War in peace : the American Legion and the continuing service of film

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"Are you proud to be British?" : Mobile film shows, local voices and the demise of the British Empire in Africa

The Colonial Film Unit (CFU) (1939–1955) produced over 200 films, which were exhibited non-theatrically to African audiences through its fleet of mobile cinema vans. While the CFU closely monitored, and theorised on, its film texts, the particular ways in which these films were exhibited and received was afforded far less attention and remains critically overlooked by scholars. In this article, I examine the development of the mobile film show across a range of colonial territories. The London-based CFU sought to standardise film exhibition across the empire, imagining these film shows as political events, as a means of monitoring, addressing and homogenising disparate groups of colonial subjects. The regulation of film space can be understood within this context as part of the broader effort to regulate colonial space. Integral to this process was the local commentator, an often-overlooked figure within African cinema. The local commentator would organise the film show, provide additional talks, answer questions, counter unrest and recontextualise the films for local audiences, often without any direct European supervision. In examining government reports, personal interviews and, in particular, a series of audience surveys, the article repositions the commentator as a pivotal presence in the latter years of empire; a rising voice within African cultural and political life.PostprintPeer reviewe

Early edition : the Daily Mail, British newspapers, and the moving image, 1896-1922

The first edition of the Daily Mail on May 4, 1896 included an advertisement for the “latest scientific marvel,” the Lumiere Cinematograph. While historians have acknowledged the concurrent rise of film and the popular press, this article explores the varied and often-innovative ways in which British newspapers produced film and visual media. From the use of Daily Mail screens to relay election results, to the production and promotion of the newspaper’s own film in 1910, these early interactions allow us to understand better the emergence, evolution and endurance of Britain’s modern media system.PostprintPeer reviewe

Stethoscapes: Listening to Hearts in a London Hospital

This thesis is about the stethoscope, and its use in the production and reproduction of bodies. It incorporates two ethnographic strands, sited at each end of the stethoscope. Firstly, the thesis engages with medical students as they begin to learn a new kind of listening. The thesis explores the shaping of the senses which medical training brings about, and positions 'auscultation' as productive of a particular kind of (acoustically) perceiving body. The emphasis placed on auscultation in medical training is seen to reflect the historical importance of auditory knowledge in the medical imagination of the anatomical body and in the mapping of its interior. At the same time, students adopt the postures of doctors in this training and so the stethoscope's importance in the generation of the medical 'habitus' is also highlighted. The instrument is seen to be important in producing and reproducing the respective roles of doctors and patients. The dissertation explores a second major ethnographic strand through examining contexts in which doctors, medical students and, particularly, patients begin to relate to their own interiority through sound. They apprehend the acoustic dimensions, not of abstract or conceptually distant bodies, but of their own immediate, lived and experienced bodies in unexpected and sometimes disturbing ways. The imagination of the body, then, in both formal and more immediately experiential terms, takes on an acoustic dimension within the context of the hospital and the diagnostic procedures encountered there. The thesis argues that the concept of 'acoustemology' may offer a new way of thinking about 'the body', reflecting the importance of sound in the manner in which it is lived, imagined and known

Graduate Training and Research Productivity in the 1990s: A Look at Who Publishes

The relationship between reputational rankings of political science departments and their scholarly productivity remains a source of discussion and controversy. After the National Research Council (1995) published its ranking of 98 political science departments, Katz and Eagles (1996), Jackman and Siverson (1996), and Lowry and Silver (1996) analyzed the factors that seemingly influenced those rankings. Miller, Tien, and Peebler (1996) offered an alternate approach to ranking departments, based both upon the number of faculty (and their graduates) who published in the American Political Science Review and upon the number of citations that faculty members received. More recently, two studies have examined departmental rankings in other ways. Ballard and Mitchell (1998) assessed political science departments by evaluating the level of productivity in nine important disciplinary and subfield journals, and Garand and Graddy (1999) evaluated the impact of journal publications (and other variables) on the rankings of political science departments. In general, Miller, Tien, and Peebler found a high level of correspondence between reputation rankings and productivity, Ballard and Mitchell did not, and Garand and Graddy found that publications in “high impact” journals were important for departmental rankings

Graduate Training, Current Affiliation and Publishing Books in Political Science

Scores of studies have measured the quality of political science departments. Generally speaking, these studies have taken two forms. Many have relied on scholars\u27 survey responses to construct rankings of the major departments. For example, almost 50 years ago Keniston (1957) interviewed 25 department chairpersons and asked them to assess the quality of various programs, and, much more recently, the National Research Council (NRC 1995) asked 100 political scientists to rate the “scholarly quality of program faculty” in the nation\u27s political science doctoral departments. In response to these opinion-based rankings, a number of researchers have developed what they claim to be more objective measures of department quality based on the research productivity of the faculty (Ballard and Mitchell 1998; Miller, Tien, and Peebler 1996; Robey 1979). While department rankings using these two methods are often similar, there are always noteworthy differences and these have generated an additional literature that explores the relationship between the rating systems (Garand and Graddy 1999; Jackman and Siverson 1996; Katz and Eagles 1996; Miller, Tien, and Peebler 1996)

Does the sound environment influence the behaviour of zoo-housed birds? A preliminary investigation of ten species across two zoos

This study was made possible thanks to an Economic & Social Research Council grant number ES/R009554/1.In the zoo, the sound environment experienced by captive wild animals will contain numerous anthropogenic features that may elicit different responses to those stimulated by naturally created, or more biologically relevant, sounds. Husbandry activities, visitor presence and neighbouring species (free-living and captive) will all influence the sounds around zoo-housed species; an animal's behavioural responses may therefore provide an insight into how its welfare state is influenced by this changing sound environment. This project aimed to investigate how animal behaviour was influenced by the sound environment at two large UK zoos; one situated in a more rural location and the other in an urban location. Species were selected based on their location in the zoo, the relevance of sound to their natural ecology (e.g., as a form of communication and/or for anti-predator responses) and their novelty as research subjects in the scientific literature. Behavioural data collection was conducted for five days per enclosure per zoo at the population and individual level for birds housed in different styles of enclosure. Instantaneous sampling at one-minute intervals was used to collect information on state behaviours, assessed using a pre-determined species-specific ethogram. Event behaviours were collected continuously for each observation period. The sound environment around or in the enclosure was recorded continuously during each behavioural recording session using a recorder mounted on a tripod. Results showed a variety of responses to the presence of visitors and potential associated changes to sound around the enclosure with some behaviours being more influenced by the presence of visitors (and increases in the volume of sound) compared to others, e.g., vigilance and vocalisations. Overall, birds showed few of the changes thought to indicate poor or impoverished welfare states linked to changes to the sound environment in their enclosure or to the presence of visitors, but we recommend that zoos consider further measurement and recording of sound on a species-by-species basis to capture individual responses and behavioural changes to variation in visitor number and the sound environment.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Listening after the animals : sound and pastoral care in the zoo

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, grant number ES/R009554/1.In anthropology and across the humanities and social sciences, zoos have tended to be theorized as places of spectacle. Scholars often focus on the ways in which these institutions enable the viewing of other-than-human animals by human publics. This article, however, uses sound-focused ethnographic fieldwork to engage with two UK zoos and to describe a particular mode of cross-species listening which is enacted by zookeepers. The concepts of pastoral care and control discussed by Foucault and applied to the zoo context by Braverman are productively reworked and reorientated in order to understand this form of listening. The article also demonstrates the interconnectedness of keeper, visitor, and animal sound worlds, in the process generating an original perspective that complements and enriches conventional zoo studies.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Spoken word recognition in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders and specific language impairment

Spoken word recognition, during gating, appears intact in specific language impairment (SLI). This study used gating to investigate the process in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders plus language impairment (ALI). Adolescents with ALI, SLI, and typical language development (TLD), matched on nonverbal IQ listened to gated words that varied in frequency (low/high) and number of phonological onset neighbors (low/high density). Adolescents with ALI required more speech input to initially identify low-frequency words with low competitor density than those with SLI and those with TLD, who did not differ. These differences may be due to less well specified word form representations in ALI