Centralised Supports for Writing in Higher Education and Their Applicability to Research, Teaching and Learning Contexts

In 2018, as part of an EU COST Action (COST Action 15221 – www.werelate.eu), 43 academics, based at various higher education institutions in Europe, were asked about existing and desirable centralised support for writing, research, teaching and learning. This article draws on the academics’ responses. It uses that data to demonstrate the ways in which the learner-centred approach, typically adopted by writing centres, might function as a blueprint for a blended centralised support model for these four strands of higher education. In order to explore this idea, the article examines the reported support for research, as the data suggest that the majority of the centralised supports that currently exist at these institutions are designed primarily to support research. The study unpicks the mechanisms and approaches that are designed to ensure that research can be supported; it identifies what is effective in terms of supporting staff as researchers. From there, turning to the existing and desirable supports for writing, teaching and learning, I argue that, using a learner-centred writing centre model as inspiration, the structures which are currently in place to effectively support research can be modified and repurposed to more effectively support writing, teaching, and learning in higher education.       &nbsp

‘God Bless the Child’: Unearthing the Dissident Potential of the Jazz Aesthetic in Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger

In an attempt to adequately convey the stagnant depths to which the Irish Free State had sunk during the decades of its infancy, John Goodby points to the cultural chasm into which Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘masterpiece “The Great Hunger” fell “stillborn” from the press in 1942 when its author was cautioned by the Garda Siochána about his poem’s “immorality”’(2000, p.15). Of course, this episode at once exemplifies the extent to which the heavy hand of the Irish Catholic Church routinely exercised its influence over the legislative and punitive forces of the still-burgeoning Irish State. And if the ultra-conservative values espoused by the establishment of post-partition Ireland echoed those of the National Socialists in Germany any one particular issue throughout the 1930s, it was most assuredly in their outright condemnation of the jazz aesthetic. This paper will set Kavanagh’s work against this socio-historical backdrop, which actually bore witness to the rise of a state-sponsored anti-jazz campaign in the mid-1930s. By doing so, it will further demonstrate that “The Great Hunger” uses the dissident cadences of the jazz aesthetic to orchestrate a vivid dramatization of the physical, emotional and psychological burden this theocratic order imposed upon the citizens of Ireland

\u3ci\u3eMaybe Mermaids and Robots Are Lonely: 40 Stories and a Novella\u3c/i\u3e

Maybe Mermaids and Robots are Lonely comprises 40 stories and a novella all set in or around Detroit and featuring figures that have become almost legendary in American culture. Stories in the collection range in form from a more traditional, if quirky, realism to a somewhat more ethereal or slipstream or magical realism. In the title story, for example, we meet a pair of star-crossed lovers, a robot and a mermaid, who must find a way to bridge their different worlds. Rollo is Rollo is a more realist play on the Cain and Abel, good brother-bad brother story. There\u27s an Andre the Giant story and a Bigfoot story. A story about an aging flower child as she tries to fight off disease. A story about a young moonman who\u27s crash landed on earth and seeks safety in the arms of a wolfgirl. Stories featuring popes and pirates and Elvis. And in the last story of the collection, a short novella, we see a family torn in the churn of aging industry in a failing city and in the city\u27s rebirth as it struggles back from the zombie apocalypse. While magic doesn\u27t always exist in the worlds of these stories, the characters often perceive some magic in their worlds, just as we often see magic in ours. In particular, there\u27s a special kind of magic threaded throughout the collection, a magic unique to life in the suburbs. In all their safety and sterility, the suburbs -- the not city and the not country, the middle-class households with two working parents -- there is some kind of magic that helps pass the afternoon time before everyone gets home from work. These stories attempt to render the world as we perceive it, which is somewhat different and more interesting (and perhaps more important to the times we live in) than traditional realism. In these stories, time collapses. Days turn on weather and modes of transportation. Water interrupts. Always, somewhere just out of reach, there\u27s something we\u27re supposed to want that seems better than what we have. And yet there\u27s something just as (if not more) special here in the places we call home

Trajectories of social and economic outcomes and problem gambling risk in Australia

Researchers are increasingly recognising the importance of longitudinal data in providing valuable information on individuals to better understand gambling behaviour, trajectories, risks and consequences. However, relatively few longitudinal surveys have a significant focus on gambling. This paper makes use of a longitudinal data source that has, for the first time, included questions on gambling behaviour in Australia: the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. The HILDA survey included gambling questions for the first time in 2015 (wave 15). Although the HILDA survey currently provides data on gambling at a single point in time, there are data on the individuals back to 2001, in most cases. This paper uses selected social, economic and health variables, and analyses their trajectories over time across the gambling risk categories measured in 2015. The paper explores economic variables (household income, employment, qualifications, financial hardship, risk and stress) and selected social variables (life satisfaction, psychological distress, alcohol intake and smoking) from multiple HILDA waves. The analysis clearly shows that problem gamblers experience significantly worse outcomes than those without gambling problems, and poor outcomes go back a number of years. In a number of cases, outcomes are becoming progressively poorer, which may suggest either increasingly risky gambling behaviour or the cumulative effects of a sustained period of problem gambling. Low- and moderate-risk gamblers have better economic, social and health outcomes than problem gamblers, but, in most cases, worse outcomes than those without gambling-related problems. Again, these differences go back a number of years. Exploring these particular variables in respect of problem gambling risk provides insights that may inform prevention and early intervention strategies to reduce gambling harm

Review of Detox Your Writing: Strategies for doctoral researchers by Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler (2016) Routledge. Taylor and Francis Group, London and New York.

Abstract included in text

Friedrich Nietzsche and the Literary Works of William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett

This thesis examines the contrasting ways in which the literary works of William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Becket engage with Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy as it is understood today. Using late twentieth-century and contemporary interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy as its primary methodological framework, the study identifies new parallels and dissimilarities between these Irish modernists. As this philosophy was interpreted in a myriad of complex and often contradictory ways, the first chapter adopts a history of ideas approach to establish the many diverse ways that Nietzsche’s work was read throughout the decades in which Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett lived and worked. Each of the remaining chapters focus on one of four central themes in Nietzsche’s writing: eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, transnationalism, and ethics. These thematic chapters are comparative and explore the degree to which Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett interact with these themes as they are understood in the Nietzschean lexicon. The chapters are arranged in an order that captures the trajectory of Nietzsche’s philosophy when it is considered as a whole. The theory of eternal recurrence is addressed first because, for Nietzsche, it functions as a litmus test for the mode of existential authenticity personified by the Übermensch. Accordingly, the Übermensch is considered in the chapter that follows. The two remaining chapters focus on that which must be overcome for this mode of authenticity to be realised, namely the nation state and the ethical values that underpin its customs and laws. This structure also shows that Nietzsche’s writing operated as a lightning rod for aesthetic modernism and that the work of Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett charts the myriad directions in which its currents flowed. There is already some critical consensus regarding the specificity and extent of these Irish modernists’ engagement with Nietzsche’s ideas. Yeats, who repeatedly acknowledged his admiration for Nietzsche, is seen as the most ‘Nietzschean’ of the three because his work dramatizes key Nietzschean motifs in fairly direct and vivid ways. In the case of Joyce, scholars have more recently begun to reconsider the long-popular notion that Joyce identified with Nietzsche’s self-created individual in his youth, before outgrowing these ideas as he matured. Beckett is regarded as the least ‘Nietzschean’ of the three and is believed to have expressed little or no interest in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Although this analysis of the Yeats/Nietzsche relationship is not without merit, this comparative study demonstrates that Beckett’s work, and to a slightly lesser extent Joyce’s work, is in many important ways more ‘Nietzschean’ than Yeats’s literary output

New Perspectives: Postgraduate Symposium for the Humanities - Reflections, Volume 2

Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, Michel Foucault wrote that ‘history has a more important task than to be a handmaiden to philosophy, to recount the necessary birth of truth and values; it should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes’ (1997, 126). Foucault’s words capture two opposing conceptions of historical change that ‘NPPSH 2017: Progress and Degeneration’ aimed to deconstruct and critique: the ‘necessary birth of truth and values’ assumed by the progressive view of historical change, and the contrasting ‘poisons’ and ‘failings’ of seeming degeneration. In the face of apparent narratives of historical progress and degeneration, we must ask: ‘Progress for whom, and according to whom?’ When our symposium took place, these questions appeared more necessary than they have been for many years. This time was marked by the re-emergence of nationalist politics, evident in Brexit and the violence in Catalonia; the resurgence of fascistic political discourse, considered unthinkable after the collapse of the brutal regimes of the twentieth century; the growth of xenophobic politics in the wake of mass east-west migration; and the continued pillaging of the natural environment. In the time that has elapsed since the symposium, we have witnessed the return of republican tensions in Northern Ireland, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the solidification of far-right political currents in Poland, and terrorist attacks on churches, mosques and synagogues in the US, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka: such ongoing and disturbing issues force us to engage with the legacy and nature of ‘progressive’ thought. The importance of the humanities in exploring such questions cannot be overstated: the impressive range of papers on show in this publication—covering everything from censorship and medical practice in the Irish Free State to French political cartoons to the political potential of William Burroughs’s cut-up technique, pedagogical practice, and the digital lives of older people—demonstrates the continued importance of the humanities to the investigation of political, social and cultural issues. It is our intention that NPPSH Reflections: Volume 2 will provide a space for early career scholars to continue to reflect on these questions, while contributing to debates that are situated at the leading edge of humanities research

Nanostructured Gel-Phase Materials for Arsenic Removal from Water

Arsenic is present naturally in groundwater in many countries around the world; it affects over 140 million people in the world. Consumption of arsenic contaminated water has resulted in arsenic been named by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as one of the top 10 chemicals of public health concern, due to the toxicity of arsenic contaminated drinking water. Current commercial arsenic adsorbents such as activated carbon have low adsorption capacities. In this work, self-assembled cationic C16-DAPMA micelles based on palmitic acid and 3,3′-diamino-N-methyldipropylamine were investigated for interactions with arsenite (As III) and arsenate (As V). The properties of a gelator based on dibenzylidene sorbitol functionalized with hydrazide groups (DBS-CONHNH2) was investigated as a support for the micelles. The embedding of C16-DAPMA micelles into DBS-CONHNH2 hydrogels was investigated to determine whether it was suitable for use as an arsenic removal system. It was found that the C16-DAPMA micelles could bind arsenate through electrostatic interactions, due to the fact that arsenate exists as an anion in water. It was found that at 3.49 mM of arsenate, aggregation between arsenate and C16-DAPMA micelles occurred. It was found that C16-DAPMA micelles could be embedded into DBS-CONHNH2 hydrogels. The presence of C16-DAPMA micelles within DBS-CONHNH2 resulted in stiffer hydrogels, as C16-DAPMA micelles limited the entanglement of the self-spanning network and reduced its flexibility. It was found that C16-DAPMA micelles embedded within the DBS-CONHNH2 hydrogels (with agarose for added stability) were able to reduce the concentration of arsenate from 298 ppb to an estimated value of between 80 to 100 ppb. This work demonstrated that C16-DAPMA micelles embedded within DBS-CONHNH2 hydrogels have potential to be used as an alternative water filtration system due to cheap nature of the materials compared to commercial adsorbents. However, further work is required to prevent leaching of the micelles from the hydrogel network

New Perspectives: Postgraduate Symposium for the Humanities - Reflections, Volume 2

Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, Michel Foucault wrote that ‘history has a more important task than to be a handmaiden to philosophy, to recount the necessary birth of truth and values; it should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes’ (1997, 126). Foucault’s words capture two opposing conceptions of historical change that ‘NPPSH 2017: Progress and Degeneration’ aimed to deconstruct and critique: the ‘necessary birth of truth and values’ assumed by the progressive view of historical change, and the contrasting ‘poisons’ and ‘failings’ of seeming degeneration. In the face of apparent narratives of historical progress and degeneration, we must ask: ‘Progress for whom, and according to whom?’ When our symposium took place, these questions appeared more necessary than they have been for many years. This time was marked by the re-emergence of nationalist politics, evident in Brexit and the violence in Catalonia; the resurgence of fascistic political discourse, considered unthinkable after the collapse of the brutal regimes of the twentieth century; the growth of xenophobic politics in the wake of mass east-west migration; and the continued pillaging of the natural environment. In the time that has elapsed since the symposium, we have witnessed the return of republican tensions in Northern Ireland, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the solidification of far-right political currents in Poland, and terrorist attacks on churches, mosques and synagogues in the US, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka: such ongoing and disturbing issues force us to engage with the legacy and nature of ‘progressive’ thought. The importance of the humanities in exploring such questions cannot be overstated: the impressive range of papers on show in this publication—covering everything from censorship and medical practice in the Irish Free State to French political cartoons to the political potential of William Burroughs’s cut-up technique, pedagogical practice, and the digital lives of older people—demonstrates the continued importance of the humanities to the investigation of political, social and cultural issues. It is our intention that NPPSH Reflections: Volume 2 will provide a space for early career scholars to continue to reflect on these questions, while contributing to debates that are situated at the leading edge of humanities research