Songs of Mobility and Belonging: Gender, Spatiality and the Local in Southern Africa’s Transfrontier Conservation Development

Western Maputaland is located in the borderlands of South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland. The combination of poverty, rural remoteness and exceptional ecological diversity has long made the region a target of conservationists and development planners, locating it centrally within the Usuthu-Tembe-Futi Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA). While driven by the rhetoric of ‘participatory biodiversity management’, which links environmental conservation with economic development, the fulfillment of the transboundary project remains dependent upon exogenous resources and authority, and conservation agencies are ambivalent towards local demands for self-determined development. This paper examines the politics of land in Western Maputaland, its position in local memories, and its foundation in spatial practices and cultural identities. More specifically, as conservation developments have affected women differently to men, my analysis focuses on the ways in which mobilities and gender intersect in a changing landscape, and how meanings given to varying mobilities through sound, song and performance inflect local experiences of land, spatiality and belonging. Building on narratives inspired by the revival of mouth-bows and the jews harp, once performed by young women as walking songs, but remembered now by elderly women only, the paper discusses how memories invoked through sounding in place and motion rehearse and revitalize senses of place. Its aim is ultimately to provide witness to transboundary conservation planners for a more culturally integrated and economically apposite reimagining of southern African borderlandscapes

Keeping in Touch via Cassette: Tracing Dinka Songs from Cattle Camp to Transnational Audio-Letter

This paper explores Dinka songs as poetic autobiography, focusing in particular on their composition and circulation as audio-letters between South Sudan and the global Dinka diaspora. Drawing on current debates on mobility and belonging, the paper explores how a tradition of personal song making, which is rooted in a culture of pastoralism and localised mobilities, has been repackaged to accommodate population dispersal across continents and cultures. While ‘big’ mobilities (transacted by civil war) have caused Dinka societies to expand and grow, the paper considers how audio-letters simultaneously bring clan groups together through a combination of old cultural forms and new geographies and concerns. Through the analysis of two Dinka Bor songs, the paper explores how the immediacy and potency inflected in the sonic and poetic convention of the genre nourishes Dinka social and spatial relations and helps to define and redefine their pasts and futures. It concludes with a reflection on the ‘affiliative power’ (Suchman 2005) of the cassette, which, despite increasing access to digital technologies, has remained the song carrier of choice, and has thus become implicated in the complexity of connections, identifications and intimacies of this contemporary global cultural practice

Investigation of pre and post plating surface roughness of electroless nickel phosphorus coated substrate for diamond turning application

In an overarching project to reduce the number of defects found in electroless nickel phosphorus alloy (EN-P) coatings on large diamond-turned components used in the next generation of reel-to-reel (R2R) printing stations, the significance of the coating surface on achieving a wear resistant and optically smooth surface has been investigated. This paper presents an investigation that focuses on the substrate roughness variation achieved through different pre-treatment methods prior to coating using a commercial plating solution. It looks at the number of features observed pre and post plating. The results provide some suggestions with respect to the diamond machining of a 100 micron thick EN-P coating

IRAS observations of BL Lac objects

IRAS data was analyzed for 35 BL Lac objects selected from a complete 5 GHz radio sample, using the coadded survey database. The detection rate is 50% with more than 40% detected in more than one band. This compares with only 15% of these sources that are included in the IRAS Point Source Catalog. High luminosity BL Lac objects generally have smooth energy spectra over four or five decades in frequency, consistent with incoherent synchrotron emission from 1 cm to 1 micron. However, many low luminosity BL Lac objects have discontinuous spectra, with a large range in the spectral index at IRAS wavelengths. For BL Lacs with a total luminosity of less than 10 to the 44th power ergs/-s, most of the far infrared energy probably originates from dust heated near the galaxy nucleus. The energy budget shows that the majority of the power per unit bandwidth emerges in the infrared (1 to 100 microns)

When it comes to teaching and tenure it is time to walk the walk.

Institutions should value teaching and service, and not just research, when considering faculty for promotion and tenure

Ideas of sex: discourses on sexuality in Liliana Cavani's 'The Night Porter' and Cesare Canevari's 'The Gestapo’s Last Orgy'

Both The Night Porter (Cavani) and The Gestapo’s Last Orgy (Canevari) are often referred to as exploitation. Exploitation cinema’s focus on empty excess is in line with the exaggeration/superficiality of “Camp”. Despite Susan Sontag’s separation of “Camp” elements and homosexual-Camp elements, subsequent commentators have argued that Camp is an exclusively gay critique of the artificial nature of the “performance” of hetero-normative gender roles. My article looks at the ways in which lesbian filmmaker Liliana Cavani discusses queer sexuality through a Camp play on gender roles, and how this same discourse is “developed” in Canevari’s virtual remake. German/Italian fascist ideology’s preoccupation with the perfected male body and Hitler’s original acceptance of homosexuality contributed to the presence of a lingering (masculine) homoeroticism in Nazi iconography. Holocaust history of Nazi domination enhanced this masculine image. Accordingly, the two filmmakers use a binary of male (masculine) Nazi dominator and female submissive prisoner, which is possessing of a heterosexual quality made fragile by the history of fascist sexual ambiguity. Essentially, my paper argues that the films’ disruption of the traditional images of Nazi aggressor/innocent victim through the protagonists’ depicted collaboration corresponds with the filmmakers’ blurring of masculine/feminine roles in their individual statements about queer sexuality

Novel nanocomposite automotive temperature sensing technology

In recent years, automotive emissions legislation has been introduced and is rapidly becoming more stringent. With alternative vehicular propulsion methods far from becoming mainstream reality, leading automotive providers have intensified efforts in the direction of reducing the harmful footprint of their products. This is being accomplished via smaller, more optimally designed internal-combustion engines. A crucial means to that end is exhaust gas temperature monitoring and control. To enable such control, a mass-produced sensor, capable of operating reliably in the harsh automotive combustion environment, comprising a broad spectrum of high temperatures, severe shocks and a chemically aggressive ambient, has been used widely in the past decade, with performance demands growing constantly in line with advances in engine performance. This paper presents a technology overview of the potential of novel nano composite sensor design and manufacture using materials in an innovative way towards industrialising such a sensing solution. The presented sensor design implements the state-of-the-art in thick and thin film technology incorporating nano materials for improved strength, fabrication and performance properties