Historical approaches to Merseybeat

This article examines the connections between place and sound with a particular concentration upon Liverpool and ‘Merseybeat’. The article examines the ways in which accounts of the city’s musical sound in the early 1960s have been presented in journalistic and critical reception of Liverpool’s popular music. It considers the assumptions behind those accounts, assesses the validity of the explanations they offer and traces the evolution of academic, journalistic and populist discourses about Merseybeat. The contributions can be organized into three categories (delivery, affinity and diversity) which are broadly distinctive perspectives that usefully indicate the different ways in which the sound of Merseybeat has been approached

Popular culture and the meaning of feelings

In the human sciences at large, it is still the case that only literary criticism and psychoanalysis seek to theorize with any degree of generosity a place for the feelings in the practice of their discipline. Of late, indeed, the most weighty presences in both literary criticism and psycho-analysis have worked to expel mere subjectivity and the theoretically irrelevant but idiosyncratically incontestable feelings which are held to define subjectivity. The structures that are left become venerable in virtue of their scientific standing: the fierce induration of such Parisian worthies as Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and (in his playful, dandyish way) Jacques Derrida has worked to reproach devout Gallophiles in England for ever countenancing 'sincere and vital emotion' and all the emotional vocabulary-baggage of the bourgeoisie. And even in philosophy, which has taken the place of the emotions seriously, the subject has come clearly down the list of both difficulty and prestige- epistemology first, then the theory of meaning, then (perhaps) metaphysics, and only then the emotions as the difficult adjunct of ethics.peer-reviewe

Blind people can do anything but not in my company : employer attitudes towards employing blind and vision-impaired people : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Studies at Massey University

Previous international research has shown blind and vision-impaired people to be in the less favoured groups of employees employers are willing to hire. None of the research has addressed why this is the case. The present study was undertaken firstly to see if in New Zealand also, blind and vision-impaired people were less favoured in comparison with other disability groups as potential employees; and secondly, to determine employer attitudes and perceptions towards employing blind people, and how or why these attitudes and perceptions influence employers to overlook the blind and vision-impaired when employing staff. One hundred and two employers (sample 200) participated in a telephone survey and, of those, six were interviewed again in an in-depth face-to-face interview. A combination of attitudinal and perception survey instruments were used. The research found participants had mainly favourable attitudes towards blind and vision-impaired people. However, in total contrast, blind and vision-impaired people (alongside those with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities) were regarded the least suitable or least employable for positions most and second most often available in firms across all industries. The results were congruent with earlier findings (Gilbride, Stensrud, Ehlers, Evans & Peterson, 2000) in that of all of the disability groups, blindness and persons with moderate or severe (mental retardation) intellectual handicap were perceived as the hardest to employ in comparison with other disability groups. Lastly, this report comments on how potential hiring practices (employers' potential behaviour) can be changed to better match their apparent positive attitudes towards blind and vision-impaired people. A range of recommendations are made such as the need for education programmes in schools, media campaigns and cultivating positive media relationships, workplace training and education, employer mentoring programmes, the development of government policies and strategies and the need for work experience programmes

Letters from a pilgrimage: Ken Inglis’s despatches from the Anzac tour to Gallipoli, April–May 1965

In April 1965, on the fiftieth anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli, Ken Inglis travelled to Anzac Cove with a boatload of diggers making a pilgrimage to the scene of Australia’s best-known battle. As they travelled from Australia to Turkey via Egypt and Greece, he wrote seven articles for the Canberra Times, which are reproduced in this ebook.  The three-week tour had been arranged by the Returned Services League and its New Zealand equivalent. The tour ship visited sites of significance in Anzac memory in the Mediterranean, culminating in a landing at Anzac Cove on 25 April. Some 300 pilgrims had signed up, and more than half the men in the party had served at Gallipoli. Accompanying the pilgrimage allowed Inglis, a professor of history at ANU, to talk at leisure with a large group of veterans, be with them as they returned, most of them for the first time, to old battlefields and the resting places of comrades, and report on the experience for Australian reader

Introduction

There has been little overt discussion of the experimental philosophy of logic or mathematics. So it may be tempting to assume that application of the methods of experimental philosophy to these areas is impractical or unavailing. This assumption is undercut by three trends in recent research: a renewed interest in historical antecedents of experimental philosophy in philosophical logic; a “practice turn” in the philosophies of mathematics and logic; and philosophical interest in a substantial body of work in adjacent disciplines, such as the psychology of reasoning and mathematics education. This introduction offers a snapshot of each trend and addresses how they intersect with some of the standard criticisms of experimental philosophy. It also briefly summarizes the specific contribution of the other chapters of this book