Connect, converse, collaborate: Encountering belonging and forging resilience through creative practice

This paper is a dialogue between two colleagues who teach drama and performance in Higher Education. Our work here has developed across a series of formal, semi-structured and informal discussions about our experiences of teaching and supporting students within the Drama and Performance department at University of South Wales. Instantly we connected on our commitment to prioritising student needs and our intentions to co-construct reflexive learning spaces. Within the disciplines of drama and performance, we (Allinson and Crews) see practice, collaboration and dialogue as equally important and core to all learning environments and encounters. Because of this we continually question how to hold a space for students through focusing on individual needs and difference, whilst simultaneously attempting to find connection through shared intentions and practices. Acknowledging individual and collective anxiety in learning environments is important because, left unchecked, these individual anxieties risk generating collective frustration, resistance to the creative process and fatigue. Openly discussing and agreeing on how to create spaces and structures for feeling heard and seen fosters belonging and in turn resilience, both in ourselves and our students. Here we propose that working within creative practices and exploring dynamic ways of holding space for ourselves and for students generates repeated experiences of successful encounters that build resourcefulness and resilience. This allows educators and students to collectively and mindfully encounter future situations and engage with them transformatively

Interdisciplinary Education Outreach with Traffic Sensor Build Kits

The goal of this project was to attract K-12 students to transportation engineering careers through STEM outreach programs. To accomplish this goal, the object of the project was to design and implement maritime freight oriented educational outreach activities centered on traffic sensing technologies for middle, high school, and first-year college students. In MarTREC Project 5011 (Evaluating the Performance of Intermodal Connectors), the research team designed a low-cost, easily implementable LiDAR and Bluetooth sensor bundle that was capable of detecting, characterizing, and tracking freight trucks as they traveled to and from inland waterway port areas. The sensor provided data necessary to measure port performance and roadway usage by industry. This project re-designed the sensor bundle as an educational outreach activity by creating sensor build kits and associated lesson plans for middle school, high school, and first year university students. The concept of the build kits as a tool was highly praised when presented by the PI to professionals at the Missouri Valley Institute of Transportation Engineers (MOVITE) fall meeting in 2017.https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cveglearn/1000/thumbnail.jp

Boxing, Bourdieu and Butler: repetitions of change

The authors of this paper engage in academic sparring. Sparring is a process, a training, and a dialogue. This paper brings into dialogue the boxing bodies and autoethnographic experiences of the authors alongside the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler. By applying a feminist reading to Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and habitus, the authors explore how the repetitive nature of boxing training can promote change. The paper considers boxing training as a transcendental identity project where individual labour is invested in order to affect change in symbolic capital. The repetitive nature of training leads to a habitus split, or habitus clivé. This split causes the boxer to renegotiate concepts of self as they engage with their own and other socially qualified and gendered bodies. This split exposes the freedoms and limitations of identity work as the boxers develop new habitus with and through their bodies (hexis). The authors argue that a reading of the performance of boxing bodies demonstrates the complex relationship between change, freedom, and restriction. Boxing is a physical culture supported by pervasive, hegemonic narratives which focus on the demonstration and development of respect and discipline. This paper explores the extent to which the repetitive nature of boxing training can be considered transgressive or resistant

The memorialization of southern poor white men's labor in rick bragg's memoir trilogy

This article explores the ways that Rick Bragg memorializes poor white men's labor across his memoir trilogy, examining the tensions that arise as he attempts to bring poor whites into the center of the southern community. I consider the neo-Agrarian strains within his work, as well as Bragg's responses to the globalization of the region. The work addresses the absences within the South's memorial landscape, and questions the extent to which Bragg's work addresses those gaps. © 2012 Cambridge University Press

Passive Immunization Reduces Behavioral and Neuropathological Deficits in an Alpha-Synuclein Transgenic Model of Lewy Body Disease

Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) and Parkinson's Disease (PD) are common causes of motor and cognitive deficits and are associated with the abnormal accumulation of alpha-synuclein (α-syn). This study investigated whether passive immunization with a novel monoclonal α-syn antibody (9E4) against the C-terminus (CT) of α-syn was able to cross into the CNS and ameliorate the deficits associated with α-syn accumulation. In this study we demonstrate that 9E4 was effective at reducing behavioral deficits in the water maze, moreover, immunization with 9E4 reduced the accumulation of calpain-cleaved α-syn in axons and synapses and the associated neurodegenerative deficits. In vivo studies demonstrated that 9E4 traffics into the CNS, binds to cells that display α-syn accumulation and promotes α-syn clearance via the lysosomal pathway. These results suggest that passive immunization with monoclonal antibodies against the CT of α-syn may be of therapeutic relevance in patients with PD and DLB