Reflect – renew – refresh

No abstract available

Habitable Cars: what we do there

Two seats and a small sofa all facing forwards. The three piece suite of the conventionally designed car. A little living room. It is supplied with a stereo for playing music and a radio. More commonly now, DVD players for the occupants of the sofa. No curtains. No coffee table. Not much in the way of shelves. No room to walk around; sitting is all there is on offer. A lot of windows though, and a lot of doors. The view from the windows changes pretty much constantly as does where you will alight if you leave by one of the doors. It is hard to write there and conversation can be difficult when traffic noise intrudes. The neighbours are always changing, sometimes they’re teenagers, sometimes they’re families, sometimes lone men and sometimes buses. They can be nuisances at times and almost never come round for a cup of sugar. A little living room that is hardly like a living room at all. The car interior. Its chairs and windows have been a constant feature of my life as I’m sure they have been for most of us here today. Early memories of staring at the windscreen wipers creating their distinctive asymmetrical shapes on the windscreen. The clunk of car doors. The smell of vinyl seating. Teenage kicks in a rusty runaround. Near misses and accidents. Conversations about love, death and insurance. Beloved offspring kicking the backs of the seats. Old age arriving in the persistent urge to drive well below the speed limit on the motorway. So much of life is there in that second smallest room, sitting side by side, with a road ahead

The art of earth-building: placing relief models in the culture of modern geography in Britain

This article explores the overlooked history and significance of physical relief models in the development of geographical knowledge and education. By examining their use in academic, educational and public settings, it argues for a broader appreciation of these models as integral to the discipline's material culture. Historical debates around their function and purpose are highlighted amidst developments in modelling techniques, materials, and instructional guides. A deeper investigation into the models, their creators, and their influence on geographical learning and public engagement is advocated for and illustrated through the production and impact of the 1951 book The Earth's Crust

Wintering Together: A Toolkit for Building Your Own Wintering Well Community

No abstract available

Winter Worries: Understanding Experiences of Seasonal Affective Disorder in the UK through the 2022 'Big SAD Survey'

This is a summary report of key findings from the ‘Big SAD Survey’ conducted between February and April 2022 as part of the ESRC-AHRC funded project ‘Living with SAD: practicing cultures of seasonality to 'feel light' differently’. The project aims to develop a greater understanding of people’s experience of self-ascribed and clinically confirmed ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder (‘SAD’ hereafter) and ‘seasonal affect’ and ‘lowered winter mood’ in particular, in order to develop new public resources for the diverse publics living with disruptive seasonal feelings. It also serves as an intervention into public discourses and media that have sometimes discredited people’s experience of SAD in recent years

The Evolution of Compact Binary Star Systems

We review the formation and evolution of compact binary stars consisting of white dwarfs (WDs), neutron stars (NSs), and black holes (BHs). Binary NSs and BHs are thought to be the primary astrophysical sources of gravitational waves (GWs) within the frequency band of ground-based detectors, while compact binaries of WDs are important sources of GWs at lower frequencies to be covered by space interferometers (LISA). Major uncertainties in the current understanding of properties of NSs and BHs most relevant to the GW studies are discussed, including the treatment of the natal kicks which compact stellar remnants acquire during the core collapse of massive stars and the common envelope phase of binary evolution. We discuss the coalescence rates of binary NSs and BHs and prospects for their detections, the formation and evolution of binary WDs and their observational manifestations. Special attention is given to AM CVn-stars -- compact binaries in which the Roche lobe is filled by another WD or a low-mass partially degenerate helium-star, as these stars are thought to be the best LISA verification binary GW sources.Comment: 105 pages, 18 figure

Making the microbiome public: Participatory experiments with DNA sequencing in domestic kitchens

Recent rapid increases in the capability and affordability of DNA sequencing have enabled scientists to map the microbiome and to identify its associations with a range of health conditions. Concerns are growing that missing microbes might be behind the current rise in inflammatory disease. Microbial absence and dysbiosis have been linked to a range of hygiene practices, fuelling popular anxiety and confusion about being both too clean and the risk of superbugs. A growing number of microbiology projects allow some publics to engage with DNA sequencing, and enable DIY experiments in microbiome management. Advocates promote this as the democratisation of sequencing. This paper outlines a new methodology for making the microbiome public, and explores the potential of thinking with microbes for social science research. It reports on an interdisciplinary research project, in which a small number of households in Oxford designed and conducted repeated experiments on their kitchen microbiome. These experiments explored the composition of the microbiome and the effects of different hygiene practices. The analysis identifies two challenges of public microbiome research: the mismatch between a vernacular species ontology and the ecological understanding of the microbiome, and the difficulties posed by scientific uncertainty. The reported methodology was able to engage publics in the design and interpretation of experiments, and to work with the surprises generated by open research. Thinking with microbes as ecologies revealed the tensions between an antibiotic and a probiotic approach to domestic hygiene. Public microbiome research needs new metaphors and visualisation tools, and an awareness of the political economic and epistemic barriers that will configure the promised democratisation of sequencing. The conclusion calls for further interdisciplinary and participatory microbiome research to guide the emergence of this new technology

Sensing the city

We reflect upon our involvement in <i>Do You See What I Mean?</i>, a sitespecific work of contemporary ‘street theatre’ presented as part of Vancouver’s 2013 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. A collaboration between a geographer and professional artists, the project involved engaging audience members in a 2.5-hour blindfolded guided tour of the public and private spaces of Vancouver, Canada. The work is considered as a site staging sensual urban journeys, giving cause for wider reflection on recent experiments in geographic thought and practice