Wilding the Edges

This was a CCW Graduate School public event, consisting of a walking tour and BarCamp. Recently the interest in psychogeography has crossed from popular literature into the fine art domain. Bestselling authors focusing on the landscape from a personal and itinerant perspective include George Monbiot, Rebecca Solnit, Paul Kingsnorth, and Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts. They discuss how we are engaging with landscape as culture – specifically where the “wild” and the “cultivated” environments overlap. This resonated with us, so we used encounter, experience and enchantment as the starting point for an interactive walking tour of little known areas of Wimbledon exploring the ‘unexamined places that thrive on disregard’*, which straddle the city and the countryside. We asked, how proactive should we be in regards to both the landscape and the city? *Farley and Roberts, Edgelands, Random House, 2012

Witnessing the Wilderness

The exhibition interrogates our preconceptions of the wilderness,and the role of the artist as adventurer, witness and mediator. Wilderness is both physical topography and a social and cultural construct, promising an untrammelled refuge or a stage for physical challenge and heroic endeavour. Meanwhile, the growth of technologies brings wild places into clear view, allowing them to be witnessed remotely or experienced through mass tourism producing a complex and evolving definition

A Hermit in Suburbia

Solo exhibition. This exhibition included paintings, animations and drawings and was part of a long-term enquiry into the ways in the largely Western and urban-based population perceive and encounter the natural world. This show focused on the ornamental hermit, a curious invention of the English Landscape Garden tradition. These were not real hermits, but were employed to live within large estates to provide human subjects for their picturesque grounds, for the amusement of the owner and guests alike. The hermits in this exhibition have been redeployed to the contemporary British suburbs asking the viewer to think anew about our relationship with nature in these ‘hybridised spaces’ whilst considering ideas about the wilderness, retreat and solitude

Lecture capture and peer working: exploring study practices through staff-student partnerships

As lecture capture technology and practice become ever more widespread in UK universities there is a growing body of literature that assesses the impact of these changes. However, there is still much to be understood about lecture capture and the full impact on student learning, especially in different institutional and subject contexts. This article describes two projects from a UK Russell Group University that worked in partnership with students to gain insights into the student experience regarding lecture capture. The article highlights insights gained in terms of how and why students use lecture recordings. This article focuses on one area in particular which has been less reported and warrants further investigation – students’ use of lecture recordings in collaborative settings. The article considers some practical implications of such insights and argues that a nuanced understanding regarding the way students use lecture recordings for learning is required. The article also highlights how educationists can harness student partnerships to further our understanding of the complex interplays between technology and student learning

An apparatus of opinion: English and North American printing in the eighteenth century

This work is a survey of the history of printing in England and North America during the 18th century. The antecedents of the craft both in the Orient and in Europe are briefly traced as a background but major emphasis is placed upon printing in the 13 English colonies in North America

Strange quark mass turns magnetic domain walls into multi-winding flux tubes

Dense quark matter is expected to behave as a type-II superconductor at strong coupling. It was previously shown that if the strange quark mass $m_s$ is neglected, magnetic domain walls in the so-called 2SC phase are the energetically preferred magnetic defects in a certain parameter region. Computing the flux tube profiles and associated free energies within a Ginzburg-Landau approach, we find a cascade of multi-winding flux tubes as "remnants" of the domain wall when $m_s$ is increased. These flux tubes exhibit an unconventional ring-like structure of the magnetic field. We show that flux tubes with winding numbers larger than one survive for values of $m_s$ up to about 20% of the quark chemical potential. This makes them unlikely to play a significant role in compact stars, but they may appear in the QCD phase diagram in the presence of an external magnetic field.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures; v2: minor improvements, extended discussion on length scales of the flux tubes, to appear in J.Phys.

The relevance of images in user generated content. A mixed method study of when and why major brands retweet

This paper develops unique new insight for business practitioners and academic researchers into the interaction between consumers and brands on social media platforms, principally where brands choose to interact with, and amplify, user-generated content (UGC) by retweeting it on their own brand channels. Despite increasing research into social media in general, there is a relative lack of available academic research on major brands engaging with consumer content, which may, be in part due to the pace of change and exponential growth in this emerging area. This mixed method study develops insight conducted over an 18-month period with leading social media practitioners, concluding that primarily a brand's social media team opportunistically seek out and retweet organic image-led UGC to convey specific messages across multiple platforms. Content containing imagery lends authenticity to brand storytelling; brands with tangible products are more likely to receive organic UGC which contains images than intangible brands

‘Imaging the Rustic and the Wilderness: The landscape sketch in nineteenth century Britain and America.’

The title of China Academy of Art’s 2017 international exhibition of emerging artists: the Inter-Youth exhibition was ‘Art. Letter Home’ and it was largely concerned with the sketch, sketchbook, drawing and artist manuscript. The exhibition was held at the Nanshan campus gallery, Hangzhou and featured work by Wimbledon graduates Indianna Farrell (BA Painting) and Laura Wend (MA Drawing). The exhibition included work from emerging artists and students from the UK, China, Germany, Australia and the USA. There is an accompanying catalogue. The show was accompanied by a symposium on the theme of the sketch, sketchbook, drawing and artist manuscript. Geraint Evans presented a paper titled: ‘Imaging the Rustic and the Wilderness: The landscape sketch in nineteenth century Britain and America.’ In this paper Evans considered how drawing and the oil sketch reflected and shaped the shifting socio-political landscape at a time of great change. There were also contributions from Brigit Brandis from University of Fine Arts, Hamburg; Allison Alder and Ruth Waller from the Australian National University, Canberra; Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow from the School of Visual Arts, New York; Sheng Wei from the China Academy of Art. Later, the Belgian curator Joël Benzakin and artists Lionel Esteve, Lucia Bru and Michel Francois spoke about their exhibition ‘Drawing as Art, Art as Drawings’, which runs alongside the Inter-Youth show. This show includes work by Anish Kapoor, Neo Rausch, Daniel Buren. The symposium ended with a panel discussion with me, Brigit Brandis, Ruth Waller, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Allison Alder and tutors from CAA Cui Xiaojian, Jiao Xiaojian and Li Qing on the subject of the different approaches taken to teaching and learning at our various colleges

Second order observations on a coaching programme: the changes in organisational culture

The purpose of this study is to illuminate the relationship between a coaching programme and the consequent changes within a scientific services unit of a UK county police force, using organisational culture as the lens to view and interpret the outcomes. A qualitative case study is used to create a detailed description of the changes in behaviour of managers and SSU staff and the consequent shift in the organisation climate, practice and culture. The findings suggest that management behaviour influences the organisational climate and contributed to an environment that changed the way members of the SSU related to each other and the divisional aims. Furthermore, the study highlighted individual sense-making of the coaching programme and the outcomes and surfaced the paradox of using person-centred non-directive coaching for explicit directed organisational change