‘Devolution and Cultural Catch-Up: Decoupling England and its Literature from English Literature’

Robert McLiam Wilson’s 1989 novel Ripley Bogle uses an unreliable narrator to expose the differences – regional, linguistic and national – between communities Bogle, the protagonist, experiences in Cambridge and Northern Ireland. Bogle is an English Literature student and then drop-out whose rejection of canonical study is the rejection of Arnoldianism and a traditionally organist and imperialist discipline that reanimates the debate about civic values and literary culture. A similar device is used in Sebastian Faulks’s 2007 novel Engleby in which Mike Engleby abandons English Literature at University only to later become a journalist probing the political landscape and personalities of the 1980s and after. Embroiled in disappearance and death, Engleby’s psychological unpredictability enables a reading of Britain’s socio-political death. These interconnected novels stand either side of Britain’s devolutionary divide and, as a pair, are suggestive of England’s need to readdress its own literary culture in the face of devolution. They are also symptomatic of a wider cultural catch-up required within England after 1999. Where the other devolved nations have sought to advance new and challenging national literary concerns and forms distinct from the pan-British literary canon of the past (and its restrictive exclusion based on class, gender and race), England has only recently come to view its literary culture as national. However, this has provided a potential filled moment of redefinition that will help free England and its authors from the pan-British sensibility of imperial dominance. This chapter argues that such redefinition, and resistance to the canon, developed immediately before and dramatically after devolution is evident in Graham Swift’s Last Orders (1996) with its resistive yet civic working class community and in the representations of marginalised, disempowered sections of England’s population offered in Alan Kent’s Proper Job, Charlie Kurnow (2005), Stella Duffy’s The Room of Lost Things (2009) and Jim Crace’s All That Follows (2010). These authors seize the opportunity provided by devolution to re-examine England’s national identity and to probe its relation to political enfranchisement, civic responsibility and literary vitality as England culturally catches up with its own socio-political reality

"Outroduction":A research agenda on collegiality in university settings

Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good functioning of universities’ contribution to society and democracy. In this concluding paper of the special issue on collegiality, we summarize the main findings and takeaways from our collective studies. We summarize the main challenges and contestations to collegiality and to universities, but also document lines of resistance, activation, and maintenance. We depict varieties of collegiality and conclude by emphasizing that future research needs to be based on an appreciation of this variation. We argue that it is essential to incorporate such a variation-sensitive perspective into discussions on academic freedom and scientific quality and highlight themes surfaced by the different studies that remain under-explored in extant literature: institutional trust, field-level studies of collegiality, and collegiality and communication. Finally, we offer some remarks on methodological and theoretical implications of this research and conclude by summarizing our research agenda in a list of themes

Factors affecting residency rank-listing: A Maxdiff survey of graduating Canadian medical students

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In Canada, graduating medical students consider many factors, including geographic, social, and academic, when ranking residency programs through the Canadian Residency Matching Service (CaRMS). The relative significance of these factors is poorly studied in Canada. It is also unknown how students differentiate between their top program choices. This survey study addresses the influence of various factors on applicant decision making.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Graduating medical students from all six Ontario medical schools were invited to participate in an online survey available for three weeks prior to the CaRMS match day in 2010. Max-Diff discrete choice scaling, multiple choice, and drop-list style questions were employed. The Max-Diff data was analyzed using a scaled simple count method. Data for how students distinguish between top programs was analyzed as percentages. Comparisons were made between male and female applicants as well as between family medicine and specialist applicants; statistical significance was determined by the Mann-Whitney test.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In total, 339 of 819 (41.4%) eligible students responded. The variety of clinical experiences and resident morale were weighed heavily in choosing a residency program; whereas financial incentives and parental leave attitudes had low influence. Major reasons that applicants selected their first choice program over their second choice included the distance to relatives and desirability of the city. Both genders had similar priorities when selecting programs. Family medicine applicants rated the variety of clinical experiences more importantly; whereas specialty applicants emphasized academic factors more.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Graduating medical students consider program characteristics such as the variety of clinical experiences and resident morale heavily in terms of overall priority. However, differentiation between their top two choice programs is often dependent on social/geographic factors. The results of this survey will contribute to a better understanding of the CaRMS decision making process for both junior medical students and residency program directors.</p

Problematising social mobility in relation to Higher Education policy

This paper problematises the concept of social mobility through an exploration of it in relation to Higher Education policy in England. Based upon a content analysis of a number of key policy documents from distinct eras, it identifies definitions and understandings of social mobility within them, exploring how such references have changed over time, and critiquing the differences between the imagined ideals of what policy rhetoric seeks to do and the reality of policy implementation. In particular, it considers the characterisation of social mobility as an individualised concern; it positions aspirations of improving social mobility within the market of Higher Education; and it ultimately asks whether Higher Education can solve the government's social mobility problem

Hyper-compressions: The rise of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa

Blair, P. (2020). Hyper-compressions: The rise of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa', The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 55(1), 38-60. Copyright © 2018. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.This article begins with a survey of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa, which it relates to the nation’s post-apartheid canon of short stories and short-short stories, to the international rise of flash fiction and “sudden fiction”, and to the historical particularities of South Africa’s “post-transition”. It then undertakes close readings of three flash fictions republished in the article, each less than 450 words: Tony Eprile’s “The interpreter for the tribunal” (2007), which evokes the psychological and ethical complexities, and long-term ramifications, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Michael Cawood Green’s “Music for a new society” (2008), a carjacking story that invokes discourses about violent crime and the “‘new’ South Africa”; and Stacy Hardy’s “Kisula” (2015), which maps the psychogeography of cross-racial sex and transnational identity-formation in an evolving urban environment. The article argues that these exemplary flashes are “hyper-compressions”, in that they compress and develop complex themes with a long literary history and a wide contemporary currency. It therefore contends that flash fiction of South Africa’s post-transition should be recognized as having literary-historical significance, not just as an inherently metonymic form that reflects, and alludes to, a broader literary culture, but as a genre in its own right

Absented Women’s Voices:Problematising Masculinity in Jim Crace’s Fiction

Absented Women’s Voices: Problematising Masculinity in Jim Crace’s Fiction Kate Aughterson (University of Brighton) Kristeva’s formulation of Semiotic - the silent rhythmic undercurrents and disruptions to the dominant Symbolic order which dislocate narrative and (gendered) subjects - act as an intertext to Crace’s narratives. Narrative dis-location is central to Crace’s work. Kristeva’s poetics offer a way of seeing how Crace’s narrative gaps and silences function as self-conscious rhetorical and narratorial strategies to offer up spaces for ‘other’ identities. Through narrative sleigh-of-hand, partial focalisations, lacunae, slippery semantics and shifting grammatical tenses Crace disturbs the microcosmic worlds his (male) narrators create. The absence of female voices (dead wives, desired woman, the young girl violated) is key to Crace’s cumulatively semiotic rhetorical technique: a blank space - an ‘other’ – a rich silence on which the reader writes alternative histories and stories

Meltable Hybrid Antimony and Bismuth Iodide One-Dimensional Perovskites

Hybrid lead-halide perovskites have been studied extensively for their promising optoelectronic properties and prospective applications, including photovoltaics, solid-state lighting, and radiation detection. Research into these materials has also been aided by the simple and low-temperature synthetic conditions involved in solution-state deposition/crystallization or melt-processing techniques. However, concern over lead toxicity has plagued the field since its infancy. One of the most promising routes to mitigating toxicity in hybrid perovskite materials is substituting isoelectronic Bi(III) for Pb(II). Various methods have been developed to allow pnictide-based systems to capture properties of the Pb(II) analogues, but the ability to melt extended hybrid pnictide-halide materials has not been investigated. In this work, we prepare a series of one-dimensional antimony- and bismuth-iodide hybrid materials employing tetramethylpiperazinium (TMPZ)-related cations. We observe, for the first time, the ability to melt extended hybrid pnictide-halide materials for both the Sb(III) and Bi(III) systems. Additionally, we find that Sb(III) analogues melt at lower temperatures and attribute this observation to structural changes induced by the increased stereochemical activity of the Sb(III) lone pair coupled with the reduction in effective dimensionality due to steric interactions with the organic cations. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to melt process phase pure thin films of (S-MeTMPZ)SbI5