State architecture: subsidiarity, devolution, federalism and independence

This chapter examines the current ‘architecture’ of the British state, in particular the way in which governmental power is distributed among the nations of the United Kingdom. The theme of this chapter will be to show how the continuing (and, as James Bryce argued, inevitable) tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces can be usefully applied to power relations between the various nations of the United Kingdom, and between these nations and Europe, providing a basis for analyzing how these nations are drawn or impelled by some forces towards a centralized unitary polity, whilst at the same time other forces tend towards dispersion of power. The resulting pattern might be analyzed along a spectrum from centralization to independence, with subsidiarity, devolution and federalism being seen as weigh stations along the way, but given how complex the variations in the distribution of power between these nations and the centre have become over time, the construction of any static architectural blueprint of the British state is bound to be misleading. Indeed, the architectural metaphor, with its implications of stability might usefully be rethought.

Michael Allen: Close Readings: Essays on Irish Poetry

The late Michael Allen was a member of the famous Belfast Group, and one of the most authoritative critical voices on poetry from Northern Ireland, intimately part of the North’s poetic movement since the early 1960s. He taught at Queen’s University, where he was a colleague of Seamus Heaney and tutor to poets such as Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian. Seamus Heaney called him ‘the reader over my shoulder’. Close Readings brings together interlinked critical writings which have crucially influenced approaches to Irish poetry during the last forty years. The book ends with an extended essay, hitherto unpublished: ‘Doubles, Twins and the Feminine: Development in the Poetry of Michael Longley’.

Close Readings contains a Foreword by Fran Brearton, which relates Michael Allen’s essays to continuing critical and cultural debates. Edna Longley’s Afterword offers a personal view of Allen’s involvement with poetry in Belfast.

Politics and Gender in Ireland: The Quest for Political Agency

This book explores the relationship between women, the state and democratic politics in Ireland today. It highlights the conservatism of the political culture shared by all traditions on the island, and how this culture circumscribes women’s political agency in Northern Ireland and Ireland. The book explores the opportunities and obstacles to women’s participation and representation on each side of the border. The chapters take the view that public decision-making institutions and processes are subject to rules and practices that reinforce the gendered foundations of democratic politics. They document women’s continuing quest for full participation and equal representation in these male-gendered arenas. The contributors focus on the marginalised experiences of women in modern politics in Ireland and detail their efforts to challenge the masculinized status quo. The book addresses the classical issues of citizenship, participation, representation and equal rights in a sustained analysis of the political systems on the island. It also deals with modern issues – multiculturalism, peace-building, the male-gendered legislature and the unequal nature of women’s citizenship in constitutional, institutional and policy contexts. The book is completed by a comprehensive appendix of all women elected to political office on the island from 1918-2013.

A Gendered Profession

A Gendered Profession, RIBA Publications, Oct 2016

For a profession that claims to be so concerned with the needs of society, the continuing gender imbalance in architectural education and practice is a difficult subject. Difficult, because it’s been stagnant for some thirty years. This book seeks to change that.
Beyond the profession, the emergence of fourth wave feminism has broken a twenty-year drought in the discourse[1]. A new generation of feminist critique is emerging, characterised by a broader civic commitment, one fuelled by the recognition that time and again, women and minorities have been the first casualties of neo-liberalism.
Whereas after World War II the architectural profession rallied around its obligation to fulfil a social need, today architecture has all but capitulated its absolute servitude to capitalism. Recognising that feminist thinking is a meaningful response to the inequalities of capitalism, A Gendered Profession will be a forum for a discussion about the failure of our profession – one that is so explicitly concerned with the design of inclusive environments – to resolve its own inequalities. Contributions have been sought and responses elicited from all corners of the discipline to propose strategies, attitudes and solutions to this crisis in representation.
At stake is more than just the lack of female representation. Male architects suffer from the same ingrained mechanisms of gender stereotyping, obliged to place professional commitments above those to their family and children. And while three quarters of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual architects report being comfortable about being open about their sexuality in the workplace, that number drops to just sixteen per cent when on the building site.
A Gendered Profession will aim to perform a diagnostic check of the architecture profession from one end of the spectrum to the other. Whereas much has been written on feminism and architecture, the majority is produced exclusively by women. A Gendered Profession has worked hard towards gender parity in both its contributions and editorial structure and therefore does not limit its understanding of gender to an either/or analogue. The chapters featured in the book are written by artists, academics, practitioners and students.
Through its diverse authorship, this book will provide the first ever attempt to move the debate beyond the tradition of gender-partitioned diagnostic or merely critical discourse on the gender and wider inclusivity debate towards something more propositional, actionable and transformative.

The first month of evolution of the slow-rising Type IIP SN 2013ej in M74

We present early photometric and spectroscopic observations of SN 2013ej, a bright Type IIP supernova (SN) in M74. SN 2013ej is one of the closest SNe ever discovered. The available archive images and the early discovery help to constrain the nature of its progenitor. The earliest detection of this explosion was on 2013 July 24.125 UT and our spectroscopic monitoring with the FLOYDS spectrographs began on July 27.7 UT, continuing almost daily for two weeks. Daily optical photometric monitoringwas achieved with the 1mtelescopes of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) network, and was complemented by UV data from Swift and near-infrared spectra from Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey of Transient Objects and Infrared Telescope Facility. The data from our monitoring campaign show that SN 2013ej experienced a 10 d rise before entering into a well-defined plateau phase. This unusually long rise time for a Type IIP has been seen previously in SN 2006bp and SN 2009bw. A relatively rare strong absorption blueward of Hα is present since our earliest spectrum. We identify this feature as Si II, rather than high-velocity Hα as sometimes reported in the literature. 

Managing pain medications in long-term care: nurses' views

The purpose of this study was to explore nurses' perceptions of their current practices related to administering pain medications to long-term care (LTC) residents. A cross-sectional survey design was used, including both quantitative and open-ended questions. Data were collected from 165 nurses (59% response rate) at nine LTC homes in southern Ontario, Canada. The majority (85%) felt that the medication administration system was adequate to help them manage residents' pain and 98% felt comfortable administering narcotics. In deciding to administer a narcotic, nurses were influenced by pain assessments, physician orders, diagnosis, past history, effectiveness of non-narcotics and fear of making dosage miscalculations or developing addictions. Finally, most nurses stated that they trusted the physicians and pharmacists to ensure orders were safe. These findings highlight nurses' perceptions of managing pain medications in LTC and related areas where continuing education initiatives for nurses are needed.

Beyond Criminal Justice: An anthology of abolitionist papers presented to conferences of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control over the past decade

Beyond Criminal Justice presents a vision of a future without brutal, authoritarian and repressive penal regimes. Many of the papers brought together here have been unavailable for more than two decades. Their republication indicates not only their continuing theoretical importance to abolitionist studies but also how they provide important insights into the nature and legitimacy of criminal processes in the here and now. Contributors highlight the human consequences of the harms of imprisonment, evidencing the hurt, injury and damage of penal incarceration across a number of different countries in Europe. Focusing on penal power and prisoner contestation to such power, the moral and political crises of imprisonment are laid bare. The contributors to Beyond Criminal Justice explore the urgent need for a coherent, rational and morally and politically sophisticated theoretical basis for penal abolitionism. Advocating a utopian imagination and at the same time practical solutions already implemented in countries around Europe - alongside grappling with controversial debates such as abolitionist responses to rape and sexual violence - the book steps outside of common sense assumptions regarding 'crime', punishment and 'criminal justice'. Beyond Criminal Justice will be of interest to students of criminology, zemiology, sociology, penology and critical legal studies as well as anyone interested in rethinking the problem of 'crime' and challenging the logic of the penal rationale.

Re-embedding economic and social constitutionalism:Normative perspectives for the EU

Introduction Tensions between the economic and the social dimensions of European integration are being perceived as increasing, and so is the potential for conflict between national and European levels of policy-making. Both are well illustrated by a highly controversial line of Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) cases on industrial relations: Viking and Laval have become symbols for the continuing dominance of the economic over the social dimension of European integration and for an increasing tendency of the EU to diminish national autonomy. As one consequence, demands to protect Member States’ social policy choices from EU law pressures arise. For such demands to be tenable, isolation of national and EU policy-making and of economic and social dimensions of European integration would have to be possible. This is arguably not the case. Economic and social dimensions of integration will thus have to be reconciled across EU and national levels, if the EU and its Member States are to maintain the ability of enhancing social justice against the pulls of economic globalisation.

'When I Land in Islamabad I Feel Home and When I Land in Heathrow I Feel Home': Gendered Belonging and Diasporic Identities of South Asian British Citizens in London, in Leicester and in North England

According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) ‘de-territorialization’ is followed by a moment of re-territorialization. This moment, however, has to be regarded as a continuing educational process that becomes a different spatial site of social practices. It is argued in this chapter that regional, local as well as global identification override national and mono-ethno cultural identities, while shaping particular notions of gendered belonging and creating specific diasporic practices. Based on a sample of interviews with professional and academic South Asian British citizens in London, in Leicester, and in a number of Northern English cities gendered and generational patterns in terms of local diasporic identities are explored. Apart from multiple cultural belonging, foremost, territorial bonds and notions of group loyalty collapse at a point where temporary migration and settlement alternate in individual biographies.

Wing Panel Design with Novel Skin-Buckling Containment Features

The impact of buckling containment features on the stability of thin-gauge fuselage, metallic stiffened panels has previously been demonstrated. With the continuing developments in manufacturing technology, such as welding, extrusion, machining, and additive layer manufacture, understanding the benefits of additional panel design features on heavier applications, such as wing panels, is timely. This compression testing of thick-gauge panels with and without buckling containment features has been undertaken to verify buckling and collapse behaviors and validate sizing methods. The experimental results demonstrated individual panel mass savings on the order of 9%, and wing cover design studies demonstrated mass savings on the order of 4 to 13%, dependent on aircraft size and material choice.

Violence and Commemoration in the New Northern Ireland: Space, Memory and Management

On June 27th 2012, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and former IRA commander, Martin McGuinness shook hands with Queen Elizabeth II for the first time at an event in Belfast. For many the gesture symbolised the consolidation of Northern Ireland's transition to peace, the meeting of cultures and traditions, and hope for the future. Only a few weeks later however violence spilled onto the streets of north and west Belfast following a series of commemorative parades, marking a summer of hostilities. Those hostilities spread into a winter of protest, riot and discontent around flags and emblems and a year of tensions and commemorative-related violence marked again by a summer of rioting and protest in 2013. Outwardly these examples present two very different pictures of the 'new' Northern Ireland; the former of a society moving forward and putting the past behind it and the latter apparently divided over and wedded to different constructions of the past. Furthermore they revealed two very different 'places', the public handshake in the arena of public space; the rioting and fighting occurring in spaces distanced from the public sphere. This paper has also illustrated the difficulties around the ‘public management’ of conflict and transition as many within public agencies struggle with duties to uphold good relations and promote good governance within an environment of political strife, hostility and continuing violence.

This paper presents the key findings and implications of an exploratory project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, explored the phenomenon of commemorative-related violence in Northern Ireland. We focus on 1) why the performance or celebration of the past can sometimes lead to violence in specific places; 2) map and analyse the levels of commemorative related violence in the past 15 years and 3) look at the public management implications of both conflict and transition at a strategic level within the public sector.

Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices

Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.

Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.

Histone deacetylase inhibitors suppress thymidylate synthase gene expression and synergize with the fluoropyrimidines in colon cancer cells

Despite recent therapeutic advances, the response rates to chemotherapy for patients with metastatic colon cancer remain at approximately 50% with the fluoropyrimidine, 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), continuing to serve as the foundation chemotherapeutic agent for the treatment of this disease. Previous studies have demonstrated that overexpression of thymidylate synthase (TS) is a key determinant of resistance to 5-FU-based chemotherapy. Therefore, there is a significant need to develop alternative therapeutic strategies to overcome TS-mediated resistance. In this study, we demonstrate that the histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi) vorinostat and LBH589 significantly downregulate TS gene expression in a panel of colon cancer cell lines. Downregulation of TS was independent of p53, p21 and HDAC2 expression and was achievable in vivo as demonstrated by mouse xenograft models. We provide evidence that HDACi treatment leads to a potent transcriptional repression of the TS gene. Combination of the fluoropyrimidines 5-FU or FUdR with both vorinostat and LBH589 enhanced cell cycle arrest and growth inhibition. Importantly, the downstream effects of TS inhibition were significantly enhanced by this combination including the inhibition of acute TS induction and the enhanced accumulation of the cytotoxic nucleotide intermediate dUTP. These data demonstrate that HDACi repress TS expression at the level of transcription and provides the first evidence suggesting a direct mechanistic link between TS downregulation and the synergistic interaction observed between HDACi and 5-FU. This study provides rationale for the continued clinical evaluation of HDACi in combination with 5-FU-based therapies as a strategy to overcome TS-mediated resistance.

Building Information Modelling (BIM) Software Interoperability: A Review of the Construction Sector

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is continuing to evolve and develop as the construction industry progresses towards level 2 maturity. However, one of the core barriers in this progression is the aspect of interoperability between software packages. This research and paper stems from a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) where both industry and academia come together to address this shortcoming within the sector. One of the core objectives of this partnership and the aim of this study is investigating potential solutions to this barrier, while also developing best working practices to be applied in industry. Using one of the case studies from this partnership (a temporary steel structure), this paper demonstrates a potential solution to addressing interoperability within structural analysis and detailing packages, MasterSeries and Revit respectively. The findings of the research indicate that a process based approach rather than that of additional software coding as being the preferred solution. The results of this preliminary research will aid in the development of the topic of interoperability within the sector, while also developing the knowledge and competencies of the parties within the KTP. The findings are explored further, by providing an overview of the resolution process adopted in this case study, in overcoming the interoperability that arose as the project progressed. It is envisaged that this study will assist the construction sector and its adoption of BIM technologies, while also addressing the critical aspect of operability between software.

Effective Teaching and Learning of Science in the Outdoors: A Blended Model

This paper reports on an innovative Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme which addressed transition issues and issues with conducting outdoor work and attitudes towards science through ‘Shared Learning' days between elementary and middle school transition classes. Teachers supported each other to overcome issues with conducting outdoor work and contributed their expertise from their educational stage. The project utilised a blended CPD approach of workshops, coteaching and in-class support and was based upon a wealth earlier successful CPD programmes to result in a sound theoretical framework.
The outcomes were measured using a thorough mixed-methods approach. This paper will report on the achieved outcomes with effective outdoor learning as the vehicle to overcome identified issues and key challenges for policy development.