I trade, therefore I am : legal personhood in the European Union

The piecemeal, case by case construction of EU citizenship has created a patchwork of personhoods rather than a unitary status - a patchwork with significant gaps through which people deemed economically inactive are allowed to fall. This paper argues that it is necessary to assess the integrity and effects of a market-centric, economic citizenship. The free movement legal landscape is riven with welfare rights "cliff edges," as changes in circumstance tip claimants from full equal welfare entitlement to none. Examples drawn from the UK include the welfare restrictions placed on Zambrano-reliant families, and the care and pregnancy gaps in Directive 2004/38. Market citizenship and the worker-commodity paradigm have not disappeared, but have been obscured and fortified through the moral language of citizenship and responsibility. The impact upon our ideas of fairness and society is evident in the Union's activation agenda for national welfare regimes. This paper argues that we should recognize the ideological ramifications of accepting the premises of market citizenship, assess its consequences, and ask whether an alternative approach is possible to challenge Member State minimal implementation, to better commit to the protection of each others' nationals and to promote EU level social justice

Body mapping Refugees and asylum seekers’ perspectives of embodied trauma: an innovative method for psychotraumatology research and practice

With the population of displaced individuals reaching over 25 million people worldwide, exacerbated by recent humanitarian emergencies there is an urgent need to rapidly assess manifestations of trauma, with a focus on providing culturally informed methods for those in distress. The novel concept of ‘embodied trauma’ is body mapped and explicated using a sample of 13 displaced individuals in the United Kingdom. This study operationalises a qualitative, semi-structured interview, incorporating the Trauma Screening Questionnaire, exploratory open questions, and body mapping exercises, utilising reflexive thematic analysis of the interview data. Results map how trauma and associated emotions are experienced in the body, generating key themes to elucidate the novel term ‘embodied trauma,’ encompassing its holistic bio-psycho-social-sexual-spiritual-existential presentations. The implications of this study make the case for the innovative use of body mapping in psychotraumatology research and practice, as part of a culturally informed approach

The role of geoarchaeology in the interpretation of fragmented buildings and occupation surfaces: The case of coastal settlements in northeast Scotland

Around the world, poorly preserved buildings and occupation deposits often represent the primary evidence for archaeological structures and settlements. Integrated geoarchaeological methods, such as soil chemistry and micromorphology, can be used to maximise the information obtained from such deposits regarding site preservation and the use of space. However, archaeologists are often reluctant to apply these methods if they suspect that preservation is poor or stratigraphy is not visible in the field. To assess the role that geoarchaeology can play in the interpretation of fragmented and poorly preserved structures, this paper presents the results of two case studies in which multiple geoarchaeological methods (microrefuse analysis, pH, electrical conductivity, magnetic susceptibility, loss‐on‐ignition, portable XRF and micromorphology) were applied to poorly preserved occupation deposits and fragmented buildings in early medieval coastal settlements in northeast Scotland. Micromorphology proved to be fundamental for recognising and understanding the composition of occupation deposits that had formerly been floor surfaces. It also aided interpretations for the use of space and maintenance practices and improved an understanding of the post‐depositional processes that had affected stratigraphic visibility at the macroscale. When subjected to principal component analysis, the geochemical, magnetic and microrefuse data were able to provide new details about activity areas, and successfully identified and filtered out the effects of post‐medieval contamination. Most significantly, the integrated approach demonstrates that fragmented buildings and poorly preserved occupation surfaces can retain surviving characteristics of the use of space, even if the floor surfaces were not preserved well enough to be clearly defined in the field or in thin section

The Environmental Context and Function of Burnt-Mounds : New Studies of Irish Fulachtaí Fiadh

The authors acknowledge funding from The Leverhulme Trust (F/00144/AI) and assistance from a large number of individuals including; Margaret Gowen (access to sites and assistance throughout),A. Ames, H, Essex (pollen processing), S. Rouillard & R. Smith (illustrations), C. McDermott, S. Bergerbrandt, all the staff of Margaret Gowen & Co. Ltd, TVAS Ireland and CRDS. Excavation works and some post-excavation analysis was paid for my Bord Gáis and the National Roads Authority (now Transport Infrastructure Ireland). Thanks also to David Smith for access to the Maureen Girling collection and assistance with identifications.Peer reviewedPostprintPostprin

Finding Maternal Siblings in Birth Registration Data to form a Pregnancy Spine – Data Linkage & Graph Based Methods for Unknown Cluster Sizes

We have developed an innovative methodology to link maternal siblings within 2000-2005 England and Wales Birth Registration data, to form a Pregnancy Spine, a unification of all births to each unique mother. Key challenges were Blocking & Cluster resolution. To optimise geographic blocking, Internal Migration data was incorporated to map likely geographic movement of mothers between births. Following probabilistic linkage, sibling clusters were modelled as a graph and their structure optimised using community detection methods. Childhood statistics data relating to child DOB were incorporated to evaluate accuracy and remove false links. Our development has resulted in a new blocking and cluster resolution method. We developed new ways to assess sibling group accuracy, beyond traditional classifier metrics, and infer error rates. We applied our method to Registration Data used in earlier studies for QA of our methods. Using this, and other maternal sibling composition statistics, we present results showing that a high degree of accuracy was obtained for standard and new evaluation metrics. These methods will improve other linkage projects linking unknown clusters sizes/multiple datasets, or longer time period longitudinal linkage. To this Spine, researchers can append and link other data sources to answer questions about maternal and child health outcomes

Biomechanical locomotion adaptations on uneven surfaces can be simulated with a randomly deforming shoe midsole

Background: A shoe with unsystematic perturbations, similar to natural uneven terrain, may offer an enhanced training stimulus over current unstable footwear technologies. This study compared the instability of a shoe with unpredictably random midsole deformations, an irregular surface and a control shoe-surface whilst treadmill walking and running. Methods: Three-dimensional kinematics and electromyography were recorded of the lower limb in 18 active males. Gait cycle characteristics, joint angles at initial ground contact and maximum values during stance, and muscle activations prior to initial contact and during loading were analysed. Perceived stability, injury-risk and energy consumption were evaluated. Instability was assessed by movement variability, muscular activations and subjective ratings. Results: Posture alterations at initial contact revealed active adaptations in the irregular midsole and irregular surface to maintain stability whilst walking and running. Variability of the gait cycle and lower limb kinematics increased on the irregular surface compared to the control across locomotion types. Similarly increased variability (coefficient of variation) were found in the irregular midsole compared to the control for frontal ankle motion (walk: 31.1 and 14.9, run: 28.1 and 11.6), maximum sagittal knee angle (walk: 7.6 and 4.8, run: 2.8 and 2.4), and global gait characteristics during walking only (2.1 ± 0.5 and 1.6 ± 0.3). Tibialis anterior pre-activation reduced and gastrocnemius activation increased in the irregular midsole compared to the control across locomotion types. During running, peroneus longus activation increased in the irregular midsole and irregular surface. Conclusions: Results indicate random shoe midsole deformations enhanced instability relative to the control and simulated certain locomotion adaptations of the irregular surface, although less pronounced. Thus, a shoe with unpredictable instability revealed potential as a novel instability-training device

The environmental context and function of Burnt-Mounds: new studies of Irish Fulachtaí Fiadh

Burnt mounds, or fulachtaí fiadh as they are known in Ireland, are probably the most common prehistoric site type in Ireland and Britain. Typically Middle–Late Bronze Age in age (although both earlier and later examples are known), they are artefact-poor and rarely associated with settlements. The function of these sites has been much debated with the most commonly cited uses being for cooking, as steam baths or saunas, for brewing, tanning, or textile processing. A number of major infrastructural development schemes in Ireland in the years 2002–2007 revealed remarkable numbers of these mounds often associated with wood-lined troughs, many of which were extremely well-preserved. This afforded an opportunity to investigate them as landscape features using environmental techniques – specifically plant macrofossils and charcoal, pollen, beetles, and multi-element analyses. This paper summarises the results from eight sites from Ireland and compares them with burnt mound sites in Great Britain. The fulachtaí fiadh which are generally in clusters, are all groundwater-fed by springs, along floodplains and at the bases of slopes. The sites are associated with the clearance of wet woodland for fuel; most had evidence of nearby agriculture and all revealed low levels of grazing. Multi-element analysis at two sites revealed elevated heavy metal concentrations suggesting that off-site soil, ash or urine had been used in the trough. Overall the evidence suggests that the most likely function for these sites is textile production involving both cleaning and/or dyeing of wool and/or natural plant fibres and as a functionally related activity to hide cleaning and tanning. Whilst further research is clearly needed to confirm if fulachtaí fiadh are part of the ‘textile revolution’ we should also recognise their important role in the rapid deforestation of the wetter parts of primary woodland and the expansion of agriculture into marginal areas during the Irish and British Bronze Ages

Emulation of long-term changes in global climate:application to the late Pliocene and future

Multi-millennial transient simulations of climate changes have a range of important applications, such as for investigating key geologic events and transitions for which high-resolution palaeoenvironmental proxy data are available, or for projecting the long-term impacts of future climate evolution on the performance of geological repositories for the disposal of radioactive wastes. However, due to the high computational requirements of current fully coupled general circulation models (GCMs), long-term simulations can generally only be performed with less complex models and/or at lower spatial resolution. In this study, we present novel long-term continuous projections of climate evolution based on the output from GCMs, via the use of a statistical emulator. The emulator is calibrated using ensembles of GCM simulations, which have varying orbital configurations and atmospheric CO2 concentrations and enables a variety of investigations of long-term climate change to be conducted, which would not be possible with other modelling techniques on the same temporal and spatial scales. To illustrate the potential applications, we apply the emulator to the late Pliocene (by modelling surface air temperature – SAT), comparing its results with palaeo-proxy data for a number of global sites, and to the next 200 kyr (thousand years) (by modelling SAT and precipitation). A range of CO2 scenarios are prescribed for each period. During the late Pliocene, we find that emulated SAT varies on an approximately precessional timescale, with evidence of increased obliquity response at times. A comparison of atmospheric CO2 concentration for this period, estimated using the proxy sea surface temperature (SST) data from different sites and emulator results, finds that relatively similar CO2 concentrations are estimated based on sites at lower latitudes, whereas higher-latitude sites show larger discrepancies. In our second illustrative application, spanning the next 200 kyr into the future, we find that SAT oscillations appear to be primarily influenced by obliquity for the first ∼ 120 kyr, whilst eccentricity is relatively low, after which precession plays a more dominant role. Conversely, variations in precipitation over the entire period demonstrate a strong precessional signal. Overall, we find that the emulator provides a useful and powerful tool for rapidly simulating the long-term evolution of climate, both past and future, due to its relatively high spatial resolution and relatively low computational cost. However, there are uncertainties associated with the approach used, including the inability of the emulator to capture deviations from a quasi-stationary response to the forcing, such as transient adjustments of the deep-ocean temperature and circulation, in addition to its limited range of fixed ice sheet configurations and its requirement for prescribed atmospheric CO2 concentrations