School of Humanities and Performing Arts​

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 1989
  • ItemMetadata only
    Two Duets with Occasion
    (Shearsman, 2024-05-01) Perril, Simon
    Perril’s new collection Two Duets with Occasion gathers two discrete works. ‘45 Days in the Company of Robert Walser’ turns to the Swiss modernist as guide to the inner workings of educational workplaces, and the lived experience of them. Alchemy, according to Jung, was a quest for individuation. Inhabiting Walser’s pioneering absurdist work exploring a school for servants, Perril finds alarming parallels between the transformative ‘suffering’ of metals in their journey to a higher state, and contemporary workplace rhetorics of self-development and transformation. Sun Deck Set Cogitation collapses the boundaries between reading and writing by playing with two texts by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The first is a forensically detailed moment by moment account of a sunset written in 1935 while en route from Marseilles to Brazil; the second his account of a 1941 voyage escaping occupied France alongside fellow refugee André Breton. As Perril explains, ‘I inhabited Lévi-Strauss’s text like it was a ship’s deck I was walking across or around.’ The poet takes impetus from an early epiphany Lévi-Strauss had looking at the formal intricacy and structural play of dandelion seed heads that give rise to other forms. His poetic ‘treatment’ of the source texts scatter and recombine word-seeds in surprising combinations: blowing on a seed-head and spreading palimpsestic filaments.
  • ItemEmbargo
    White City: the world's first Olympic stadium
    (The Historical Association, 2023) Polley, Martin
    The modern Olympic Games were first held in 1896, but it was not until their fourth edition, held in London 1908, that they had a purpose-built stadium as their sporting and ceremonial heart. This article explores that stadium’s history. At a time when the Olympic movement did not consider the legacies of its venues, the stadium was due to close at the end of 1908: but it survived and found multiple new uses before its closure and demolition in 1985. The article considers the stadium’s unplanned influence on London’s sporting life, and ends with a review of the site now.
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    Finding My Way: Walking as Research in Sports History
    (University of Gothenburg, 2024) Polley, Martin
    In 2006, I walked the route of the 1908 London Olympic Marathon as part of a research project on the city’s Olympic history. With this physical act of research and recovery, I aimed to make the route itself more well-known as a site in local history. The physical nature of the research was a new departure for me. In this personal, reflexive article, I revisit the project to explore my motivations, methods and the impact that the walk had on my practice as a sports historian.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Creating Space for Creative Voices
    (National Association of Writers in Education, 2024-02-05) Smith, Sabrina
    This is an article that examines how evidence can be gathered and objectives set when teaching creative writing in Further Education and community contexts. This article offers practical advice to set objectives in the creative writing classroom that produces activities targeted at marginalized groups. It discusses the practicalities of delivering creative writing in community settings: from care homes to online teaching.
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    Normative behaviourism: groups it cannot reach?
    (Taylor and Francis, 2023-11-15) Stevens, Simon
    In this article, I critique Jonathan Floyd’s method of normative behaviourism (NB): that we should measure political preference for a political system from levels of crime and insurrection. First, I distinguish between problems with the data and problems with the theory. I proceed to examine 6 groups who present a difficulty for NB and identify the common thread: NB abstracts the capacity of groups to commit crime and insurrection, and therefore, misreads them in the data as normative approval of a political system. Next, I argue that this a problem, especially as that capacity is often caused by the conditions of the political structure such groups live within. This lack of capacity often means they are amongst the most vulnerable. Consequently, NB needs to be careful of overlooking corrective justice. Subsequently, I offer some simple amendments to NB, followed by two complementary approaches: ethnography and fictional narratives.
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    Excerpt from Sun Deck Set Cogitation, Promenade 3
    (Shuddhashar Freevoice, 2024-02-16) Perril, S. D.
    This is a further excerpt from my book-length poem-in-progress Sun Set Deck Cogitation. Each of the six ‘decks’, or 'promenades', in the poem differently negotiates the text of a notebook entry description of a sunset the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss made from the deck of a ship. This excerpt is from ‘Promenade Deck 3'. There is an accompanying essay listed separately in the repository.
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    Excerpt from Sun Deck Set Cogitation: Promenade, Deck 3
    (2024-02-08) Perril, S. D.
    This is a further excerpt from my book-length poem-in-progress Sun Deck Set Cogitation. Each of the six ‘decks,’ or ‘promenades’, in the poem differently negotiates the text of a notebook entry description of a sunset the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss made from the deck of a ship. This excerpt is from ‘promenade: deck 3.’ There is an accompanying essay listed separately in the repository.
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    'Good to Think With’: My Surrealism
    (Shuddhashar Freevoice, 2024-02-08) Perril, S. D.
    This essay gives an account of my writing, and visual, practice's relationship to Surrealism. It offers a contextualized discussion of the research areas my long poem Sun Deck Set Cogitation is informed by; and situates it within a larger poetry ongoing poetry project called 'The Diver's Manual.' The essay revisits surrealism within the context of practice research, and discusses the complex relationship anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss had to Andre Breton as fellow exiles leaving occupied France. It also discusses my visual collage practice, and contains a brief account of how Sun Deck Set Cogitation has also become an installation collaboration with composer John Young.
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    Three Visual Collages
    (Shuddhashar Freevoice, 2024-02-08) Perril, S. D.
    These three collages are taken from two projects. 'The Idea of Cinema in the Mind of a Painting' was made to accompany my book 'Nitrate', a book of poems concerning the emergence of cinema as an accidental by-product of scientific research into how to capture motion. The other two images are taken from my ongoing 'collage novel' called 'Under Austerity Rubble, Ancient Bird Folk Laid Future Eggs.'
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    Five poems from '45 Days in the Company of Robert Walser'
    (Blackbox Manifold, 2024-01-19) Perril, S. D.
    These are five poems from a longer work in progress. '45 Days in the Company of Robert Walser' finds renewed relevance in the work of Austrian nascent Modernist novelist Robert Walser in the context of Mark Fisher’s account of the effects ‘Capitalist Realism’ (2009) has had upon work, culture and education. It pays particular attention to Walser’s novel 1909 novel Jakob Von Gunten, a pioneering absurdist work exploring a school for servants.
  • ItemEmbargo
    “Quickening Life:” Motherhood and the Unborn Child in Aurora Leigh and The Ring and the Book
    (University of California Press, 2024-06) Phelan, J. P.
    This article examines two major nineteenth-century poems -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), and Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868-9) -- in relation to their treatment of the 'unborn child'. It traces the development of medical knowledge and legal restrictions relating to this topic across the century, and looks at the ways in which both poems respond to these developments by making care for and protection of the 'unborn child' central to the fates of the central characters of both poems.
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    Support group or transgender lobby? Representing Mermaids in the British press
    (Taylor and Francis, 2023-12-18) Bailey, Aimee; Mackenzie, Jai
    This article examines representations of Mermaids, a charity that supports trans young people and their families, in the British press. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, we identify and chart patterns in reporting between Mermaids’ inception as a charity in 2015, and 2022, a turbulent year for both the charity and trans people in the UK more generally. The findings show that, in the early years, there is relatively little attention to Mermaids in the press. Where they are mentioned, the charity is represented as a useful source of advice and support, and their service users as happy and united. However, 2018 represents a turning point, with increasingly negative and misleading portrayals of Mermaids coinciding with a rise in public interest and funding. By 2019, media interest in the charity has surged and the impression of Mermaids as a support group for families is supplanted by the image of a powerful, dangerous and controversial organisation. We argue that the increasingly excessive, negative and polarised reporting around Mermaids is a strategy for indirectly delegitimising and attacking the lives of trans young people themselves. In a burgeoning culture war, Mermaids is used as a weapon against the very people they seek to support.
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    Margaret Maughan
    (Oxford University Press, 2023-12) Polley, Martin
    Biography of Margaret Maughan (1928-2020), multiple medallist at the International Stoke Mandeville Games, the forerunners to the Paralympics. Biography of Paralympian archer and swimmer Margaret Maughan (1928-2020)
  • ItemOpen Access
    Coubertin Oak Tree, Much Wenlock
    (Arete Verlag, 2023) Polley, Martin
    A brief history of the oak tree that Pierre de Coubertin planted in Much Wenlock. The chapter forms part of a book on a history of European sport in 100 objects.
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    Clipped
    (Reflex Press, 2022-07-28) Dixon, Joanne
    'Clipped' is a story published in an international flash fiction anthology of international writers. The anthology contains page-long stories of less than 360 words selected for publication by Reflex Press.
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    The Olympic Winter Games at 100
    (Routledge, 2024) Dichter, Heather L.; Teetzel, Sarah
    2024 marks the 100-year anniversary of the winter sports week festival celebrated in Chamonix in 1924, which is now recognized as the first Olympic Winter Games. As a globally watched quadrennial mega-event, the winter Olympics is unique from both summer sport festivals and other winter festivals, such as the Winter X Games. This book explores the impacts, issues, and legacies of the past century of the Olympic Winter Games. Grounded in sport history, the chapters in this volume draw on the disciplines of cultural history, diplomatic history, global history, environmental history, and media history to analyze the continued allure of the winter Olympics, a century after its origin, and in light of the sustained and significant problems facing the Olympic movement. Host cities’ efforts to create positive and lasting legacies are analyzed to highlight the challenges and complexities that have plagued the Olympic movement throughout the last century. The Olympic Winter Games at 100 is essential reading for any researcher, advanced student, or scholar with an interest in Olympic Studies, sports development, sport policy, and history.
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    “Fairness versus inclusion”: Representations of transgender athletes in British newspaper reports
    (De Gruyter, 2023-11-20) Bailey, Aimee; Jones, Lucy
    Following the increasing visibility of successful trans athletes and the rise of anti-gender movements such as ‘gender critical feminism’, policies concerning trans women’s participation in elite women’s sport have sparked intense debate in online and traditional media. Although policies about trans inclusion have been in place at the highest levels of sports, such as the Olympics, for decades, the perceived disruption of long-standing categories which are rooted in the concept of sex as a binary and immutable fact has proven deeply controversial. The issue also relates to broader discourse around the inclusion of trans women in female spaces more generally; this has become highly divisive, as gender critical voices argue that trans inclusion threatens women’s ‘sex-based rights’. We investigate the discourse surrounding this debate via a specific case study: representations of the American swimmer and trans woman Lia Thomas, whose win at a women’s 500-yard freestyle event in March 2022 led to widespread news coverage. We conduct corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of British newspaper coverage of this story, taking a queer and feminist approach to the data. We find that news coverage of trans inclusion in elite sport typically reproduces cisnormative assumptions about binary sex, and that implicitly transphobic language is often used to frame trans identities as abnormal. In this way, the inclusion of trans women in sport is framed as being fundamentally unfair to cisgender women. We argue that this discourse suppresses any serious consideration of how trans women could be included in elite sport, and advocate for media coverage which is informed by - and which represents - a more balanced range of perspectives.
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    Glossary of Printing and Misprinting: Japanese
    (Oxford University Press, 2023) Kato, Takako; Watanabe, Akihiko; Della Racca de Candel, Geri; Grafton, Anthony; Sachet, Paolo
    Translation of Glossary of Printing and Misprinting into Japanese
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    “No importance and no value”? Geniza sources on personal shopping and the 'economy of regard'
    (Bloomsbury Publishing India, 2023-07-30) Lambourn, E.
    This chapter explores the relationships between domestic and commercial worlds, and the potential of documents from the Cairo Geniza to contribute to this exploration. In this contribution, I focus on the shopping activities of India traders and the ways that shopping for business partners worked to consolidate networks as well as to build both domestic and commercial spaces. In the first part of this contribution, I drill down into the mechanisms of exchange which underlay the shipments of household items intended for personal and family use in India. In the second I work with the idea of the ‘economy of regard’ first proposed by the economic historian Avner Offer in the article ‘Between the Gift and the Market’, written in the late 1990s, to unpick how shopping for goods destined for ‘the personal use of the Jewish merchant in India and his family’ constituted an opportunity for the accumulation and consolidation of regard within the merchant community, or, from another perspective, a potentially dangerous activity that imperilled regard.