‘Is Anthropology Legal?’

In May 2018, the European Union (EU) introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with the aim of increasing transparency in data processing and enhancing the rights of data subjects. Within anthropology, concerns have been raised about how the new legislation will affect ethnographic fieldwork and whether the laws contradict the discipline’s core tenets. To address these questions, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London hosted an event on 25 May 2018 entitled ‘Is Anthropology Legal?’, bringing together researchers and data managers to begin a dialogue about the future of anthropological work in the context of the GDPR. In this article, I report and reflect on the event and on the possible implications for anthropological research within this climate of increasing governance

The Body as Weapon: Bobby Sands and the Republican Hunger Strikes

The 1981 Hunger Strike marked an important point in the Northern Ireland conflict, shifting its focus away from city streets and country lanes into the H-Block prison. Here republican prisoners used their embodiment to resist and fight back at attempts to recast them as criminals as opposed to the soldiers they perceived themselves to be. Given the centrality of the body and embodiment in the prison struggle this paper will theorise the \'body-as-weapon\' as a modality of resistance. This will begin by interrogating key themes within the sociology of the body before discussing and dismissing an alternative explanation of the Hunger Strike: the actions of the hunger strikers standing in the traditions of heroic Gaelic myths and Catholic martyrdom. Finally, drawing from the sociology of the body, I will then proceed to discuss how the body and embodiment deployed in this manner can be effective, concentrating on how the \'body-as-weapon\': (i) acts as a resource for minority political groups; (ii) destabilises notions of the body in modernity and related to that point (iii) engages in a \'hidden\' impulse of modernity, that of self-sacrifice.Embodiment, Conflict, Modernity, Northern Ireland, Resistance

The Credit Crunch and the High Street: 'Coming Like a Ghost Town'

Drawing on primary visual data and secondary sources this rapid response piece speculates on the changes to the British high street as a consequence of the credit crunch. The changes are much more profound than simply the loss of a place to shop. For both individuals and wider society the changes to the British high street carry implications for issues of self-identity, social contacts and social exclusion.Credit Crunch, High Street, Visual Sociology, Urban, Consumerism, Social Exclusion

The differential relations between verbal, numerical and spatial working memory abilities and children’s reading comprehension

Working memory predicts children's reading comprehension but it is not clear whether this relation is due to a modality-specific or general working memory. This study, which investigated the relations between children's reading skills and working memory (WM) abilities in 3 modalities, extends previous work by including measures of both reading comprehension and reading accuracy. Tests of word reading accuracy and reading comprehension, and working memory tests in three different modalities (verbal, numerical and spatial), were given to 197 6- to 11-year old children. The results support the view that working memory tasks that require the processing and recall of symbolic information (words and numbers) are better predictors of reading comprehension than tasks that require visuo-spatial storage and processing. The different measures of verbal and numerical working memory were not equally good predictors of reading comprehension, but their predictive power depended on neither the word vs. numerical contrast nor the complexity of the processing component. In general, performance on the verbal and numerical working memory tasks predicted reading comprehension, but not reading accuracy, and spatial WM did not predict either. The patterns of relations between the measures of working memory and reading comprehension ability were relatively constant across the age group tested

The optimal placement of phasor measurement units and their effects on state estimation

Phasor measurement units (PMUs) are a key new technology for use in electric power systems as a backbone for sensing and measurement and to improve interface and decision support using instantaneous PMU data which will drive faster simulations and advanced visualisation tools that will help system operators assess dynamic challenges to system stability. The two main objectives of this work are to investigate and develop 1. a method for the algorithmic placement of a minimum number of PMUs into a system to ensure full observability, 2. conventional, hybrid and linear state estimation techniques to incorporate and utilize PMU measurement data to perform state estimation and to study the effects that differing PMU placement positions have on the accuracy of the resultant state estimator solution

Is there a place for affect in studying alienation?

During the 1960s and 1970s alienation was, in the parlance of Nisbet (1966), one of the core units of sociological study. A quick trawl through the literature of the time easily identifies a burgeoning and expansive field that drew on material mainly from North America and Europe. Weighty philosophical tracts explored the theoretical dimensions of alienation in a capitalist society, while a raft of empirical work sought to investigate levels of alienation in workplaces and the wider society. From the 1980s onwards however interest in the concept of alienation waned for reasons external and internal to the academy. The decline of what can be seen as the wider Marxist project after the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in the 1990s signalled closing time for those taking the writings of Marx as their reference point for alienation, whilst the linguistic turn ushered in by followers of the likes of Foucault and Derrida witnessed a rejection of many ideas – and not just alienation – that had been a core part of the sociological tradition prior to the 1980s

Scaffolding: integrating social and cognitive perspectives on children’s learning at home

Since the translation and cultural assimilation of Vygotsky’s (1978) ideas into the English-speaking academic community from the 1970s, through thinkers such as Wertsch (1984), Vygotsky’s ideas continue to have a powerful influence in psychology and education, as well as being enthusiastically appropriated in other fields such as technology-mediated education (Luckin, 2003). As academics working across these disciplines, we felt the time was right to reflect on the use of socio-cultural theory, and the concept of scaffolding in particular, in understanding parent-child tutoring interactions at home, with reference to children’s academic achievement at school. Thanks to funding from the British Psychological Society, we ran a series of three seminars, and this Special Issue arises from questions raised there

Knowing me, knowing you: perspectives on awareness in autism

Purpose: This paper raises important questions from the different perspectives on autism research that arose from a seminar on autism and technology, held as part of an ESRC-funded series on innovative technologies for autism. Design/methodology/approach: The paper focuses on the roles of technology in understanding questions about different perspectives on autism: how do people on the spectrum see neurotypicals (people without autism) and vice versa?; how do we use eye-gaze differently from each other?; how might technology influence what is looked at and how we measure this?; what differences might there be in how people use imitation of others?; and finally, how should we study and treat any differences? Findings: We synthesise common themes from invited talks and responses. The audience discussions highlighted the ways in which we take account of human variation, how we can understand the perspective of another, particularly across third-person and second-person approaches in research, and how researchers and stakeholders engage with each other. Originality/value: We argue that the question of perspectives is important for considering how people with autism and neurotypical people interact in everyday contexts, and how researchers frame their research questions and methods. We propose that stakeholders and researchers can fruitfully engage directly in discussions of research, in ways that benefit both research and practice

Recent regional policy developments in the member states and Norway

This paper aims to provide a comparative review of recent regional policy developments in the countries of the EU and Norway, concentrating particularly on the period of 2007. The papers has been prepared by the European Policies Research Centre (EPRC) under the aegis of EoRPA (European Regional Policy Research Consortium), which is a grouping of national government authorities from countries across Europe. The Consortium provides sponsorship for the EPRC to undertake regular monitoring and comparative analysis of teh regional policies of European countries and the inter-relationships with EU Cohesion and Competition policies

The spectre of Japan: the influence of foreign relations on race relations theory, 1905–24

Race relations became the dominant paradigm by the time the official report on the 1919 Chicago riot, The Negro in Chicago, was published. It expressed a new appreciation of the danger to Whites of conflict based on colour. Before 1905 most observers assumed the inferiority of Blacks and saw race conflict as the fault of African Americans. But a new possibility arose when the fate of African Americans was linked to the rising power of Japan, occurring after the defeat of Russia by Japan in 1904–5. Race conflict, in this new model, was a form of conflict between nations. Race relations pioneer Robert E. Park, in his 1913 article, ‘Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups’, noted that ‘under conditions . . . of individual liberty and individual competition, characteristic of modern civilization, depressed racial groups tend to assume the form of nationalities. A nationality, in this narrower sense, may be defined as the racial group which has attained self-consciousness, no matter whether it has at the same time gained political independence or not.’ Yuill's paper will explore the thesis that a liberal perspective based on developments in contemporary international relations slowly changed the way race was regarded in the United States. From 1905 onwards, a new liberal paradigm sought to manage race conflict. It was this—rather than labour-based racial antipathies or commitment to racial equality—that shaped US race relations in the twentieth century