The Work of Maggie Jackson

Catalogue entry to accompany exhibited work by Maggie Jackso

Conversations in Sculpture

An exhibition at Huddersfield Art Gallery during July ~September 2019 brining together members of the Royal Society of Sculptors from the north and the midlands to coincide with the 2019 Yorkshire Sculpture International. Ten members and fellows of the RSS took part in the show curated by Grant Scanlan. The exhibition was lottery funded by Arts Council England and Kirklees Council and featured an accompanying catalogue with foreword by Clare Burnett, President of the RSS and catalogue essay by Stephen Clarke, University of Chester. Nine artists talks, three workshops and one mentoring session were also schedules through the duration of the exhibition

Authoring the Intimate Self: Identity, Expression and Role-playing within a Pioneering Virtual Community

We examine Traveler, a social-based 3D online virtual community with over ten years of continuous community use, as a case study. Traveler is a client-server application allowing real-time synchronous communication between individuals over the Internet. The Traveler client interface presents the user with a shared, user created, virtual 3D world, in which participants are represented by avatars. The primary mode of communication is through multi-point, full duplex voice, managed by the server. This paper reflects on the initial design goals of the developers in the mid 1990s to emulate natural social paradigms and, more recently, reports on how the online community uses distance attended multi-point voice and open-ended 3D space construction to express themselves both on a personal level and collaborative level to facilitate a tight socially based community. This paper situates the historical importance of Traveler within the framework of contemporary virtual worlds and provides insights into the ways that this software platform might influence next-generation virtual communities

Shining a spotlight on small rural businesses: How does their performance compare with urban?

Rural enterprises play an important economic role, contributing to national prosperity and wellbeing but are often a blind spot within rural development and wider economic policies and evidence. This paper presents an urban-rural analysis of a large scale survey of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). It applies Propensity Score Matching to allow for an assessment of the effects of rurality on business performance. Results show that England's rural firms have similar levels of turnover to their urban counterparts, but are more likely to report a profit. The analysis also reveals rural firms to be significantly stronger exporters of goods and services and to have goods or services suitable for exporting. However, there are some weaknesses and obstacles to business success that concern significantly more rural than urban firms, that vary with the rurality of local districts, and which require the attention of policy makers and support providers seeking to achieve spatially-balanced and more equitable economic development

The impact of armed violence on poverty and development: Full report of the Armed Violence and Poverty Initiative

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