Community: The Thread that Holds Individuals Together

This article discusses the importance of community to both the Puritan and Enlightenment ideologies, which were otherwise opposites in many respects

The Translation of Radical Ideas into Radical Action: The American Revolution and Revolutionary Philadelphia

This paper seeks to analyze the role of Philadelphia as a hotbed of revolutionary activity directly preceding and during the American Revolution. By exploring primary documents, Skeggs attempts to piece together the path to the radical changes in government structure and civil liberties in Pennslyvania. By doing so, she shows that both ideology and action played integral roles in shaping the transformation of Philadelphia from a conservative area to a center of radicalism

Necroeconomics: How Necro Legacies Help Us Understand the Value of Death and the Protection of Life During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The paper offers an analysis of how three historical legacies shaped the context for responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in England. They are firstly, necrospeculation, the ability to turn destructiveness into profit and produce new capitalist value. The second is the legacy of thanatocracy, the enactment of mass and organised killing as an official policy of the state. The third necro legacy, social reproduction, is not just about violent death and accumulation, but also the state’s divestment of responsibility to women for the protection of life itself. What these violent legacies have in common as they entwine throughout history is the continuing relationship between property, accumulation, and disposable peoples, showing how economic and moral value is both captured and erased through abstract classifications of class, race, and gender. Bringing these legacies on a journey, we will see how they are modified and repeated in the present. Death during COVID-19 was used as an opportunity for speculation, consolidation of political power, and manipulation of the economy in the interests of the super-rich, government ministers, their friends, and the virus. True to neo-liberal philosophy, they "never let a serious crisis go to waste." Their predatory practices led to many people being callously disregarded, neglected, and unprotected, exposing those considered to be surplus to state and capital requirements. The pandemic revealed that the social contract was broken as the matter of state responsibility for protection of the people was transferred by the government to individuals. The paper will also show how some groups attempted to protect others and save lives

Class: Disidentification, Singular Selves and Person-Value (Published in Portuguese as Classe; Disidenificacao, Selves Singulars E Valor Da Pessoa)

In all the research I have conducted in the UK I have found one consistently repeated issue in relation to identity: the women who would be defined by almost any sociological measurement as working class resolutely refuse to make an identification with the term working class. For them class is a category loaded with negative connotations, a category by which they believe they are mis-recognised and from which they dis-identify. The ethnography Formations of Class and Gender documents this process in detail. The point of this paper is to show how identity is a slippery term always associated with visibility and value, and it is to the evaluation of identity categories that attention should be focused

Using domain specific language and sequence to sequence models as a hybrid framework for a natural language interface to a database solution

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe aim of this project is to provide a new approach to solving the problem of converting natural language into a language capable of querying a database or data repository. This problem has been around for a while, in the 1970's the US Navy developed a solution called LADDER and since then there have been an array of solutions, approaches and tweaks that have kept the research community busy. The introduction of electronic assistants into the smart phone in 2010 has given new impetus to this problem. With the increasingly pervasive nature of data and its ever expanding use to answer questions within business science, medicine extracting data is becoming more important. The idea behind this project is to make data more democratised by allowing access to it without the need for specialist languages. The performance and reliability of converting natural language into structured query language can be problematic in handling nuances that are prevalent in natural language. Relational databases are not designed to understand language nuance. This project introduces the following components as part of a holistic approach to improving the conversion of a natural language statement into a language capable of querying a data repository. ● The idea proposed in this project combines the use of sequence to sequence models in conjunction with the natural language part of speech technologies and domain specific languages to convert natural language queries into SQL. The approach being proposed by this chapter is to use natural language processing to perform an initial shallow pass of the incoming query and then use Google's Tensor Flow to refine the query with the use of a sequence to sequence model. ● This thesis is also proposing to use a Domain Specific Language (DSL) as part of the conversion process. The use of the DSL has the potential to allow the natural language query to be translated into more than just an SQL statement, but any query language such as NoSQL or XQuery

Young women and further education: a case study of young women's experience of caring courses in a local college

This is an ethnographic account of 83 young women on caring courses at a local Further Education college. It represents an attempt to understand and explain how these students experience the institutional parameters of Further Education. It also represents a more general attempt to understand the ways in which subjectivity is constructed in relation to structures of class and gender; and how, in this process, young women come necessarily to be implicated in constructing their own future subordination. The study starts by establishing its historical background; in particular the origins of the legacy of young women being prepared for a role outside the labour market. Then it proceeds to examine the organisation of Further Education, its modes of presenting knowledge, and the ways in which the institution is used to transmit ideology. This analysis divides broadly into two areas, representing on the one hand the role of the institution, and on the other, the student's responses to that role. Further Education is seen to contribute towards reproducing social fragmentation; naturalising the young women's status as domestic labourers; and making specific allocations of role and responsibility in this context. The student's responses are characterised by attempts to resist powerlessness, and to establish some degree of autonomy; but this response takes place within the frameworks prescribed by the institution and wider class and gender structures. In this respect the responses contribute towards producing a guilt culture, and the establishment of systems of self-surveillance, thus creating a whole pattern of behaviour that reaffirms subordination. In a wider context, these courses are indicative of recent State initiatives on pre-vocational education, and it is one of this study's main overall concerns to show the way that caring courses are part of a more general attempt by the State to restructure social relations

Class culture and morality: legacies and logics in the space for identification

Chapter for the sage handbook of identities (author has copyrite

The Labour of Transformation and Circuits of Value ‘around’ Reality Television

Drawing on recent research from a project which included both textual and audience research, this paper will explore the involvement of women viewers with 'reality' TV as 'circuits of value'. These relationships cannot be adequately described as deconstructions of representations as in a text-reader framework of media theory. Rather, we examine these relationships as an extended social realm, whereby the immanent structure of reality television generates emotional connections to the labouring undertaken by participants on the programmes. 'Reality' television develops different traditions of women’s genres from melodrama, magazines to lifestyle television, it drawing attention to those who need transformation. By promoting different forms of women’s emotional, appearance and domestic labour, it parallels broader political shifts to an 'affective economy'. Rather than these texts producing wholly divisive moral reactions in viewers, we noticed how our audience participants assessed the forms of labour performed through their different classed resources, made judgements through pursuing connections with their own lives, and ultimately tended to value care over condemnation

Being seen in your pyjamas : the relationship between fashion, class, gender and space

Over the last decade class has re-emerged as a significant concept within British sociology, with prominent academics calling for a more Bourdieuian approach which focuses on class distinctions in cultural practices and tastes. Within this discussion, several note the important role fashion plays as a means of class distinction, though few have fully explore just how the fashion-class relationship operates. Based on empirical research, carried out as part of qualitative study into fashion practices and fashion discourse, this article examines the fashion-class relationship, by considering its links to both gender and space. It argues that the way in which women judge visibility and public space differs with class status and that this in turn has significant implications for women's fashion choices, and more specifically, dressing up. Indeed, whilst middle class participants tend to view almost any space as public and one in which they are visible, for working class participants neighbourhood and local spaces are seen to constitute semi-private spaces, whose audiences' opinions and judgements do not matter. As a result, being dressed in your pyjamas is not deeply problematic for these working class women in the context of their everyday lives, while for their middle class counterparts being seen in your pyjamas is something which should be avoided, at all cost. Moreover, as the article demonstrate, the wearing of pyjamas is often considered by middle class respondents as indicative of working classness. And thus, being seen in your pyjamas is undesirable on two counts