'Sometimes I wish I was an "ex" ex-prisoner': identity processes in the collective action participation of former prisoners in Northern Ireland

Since the signing of the Northern Ireland peace agreement a plethora of community based prisoner self-help organisations have been established wherein former prisoners staff, manage and deliver services to colleagues. By forging and maintaining their collective identities through community based mutual aid, members of these self-help organisations have progressed to create not only individual change/assistance but have also developed and evolved to tackle serious wider social issues which impact on the members of their organisations. This article critically analyses how the conditions of a post conflict society can influence both the development and evolution of these organisations and also how members situate their claims about the self in the organisation and beyond. Using the social movement framework it is argued that the work of these self-help organisations have given rise to a new politics of identity … that is the ‘politically motivated’ ex-prisoner. ©2013 Taylor & Francis

Diachronic Change in Verbal Agreement Patterns with Majorité

This article is concerned with the description of data relating to a case of morphosyntactic variation and change in French: verbal agreement patterns with the noun majorité (‘majority’). Quantitative analysis of apparent-time data from cloze (‘gap-fill’) tests suggests that plural agreement with this noun is increasing; data from a diachronic corpus study confirm that this is the case. A number of factors are found to constrain this variation and change, including most importantly the presence and number of a post-modifying noun phrase (e.g. la majorité des hommes). The implications of these findings for the definition of collective nouns in French are discussed.

Variation and Change in French Morphosyntax: The Case of Collective Nouns

Collective nouns such as majorité or foule have long been of interest to linguists for their unusual semantic properties, and provide a valuable source of new data on the evolution of French grammar. This book tests the hypothesis that plural agreement with collective nouns is becoming more frequent in French. Through an analysis of data from a variety of sources, including sociolinguistic interviews, gap-fill tests and corpora, the complex linguistic and external factors which affect this type of agreement are examined, shedding new light on their interaction in this context. Broader questions concerning the methodological challenges of studying variation and change in morphosyntax, and the application of sociolinguistic generalisations to the French of France, are also addressed.

Reviews:

‘Cet ouvrage constitue un apport majeur dans le champ de la linguistique variationniste et diachronique, tant par les résultats mis au jour que par la qualité de sa démarche méthodologique.’ — Sophie Prévost, French Studies 69.4, October 2015, 578-79

‘While language variation and change have been the focal point for linguists on this side of the Atlantic, Tristram argues that studies on morphosyntactic variation in French studies are lacking due to a focus on phonology and dialectology as well as denial of variation and change in the French language. Tristram’s book is thus a welcome contribution.’ — Samira Hassa, French Review 89.3, 2016, 108

‘Anyone teaching variation in French will want to talk about the findings and reflections reported in this study. A remarkable amount of ground is covered in a small compass. This is a highly welcome addition to the Legenda list, and one must hope that further linguistics titles will be added to it before very long.’ — Nigel Armstrong, Journal of French Language Studies 26.2, 2016, 211-13

Participatory Action Research with and within community activist groups: capturing the collective experience of Ireland's Community and Voluntary Pillar

The inclusion of community activists in policy planning is increasingly recognized at the highest international level. This article shows how the use of Participatory Action Research (PAR) can present a deeper and more holistic picture of the experiences of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in shaping national-level social policy. By utilizing action-based research, the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP) of Ireland’s system of social partnership is shown to be an important agent in deliberating national bargaining outcomes (known as the Towards 2016 national agreement). The key contribution of this research is the reflective methodological considerations in terms of PAR design, execution and participant integration in the research process as a way to enrich and develop a deeper and more informed community of practice.

Autonomous collective agreements as a regulatory device in European labour law:How to read Article 139 EC

This article discusses whether European social partners can derive the competence to autonomously devise European collective labour agreements from Article 139 EC (equals Article III-212 Constitution of Europe). Placing the question in the context of discussions of EU governance and private lawmaking in general, the author starts with a comparative overview of legal conceptions for collective labour agreements in Europe, focusing on three Member States' orders where their effects are not or only partly regulated by state legislation. Based on this comparison, she analyses Article 139(2) and offers a new interpretation of its provisions concerning autonomous implementation of European social partner agreements. She concludes that European social partners do have the competence to agree on a basic agreement stating the rules for European collective bargaining autonomously.

Discourses of equality in post-Agreement Northern Ireland

This article analyses the use of equality as a concept central to the implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. The authors argue that, although equality legislation is succeeding in redressing previous discrimination in society, the discourses that have emerged around it have exacerbated competition and polarization between communities for two main reasons. Firstly, in " selling' the Agreement to their supporters, political elites have appropriated community-specific definitions of the concept, thus reinforcing rather than weakening group differences. Secondly, the practice of equality legislation involves the definitive categorization of individuals as members of particular groups. This article examines these processes and their effects through the analysis of the discourse of nationalist and Unionist Party elites and of individual Catholics and Protestants. This is done in order to capture the dynamics of change in political communication and identification rather than simply describing institutional alterations.

Entanglement between collective operators in a linear harmonic chain

We investigate entanglement between collective operators of two blocks of oscillators in an infinite linear harmonic chain. These operators are defined as averages over local operators (individual oscillators) in the blocks. On the one hand, this approach of "physical blocks" meets realistic experimental conditions, where measurement apparatuses do not interact with single oscillators but rather with a whole bunch of them, i.e., where in contrast to usually studied "mathematical blocks" not every possible measurement is allowed. On the other, this formalism naturally allows the generalization to blocks which may consist of several noncontiguous regions. We quantify entanglement between the collective operators by a measure based on the Peres-Horodecki criterion and show how it can be extracted and transferred to two qubits. Entanglement between two blocks is found even in the case where none of the oscillators from one block is entangled with an oscillator from the other, showing genuine bipartite entanglement between collective operators. Allowing the blocks to consist of a periodic sequence of subblocks, we verify that entanglement scales at most with the total boundary region. We also apply the approach of collective operators to scalar quantum field theory.

Hydrogen bonding and collective proton modes in clusters and periodic layers of squaric acid: A density functional study

Hydrogen bonding in clusters and extended layers of squaric acid molecules has been investigated by density functional computations. Equilibrium geometries, harmonic vibrational frequencies, and energy barriers for proton transfer along hydrogen bonds have been determined using the Car-Parrinello method. The results provide crucial parameters for a first principles modeling of the potential energy surface, and highlight the role of collective modes in the low-energy proton dynamics. The importance of quantum effects in condensed squaric acid systems has been investigated, and shown to be negligible for the lowest-energy collective proton modes. This information provides a quantitative basis for improved atomistic models of the order-disorder and displacive transitions undergone by squaric acid crystals as a function of temperature and pressure. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.