner, the ‘penny blood’, and the Gothic drama of the period. In its use of both penny blood archetypes (the werewolf, the vampire) and literary sources that were either bastardised for popular fiction and drama (Frankenstein) or which were criticised as being too ‘vulgar’ or ‘noxious’ to be read (The Picture of Dorian Gray) the series stages a clash of high and low cultures, of what is now considered ‘classic’ literature, and pulp. Paradoxically, Logan’s Penny Dreadful does all this not in the name of crude commercialism, but as the flagship of a Sky Atlantic campaign to raise the profile of its productions and to achieve the critical kudos routinely awarded to the American subscription channel Home Box Office (HBO). So the invoking of Victorian low-brow fiction serves to facilitate the middlebrow trajectory of a 21st-century television channel (in stark contrast to Victorian penny-blood authors like G.W.M. Reynolds, who, on moving into the more ‘respectable’ world of newspapers, sought to deny their roots in the business). In addition to exploring the rhetorical, structural and and semantic resonances of Penny Dreadful as a title and organising concept for the series, I will consider its broad appeal as an example of what Victoria Nelson, Catherine Spooner and Kohlke and Gutleben have classified in different ways as the ‘global Gothic’, the ubiquity of commercialised Gothic tropes in contemporary culture. Finally, the article seeks to place Penny Dreadful in the context of broadcasters’ difficulties, over the last decade, in representing the Victorian period in ways that win both critical and commercial acclaim. Seen in such a light, the show can be read as a conscious ‘liberation’ (in Logan’s words) from the historical weight of twentieth-century adaptations of Victorian fiction; but it is also a liberation which relies on audiences’ cultural capital to parse the meaning of its textual infidelities