Empty Places Research Articles

Filling the empties in supported housing: How big is the problem and what can be done?

EMPTY PLACES IN SUPPORTED housing can be very costly. How significant is this problem, why does it happen and what should be done? A study commissioned by the former Cleveland Special Needs Housing Forum, funded through a Housing Corporation Grant, looked at void levels and how to reduce them. This paper reports on the results of the study.

Shadowed ground: America's landscapes of violence and tragedy

From the battlefield at Gettysburg to the Oklahoma City block where the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building once stood, sites of violence and tragedy have left indelible marks on the American landscape. Some have become places of pilgrimage, where visitors mourn losses, learn lessons from the tragedy, and experience renewal. Others became empty places where nothing remains to commemorate or even to mark the occurrence. In this pioneering book, Kenneth E. Foote explores how and why Americans have memorialized--or not--the sites of tragic and violent events. Drawing on years of travel and reflection, he traces the history of sites spanning three centuries and every region of the United States. Foote deduces that Americans usually react to the scenes of tragedy in one of four ways. Many places undergo public sanctification, such as Memphis' Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Some are simply designated with a marker, while others are rectified and returned to normal use. Those that produce shame and revulsion are often obliterated and left empty. These differing reactions to sites of violence offer an important new perspective to the debate over violence in American society.

Die deutsche Barockliteratur im literarischen Kanon

Although ›baroque‹ in the meaning of ›bombastic mannerism‹ seems to exclude canonization, a few baroque authors and texts have, by taking manifold historical hurdles and proving original and exemplary, passed into the canon of German literary history, mainly some poetry and the novel Simplicissimus. Even if the 17th century was hardly ever discussed in debates on canon, it turned out that only multiple fulfilment of the most common criteria could grant a survival. This applies in a strict sense merely to Gryphius and Grimmelshausen, who constitute a minimal canon, which is confirmed by statistics on syllabi and recommended readings, and even more so with regard to German studies abroad. The canonical selection is effectively fixed by editions and proportions within works of literary criticism. Reappearing reading lists show that canon is text, that it is based on or formulated as a catalogue, in critical or fictional mode. For literature as a textual system tends to form a canon already by itself, not only on behalf of external necessities. The small actual baroque canon should be secured in order to make its empty places profitable for university studies.

Relations of ruling: class and gender in postindustrial societies

Part 1 Class relations in post-industrial societies: class relations in industrial capitalism filling the empty places - class, gender, and postindustrialism post-industrialism, small capital, and the old middle class (co-authored with Grant Schellenberg) post-industrialism and the regulation of labour the political culture of class. Part 2 gender relations in post-industrial societies bringing in gender - post-industrialism and patriarchy (co-authored with Clarence Lochhead) household relations - power divisions and domestic labour linking domestic and paid labour - career disruptions and household obligations social cleavages and the political cultures of gender after industrialism.

Laurie Anderson and the Politics of Performance

Laurie Anderson and the Politics of Performance Woodrow B. Hood Anderson, Laurie. Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972–1992. Performed at the Lied Arts Center, Lawrence Kansas, March 29, 1994. Performance theorist Philip Auslander has argued that whatever theoretical or empirical value finally attaches to the term “postmodernism,” the contemporary performance artists that we call postmodern share a certain critical distance from modernism and are able to historicize the contemporary “in the Brechtian sense of getting some distance on the world we live in and thus gaining a better understanding of it.” 1 Gaining distance from the world of late capitalistic America seems indeed to be the focus of Laurie Anderson’s new performance piece currently touring the United States and Canada. The work is ostensibly to promote Anderson’s book Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972–1992, but it more importantly offers a contextualization of Anderson’s art from the early 1970s up to current day. The event details the growth of Anderson as an artist from her rougher beginnings like the song “Walk the Dog” to her more polished performance pieces from Empty Places. The show is a work in progress and it may change from venue to venue as it tours the country over the next few months. This review is being based on the March 29th performance at the Lied Center in Lawrence, Kansas. Though Lawrence seems an unlikely venue for an Anderson performance (she generally sticks to larger, more urban areas), she frequents this small, Midwestern town for the sake of her friend and artistic mentor William S. Burroughs, a local resident who was in attendance at the Lawrence show. The evening is rather brief—a little over one hour. The performance consists of Anderson sitting in front of a keyboard with two microphones (one is processed and the other isn’t) and a large sound board to her right. Underneath the sound board lies a DAT machine which plays the underscoring of Anderson’s readings from a collection of pages in front of her. This is the most intimate Anderson to date. The mise-en-scene has been stripped to its bare technical bones. The videoscreens, lasers, techno-gadgetry, and spectacle wizardry are gone. Lighting effects consist mainly of gel changes and primarily only light her well enough to be seen. What one sees is Anderson reflecting back on her career with an eye towards her future. She even says that the show is a retrospective about the future; by looking at where you’ve come from, you see where you’re going. The stories and talk-songs that comprise the performance are arranged by the series of associations based upon the “Nerve Bible”—by which she means the body. 2 What the audience gets is an apparently free association of juxtaposed images and ideas; the responsibility of finding meaning in the juxtapositions is placed solely upon the audience. The arrangement of the pieces may vary from night to night as Anderson creates new material or deletes old, establishing a whole new arena in which meanings can be created. Anderson performs a sampling of performance pieces from all periods of her work. Several of the pieces come from her recent notes, and will presumably go onto her upcoming album, Bright Red (produced by Brian Eno), and eventually the album’s multi-media promotional tour next year. She begins with the end of the Nerve Bible book, by talking about the future in “My Grandmother’s Hats,” a story about her Bible-thumping grandmother who kept waiting for the end of the world to arrive: . . . I remember the day she died, she was very excited. She was sitting in her hospital room waiting to die and she was very excited. She was like a small bird perched on the edge of her bed near the window and she was wearing this pink nightgown and combing her hair so that she would look pretty when I came to get her. And she wasn’t afraid but then something happened that changed everything. After years of preaching and predicting the future, suddenly, she panicked. Because she couldn’t decide on whether or not...

Distributed disassembly of mosaics

Mosaics are planar graphs with vertices labelled with nonnegative integers. In a mosaic, vertices labelled with 0 represent empty places (holes); vertices labelled with positive integers are interpreted as places occupied by pieces with colour indicated by their labels. A distributed algorithm for choosing a single piece of mosaic is given, provided the mosaic is finite, triangular, and has nonempty and connected sets of holes and pieces. Correctness of the algorithm of removing pieces from mosaics is proved.

Feminist lives in Victorian England: private roles and public commitment

Preface: configuring feminism historically. Part 1 Private lives: family, faith and politics reappropriating adulthood understanding the empty places - love, friendship, and women's networks. Part 2 Public commitment: disrupting the dark continent breaking the male monopoly - politics, law and feminism invading the public sphere - employment, education and the middle class women nurturing the sickly plants - women, labour and unionism. Conclusion: organizing principles - re-reading the political geneaology of feminism.

Reforms in higher education: The case of Chile in the 1980s

The impact of the 1981 reforms on the system of higher education in Chile is described and analyzed. The system has been diversified by the encouragement of private universities, the creation of professional institutes and the establishment of centers for technical formation. Changes in the funding system have, however, led to problems with student loan recovery and to private universities concentrating on subjects with low costs. Though the participation rate has greatly increased, the existence of empty places, especially in the newer private universities, is evidence of over-provision.

Empty places on course

Empty places on course

Inachèvements

The author lays stress on the fact that gaps, empty places, blanks, and also stops and cuts are to be taken into account in many fields of linguistic research and should give rise to the formulation of theoretical assumptions. She emphasizes that every hypothesis about "emptiness" can scarcely be conceived without a simultaneous and solidary hypothesis about "completeness" and "full forms" (morphological and syntactical microstructures ; textual, pragmatical or cognitive macrostructures - which may have to remain unspecified as to their verbal substance). Some morphological and syntactical phenomena are briefly analysed as well as some particular types of short "texts" (joke, advertisements, telegrams). Conversational stops lead the author to propound a dynamical type of explanation, making use of "real time" and of operations which are tentatively supposed to represent mental processes.

The Mobile Managerial Family

The management development adviser has a crucial role in ensuring that geographical mobility retains status, and that the organisation recognises, and makes adequate provision for, its pitfalls. A survey of managers from more than 50 British organisations suggests that managers need to feel that such moves are contributing to positive career and personal development, rather than that they are being moved at the company's whim in order to fill empty places. It is apparent from case studies presented that, unless organisations wish to lose experienced managers, they should expect and accommodate a manager's desire to “put down roots”, when this becomes an important consideration to the individual concerned.

A Theology For Britain In The 80s ?

Has Liberation Theology taken root in Britain? The Times (28 August) detected it as an alien influence when the Archbishop of Liverpool and other local churchmen supported the BCC grant of £500 to the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee. The complaint was that although it might be appropriate in its countries of origin, with their acute poverty, cruelty, exploitation and political corruption, in Britain it can do nothing but play into the hands of political extremists. But £500 won’t go very far towards a revolution these days. It will soon be eaten up in fares and lawyers’ fees. It is clearly the sign of the churches taking sides — that is, changing sides — in a political struggle, that the Times doesn’t like. Whatever we may think of the Liverpool events, the 80s is clearly going to be a dangerous decade. There have been warnings of deepening social division, more urban conflict and a police force changing its main concern from crime-prevention to national security. If this is the way things are going, there will certainly be serious attempts by British Christians to learn lessons from the Liberation Theologians and apply them on their own ground.It was concerns of this kind that caused a group of politically- minded Christians to organise a conference entitled “A Theology for Britain in the 80s” at Easter time this year in Digby Stuart College, Roehampton and to get funds from — the BCC. The event had been planned for two years and the participants were personally invited months beforehand and asked to prepare themselves through discussions with their “base groups”. However, judging by the lateness of some invitations, the organisers had difficulty in attracting many of the people they had first asked to this theological banquet. Some of the guests, it seems, had pressing reasons of their own for not turning up; and the organisers had been obliged, to go out and compel others to come in and fill the empty places.

Rosenhain Centenary Conference - 5. The task for the educator

The first task for the educator is to get someone to educate. It is extraordinary how, in a time of shrunken classes and empty places in academic departments of engineering and metallurgy, this elementary point is overlooked in discussions about the teaching of these subjects. Arguments all too often become unrealistic because they are built on an assumption that there exist captive audiences available to the educator to mould as he wills, an assumption that is as far from reality in this permissive and feather-bedded age as the Victorian mechanics institutes are from the student unions. Even when they are supposed to address themselves to the problem of the empty places, such discussions tend to drift away into a make-believe world. A voice goes up: ‘a year in industry, between school and university, would do the students good’. That may well be so, but the setting up of an extra hurdle between the student and his degree, in the applied sciences, would inevitably deflect many school-leavers away into the pure or social sciences, or the arts, where the ambitious ones could maintain their academic momentum without interruption and the more cautious ones could continue to enjoy the familiar comforts of an academic environment. The cry ‘ a year in industry first ’ pre-supposes that the school-leavers are already committed to eventual entry into industry, an assumption which for the most part is quite untrue in the conditions of today. I believe that if such a requirement were introduced, it would in fact cause them to make up their minds not to go into industry or subjects related to it.

An analysis of the parking situation in the downtown area of West Berlin

The parking situation in the Zoo district of West Berlin is considered. The demand for parking places in different blocks and of different parking time classes is assigned to the supply of existing facilities (parkhouses, public parking lots, etc) in such a manner that an expression for the societal costs associated with the parking system is minimized. Societal costs include among other things walking costs, when vehicles are assigned to blocks other than the final destination ones. Supply and demand are measured in terms of physical parking places, not in terms of automobiles or trips. The minimization is carried out in an L.P. model of the transportation type. This analysis gives an overview of what an “optimal” utilization of existing parking facilities would look like. For example how far would drivers have to walk from their vehicles to reach their final destinations? Where would there be empty places on the streets? The paper concludes with some recommendations for a more effective parking system in downtown West Berlin.

W. S. Merwin and the Nothing That Is

Of the immortal in Blue Merwin writes, There is no pity in him. Where would he have learned it?' Colder than any of his contemporaries, the poet himself seems to aspire to such supernatural neutrality. Even more than the glacial Wallace Stevens he has actually achieved what Stevens called mind of winter,2 not simply in order to behold Nothing, but to describe human emptiness with the chill accuracy it deserves. And in a time of apocalyptic poetry no one else confronts the End with such inhuman calm, such studious avoidance of fear or exultation. Even when Merwin seems to welcome the apocalypse he does so in a minor key, quietly; his recent poetry is dominated by undertones. At first his voice was not quite so muted, nor his preoccupations so consistently grim. Though always drawn to the empty places of the imagination, Merwin wrote, as late as The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), about a variety of things in an impressive variety of tones. But in the series of volumes he has published since The Moving

Physics in school

There has been much discussion of the reasons for the decrease in the number of pupils taking physics at school, and the empty places in physics departments at the universities. There has been little mention of what I believe to be the principal reason, that physics courses have become increasingly complex.

Empty Places in the Cold

Empty Places in the Cold

Church and Education in the Lake Nyasa Region of Tanganyika

Although in undeveloped countries a major educational problem is the shortage of teachers and schools, in one remote district of Tanganyika on the shores of Lake Nyasa the local problem was very different-a concentration of primary schools with an embarrassingly high proportion of empty places, managed by two competing voluntary agencies, the University Mission to Central Africa and the Roman Catholic Order of St. Benedict. The U.M.C.A. was formed as a result of Livingstone's famous address at Cambridge in 1852.1 This Anglican mission returned to Nyasaland in 18822 from Zanzibar and started schools in 1886.2 Shortly afterwards the Order of St. Benedict began work in Tanganyika, starting at Dar es Salaam in 1888,4 and eventually arrived in the Songea District, beginning their work from their base at Peramiho. In the early years of the first decade of the twentieth century they began to establish missions in the lake shore area on a place already penetrated by the U.M.C.A., albeit not very much earlier. It is not surprising that the German Benedictines were in Tanganyika which was then known as German East Africa.

German Culture in English Lecture Courses

SINCE the growing trend of offering, on the undergraduate level, elective English lecture courses dealing with phases of German civilization has run parallel to soaring enrollment in German language courses, we can construe this development as a sign of expansion and initiative. It is not as though we are delaying a retreat forced upon us by dwindling registration. Freshmen and sophomores fill many sections of lower division courses, a generous sprinkling of juniors and seniors leave few empty places in upper division courses, and there is even an increase of graduate students to gladden our hearts. What is the motivation then for transmitting to students unable to understand German the fruits, sweet and bitter, of German culture?