Aging reimagined: Exploring older women’s attitudes to aging through reader response

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website through the link below. Copyright @ 2011 The Author.Since the 1970s, concern with questions of reception within literary studies has been, at best, sporadic. This essay presents early insights from a pioneering research study, conducted in 2009–10, involving a rehabilitated form of reader-response analysis. Working with 80 volunteers (of average age 70), the study used fiction to create a space of critical reflection on the changing experience of aging. Volunteers were recruited from the Universities of the Third Age, a network of self-help cooperatives for older people: over the course of a year, they read and reflected on a series of fictional texts. This essay focuses on the responses of older women readers to one particular novel, Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn. Setting their varied and thought-provoking responses within the changing context of contemporary age-culture, the essay highlights some of the neglected possibilities of reader-response as a mode of analysis capable of shedding significant new light on the gendered experience of aging

The turn to precarity in twenty-first century fiction

This is an open access article. Copyright © 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH.Recent years have seen several attempts by writers and critics to understand the changed sensibility in post-9/11 fiction through a variety of new -isms. This essay explores this cultural shift in a different way, finding a ‘turn to precarity’ in twenty-first century fiction characterised by a renewal of interest in the flow and foreclosure of affect, the resurgence of questions about vulnerability and our relationships to the other, and a heightened awareness of the social dynamics of seeing. The essay draws these tendencies together via the work of Judith Butler in Frames of War, in an analysis of Trezza Azzopardi’s quasi-biographical study of precarious life, Remember Me

Humanism, education and spirituality: Approaching psychosis with levinas

The article investigates the recent turn towards Emmanuel Levinas’ writings in the philosophy of Education. Engaging this turn, the article sets out to develop an ethical, personal and contemplative approach towards understanding and responding to psychosis. By imagining a Levinasian horizon for understanding the experience of psychosis in the Teaching-Learning environment, Levinas’ thought gives hope to take on the work of justice and offer a gift of friendship especially when faced with students experiencing psychosis. The approach towards people suffering the moods and difficulties of psychosis, the article argues, parallels the very spiritual practice of contemplation

Markup Behavior in Durable and Nondurable Manufacturing: A production Theory Approach

In this paper I provide a production theory-based framework for measuring markups of price over marginal coat, and the effects of cost and demand characteristics on these markups. Price to marginal coat ratios are measured for various Canadian manufacturing industries, and the impacts of capacity utilization, scale economies, changing prices of variable inputs, import competition, unemployment and other cost and demand determinants are evaluated using adjusted markup indexes and elasticities of the markup ratios. The measured price margins are within a reasonable range and tend to be countercyclical. Moreover, these measures suggest that profitability stemming from the potential to increase price over marginal cost appears primarily to arise from cost characteristics determining scale economies.

Market Power, Economic Profitability and Productivity Growth Measurement: An Integrated Structural Approach

The purpose of this paper is to treat scale economies, profit-maximizing markups, economic profitability, capacity utilization and productivity growth within an integrated structural model, and to assess their interactions empirically using annual two-digit U.S. manufacturing data. Attention is focused on error biases in measuring productivity using traditional accounting procedures. An important conjecture by Robert Hall, that the coexistence of normal economic profits and positive markups of price over marginal cost imply the existence of substantial scale economies and excess capacity, is then examined using this structure. The empirical results suggest that markups in most U.S. manufacturing firms have increased over time, and tend to the countercyclical. However, procyclical capacity utilization and scale economies tend to offset the short run profit potential from markup behavior. As a result, on average economic profits are normal, but declining profitability is prevalent in most industries since the early 1970s. Also, although cost and revenue shares tend to be approximately equal, the error biases in standard productivity growth measures resulting from input fixity and scale economies are substantial, particularly over business cycles.

Economic performance, cost economies and pricing behaviour in the US and Australian meat products industries

The cost and demand structures of meat products industries in the US and Australia from 1970 to 1991 are examined. Scale economies, technical change and trade impacts and output pricing behaviour are evaluated, using short‐ and long‐run input cost and input and output demand elasticities. The greatest technological impacts stem from large‐scale economies, which are similar across countries. Unit cost savings from output expansion involve capital investment and materials saving in the long run, although input‐specific patterns vary by country. Import competition appears to motivate capital expansion further. Finally, large mark‐ups of price over marginal cost are found, which are consistent with low profits as a result of the underlying scale economies.Livestock Production/Industries,

Being subject-centred: A philosophy of teaching and implications for higher education

Being subject-centred as a higher education teacher offers a rich and illuminating philosophical and practical understanding of learning. Building upon previous research on subject-centred learning, we draw on reflection, literature review and a phenomenological approach to show how our ways of being infuse the teaching and learning environment. Philosophically, it is our way of being with our subject as teachers that influences the learning within our students. We show how posing the question: 'What is the best way to teach this subject?' helps a teacher find the best way to enhance the learning experience. It entails moving away from reliance solely on approaches that simply 're-present' content, such as lectures and online learning management systems, to interactive classrooms where space is created for the students to enter into their own engagement with the subject in a shared pursuit with the teacher, resulting in more effective teaching and learning. We illustrate this with personal accounts of our own journeys as teachers. We acknowledge that it takes courage to teach and to fully be subject-centred in the face of prevailing trends and pressures for other ways of teaching currently prominent in the higher education sector. But, ultimately, it is who we are as teachers that matters most, and being subject-centred provides the most effective way for us to most meaningfully reach our students