Visualizing Inequality: The Spatial Politics of Revolution Depicted in Syrian Television Drama

Space has played a central and largely overlooked role in the Syrian conflict during the past eight years. A tension surrounds the organization of urban space and its impact on cultural identity, inequality, and political mobilization. Spatial politics represent a looming threat that is implicit in the project of ISIS, an international terrorist organization that seeks to appropriate the geographical area of al-Sham (Greater Syria) to create a transnational Caliphate. It also appears in the ‘development proposals’ of the Syrian government, which capitalize on a humanitarian crisis to expropriate forcibly displaced citizens of their land and properties.1 This article analyzes how Syrian television drama is not only an important field of cultural expression and a site of contestation but also reveals the many socio-economic spatial tensions underlying the 2011 Revolution and its aftermath. The latter aspect is demonstrated through a visual and textual analysis of two television serials that depict the ‘ashwa’iyat,2 [arbitrary informal settlements of Damascus]. The first show, al-Intizar, (2006) was aired before the Syrian conflict. The second, Zawal (2016) was aired as the political turmoil in Syria unfolded. This comparative analysis illustrates how the organization of urban space has impacted the dynamics of the Syrian Revolution and its aftermath, and how portrayals of urban and shantytown dramas portrayed the spatial inequalities of Damascus before and during the conflict

8.7% Power conversion efficiency polymer solar cell realized with non-chlorinated solvents

The use of environmental friendly solvents for the fabrication of solution processed organic photovoltaics is a key issue to scale up the technology. Nowadays however, toxic and harmful chlorinated solvents are largely used in polymer solar cell laboratory research . In this work we successfully reached high solubility and miscibility of the low band gap polymer Poly[[4,8-bis[(2-ethylhexyl)oxy]benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b']dithiophene-2,6-diyl][3-fluoro-2-[(2-ethylhexyl)carbonyl]thieno[3,4-b]thiophenediyl]] (PBDTTT-E-F, commonly known as PTB7), blended with [6,6]-Phenyl-C71-butyric acid methyl-ester ([70]PCBM fullerene derivative) in a non-chlorinated solvent (Dimethylbenzenes also known as Xylenes). We studied the solar cells realized depositing blend solutions based on various Xylenes (ortho, para and an isomeric mixture from technical grade) achieving high power conversion efficiencies up to 8.7%

A comparative study of organic photodetectors based on P3HT and PTB7 polymers for visible light communication

Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising candidate to face the bandwidth limitation problems of traditional radio communication system. The use of a light emitting diode (LED), directly modulated, as a transmitter of the wireless telecommunication link permits the installation of VLC-based systems in practically all human-attended settings (home, office, markets). However, a drawback of VLC systems remains the receiver side, due to the lack of photovoltaic devices for this specific application. Organic electronics based on solution processed technologies has the great potential to be applied in VLC systems, building effective, scalable and low-cost photodetectors. We have investigated the effect of the device architecture on optical and electrical device performance, using both P3HT:PCBM and PTB7:PC70BM bulk-heterojunction active layers. We have established that both materials and structures could affect greatly the device properties, and we have provided an analytical representation of the spectral matching between light source and detector. In particular, the most promising device, based on a P3HT:PCBM blend, has demonstrated high performance, especially using an inverted structure. In this configuration, a device cut-off frequency of ~1.0 MHz has been achieved, paying the way to organic photodetector application on VLC-based telecommunication systems in 5G scenarios