Confusing Culture and Politics: Ulster Scots Culture and Music

In Northern Ireland of the mid-1990s, many were caught off-guard by the comet-like arrival of a previously unarticulated Ulster Scots identity, replete with its own folk traditions. The article exploits the author’s position as Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1998 until 2003 to offer an auto-ethnographic reflection on the literature on cultural politics in Northern Ireland since the outbreak of the Troubles, informed by extensive fieldwork with arts administrators and with contemporary Ulster Scots musicians. The article gives a close reading and historical contextualisation of the Ulster-Scots musical revue On Eagle's Wing, which was developed during this period. The article uses the concept of "suture" articulated by Lacan and developed by Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek to explain both the potential for Ulster Scots culture to enter political discourse out of a seeming vacuum and its subsequent difficulties, offering an original interpretation of the role of culture in the contemporary trajectory of Northern Ireland politics.

Fiddling for Outcomes: Traditional Music, Social Capital, and Arts Policy in Northern Ireland

Arts development policies increasingly tie funding to the potential of arts organisations to effectively deliver an array of extra-artistic social outcomes. This paper reports on the difficulties of this work in Northern Ireland, where the arts sector, and in particular the so-called 'traditional arts', have been drawn into a politically ambiguous discourse centered on the concepts of 'mutual understanding' and, more recently, 'social capital.' The paper traces the recent history of these policies and the difficulties in evaluating the social outcomes of arts programs. The use of the term 'social capital' in the work of Putnam and Bourdieu is considered. The paper argues, through a rereading of Bourdieu's articulation of the 'forms' of capital and Eagleton's 'ideology of the aesthetic,' the concept of social capital can be released from its current neoliberal trappings by imagining a reconnection of the concepts of 'capital' and 'the aesthetic.'

Photonic Guitar Pick-up: Fiber Strain Sensors Find Applications in Music Recording

In this report we give a summary of our work on the development of low-noise fiber-optic strain sensors. Three types of strain sensors were developed and were tested by attaching them to the bodies of acoustic guitars. The fibers are strained as the soundboards of the guitars vibrate. The resulting spectral shift of either a Fiber Bragg Grating or a fiber Fabry-Perot cavity is then used to record the sound of the instrument.

Strasheela: Design and usage of a music composition environment based on the Oz programming model

Strasheela provides a means for the composer to create a symbolic score by formally describing it in a rule-based way. The environment defines a rich music representation for complex polyphonic scores. Strasheela enables the user to define expressive compositional rules and then to apply them to the score. Compositional rules can restrict many aspects of the music - including the rhythmic structure, the melodic structure and the harmonic structure - by constraining the parameters (e.g. duration or pitch) of musical events according to some numerical or logical relation. Strasheela combines this expressivity with efficient search strategies.

Between “the Housewife” and “the Philosophy Professor”: Music, Narration and Address in Ousmane Sembene's Xala

The acclaimed Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene conceptualised himself as a modern day griot (West African oral performer), producing often didactic films that address a diverse spectatorship. Examining Xala, this paper argues that this address cannot be fully understood without attention to the film’s complex music/image relationships, which refigure classical and modernist film aesthetics to mobilise a discourse that recalls oral performance. In this way, Sembene negotiates the tensions of address generated by a spectatorship that is situated in the culturally hybrid spaces between the literate and the oral, the urban and the rural, and the global and the local.

‘Doing it with men’: feminist research practice and patriarchal inheritance practices in Welsh family farming

Internationally, the gender relations of the family farming ‘way of life’ have beenshown to be stubbornly persistent in their adherence to patriarchal inheritancepractices. This article demonstrates how such ‘agri-cultural’ practices are situated bothwithin the subjective sphere of farming individuals’ and within global agri-economics,bringing new challenges to patrilineal farm survival. It is suggested here that the recenttendency for post-structuralist theorisation in rural studies has underestimated theexistence and impact of patrilineal patterns in family farming. Such patterns mean thatwomen are shown to largely occupy relational gender identities as the ‘helper’, whilstmen are strongly identified as the ‘farmer’. Drawing on repeated life-history interviewsconducted with farming men and women from Powys, Mid Wales, the aim of thisarticle is to generate debate as to the extent to which men can be brought into feministresearch practice in order to reveal patriarchy to a greater degree. The article begins bysituating the near-exclusion of men from feminist research practice within theoreticaldevelopments in feminist geography. This discussion also assists in deriving issues ofresearch methods, positionality and interpretive power which focus the integration ofempirical material in the methodological reflections provided in section three. In sectiontwo, the rationale for the epistemological stance taken in the research is provided. Thearticle provides an example of the successful integration of men into a feminist researchframe, suggests avenues for theoretical development and identifies future researchdirections which can be informed by ‘doing it with men’.

Keywords: epistemology; family farming; feminist res