'From grade B thrillers to deluxe chillers': prestige horror, female audiences, and allegories of spectatorship in The Spiral Staircase (1946)

This paper examines the prestige ‘shocker’ The Spiral Staircase (1946), suggesting that it challenges the perception of the decline in quality in the horror genre in the 1940s, as well as assumptions in scholarship that the genre has historically been addressed to a male audience. Whilst the film is usually discussed as a woman’s film, on release it was centred as part of a distinct shift in the horror genre from ‘grade B thrillers to deluxe chillers’. The reclassification of films like The Spiral Staircase as woman’s films could be seen as an attempt to make text fit established theory – the film is addressed to a female audience and thus cannot be a horror film. Through an analysis of textual and extra-textual discourses, including reception and publicity materials, this paper will challenge the pervasive theories that suggest female pleasure or identification is unattainable in horror spectatorship. Whilst the theory is that women refuse to look at horror, averting their eyes or turning away, in 1946 The Spiral Staircase asked a predominantly female audience to take a closer look and question the very act of looking at the cinema screen

C^\infty smoothing for weak solutions of the inhomogeneous Landau equation

We consider the spatially inhomogeneous Landau equation with initial data that is bounded by a Gaussian in the velocity variable. In the case of moderately soft potentials, we show that weak solutions immediately become smooth and remain smooth as long as the mass, energy, and entropy densities remain under control. For very soft potentials, we obtain the same conclusion with the additional assumption that a sufficiently high moment of the solution in the velocity variable remains bounded. Our proof relies on the iteration of local Schauder-type estimates.Comment: 23 pages, updated with to-be-published versio

Resisting relocation and reconceptualising authenticity: the experiential and emotional values of the Southbank Undercroft London UK

The tagline, ‘You Can’t Move History: You Can Secure the Future’, encapsulated the battle at the heart of the campaign to retain the Southbank Undercroft skate spot in the light of planned redevelopment of the Southbank Centre, London. The 2013-15 campaign against relocation adopted a position of no compromise and provides a lens through which three key areas of heritage theory and practice can be examined. Firstly, the campaign uses the term found space to reconceptualise authenticity and places a greater emphasis on embodied experiences of, and emotional attachments to, historic urban spaces. Secondly, the paper argues that the concept of found space opens up a discussion surrounding the role of citizen expertise in understanding the experiential and emotional values of historic urban spaces. Finally, the paper considers the wider relevance of found space in terms of reconceptualising authenticity in theory and practice. The paper is accompanied by the award-winning film ‘You Can’t Move History’ which was produced by the research team in collaboration with Paul Richards from Brazen Bunch and directed by skater, turned filmmaker, Winstan Whitter

YouTube Across the Disciplines: A Review of the Literature

YouTube has grown to become the largest and most highly visited online video-sharing service, and interest in the educational use of YouTube has become apparent. Paralleling the rise of academic interest in YouTube is the emergence of YouTube scholarship. This article presents the results of a review of 188 peer reviewed journal articles and conference papers with YouTube in the title that were published between 2006 and 2009. Four questions were answered through the review of YouTube literature: (1) What is the overall distribution of publication activity for refereed journal articles and conference papers with YouTube in the title? (2) How are publications with YouTube in the title distributed across academic disciplines? (3) What have scholars written about instructional methodologies involving YouTube in a sample of literature containing YouTube in the title? (4) What have scholars reported about the results of studies involving YouTube in a sample of literature containing YouTube in the title? An analysis of the publications revealed that the literature emerged from multiple academic disciplines. The sample of literature included 39 articles and papers describing methods for teaching with YouTube. A total of 99 articles and papers containing the results of research studies were identified and categorized. This literature review is particularly relevant to those online educators who are interested in learning what scholars from their own academic disciplines are writing about YouTube. An emphasis is placed on trends in teaching and research discussed in the sampled literature