Interview with Robyn Davidson

In an interview with Tim Youngs, conducted on 8 July 2004, Robyn Davidson discusses her relationship to Australia and her peripatetic existence, which she compares with the movement of traditional nomads. Refusing an easy identification with them, she nevertheless admits having a romantic feeling for their lifeways. Modern forms of post-industrial rootlessness, she acknowledges, are not the same as ancient forms of nomadism, which are disappearing with globalisation, a process whose effects she plans to represent in a series of films. Reflecting on her travel books, Tracks and Desert Places, Davidson talks of how they are artefacts and their narrators creations. The construction of a persona affords her a welcome anonymity. Writing about a journey is to relive it but also creates a distance between the event and the writing. Davidson likens travel writing to the novel and she considers some of the characteristics of women's writing. Finally, developing some comments made in her introduction to the Picador Book of Journeys, Davidson talks about the future of travel writing

Designing the Digital Economy: Embedding Growth Through Design, Innovation and Technology

The Design Commission's newest report warns the UK digital economy will not reach its full economic and social potential without the strategic application of design to ensure people, and not technologies, are at the centre of the ‘digital revolution’. The report is the result of an eight-month inquiry chaired by Lord Inglewood of Hutton in the Forest and co-chaired by Gillian Youngs, Professor of Digital Economy at Brighton University, and makes 17 recommendations to spark policy and culture change across government and the design and technology sector

FuseBox24

Following on from the findings of the Brighton Fuse report, the FuseBox24 project examined in further detail the conditions necessary to accelerate innovation in the Creative, Digital and IT (CDIT) sector, a strong and growing part of the UK economy. The FuseBox24 project found that CDIT innovators: - Trade in ideas and content, but tend not to worry about protecting intellectual property – open innovation and collaborative approaches dominate. - Often as sole traders or micro-businesses need shared spaces in which to collaborate with others to develop ideas. - Need support, capability and new tools to enable them to get the most out of collaborations for sustainable innovation. The FuseBox24 findings demonstrated that arts, humanities and design approaches are highly effective in meeting these needs

Digital transformations of transnational feminism in theory and practice

The chapter explores how information and communication technologies (ICTs) have brought about transformations in transnational feminist theory and practice in multiple ways that continue to challenge historically embedded areas of gender discrimination, not least those related to core areas of STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math. The boundary-crossing nature of ICTs transformed political space for women in transnational terms. Previously male-dominated international relations were reconfigured in significant ways by the cybertechnology revolution. Feminist critiques of male-dominated STEM and the drive toward digital cultures hold significant promise for new power for women. They also point to an area rich in potential for feminist and women’s future activism and advocacy as well as entrepreneurialism. This chapter develops these arguments in more detail by looking at feminism and the new networked world; transnational feminism and digital public spheres; and upping the policy stakes for gender balance in STEM and innovation

Steady-state ditch-drainage of two-layered soil regions overlying an inverted v-shaped impermeable bed with examples of the drainage of ballast beneath railway tracks

Water-table heights due to steady surface accretion in drained two-layered soil regions overlying an inverted V -shaped impermeable bed are obtained using both the Dupuit-Forchheimer approximate analysis with flow assumed parallel to the bed and also from numerical solutions of Laplace's equation for the head distribution. For illustration, water-table profiles obtained by the two procedures are compared for surface accretion draining to ditches in a typical two-layered ballast foundation for a railway track where a very permeable ballast material overlies a less permeable sub-grade on top of an inverted V-shaped impermeable bed that slopes away both sides from a central line to drainage ditches. These results are found to be in good agreement except very near the drainage ditches where the Laplace numerical solution takes into consideration a surface of seepage that is ignored in the Dupuit-Forchheimer analysis. The Dupuit-Forchheimer analysis is also in good agreement with results of a laboratory model experiment. It is concluded that the approximate Dupuit-Forchheimer analysis can be used with confidence in these situations. It is used to investigate the effect on the water-table elevation caused by the reduction of hydraulic conductivity of the porous materials due to clogging

Nonassociative Field Theory on Non-Geometric Spaces

We describe quasi-Hopf twist deformations of flat closed string compactifications with non-geometric R-flux using a suitable cochain twist, and construct nonassociative deformations of fields and differential calculus. We report on our new findings in using this formalism to construct perturbative nonassociative field theories on these backgrounds. We describe the modifications to the usual classification of Feynman diagrams into planar and non-planar graphs. The example of phi(4) theory is studied in detail and the one-loop contributions to the two-point function are calculated.Comment: 6 pages; Contribution to the proceedings of the Workshop on Noncommutative Field Theory and Gravity, Corfu, Greece, September 8-15, 201

India and the EU: deal-making rather than diplomacy?

In a new LSE IDEAS report titled “Europe in an Asian Century”, Richard Youngs writes that the EU’s highly mercantile form of commercial diplomacy with Asian countries, including India, is unlikely to serve its own long-term interests