bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The role and status of the mistress
Authors: Thornton Tim , Carlton Katharine
Published: September 2019

The historiography might suggest that female servants were the typical mistresses of the elite. Such relationships are explored in this section, but it is also evident that many of the mistresses of the elite were either non-elite women who had come into contact with their eventual lovers through other routes than service, or themselves came from the elite. These might be the daughters and wives of gentry families, and not always from families of lower status (although this was a notable pattern among the mistresses of the peerage); an important group was drawn from the illegitimate offspring of the elite themselves, suggesting in some cases a parallel kinship and relationship structure. While some of these mistresses were undoubtedly badly treated (and may be little more than shadowy victims in our records), many were able to access considerable material wealth and influence through their relationships. The chapter will explore how this was accumulated, the forms that it took, and the power that these mistresses were able to wield. Further, the implications of these relationships for interactions between individuals and families in county, regional and national society and politics will be considered: sometimes disruptive, sometimes forging new connections and alliances.
Neolithic cave burials
Authors: Peterson Rick
Published: September 2019

The book studies Neolithic burial in Britain by focussing primarily on evidence from caves. It interprets human remains from 48 Neolithic caves and compares them to what we know of Neolithic collective burial elsewhere in Britain and Europe. It provides a contextual archaeology of these cave burials, treating them as important evidence for the study of Neolithic mortuary practice generally. It begins with a thoroughly contextualized review of the evidence from the karst regions of Europe. It then goes on to provide an up to date and critical review of the archaeology of Neolithic funerary practice. This review uses the ethnographically documented concept of the ‘intermediary period’ in multi-stage burials to integrate archaeological evidence, cave sedimentology and taphonomy. Neolithic caves, environments and the dead bodies within them would also have been perceived as active subjects with similar kinds of agency to the living. The book demonstrates that cave burial was one of the earliest elements of the British Neolithic. It also shows that Early Neolithic cave burial practice was very varied, with many similarities to other Neolithic burial rites. However, by the Middle Neolithic, cave burial had changed and a funerary practice which was specific to caves had developed.
How do caves act?
Authors: Peterson Rick
Published: September 2019

This chapter addresses the question of what the agency of non-animate objects might imply for the study. It begins by discussing early archaeological applications of the ideas of Giddens and Bourdieu. It then moves on to discuss anthropological ideas about the agency of non-humans, in particular Ingold’s dwelling perspective and the idea of the taskscape. It suggests that the agency of inanimate objects has been conceptualised in two different ways. Gell’s ‘secondary agency’ is compared with Latour’s ‘actor-network theory’. These approaches are situated more broadly within developing Post-humanist interpretations of object agency. Understandings of time and temporality are also discussed within the same framework. The chapter follows Gell in using the distinction between A and B series time to construct an account of time experience based on the material world. B-series time is held to be a map of temporally ordered events. Material narratives of time and object biographies are shown to be central to this process, of particular importance is the way that changes to objects and places index the passage of time.
The process of frame-building
Authors: Dekavalla Marina
Published: September 2019

Chapter 6 attempts to explain the prominence of these frames in the media coverage, based on insights from interviews with broadcasters and their sources. It proposes five factors which played a role in shaping media frames: the influence of political campaigns, professional routines relating to balance, journalists’ views of their own role in the coverage of a contested issue, broadcasters’ perceptions of what attracts audiences and what constitutes a contribution to public debate, as well as previous experience of covering election campaigns. The discussion is contextualized within broader academic literature about frame building.
Conclusion
Authors: Dekavalla Marina
Published: September 2019

This chapter revisits the question of whether the mediation of referendum campaigns is distinctive enough to deserve dedicated analysis. It queries the extent to which the referendum analysed in this book bears similarities with the UK’s subsequent 2016 EU referendum and how that event was framed in the mainstream media. The chapter argues that the frame-building model proposed in chapter 7 appears to also provide an account for the mediation of that campaign. The chapter concludes with a wider consideration of the contribution of old and new media to our understanding of politics. It considers the changing nature of public debate following Brexit and the 2016 US Presidential election and questions the extent to which mainstream media remain key determinants of public discourse. It proposes that future avenues for frame building research would need to explore frame building processes on social media, where the gatekeepers and organizational routines that are so central in the frame building model proposed in this book are absent. It argues that in order to deliver the complete picture frame analysis needs to engage with the totality of news provision and sharing as this moves towards the internet and news aggregation, propaganda sites and social media.
The philosophical anthropology of Edward Shils
Authors: Grosby Steven
Published: September 2019

The work of Edward Shils is replete with a number of rich anthropological insights that amount to a philosophy of life. His analysis of the different, heterogeneous orientations of the human mind, and the implications of that analysis, represent a philosophical anthropology. It may be that the most productive way to understand the wide-ranging corpus of his writings, including his understanding of the calling of sociology and the purpose of the university, is to approach them from the perspective of the principled pluralism of his philosophical anthropology.
Edward Shils on pluralism and civility
Authors: Boyd Richard
Published: September 2019

One place where Edward Shils’ writings remain prominent and particularly salient today is in contemporary debates over the concept of civility.  Shils has recently been characterized as a ‘civilitarian’ for his emphasis on the importance of civility in modern society.  While some participants invoke Shils’ work affirmatively, critics fear that appeals to civility serve as a mask for exclusion, repression, or the hegemony of traditional religious values. This chapter critically examines this particular rendition of Shils’ notion of civility, taking issue both with the characterization of his views of civility as well as the contention that civility is necessarily ‘conservative’, repressive, or inimical to a modern pluralistic society. Upon closer examination, I will suggest, Shils’ emphasis on civility represents a prescient acknowledgment of civility as the virtue uniquely congenial to complex, diverse, and pluralistic societies where citizens can no longer be expected to share substantive ends or purposes: a fundamentally liberal disposition borne of modern social conditions and well suited to maximizing the freedoms afforded to liberal citizens.
Nations, nationality, and civil society in the work of Edward Shils
Authors: Mentzel Peter
Published: September 2019

This chapter explores Shils’ original and highly nuanced treatment of the concepts of ‘nationality’, ‘nationalism’, and ‘civil society’. In particular, the chapter argues that Shils distinguishes between ‘nationality’ (which he seems to use as a synonym for ‘national self-consciousness’) and ‘nationalism’, which he identifies as an ideology. In this taxonomy, ‘nationality’ is a basic almost primordial force that provides the foundation for civil society and, ultimately, individual liberty. In this respect, nationality is a positive, or at the very least neutral, force. Shils portrays the ideology of nationalism, on the other hand, as highly dangerous. To put it simply, while regarding nationality as essential for civil society, Shils suggested that nationalism is in fact a danger to it. The chapter goes on to situate Shils’s theories of nations and nationalism with in the broader scholarly debate on these subjects. In the process, it examines Shils’s ideas concerning the relative antiquity of nations and the historical specifics about the origins of nationalism.
Edward Shils and his Portraits
Authors: Turner Bryan S.
Published: September 2019

Edward Shils’ Portraits offers various intellectual biographies of major figures that played a large role in his life, mainly at the University of Chicago. The list is diverse including economists, sociologists, natural scientists, and historians of the ancient world. The diversity illustrates the breadth of Shils’ academic work.
The famous Committee for Social Thought was a key institution in Shils’ intellectual development and, while Portraits can be read as a history of the University of Chicago during the twentieth century, Shils was a trans-Atlantic intellectual with close connections to Peterhouse College Cambridge and the London School of Economics. Portraits is a celebration of the Chicago tradition created by Robert Maynard Hutchins University President (1929-1945) for the in-depth study of ‘great books’, but Shils concludes with a nostalgic reflection on the end of the ‘age of books’. The narrative is haunted by the figure of Max Weber, whose rationalization thesis has been borne out with the rise of the bureaucratic corporate university and the narrow specialization of research.
Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud
Authors: Lamm Kimberly
Published: September 2019

Chapter 3 is devoted to Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud (1971–72), an epic artwork in which she orchestrated typewritten texts and painted images to seize the monstrosity attributed to white women if they do not stay within patriarchal constraints. The chapter analyses Codex Artaud as a feminist claim to women’s aggressive capacities and all they connect to: sexuality, disorder, insanity, and protest, but also the capacity to represent oneself as other. The reading focuses on Spero’s conflicted engagement with Antonin Artaud’s writings and the fact that though he was insane, he was able to command the patriarchal orders of language to create a mobile range of self-representations. Spero’s engagement with Artaud’s texts produced a form of writing that both emulates and critiques the masculine privileges that make such self-representations of otherness possible, thereby revealing the aggression from which women in western culture have been traditionally barred. To evoke the psychic mechanisms that enforce this exclusion, the chapter turns to Sigmund Freud’s definition of sexuality in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and his articulation of the expectation that women should not indulge in the pleasures of aggression, but should instead create aesthetically pleasing images devoid of shame and disgust..
Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey
Authors: Lamm Kimberly
Published: September 2019

Chapter 6 focuses on Laura Mulvey’s theoretical writings on film and her essay film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), which it reads in relation to the feminist collaboration between Kelly and Mulvey that took place at the height of Women’s Liberation in Britain. Like Post-Partum Document, Riddles of the Sphinx creates a hieroglyphic aesthetic that mines the feminist possibilities of repressed maternal desires and draws out their connections to British colonial history. Replete with images of writing, the consistent attention to text in Riddles is the means by which Mulvey represents the pleasures of the maternal bond and transfers them into a form of fetishisation that opens onto collaborations between women that move across the lines of race and class. By placing the hieroglyph and the colonial extractions for which it figures in the context of women’s atomised struggles with reproductive labour in late capitalism, Riddles writes collective feminist reading practices that might allow women to correspond across the divisions created by colonial, racial, and class hierarchies and therefore create what Mulvey identifies in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), as a ‘new language of desire.’
Jews as Yorkshiremen: Jewish identity in late-Victorian Leeds
Authors: Appell James
Published: September 2019

The chapter analyses the character and impact of the mass migration which transformed the Jewish community in the late Victorian period. It is shown that despite family stories which asserted that people arrived in Leeds by accident, there were clear geographic connections which made Leeds the intended destination for most immigrants. Leeds Jews came predominantly from the western part of the Russian Pale, from Lithuanian and the province of Kovno. The new arrivals soon made their presence felt in local affairs such as strikes. The 1917 anti-Semitic riots were a low point in attempts to integrate into Yorkshire society.
The community today and its recent history
Authors: Fraser Derek
Published: September 2019

The final chapter falls into two parts, a survey of developments in the second half of the twentieth century and some final thoughts analysing the key themes of the book as a whole. Social mobility, economic success and residential concentration are notable characteristics of the modern community. Divisions persisted and one of the aims of the Jewish Representative Council was to speak for the diverse range of opinion, from the liberal Sinai Synagogue to the ultra-orthodox Lubavitch supporters. Much is made of the achievement of integration without assimilation and the penetration of the professions is highlighted. The case of Arnold Ziff is cited as a prime example of a major contribution to the economic and social life of Leeds, including benefactions to a range of causes, while retaining a committed Jewish identity.
Locating seditious memories in England and Wales
Authors: Legon Edward
Published: September 2019

This chapter locates seditious memories in legal records and government papers. In doing so, the ways that sympathies for parliament and the republic were expressed in England and Wales are outlined. These include justification of, identification with, and nostalgia for opposition and resistance during the 1640s and 1650s. They are also shown to include ‘prospection’ or the imagination of the restoration of parliamentarianism and republicanism in the future. The chapter finishes by demonstrating that seditious memories are likely to be representative of a wider body of opinion after the Restoration.
Improvisation in high places? Setting the national framework for bussing
Authors: Esteves Olivier
Published: September 2019

Devised by a Conservative government, dispersal was finally introduced by a Labour government, under Harold Wilson (1964–70). This chapter analyses the national, broad framework to the introduction of dispersal, via White Papers, government publications and ministerial circulars. It investigates the various structural shortcomings to dispersal, such as the absence of a definition of ‘immigrant children’, the unscientific claim that when a schools had more than 30% immigrant children dispersal should be introduced, the difficulties involved in introducing ethnic statistics of immigrant children in schools, lastly the ministerial racial myopia which failed to anticipate the fact that Asian children would face racial bullying in white schools.
Women, workplace protest and political identity in England, 196885
Authors: Moss Jonathan
Published: September 2019

This book draws upon original research into women’s workplace protest to deliver a new account of working-class women’s political identity and participation in post-war England. In doing so, the book contributes a fresh understanding of the relationship between feminism, workplace activism and trade unionism during the years 1968-1985. The study covers a period that has been identified with the ‘zenith’ of trade union militancy. The women’s liberation movement also emerged in this period, which produced a shift in public debates about gender roles and relations in the home and the workplace. Industrial disputes involving working-class women have been commonly understood as evidence of women’s growing participation in the labour movement, and as evidence of the influence of second-wave feminism upon working-class women’s political consciousness. However, the voices and experiences of female workers who engaged in workplace protest remain largely unexplored. The book addresses this space through detailed analysis of four industrial disputes that were instigated by working-class women. It shows that labour force participation was often experienced or viewed as claim to political citizenship in late modern England. A combination of oral history and written sources are used to illuminate how everyday experiences of gender and class antagonism shaped working-class women’s political identity and participation.
The Trico-Folberth equal pay strike, Brentford, 1976
Authors: Moss Jonathan
Published: September 2019

The longest equal pay strike in British labour history took place at the Trico-Folberth windscreen wiper factory in Brentford, west London, during the summer of 1976. This chapter will be the first detailed consideration of this strike from an historical perspective. Having discussed the Equal Pay Act’s failure to achieve a meaningful reduction in the differential between male and female wages in Chapter 1, and considered the key role the Ford sewing-machinists played in the origins of equal pay legislation in Chapter 2, this case study examines how the Equal Pay Act was interpreted and challenged by female workers once it was implemented in 1975. The chapter considers the Trico women’s experiences of work and trade unionism. It considers the women’s subjective motivations for going on strike, and examines the extent to which they associated the dispute with a shift in their expectations of paid work, and political identity.
Urban gardening and the quest for just uses of space in Europe
Authors: Certomà Chiara , Sondermann Martin , Noori Susan
Published: September 2019

The chapter investigates the relationship between urban gardening– as political gesture- and socio-spatial justice. In search for an actually existing just city, gardeners’ everyday initiatives advance a substantive micropolitics of life that point out to less visible and sometimes ignored sides of urban governance and planning; and unveil the articulation of different forms of power, dominance and resistance to the unequal distribution of benefits and burdens in space. The critical analysis proposed specifically revolves around the question of whether (and how) urban gardening practices are able to tackle social and spatial injustices. It outlines the consequences, potentialities and contradictions in the constitution of urban spaces and urbanity; and its capability to mitigate material, political and social exclusions, unfairness and inequalities effects. This is complemented with an overview of the contributions comprised in the book.
Conflation in political gardening: concepts and practice
Authors: Wright Lucy Rose , Young Ross Fraser
Published: September 2019

This chapter is an introduction to the concept of political gardening; it aims to inform the reader of the political turn in the urban gardening movement. It begins by contextualising the re-evaluation of ‘everyday space’ through the neoliberal processes of privatisation, devolution and entrepreneurialism. It then marries together these processes with the rise of academic interest in urban gardening and a more recently the political aspect of this movement. The chapter then conflates the ideas of political gardening with injustice based on Rawls theory of social justice. Case study examples are then used to unpack the process of political gardening – in six iterative stages - in dealing with these injustices, arriving at a working definition of what political gardening is and that it is not just a term but also a process in which participants undergo towards becoming engaged ‘democratised’ citizens.
Temporary urban landscapes and urban gardening: re-inventing open space in Greece and Switzerland
Authors: Nikolaidou Sofia
Published: September 2019

New forms of urban gardening are gaining a momentum in cities transforming the conventional use and functions of open green and public space. They often take place through informal and temporary (re)use of vacant land consisting part of greening strategies or social inclusion policy through new modes of land use management, green space governance and collaborative practices. Particular emphasis is placed on shifted meanings of the notion of open public space by referring to its openness to a diversity of uses and users that claim it and relates to the questions of access rights, power relations among actors, negotiations and the so called right to use and re-appropriate land. By using examples drawn from the Greek and Swiss case, this chapter underlines differences and similarities in urban gardening practices, social and institutional contexts, collaborative governance patterns, motivations, levels of institutionalisation, openness and inclusiveness of space. More specifically it calls attention to the critical role of the temporary nature of these initiatives in relation to their multifunctional, spatial and socio-political aspects that affect new configurations of urban green areas and public space as well as related planning practices.
Community gardening for integrated urban renewal in Copenhagen: securing or denying minorities’ right to the city?
Authors: Roy Parama
Published: September 2019

This chapter presents a case study from Copenhagen on a community-based, but state-initiated urban gardening effort to examine what such efforts mean for the minorities’ (the homeless and the ethnic minorities’) right to the city (Purcell, 2002; 2013) especially within the context of a traditionally welfare-driven, but increasingly neoliberalized urban context. David Harvey has described the right to the city as “not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire” (Harvey, 2003). As such, in this chapter the concept of “right to the city” is operationalized as a measure or proxy for social and spatial justice to explore how the state-initiated community gardening effort in the Sundholm District shapes/secures/denies the homeless and the ethnic minorities’ ability to, a) use and just be in the physical space of the garden (a public space) and b) to translate this into access to the political space of urban governance (and governance of the garden space) where they can voice their needs/concerns.
The migration mystery
Authors: Richards Eric
Published: September 2019

Historians have resorted to a language of mystery and metaphor when they come to grapple with the great structural changes which underpin the array of contributory causes of migration. The British Isles was the prototype case of agrarian transformation associated with industrial growth and mass migration. Frank Thistlethwaite in the early 1960s re-shaped the subject by insisting on linking the two sides of the Atlantic into a connected explanation of the migratory turmoil. There were links along the chain of causation towards the migration of millions of the British people in their confusing permutations. Migration history comes in three main schematic forms: first the individual account, second the general narrative of migratory behaviour, and third the grand theories of migration. International emigration has depended on the basic facilities of migration. The British case was the prototype of modern rural-urban migration and has been replicated, with important variations, across the world.
Before the discontinuity and the start of modern times
Authors: Richards Eric
Published: September 2019

A radical shift in the velocity and volume of general mobility was a sine qua non of mass emigration. The pre-existing shape of labour mobilities set the context for the emergence of mass emigration. The beginnings of mass emigration were located in the British Isles in the 1820s, but the scale of the discontinuity requires a measure of the circumstances before the change. Modern mass mobility erupted in the western world in the early nineteenth century, especially in Victorian times. The case of Alexander Somerville in Scotland provides a standard pattern for mobility in the transitional age. English historians have long identified an array of categories of mobility in the pre-modern population, some long-distance, some seasonal, some local and circulatory. A composite picture has emerged which emphasises the essential fluidity of the population before industrialisation, of people in localised motion and perhaps increasingly so.
The discontinuity
Authors: Richards Eric
Published: September 2019

The supply and demand of emigrants were evidently entangled and it is unlikely that the propaganda machine was the first cause of the new scale and urgency of mass emigration. The years 1768 to 1776 may have marked an earlier fundamental discontinuity in emigration but the evidence is ambiguous. There is ample remaining contention among the migration scholars, and the views of the historical geographer Ian Whyte are typical of modern scepticism about the notion of any fundamental discontinuity in the long narrative of mobility. Strong support for the discontinuity thesis comes from the quantitative historians T.J. Hatton and J.G. Williamson. The American scholar Raymond Cohn has provided emphatic reinforcement to the claim of ‘discontinuity’ in the later 1820s when, he declares, that ‘mass migration began’. He says there was a break in trend in Atlantic migration between 1827 and 1831.
Remote departures: the Scottish Highlands
Authors: Richards Eric
Published: September 2019

The Scottish Highlands and Islands were furthest from London, remote from the trade routes and commerce of the nation, the last region to experience a battle of great military forces. The Highlands present a clear-cut case of emigration as extrusion, of a poor population propelled outwards by force majeure. The Highland story was punctuated by recurring and dramatic episodes of exodus by emigration, but most of the intermittent and sporadic outflow was within Scotland. Even in wartime, emigration from the Highlands continued, usually associated with landlord policies to rationalise their estates, as in the early Clearances in Sutherland in 1806-1807. Famine was a conclusive symptom of land hunger and low productivity, vulnerability and a misshapen community, in the 1840s emigration accelerated, urged on by landlord assistance, pressure and coercion, and the availability of philanthropic, landlord and colonial assisted passages.
The looking machine
Authors: MacDougall David
Published: September 2019

The looking machine calls for the redemption of documentary cinema, exploring the potential and promise of the genre at a time when it appears under increasing threat from reality television, historical re-enactments, designer packaging, and corporate authorship. The book consists of a set of essays each focused on a particular theme derived from the author’s own experience as a filmmaker. It provides a practice-based, critical perspective on the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, questions of aesthetics, and the intellectual and emotional relationships between filmmakers and their subjects. It is especially concerned with the potential of film to broaden the base of human knowledge, distinct from its expression in written texts. Among its underlying concerns are the political and ethical implications of how films are actually made, and the constraints that may prevent filmmakers from honestly showing what they have seen. While defending the importance of the documentary idea, MacDougall urges us to consider how the form can become a ‘cinema of consciousness’ that more accurately represents the sensory and everyday aspects of human life. Building on his experience bridging anthropology and cinema, he argues that this means resisting the inherent ethnocentrism of both our own society and the societies we film.
Looking with a camera
Authors: MacDougall David
Published: September 2019

This chapter presents the camera as a ‘looking machine’ that extends human perception. However, photography and film fix the act of looking, placing further constraints on who can look at what, and forcing the act of looking into specific channels. The constraints take the form of artistic conventions in filmmaking itself, commercial pressures, community standards of propriety, legal and ethical concerns, and ultimately self-censorship. Filmmakers often compromise their work by colluding too closely with the aims of sponsors and the film subjects themselves. The author suggests that all these forces pose serious challenges to the ability of filmmakers to represent honestly what they see, resulting in lop-sided portrayals of human experience, particularly in documentary cinema. He argues that it may therefore be necessary to make ‘impolite’ films that challenge viewers’ cultural rigidity and ethnocentrism.
The experience of colour
Authors: MacDougall David
Published: September 2019

Colour plays an important part in the aesthetics of everyday life. It has significant psychological effects as well as carrying symbolic meanings, both religious and secular, and it is an important marker of cultural identity. This chapter explores the role and uses of colour at the Doon School, an elite boys’ boarding school in India where the author made a number of films. In this highly controlled community, the social aesthetics of the institution becomes imprinted on the consciousness of its inhabitants. It is intimately associated with the students’ activities, social relationships, and sensory experiences. It defines their status and shapes their lives. The uses of colour at the school are also consistent with a wider social aesthetic emphasising restraint, logical thought, and the training and presentation of the body. Many of these values can be seen to have their origins in the school’s colonial history and postcolonial aspirations. The author argues that we can only understand the full implications of such sensory patterning in society through more extensive research in social aesthetics.
Notes on cinematic space
Authors: MacDougall David
Published: September 2019

This chapter addresses the problem of portraying space in the cinema and the position the film viewer imagines himself or herself to occupy when watching a film. Beginning with the rendering of depth in early films, the author argues that this was never the important question; rather it was the question of how the viewer related to sensations of being included or excluded by the images on the screen. The sense of exclusion was partly resolved through editing techniques such as the shot/counter-shot technique that incorporated the viewer into the action and also by employing deep focus and proximity to close objects, as in the films of Orson Welles. Equally important were narratives that involved the viewer through identification with the characters, as well as the culturally-constructed ‘cinema of familiarity’ of genre films and the work of certain filmmakers such as Ozu. Although none of the methods employed fully succeeded in overcoming the problem of cinematic space, the author argues that at least in nonfiction cinema filmmakers can limit it by being more open about their own intentions and the limitations of the medium.
Outsourcing on steroids: regeneration meets the Private Finance Initiative
Authors: Hodkinson Stuart
Published: September 2019

This chapter introduces the controversial background and evolution of the PFI model in public housing regeneration. A first section outlines the basic workings of PFI and how it emerged as part of the wider corporate takeover and financialisation of public services. A second section debunks official claims that the inflated cost of private finance is justified by the superior ‘value for money’ delivered through PFI’s ‘risk transfer’ and ‘payment by result’s model. A third section provides an overview of the origins and evolution of PFI as the ‘only game in town’ for local authorities during the 2000s that wanted to retain ownership of public housing and access the desperately-needed finance for home and estates in need of major regeneration and refurbishment. It introduces the twenty public housing PFI regeneration schemes now operational in England, introducing the three London local authority case studies which form the evidence base of the book: Islington’s Street Properties, Camden’s Chalcots Estate and Lambeth’s Myatts Field North estate. A final section reveals the controversy on the ground that met the undemocratic imposition of many housing PFI schemes – sometimes in the face of resident opposition – and the problems that engulfed the procurement of these contracts.
The accountability vacuum
Authors: Hodkinson Stuart
Published: September 2019

This chapter focuses on the more sinister side of the outsourced state under PFI that was clearly present in the Grenfell disaster – the ‘accountability vacuum’. It draws on interviews with public and private sector professionals, residents involved in PFI schemes, and whistle-blowers, to illuminate specific examples of this deficit. A first section focuses on the lack of public or regulatory scrutiny of PFI contracts that reply on self-certified performance reporting, akin to paying a fox to guard the hen house. A second section explains how poorly-written contracts that set largely meaningless Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) result in minimal financial penalties despite demonstrable failings. A third section shows how local authorities’ prioritise the protection of long-term partnerships with private companies over genuine resident involvement and empowerment. A fourth section describes how resident disempowerment is compounded by the absence of both genuinely independent and powerful regulatory bodies, as well as legal routes that residents could use to get redress. It provides a number of examples of how those who did speak out were routinely ignored and sometimes actively silenced.
Empire, migration and the NHS
Authors: Simpson Julian M.
Published: September 2019

Chapter 2 connects the history of the NHS to the history of the British empire and post-war migration. The arrival in Britain of the South Asian medical graduates who became GPs was the product of a very specific post-imperial context that existed in the forty years following the establishment of the NHS. The post-war migration of doctors was not a spontaneous or new phenomenon-it is linked to the long history of British medicine in South Asia and is an amplification of longstanding imperial flows of doctors to Britain. Medicine on the Indian subcontinent had been fundamentally shaped by its imperial past. Conversely, in a growing NHS, their labour offered a solution to the staffing needs of the new organisation, particularly in junior posts, in unpopular specialties and in industrial areas. There was a time lag between the formal end of empire and the dismantling of its legacies such as the freedom of doctors to move to Britain and their ability to gain recognition for their qualifications. This explains how between the 1940s and the 1980s South Asian doctors came to take on such an important role in the British healthcare system.
Beyond the surgery boundaries: doctors’ organisations and activist medics
Authors: Simpson Julian M.
Published: September 2019

This chapter describes how migrant doctors became involved in medical politics and in addressing social questions. They added new dimensions to British medical culture by creating groups that catered to their professional ambitions and their social and cultural aspirations as migrants.
The Last Days of Pompeii (1984)
Authors: Magerstädt Sylvie
Published: September 2019

This section contains a case study of The Last Days of Pompeii (1984), based on a historical novel of the same title by British writer and poet Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
Rome (2005–8)
Authors: Magerstädt Sylvie
Published: September 2019

This section contains a case study of the HBO–BBC co-production Rome (2005–7).
Cell lineage trees: the central structure plus key dynamics of biological aging and formulating the limiting problem of comprehensive organismal rejuvenation
Authors: Csordas Attila
Published: September 2019

The argument makes the case for cell lineage trees and cell tree dynamics to be considered as the central structure and process of understanding organismal level, multicellular biological aging. The limiting challenge of counteracting biological aging is comprehensive organismal rejuvenation. The central theoretical problem of comprehensive biological rejuvenation is to find an algorithm to restore the balance and maintain the healthy dynamics of the aging organismal cell lineage tree. The most comprehensive medical solution of biological aging needs to use individual cell lineage trees as a central tool for diagnosis and treatment.
Reforming the Port: The Campaign for Clean Trucks
Authors: Cummings Scott L.
Published: September 2019

This chapter analyses the policy campaign to change LA law to reform the port trucking industry by requiring clean fuel trucks operated by employee drivers.
When Cyberbullying Ends in Suicide
Authors: Milosevic Tijana
Published: September 2019

This chapter serves as an introduction to the book and it starts with a very brief overview of several online bullying cases that resulted in suicides (which are elaborated on later in the book) and that garnered significant attention from the media internationally. The chapter explains the dynamic between the relevant stakeholders (regulators, industry, parents/caregivers, media, educators) that emerge in such cases, focusing briefly on the pressures that the companies where these incidents took place can face under such circumstances, which leads to the development of their self-regulatory mechanisms (cyberbullying policies, intervention and prevention mechanisms). This chapter also details the scope of the book and the questions it raises.
Strengths and Limitations of Self-Regulation
Authors: Milosevic Tijana
Published: September 2019

A more transparent self-regulatory framework is proposed here and it is argued in the chapter that operational policies need to be publicized and that mechanisms adopted by the companies need to be publicly available and regularly evaluated. Introducing regular independent evaluation of the mechanisms’ effectiveness is recommended as an essential component of effective self-regulation, and it is currently missing. Here, it is also explained why transparency is not the end-goal in and of itself. The aim behind ensuring transparency is to allow for an evaluation of the mechanisms’ effectiveness from youth perspective, which could open up space for changes in policies and mechanisms in a way that works for youth. This evaluation should nonetheless be independent –meaning that it is not executed by the companies themselves but rather by a third party whose impartial nature is established through regulatory monitoring.
Young Years (1920s–1930s)
Authors: Hoddeson Lillian , Garrett Peter
Published: September 2019

This chapter describes Ovshinsky’s Eastern European Jewish family background and his early years of growing up in Akron, Ohio. It explores his formative experiences of working-class culture and the influence of the social democratic values of the Workmen’s Circle. His father, Ben, whose radical political background made him the primary source of those values, also influenced Ovshinsky’s choice of vocation as a machinist and toolmaker by introducing him to the life of Akron’s machine shops and factories. The chapter recounts the beginnings of Ovshinsky’s self-education in his insatiable curiosity and his constant, omnivorous reading from an early age. This education, amplified by his heavy involvement in socialist politics, was far more important than his formal schooling, traced here through his early years in high school.
Green Capital Denial: Insulating the Green Spirit from Capital
Authors: Goldstein Jesse
Published: September 2019

Planetary improvement is less about improving the planet in some objective, ‘natural’ sense as it is about improving and sustaining a very distinct mode of inhabiting this planet, of making natures and organizing lives (human and nonhuman alike). Cleantech entrepreneurs envision themselves greening the economy bit by bit, and refuse to see how the economy is actually transforming their visions and ideas, molding any new technologies or the possibility thereof into a commodity form that primarily serves the needs of capital. Through the maintenance of four conceptual and practical separations, cleantech proponents are able to gesture vaguely towards world-making ambitions, while at the same time insulating these visions from their day-to-day business activities and short-term financial projections: (1) a separation between personal and professional commitments; (2) the difference between thinking (about climate change) and doing (something profitable); (3) the difference between abstract and concrete concerns; and (4) the distinction between short-term (fundable) solutions and long-term visions. What emerges is a way of seeing the future as a forever receding horizon of possibility, whose radical transformation is preserved in people’s minds while the perpetuation of an unsustainable status quo is preserved in reality.
Coda: Learning to Let Go and Love Other Worlds
Authors: Goldstein Jesse
Published: September 2019

To the extent that investors, entrepreneurs and businesspeople – or anyone else who has internalized the smarts of smart money – act as representatives of our collectively creative capacities, then new technologies, and perhaps even new policies and forms of governance, will be oriented around greening what we have – improving our lives and our planet – without ever questioning whether it is precisely these lives in possession of this planet that need to be challenged and ultimately transformed. This chapter points towards evaluating sociotechnical systems within what decolonial scholars would call a pluriversal context, one in which modern technological knowledge is considered to be one out of many legitimate ways of knowing and engaging with the world. Is it possible that there exists a green spirit that goes beyond capitalism; that we are more and better than this relatively simplistic, inward-looking and self-obsessed logic of profit-maximization? Liberating this green spirit will require hard work, political struggle, unexpected alliances and a deep sense of humility; we face a messy and uncertain future as we engage with the long and hard work of transforming our socio-ecological lives.
The Web in the Spider: Associative Learning Theory
Authors: Kapatsinski Vsevolod
Published: September 2019

This chapter provides an overview of basic learning mechanisms proposed within associationist learning theory: error-driven learning, Hebbian learning, and chunking. It takes the complementary learning systems perspective, which is contrasted with a Bayesian perspective in which the learner is an ‘ideal observer’. The discussion focuses on two issues. First, what is a learning mechanism? It is argued that two brain areas implement two different learning mechanisms if they would learn different things from the same input. The available data from neuroscience suggests that the brain contains multiple learning mechanisms in this sense but each learning mechanism is domain-general in applying to many different types of input. Second, what are the sources of bias that influence what a learner acquires from a certain experience? Bayesian theorists have distinguished between inductive bias implemented in prior beliefs and channel bias implemented in the translation from input to intake and output to behaviour. Given the intake and prior beliefs, belief updating in Bayesian models is unbiased, following Bayes Theorem. However, biased belief updating may be another source of bias in biological learning mechanisms.
What Are the Nodes? Unitization and Configural Learning vs. Selective Attention
Authors: Kapatsinski Vsevolod
Published: September 2019

This chapter introduces the debate between elemental and configural learning models. Configural models represent both a whole pattern and its parts as separate nodes, which are then both associable, i.e. available for wiring with other nodes. This necessitates a kind of hierarchical inference at the timescale of learning and motivates a dual-route approach at the timescale of processing. Some patterns of language change (semanticization and frequency-in-a-favourable-context effects) are argued to be attributable to hierarchical inference. The most prominent configural pattern in language is argued to be a superadditive interaction. However, such interactions are argued to often be unstable in comprehension due to selective attention and incremental processing. Selective attention causes the learner to focus on one part of a configuration over others. Incremental processing favors the initial part, which can then overshadow other parts and drive the recognition decision. Only with extensive experience, can one can learn to integrate multiple cues. When cues are integrated, the weaker cue can cue the outcome directly or can serve as an occasion-setter to the relationship between the outcome and the primary cue. The conditions under which occasion-setting arises in language acquisition is a promising area for future research.
The Interplay of Syntagmatic, Schematic, and Paradigmatic Structure
Authors: Kapatsinski Vsevolod
Published: September 2019

This chapter is a step towards developing an associationist framework for an account of productive morphology. Specifically, the aim is to address the paradigm cell filling problem, how speakers produce novel forms of words they know, often studied using elicited production. Learning is assumed to follow the Rescorla-Wagner rule. The model is applied to miniature artificial language learning data from several experiments by the author. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations and an operation, copying of an activated memory representation into the production plan, are argued to be necessary to account for the full pattern of results. Furthermore, learning rate must be low enough for the model not to fall prey to accidentally exceptionless generalizations. At these learning rates, an error-driven model closely resembles a Hebbian model. Limitations of the model are identified, including the use of the strict teacher signal in the Rescorla-Wagner learning rule.
Why Carbon Pricing Is Appealing
Authors: Rabe Barry G.
Published: September 2019

The use of taxes to elevate the price of popular commodities in order to reduce consumption and risks related to use did not originate with carbon taxes. Excise taxes on tobacco have been used aggressively by governments in the United States and beyond in recent decades to achieve significant reductions in smoking. Fossil fuel use has long been deemed by diverse economists as a viable target for a sequel, leading to innumerable reports and scholarly arguments making the case for a carbon price. This can take the form of either a direct tax on the carbon content of fossil fuels or a cap-and-trade system that allows for purchase of rights to release emissions at a price. Both are thought to offer effective paths to reduce emissions in a cost-effective manner.