Streets Of London Research Articles

Musical ecologies of grief: breathing and environmental justice in Love Ssega’s “Our World (Fight for Air)”

This paper will consider how ecological grief is managed in “Our World (Fight for Air)”, a single released in 2021 by British-Ugandan musician Love Ssega, which addresses the deadly consequences of air pollution on the South Circular road in London. In light of sparse musicological engagement with ecological grief and air, I bring together the concepts of a “political ecology of air-and-breathing-bodies” (Allen 2020) and “weathering” (Neimanis and Walker 2014) to illustrate that, in Ssega’s work, (safe) breathing becomes political, traversed by vectors of race and class. Paying attention to air and breathing facilitates an understanding of how Ssega’s music can help us grieve well, on scales attuned to both individual tragedy and the enormous, distributed nature of environmental pollution. I argue that this music shapes “ecologies of grief” which are communal and therefore can help us engage with loss, not merely as mourners, but as makers of safer futures.

A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham

A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham

Social worker as the Good Samaritan

Professionally a social worker has to pay attention to both the society’s values and to a client’s personal values. However, a social worker’s personal values are not the least of importance and can’t be ignored. Where could a sharp line be drawn between professional and private values and acting? The problem of decision-making has been pondered over since ancient times when Socrates contended that ‘everyone desires the good.’ Could it then be that for some the profession becomes a calling? This paper uses a collaborative autoethnographic approach with the narrative told by the first author, a female Swedish social worker. The story is about her meeting with a male drug addict living on the streets of London and about the decision she made. As it turned out, her decision would have consequences far beyond her and his imagination. The Introduction was written by the second author in order to provide the scientific framework embedding the first author’s story. Finally, the Discussion was written mutually as an interview

Running for home: Hong Kong migrant runners seek the familiar in London streets

Running for home: Hong Kong migrant runners seek the familiar in London streets

No, It Wasn’t About Love: Teaching Geoffrey Sax’s Othello

This Teaching Note reviews a 2001 made-for-TV film adaptation of William Shakespeare's Othello. Geoffrey Sax's production transposes the action into the streets of London where protests are erupting against racist police brutality, while the London Metropolitan Police struggles to remake its image and reestablish a sense of order. I have found that the film teaches very well alongside the play in my Introduction to Literature survey course at a public community college in New York.

Prowling in London: Canines in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Dracula first appears in front of the British public in England not as a gentleman but in the form of “an immense dog.” This article reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in the context of human-animal encounters happening on the streets of London when the fear of rabid dogs swept the city. Victorian urban projects aimed at building an urban structure securing human control over animals. Yet this vision was disrupted by the ubiquitous presence of stray dogs in London and their alleged infection with rabies. Dracula’s and Un-Dead Lucy’s prowling in London emblematize this threat of urban stray dogs. The novel’s narratives also prowl, emulating animal intelligence in the way they rely on instant perception lacking reflection and leading to a hunt. This temporal immediacy and chasing mobility of prowling narratives envision co-evolutionary intelligence, dissolving the human-animal binary which structured the domestication, or the anthropocentric urbanization, of the city.

An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic

An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic

Young retail shift workers (not) planning their future: working with customers in the 24/7 service society in the transition to adulthood

PurposeThe retail sector is not largely studied in Italy. The study offers a comparison between youth retail shift work in Milan and London. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the one hand on youth work and on the other hand to the debate on agency and structural factors in life planning, representation of the future and the transition to adulthood, observed in the United Kingdom's and Italian labour market. Even if the second one is a Southern European Country, these contexts are both characterised by a service-oriented economy and the widespread of precarious and flexible jobs.Design/methodology/approachQualitative methods were used: one year of ethnographic observation, 50 interviews and two focus groups were carried out between 2015 and 2018 with retail workers and trade unionists. The contexts are Corso Buenos Aires in Milan, Italy, and Oxford Street in London, United Kingdom. Analysing young workers' discourses, the author identifies narratives that allow to grasp their present agency and imagined future.FindingsObserving the crisis of the narrative (Sennett, 2020) allows to highlight the social consequences of working times on young workers' everyday life and future. The author argues that young workers struggle with the narrative of their present everyday life and the representation of the future. This relates to the condition of time alienation due to the flexible schedules and the fast pace of work in retail, both affecting the work-life balance.Originality/valueThe social consequences of flexible schedules in retail and fast fashion sector, which are new issues not yet sufficiently explored, are here investigated from the perspective of young workers. The study is focussed on the representations of young people working with customers in social and economic contexts characterised by flexible schedules and the deregulation of shop openings, the so-called 24/7 service society, not largely investigated in the sociological scientific literature, above all in the Italian context.

President's Page: Urban geophysics: Where geophysics meets society head-on

Today, 55% of the world's population lives in urban areas, consumes between 67% and 76% of global energy, and generates about 70% of global carbon emissions. In less than 300 years since the beginning of the British Industrial Revolution, many urban centers in the developed world have evolved from simple congregations of human labor with overcrowded tenements, frequent epidemics, inequitable resources, and insufferable sanitary or safety conditions to become “smart cities” that utilize cutting-edge technologies to enhance the advantages and minimize the inconveniences of urbanization for residents. Cities such as Tokyo, Japan; Zurich, Switzerland; and Auckland, New Zealand; have been consistently ranked among the smartest cities worldwide based on their technological smartness in the areas of health and safety, mobility, activities, opportunities, and governance. Residents in these cities enjoy advanced health care, affordable housing, superior mobility, excellent education, and abundant employment opportunities. On the other hand, urban slums such as Neza-Chalco-Itza in Mexico, Dharavi in Mumbai, India, and the favelas in San Paulo, Brazil, do not look much different from the early 19th century London streets.

High Resolution Modelling of Traffic Emissions Using the Large Eddy Simulation Code Fluidity

The large eddy simulation (LES) code Fluidity was used to simulate the dispersion of NOx traffic emissions along a road in London. The traffic emissions were represented by moving volume sources, one for each vehicle, with time-varying emission rates. Traffic modelling software was used to generate the vehicle movement, while an instantaneous emissions model was used to calculate the NOx emissions at 1 s intervals. The traffic emissions were also modelled as a constant volume source along the length of the road for comparison. A validation of Fluidity against wind tunnel measurements is presented before a qualitative comparison of the LES concentrations with measured roadside concentrations. Fluidity showed an acceptable comparison with the wind tunnel data for velocities and turbulence intensities. The in-canyon tracer concentrations were found to be significantly different between the wind tunnel and Fluidity. This difference was explained by the very high sensitivity of the in-canyon tracer concentrations to the precise release location. Despite this, the comparison showed that Fluidity was able to provide a realistic representation of roadside concentration variations at high temporal resolution, which is not achieved when traffic emissions are modelled as a constant volume source or by Gaussian plume models.

Fatbergs [waste - solutions

Fatbergs are a nuisance and, quite frankly, disgusting. How can we find the root of the problem and solve it? Every day beneath the streets of London, sewer cleaners are fighting a grim war against giant 'fatbergs' clogging the system. Fatbergs are rock-like heaps of waste that build up in sewer systems thanks to the unsavoury and lazy habits of humans. Cooking fat and oils poured down sinks congeal in the sewers, forming a thick layer around pipes. This fatty build-up stops sewage from flowing freely, which can cause it to back up. But it's the addition of non-biodegradable solids such as wet wipes and nappies that, when mixed with the fat, create hard fatbergs capable of growing to the size of buses and completely blocking sewage systems. In short, it's one disgusting recipe for disaster.

Prefrontal cortical activation associated with prospective memory while walking around a real-world street environment

Rostral PFC (area 10) activation is common during prospective memory (PM) tasks. But it is not clear what mental processes these activations index. Three candidate explanations from cognitive neuroscience theory are: (i) monitoring of the environment; (ii) spontaneous intention retrieval; (iii) a combination of the two. These explanations make different predictions about the temporal and spatial patterns of activation that would be seen in rostral PFC in naturalistic settings. Accordingly, we plotted functional events in PFC using portable fNIRS while people were carrying out a PM task outside the lab and responding to cues when they were encountered, to decide between these explanations. Nineteen people were asked to walk around a street in London, U.K. and perform various tasks while also remembering to respond to prospective memory (PM) cues when they detected them. The prospective memory cues could be either social (involving greeting a person) or non-social (interacting with a parking meter) in nature. There were also a number of contrast conditions which allowed us to determine activation specifically related to the prospective memory components of the tasks. We found that maintaining both social and non-social intentions was associated with widespread activation within medial and right hemisphere rostral prefrontal cortex (BA 10), in agreement with numerous previous lab-based fMRI studies of prospective memory. In addition, increased activation was found within lateral prefrontal cortex (BA 45 and 46) when people were maintaining a social intention compared to a non-social one. The data were then subjected to a GLM-based method for automatic identification of functional events (AIDE), and the position of the participants at the time of the activation events were located on a map of the physical space. The results showed that the spatial and temporal distribution of these events was not random, but aggregated around areas in which the participants appeared to retrieve their future intentions (i.e., where they saw intentional cues), as well as where they executed them. Functional events were detected most frequently in BA 10 during the PM conditions compared to other regions and tasks. Mobile fNIRS can be used to measure higher cognitive functions of the prefrontal cortex in “real world” situations outside the laboratory in freely ambulant individuals. The addition of a “brain-first” approach to the data permits the experimenter to determine not only when haemodynamic changes occur, but also where the participant was when it happened. This can be extremely valuable when trying to link brain and cognition.

A siren identification system using deep learning to aid hearing-impaired people

The research presented in this paper is aiming to address the safety issue that hearing-impaired people are facing when it comes to identifying a siren sound. For that purpose, a siren identification system, using deep learning, was designed, built, and tested. The system consists of a convolutional neural network that used image recognition techniques to identify the presence of a siren by converting the incoming sound into spectrograms. The problem with the lack of datasets for the training of the network was addressed by generating the appropriate data using a variety of siren sounds mixed with relevant environmental noise. A hardware interface was also developed to communicate the detection of a siren with the user, using visual methods. After training the model, the system was extensively tested using realistic scenarios to assess its performance For the siren sounds that were used for training, the system achieved an accuracy of 98 per cent. For real-world siren sounds, recorded in the central streets of London, the system achieved an accuracy of 91 per cent. When it comes to the operation of the system in noisy environments, the tests showed that the system can identify the presence of siren when this is at a sound level of up to -6 db below the background noise. These results prove that the proposed system can be used as a base for the design of a siren-identification application for hearing-impaired people.

Moo-re Gene-edited Animals Get Regulatory Clearance: U.S. FDA Approves Genetically Engineered Cattle for Human Consumption

Moo-re Gene-edited Animals Get Regulatory Clearance: U.S. FDA Approves Genetically Engineered Cattle for Human Consumption

Responsibility, Recourse, and Redress: A Focus on the Three R’s of AI Ethics

In August 2020, students took to the streets of London in a mass protest over their A-level results (that determine entry to university), chanting “F*ck the algorithm.” Their A-level grades had been determined by an algorithm that depended on past school performance, a system of teacher ratings, and for smaller student groups, the use of Centre Assessed Grades. Commendably Ofqual (the U.K. Government Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation) were transparent in their use of the algorithm so that affected stakeholders were informed of the algorithm’s existence and the key details of how it was developed. The design of the data set produced an algorithm with biased outputs, which hardcoded preexisting educational, policy, and societal biases. Due to the large numbers of students, the single “results day” output and the wider interests of schools, teachers, parents, and universities, the unfairness of the outcome was magnified. Add to this that the students were, by definition, academically proficient individuals, many of whom derived from privileged and supportive backgrounds, which meant that they had the awareness and capacity to challenge. Hence, the impact of this biased algorithm was not received silently and so it was hard to deny, deflect, and dismiss. However, this is not always the case, and many systems are deployed with similar biases and harmful outcomes but the impact is dissipated over time and individuals, and therefore not so immediately obvious and easy to challenge. This is particularly the case when the people impacted do not have the advantages that enabled the A-level students to challenge.

Licensing the Informal Economy in Early Modern Europe: Food Hawkers in London and Naples

Food hawkers filled the streets of early modern London and Naples but had an ambiguous relationship with urban governors. By comparing how hawkers were regulated in the two capitals between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this article extends our knowledge of irregular work to two of the period’s largest cities and argues that historians should consider informality as a social process, rather than a fixed economic category. It examines, in turn, how food hawkers were hard to distinguish from other rule-breaking retailers, how governors issued food-selling licences, and how hawker regulation also involved managing public space and related to gender and social status. Instead of clamping down completely, London aldermen and Neapolitan eletti gave licence to food hawking when it was useful and stayed within standards of behaviour. Deciding who was allowed to sell food and how were finely balanced questions of governance in the expanding early modern metropolis.

Representation of the Postcolonial Migrants’ Multi-Religious Cultures and the Fantasy of Christianity in John Lanchester’s Capital

Literary writings have broadened that the world broaches the religious and cultural discrimination between the imperialist countries and the colonized immigrants. John Lanchester spreads over the conflicts of the multi-religious culture of migrants and the pride of the Christmas festival in European countries in his novel, Capital (2012). The Christian countries have defeated the migrants by showing pretentious prevailing city life in London. Unfortunately, some migrating laborers are illiterate to encounter them all. He forces migrants not to convert themselves from one religion to another for getting jobs. He also emancipates his presser to look after the life of migrating people in European countries. He then indirectly talks about the three religions: Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. He proves that London is a place for Christianity, which is reflected in Christmas decorations. This novel elongates many themes related to the social and economic exploitation of poor migrants at Pepys Road in London.

‘STFU and start listening to how scared we are’: Resisting misogyny on Twitter via #NotAllMen

This article focuses on the strategies that were used to resist misogyny on the microblogging platform Twitter during March 2021, a time when the hashtag #NotAllMen was trending. We take a critical feminist approach, combining corpus linguistics with a qualitative analysis of #NotAllMen users’ discursive strategies. This particular iteration of #NotAllMen followed the disappearance and subsequent rape and murder of Sarah Everard, a 33 year old white woman who was abducted from a street in London, UK, whilst walking home. Following a keyword analysis (Scott 1997) to survey a dataset of 18,701 tweets containing the hashtag #NotAllMen, we identify salient themes in a sub-set of keyword concordances, and produce a detailed qualitative analysis of the strategies deployed in ten randomly sampled tweets. Despite #NotAllMen initally being used as a statement of protest against supposedly unfair accusations levelled at ‘all’ men, our analysis illustrates the use of resistant and empowering strategies which challenge the misogyny of this message, re-framing the hashtag and thus acting as a form of resistance to its original message: that not all men enagage in gender-based violence. We argue that this points to the strategic use of social media to challenge harmful rhetoric, whereby users exploit the affordances of hashtags. Twitter users engaged in strategies including resistance, opposition, and polarity to the hashtag, evidenced through the linguistic use of expletives, insults, and direct address, most often emerging through metadiscussion of the #NotAllMen hashtag itself; this works as a form of collective counter-protest through hashtag reframing. The hashtag reframing operates as a tool to show how those using the hashtag to focus on the defence of men, rather than critiquing the sociocultural dominance of misogynistic behaviour, ignored the fear experienced by all women and girls of being victims of gender-based violence, rape and murder.

“Meddling with Sorcery”: Hypnotism, the Occult and the Return of Forsaken Women in the 1890s Ghost Stories of Lettice Galbraith

Lettice Galbraith’s ghost stories are largely excluded from histories of the Victorian supernatural. Despite writing within a genre popular in the 1890s, little is known of her biography, her literary circle or her influences. Like other 1890s writers, Galbraith capitalised on public fascination with the tropes of crime narratives – the foggy London streets, the sensational newspaper snippets, violence and suppressed scandal – as well as the fascination with hypnotism and the occult revival. In the stories “In the Séance Room” and “The Missing Model” (1893) the wronged woman, abandoned, mistreated and objectified, returns as a terrifying spirit, who manifests in disturbing form to shame professional men. The séance room and the art gallery admit the excluded woman who silently petitions for her lost story to be told: the ghostly women have “magnetic” stares, subverting power relations in contemporary discourses of hypnotism. In “The Blue Room” (1897) women’s attempts to summon a demon have dangerous consequences and are seen as “meddling with sorcery”. Borrowing from the crime narrative with its mysteries, clues, detection and fake identities, Galbraith refashions the Victorian ghost story to hold men accountable for their deception and violence and addresses fears about black magic and hypnotism.

Project Eagle: Polscy wywiadowcy w raportach i dokumentach wojennych amerykańskiego Biura Służb Strategicznych [Project Eagle: Polish Agents in the Reports and Wartime Documents of the American Office of Strategic Services

<i>Project Eagle: Polscy wywiadowcy w raportach i dokumentach wojennych amerykańskiego Biura Służb Strategicznych</i> [Project Eagle: Polish Agents in the Reports and Wartime Documents of the American Office of Strategic Services