Focus E15: Performing Nuisance as a Feminist Narrative of Property

In 2014 Focus E15 resisted the evictions of young carers by drawing attention to the precarity of the London housing crisis (2010-). The campaign’s local occupations protested the devastations of urban cleansing in the area of Newham and won them the ‘right to stay put.’ After, Focus E15 mounted a musical and verbatim theatre project staging the narrative of their protest, entitled, The Land of the Three Towers (2016). The production detailed how the political and feminist voices of the campaign emerged, and I argue not only as the metaphorical ‘voices’ for the mothers' self-representation, but as the material through which they laid claim to property. This article discusses how Focus E15 challenged UK property regimes while illustrating the critical contribution of voice as a feminist strategy of resistance, and as a way of showing how property is tethered to performative vocal claims. I observe how nuisance featured as an activist strategy of the campaign elaborating on its meanings as a form of property disturbance and as a form of untolerated noise to identify how the mothers usefully politicised nuisance as a tactic to address their displacement. Finally, I argue that a feminist narrative of property unfolded across the political campaign and its subsequent theatrical staging

Nomadic Contagions and the Performance of Infrastructure in Dale Farm's Post-eviction Scene

The state dismantlement of an unauthorized Irish Traveller settlement at Dale Farm, Essex in 2011 showed how nomadic infrastructures are made to disappear. Thereafter, local authorities substituted the residential foundations of Dale Farm with an alternative form of ‘invisible’ infrastructure whereby the razed soil at Dale Farm, the very property of the ex-residents, was discretely made to behave against them. This paper considers a structure used in environmental planning for the prevention of chemical and toxic waste. The structure is called ‘bunding’ and its only other application beyond industrial waste sites is in Traveller sites. Technically it is used to stop the spread of pollutants from exposed topographies, but I argue that it is ideologically used as an infrastructure to prohibit Traveller practices—bunding is constructed as a defence wall composed of mounds of earth that prevent Travellers from re-entering their lands after eviction—while also exposing them in a more insidious way to the contaminants that collect in these enclosed landscapes. Filled by storm water, the bund-walled areas of Dale Farm floated open sewage and asbestos. These and other municipal infrastructures are routinely encountered by nomads while they are in transit or in situ and are perceived by Travellers as deliberately composed of obstructive materials, for instance, the common use of boulders strewn across marginal public land act as a deterrent against halting. Conversely, within a sedentarist scene-scape these topographies feature as accidentally discarded material, but to Travellers such obvious techniques of obstruction detain life and vitiate against their social reproduction. I argue that by embedding the logic of containment and contamination as a rationality of governance over the Travellers, the state shows their regard for this community as sub-nationals with the potential to pollute or infect the sedentarist population

Quantifying mixing using magnetic resonance imaging.

Mixing is a unit operation that combines two or more components into a homogeneous mixture. This work involves mixing two viscous liquid streams using an in-line static mixer. The mixer is a split-and-recombine design that employs shear and extensional flow to increase the interfacial contact between the components. A prototype split-and-recombine (SAR) mixer was constructed by aligning a series of thin laser-cut Poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) plates held in place in a PVC pipe. Mixing in this device is illustrated in the photograph in Fig. 1. Red dye was added to a portion of the test fluid and used as the minor component being mixed into the major (undyed) component. At the inlet of the mixer, the injected layer of tracer fluid is split into two layers as it flows through the mixing section. On each subsequent mixing section, the number of horizontal layers is duplicated. Ultimately, the single stream of dye is uniformly dispersed throughout the cross section of the device. Using a non-Newtonian test fluid of 0.2% Carbopol and a doped tracer fluid of similar composition, mixing in the unit is visualized using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI is a very powerful experimental probe of molecular chemical and physical environment as well as sample structure on the length scales from microns to centimeters. This sensitivity has resulted in broad application of these techniques to characterize physical, chemical and/or biological properties of materials ranging from humans to foods to porous media (1, 2). The equipment and conditions used here are suitable for imaging liquids containing substantial amounts of NMR mobile (1)H such as ordinary water and organic liquids including oils. Traditionally MRI has utilized super conducting magnets which are not suitable for industrial environments and not portable within a laboratory (Fig. 2). Recent advances in magnet technology have permitted the construction of large volume industrially compatible magnets suitable for imaging process flows. Here, MRI provides spatially resolved component concentrations at different axial locations during the mixing process. This work documents real-time mixing of highly viscous fluids via distributive mixing with an application to personal care products

Topological Quantum Field Theory and Seiberg-Witten Monopoles

A topological quantum field theory is introduced which reproduces the Seiberg-Witten invariants of four-manifolds. Dimensional reduction of this topological field theory leads to a new one in three dimensions. Its partition function yields a three-manifold invariant, which can be regarded as the Seiberg-Witten version of Casson's invariant. A Geometrical interpretation of the three dimensional quantum field theory is also given.Comment: 15 pages, Latex file, no figure