Tomorrow's Great Pageant

Tomorrow’s Great Pageant is a socially charged project that re-imagined the iconic Suffrage play, A Pageant of Great Women, for a 21st Century non-binary context. Workshops and participatory events with Bedford’s LGBTQIA+ community performed active ways of debating and co-writing to generate new dialogue and form a network of contemporary voices to comment on issues of gender and freedom. The project launched during The Place Theatre, Bedford’s LGBTQIA+ season in February 2019 with a collective brainstorming event. Guest writers, critics and community activists joined an audience to revisit the structure and message of the historic play and discuss how it could be updated to represent the values and ideals of a diverse 21st century LGBTQIA+ community. Using collective creation, improvisation and debate, Bedford’s local community were then invited to co-author the new play. Workshops led by Ray Filar, Claudia Jefferies and Emma Frankland brought together Q:Youth Bedford, students and local performers over a period of six weeks to debate the original play’s premise and characters, transforming their ideas into a new dialogue and updated script. A final performative event, presented a first sharing of the script at The Place Theatre, Bedford on 6 April 2019. Subsequent sharing’s took place at Goldsmith’s, University of London, and Eastside Projects, Birmingham

The Ballad of Goodwill

The Ballad of Goodwill or The Lecturers Lament at the Demise of Goodwill in the Neoliberal University. The Ballad of Goodwill is a new workers ballad collectively written during a one-day singing symposium devised by Post Workers Theatre and hosted by the Allmänningen (The Common Room) at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, Gothenburg University (2021). The symposium guests included: Professor Rajani Naidoo - Director, International Centre for Higher Education Management / Dr. Joanna Figiel - Researcher and activist, Centre for Cultural Policy and Management, University of London / Dr. Stevphen Shukaitis- Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, Centre for Work and Organisation / Dr. Jenni Hyde- Ballad historian and precarious academic. Symposium guests and invited speakers all contributed to the production of a ballad through retelling, scripting and discussing the often-hidden economies of goodwill in academic labour and life. Soprano and librettist Roxanne Korda, acted as the event's Troubadour, and sings the final recording of the ballad accompanied by a PWT modular synthesiser reimagining of the tune Packington's Pound, a popular broadside ballad tune before 1700. The Ballad of Goodwill revisits the social function of the broadside ballad for the contemporary workplace and considers the ballad's potential to create relationships across different institutions and professions that face growing pressure and precarity within marketized education. The Ballad of Goodwill was organised as part of Post Workers Theatres residency within Allmänningen (The Common Room) at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, Gothenburg University. Allmänningen was a Vinnova funded research project from 2018-2021 developing and piloting alternative models for university usership and collaboration. The symposium was accessible for students and staff from the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, Gothenburg University, Goldsmiths University and Birmingham City University

Autohoodening

Autohoodening is a consciousness-raising custom for the age of A.I Capitalism, updating an ancient midwinter ritual to critically engage with the horrors of working as a seasonal associate in an Amazon fulfilment centre. Conceived in 2019 by Post Workers Theatre, Autohoodening is a collective inquiry that combines talks and debate on folk history and contemporary work issues, with scripts, songs, costume and live performance. A symposium was held within the Design Department at Goldsmiths, which acted as the catalyst for a week of collective reworking. Discussion focues on how folkloric, archetypes could be used to address contemporary labour issues. Presentations were given by Ben Jones, member of the St Nicholas at Wade Hoodeners, Folk Historian George Frampton and journalist and writer James Bloodworth who shared his experience of working undercover in Amazon's Rugeley Fulfilment Centre. Participants of the symposium went on to produce a collectively written response to the mid-winter custom of Hoodening, performed in East Kent for over 200 years. Originally, the Hoodeners were agricultural labourers, working in ploughing teams, who performed a carnivalesque satire of their working realites, visiting different locations in the local community during the fallow season of winter. Autohoodening 2019 begins to reimagine this custom for the age of automation, updating its design, delivery and social purpose. How might the singing, dancing and physical humour parody and draw attention to the horrifying working conditions hidden behind consumer-facing infrastructure and the ease of ‘one-click’ delivery

Autohoodening: The Rise of Captain Swing

As part of the wider Autohoodening Symposium and workshops begun in 2019, this is a collaborative response to a midwinter custom dating back over 200 years. Further research in the working conditions of Amazon Workers in the UK to create a feature length tragic comic opera farce, further reimaging the Kentish calendar Custom of Hoodening. Hoodening was originally performed by farm labourers in East Kent who paraded with a horse effigy in a carnivalesque satire of their working reality during the fallow season of winter. The Opera was written in collaboration with Infinite Opera, with additional material gathered through interviews with GMB Union Managers and Amazon worker message boards. Autohoodening reimagines this custom for the age of automation, updating its design, delivery and social commentary and asks how might the singing, dancing and physical humour parody and draw attention to the horrifying working conditions hidden behind consumer-facing infrastructure and the ease of ‘one-click’ delivery? The work was premiered at Vivid Studios Birmingham at Christmas in 2021, following Amazon Prime Day and during a spate of worldwide protests against the treatment of Amazon workers, and shown again at the 2022 Lulea Bienalle in Sweden. The film focuses on Captain Swing, the fictional face of worker dissent in the great English agricultural uprising of 1830, is resurrected to confront the horrors of working as a seasonal associate in an Amazon fulfilment centre. Will Swing help the workers to overcome Alexis the evil scanner, a symbol of Amazon’s regime of technological discipline

Protesteroo

Protesteroo is a socialist rerouting of the gig economy food delivery company Deliveroo. A singing and cycling protest service that reactivates activities from the historic Clarion social movement to deliver on-demand messages of hope and resistance. Protesteroo was conceived as part of Three Day Work-Out; a three day event exploring the connections between work, social movements and free time at Tate Liverpool in May 2019. The Clarion, a historic social reform movement, was very active in Liverpool in the late 19th century. Three Day Work-Out, revisited it’s core activities: communal cycling, singing and publishing to reflect on current debates around modern forms of work and leisure. The project brought together the Liverpool Socialist Singers, and the Angry Margaret Protest Choir (BCU) led by Infinite Opera. Members of the public were invited to update songs from the Clarion Song Book and specify a location within a 2.5 mile radius of Tate Liverpool where they would like their protest to be delivered. Tate Exchange became the Protesteroo HQ, hosting a range of participatory events. These included a film screening of The Last Clarion House (2017), directed by Charlotte Bill, a talk and discussion with Prof Peter Cox on the Clarion movement, cycling cultures, and activism and a drop in a zine-making workshop led by Gareth Proskourine-Barnett and BAAAD Press

The Critically Designed Garden.

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Adams, J. & Hyde, W. (2018) The Critically Designed Garden. International Journal of Art and Design Education, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 348-352., which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12195. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-ArchivingThis article is concerned with design applied to gardens, using examples from the Chelsea Flower Show in London. There is a discussion of those show gardens that represented Syrian refugees’ gardens in Iraq and the Windrush generation immigration to the UK. The garden designs combine the aesthetics of organic materials and spatial architecture with an implicit critique of topical contemporary social issues. The article concludes by commenting on the risks posed by the reduced and impoverished UK arts education policies for producing the next generation of applied design practitioners

Negative mood and obsessive-compulsive related clinical constructs: an examination of underlying factors

Emerging evidence suggests that many of the clinical constructs used to help understand and explain obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms, and negative mood, may be causally interrelated. One approach to understanding this interrelatedness is a motivational systems approach. This approach suggests that rather than considering clinical constructs and negative affect as separable entities, they are all features of an integrated threat management system, and as such are highly coordinated and interdependent. The aim of the present study was to examine if clinical constructs related to OC symptoms and negative mood are best treated as separable or, alternatively, if these clinical constructs and negative mood are best seen as indicators of an underlying superordinate variable, as would be predicted by a motivational systems approach. A sample of 370 analogue participants completed measures of mood and the clinical constructs of inflated responsibility, intolerance of uncertainty (IU), not just right experiences (NJREs) and checking stop rules. An exploratory factor analysis suggested two plausible factor structures, one where all construct items and negative mood items loaded onto one underlying superordinate variable, and a second structure comprising of 5 factors, where each item loaded onto a factor representative of what the item was originally intended to measure. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that the five factor model was preferential to the one factor model, suggesting the four constructs and negative mood are best conceptualised as separate variables. Given the predictions of a motivational systems approach were not supported in the current study, other possible explanations for the causal interrelatedness between clinical constructs and negative mood are discussed

The perseverative worry bout: a review of cognitive, affective and motivational factors that contribute to worry perseveration

This paper reviews the cognitive, affective and attentional factors that contribute to individual perseverative worry bouts. We describe how automatic biases in attentional and interpretational processes contribute to threat detection and to the inclusion of negative intrusive thoughts into the worry stream typical of the “what if …?” thinking style of pathological worriers. The review also describes processes occurring downstream from these perceptual biases that also facilitate perseveration, including cognitive biases in beliefs about the nature of the worry process, the automatic deployment of strict goal-directed responses for dealing with the threat, the role of negative mood in facilitating effortful forms of information processing (i.e. systematic information processing styles), and in providing negative information for evaluating the success of the worry bout. We also consider the clinical implications of this model for an integrated intervention programme for pathological worrying

Spin dynamics in semiconductors

This article reviews the current status of spin dynamics in semiconductors which has achieved a lot of progress in the past years due to the fast growing field of semiconductor spintronics. The primary focus is the theoretical and experimental developments of spin relaxation and dephasing in both spin precession in time domain and spin diffusion and transport in spacial domain. A fully microscopic many-body investigation on spin dynamics based on the kinetic spin Bloch equation approach is reviewed comprehensively.Comment: a review article with 193 pages and 1103 references. To be published in Physics Reports

The Treatment In Morning versus Evening (TIME) study:Analysis of recruitment, follow-up and retention rates post-recruitment

Abstract Background The use of information technology (IT) is now the preferred method of capturing and storing clinical research data. The Treatment In Morning versus Evening (TIME) study predominantly uses electronic data capture and IT to compare morning dosing of hypertensive medication against evening dosing. Registration, consent, participant demographics and follow-up data are all captured via the study website. The aim of this article is to assess the success of the TIME methodology compared with similar studies. Methods To assess the TIME study, published literature on similar clinical trials was reviewed and compared against TIME recruitment, follow-up and email interaction data. Results The TIME website registered 31,695 individuals, 21,116 of whom were randomised. Recruitment cost per randomised participant varied by strategy: £17.40 by GP practice, £3.08 by UK Biobank and £58.82 for GoShare. Twelve-month follow-up retention rates were 96%. A total of 1089 participants have withdrawn from their assigned time of dosing, 2% of whom have declined follow-up by record linkage or further contact. When the TIME data are compared with similar study data, study recruitment is very successful. However, TIME suffers difficulties with participant follow-up and withdrawal rates similar to those of conventional studies. Conclusions The TIME study has been successful in recruitment. Follow-up, retention rates and withdrawal rates are all acceptable, but ongoing work is required to ensure participants remain engaged with the study. Various recruitment strategies are necessary, and all viable options should be encouraged to maintain participant engagement throughout the life of studies using IT