Performing Urban Violence: Protest Theatre and Semi-Public Space in London and Cape Town

This article offers an account of two case studies of theatrical performance from London and Cape Town, both of which raise and interrogate the inter-related concepts of protest theatre and public space. A production of Tunde Euba’s play Brothers, by the Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theater (GLYPT) in London (2013/14), and the contemporaneous theatrical work and awareness-raising campaigns of the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) in Cape Town, both use theatrical performance to question, diagnose and protest multiple forms of violence perpetrated against marginalized urban populations, often at the hands of the state. In twenty-first-century neoliberal cities such as London and Cape Town, government and private forces collude to privatize their once public spaces, thus encroaching upon—if not entirely disappearing—venues that might be used for protesting against such forms of violence (see Garrett).i Meanwhile, those public spaces that do remain are, in the ongoing era of the “War on Terror,” increasingly subject to militarized policing strategies that place increased restrictions on large assemblies and free movement within cities, “particularly for members of darker-skinned groups” (Marcuse 264)

Urban comix: Subcultures, infrastructures and “the right to the city” in Delhi

This article argues that comics production in India should be configured as a collaborative artistic endeavour that visualizes Delhi’s segregationist infrastructure, claiming a right to the city through the representation and facilitation of more socially inclusive urban spaces. Through a discussion of the work of three of the Pao Collective’s founding members – Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh – it argues that the group, as for other comics collectives in cities across the world, should be understood as a networked urban social movement. Their graphic narratives and comics art counter the proliferating segregation and uneven development of neo-liberal Delhi by depicting and diagnosing urban violence. Meanwhile, their collaborative production processes and socialized consumption practices, and the radical comix traditions on which these movements draw (and which are sometimes occluded by the label “Indian Graphic Novel”) create socially networked and politically active spaces that resist the divisions marking Delhi’s contemporary urban fabric

From Communism to Postcapitalism: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848)

History bears testament to the Manifesto’s planetary circulation, global readership and material impact. Interpretations of this short document have affected the lives of millions globally, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. The text is somehow able to outline the complex theoretical foundations for the world’s most enduring critique of capitalism in a comprehensible and persuasive language, and as such, readers of all classes, professions, nations and ethnicities have drawn on – and in many cases warped and manipulated – its valuable insights. Whilst arguing for the importance of the Manifesto as an anti-imperial book and exploring the reasons for its viral circulation, this chapter will also show that it is a self-reflexive text that predicts its own historic impact. It is the formal and generic – or, in fact, ‘literary’ – qualities of this astonishing document that have given it such primacy in the canon of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist writing

Strengthening the ties that exist: Reexploring charted territory

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Assessing the impact of non-additive noise on modelling transcriptional regulation with Gaussian processes

In transcriptional regulation, transcription factors (TFs) are often unobservable at mRNA level or may be controlled outside of the system being modelled. Gaussian processes are a promising approach for dealing with these difficulties as a prior distribution can be defined over the latent TF activity profiles and the posterior distribution inferred from the observed expression levels of potential target genes. However previous approaches have been based on the assumption of additive Gaussian noise to maintain analytical tractability. We investigate the influence of a more realistic form of noise on a biologically accurate system based on Michaelis-Menten kinetics

Quantum Loop Modules and Quantum Spin Chains

We construct level-0 modules of the quantum affine algebra \Uq, as the $q$-deformed version of the Lie algebra loop module construction. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the modules to be irreducible. We construct the crystal base for some of these modules and find significant differences from the case of highest weight modules. We also consider the role of loop modules in the recent scheme for diagonalising certain quantum spin chains using their \Uq symmetry.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figures (appended), ENSLAPP-L-419/93, MRR2/9

Literature, planning and infrastructure: Investigating the southern city through postcolonial texts

This article explores the ways in which postcolonial literary and other cultural texts navigate, decode and in some cases re-imagine the infrastructures that organize urban life, particularly in the postcolonial cities of Johannesburg, London and Delhi. Readings of Ivan Vladislavić, Mark Gevisser Brian Chikwava, Selma Dabbagh, Rana Dasgupta and Manju Kapur consider the constantly shifting relationship between urban planning, the organization of public space, and various other forms of human intervention, and suggest that the ways in which urban spaces are mapped in creative practice can explore, negotiate and at times disrupt and reconstruct that relationship

The Herschel Virgo Cluster Survey - I. Luminosity function

We describe the Herschel Virgo Cluster Survey (HeViCS) and the first data obtained as part of the science demonstration phase (SDP). The data cover a central 4×4 sq deg region of the cluster. We use SPIRE and PACS photometry data to produce 100, 160, 250, 350 and 500 μm luminosity functions (LFs) for optically bright galaxies that are selected at 500 μm and detected in all bands. We compare these LFs with those previously derived using IRAS, BLAST and Herschel-ATLAS data. The Virgo cluster LFs do not have the large numbers of faint galaxies or examples of very luminous galaxies seen previously in surveys covering less dense environments

Design Features for the Social Web: The Architecture of Deme

We characterize the "social Web" and argue for several features that are desirable for users of socially oriented web applications. We describe the architecture of Deme, a web content management system (WCMS) and extensible framework, and show how it implements these desired features. We then compare Deme on our desiderata with other web technologies: traditional HTML, previous open source WCMSs (illustrated by Drupal), commercial Web 2.0 applications, and open-source, object-oriented web application frameworks. The analysis suggests that a WCMS can be well suited to building social websites if it makes more of the features of object-oriented programming, such as polymorphism, and class inheritance, available to non-programmers in an accessible vocabulary.Comment: Appeared in Luis Olsina, Oscar Pastor, Daniel Schwabe, Gustavo Rossi, and Marco Winckler (Editors), Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Web-Oriented Software Technologies (IWWOST 2009), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Volume 493, August 2009, pp. 40-51; 12 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl