Death has a touch of class: society and space in Brookwood Cemetery, 1853-1903

Changes in the cultures and spaces of death during the Victorian era reveal the shifting conceptualisations and mobilisations of class in this period. Using the example of Brookwood Necropolis, established 1852 in response to the contemporary burial reform debate, the paper explores tensions within the sanitary reform movement, 1853–1903. Whilst reformist ideology grounded the cemetery's practices in a discourse of inclusion, one of the consequences of reform was to reinforce class distinctions. Combined with commercial imperatives and the modern impulse towards separation of living and dead, this aspect of reform enacted a counter-discourse of alienation. The presence of these conflicting strands in the spaces and practices of the Necropolis and their changes during the time period reflect wider urban trends.

High-resolution (space, time) anthropogenic heat emissions: London 1970-2025

The anthropogenic heat emissions generated by human activities in London are analysed in detail for 2005–2008 and considered in context of long-term past and future trends (1970–2025). Emissions from buildings, road traffic and human metabolism are finely resolved in space (30 min) and time (200 × 200 m2). Software to compute and visualize the results is provided. The annual mean anthropogenic heat flux for Greater London is 10.9 W m−2 for 2005–2008, with the highest peaks in the central activities zone (CAZ) associated with extensive service industry activities. Towards the outskirts of the city, emissions from the domestic sector and road traffic dominate. Anthropogenic heat is mostly emitted as sensible heat, with a latent heat fraction of 7.3% and a heat-to-wastewater fraction of 12%; the implications related to the use of evaporative cooling towers are briefly addressed. Projections indicate a further increase of heat emissions within the CAZ in the next two decades related to further intensification of activities within this area.

Terrorist transgressions: gendered representations of the terrorist in visual culture

The aim of Terrorist Transgressions is to analyse the myths inscribed in images of the terrorist and identify how agency is attributed to representation through invocations and inversions of gender stereotypes. In modern discourses on the terrorist the horror experienced in Western societies was the appearance of a new sense of the vulnerability of the body politic, and therefore of the modern self with its direct dependency on security and property. The terrorist has been constructed as the epitome of transgression against economic resources and moral, physical and political boundaries. Although terrorism has been the focus of intense academic activity, cultural representations of the terrorist have received less attention. Yet terrorism is dependent on spectacle and the topic is subject to forceful exposure in popular media. While the terrorist is predominantly aligned with masculinity, women have been active in terrorist organisations since the late 19th century and in suicidal terrorist attacks since the 1980s. Such attacks have confounded constructions of femininity and masculinity, with profound implications for the gendering of violence and horror. The publication arises from an AHRC networking grant, 2011-12, with Birkbeck, and includes collaboration with the army at Sandhurst RMA. The project relates to a wider investigation into feminism, violence and contemporary art.

Femininity, feminism and the terrorist

This chapter aims to discuss the relationship between femininity and representations of women involved in violence, focussing on visual representations. Miranda Alison has made the point that the repeated necessity to qualify the term 'combatant' with the descriptor 'female' draws attention to how women soldiers, female freedom fighters, female suicide bombers and female terrorists are exceptional figures. That the female combatant or the female terrorist is an aberration or a deviation from a masculine norm is undermined by the lengthy history of women as warriors, fighters, and terrorists. In that sense it is not so much that fighting women are rare but that there is amnesia within cultural memories concerning the woman fighter. However, in representations of conflict, the dominant image associated with femininity is passive; that is as the defenceless and the defended, or as the allegory of peace. Moreover, representations of men in wars as defeated or wounded means feminising such figures. Miriam Cooke, in her Women and the War Story, 1996, points out how a mythic war story provides men with political roles, in the politikon or public arena, whereas women are domesticated in the space of the oikon. In the mythic war story women may function as Mater Dolorosa, Patriotic Mother or Spartan Mother. It follows then that there are conditions in which it is permissible to represent women fighting on behalf of their children or in defence of the home, and in the absence of men. These images are also found in wider culture: Sarah Connor in Terminator or Ripley in Alien, for example. Images of the female terrorist raise new issues but I want to argue that it is also the case that discussing femininity and the terrorist must involve relating such imagery to representations of the female warrior over a longer timespan. Some questions have shifted since the late twentieth century. Dating from the early 1990s, most Western nations increasingly incorporated women into combat roles within their armed forces. This paper will aim to unpick some of the intricate connections between the increasing presence of women in the armed forces, what relationship this has to emancipation and the participation of women in violence classed as terrorist.

Star/poverty space: the making of the ‘development celebrity’

What is it that gives celebrities the voice and authority to do and say the things they do in the realm of development politics? Asked another way, how is celebrity practised and, simultaneously, how does this praxis make celebrity, personas, politics and, indeed, celebrities themselves? In this article, we explore this ‘celebrity praxis’ through the lens of the creation of the contemporary ‘development celebrity’ in those stars working for development writ large in the so-called Third World. Drawing on work in science studies, material cultures and the growing geo-socio-anthropologies of things, the key to understanding the material practices embedded in and creating development celebrity networks is the multiple and complex circulations of the everyday and bespectacled artefacts of celebrity. Conceptualised as the ‘celebrity–consumption–compassion complex’, the performances of development celebrities are as much about everyday events, materials, technologies, emotions and consumer acts as they are about the mediated and liquidised constructions of the stars who now ‘market’ development.Moreover, this complex is constructed by and constructs what we are calling ‘star/poverty space’ that works to facilitate the ‘expertise’ and ‘authenticity’ and, thus, elevated voice and authority, of development celebrities through poverty tours, photoshoots, textual and visual diaries, websites and tweets. In short, the creation of star/poverty space is performed through a kind of ‘materiality of authenticity’ that is at the centre of the networks of development celebrity. The article concludes with several brief observations about the politics, possibilities and problematics of development celebrities and the star/poverty spaces that they create.

Postmodernism, culture and feminism: the aesthetics of space and performance in Rock Follies and Rock Follies of '77

This article discusses the aesthetic and spatial representational strategies of the popular studio-based musical television drama serials Rock Follies and Rock Follies of ’77. It analyses how the texts’ themes relating to women and the entertainment industry are mediated through their postmodern ironic mode and representation of fantastic spaces. Rock Follies’ distinctive stylised aesthetic and mode of caricature are analysed with reference to the visual intentions and ‘voice’ of the writer, Howard Schuman. Through considering the programmes’ various spatial strategies, the article draws attention to the importance of visual and performance style in their postmodern discourse on culture, fantasy, gender and subjectivity. Analysis of the spaces of musical performance, characters’ domestic environments and simulated entertainment spaces reveals how a dialectic is established between the escapist imaginative pleasures of fantasy and the manipulative and exploitative practices of the culture industry. The shift from the optimism of the first series, when the LittleLadies first form, to the darker mood of the second series, in which they are increasingly divided by industry pressures, is traced through changes in the aesthetics of space and characterisation. As a space of artifice, performance and electronic visual manipulation that facilitates the texts’ reflexive representation of culture and feminised fantasy, the studio’s unique aesthetic strengths emerge through this case study.

Socially anxious mothers’ narratives to their children, and their relation to child representations and adjustment

Anxious mothers’ parenting, particularly transfer of threat information, has been considered important in their children’s risk for social anxiety disorder (SAnxD), and maternal narratives concerning potential social threat could elucidate this contribution. Maternal narratives to their pre-school 4-5 year-old children, via a picture book about starting school, were assessed in socially anxious (N=73), and non-anxious (N=63) mothers. Child representations of school were assessed via Doll Play (DP). After one school term, mothers (CBCL) and teachers (TRF) reported on child internalizing problems, and child SAnxD was assessed via maternal interview. Relations between these variables, infant behavioral inhibition, and attachment, were examined. Socially anxious mothers showed more negative (higher threat attribution), and less supportive (lower encouragement) narratives, than controls, and their children’s DP representations, SAnxD and CBCL scores were more adverse. High narrative threat predicted child SAnxD; lower encouragement predicted negative child CBCL scores and, particularly for behaviorally inhibited children, TRF scores and DP representations. In securely attached children, CBCL scores and risk for SAnxD were affected by maternal anxiety and threat attributions, respectively. Low encouragement mediated the effects of maternal anxiety on child DP representations, and CBCL scores. Maternal narratives are affected by social anxiety, and contribute to adverse child outcome.

Emotions and the habitus: Young people with socio-emotional differences (re)producing social, emotional and cultural capital in family and leisure space-times

In this paper we explore the importance of emotionally inter-dependent relationships to the functioning of embodied social capital and habitus. Drawing upon the experiences of young people with socio-emotional differences, we demonstrate how emotionally inter-dependent and relatively nurturing relationships are integral to the acquisition of social capital and to the co-construction and embodiment of habitus. The young people presented in this paper often had difficulties in forging social relationships and in acquiring symbolic and cultural capital in school spaces. However, we outline how these young people (re)produce and embody alternative kinds of habitus, based on emotionally reciprocal relationships forged through formal and informal leisure activities and familial and fraternal social relationships. These alternative forms of habitus provide sites of subjection, scope for acquiring social and cultural capital and a positive sense of identity in the face of problematic relations and experiences in school spaces.

Enhanced affective brain representations of chocolate in cravers vs. non-cravers

To examine the neural circuitry involved in food craving, in making food particularly appetitive and thus in driving wanting and eating, we used fMRI to measure the response to the flavour of chocolate, the sight of chocolate and their combination in cravers vs. non-cravers. Statistical parametric mapping (SPM) analyses showed that the sight of chocolate produced more activation in chocolate cravers than non-cravers in the medial orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum. For cravers vs. non-cravers, a combination of a picture of chocolate with chocolate in the mouth produced a greater effect than the sum of the components (i.e. supralinearity) in the medial orbitofrontal cortex and pregenual cingulate cortex. Furthermore, the pleasantness ratings of the chocolate and chocolate-related stimuli had higher positive correlations with the fMRI blood oxygenation level-dependent signals in the pregenual cingulate cortex and medial orbitofrontal cortex in the cravers than in the non-cravers. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show that there are differences between cravers and non-cravers in their responses to the sensory components of a craved food in the orbitofrontal cortex, ventral striatum and pregenual cingulate cortex, and that in some of these regions the differences are related to the subjective pleasantness of the craved foods. Understanding individual differences in brain responses to very pleasant foods helps in the understanding of the mechanisms that drive the liking for specific foods and thus intake of those foods.

Expected value, reward outcome, and temporal difference error representations in a probabilistic decision task

In probabilistic decision tasks, an expected value (EV) of a choice is calculated, and after the choice has been made, this can be updated based on a temporal difference (TD) prediction error between the EV and the reward magnitude (RM) obtained. The EV is measured as the probability of obtaining a reward x RM. To understand the contribution of different brain areas to these decision-making processes, functional magnetic resonance imaging activations related to EV versus RM (or outcome) were measured in a probabilistic decision task. Activations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex were correlated with both RM and with EV and confirmed in a conjunction analysis to extend toward the pregenual cingulate cortex. From these representations, TD reward prediction errors could be produced. Activations in areas that receive from the orbitofrontal cortex including the ventral striatum, midbrain, and inferior frontal gyrus were correlated with the TD error. Activations in the anterior insula were correlated negatively with EV, occurring when low reward outcomes were expected, and also with the uncertainty of the reward, implicating this region in basic and crucial decision-making parameters, low expected outcomes, and uncertainty.

Semantic self-knowledge and episodic self-knowledge: Independent or interrelated representations?

In this study of the structure of self-knowledge, we examined priming effects for the recall of personal episodes in order to investigate whether abstract trait knowledge and personal episodes are independent mental representations. We found that accessing similar abstract representations of traits facilitated a faster recall of related personal episodes than did accessing irrelevant abstract representations of traits (Experiments 1 and 2), reading a nonword prime (Experiments 2 and 3), accessing knowledge of one's mother (Experiment 3), or accessing semantic knowledge (Experiment 3). Contrary to previous findings, which indicated that abstract trait knowledge is represented independently of related personal episodes (e.g., Klein & Loftus, 1993, our results suggest that abstract trait knowledge is associated with personal episodes, and therefore that semantic self-knowledge is associated with episodic self-knowledge in long-term self-knowledge.