‘It’s what Emmeline Pankhurst would have wanted’: Celebrity Big Brother: Year of the Woman (2018, UK) and negotiations of popular feminism(s)

Feminist scholarship has invested attention in popular culture as a terrain upon which understandings of feminism are circulated, contested and explored. This is particularly so in the contemporary moment in which feminism appears to have achieved a new ascendency. But whilst popular culture and feminism are recognised as inextricably enmeshed, there remains the implicit or explicit assumption in feminist scholarship that popular media culture could do ‘better’, and that there is a more ‘authentic’ form of feminism waiting to find representation. In response to this context, this article undertakes an analysis of Twitter responses to Celebrity Big Brother: Year of the Woman (2018) in order to explore the ways in which a popular media text provides an arena for the negotiation of popular feminism. Rather than positioning reality TV and celebrity culture as a site of ‘ideological ruin’ for feminism, this article explores how CBB is discussed in relation to feminism as popular television, and the ways in which this may offer affordances and limitations. The article concludes that feminist media scholars need to give due attention to the complexities of popular feminism as articulated by popular media culture

Cultural Value: The Story of Lidice and Stoke-on-Trent: Towards Deeper Understanding of the Role of Arts and Culture

This report details the research activities, findings and outputs from our six month Research Development Award exploring the value of arts and culture in relation to empathy, compassion and understanding. Our research focused on storytelling approaches in the context of exhibitions and community and participatory arts projects. We use as a case study the relationship between Stoke-on-Trent and the village of Lidice in the Czech Republic. Following the destruction of Lidice by the Nazis in 1942, Stoke-on-Trent Doctor and Councillor Barnett Stross launched the ‘Lidice Shall Live’ campaign, rallying local working people to contribute to a fund that eventually contributed to re-building the village after the war. Many people demonstrated tremendous empathy and compassion by donating up to a week’s wages despite the hardships of the time. In recent years, the links between Stoke-on-Trent and Lidice have been refreshed and are explored, expressed and celebrated almost exclusively through arts and culture. Our main research question is therefore why we would choose the medium of arts and culture to link distant geographical communities in ways that foster empathy, compassion and understanding. We held interviews and focus groups with a multi-disciplinary group of academics and with a wide range of artists and creative practitioners to discuss issues of empathy, compassion and understanding, and the value of arts and culture. A working group of participants was formed to explore new ways of identifying and expressing such value. In June 2014, some of the working group travelled to the Czech Republic and took part in a research visit that included participation in arts and cultural activities and events. A range of resources to support the design and evaluation of arts activities was developed, including a series of short films to disseminate the findings and to encourage on-going reflection and debate

Analysis of biophysical and functional consequences of Tropomyosin - fluorescent protein fusions.

The dynamic nature of actin polymers is modulated to facilitate a diverse range of cellular processes. These dynamic properties are modulated by different isoforms of Tropomyosin, which are recruited to distinct subpopulations of actin polymers to differentially modulate their functional properties. This makes them an attractive target for labelling discrete actin populations. We have assessed the effect of different fluorescent labelling strategies for this protein. Although tropomyosin fluorescent fusions decorate actin in vivo, they are either non-functional or perturb regulation of actin nucleation and cell cycle timings. Thus conclusions and physiological relevance should be carefully evaluated when using tropomyosin fusions

A Comparison of the Interiors of Jupiter and Saturn

Interior models of Jupiter and Saturn are calculated and compared in the framework of the three-layer assumption, which rely on the perception that both planets consist of three globally homogeneous regions: a dense core, a metallic hydrogen envelope, and a molecular hydrogen envelope. Within this framework, constraints on the core mass and abundance of heavy elements (i.e. elements other than hydrogen and helium) are given by accounting for uncertainties on the measured gravitational moments, surface temperature, surface helium abundance, and on the inferred protosolar helium abundance, equations of state, temperature profile and solid/differential interior rotation.Comment: 25 pages, 6 tables, 10 figures Planetary and Space Science, in pres

UWE - Celebrating Bristol Green Capital 2015 activities catalogue

This catalogue showcases and celebrates examples of the work of the hundreds of UWE staff and students who contributed to Bristol Green Capital 2015

From metabonomics to pharmacometabonomics: The role of metabolic profiling in personalized medicine

Variable patient responses to drugs are a key issue for medicine and for drug discovery and development. Personalised medicine, that is the selection of medicines for subgroups of patients so as to maximise drug efficacy and minimise toxicity, is a key goal of 21st century healthcare. Currently, most personalised medicine paradigms rely on clinical judgement based on the patient’s history, and on the analysis of the patients’ genome to predict drug effects i.e. pharmacogenomics. However, variability in patient responses to drugs is dependent upon many environmental factors to which human genomics is essentially blind. A new paradigm for predicting drug responses based on individual pre-dose metabolite profiles has emerged in the past decade: pharmacometabonomics, which is defined as ‘the prediction of the outcome (for example, efficacy or toxicity) of a drug or xenobiotic intervention in an individual based on a mathematical model of pre-intervention metabolite signatures’. The new pharmacometabonomics paradigm is complementary to pharmacogenomics but has the advantage of being sensitive to environmental as well as genomic factors. This review will chart the discovery and development of pharmacometabonomics, and provide examples of its current utility and possible future developments

UWE Celebrating Bristol Green Capital 2015 - Activities portfolio (supporting document for UWE Celebrating Bristol Green Capital 2015 activities catalogue)

This Activities Portfolio details projects, events and initiatives which represent the work of hundreds of UWE staff and students during Bristol's year as European Green Capital in 2015. It is the working file to accompany the UWE Green Capital 2015 Activities Catalogue

Nucleosynthetic osmium isotope anomalies in acid leachates of the Murchison meteorite

We present osmium isotopic results obtained by sequential leaching of the Murchison meteorite, which reveal the existence of very large internal anomalies of nucleosynthetic origin. The Os isotopic anomalies are correlated, and can be explained by the variable contributions of components derived from the s, r and p-processes of nucleosynthesis. Much of the s-process rich osmium is released by relatively mild leaching, suggesting the existence of an easily leachable s-process rich presolar phase, or alternatively, of a chemically resistant r-process rich phase. The s-process composition of Os released by mild leaching diverges slightly from that released by aggressive digestion techniques, perhaps suggesting that the presolar phases attacked by these differing procedures condensed in different stellar environments. The correlation between 190Os and 188Os can be used to constrain the s-process 190Os/188Os ratio to be 1.275 pm 0.043. Such a ratio can be reproduced in a nuclear reaction network for a MACS value for 190Os of ~200 pm 22 mbarn at 30 keV. We also present evidence for extensive internal variation of 184Os abundances in the Murchison meteorite. This suggests that p process rich presolar grains (e.g., supernova condensates) may be present in meteorites in sufficient quantities to influence the Os isotopic compositions of the leachates.Comment: 40 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in Earth and Planetary Science Letter

Characterisation of feline renal cortical fibroblast cultures and their transcriptional response to transforming growth factor beta 1

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is common in geriatric cats, and the most prevalent pathology is chronic tubulointerstitial inflammation and fibrosis. The cell type predominantly responsible for the production of extra-cellular matrix in renal fibrosis is the myofibroblast, and fibroblast to myofibroblast differentiation is probably a crucial event. The cytokine TGF-β1 is reportedly the most important regulator of myofibroblastic differentiation in other species. The aim of this study was to isolate and characterise renal fibroblasts from cadaverous kidney tissue of cats with and without CKD, and to investigate the transcriptional response to TGF-β1