Bureaucracy, Violence, Resistance: An account of Home Office reporting in Britain

Scholarship on asylum often overlooks bureaucracy, folding its associated sites and practices into the broader, more overtly violent spaces and systems in which they take place. Yet, this thesis demonstrates that contributions which only focus on overt or more visible forms of violence are not necessarily indicative of asylum seekers’ daily experiences. They also inadequately reflect how a modern state governs the lives of those seeking asylum, from the everyday intimate experience of state-enforced destitution, through to the structural dynamics that threaten and enforce the detainment and removal of individuals from Britain; though seemingly disparate experiences, both are part of a broader political agenda for making life unliveable for unwanted migrants. Making connections across these different modes of violence and the logics through which they operate underpins the aims of this thesis. Based on 16-months of ethnographic fieldwork, including 11-months as a Signing Support volunteer at a Home Office reporting centre, I argue that Home Office reporting provides a critical site for understanding how these various modes of violence come together. By drawing together aspects of Hannah Arendt’s poignant analysis of bureaucracy with feminist theorisations of violence, I argue that the threat of physical force plays a constitutive role in creating a politically induced condition of precarity amongst asylum seekers. Yet, as I will explore, these sites can never fully extinguish the possibility of resistance and by appropriating a Rancièrian notion of dissensus, I show how both asylum seekers and Signing Support volunteers who offer support to those reporting, find ways to disrupt the ‘going-on-being’ of these operations. I argue that these forms of resistance have oftentimes, indeterminate political outcomes, yet are an important form of politics in momentarily challenging these operations.ESR

New geographies of European financial competition? Frankfurt, Paris and the political economy of Brexit

The UK’s exit from the EU is unlikely to challenge the City of London’s position as Europe’s leading international financial centre (IFC). However, Brexit does create opportunities for alternative financial centres located inside the remaining EU member states. In this article, we assess the strategic positioning of private and public actors within two European IFCs - Frankfurt and Paris - in the period following the Brexit vote. Agents within these centres are seeking to differentially benefit from Brexit in two distinct ways: by mobilising to attract ‘low hanging fruit’ – vulnerable financial sub-sectors – away from the City and by utilising Brexit as a ‘bargaining chip’ to leverage domestic and European regulatory reforms. In light of these findings we argue that existing approaches to financial centre relations - in particular ‘Globalisation and World Cities’ research - should engage with the ways in which political actors shape European financial relations. Whilst private actors inside financial ‘networks’ may agitate for continued ‘cooperation’ and regulatory convergence after Brexit, new competitive orientations are also in evidence as political actors seek to privilege their territories relative to rival spaces

Lexical access and lexical diversity in first language attrition

This paper presents an investigation of lexical first language (L1) attrition, asking how a decrease in lexical accessibility manifests itself in long-term residents in a second language (L2) environment. We question the measures typically used in attrition studies (formal tasks and type?token ratios) and argue for an in-depth analysis of free spoken data, including factors such as lexical frequency and distributional measures. The study is based on controlled, elicited and free data from two populations of attriters of L1 German (L2 Dutch and English) and a control population (n = 53 in each group). Group comparisons and a Discriminant Analysis show that lexical diversity, sophistication and the distribution of items across the text in free speech are better predictors of group membership than formal tasks or elicited narratives. Extralinguistic factors, such as frequency of exposure and use or length of residence, have no predictive power for our results

Composition Dependence of Structural Parameters and Properties of Gallium Ferrite

We show the effect of composition on structural and magnetic characteristics of pure phase polycrystalline GaFeO (GFO) for compositions between 0.8 <= x <= 1.3. X-ray analysis reveals that lattice parameters of GFO exhibit a linear dependence on Fe content in single phase region indicating manifestation of Vegard's law. Increasing Fe content of the samples also leads to stretching of bonds as indicated by the Raman peak shifts. Further, low temperature magnetic measurements show that the coercivity of the samples is maximum for Ga:Fe ratio of 1:1 driven by a competition between decreasing crystallite size and increasing magnetic anisotropy.Comment: 15 pages with 4 figure

Commensurate-Incommensurate Magnetic Phase Transition in Magnetoelectric Single Crystal LiNiPO4_4

Neutron scattering studies of single-crystal LiNiPO$_4$ reveal a spontaneous first-order commensurate-incommensurate magnetic phase transition. Short- and long-range incommensurate phases are intermediate between the high temperature paramagnetic and the low temperature antiferromagnetic phases. The modulated structure has a predominant antiferromagnetic component, giving rise to satellite peaks in the vicinity of the fundamental antiferromagnetic Bragg reflection, and a ferromagnetic component giving rise to peaks at small momentum-transfers around the origin at $(0,\pm Q,0)$. The wavelength of the modulated magnetic structure varies continuously with temperature. It is argued that the incommensurate short- and long-range phases are due to spin-dimensionality crossover from a continuous to the discrete Ising state. These observations explain the anomalous first-order transition seen in the magnetoelectric effect of this system

Predicting the Next Best View for 3D Mesh Refinement

3D reconstruction is a core task in many applications such as robot navigation or sites inspections. Finding the best poses to capture part of the scene is one of the most challenging topic that goes under the name of Next Best View. Recently, many volumetric methods have been proposed; they choose the Next Best View by reasoning over a 3D voxelized space and by finding which pose minimizes the uncertainty decoded into the voxels. Such methods are effective, but they do not scale well since the underlaying representation requires a huge amount of memory. In this paper we propose a novel mesh-based approach which focuses on the worst reconstructed region of the environment mesh. We define a photo-consistent index to evaluate the 3D mesh accuracy, and an energy function over the worst regions of the mesh which takes into account the mutual parallax with respect to the previous cameras, the angle of incidence of the viewing ray to the surface and the visibility of the region. We test our approach over a well known dataset and achieve state-of-the-art results.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, to be published in IAS-1

What does degrowth do in/to empirical research? Methodological deliberations on placing degrowth ‘in the world’

This paper investigates how the notion of degrowth directs our focus as researchers, which leads us to deliberate on the consequences of empirically placing degrowth ‘in the world.’ We propose to rethink methodological questions about how phenomena are put into relation with notions of degrowth (or not) – and our own role as researchers in this process. Mobilizing the concept of diffraction, we argue that careful attention must be paid to what notions of ‘degrowth’ do in/to our research practices, including their role in researchers' selecting, thinking and talking about social phenomena – as well as the material and discursive practices encountered in fieldwork. This is illustrated through engagement with two studies, which undertook research on a housing community in Manchester (United Kingdom) and eco-social entrepreneurs in Stuttgart (Germany). Analyzing these cases with a diffractive lens, we show how an attunement to difference allows for attention to be paid to the ‘translation’ and ‘operationalization’ of degrowth in (research) practice. This orientation, we suggest, can help scholars with the inevitable negotiations intrinsic to the choice of how and whether to engage with and understand degrowth in empirical research

Hyperexcitable and immature-like neuronal activity in the auditory cortex of adult rats lacking the language-linked CNTNAP2 gene.

The contactin-associated protein-like 2 gene, CNTNAP2, is a highly penetrant risk gene thought to play a role in the genetic etiology of language-related disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder and developmental language disorder. Despite its candidacy for influencing language development, few preclinical studies have examined the role of CNTNAP2 in auditory processing. Using in vivo and in vitro electrophysiological recordings in a rat model with translational validity, we report that a loss of the Cntnap2 gene function caused immature-like cortical evoked potentials, delayed multiunit response latencies to acoustic stimuli, impaired temporal processing, and led to a pattern of hyperexcitability in both multiunit and single cell recordings in adulthood. These collective results provide direct evidence that a constitutive loss of Cntnap2 gene function in rats can cause auditory processing impairments similar to those seen in language-related human disorders, indicating that its contribution in maintaining cortical neuron excitability may underlie the cortical activity alterations observed in Cntnap2-/- rats