Narrative Personae and Visual Signs: Reading Leonard’s intimate photo-memoir. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

: In this paper, I look at Joanne Leonard’s Being in Pictures and engage in a critical dialogue with an assemblage of visual and textual narratives that comprise her intimate photo memoir. In doing this I draw on Hannah Arendt’s take on narratives as tangible traces of uniqueness and plurality, political traits par excellence in the cultural histories of the human condition. Being aware of my role as a reader/viewer/interpreter of a woman artist’s auto/biographical narratives, I move beyond dilemmas of representation or questions of unveiling “the real Leonard”. The artist is instead configured as a narrative persona, whose narratives respond to three interrelated themes of inquiry, namely the visualization of spatial technologies, vulnerability and the gendering of memory. Key words: gendered memories, narrative persona, spatial technologies, photo memoir, vulnerability

The autobiographical you: letters in the gendered politics of the labour movement.

In this article, I consider the importance of epistolary narratives in the interface of autobiography and politics. In doing this, I read the letters of Fannia Mary Cohn, a Jewish immigrant worker, trade union activist and ardent labour organizer in the garment industry in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century. Cohn was a prolific writer and political activist and left a rich body of labour literature, but never wrote an autobiography or a diary or journal. It is in her letters to her comrades and friends in the labour movement that short autobiographical stories erupt and it is on such stories across her correspondence that this article focuses. The analysis is informed by Hannah Arendt’s theorization of narratives in their interrelation with politics and history. Drawing on a rich body of feminist literature around the relational self, what I argue is that an Arendtian reading of epistolary narratives is a useful analytical tool in understanding gendered politics in the diverse histories of the labour movement.

The PREDICTS database: a global database of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human impacts

Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species’ threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that support computation of a range of biodiversity indicators, is necessary to enable better understanding of historical declines and to project – and avert – future declines. We describe and assess a new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world. The database contains measurements taken in 208 (of 814) ecoregions, 13 (of 14) biomes, 25 (of 35) biodiversity hotspots and 16 (of 17) megadiverse countries. The database contains more than 1% of the total number of all species described, and more than 1% of the described species within many taxonomic groups – including flowering plants, gymnosperms, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. The dataset, which is still being added to, is therefore already considerably larger and more representative than those used by previous quantitative models of biodiversity trends and responses. The database is being assembled as part of the PREDICTS project (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems – www.predicts.org.uk). We make site-level summary data available alongside this article. The full database will be publicly available in 2015.

Most Significant Change in conflict settings: staff development through monitoring and evaluation

Capoeira4Refugees is an NGO that uses the Afro-Brazilian art-form of Capoeira to promote psychosocial well-being in children affected by conflict and occupation. Capoeira4Refugees introduced the Most Significant Change (MSC) methodology to monitor and evaluate project implementation and impact across two locations in the Middle East. Analysis of interviews conducted with five field staff revealed that in line with, and building on previous research, MSC became an empowering tool that led to staff development. The potential for MSC to build staff reflexivity, independence and leadership has implications for other organisations working in conflict areas, particularly in situations of remote management.