Aesthetics and the Political: An Essay on Francis Alys's 'Green Line'

In this paper I examine Francis Alÿs’s performance of walking the ‘green line’ – the 1949 act of partition that separated East from West Jerusalem – in light of his question: how can a work of art be political without engaging in politics? I situate this question in the context of a general problematic – that of the relation of the political to the aesthetic, borrowing Jacques Rancière’s distinction between the aesthetic and representational regimes of the image. I explain how the political work of art faces a twofold paradox today, characteristic of its specific historicity. First, it faces what I call the ‘state of aesthetic exception’, which deprives art of a criterion ensuring a univocal, communicable message; second, it confronts a broader historical contradiction, which becomes symptomatic in Bourdieu’s sociological reduction of art to the condition of the habitus. I argue Alÿs’ Green Line circumvents this paradox and in the process provides a novel answer to the question of how a work can be political while evading ‘politics’. The Green Line, I suggest, is thereby able to disclose not just the logic of the political but the constitutive aporia of the sovereign act of power which founds it

Current and Future Issues in the Development of Spinal Agents for the Management of Pain.

Targeting analgesic drugs for spinal delivery reflects the fact that while the conscious experience of pain is mediated supraspinally, input initiated by high intensity stimuli, tissue injury and/or nerve injury is encoded at the level of the spinal dorsal horn and this output informs the brain as to the peripheral environment. This encoding process is subject to strong upregulation resulting in hyperesthetic states and downregulation reducing the ongoing processing of nociceptive stimuli reversing the hyperesthesia and pain processing. The present review addresses the biology of spinal nociceptive processing as relevant to the effects of intrathecally-delivered drugs in altering pain processing following acute stimulation, tissue inflammation/injury and nerve injury. The review covers i) the major classes of spinal agents currently employed as intrathecal analgesics (opioid agonists, alpha 2 agonists; sodium channel blockers; calcium channel blockers; NMDA blockers; GABA A/B agonists; COX inhibitors; ii) ongoing developments in the pharmacology of spinal therapeutics focusing on less studied agents/targets (cholinesterase inhibition; Adenosine agonists; iii) novel intrathecal targeting methodologies including gene-based approaches (viral vectors, plasmids, interfering RNAs); antisense, and toxins (botulinum toxins; resniferatoxin, substance P Saporin); and iv) issues relevant to intrathecal drug delivery (neuraxial drug distribution), infusate delivery profile, drug dosing, formulation and principals involved in the preclinical evaluation of intrathecal drug safety

The Molecular Gas Density in Galaxy Centers and How It Connects to Bulges

In this paper we present gas density, star formation rate, stellar masses, and bulge disk decompositions for a sample of 60 galaxies. Our sample is the combined sample of BIMA SONG, CARMA STING, and PdBI NUGA surveys. We study the effect of using CO-to-H_2 conversion factors that depend on the CO surface brightness, and also that of correcting star formation rates for diffuse emission from old stellar populations. We estimate that star formation rates in bulges are typically lower by 20% when correcting for diffuse emission. We find that over half of the galaxies in our sample have molecular gas surface density >100 M_sun pc^-2. We find a trend between gas density of bulges and bulge Sersic index; bulges with lower Sersic index have higher gas density. Those bulges with low Sersic index (pseudobulges) have gas fractions that are similar to that of disks. We also find that there is a strong correlation between bulges with the highest gas surface density and the galaxy being barred. However, we also find that classical bulges with low gas surface density can be barred as well. Our results suggest that understanding the connection between the central surface density of gas in disk galaxies and the presence of bars should also take into account the total gas content of the galaxy and/or bulge Sersic index. Indeed, we find that high bulge Sersic index is the best predictor of low gas density inside the bulge (not barredness of the disk). Finally, we show that when using the corrected star formation rates and gas densities, the correlation between star formation rate surface density and gas surface density of bulges is similar to that of disks.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

Development of a Task Force to Provide Education and Leadership to an Emerging Industry

The Ohio Meat Goat Task Force is a model for engaging resources and building leadership capacity to generate income and enhance sustainability of farm businesses. The collaboration of multi-disciplinary faculty, producers, allied industry, ethnic cultures, and various agencies combines expertise and leadership with applied experience to foster entrepreneurship. Grants have been secured to research ethnic market preferences, processing infrastructure and capacity, and economically viable production systems. Education provides farm businesses capacity to build leadership, share knowledge, and network resources to capture value-added marketing opportunities

Problems of Stasis in My Country: The National Theatre and the Crisis of General Enculturation in Post-Referendum Britain

This essay explores the discursive invocation of ‘civil war’ to describe the polarization of the political terrain in post-Referendum Britain in order to contextualize the National Theatre’s production of Carol Ann Duffy and Rufus Norris’s ‘verbatim’ play My Country and its representation of Brexit. It shows how the political reality of Brexit, understood as a crisis of ‘general enculturation’, undermined the NT’s attempt to transcend the impasse of the political context. It argues that in identifying the NT with the play’s central figure of Britannia, an image of reconciliation, the theatre failed to account for its own implication in the wider crisis of enculturation

ImpaCT2: pupils' and teachers' perceptions of ICT in the home, school and community

The Strand 2 report of the ImpaCT 2 research describes the results of applying a range of research methods to explore, how pupils use ICT, in particular out of school and what had been gained from this use. ImpaCT2 was a major longitudinal study (1999-2002) involving 60 schools in England, its aims were to: identify the impact of networked technologies on the school and out-of-school environment; determine whether or not this impact affected the educational attainment of pupils aged 8 - 16 years (at Key Stages 2, 3, and 4); and provide information that would assist in the formation of national, local and school policies on the deployment of ICT

Assessing female sexual offenders\u27 motivations and cognitions : an exploratory study

Semi-structured interviews eliciting cognitions and motivations were carried out with 15 incarcerated female child sexual abusers (nearly 50% of the current UK female sexual offender prison population). Qualitative analysis indicated that four of the five motivational schemas (implicit theories) suggested by Ward (Ward, 2000; Ward & Keenan, 1999) to underlie male sexual offenders\u27 cognitions could be clearly identified in women, these were: Uncontrollability (UN, identified in 87% of participants), Dangerous world (DW, 53%), Children as sexual objects (CSO, 47%) and Nature of harm (NH, 20%). Entitlement, the final implicit theory (IT), commonly found in males, was not identified in any participants in the sample. Further analysis indicated that there were four main motivational types of offender based on combinations of these ITs. These were: (1) presence of DW/CSO, indicating sexual motivation and cognitions with fear of violence; (2) presence of DW/no CSO, indicating fear of violence with no sexual cognition or motivation; (3) presence of CSO/no DW, indicating sexual motivation and cognition; the NH IT also strongly featured in this group; and (4) presence of UN/no DW or CSO, indicating lack of control, sometimes with sense of protection for the victim. Suggestions are made on how the results can inform theoretical developments in the field as well as policy and practice

The Review of Economic Performance and Social Progress 2002: Towards a Social Understanding of Productivity

In this chapter, Tony Fisher and Doug Hostland provide an historical perspective on trends in labour productivity, labour income and living standards in Canada. They find that, once the appropriate adjustments are made, the labour share and the non-labour share (composed of profits, interest and investment income, and incorporated business income) in national income tend to revert to their historical means over the 1926-2001 historical period, although divergences may last for several years. They note, for example, that the decline in the labour share in Canada since 1994 has not been due to any increase in profit share, but to an increase in the share of depreciation or capital consumption allowances associated with the short services lives of high-tech investment goods.Productivity, Labor Productivity, Labour Productivity, Growth, Wages, Income, Living Standards, Well-being, Wellbeing, Well Being, Long-run, Taxes, Labour Income, Labor Income, Non-labour Income, Non-labor Income, Business Income, Corporate Profits, Investment Income, Real Wage Growth