Academic temporalities: Apprehending micro-worlds of academic work through a photo-serial methodology

This article focuses on academic temporalities to consider the rhythms, repetitions and discontinuities of academic work. Using a photo-serial methodology which generated an archive of images taken at the same time of day for a fortnight, we take up material and affective theories to rethink academic work as assemblages or micro-worlds that emerge through happenstance at particular moments. Our nonrepresentational, new materialist approach shifts away from discursive analyses of accounts of academic labour, and from assumptions of visual methods as ‘documentary’ representations of the world. We adopt an emergent, processual and experimental mode of inquiry that works against linearity, and an analytical approach that attends to the ‘punctum’ of images through glimpses, tangents and elusive details. The contributions of this paper lie in its mobilisation of images to think differently about the ubiquity and ‘throwntogetherness’ of academic labour, and its theoretical reframing of academic temporalities as composed of affective and material entanglements of events, relations, doings, objects, and spaces of all kinds

Interesting times: a short introduction from the new editorial team of Gender and Education

Editoria

Synthesis and cellular penetration properties of new phosphonium based cationic amphiphilic peptides

A new category of phosphonium based cationic amphiphilic peptides has been developed and evaluated as potential antimicrobial peptides and cell penetrating peptides. The required building blocks were conveniently accessible from cysteine and could be applied in a solid phase peptide synthesis protocol for incorporation into peptide sequences. Evaluation of the antimicrobial properties and cellular toxicity of these phosphonium based peptides showed that these “soft” cationic side-chain containing peptides have poor antimicrobial properties and most of them were virtually non toxic (on HEK cells tested at 256 and 512 μM) and non-haemolytic (on horse erythrocytes tested at 512 μM), hinting at an interesting potential application as cell penetrating peptides. This possibility was evaluated using fluorescent peptide derivatives and showed that these phosphonium based peptide derivatives were capable of entering HEK cells and depending on the sequence confined to specific cellular areas

Arctic terns : writing and art-making our way through the pandemic

We call ourselves the Arctic terns after the birds that migrate between the northern and southern hemispheres. Three of us live in south-west Britain and three in south-east Australia. We tried to make sense of our lockdown lives and the ways we were imbricated in world events. We wrote and made art in response. We read our work to each other and showed each other our artworks. The material practices we developed helped make the pandemic endurable, and at times hilarious. Here we share some of our work and some of our thinking about why it matters

Doing time and motion diffractively: Academic life everywhere and all the time

This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear teleology of cause and effect. As a counterpoint, we deploy posthumanist new materialist research practices which refuse human-centric approaches and aim to give matter its due. As a means to analyse what comes out of our joint workspaces photo project we produce two ‘passes’ through data – two diffractive experiments which destabilise what normally counts as ‘findings’ and their academic presentation. The article deploys the motif of ‘starting somewhere else’ to signal both our intention to keep data animated, alive and interactive, and to utilise visual and written modes of seriality as enabling constraints which produce a more generative focus on the mundane, emergent, unforeseen, and happenstance in studies of daily working life

Evolving the Face of a Criminal: How to Search a Face Space More Effectively

Witnesses and victims of serious crime are often required to construct a facial composite, a visual likeness of a suspect’s face. The traditional method is for them to select individual facial features to build a face, but often these images are of poor quality. We have developed a new method whereby witnesses repeatedly select instances from an array of complete faces and a composite is evolved over time by searching a face model built using PCA. While past research suggests that the new approach is superior, performance is far from ideal. In the current research, face models are built which match a witness’s description of a target. It is found that such ‘tailored’ models promote better quality composites, presumably due to a more effective search, and also that smaller models may be even better. The work has implications for researchers who are using statistical modelling techniques for recognising faces

‘Working on a rocky shore’: Micro-moments of positive affect in academic work

Neoliberal ideologies, marketization and performative regimes ssociated with recent reforms in universities have exerted considerable pressure on academic working conditions and subjects in recent years. While analysing these pressures is important, it is also productive to consider the ways in which academics engage in moments of resistance by mobilising resources beyond those of critique. This paper therefore focuses on joy and positive affect in the everyday moments of academic life. It utilises the feminist methodology of collective biography to explore ways of making the restricted spaces of our working day more expansive and finding within them unexpected openings for joy. Our analysis of the stories included in this paper traces the mercurial and ambiguous affective atmospheres of academic work. We suggest that joy is founded upon connections with others, that it arises in different academic spaces and that it can lead to revised knowing of ourselves. We argue that the glimpses of joy evident in this paper provoke affective attunement within the everyday, sensitizing us to other fragments of joy and providing strategies to strengthen that resistance

The Grizzly, January 26, 1979

Campus Life Committee to Replace SFARC • Quad Fire Brought Quickly Under Control • The Fabulous Greaseband Presents...Rock \u27N\u27 Roll Revue Tonight • Christmas Thefts Hit Women\u27s Dorms • Four-One-Four Proposed • Integrated Dining: An Interesting Proposal • Low Attendance Attracts Attention • Letters to the Editor: No static at all?; Big-name concert • Roving Reporter: Alcohol policy • Ritter Gift • Class Skiing Trips: Coming Up • Billy Joel: Isn\u27t One Elton John Enough? • Grateful Dead Rocks Spectrum • Operatic Forum • Audio Corner: Receivers • Token Tolkien • Financial aid night to be held; Meistersingers on tour; New sports editor; Gift collection received; William J. Phillip prize endowed • USGA Elections Near • Bears Sink Below .500 • Cagers Capture Only One Of Six • Flying Fish • Grapplers Groping • Girl\u27s B-Ballhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1010/thumbnail.jp