Filling the gaps: the Iron Age in Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan

Over the last 20 years interpretive approaches within Iron Age studies in Britain have moved from the national to the regional. This was an important development which challenged the notion that a unified, British, Iron Age ever existed. However, whilst this approach has allowed regional histories to be told in their own right, there has been far too much focus on ‘key’ areas such as Wessex and Yorkshire. Our knowledge of the ‘gaps’ in-between these regions is uneven across the country and seriously distorts our understanding of the period. This situation is particularly acute in Wales where there is a paucity of very large material and structural assemblages. As with many ‘in-between’ areas, developer-funded archaeology has increased the baseline dataset, although the interpretations of those data have not developed in parallel. This paper will demonstrate that, to more fully understand the integrated regional composition of Iron Age Britain, we must give detailed consideration to the evidence from these ‘gaps’. By bringing together for the first time all of the available aerial photographic, chronological, faunal, palaeobotanical, and excavated data in one of these ‘gap’ areas, southern Glamorgan, this paper will show that through the careful analysis of the available evidence we are able to gain an understanding of different areas’ distinctive regional characters and move beyond our over-reliance on a small number of key regions

Leading by example : a queer critique of personalization and coercive community governance in Act Up-Paris's operation against the bareback writers

This article advances a queer historiographical critique of Act Up-Paris’s operation against Guillaume Dustan and Erik Rémès, two writers of semi-autobiographical fiction closely associated with bareback in France at the turn of the 21st century. It calls into question the group’s strategy of personalization, its insistence on exemplarity of conduct and its reliance on a problematic if widely accepted view of the necessity of community governance by ‘role model’. Without simply finding in favour of the writers, the article develops and contextualizes, both historically and theoretically (principally by reference to Foucault’s account of the ‘state of emergency’ and the ongoing work of Tim Dean), reservations voiced by some members of the community at the time about the latent ‘fascism’ in Act Up’s attempt to coercively police adherence to the norm of condom use. It argues that Act Up-Paris, alongside its intended objective to police the consensus around safe sex, unwittingly offered a collateral lesson in stigmatizing coercion, which constituted a performative contradiction of a nurturing function it had so effectively played for gay people in the preceding decade. The article concludes by resituating bareback within a continuity of ‘arse-sex-positive’ queer socio-sexual practices

A special issue of Sexualities : bareback sex and queer theory across three national contexts (France, UK, USA)

To use the word ‘bareback’ to refer to condomless anal sex between men is to evoke the almost caricaturally US-American world of cowboys and rodeos to which the coinage of the term, in the mid-1990s, gestured salaciously (Rofes, 1998). This special issue offers new insight into bareback, as sexual practice and subcultural phenomenon, by investigating how it has been apprehended by queer theory and queer thinking within and across three national contexts: the US, in which bareback was first named and elaborated into an identifiable subculture and which is most prevalent in existing research (medical, sociological and historical alike), France and the UK. The dual objective is both to say something queer about bareback and to use bareback and the discussion it has sparked to reveal something about the respective states of queer thinking within these national contexts

Managing (in)security in Paris in Mai ’68

This article reframes the extensive literature on the policing of protests in Paris in Mai ’68 around (i) the concept, borrowed from Critical Security Studies, of the management of (in)security and (ii) Peter Manning’s understanding of the dramaturgical function of policing. In the absence of direct archival evidence about how police felt during May, the article attempts a reconstruction – based on archival and secondary sources – of officers’ experience of insecurity by highlighting the contrast between Mai and customary practice in managing demonstrations as ‘co-productions’ with the services d’ordre of trade unions and political parties. It is argued that the response of rank-and-file officers to Maurice Grimaud’s strategy was widespread insubordination, contrary to the impression given in accounts by Grimaud himself. The role of le Service d’action civique (SAC) as clandestine policing auxiliaries is also discussed. The article concludes that the spread of police ways of knowing protestors into the wider population in the last week of May constituted a form of (in)security governance which worked by allowing ordinary people to feel sufficiently afraid to reaffirm their support of the regime and its frontline functionaries

Chapter 5 Autonomy and autoheteronomy in psychedelically assisted psychotherapy

Psychedelically-enhanced psychotherapy (PAP) looks set to become a common remedy for a range of serious mental health problems. The market for providing PAP, including a secondary market for the training, credentialising and monitoring of therapists, is expanding rapidly. Concerns have been raised recently by actors in that secondary market about the potential for abuse in PAP, which have been framed in terms of a failure to respect patient autonomy. Such concerns cannot be adequately addressed without a fundamental reconsideration of the role of autonomy in psychotherapy. Discussing what autonomy means in psychotherapy and thence especially in PAP is the aim of this chapter, which starts from practitioner-focused guidance, before reflecting on the history of autonomy in geopolitics and ethics and finally returning to consider its place in psychotherapy generally and PAP specifically. The conclusion reached is that while protecting autonomy is the primary concern of medical ethics today, autonomy is not equal to the phenomenology of the psychedelic experience, which is better characterised in terms of ‘autoheteronomy’. The chapter’s contribution to the emerging ‘psychedelic humanities’ is to show that PAP brings to crisis longstanding cultural compromises and uncertainties around the way in which psychotherapy has been thought to foster patient autonomy

Leibniz Equivalence, Newton Equivalence, and Substantivalism

Active diffeomorphisms map a differentiable manifold to itself. They transform manifold points and objects without changing the system of local coordinates used to represent those objects. What has been called Leibniz Equivalence is the assertion that, although active diffeomorphisms do change manifold objects, they do not change what is called the "physical situation" being modeled by those objects. This paper introduces the contrasting idea of Newton Equivalence, which asserts that the different values of manifold objects produced by active diffeomorphisms do model different physical situations. But due to the assumption of general covariance, these different physical situations are all equally possible. They represent physically different situations all of which could happen. This paper compares these two interpretations of active diffeomorphisms, and comments on their importance in the substantivalism debate

Magnetic Charge and Dyality Invariance

This paper is a critical study of non-standard Maxwellian electrodynamics. It explores two important topics: the inclusion of both magnetic and electric charge to produce what it calls Extended Electrodynamics, and the existence of a symmetry called Dyality Invariance that exchanges electric and magnetic quantities. First, the paper summarizes Extended Electrodynamics, including potentials, gauge transformations, and a new proof of the extended electrodynamic Poynting theorem. A formal Lagrangian derivation of the extended Maxwell equations is also given, but its value in fundamental studies is questioned. The paper then defines Dyality Invariance (form invariance under the so-called Dyality Transformation that exchanges electric and magnetic quantities) and shows it to be a valid symmetry if and only if electrodynamics is given the extended form. The paper suggests that the complete Maxwellian electrodynamics is extended electrodynamics with its dyality invariance. But dyality can be interpreted either actively or passively. Since magnetic charge has not been observed experimentally, the active interpretation is ruled out. But a passive interpretation can be used to avoid writing magnetic source and potential terms explicitly. The paper also refutes the idea that dyality invariance would permit a magnetic charge to be transformed away even if one existed. If nonzero magnetic charge exists, then experimental evidence for its existence cannot be hidden by a dyality transformation