Sound Art and Spatial Practices: Situating Sound Installation Art Since 1958

This dissertation examines the emergence and development of sound installation art, an under-recognized tradition that has developed between music, architecture, and media art practices since the late 1950s. Unlike many musical works, which are concerned with organizing sounds in time, sound installations organize sounds in space; they thus necessitate new theoretical and analytical models that take into consideration the spatial situated-ness of sound. Existing discourses on “spatial sound” privilege technical descriptions of sound localization. By contrast, this dissertation examines the ways in which concepts of space are socially, culturally, and politically construed, and how spatially-organized sound works reflect and resist these different constructions. Using an interdisciplinary methodology of critical spatial analysis and critical studies in music, this dissertation explores such topics as: conceptions of acoustic space in postwar Western art music, architecture, and media theory; the development of sound installation art in relation to philosophies of everyday life and social space; the historical links between musical performance, conceptual art, and sound sculpture; the body as a site for sound installations; and sonicspatial strategies that confront politics of race and gender. Through these different investigations, this dissertation proposes an “ontopological” model for considering sound: a critical model of analysis and reception that privileges an understanding of sound in relation to ontologies of space and place.

Sound Art and Public Engagement in the Built Environment: Reflections from an Architecture Center

This article explores the deployment of sound in architectural-curatorial and community engagement contexts through the work of PLACE, a multidisciplinary not-for-profit architecture center in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The author, who worked with PLACE and contributed to the projects discussed here, contextualizes architecture centers and their relationship with sound before examining the specific case of sound and sound art in Northern Ireland and case studies of projects delivered by PLACE. Specifically, the article evaluates two sound installation artworks and three community engagement projects for young audiences. As a means of curating urbanism and architecture, sound-art-as-public-art affords useful strategies to examine, describe or critique the environment as alternatives to traditional architecture exhibition formats. Sound’s temporality and materiality allow sound art works to exist as temporary sculptural interventions in the urban sphere, with attendant implications for public art procurement and urban acoustics. Rich territories of engagement are opened when using sound in a community participatory context.

Laser-Driven Ion Accelerators: State of the Art and Applications

Laser-plasma based accelerators of protons and heavier ions are a source of potential interest for several applications, including in the biomedical area. While the potential future use in cancer hadrontherapy acts as a strong aspirational motivation for this research field, radiobiology employing laser-driven ion bursts is alreadyan active field of research. Here we give a summary of the state of the art in laser driven ion acceleration, of the main challenges currently faced by the research inthis field and of some of the current and future strategies for overcoming them.

Troubled Geographies: A Spatial History of Religion and Society in Ireland

Ireland’s landscape is marked by fault lines of religious, ethnic, and political identity that have shaped its troubled history. Troubled Geographies maps this history by detailing the patterns of change in Ireland from 16th century attempts to “plant” areas of Ireland with loyal English Protestants to defend against threats posed by indigenous Catholics, through the violence of the latter part of the 20th century and the rise of the “Celtic Tiger.” The book is concerned with how a geography laid down in the 16th and 17th centuries led to an amalgam based on religious belief, ethnic/national identity, and political conviction that continues to shape the geographies of modern Ireland. Troubled Geographies shows how changes in religious affiliation, identity, and territoriality have impacted Irish society during this period. It explores the response of society in general and religion in particular to major cultural shocks such as the Famine and to long term processes such as urbanization.

Metaphor and Maltese Art: Explorations in the Temple Period

Temple Period Malta in the 3rd millennium BC saw the production of a range of figurative and decorative art and architecture that implies a richly populated spiritual and cognitive world associated with ritual practice in life and death. The paper explores the potential to categorize the figurative art into distinct groups, and how these various images might represent aspects of the cosmology and social concerns of a prehistoric island society.

Multiculturalism, freedom of religion, equality, and the British constitution: The JFS case considered

In the JFS case, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom held that the admissions policy of a Jewish faith school constituted unlawful racial discrimination because it used the Orthodox Jewish interpretation of who is Jewish as a criterion for determining admission to the school. A detailed discussion of the case is located in the context of two broader debates in Britain, which are characterized as constitutional in character or, at least, as possessing constitutional properties. The first is the debate concerning the treatment of minority groups, multiculturalism, and the changing perceptions in public policy of the role of race and religion in national life. It is suggested that this debate has become imbued with strong elements of what has been termed “post-multiculturalism”. The second debate is broader still, and pertains to shifting approaches to “constitutionalism” in Britain. It is suggested that, with the arrival of the European Convention on Human Rights and EU law, the U.K. has seen a shift from a pragmatic approach to constitutional thinking, in which legislative compromise played a key part, to the recognition of certain quasi-constitutional principles, allowing the judiciary greatly to expand its role in protecting individual rights while requiring the judges, at the same time, to articulate a principled basis for doing so. In both these debates, the principle of equality plays an important role. The JFS case is an important illustration of some of the implications of these developments.

Sound Art in Urban Architecture and Planning: An Introduction

This article will introduce a specially-commissioned edition of the JSS centering on articles developed from the International Symposium May 2014 by the Recomposing the City project.

Northern Ireland, America and the Emerging Church Movement: Exploring the Significance of Peter Rollins andthe Ikon Collective

The Emerging Church Movement (ECM) is a primarily Western religious phenomenon, identifiable by its critical ‘deconstruction’ of ‘modern’ religion. While most prominent in North America, especially the United States, some of the most significant contributors to the ECM ‘conversation’ have been the Belfast-based Ikon Collective and one of its founders, philosopher Peter Rollins. Their rootedness in the unique religious, political and social landscape of Northern Ireland in part explains their position on the ‘margins’ of the ECM, and provides many of the resources for their contributions. Ikon’s development of ‘transformance art’ and its ‘leaderless’ structure raise questions about the institutional viability of the wider ECM. Rollins’ ‘Pyrotheology’ project, grounded in his reading of post-modern philosophy, introduces more radical ideas to the ECM conversation. Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ and ‘marginal’ location provides the ground from which Rollins and Ikon have been able to expose the boundaries of the ECM and raise questions about just how far the ECM may go in its efforts to transform Western Christianity.

Love Thy Neighbor? Relationships between Religion and Racial Intolerance in Europe.

This article examines relationships between religion and racial intolerance across 47 countries by applying multilevel modeling to European survey data and is the first in-depth analysis of moderation of these relationships by European national contexts. The analysis distinguishes a believing, belonging, and practice-dimension of religiosity. The results yield little evidence of a link between denominational belonging, religious practice, and racial intolerance. The religiosity dimension that matters most for racial intolerance in Europe is believing: believers in a traditional God and believers in a Spirit/Life Force are decidedly less likely, and fundamentalists are more likely than non- believers to be racially intolerant. National contexts also matter greatly: individuals living in Europe’s most religious countries, countries with legacies of ethnic-religious conflict and countries with low GDP are significantly more likely to be racially intolerant than those living in wealthier, secular and politically stable countries. This is especially the case for the religiously devout.

Northern Ireland: Religion and Transitional Justice

The right to practice religion is recognised as one of the universal liberties transitional justice interventions are designed to defend, and religion is often mentioned as one of the cultural factors that impact on local transitional justice practices from below. Many human rights cases of abuse, however, are motivated by religious extremism and the association of religion with conflict has largely a discouraged reflection on its positive contribution to transitional justice. This field is undeveloped and the little work that elaborates its positive role is descriptive. This paper theorises the relationship between religion and transitional justice and develops a model for understanding its potential role that better allows an assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. The model is applied to original research conducted on ex-combatants in Northern Ireland, and concludes that only in very limited circumstances can religious actors make a telling contribution to transitional justice.Understanding what these circumstances are is the purpose of the model developed here.

Is Northern Ireland abnormal? An extension of the sociological debate on religion in modern Britain

This article places Northern Ireland within the unfolding sociological debate on religion in modern Britain. It measures secularization along Casanova’s three dimensions (1994): religious differentiation, decline and privatization. It finds that Northern Ireland has, in common with Britain, high levels of religious differentiation, grey areas of religious belief and little convinced secularism. However, Northern Ireland differs in that it has higher levels of religious affiliation and practice, and religion plays more roles in civil society than it does in other parts of Britain. The article explores the role of conflict in forming these religious trends, asking if they represent a persistence of the sacred, or simply mask deeper ethnic divisions. It concludes that the social dimensions of religion are just as important as the supernatural, and that they often inform each other. Finally, it suggests that the dynamics of religious change are comparable across regions and, as such, Northern Ireland might be a useful case study for British policy makers, particularly as it becomes increasingly multicultural and religiously plural.