Doctrine and decision: navigating Labour’s new constitutional position in the Lords

The 2015–17 Parliament was the first time in history that the Conservatives were in government with no easily assembled majority in the House of Lords. This has fundamentally altered the role that Labour is able to play in the Lords and, conversely, that peers are able to play in the Labour party. Yet the political significance of this situation has not yet been fully appreciated by a party which remains culturally antagonistic and constitutionally wary of the Lords. In this paper, we draw on interviews with Labour peers, particularly the late Baroness Hollis of Heigham, who have been able to use the essentially conservative powers of the Lords for social democratic ends. We suggest that the Labour party needs to incorporate the second chamber into both its practical and symbolic politics, and to find ways to use this new source of constitutional power without accommodating to it

Narratives of organisational reform in the British Labour Party, 1979-2014

Party organisation is about more than structure and power: it is an important means through which political elites define a party and its political identity. This thesis examines narratives of organisational reform in the British Labour Party between 1979 and 2014, at times of significant debate about methods of leadership election, party governance, processes of policy-making and the union link. When arguing for particular kinds of organisational reform, elites within the Party have constructed different stories in order to contest proposals and present their visions for structural change. In doing so, they have tied together interpretations of Labour’s past, present and future with particular notions of what makes for ‘democratic’ and ‘legitimate’ politics. This temporal and cultural politics lies at the heart of the transformation the Party underwent in this period and underpins the challenges posed to its identity in recent years. In the course of this thesis, three related arguments are made. First, it is argued that the organisational debates that took place between 1979 and 2014 offer a unique perspective on the complicated and fractious identity politics of the Party as being historically rooted in collectivism or individualism, movement politics or parliamentarism. Second, it is argued that Labour’s elites have increasingly sought to individualise party structures since the decline of the left in the ‘80s. In contrast to other accounts of Labour’s organisation that focus on its structures, this thesis argues that this individualisation was as much about party identity as it was process. Third, this thesis argues that the prolonged debates about Labour’s organisational identity demonstrate how unsettled and divided the Party has been throughout its recent history. The lack of a common sense understanding of the Party's organisational character can help to explain its fractured internal dynamics since its loss in the General Election of 2015

Workshops: investigating and developing participatory environments for artistic learning

Workshops: Investigating and Developing Participatory Environments for Artistic Learning is a practice-led (Haseman, 2006; Bolt, 2007; Smith & Dean, 2009) transdisciplinary (Klein, 2018) PhD investigation conducted by action-research (McNiff & Whitehead, 2008) and participatory action reflection (Kemmis, et al., 2014) approaches. This PhD includes a written thesis exegesis accompanied by a portfolio of descriptions of my artistic practice presented on the scaffold of critical action-reflection cycles. The thesis is a critically reflective account of how I have developed my own approach to composing, conducting, and playing workshops as a potentially exemplative approach to developing paragogic (Corneli & Danoff, 2011) artistic learning environments. This includes contextualising and exploring matters of concern that emerged or were identified in and through (Borgdorff, 2011) this artistic inquiry. This investigation explores the following questions: • What are workshops within a visual arts education context? • How can we understand the production of workshops as an artistic practice? • What critical vocabulary do we require to describe workshop practices in a broader context? The thesis exegesis includes three sections, each one involves its own subsets of focused investigations of the following areas: Section 1 Section 1 of this thesis is concerned with providing a historical and critical framework for understanding the role of workshops within artistic learning and knowledge production in the premodern era. This framework will then be used to explore the links between these formulations to study of the learning characteristics that workshop environments within visual arts education currently embody. The underpinning intention within this section is to establish the foundations of a critical vocabulary that communicates the nuanced and complex nature of workshops as artistic learning environments. These aims can be surmised in the follow questions: • What is the historical context of workshops as artistic learning environments? • How, if at all, has the role of the workshop within artistic learning shifted? • What kinds of learning have and can occur within workshops? • What is the current role of workshops within and outwith higher education institutions? • How can we critically and philosophically communicate the way workshops operate as environments of artistic learning? Section 2 This section of the thesis is focused on my collaborative research as a member of Shift/Work. The intention in critically reflecting on this work is to demonstrate how collective artistic learning experiences can interrogate emergent rhetoric within artistic practices and thinking. Examining how this process can generate ongoing research interests while also providing participants of the research with an understanding of how to compose paragogic artistic learning experiences for, and with, their peers. In this process I will explore the following questions: • What is the potential of workshop production as a collaborative research approach into the matters emerging within and through artistic practice? • What is the critical contextualisation for the emergent concerns within artistic practice identified through my practice-led research? • How can the types of practices and knowledge these collaborative and participatory investigation produce, or transform, be understood? • What is the value of a paragogical approach to co-producing these learning environments? Section 3 In this section I will critically reflect on case studies drawn from my own individual artistic practice. Prior to doing so I will provide critical contextualisation discovered and produced through my practice-led investigation, this is with the intention of contributing to the production of a critically robust and rigorous vocabulary that can advocate for the potential benefits of workshops as artistic learning environments. To achieve this, I will explore the following questions: • What does the historical role of the workshop in the cultivation and transmission of artistic knowledge relate to current pedagogical and artistic practices? • What practices within the action of composing, conducting, and playing workshops require critical consideration? • How can we produce and/or identify and develop a transdisciplinary critical vocabulary to articulate the nuances of these current workshop knowledge practices? • What can critical action-reflection research into my artistic practice yield as exemplars for composing and conducting paragogic learning processes within workshops? In the conclusion to this research I will explore the limitations of the research as it currently exists and potential future paths of inquiry it creates

The Pact for Mexico after Five Years: How Has It Fared?

The Pact for Mexico pledged to institute policies that would usher in a new era of growth and prosperity for Mexico, through the implementation of a series of structural reforms. The timeline for implementation of the proposed reforms extended to the second semester of 2018.This paper examines whether there has been progress toward the Pact's goals since it was signed; and whether any measures taken since then — including current economic policies — are likely to help Mexico break out of its long economic slump and forge a different path toward economic and social progress.Five years into the Pact for Mexico, it is clear from the available data that the Pact's promises to launch a new era of economic and social progress have not begun to materialize. The authors conclude that the country's persistent sluggish growth, poverty, and inequality are rooted in a set of important economic policy choices that have been made consistently for a long time

Pre-registration for Predictive Modeling

Amid rising concerns of reproducibility and generalizability in predictive modeling, we explore the possibility and potential benefits of introducing pre-registration to the field. Despite notable advancements in predictive modeling, spanning core machine learning tasks to various scientific applications, challenges such as overlooked contextual factors, data-dependent decision-making, and unintentional re-use of test data have raised questions about the integrity of results. To address these issues, we propose adapting pre-registration practices from explanatory modeling to predictive modeling. We discuss current best practices in predictive modeling and their limitations, introduce a lightweight pre-registration template, and present a qualitative study with machine learning researchers to gain insight into the effectiveness of pre-registration in preventing biased estimates and promoting more reliable research outcomes. We conclude by exploring the scope of problems that pre-registration can address in predictive modeling and acknowledging its limitations within this context

Brexit and the everyday politics of emotion: methodological lessons from history

The 2016 European Union referendum campaign has been depicted as a battle between ‘heads’ and ‘hearts’, reason and emotion. Voters’ propensity to trust their feelings over expert knowledge has sparked debate about the future of democratic politics in what is increasingly believed to be an ‘age of emotion’. In this article, we argue that we can learn from the ways that historians have approached the study of emotions and everyday politics to help us make sense of this present moment. Drawing on William Reddy’s concept of ‘emotional regimes’, we analyse the position of emotion in qualitative, ‘everyday narratives’ about the 2016 European Union referendum. Using new evidence from the Mass Observation Archive, we argue that while reason and emotion are inextricable facets of political decision-making, citizens themselves understand the two processes as distinct and competing

Creating testable questions in practical conservation: a process and 100 questions

It is now clear that the routine embedding of experiments into conservation practice is essential for creating reasonably comprehensive evidence of the effectiveness of actions. However, an important barrier is the stage of identifying testable questions that are both useful but also realistic to carry out without a major research project. We identified approaches for generating such suitable questions. A team of 24 participants crowdsourced suggestions, resulting in a list of a hundred possible tests of actions.Additional co-authors: Roger Mitchell, William H. Morgan, Roy Mosley, Silviu O. Petrovan, Kit Prendergast, Euan G. Ritchie, Hugh Raven, Rebecca K. Smith & Ann Thornto