Female narratives of ‘new’ citizens’ belonging(s) and identities in Europe: case studies from the Netherlands and Britain

Public discourses on citizenship, identity and nationality, which link geographical borders and the political boundaries of a community, are infused with tensions and contradictions. This paper illustrates how these tensions are interwoven with multilayered notions of home, belonging, migration, citizenship and individual’s ‘longing just to be’, focusing on the Dutch and the British context. The narratives of a number of Dutch and British women, who either immigrated to the respective countries or were born to immigrants, illustrate how the growing rigid integration and assimilative discourses in Europe contradict an individual anchoring in national and local communities. The narratives of women participating in these studies show multilayered angles of belonging presenting an alternative to the increasing strong argument for a fixed notion of positioning and national belonging. The female ‘new’ citizens in our study tell stories of individual choices, social mobility and a sense of multiple belonging in and across different communities.

Museum City - Improvisation and the narratives of space

This paper provides four viewpoints on the narratives of space, allowing us to think about possible relations between sites and sounds, reflecting on how places might tell stories, or how practitioners embed themselves in a place in order to shape cultural, social and/or political narratives through the use of sound. I propose four viewpoints that investigate the relationship between sites and sounds, where narratives are shaped and made through the exploration of specific sonic activities. These are:
- sonic activism
- sonic preservation
- sonic participatory action
- sonic narrative of space

I examine each of these ideas in turn before focusing in more detail on the final viewpoint, which provides the context for discussing and analysing a recent site-specific music improvisation project, entitled ‘Museum City’, a work that aligns closely with my proposal for a ‘sonic narrative of space’.
The work ‘Museum City’ by Pedro Rebelo, Franziska Schroeder, Ricardo Jacinto and André Cepeda specifically enables me to reflect on how derelict and/or transitional spaces might be re-examined through the use of sound, particularly through means of live music improvisation. The spaces examined as part ‘Museum City’ constitute either deserted sites or sites about to undergo changes in their architectural layout, their use and sonic make-up. The practice in ‘Museum City’ was born out of a performative engagement with[in] those sites, but specifically out of an intimate listening relationship by three improvisers situated within those spaces.
The theoretical grounding for this paper is situated within a wider context of practising and cognising musical spatiality, as proposed by Georgina Born (2013), particularly her proposition for three distinct lineages that provide an understanding of space in/and music. Born’s third lineage, which links more closely with practices of sound art and challenges a Euclidean orientation of pitch and timbre space, makes way for a heightened consideration of listening and ‘the place’ of sound. This lineage is particularly crucial for my discussion, since it positions music in relation to social experiences and the everyday, which the work ‘Museum City’ endeavoured to embrace.

The validity of classical trajectory and perturbative quantal methods for electron-impact ionization from excited states in H-like ions

To test the validity of classical trajectory and perturbative quantal methods for electron-impact ionization of H-like ions from excited states, we have performed advanced close-coupling calculations of ionization from excited states in H, Li 2+ and B 4+ using the R -matrix with pseudo states and the time-dependent close-coupling methods. Comparisons with our classical trajectory Monte Carlo (CTMC) and distorted-wave (DW) calculations show that the CTMC method is more accurate than the DW method for H, but does not improve with n and grows substantially worse with Z , while the DW method improves with Z and grows worse with n .