Climate Change and Television: What the Paris Agreement means for broadcasters

In December 2015, the Paris Agreement was signed and governments committed themselves to major reductions in their carbon emissions. These commitments imply far reaching changes to everyday life. In this report, Joe Smith talks to a range of broadcasters, independent producers and academics. He argues that television has a good track record of making issues related to climate change accessible to mainstream audiences and he makes some concrete suggestions for ways in which it could continue to tell a range of stories about climate change that will engage audiences and better equip them to respond to this dynamic story

Culture and climate change scenarios: the role and potential of the arts and humanities in responding to the ‘1.5 degrees target’

This paper critically assesses the role and potential of the arts and humanities in relation to the ‘1.5 degree target’ embedded within the Paris Agreement. Specifically, it considers the purpose of scenarios in inviting thinking about transformed futures. It includes a preliminary assessment of the Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios project, an example of arts and humanities engagement with a ‘1.5 °C future’. The paper argues that integrating more culturally rooted contributions into the creation and deliberation of climate change scenarios would enrich processes of future-thinking beyond climate model outputs. It would also test and extend some established practices of climate research and policy in anticipating and making futures. The paper suggests that the key characteristics of scenarios as a cultural form are that they provide space for collective, improvisational and reflexive modes of acting on and thinking about uncertain futures

Sustainability and the “urban peasant”: rethinking the cultural politics of food self-provisioning in the Czech Republic

From the introduction: The third article, written by environmentalists Petr Jehlička and Joe Smith, overturns accounts of food self-provisioning in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe that are rooted in myths of the “urban peasant”. After reviewing and rejecting those accounts the authors introduce very different explanations for high rates of growing and sharing food outside the market system based in social anthropological research in the region. The authors have extended that work with their own qualitative and quantitative research over a period of six years in the Czech Republic, and here present findings that confirm the contribution that food self-provisioning is making to both the social and ecological sustainability

Reflecting the real world?: How British TV portrayed developing countries in 2005

TV audiences are fed up with how the developing world is portrayed on the small screen, according to a new VSO report published today. Reflecting the real world? How British TV portrayed developing countries in 2005 reveals that television viewers have an overwhelmingly negative view of the developing world and that they hold TV responsible. The report shows that viewers have a real appetite for richer representations of the world outside the UK and calls on broadcasters to invest more money, creativity and talent in bringing the world to UK audiences. The report is based on interviews with TV viewers and leading broadcasters. It shows that despite the high level of developing world coverage on TV over the last year, there has been no sign of a positive shift in public attitude. TV viewers associated the developing world with famine, disaster and corruption and people's initial image was very often of starving babies with flies around their eyes. The research highlights that news coverage and charity campaigns have also contributed to a feeling that the developing world is a hopeless cause. News reporting of the Asian Tsunami and the Pakistan earthquake brought people's attention to poorer countries but reinforced a doom-laden view of them. Even the Make Poverty History campaign and the Live 8 concerts, which enthused millions of people, appear to have inadvertently contrived to confirm a stereotype of Africa as a continent on its knees and added to a sense that nothing has changed over the last 20 years. The research uncovered a very strong sentiment that TV coverage of developing countries is too negative. Viewers expressed a desire to see the positive side of life in the developing world and hear about any progress being made. Crucially, they wanted TV programmes that were positive and transforming, challenged their perceptions, and contained human interest stories, real-life issues and characters they can relate to. Their ideas for new developing world programming tended to reflect their favourite genres and included Jamie's African School Dinners, Life Swap, African Grand Designs, Spooks or 24 in Africa and Africa's Next Top Model

Richtags: Cross Repository Browsing

richtags allows you to search across multiple repositories from numerous institutions covering hundreds of disciplines for research that is of interest to you

The Surprising Wealth of Pre-industrial England

Occupations listed in wills reveal that as early as 1560 effectively only 60% of the English engaged in farming. Even by 1817, well into the Industrial Revolution, the equivalent primary share, once we count in food and raw material imports, was still 52%. By implication, incomes in pre-industrial England were close to those of 1800. Urbanization rates are not a good guide to pre-industrial income levels. Many rural workers were engaged in manufacturing, services and trade. The occupation shares also imply pre-industrial England was rich enough in 1560 to rank above the bottom fifth of countries in 2007.Long Run Growth England

The Surprising Wealth of Pre-industrial England

Occupations listed in wills reveal that as early as 1560 effectively only 60% of the English engaged in farming. Even by 1817, well into the Industrial Revolution, the equivalent primary share, once we count in food and raw material imports, was still 52%. By implication, incomes in pre-industrial England were close to those of 1800. Urbanization rates are not a good guide to pre-industrial income levels. Many rural workers were engaged in manufacturing, services and trade. The occupation shares also imply pre-industrial England was rich enough in 1560 to rank above the bottom fifth of countries in 2007.Growth, England, Pre-industrial

Autobiography: theory and practice

The thesis consists of two related parts. The first section, Theory, is a consideration of autobiographical reliability. It investigates the nature and usages of memory in the context of memoir, with particular reference to definitions and expectations of ‘authenticity’ in narrative self-portrayal. It addresses conflicting notions of autonomy and reliability in present, past, perceived and actual subject identities, followed by considerations of narrative continuity, inclusions and omissions, and the insidious nature of the nostalgic impulse. A range of post-sixties autobiographical texts are considered, in the light of a variety of twentieth century critical theory, as well as in that of personal experience during the compilation of part two, entitled Practice, an extract from a memoir in progress, The Artilleryman. I argue throughout the first section that there are limitations to first person autonomy that set autobiography apart from other entirely fictional genres, even in work that is not a record of public life and service. Perceptions of personal identity and experience, within an extended time frame, are highly subjective, and yet remain contingent and provisional within a shared existence. Reader assent for memoir is gained by an unspoken will towards what is defined as both a ‘narrative’, and a consciously subjective sense of truth: the imaginative therefore becomes more appropriate than the imaginary. Scope for the memoirist lies in the linguistic and traditional flexibility of the narrative process, together with a necessarily internalised, but professedly uncategorical impression of experience, rather than in any re-shaping of character, or history. I have expressed this sense of keeping faith, as compared with examples of spurious memoir, or a proposed unconditional liberty of the first person, as autobiographical reliability, and an expressed and imaginative awareness of the strengths and failings of the remembering process as acceptable unreliability. The two together, within the context of my argument, form a sense of ‘reliable unreliability’, or autobiographical authenticity. The second section, Practice, consists of nine selected chapters that will come to form a longer memoir. It is descriptive of the influence exerted by my father on the formation of my own and sibling’s identities. The Artilleryman is a series of recollections on the time we spent together. I have written principally from memory but with my recall assisted by talks with my younger sisters, Mary, Kate and Jane and by having access to a few terse computerised notes compiled by my brother Peter. I have also had recourse to a couple of year’s worth of extremely intermittent, cryptic and mould damaged diaries, written in a near illegible hand by my father. He was intelligent and articulate; he was an artist, a philosopher, a guide, a naturalist and a generous host. Also a drunkard, a bully and, occasionally a brute, he gave us a childhood that was wondrous in its proximity to nature, that was rich in its variety, and that was often terrifying in its daily reality. ‘You may not like me when you are older,’ he once told us, ‘but you will not forget me’

Aerial Oxidation of Lith Developers

Lith developers, unlike conventional developers, lose alkalinity when aerially oxidized. This is attributed to the alkaline reaction of the formaldehyde-bisulfite compound (FBS) commonly employed in lith developers as a sulfite buffer . Conventional chemical analysis methods are used to obtain data and experimentally derive an equilibrium constant for the alkaline disassociation of FBS. Chemical and sensitometric data are presented that indicate that the alkalinity loss contributes significantly to the overall loss of developer activity. It is also shown that aeriating a lith developer quantitatively converts hydroquinone to hydroquinone monosulfonate that, in turn, is a measurably active developing agent. Additional data are presented that show that solution ionic strength strongly influences hydroquinone developer activity. This is attributed to increased ionization of hydroquinone. Finally, chemical analysis data are given that indicate that the accepted reaction for the aerial oxidation of conventional hydroquinone developers does not quantitatively apply when the sulfite concentration is in the range commonly employed in lith developers

Rich Tags: Cross-Repository Browsing

We present RichTags, a system for cross-site browsing and exploration of digital repositories. Categorical and faceted search across repositories is poorly supported, especially compared to the support of keyword search through internet search engines. We combine a variety of information retrieval techniques to determine categories of papers, to enable cross-repository browsing by category. The browsing and exploration of this metadata is achieved through a multi-faceted dynamic exploration interface. Social interaction features have also been added to enable cross-repository tagging, commenting and sharing of papers into groups. These social features are available via an API to enable future work to add plugins to pull comments back to the repositories