99 research outputs found

    Toward a creative-critical approach to narratives of student-to-student abuse in Canada’s Indian Residential School System

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    There is a dearth of research on student-to-student abuse in Canada’s Indian Residential School System despite the fact that the legacy of this violence continues to negatively impact Indigenous communities. This paper proposes an approach to dealing with this difficult subject matter by using creative practice as a means of working collectively with community leaders, scholars, artists and students to develop shared understandings of the abuse and its continued legacy. This paper outlines the rationale for work in this area and the beginnings of the development of hybrid Indigenous and non-Indigenous methodology that brings survivors’ stories to audiences through a series of collectively authored theatrical performances that promote understanding and dialog. This paper is of interest to scholars, artists, playwrights, community leaders, and front line social workers who are working to bridge academic research and community engagement, particularly as it relates to artistic practice

    Social citizenship, public art and dementia: Walking the urban waterfront with Paul’s Club

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    Among gerontologists and health researchers, there is growing recognition of the importance of social participation and inclusion towards the health, well-being and quality of life of people with dementia. This paper examines the role of public artworks to facilitate the social citizenship of people with dementia. It is based on a subset of data from a larger study on community-based programmes for persons living with dementia and examines how Paul’s Club, a social recreation group for people with young onset dementia, experience the public art they encounter on their daily walks through the downtown core and around the Seawall of Vancouver, Canada. Analysis suggests that public art not only helped members navigate urban spaces, but also provided a focus for curiosity that leads to meaningful social interaction and place-based conversations, clearly contributing to group enjoyment and a sense of community belonging. Implications of this study relate to community programming, social citizenship, community design, public art and community engaged art practice, as well as health and social care for persons with dementia

    "Dear Simon..."

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    Could Direct Killing by Larger Dingoes Have Caused the Extinction of the Thylacine from Mainland Australia?

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    Invasive predators can impose strong selection pressure on species that evolved in their absence and drive species to extinction. Interactions between coexisting predators may be particularly strong, as larger predators frequently kill smaller predators and suppress their abundances. Until 3500 years ago the marsupial thylacine was Australia's largest predator. It became extinct from the mainland soon after the arrival of a morphologically convergent placental predator, the dingo, but persisted in the absence of dingoes on the island of Tasmania until the 20th century. As Tasmanian thylacines were larger than dingoes, it has been argued that dingoes were unlikely to have caused the extinction of mainland thylacines because larger predators are rarely killed by smaller predators. By comparing Holocene specimens from the same regions of mainland Australia, we show that dingoes were similarly sized to male thylacines but considerably larger than female thylacines. Female thylacines would have been vulnerable to killing by dingoes. Such killing could have depressed the reproductive output of thylacine populations. Our results support the hypothesis that direct killing by larger dingoes drove thylacines to extinction on mainland Australia. However, attributing the extinction of the thylacine to just one cause is problematic because the arrival of dingoes coincided with another the potential extinction driver, the intensification of the human economy

    A genetic assessment of the human-facilitated colonization history of black swans in Australia and New Zealand

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    Movement of species beyond their indigenous distribution can fundamentally alter the conservation status of the populations involved. If introductions are human-facilitated, introduced species could be considered pests. Characterizing the colonization history of introduced species can therefore be critical to formulating the objectives and nature of wildlife management strategies. The black swan (Cygnus atratus) is native to Australia but is considered a reintroduced species in New Zealand, where the endemic population was reported extinct during the 19th century. After the reintroduction of a small number of individuals from Australia, the New Zealand population expanded unexpectedly rapidly, which was attributed to simultaneous waves of migration from Australia. An alternative, but hitherto unformalized, hypothesis is that local extant populations remained and admixed with introduced individuals. To contribute to our understanding of the reintroduction history of the species, we investigated dispersal patterns and demographic histories of seven populations from Australia and New Zealand, using population genetic inferences from a microsatellite dataset. Our results on genetic structure, dispersal rates, and demographic histories provide mixed evidence on the origin of New Zealand black swans. The hypothesis that reintroduced individuals mixed with remaining local individuals and that the subsequent dramatic population expansion may have been due to genetic rescue of the inbred indigenous population cannot be discarded and needs further investigation.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

    The role of ETG modes in JET-ILW pedestals with varying levels of power and fuelling

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    We present the results of GENE gyrokinetic calculations based on a series of JET-ITER-like-wall (ILW) type I ELMy H-mode discharges operating with similar experimental inputs but at different levels of power and gas fuelling. We show that turbulence due to electron-temperature-gradient (ETGs) modes produces a significant amount of heat flux in four JET-ILW discharges, and, when combined with neoclassical simulations, is able to reproduce the experimental heat flux for the two low gas pulses. The simulations plausibly reproduce the high-gas heat fluxes as well, although power balance analysis is complicated by short ELM cycles. By independently varying the normalised temperature gradients (omega(T)(e)) and normalised density gradients (omega(ne )) around their experimental values, we demonstrate that it is the ratio of these two quantities eta(e) = omega(Te)/omega(ne) that determines the location of the peak in the ETG growth rate and heat flux spectra. The heat flux increases rapidly as eta(e) increases above the experimental point, suggesting that ETGs limit the temperature gradient in these pulses. When quantities are normalised using the minor radius, only increases in omega(Te) produce appreciable increases in the ETG growth rates, as well as the largest increases in turbulent heat flux which follow scalings similar to that of critical balance theory. However, when the heat flux is normalised to the electron gyro-Bohm heat flux using the temperature gradient scale length L-Te, it follows a linear trend in correspondence with previous work by different authors

    Spectroscopic camera analysis of the roles of molecularly assisted reaction chains during detachment in JET L-mode plasmas

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    The roles of the molecularly assisted ionization (MAI), recombination (MAR) and dissociation (MAD) reaction chains with respect to the purely atomic ionization and recombination processes were studied experimentally during detachment in low-confinement mode (L-mode) plasmas in JET with the help of experimentally inferred divertor plasma and neutral conditions, extracted previously from filtered camera observations of deuterium Balmer emission, and the reaction coefficients provided by the ADAS, AMJUEL and H2VIBR atomic and molecular databases. The direct contribution of MAI and MAR in the outer divertor particle balance was found to be inferior to the electron-atom ionization (EAI) and electron-ion recombination (EIR). Near the outer strike point, a strong atom source due to the D+2-driven MAD was, however, observed to correlate with the onset of detachment at outer strike point temperatures of Te,osp = 0.9-2.0 eV via increased plasma-neutral interactions before the increasing dominance of EIR at Te,osp < 0.9 eV, followed by increasing degree of detachment. The analysis was supported by predictions from EDGE2D-EIRENE simulations which were in qualitative agreement with the experimental observations

    Shattered pellet injection experiments at JET in support of the ITER disruption mitigation system design

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    A series of experiments have been executed at JET to assess the efficacy of the newly installed shattered pellet injection (SPI) system in mitigating the effects of disruptions. Issues, important for the ITER disruption mitigation system, such as thermal load mitigation, avoidance of runaway electron (RE) formation, radiation asymmetries during thermal quench mitigation, electromagnetic load control and RE energy dissipation have been addressed over a large parameter range. The efficiency of the mitigation has been examined for the various SPI injection strategies. The paper summarises the results from these JET SPI experiments and discusses their implications for the ITER disruption mitigation scheme

    New H-mode regimes with small ELMs and high thermal confinement in the Joint European Torus

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    New H-mode regimes with high confinement, low core impurity accumulation, and small edge-localized mode perturbations have been obtained in magnetically confined plasmas at the Joint European Torus tokamak. Such regimes are achieved by means of optimized particle fueling conditions at high input power, current, and magnetic field, which lead to a self-organized state with a strong increase in rotation and ion temperature and a decrease in the edge density. An interplay between core and edge plasma regions leads to reduced turbulence levels and outward impurity convection. These results pave the way to an attractive alternative to the standard plasmas considered for fusion energy generation in a tokamak with a metallic wall environment such as the ones expected in ITER.& nbsp;Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing
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