Spectacle and spectres: London 7 July 2005

This essay is prompted by some photographs that have haunted me ever since I first saw them, on a train leaving London on 8 July 2005. They were in the Evening Standard newspaper, the day after four bombs exploded on London's public transport system, and they showed the faces of some of the people missing on that day. The same photographs, or photographs very like them, of those people and other people, were published in almost every national newspaper, in one form or another, in the days and weeks that followed the attacks. The faces - pictured on holiday, at graduations, at parties, even the driving licence mugshots - were so vividly alive that they continued to exert a presence even after I knew that almost all of the people pictured had died brutal deaths in a train carriage or a bus that July

Bodies and everyday practices in designed urban environments

In recent years, the centres of many towns and cities have been reshaped by urban design projects, but little attention has been paid to how these transformations are experienced everyday by users of the city. In other words: how do the users of urban centers, such as shoppers, cleaners, or workers, perceive these changes, as embodied subjects in specific material environments? This paper analyses how bodies in two intensely designed urban spaces – the shopping centre of Milton Keynes, a 1960s new town, and Bedford's recently redeveloped historic town centre – are affected by elements of the built environment. 'Affected' is a term borrowed from Latour (2004), and the paper works with, and elaborates, some of his and others' work on how bodies are effectuated by other entities. Such Latourian work pays a great deal of attention to how bodies are affected by both human and non-human entities of many kinds, and we examine how certain aspects of the built environment in these two towns affects bodies in specific ways. However, we also emphasise the variability in this process, in particular that bodies seem unaware – or ambivalently aware – of many entities' affordances

Visualising human life in volumetric cities: city digital twins and other disasters

City digital twins (CDTs) are attracting considerable attention as a tool for the management of cities facing many kinds of crises. CDTs are three-dimensional, animated digital models of cities which display the big data generated by urban sensors in near-real-time. Most of the academic literature on CDTs consists of technical discussions of their design or implementation. This paper instead proposes a different context for understanding CDTs. It adopts an intersectional feminist and techno-cultural analysis of the visual form of power enacted by CDTs, as exemplary of a much wider turn in contemporary visual culture towards visualising the world digitally in three dimensions. Many critical accounts of this visual and volumetric regime are attentive to the forms of corporealised human life that emerge in relation to the picturing of various volumes. This paper examines how CDTs visibly coconstitute a number of digitally-mediated forms of human life, including its user and its human inhabitants. The paper argues that, while both the technological affordances and the cultural imaginary of CDTs perform the kind of powerful white masculinity that sees space as transparent and actionable, discussions of CDTs also persistently generate an excessive form of human life which is understood as untwinn-able. The paper argues that masculinist anxieties around this excess erupt in another form of digitally-animated volumetric city facing disaster: the disaster movie. The paper thus makes an argument about the specific form of white masculinity co-constituted with CDTs, and insists on the necessity of critical techno-cultural analyses of urban management technologies

Visual Culture, Photography and the Urban: An Interpretive Framework

This paper offers a framework for understanding and reflecting upon the various ways that urban scholars have worked with visual representations of city spaces. It suggests that there are three main approaches: representing the urban, evoking the urban and performing the urban. The paper discusses the methodological implications of each of these

Seismological studies at the hengill geothermal area SW Iceland

Iceland is a sub-aerial part of the mid-Atlantic Ridge which has formed above an E migrating ridge centred hotspot. The Hengill area is a ridge-ridge-transform triple point that contains a central volcano-fissure swarm system and a large geothermal area. A seismological study of this triple point was conducted with the main emphasis on natural earthquake studies. The aims were to study the geothermal prospect and tectonic structure and to evaluate the passive seismic method as a geothermal prospecting tool. The area exhibits continuous small magnitude earthquake activity that correlates positively with surface geothermal displays, and negatively with surface faulting. The log (cumulative frequency) magnitude relationship is linear and indicates a b value of 0.74 ± 0.06. Focal mechanisms for 178 events indicated both shear and tensile crack type movements, the latter being confined to the high temperature geothermal area. Teleseismic and explosion data indicate a low velocity body beneath the central volcano in the depth range 0 - 10 km, flanked by higher velocity bodies to the W and E. Two volcanic systems occupy the Hengill area : the presently active Hengill system and the extinct Grensdalur system. The ongoing seismicity of the area is attributed to contraction cracking due to the action of cool groundwater fluids on hot rook, which, in a tensile stress regime, results in tensile crack formation. The high temperature area is fuelled by two heat sources associated with the two volcanic systems and may be divided into two separate fields that exhibit contrasting reservoir characteristics. Local seismioity studies may be applied to other Icelandic high temperature geothermal areas as a tool to map those volumes of rock that are fueling the geothermal reservoirs. The continuous formation of small tensile cracks on accretionary plate boundaries offers an explanation for the mechanism of dyke injection

The medical treatment of endometriosis with danazol and gestrinone: A study of their clinical, endocrine and in vitro effects.

This thesis describes an investigation of the clinical efficacy and mechanisms of action of danazol and the newer steroidal agent, gestrinone in the medical management of endometriosis. A prospective randomized double-blind study was performed on 51 patients treated with either danazol or gestrinone. The efficacy and tolerance of the two drugs were shown to be similar. The endocrine effects of danazol and gestrinone were found to be analogous. Treatment with both drugs resulted in early follicular phase levels of luteinizing hormone, follicle stimulating hormone and oestradiol, a fall in sex hormone binding globulin and an increase in percent free testosterone and the concentration of free testosterone. The latter is significantly related to the improvement in endometriosis seen during treatment. Although vaginal bleeding and oestradiol levels during therapy are also significantly related, neither of these parameters correlate with effective elimination of endometriosis. The effect of gestrinone, danazol and the two major metabolites of danazol, ethisterone and 2-hydroxymethyl ethisterone were tested on endometrial tissue cells, used as a model for endometriotic tissue, cultured in vitro. In view of the increase in free testosterone observed during treatment with the drugs, the effect of testosterone was also examined. Danazol and testosterone at one and ten times the normal circulating concentrations caused a significant suppression of endometrial cell growth in vitro, but gestrinone, ethisterone and 2-hydroxymethyl ethisterone caused no effect

Locality, politics and culture : Poplar in the 1920s.

PhDThe thesis begins with a discussion of the literature on local working-class politics, which includes the work of labour historians, political geographers and locality-study writers. The latter have been especially keen to acknowledge the unique causal powers of the social formations of specific localities and to explore the implications of these for local political behaviour. Nonetheless, locality studies share with other approaches to local politics an interest in class to exclusion of other bases of social action, and a structuralism which denies human agency. The history of Poplar in the 1920s denies such explanatory logic. The Labour Party came to power in the borough in 1919. Yet although the class and economic structure of Poplar was very similar to that of the rest of east London, Poplar Labour Party was unique in the degree of its militancy. In order to explain this radicalism, the thesis turns away from structural analysis and towards cultural interpretation, exploring Poplar's politics in terms of local culture and civil society, focussing on five themes: the politics of class and of gender, the discourses of citizenship, the morality of the neighbourhoods and the religious faiths. The influence of these cultural 'communal sensibilities' on Poplar Labour Party are traced in order to stress the complexity and contingency of the relationship between a locality and its politics. That contingency is further emphasised in the conclusion, which describes the shift in Poplar Labour Party away from a left-wing and participatory form of politics and towards a right-wing and elitist mode as the 1920s progressed. It is concluded that both types of politics were closely linked to Poplar's culture and that, although local culture in all its complexity is vital for the understanding of local politics, there is no necessary relationship between a culture and the form of political expression it may take

Root responses to mechanical impedance and the role of ethylene signalling.

Plant roots encounter a number of physical stresses in the soil and must be able to respond their growth appropriately. One such stress is mechanical impedance, which becomes an increasing problem in drying soils as soil strength increases with decreasing water content. In addition, the use of larger, heavier farming machinery leads to soil compaction, further increasing soil strength. Mechanical impedance has previously been shown to reduce root elongation and may have a negative impact on crop yields. It is therefore important to understand how root development is affected and growth regulated in response to mechanical impedance. This thesis investigates the effect of mechanical impedance on root growth of Arabidopsis thalina and focuses on the role of the plant hormone ethylene in mediating this response. In particular the role of ethylene signalling in mediating root growth via crosstalk with auxin is examined. In addition the involvement of other plant hormones such as ABA, cytokinin and gibberellin is also briefly investigated. Experiments were carried out using a previously developed method whereby seedlings grown on horizontally orientated, dialysis membrane covered agar experience sufficient mechanical impedance to induce a response. Mechanically impeded roots exhibited a characteristic ethylene response, with decreased primary root growth, increased diameter and root hair growth occurring closer to the tip. Analysis of mutants with altered responses to ethylene and auxin, and the effect of inhibitors of ethylene signalling and auxin demonstrated that both correct ethylene signalling and auxin transport are required for a mechanical impedance response. Confocal microscopy demonstrated that under mechanical impedance, auxin is redistributed at the root tip with increases in the expression of the transporters PIN1 and PIN2. ABA signalling is not required for a response to mechanical impedance and cytokinin responses appear to be reduced

Conceptualising aesthetic power in the digitally mediated city

Aesthetics, generally understood as an intensified emphasis on the sensorial look and feel of urban environments, has become an important perspective through which urban scholarship is examining the economic, social, political and cultural processes of urban regeneration projects across the globe. Much of this aestheticising work is now mediated by many kinds of digital technologies. The entanglement of digital technologies with the sensorial feel of urban redevelopments manifests in many different ways in different urban locations; it is deeply reshaping the embodied experiencing of urban life; and it enacts specific power relations. It is the focus of this paper. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Jansson, this article develops the notion of 'textured' space in order to offer an analytic vocabulary that can describe distinctive configurations of urban experience at the intersection of specific urban environments, bodily sensations, and digital devices. Analysing embodied sensory politics is important because various aspects of bodily sensoria are central to human experiences of, and relations between, both self and other. Hence bodies are enrolled differentially into different expressions of these new urban aesthetics: while some are seduced, others are made invisible or repelled, or are ambivalently entangled in digitally-mediated aesthetic atmospheres. The article offers some examples of the power relations inherent in the textured aesthetics of three of the most significant, and interrelated, processes of contemporary, digitally-mediated urban change: efforts to be seen as a 'world-class city' and to facilitate gentrification and tourism

Reading List (R)evolution - exploring the value of reading lists as a pedagogical tool to support students' development of information skills

Reading lists are a ubiquitous part of U.K. Higher Education and tutors are expected to provide them as guidance on every course. Currently reading lists are used primarily for collection development purposes. We feel it is time to explore their additional role as a tool to support students’ information skills development. Opportunities are arising for librarians and academics to work together to develop reading lists as a pedagogical tool. Studies have highlighted the value of annotated reading lists for signposting students to different sources of information in terms of format, level and style of writing. This can help to support or ‘scaffold’ students’ development of key information skills, notably the ability to access, retrieve and use information appropriately and effectively. This session will present findings from practitioner research exploring students’ perceptions of reading lists as part of their learning experience. Examples of reading lists will be used as discussion points to encourage participants’ reflection on the student experience. The session will facilitate the sharing and generation of ideas on how we can promote more active engagement with reading lists by all stakeholders (academics, students, librarians). It will also reflect on how the research has been used to implement the reading list software, Talis Aspire, a more dynamic tool for managing these lists. The research is designed to encourage the (r)evolution of reading lists so that they are used as a valuable pedagogical tool to support students’ information skills development and enhance their learning at university