Britishness and commemoration: National memorials to the First World War in Britain and Ireland

The 1917 call for a national memorial to the First World War led to the establishment of the Imperial War Museum in London. It also inspired Scottish, Welsh and Irish national memorials. No English national memorial was ever proposed; instead the Cenotaph and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier were conceived as imperial memorials. The new statelet of Northern Ireland did not commemorate its overall war effort within its own territory. This article surveys the organisation, location and design of the Scottish, Welsh and Irish national war memorials to the First World War. It examines some aspects of the complex set of relationships between the local, regional, national and imperial layers of identity that are inherent in Britishness. In doing so it reveals the confused and contested nature of national identity in the United Kingdom at the close of the First World War

A century of Armistice Day: memorialisation in the wake of the First World War

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. In the wake of the First World War a set of commemorative traditions were invented that were met with a huge public response and were repeated in every subsequent November. These apparently unchanging traditions were reported in the media each year in ways that reflected the, then, present circumstances. This article explores the ideas of continuity and relevance as a means to chart the changing nature of public debate about the commemoration of war in Britain. It will consider three broad periods: inter-war, the Second World War and post-war decades, and the 1980s to the centenary years. It will argue that the commemorations were fiercely relevant in the inter-war period, but in the wake of the Second World War the commemorations spoke far less directly to the experiences and emotional legacy of that later war. Attendance and newspaper reporting of the event diminished significantly in this period. However, from the 1980s and particularly the late 1990s renewed interest and relevance became apparent. The sustained period of warfare from 2001 onwards added further to this

Resisting roles: Women, violence and dramaturgy in British theatre during the nineties

Within a patriarchal framework women are neither expected nor allowed to be violent. The assumed codes of acceptable gender behaviour locate violence as a legitimate expression of masculinity. Thus, when a woman transgresses expected gender roles her actions are regarded as a sign of her inherent madness, sexual deviancy or even an indication that she is not a woman. The increased representation of violent behaviour by women in Britain during the Nineties and the social phenomenon of girl gangs emphasised these stereotypes and the scripts attached to them, particularly within popular culture. This thesis critically analyses the stereotypes of women who transgress gender roles and the structures that produce them through an in-depth examination of selected play texts which emerged within this context, hi doing so the thesis contributes to the relatively unexplored area of dramaturgical representations in Britain during the Nineties of women who engage in violent behaviour. Chapter One examines the context of late Twentieth-Century Britain, identifying key socio economic and cultural characteristics, which may have impacted upon female identity and the representation of female acts of violence, including the notion of a feminist backlash. Chapter Two focuses on the portrayal of girl gangs, and considers the plays' treatment of causes of female violence in relation to the essentialist theories of Nineteenth-Century male criminologists and contemporary media representations. The body and issues of control and transformation are the subject of Chapter Three, which draws upon methods from phenomenology to identify female acts of violence as a product of both predetermined and cultural forces. Chapter Four considers the construction of stereotypes in relation to narrative structures and identifies a correlation between an alternative, fragmentary approach to narrative structure and non-restrictive representations. Central to the thesis are gender stereotypes of women as role breakers within a patriarchal structure and how the play texts problematise these representations through postmodernist, resistant aesthetic strategies. The thesis concludes, that by adopting postmodernist resistant aesthetic strategies, the play texts offer a progressive position of critical inquiry inspiring a more pluralistic understanding of women who engage in violent behaviour and their stories

Short-term serotonergic but not noradrenergic antidepressant administration reduces attentional vigilance to threat in healthy volunteers

Anxiety is associated with threat-related biases in information processing such as heightened attentional vigilance to potential threat. Such biases are an important focus of psychological treatments for anxiety disorders. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are effective in the treatment of a range of anxiety disorders. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of an SSRI on the processing of threat in healthy volunteers. A selective noradrenergic reuptake inhibitor (SNRI), which is not generally used in the treatment of anxiety, was used as a contrast to assess the specificity of SSRI effects on threat processing. Forty-two healthy volunteers were randomly assigned to 7 d double-blind intervention with the SSRI citalopram (20 mg/d), the SNRI reboxetine (8 mg/d), or placebo. On the final day, attentional and interpretative bias to threat was assessed using the attentional probe and the homograph primed lexical decision tasks. Citalopram reduced attentional vigilance towards fearful faces but did not affect the interpretation of ambiguous homographs as threatening. Reboxetine had no significant effect on either of these measures. Citalopram reduces attentional orienting to threatening stimuli, which is potentially relevant to its clinical use in the treatment of anxiety disorders. This finding supports a growing literature suggesting that an important mechanism through which pharmacological agents may exert their effects on mood is by reversing the cognitive biases that characterize the disorders that they treat. Future studies are needed to clarify the neural mechanisms through which these effects on threat processing are mediated

Color discrimination in anomalous trichromacy: experiment and theory

In anomalous trichromacy, the color signals available from comparing the activities of the two classes of cone sensitive in the medium and long wavelength parts of the spectrum are much reduced from those available in normal trichromacy, and color discrimination thresholds along the red-green axis are correspondingly elevated. Yet there is evidence that suprathreshold color perception is relatively preserved; this has led to the suggestion that anomalous trichromats post-receptorally amplify their impoverished red-green signals. To test this idea, we measured chromatic discrimination from white and from saturated red and green pedestals. If there is no post-receptoral compensation, the anomalous trichromat's loss of chromatic contrast will apply equally to the pedestal and to the test color. Coupled with a compressively nonlinear neural representation of saturation, this means that a given pedestal contrast will cause a smaller than normal modulation of discrimination sensitivity. We examined cases where chromatic pedestals impair the color discrimination of normal trichromatic observers. As predicted, anomalous observers experienced less impairment than normal trichromats, though they remained less sensitive than normal trichromats. Although the effectiveness of chromatic pedestals in impairing color discrimination was less for anomalous than for normal trichromats, the chromatic pedestals were more effective for anomalous observers than would be expected if the anomalous post-receptoral visual system were the same as in normal trichromacy; the hypothesis of zero compensation can be rejected. This might suggest that the effective contrast of the pedestal is post-receptorally amplified. But on closer analysis, the results do not support candidate simple models involving post-receptoral compensation either

Understanding 'missed appointments' for pills and injectables: a mixed methods study in Senegal.

INTRODUCTION: High discontinuation rates of contraceptive methods have been documented in sub-Saharan Africa. However, little is known about gaps within individual episodes of method use, despite their implications for unintended pregnancies. The objective of this mixed methods study was to examine the prevalence of, and explore the factors contributing to, delays in repeat appointments for pills and injectables in Senegal. METHODS: First, we constructed a longitudinal data set of women's contraceptive consultations using routine records from 67 facilities in Senegal. Consultations for pills and injectables were classified as on time, delayed or with unknown delay status based on time since previous appointment. We described the prevalence of delayed appointments and used backward stepwise regression to build a mixed-effects model to investigate risk factors for delay. Second, we conducted workshops with family planning (FP) providers, and indepth interviews and focus group discussions with women of reproductive age, to explore factors contributing to delays. RESULTS: Almost one-third (30%) of appointments for pills and injectables were delayed, resulting in risk of pregnancy. Previous delay, pill use, lower educational level, higher parity, third and subsequent visits, and Islamic faith were independently predictive of delays (p<0.04 for all). Although women's 'forgetfulness' was initially mentioned as the main reason for delays by women and providers, examining the routines around appointment attendance revealed broader contextual barriers to timely refills-particularly widespread covert use, illiteracy, financial cost of FP services and limited availability of FP services. CONCLUSION: Delays in obtaining repeat pills and injections are common among contraceptive users in Senegal, exposing women to unintended pregnancies. Strategies to reduce such delays should move beyond a narrow focus on individual women to consider contraceptive behaviour within the broader socioeconomic and health systems context. In particular, effective interventions addressing low acceptability of contraception and appointment reminder strategies in high illiteracy contexts are needed

Judging parental competence: A cross‐country analysis of judicial decision makers' written assessment of mothers' parenting capacities in newborn removal cases

This paper examines the discretionary reasoning of the judiciary in three jurisdictions, England, Germany and Norway, in cases deciding whether a newborn child is safe with her parents or intervention is necessary. Our analysis focuses on one specific dimension of decision makers' exercise of discretion, namely, if and how the strengths and weaknesses of the mother are considered. The data material consists of all decisions concerning care orders of newborns from one large city in Germany from 2015 to 2017 (n = 27) and 2016 in Norway (n = 76) and all publicly available newborn removal decisions in England for 2015–2017 (n = 14). The findings reveal a high number of risk factors in the cases and less focus on risk‐reducing factors. The situation of the newborn is considered to be harmful, as most cases result in a care order. Judicial discretion differs by how much information, and what types of factors, are included in the justification for the decision. A learning point for decision makers and policymakers would be to actively undertake a balancing act between risk‐increasing and risk‐reducing factors.publishedVersio