‘It stays with you’: multiple evocative representations of dance and future possibilities for studies in sport and physical cultures

This article considers the integration of arts-based representations via poetic narratives together with artistic representation on dancing embodiment so as to continue an engagement with debates regarding multiple forms/representations. Like poetry, visual images are unique and can evoke particular kinds of emotional and visceral responses, meaning that alternative representational forms can resonate in different and powerful ways. In the article, we draw on grandparent-grandchild interactions, narrative poetry, and artistic representations of dance in order to illustrate how arts-based methods might synergise to offer new ways of ‘knowing’ and ‘seeing’. The expansion of the visual arts into interdisciplinary methodological innovations is a relatively new, and sometimes contentious approach, in studies of sport and exercise. We raise concerns regarding the future for more arts-based research in the light of an ever-changing landscape of a neoliberal university culture that demands high productivity in reductionist terms of what counts as ‘output’, often within very restricted time-frames. Heeding feminist calls for ‘slow academies’ that attempt to ‘change’ time collectively, and challenge the demands of a fast-paced audit culture, we consider why it is worth enabling creative and arts-based methods to continue to develop and flourish in studies of sport, exercise and health, despite the mounting pressures to ‘perform’

Materializing digital collecting: an extended view of digital materiality

If digital objects are abundant and ubiquitous, why should consumers pay for, much less collect them? The qualities of digital code present numerous challenges for collecting, yet digital collecting can and does occur. We explore the role of companies in constructing digital consumption objects that encourage and support collecting behaviours, identifying material configuration techniques that materialise these objects as elusive and authentic. Such techniques, we argue, may facilitate those pleasures of collecting otherwise absent in the digital realm. We extend theories of collecting by highlighting the role of objects and the companies that construct them in materialising digital collecting. More broadly, we extend theories of digital materiality by highlighting processes of digital material configuration that occur in the pre-objectification phase of materialisation, acknowledging the role of marketing and design in shaping the qualities exhibited by digital consumption objects and consequently related consumption behaviours and experiences

An analysis of the surface quality of AA5182 at different testing temperatures

The mechanical behaviour of the commercial aluminium alloys EN AW-5182, EN AW-6016 and EN AW-7021 is investigated at temperatures ranging from 298 to 77 K and strain rates from 1.7 × 10__ to 6.6 × 10_ s-1. A device which allows testing at cryogenic temperatures is developed and demonstrated, where the specimens are subject to uniaxial tensile loads. The influence of a solution heat treatment for precipitation hardenable alloys is shown. The strain hardening coefficient is determined and mapped in terms of the experimentally investigated uniform elongation. The experimental data of tested aluminium alloys are compared with EN AW-1050A-H14, which is used as a reference. The effect of the Portevin-LeChatelier (PLC) effect on ductility and strength is discussed. The Ludwik relationship is adapted to describe materials showing a PLC-effect

‘In the air’ and below the horizon: migrant workers in UK construction and the practice-based nature of learning and communicating OHS

Local, tacit and normally unspoken OHS (occupational health and safety) knowledge and practices can too easily be excluded from or remain below the industry horizon of notice, meaning that they remain unaccounted for in formal OHS policy and practice. In this article we stress the need to more systematically and routinely tap into these otherwise ‘hidden’ communication channels, which are central to how everyday safe working practices are achieved. To demonstrate this approach this paper will draw on our ethnographic research with a gang of migrant curtain wall installers on a large office development project in the north of England. In doing so we reflect on the practice-based nature of learning and sharing OHS knowledge through examples of how workers’ own patterns of successful communication help avoid health and safety problems. These understandings, we argue, can be advanced as a basis for the development of improved OHS measures, and of organizational knowing and learning

Building networks to work: an ethnographic study of informal routes into the UK construction industry and pathways for migrant up-skilling

The UK construction industry labour market is characterised by high levels of self-employment, sub-contracting, informality and flexibility. A corollary of this, and a sign of the increasing globalisation of construction, has been an increasing reliance on migrant labour, particularly that from the Eastern European Accession states. Yet, little is known about how their experiences within and outside of work shape their work in the construction sector. In this context better qualitative understandings of the social and communication networks through which migrant workers gain employment, create routes through the sector and develop their role/career are needed. We draw on two examples from a short-term ethnographic study of migrant construction worker employment experiences and practices in the town of Crewe in Cheshire, UK, to demonstrate how informal networks intersect with formal elements of the sector to facilitate both recruitment and up-skilling. Such research knowledge, we argue, offers new evidence of the importance of attending to migrant worker’s own experiences in the development of more transparent recruitment processes