Municipalism and feminism then and now: Hilary Wainwright talks to Jo Littler

Hilary Wainwright discusses municipalism and its relationship to feminism, past and present. She discusses how the women's liberation movement and in particular its creation of collective childcare produced a form of prefigurative politics which also opened up the possibilities of women being more active. She also discusses her involvement in the Greater London Council in the 1980s and its particular form of municipal politics, which included empowering communities, supporting co-operatives, an alternative industrial strategy and a progressive procurement policy. All these examples of 'power as transformative capacity' rather than 'power-over', are related to contemporary forms of municipalism, from Preston to Barcelona, and point to the necessity of local government as a necessary space of engagement in the wake of the 2020 general election.</jats:p

Dundee’s Jute mills and factories: Spaces of production, surveillance and discipline

Taking Dundee’s jute industry as its focus, this paper provides a geographical reading of the architectural form, design and layout of the mills and factories of the late nineteenth century. By tracking the change from the multi-storey to the shed system, it emphasises the importance of the internal geographies of the production process. And drawing upon Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power, notably his rule of functional sites and techniques of enclosure and partitioning, together with his tentative references to the factory system, I show how the external architecture and internal space of the mills and factories were used to create an ordered geography of both people and machinery and help maintain a gendered labour hierarchy. With the industry’s largely female workforce channelled through points of visibility, a preliminary investigation is made into the matrix of knowledge, spanning the entire works, that ensured all space and all those within it, could be accounted for

Constructing gendered workplace 'types': The weaver-millworker distinction in Dundee's jute industry c.1880-1910

Victorian and Edwardian Dundee was labelled a ‘woman’s town’ due to the high proportion of women who worked in the city’s staple jute industry. In this article, drawing on a range of contemporary sources, I use the work of feminist historians and Foucauldian notions of discourse to interrogate this label and explore why and how working women came to be marked as a particular problematic group. Further, in questioning this group, I demonstrate how two specific workplace ‘types’ – the weaver and millworker – were identified and constructed in contrast to one another. This article probes the processes through which these two ‘types’ were created, contested and performed in relation to the segregations and working conditions of their respective workplaces, and argues for a markedly spatial interrogation of gender identities and the category ‘working woman’

Alien nation: contemporary art and black Britain

About the book: This fascinating text introduces readers to postcolonial theory using the context of British media culture in ethnic minority communities to explain key ideas and debates. Each chapter considers a specific media output and uses a wealth of examples to offer an absorbing insight into postcolonial media for all students of cultural and media studies

Discussion: Latent variable graphical model selection via convex optimization

Discussion of "Latent variable graphical model selection via convex optimization" by Venkat Chandrasekaran, Pablo A. Parrilo and Alan S. Willsky [arXiv:1008.1290].Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOS981 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

CosmoTransitions: Computing Cosmological Phase Transition Temperatures and Bubble Profiles with Multiple Fields

I present a numerical package (CosmoTransitions) for analyzing finite-temperature cosmological phase transitions driven by single or multiple scalar fields. The package analyzes the different vacua of a theory to determine their critical temperatures (where the vacuum energy levels are degenerate), their super-cooling temperatures, and the bubble wall profiles which separate the phases and describe their tunneling dynamics. I introduce a new method of path deformation to find the profiles of both thin- and thick-walled bubbles. CosmoTransitions is freely available for public use.Comment: 9 figure

Sharp thresholds for high-dimensional and noisy recovery of sparsity

The problem of consistently estimating the sparsity pattern of a vector \betastar \in \real^\mdim based on observations contaminated by noise arises in various contexts, including subset selection in regression, structure estimation in graphical models, sparse approximation, and signal denoising. We analyze the behavior of $\ell_1$-constrained quadratic programming (QP), also referred to as the Lasso, for recovering the sparsity pattern. Our main result is to establish a sharp relation between the problem dimension \mdim, the number \spindex of non-zero elements in \betastar, and the number of observations \numobs that are required for reliable recovery. For a broad class of Gaussian ensembles satisfying mutual incoherence conditions, we establish existence and compute explicit values of thresholds \ThreshLow and \ThreshUp with the following properties: for any $\epsilon > 0$, if \numobs > 2 (\ThreshUp + \epsilon) \log (\mdim - \spindex) + \spindex + 1, then the Lasso succeeds in recovering the sparsity pattern with probability converging to one for large problems, whereas for \numobs < 2 (\ThreshLow - \epsilon) \log (\mdim - \spindex) + \spindex + 1, then the probability of successful recovery converges to zero. For the special case of the uniform Gaussian ensemble, we show that \ThreshLow = \ThreshUp = 1, so that the threshold is sharp and exactly determined.Comment: Appeared as Technical Report 708, Department of Statistics, UC Berkele

The Spiritual Senses in Western Spirituality and the Analytic Philosophy of Religion

The doctrine of the spiritual senses has played a significant role in the history of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality. What has been largely unremarked is that the doctrine also played a significant role in classical Protestant thought, and that analogous concepts can be found in Indian theism. In spite of the doctrine’s significance, however, the only analytic philosopher to consider it has been Nelson Pike. I will argue that his treatment is inadequate, show how the development of the doctrine in Puritan thought and spirituality fills a serious lacuna in Pike’s treatment, and conclude with some suggestions as to where the discussion should go nex