Out of this world: surrealist practice and posthumanist ethics in the writing and visual arts of Elizabeth Bishop, Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning

This thesis argues that the surrealist aesthetics of Elizabeth Bishop, Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning anticipate a posthumanist approach in a way that both revises women’s relationship with Surrealism and contributes to contemporary feminist and ecological debates. I demonstrate how the surrealist sensibilities exhibited in their prose, poetry and visual art embody Rosi Braidotti's argument that feminism does not share humanist principles. I show how the three subjects deviate from the androcentricism that characterises a humanist positioning in work that recurrently exhibits posthuman themes of entanglement, becoming and metamorphoses. Chapter One explores the human-animal hybrid motif in Bishop's and Carrington's written and visual oeuvre explaining that it bodies forth both our interconnection to the non-human as well as our own inherent animality. Chapter Two develops this investigation of becoming-animal, examining what I describe as becoming-matter themes in the work of Bishop and Tanning. I demonstrate how the boundaryless visions that both evoke speak to new materialist thinking that horizontalises relations between human and non-human worlds. Chapter Three is underpinned by Braidotti's argument that Humanism is at its core Eurocentric examining how Bishop's and Carrington's Latin American work speaks to a more posthuman trajectory in its alignment with the philosophies of indigenous cultures. Chapter Four is driven by Donna Haraway's insistence that stories should no longer be underpinned by a belief in human exceptionalism. To this end I examine how Carrington and Tanning radically retell and defamiliarise traditional tales that are rooted in Western imagination and Christian narratives. Chapter Five argues that the liminal spaces exhibited in the work of all three practitioners eschew the borderlines of Humanism to interrogate instead oneiric and open-ended realms, thus resonating with Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia

Austerity, political control and supplier selection in English local government: implications for autonomy in multi-level systems

Analysis of 60,000 contracts awarded by English councils between 2015-19 reveals that austerity constraints are a key predictor of councils outsourcing services to for-profit suppliers, regardless of their political control. Conservative Party-controlled councils are also more likely to contract with for-profit suppliers, although we found no link between Labour-controlled councils and not-for-profit suppliers, nor evidence that political or budgetary factors influence whether councils contract with providers based in their own region. We argue that centrally imposed funding cuts, and a belief that for-profit suppliers represent a cheaper option, could be overriding Labour Party councils’ ideological preference for not-for-profit providers

3-D In Vitro Acoustic Super-Resolution and Super-Resolved Velocity Mapping Using Microbubbles

Standard clinical ultrasound (US) imaging frequencies are unable to resolve microvascular structures due to the fundamental diffraction limit of US waves. Recent demonstrations of 2D super-resolution both in vitro and in vivo have demonstrated that fine vascular structures can be visualized using acoustic single bubble localization. Visualization of more complex and disordered 3D vasculature, such as that of a tumor, requires an acquisition strategy which can additionally localize bubbles in the elevational plane with high precision in order to generate super-resolution in all three dimensions. Furthermore, a particular challenge lies in the need to provide this level of visualization with minimal acquisition time. In this work, we develop a fast, coherent US imaging tool for microbubble localization in 3D using a pair of US transducers positioned at 90°. This allowed detection of point scatterer signals in 3 dimensions with average precisions equal to 1.9 µm in axial and elevational planes, and 11 µm in the lateral plane, compared to the diffraction limited point spread function full widths at half maximum of 488 µm, 1188 µm and 953 µm of the original imaging system with a single transducer. Visualization and velocity mapping of 3D in vitro structures was demonstrated far beyond the diffraction limit. The capability to measure the complete flow pattern of blood vessels associated with disease at depth would ultimately enable analysis of in vivo microvascular morphology, blood flow dynamics and occlusions resulting from disease states