Manchester Metropolitan University Research Articles

Always Different, Always the Same: Critical Essays on The Fall

A review of the above edited collection by Dr David Wilkinson, Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Toddlers, Tech and Talk: What does research literature tell us?

The second article in this series about the Toddlers, Tech and Talk project reviews the academic literature around young children's use of technology in the home. Dr Sandra El Gemayel, research associate at Manchester Metropolitan University, Rosie Flewitt, professor of early childhood communication at Manchester Metropolitan University and Dr. Lorna Arnott, senior lecturer and director of Early Years at The Strathclyde Institute of Education, discuss the current guidelines for children's use of digital tech and what ‘screen time’ means in practice, as well as share tips for how parents can be encouraged to help mediate children's tech use.

Can A Language Model Be Conscious?

Abstract Unseduced by ChatGPT's apparent abilities, Dr Matthew Shardlow of Manchester Metropolitan University's Department of Computing and Mathematics explores the current limits of AI.

Editorial Presentation: Critical perspectives in social innovation, social enterprise and/or the social solidarity economy

This Thematic Issue seeks to explore critical perspectives of an international nature on social innovation (SI), social enterprise (SE) and/or social solidarity economy (SSE). The aim is to examine the grand narrative, explore the ontological assumptions of the field, challenge the normative and present alternatives that draw attention to political economy, critical theory and critical management studies.Critical perspectives emerged in social innovation (SI) literature as a concerted effort sometime in 2008. A few voices sounded from the edges of the field much earlier. Ash Amin, Professor of Geography at Durham University, inspected the new favourite of public policy way back in 2002, discarded it as a “a poor substitute for a welfare state” and never returned to the subject. There were heated debates that challenged the grand narrative of SI at the International Social Innovation Research Conferences (ISIRC) (once called the Social Enterprise Research Conference before becoming ISIRC with the involvement of the social innovation theme from Skoll Centre). The Voluntary Sector Studies Network (VSSN) conferences picked away at the promise of unlimited performance and achievement of the upstart SE in a mature voluntary and charity network (Aiken, 2002, 2006, 2007; Grenier, 2009; Pharaoh, Scott & Fisher, 2004). Still, on the whole, the literature in the last twenty years has been overwhelmingly interested in promoting social enterprise (SE) and SI as (a) an inherently good thing, (b) a solution to all problems and (c) a politically neutral complement to neo-liberal economics globally.Through 2005-2008, a handful of academics were beginning to make concerted inroads from within the SE field that challenged the superpowers gifted to the SE/SI rhetoric. First through conference presentations, in particular in 2006, a 1-day seminar at Manchester Metropolitan University, ‘Critical Perspectives on Social Enterprise’, followed by a Special Issue in International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research (Bull, 2008). Later individual publications developed the critical themes in different directions (Seanor et al., 2013; Curtis, 2008; Curtis et al., 2010; Grant, 2008; Scott-Cato et al., 2008; Scott & Hillier, 2010; Jones et al., 2008a, Betta et al., 2010; Bull & Ridley-Duff, 2019; Ridley-Duff & Bull, 2021), each skirting around the issue of critical theory and focussing on finding the ‘social’ in SE, but not addressing critical theory head-on.Then at the 2010 Skoll Centre Research Colloquium on Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School, Oxford, Pascal Dey of University Applied Science, Northwestern, Switzerland burst on to the scene, wowing the gathered crowd with the lucidity of his paper (Dey, 2010), on the symbolic violence in social entrepreneurship discourse. Critical theory had come of age, moving away from the functional critiques (SEs don’t do what they claim) and territorial debates (SEs are businesses in disguise or charities do this anyway) to a more theoretically informed investigation, deliberately working from and with critical theory. Steyaert and Dey (2010) followed this up, in the first edition of the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, with a mature call to keep social enterprise research ‘dangerous’.Since then, critical perspectives on SI have widened and diversified with critical perspectives tracks in EMES International Research Network, ISIRC and other SI related conferences as well as an increasing number of PhD and early career researchers adopting a critical lens in studying SI’. Whilst ‘ordinary’ critical thinking might be described as an attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one's experiences (Glaser 1941). However, the critical perspectives we are seeking to develop in this Thematic Issue are best described by Horkheimer (1982), whereby we question the facts which our senses present to us as socially performed approaches to understanding in the social sciences. We should start with an understanding of a "social" experience itself as always fashioned by ideas that are in the researchers themselves. The project of a critical perspective is also “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1982, p244), not merely to describe the functions of those circumstances.Until the late nineteenth century, SI was understood to be subversive of the social order (Sargant, 1858), but in the French milieu was a ‘happy innovation’ of social progress (Comte 1841). What seems to have occurred in the research and publications in critical perspectives on social innovation over the last decade is as threefold engagement with epistemological issues, a drawing on theoretical insights from popular critical theory thinkers and challenges to normative methodological strategies in research. However, there seems to be a dearth of challenges to ontological assumptions (Hu 2018, Hu et al. 2019). By epistemological questions, we mean the question ‘what is the ‘social’ in social enterprise?’, considering (as the rest of this journal does) social is not just a modifier of innovation, but innovation and enterprise as a modifier of the social (Arthur et al., 2006, Bull & Ridley-Duff, 2019). In terms of engagement with critical theorists and challenges to normative research, there is research, for example, on Bourdieu (Teasdale et al., 2012); Giddens (Nicholls & Cho, 2006); Foucault (Curtis, 2007); Polanyi (Bull & Ridley-Duff, 2019; Roy & Grant, 2020; Thompson et al., 2020) and Ostrom (Ridley-Duff & Bull, 2021; Peredo et al., 2020) that offers avenues for development. Likewise, a convergence on the notion of SI as social bricolage (Di Domenico et al., 2010) represents a post-modern turn rather than a critical turn that could offer new avenues of exploration. In methodological terms, more social constructivist/revisionist work is needed too, for example, Froggett and Chamberlayne (2004). There are other critical perspectives that have a few researchers labouring in small groups. In political economy, there are Marxist, green and communitarian perspectives (Yıldırım & Tuncalp, 2016; Scott-Cato, 2008; Scott & Hillier, 2010; Ridley-Duff, 2007). There is a small feminist literature exploring immaterial and affective labour (Jones et al., 2008b; Teasdale et al., 2011), and some in queer theory- exploring transgressions and deviance, such as Grenier (2010) and Dey and Teasdale (2013). There are even fewer working in the post-colonialist space, including Green Nyoni (2016) and Watkins (2017).This Thematic Issue seeks to revisit, review and revivify the emancipatory and critical project proposed by the founder of this journal, Benoît Godin. To this end, this Thematic Issue of NOvation invited submissions with a particular focus on the critical perspectives on social innovation, social enterprise and the social solidarity economy (SSE), to promote new and emerging perspectives.The five articles presented in this Thematic Issue explore critical perspectives on SI, SE & SSE. The first paper by the Guest Editors themselves, Curtis, Bull and Nowak, outlines the rising tide of criticality in SI research. They present three waves of research in the field to date. The first wave of criticality in SI/SE research they present outlines critiques of the ‘social’ in social enterprise research, that sought to challenge the pro-business and celebrity-like status given to SE. The second wave highlights a post structuralist shift where research challenged the theoretical underpinnings of SI/SE research. The third wave they suggest constitutes a dangerous threat to the left’s political appreciation of this movement. Where wave two sought to open and welcome opinions that challenged the ontology and epistemological foundations of thought, the third wave has the potential for right-wing co-option. They therefore call for a more forensic conceptualisation on what is ‘good’, ‘ethical’ and ‘social’ about SI/SE, with this threat to the cultural hegemony, subverting and changing intellectual emancipation of the field.    The second paper by Pel, Wittmayer, Avelino and Bauler picks up on critical issues by detailing the intrinsic and pervasive paradoxes of transformative SI (TSI) and offering researchers concrete strategies to account for them. The authors identify three core paradoxes of social innovation: system reproduction, temporality and reality construction. System reproduction is encountered where SI both challenges and reproduces the existing social order. The paradox of time draws attention to how the same SI can be considered new and old – varying across different points in time and contexts. Reality construction paradoxes occur as SI exists both as concrete activity and as a projection/interpretation, with researchers engaged in shaping and co-producing SI phenomena. Blending their extensive research experience and empirical examples from the literature the authors demonstrate how these paradoxes are integral to TSI phenomena and point to how methodological clarity is necessary to properly understand them. This leads to suggestions of clear research strategies that will support SI researchers in navigating each of these paradoxes.The third paper from Sardo, Callegari and Misganaw examines the ‘social’ in current social innovation and entrepreneurship studies and how it has been appropriated. Following their literature review of 18 leading innovation and entrepreneurship journals, they identify four categories: the disciplinary and integrationist approaches are where the social is integrated in existing dominant framework and discourse; the separationist approach is a critique of self-interest and provides ideas of altruism, lifestyle and democracy dimensions considering the context specific nature of the ‘social’; finally, the essentialist approach they discuss as arguments for the social nature of innovation and entrepreneurship to be integrated into the mainstream, bringing ecosystems and the socially constructed nature of innovation and entrepreneurship to the fore. They call for a more substantial integration of the social dimension in critical studies yet warn that tensions on extending into separationist and essentialist avenues cannot be reconciled with existing linear developments.The fourth paper from Curtis presents a critical realist and systems analysis approach, using Checkland’s soft systems methodology to empirical research. The paper uses evidence from a research study of community policing and the adoption of a specifically designed handbook to assist social innovators to implement locally identified solutions and practices (context mechanism outcome chains) that makes the case that SI is more than social bricolage and not a mysterious craft of innovation, but instead a systematic and replicable process.The final and fifth paper from Ergun and Begum explores the nexus between SI and the environment. Their paper challenges the narrative of United Nations Development Programmes through an eco-critical discourse analysis (ECDA) lens of fourteen UN publications. They suggest the dominance of an anthropocentric perspective, where neoliberalism resides is commonplace in these publications. They state it is not until we change to an ecocentric discourse that we will align at one with nature and redress the socio-economic problems of the world.We hope this Thematic Issue raises some interest and some thought-provoking conversations in the future. Many thanks to the reviewers, the authors and above all the editors of NOvation, for trusting us with this Thematic Issue! We hope scholars enjoy the edition as much as we have in bringing this together.

Newly Elected CIS Administrative Committee Members (2023–2025) [Society Briefs]

Keeley Crockett is a Professor in Computational Intelligence at Manchester Metropolitan University. She gained a B.Sc. degree (hons) in computation from UMIST (1993), and a Ph.D. in Fuzzy Decision Trees from MMU (1998). Her research interests include the ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI), fuzzy systems, psychological profiling using AI, fuzzy natural language processing, semantic similarity, conversational agents, and intelligent tutoring systems. She led work on Place based practical Artificial Intelligence, facilitating a parliamentary inquiry with Policy Connect and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Data Analytics leading to the inquiry report Our Place Our Data: Involving Local People in Data and AI-Based Recovery. She is currently the Principal Investigator on the EPSRC Grant – “PEAs in Pods: Co-production of community based public engagement for data and AI research”, CO-I on The Alan Turing Institute, People-powered AI: responsible research and innovation through community ideation and involvement Grant, academic co-lead in the ERDF £6m GM Artificial Intelligence Foundry, and PI on two Innovate U.K. KTPs.

Lightweight multi-hop routing protocol for resource optimisation in edge computing networks

Data transmission over power line communication (PLC) infrastructure will proliferate lightweight Internet of Things (IoT) nodes in 5G and 6G networks. Consequently, a corresponding lightweight multi-hop routing protocol (LMRP) with reduced path loss and computational complexities will be required at the edges of PLC networks to connect the cloud sinks. Using a multi-layered system architecture, we present an LMRP for optimal routing and highlight the components of a smart PLC network comprising edge power pool orchestration, edge layer service provisioning, fog latency layer, and cloud resilient backbone. The LMRP reduces path loss and node failure states at the edge while optimising throughputs, minimum cost flow, and signal stability. A multi-hop deterministic testbed is designed and applied in three different locations to estimate path loss leveraging TelosB IoT node, Raspberry Pi (RPI) with NesC, and Java scripted logger application. Three different testbeds of varying path loss characteristics at the Federal University of Technology Owerri (FUTO) are used while the analysis was completed at Manchester Metropolitan University engineering LAB. The result of PL mitigation in Location 1 (sonic FUTO) shows 33.89%, 33.25%, and 32.77% with genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimisation (PSO), and the proposed LMRP, respectively. In Location 2 (Old SEET Complex, FUTO), the PL obtained are 33.81%, 33.57%, and 32.62%, while Location 3 (New SEET Complex, FUTO) yields 33.65%, 33.41%, and 32.74% in PL mitigation for GA, PSO, and LMRP, respectively. Despite improved PL mitigation, the results also show that the proposed scheme offers a lightweight routing performance of at least 76.30% compared to similar schemes.

Narrative Formulation Revisited: On Seeing the Person in Mental Health Recovery

Narrative Formulation RevisitedOn Seeing the Person in Mental Health Recovery Anna Bergqvist (bio) The use of narrative in mental health contexts models consciousness as something necessarily embodied, as already part of the world, in an inherently value-laden and perspectival way. As such narrative presents a powerful tool for critical reassessment and reevaluation of preconceived ideas in relating to difficult concepts in clinical interactions. Narrative structures can reveal psychological differences between persons in a way that matters for the provision of effective treatment and management. As emphasized by Solomon (2015), narrative reasoning is also motivated by distinctly first-personal concerns that are operative in the practitioner–client relationship. I maintain that the dynamics of that interpersonal relationship are part and parcel of what it means to address the patient's needs to be seen as a person in humanistic empathetic care—without thereby reducing truth to an individual person's perspective to encourage positive transformation.1 The notion of empowering narratives to encourage positive change is a core concept behind the emphasis on the critical role of empathy in explaining human development and psychoanalytic change within the self-psychology tradition but is also key to recovery-based models of the significance of person-centered quality of life in medicine more generally. This is defined in mental health as recovering a good quality of life as determined by the values of (by what matters or is important to) the individual concerned (Allott, Loganathan, & Fulford, 2002; Fulford, 1989, 2004; Fulford, Peile, & Carroll, 2012). The importance of strengths in this regard was reflected for example in the UK government program on values-based mental health assessment. The 3 Keys program, as it was called (National Institute for Mental Health in England, NIMHE, and the Care Services Improvement Partnership, 20082) identified three shared 'keys' to good practice in mental health assessment: three things that were identified in a wide-ranging consultation as being important alike by health professionals of all kinds and by 'service users' thus understood as patients and carers (Fulford, Duhig, Hankin, Hicks, & Keeble, 2015a; Fulford, Dewey, & King, 2015b). The third of these keys was defined in [End Page 7] the subsequently published Good Practice Guidance, as "a person-centred focus that builds on the strengths, resiliencies and aspirations of the individual service user as well as identifying his or her needs and challenges" (NIMHE, 2008: 6); and the guidance included a number of real-life case examples of best recovery practice reflecting this aspect of mental health care (Slade et al., 2014). What my (Bergqvist, 2018, 2020, 2022, forthcoming) account adds to this claim is that while such choices are revelatory or expressive of a distinctly first-personal stance, they do not constitute or determine selfhood and self-interpretation in a fixed way. Moreover, the reason is that one can also adopt a second-personal stance on one's own experience and address oneself, where the relationship between the first- and the second-personal narrative perspective on experience and self-understanding is itself a dynamic and open-ended evaluative process. Anna Bergqvist Anna Bergqvist is Reader in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University since 2021, and has been Postgraduate Research Coordinator and AHRC North West Doctoral Pathway Consortium Lead for Philosophy since 2020. I was elected to a Visiting Fellowship at St Catherine's College University of Oxford for Michaelmas Term 2021. Her service to the profession out with the University includes acting as Secretary of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) Section for Philosophy & Humanities in Psychiatry (October 2020 – present), Executive Committee Member of the Royal College of Psychiatry (RCPsych) SIG in Philosophy (February 2020 – present) and External Examiner, University of Liverpool (November 2019 – present, 4-year tenure). She is also Director of the Values-based Theory Network at St Catherine's Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice at the University of Oxford, and Member of its Whiteness and Race Equality Network. Her approach to philosophy bridges the disciplines of moral philosophy, moral psychology and philosophy of psychiatry to improve lives through her reputable expertise in moral perception and co-production as a mechanism for change. Notes 1. Here I side with Goldie (2012) and Solomon (2015), who...

The Anthropocene as framed by the far right

‘Homeland’, borders, and business-as-usual “The far right discourse on the ecological crisis has historically been to deny its existence” The ecological crisis is subject to a series of political discourses which each imperfectly capture the complex myriad of social, economic, and technological dynamics that are degrading planetary ecosystems. These discourses shape the public understanding of the environmental crisis and the appropriate strategies for its resolution, with each discourse purveyed by distinctive but evolving political factions and social forces.3,4 The far right discourse on the ecological crisis has historically been to deny its existence.5,6 This denial has taken many forms, but most commonly the science of ecological degradation has been disavowed and this has been matched by the refusal to accept any national responsibility for addressing the unfolding global ecological catastrophe. Customarily, the scientific evidence has been pronounced as a conspiracy designed to benefit ‘globalist elites’ or a plot to undermine national sovereignty through the ratification of multilateral agreements. This has served to bolster resistance to effective environmental policies. However, this environmental discourse is no longer as central to the far right movement as it was in the 2000s and 2010s. Increasingly, climate science is tacitly accepted, but the finger of blame is being disingenuously pointed towards the far right's traditional enemies. As environmental issues have risen up the political agenda (becoming salient to younger voters in particular), far right parties have seemingly shifted away from denialism of the science. This shift has not led to a recognition of the need for a just economic transformation or, indeed, any political action commensurate to the scale and character of the environmental crisis. Instead, the increasing (albeit belated) recognition of environmental issues (primarily those which exist within national borders) has been fused with an anti-immigration agenda to create a new invidious framing of environmental politics. The emerging discourse, which we have conceptualised as ‘ecobordering’ elsewhere,7 is characterised by climate nationalism and seeks to depict immigration (of which migration from the Global South is made hyper-visible) as a threat to local and national environments. This discourse takes two primary forms. First, it aims to politicise the environmental impacts of ‘mass immigration’ from the Global South, while depoliticising the impacts of ‘natives’. This includes linking ‘mass immigration’ with rising demand for natural resources and local environmental problems such as the pollution resulting from greater traffic and consumption. Immigration, it is suggested, is to blame for such problems, which were not issues of concern for local areas prior to multiculturalism. “The depiction of Global South migrants is juxtaposed with the depiction of ‘natives’ as responsible stewards of their ‘homeland’” “The purported threat posed by immigration and migrants… seeks to vindicate the notion that border policies are key forms of statecraft for the protection of the environment” The lack of belonging is key to understanding this portrayal; as Le Pen explicitly put it: “environmentalism [is] the natural child of patriotism, because it's the natural child of rootedness… if you're a nomad, you're not an environmentalist… Those who are nomadic… do not care about the environment; they have no homeland”.20 The depiction of Global South migrants is juxtaposed with the depiction of ‘natives’ as responsible stewards of their ‘homeland’ and adept stewards of their ‘little platoons’ (to invoke the eco-fascist and Burkean logics which this framing draws upon). This typically entails glorifying the historic stewardship of pastoral national citizens (such as farmers21 or foresters22) and the proclaiming the sound management of domestic natural resources by ‘natives’23 over the ‘homeland’.24,25 The National Front and Golden Dawn have even established wings of their movements called ‘New Ecology’26 and ‘Green Wing’27 designed to protect “family, nature and race”28 and “the cradle of our race”29 respectively. Both of these discursive traits have since been identified more recently in Marine Le Pen's recent presidential campaign in which she obtained 41.5 per cent of the vote. Dubbed ‘patriotic ecology’ by her followers, the fallacious depictions of culprits and saviours in the environmental crisis have become normalised in French politics to the extent that they are echoed by rival conservative politicians. The purported threat posed by immigration and migrants to previously ‘pure’ and ‘sustainable’ spaces of European nature seeks to vindicate the notion that border policies are key forms of statecraft for the protection of the environment. As a senior figure in Marine Le Pen's National Rally, Jordan Bardella, declared in 2019: “borders are the environment's greatest ally… it is through them that we will save the planet”.30 “To ignore the root causes of the ecological crisis at this juncture would be catastrophic for the natural world” This would be catastrophic on two fronts. On the one hand, the discourse prescribes a form of statecraft centred on border security rather than systemic economic transformation, which represents an apocryphal programme of environmental protection. It does so by focusing narrowly on ‘national’ nature (peripheralising global issues) and obscuring the material economic drivers of ecological degradation (such as the heavily polluting energy and aviation industries, for which Global North populations are primarily culpable). To ignore the root causes of the ecological crisis at this juncture would be catastrophic for the natural world, but that is precisely what this political framing inculcates. Just as importantly, ecobordering seeks to inflict further structural violence on those who those exploited at the peripheries of the global economy. The nationalistic framing emerges at a time when immigration is rising because of climate change, and the discourse thus seeks to diagnose the symptoms of ecological degradation as the causes of it. There is already evidence that the rise of the far right strengthens political resistance to climate migration,31 and this framing serves to justify this resistance from an environmental perspective. At a global scale, these framings threaten to rationalise a de facto climate apartheid; with Global North populations and elites in the Global South enjoying the spoils of an environmentally deleterious global economy, while poorer Global South populations become confined to increasingly uninhabitable areas facing escalating risks of climate shocks and deteriorating health conditions. The meaning and practical implications of climate justice will become an increasingly hot topic in the Anthropocene. Challenging the depictions of culprits and saviours purveyed by far right figures is only an initial step to preventing injustices mounting further.32 Recognising the historical constitution of the global economy and the inequalities and vulnerabilities resulting from it underlines the injustices of far right framings and the need for progressive actors to advance more transformative approaches.33 Progressive responses to the rise of the far right in the Anthropocene requires formulating and advancing notions of a just transition which accounts for the movement of people affected by climate change as well as other less privileged groupings in society.34 This will require far more progressive forms of statecraft which are a world away from those advocated in the framings of the far right. Dan Bailey is a senior lecturer in international political economy at Manchester Metropolitan University. His is interested in the evolving and complex interactions between the global economy, climate change, the objectives and strategies of political institutions, and the ideas and discourses that shape public understandings of the ecological crisis and sustainability transitions. He has authored a series of academic publications and policy reports on topics relating to these interactions. Joe Turner is a lecturer in international politics at the University of York. His interdisciplinary examines how border regimes in post-imperial states like Britain are structured by imperial and colonial histories and hierarchies of human value. He recently published the book Migration Studies and Colonialism with Lucy Mayblin.

Idoya Puig and Karl McLaughlin, eds. Spanish Golden Age Texts in the Twenty-First Century: Teaching the Old Through the New; Alba Carmona. Las reescrituras fílmicas de la comedia nueva: Un siglo en la gran pantalla

Going by the strength of the first two publications of the new Peter Lang series, Spanish Golden Age Studies, this initiative is very much to be welcomed. Both constitute important contributions to the discipline. The first, a volume of essays edited by Idoya Puig and Karl McLaughlin, arising from a symposium held at Manchester Metropolitan University in April 2018, is a timely reflection on the state of the field of Golden Age Studies, predominantly in the United Kingdom, although it does include important reflections on its place in modern Spain and the United States. A sense of crisis in the discipline has been with us for some time. UCL ran a symposium on the state and future of the field just under 20 years ago but perhaps this has been magnified recently as part of a more generalized siege mentality in arts and humanities as a whole and an even greater one in languages. The notion of “teaching the old through the new” seeks to address two related problems. Firstly, the challenge of making strange, intellectually challenging linguistic artifacts attractive, accessible, and manageable for students who are increasingly audiovisual learners. Secondly how to make these strange materials feel relevant in a higher education sector increasingly dominated by instrumentalist conceptions of learning. A central presupposition of their critique is a declining capacity for reading. One of the most significant proposals in the volume, registered in several chapters, is to take analogous cultural forms to build “cognitive bridges” allowing learners to relate the unfamiliar to contemporary contexts.To some extent in tension with this approach is the delightfully pugnacious and brilliant opening riposte from Jeremy Lawrance, who underlines the indispensable role played by difference in both generating interest and learning. Defending the intrinsic value and pleasure of the Golden Age text, he makes the case that their unique unrepeatability arises from an otherness that cannot simply be appropriated by our concerns but requires us to be appropriated by them. The literary text is not information. The notion of the afterlife of the work, downstream contexts, proposes that as its material form becomes increasingly unfamiliar its truth value becomes increasingly palpable in a growing foreignness and alterity in which it is renewed and transformed. Literary theoretical movements and the globalization of literary studies propose a comparability based on discursive transparency, which is to ignore the aesthetic or in Emily Apter’s phrase the “poetics of translational difference.” For Lawrence, the canon has been one of the main victims of the emphasis on critique rather than commentary, which keeps intrinsic value and the aesthetic in view. A fascinating and vital study of what is being taught at UK universities by Stuart Davis corroborates Lawrance’s critique, showing how there has been a broadening of the range of texts offered and a move away from the canonical literary to historical and visual culture with a notable trans-Atlantic inflection. For those of us with skin in the game, it is a concern that just under half of Hispanic Departments in the country now offer no Golden Age whatsoever. Perceived ease and accessibility have undoubtedly played a role in this reshaping, however; equally significant, however, is how much is at stake for learners, along with a growing lack of familiarity attendant on the diminishing place of the period in the canon. Students want intellectual stretch and challenge unless it impairs their attainment.The Francoist promotion of Spain’s imperial glories has tarnished the celebration of its literature under democracy. Almudena García González rightly acclaims the sophisticated, witty, and playful TVE series, El ministerio del tiempo, as a tool for introducing students to history, literary figures, and even poetic ideas from the period. Its mash up of sci-fi and historical fiction, under the aegis of the idea that Spain’s history must be protected at all costs and remain what it is, offers a demythologising vision of its past that, in the words of Paul Julian Smith, is “affectionate but sceptical” while being genuinely “apasionante.” One of the powers of historical fiction is to reinsert us in media res, back into the drama and contingency of history. Two chapters specifically reference hip-hop and rap as ways of animating Golden Age poetry. Ted Bergman offers 50 Cent as bridge to Quevedo’s jácaras, foregrounding the figure of the anti-hero, dark humor, bravado, and cynicism implicit in the gangsta rap genre, fueled by professional and aesthetic competition. Antonio Carreño-Rodríguez takes this further. comparing the tit for tat between Góngora, Lope, and Quevedo with the East Coast–West Coast rivalry that marked the hip-hop scene in the late 1990s (NWA, Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube, Nas, Jay Z) and claimed several lives. Rubén Cristóbal Hornillos takes this rich set of analogies and affinities beyond the metric to look at the ways lyric can be used to open vistas onto classic poetry, exploring San Juan de la Cruz and Sor Juana in relation to reggaeton and folk rock, which of course draw a surprising amount of their imagery and metaphorics from this prior tradition. Karl McLaughlin explores how to get out from under the pall cast by Received Pronunciation versions of the classics, Shakespeare in this case, by searching for parallels that will resonate with students. Here, the seventeenth century’s poetic academies, salons, and competitions are set alongside Twitter storms, celebrity spats, and talent shows. All of these approaches are particularly effective in enlivening the consideration of the formal poetic qualities of lyric, although the contemporariness of their parallels fade fast in the churn of twenty-first-century music and celebrity culture.Another important approach to teaching the literature of the Golden Age promoted here is its combination with translation activities. Idoya Puig champions a multiliteracies approach in relation to “La española inglesa,” taking advantage of the 2015 TVE film and simultaneous need to incorporate intercultural awareness, aural, visual, and digital literacies into traditional pedagogy and explore the new social and collaborative possibilities afforded by digital technologies to how “traditional” texts are explored and taught. Such an approach is modeled by Jules Whicker’s use of concordance tools to produce word frequency lists and word clouds from a Góngora poem for a module exploring literature through translation, which culminates in students comparing the versions they have produced, part collaboratively, and part individually with published ones. Such approaches do undoubtedly support the deep engagement with the realia of the work and close reading of language. Collin McKinney advocates a different form of comparison, using the transgeneric adaptation of Don Quixote as a graphic novel as a support for introducing the novel itself, one advantage of which is the effectiveness of the form in conveying some of the humor of the original. Aroa Algaba Granero and Sara Sánchez-Hernández promote a performance studies approach and the use of contemporary performances of Golden Age drama as a crucial part of their pedagogy. Gema Cienfuegos Antelo proposes a transversal approach to Golden Age theatre focused on the female voice. The selection of like-minded female characters facilitates the identification of patterns and conventions in a student body lacking a broad contextual knowledge of the drama. The embodied, doing, and creative response are implicit in all the chapters explicitly addressing classroom methodologies.One thing that is clear from this cri de coeur is that the literary qualities of these texts need to remain at the heart of how and why they are taught. The need for critical reflection on how we approach Golden Age literature is underlined by Duncan Wheeler’s insightful concluding chapter, evaluating the possibilities and downsides of using cinematic adaptations, following a review of the cultural politics around education and national heritage. Pointing to the erosion of the place of the Golden Age within primary and secondary education since the Transición, he notes the problem that many of the Spanish attempts to bring their classics to the silver screen have been notably less successful than their British equivalents, especially in terms of international projection. Greater attention is needed to how Spain’s rich cultural patrimony can be communicated in ways that combine education and entertainment for a broad range of learners both at home and abroad. As Lisa Jardine once said about Yann Martel’s novel The Life of Pi, without the tiger the eponymous hero would not have survived. Similarly, for us, there are positive signs for the future, not least this inspiring and innovative volume of essays, despite the tiger.Alba Carmona’s tour de force Las reescrituras fílmicas de la comedia nueva is a definitive consideration of film versions of the comedia. Beautifully written and painstakingly documented in the face of the challenge posed by the absence in some cases of the films themselves. She takes us from the 1910s and the fragmentary remains of Adrià Gual’s El alcalde de Zalamea, whose adaptation as far as can be reconstructed is aimed at the aesthetic education of its audience rather than being pointedly political, through the 1920s and Ludwig Berger’s 1920 film version of the same play, Der Richter von Zalamea, that emphasized the question of honor, its Catholicism and superstition, transforming it into an “españolada” for its German audience. Stopping briefly, Carmona considers another lost film, an early biopic of Lope de Vega, La musa y el Fénix from 1935, which appears to have aspects in common with a theatre project under consideration by Federico García Lorca and coincided with the early work of La Barraca and Teatro Popular who sought to educate the people through a poet seen as revolutionary and of the people. Under the dictatorship, Antonio Román filmed a version of Fuenteovejuna (1947): praised for exalting “virtudes raciales,” it exaggerated the villainy of Fernán Gómez, even as it drew a veil over the sexual violence of the play and exalted the role of the Reyes Católicos, in keeping with their wider idealization under the Franco regime. A year earlier, a musical comedy version of La viuda valenciana directed by Fernando Cortés, adapted by Max Aub, had premiered in Mexico City. This had followed Aub’s collaboration with María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti the previous year on a film of La dama duende directed by Luis Saslavsky, which was shown in Buenos Aires. Here again, liberal use had been made of music and dance to lighten the tone. Neither film was given a general release in Spain no doubt due to their association with republican exiles like Aub and Alberti. The triumph of conservative appropriations of the classics have meant that the radical tradition headed by Lorca, Aub, Alberti, and others recognizing the modernity of these playwrights and their availability to progressive readings have largely been forgotten.Further conservative filmic readings of the comedia appeared in the 1950s, with a version of Don Juan, mixing Zorrilla and Tirso’s versions, directed by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, that emphasized Catholic redemption. A similarly reactionary version of El alcalde by José Gutiérrez Maesso emphasizing the heroic qualities of Pedro Crespo and his family, graced Spanish screens in 1954 to little acclaim, augmenting the presence of Philip II, six years after Spain had constituted itself as a kingdom again under Franco. In 1964, Vittorio Cottafavi directed an adaptation of Lope de Vega’s little known comedia, Las famosas asturianas, as Los cien caballeros, a work dramatizing the early period of the Reconquista and offering an unflattering picture of both Christian and Moors. The government worried about the negative representation of Muslim characters, given the regime’s dependence at that time on the Arabic world and the film’s light-hearted comic tone meant that its critical reception was similarly subdued. The first verse adaptation to screen finally arrived in 1974 with Juan Guerrero Zamora’s version of Fuenteovejuna, whose violence, often a gesture of political opposition, provoked censors to make 47 cuts, which led the director not to attend his own premiere. Another version of El alcalde by left-wing director Mario Camus appeared in 1973, shot through with indeterminacy in the script given that no censor would have passed a film that overtly represented a capricious and corrupt justice system.Twenty years would pass before another translation of Lope onto the silver screen would be attempted, with the ex-director of RTVE Pilar Miró’s version of the then little-known romantic(?) comedy El perro del hortelano in 1996. Despite skepticism, the film went on to be a commercial and critical success. The subtle changes made to Lope humanized the protagonist Diana, thus toning down the misogyny of the original and downplaying of Teodoro’s vaulting ambition. Carmona traces in forensic detail the extent to which Miró’s version may have built on a Russian version, Sobaka na sene, shown on Soviet TV in 1978 by Yan Frid. Passing over the commercial disaster of Manuel Iborra’s La dama boba from 2006, unfairly ignored by critics and the public, Carmona’s final chapter examines the last decade. It takes us from the 2010 Lope biopic by Andrucha Waddington, which focused reductively and romanticized the period of the dramatist’s life from about 1583–1588, availing itself of the cliché trope of the self-destructive genius, to his appearance in Cervantes contra Lope (2016) and El ministerio del tiempo (2015–2017). These most recent outings of the Fénix on screen are less overtly mythologizing and although they present a less than heroic version of the so-called womanizing playwright, there is a leavening injection of humor and wry winks at the popular historiography.In her conclusions, Carmona reflects on the lack of success, either commercial or critical, achieved by any of these filmic rewritings and compares this inheritance unfavorably with the English-speaking world’s. However, despite this somewhat disheartening end, the most recent outings of Spain’s Golden Age comedia on-screen have seen more playful, humorous, and less reverential experimentation. At the same time, much will depend on the success of the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico in its search for commercial success based on innovative and accessible stagings of the classics. The vast corpus of Golden Age comedias with their immeasurable potential for adaptation and transferral to the screen awaits that animating moment that will finally establish a tradition that cannot be ignored.

In memory of Dr. Saeed Ul Hassan, Associate Professor (SL) at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) UK

In memory of Dr. Saeed Ul Hassan, Associate Professor (<scp>SL</scp>) at Manchester Metropolitan University (<scp>MMU</scp>) <scp>UK</scp>

Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 by Alison Hedley

Reviewed by: Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 by Alison Hedley Emma Liggins (bio) Alison Hedley, Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), pp. 187, $85/ £70.99 hardcover. Drawing on media studies approaches and new understandings of technology, Making Pictorial Print gives a lively, broad-ranging account of the significance of images in the periodical at the fin de siècle. Whilst recent studies have paid welcome attention to illustration and image reproduction in nineteenth-century journalism, Alison Hedley's timely intervention broadens conceptualisations of text-image relations across a number of representative magazines and encourages us to rethink their complex visuality and rapidly increasing audiences. She demonstrates that what she terms "the technological imagination," encompassing the modernity of new communication technologies from the gramophone to the camera, is hugely significant for appreciating "readers' enhanced awareness of media materiality" (16). As she argues, "Popular illustrated magazines prepared mass readerships for modern media systems," helping to usher in a new media age (17). Analysing advertisements, photographs, magazine headers, wood engravings, and scrapbooks, Hedley shows how pictorial magazines, and indeed popular culture in general, became increasingly visual and multimodal as the twentieth century approached. This new media landscape "created new possibilities for readers to exert agency" and make meaning at a time of periodical diversification (62). She takes as her case studies the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, Pearson's Magazine, and the Strand Magazine, all popular Victorian publications with long print runs surviving into the 1930s and beyond. Although oriented around general [End Page 459] interest periodicals and omitting the widely read women's magazines of this era, this selection allows Hedley to examine reader engagement and different aesthetic representations in detail. A good range of periodical pages are included to demonstrate the variety and variability of images in circulation. Beginning with the new visuality of the Illustrated London News (ILN) at the turn of the century, Hedley argues that print's "established text-image hierarchy" was subverted at the fin de siècle (29). She draws on André Gaudreault and Phillipe Marion's three-phase model for constituting media—appearance, emergence, and advent—to demonstrate that advances in print technology and changing attitudes to visual communication transformed the balance between letterpress and pictures in the ILN. Her quantitative analysis of random sample numbers shows that image-dominated pages increased from 42 percent of the issue in 1880 to 85 percent by 1907, correlating with the rise in halftones from photographs. Hedley reads a representative item from 1907, "Fairy Stories by Photography: Grimm Illustrated," in terms of a hybrid intermediality that "[juxtaposes] old and new aesthetic techniques" through a combination of photography and hand-drawn or painted images (55). The second chapter focuses on advertisements and consumer culture in a comparison between the ILN and the Graphic, examining the metamorphosis of the advertising pages into a "visual bazaar of images of slogans" built on greater "extravagant aesthetics" (63). This adds to critical discussions of advertising though a greater emphasis on readers' engagement with mass culture and "counter-interpretative hyper-reading" (87). Hedley's new readings of advertisements for cocoa and Pears soap emphasise the techniques of mélange and hybridity while also thinking about ways in which readers could resist advertisers' strategies. This resistance could take the form of curatorial remediations, as shown in her analysis of a scrapbook from the Harry Page collection of ephemera at Manchester Metropolitan University, which contains elaborate pictorial scenes accompanied by handwritten comments. I was fascinated to read about this subversive commentary on consumerism evident in the fetishized displays of commercial brands on scraps cut from periodical advertisements, a lesser-known tactic of alternative interpretation. Possibilities for subversive engagement are also highlighted in the third chapter, which explores data visualizations in Pearson's Magazine (1896–1902) in relation to reader engagement with population journalism. Photorealistic representations of statistical data on such subjects as marriage or suicide rates function as further examples of the aesthetic evolution through which illustrated periodicals of this time "responded to innovations in mass image reproduction" (112). Readers have the chance to...

Histories, Memories and Representations of Being Young in the First World War ed. by Maggie Andrews, N. C. Fleming, and Marcus Morris

Reviewed by: Histories, Memories and Representations of Being Young in the First World War ed. by Maggie Andrews, N. C. Fleming, and Marcus Morris Ashley Henrickson Histories, Memories and Representations of Being Young in the First World War. Edited by Maggie Andrews, N. C. Fleming, and Marcus Morris. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xiii + 257 pp. Hardcover $119.99, paper $84.99. Histories, Memories and Representations of Being Young in the First World War explores the experiences of young people during the war and how the conflict has been presented to young people in the century that followed. The edited collection was developed from a 2015 conference at Manchester Metropolitan University titled "Being Young in World War One." Editors Maggie Andrews, N. C. Fleming, and Marcus Morris have broadly defined both children and youth (including people up to the age of twenty) and welcomed essays that explore the diverse perspectives and experiences of young people. The editors aptly note that the collection does not and cannot cover the entirety of young people's experiences; however, the contributors should be commended for putting a notable dent in the historiography. The chapters cover many different topics, including children's and young people's experiences in education, the workplace, and organizations like the Navy League. Examining such a breadth of topics inevitably means that the authors describe numerous and sometimes contradictory wartime experiences. For example, in her chapter, Ruth Percy suggests that young, working-class women viewed the war as a time of opportunity rather than a time of loss and sorrow. Conversely, Melanie Tebbutt describes how young people often found refuge from the sadness of war in darkened movie theatres. Marcus Morris illustrates yet another unique experience by drawing attention to the desires of some young women to subvert gender norms and fight on the front lines. These varied descriptions of young people's experiences may appear inconsistent, but as Maggie Andrews, Hayley Carter, Lisa Cox-Davies, and Anna Muggeridge explain in their chapter, "there were numerous home fronts just as there were numerous battlefronts," and furthermore, "a national narrative of the conflict, even in relation to children, is not the national narrative" (55). By highlighting a variety of perspectives, this edited collection embraces the inevitable complexity of wartime and childhood. [End Page 441] The collection works to center the experiences of children and young people in a field where their experiences are often studied only in relation to other histories. In doing so, the authors demonstrate how the history of childhood helps paint a more complete picture of the past. For example, by focusing on the experiences of urban children, Rebecca Ball's chapter challenges the belief that the home front was a predominantly female space and questions the assumption that relationships between civilians and soldiers were largely defined by separation. The latter half of the collection examines contemporary understandings of the war and children's place within it, along with ways that the war was presented to later generations. Jane Rosen considers how children's novels produced over the past four decades preserve myths about the war in an attempt to tell morally instructive tales. Sam Edwards discusses how the war has been portrayed and commemorated through television. The collection concludes with a fascinating chapter by Maggie Andrews that will interest both academic and public historians. Andrews reviews the numerous accommodations that were undertaken to make the centennial commemorations of the First World War palatable for consumption by young people in the United Kingdom. She outlines the various political, historiographic, and economic factors that shaped and ultimately limited the histories of the war that were shared with young people. Overall, this collection provides a wealth of insight into the experiences of young people in World War I. Melanie Tebbutt's analysis of how children experienced the darkened space of the cinemas is especially innovative. As a whole, the book demonstrates that growing up during a time of conflict had enormous effects on young people's lives; however, these effects were diverse and sometimes contradictory. Ashley Henrickson Know History Inc. Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press

From the President andIFSTNews

After more than 12 years as Chief Executive of IFST I have made the decision, with a great degree of sadness, to step down from the role to pursue my work as a consultant full-time. This will be my last article before I finish in November and therefore I hope you don't mind me using the opportunity to look back over my time in the role and reflect on some of the great moments and achievements for the Institute. When I took on the role, I could see the great potential for the Institute but what immediately struck me was how incredibly positive and dedicated its volunteer members were. I had worked in other membership bodies previously and never experienced this level of commitment and passion. So, before I start, I would like to thank all the amazingly talented and dedicated members, who I have met and worked with, for making the job so enjoyable and possible. For the first couple of years much of the focus was, necessarily, quite inward-looking. We needed to streamline and simplify our governance and ways of working, reducing our committee structures from 15 down to eight committees and halving the size of our constitutional documents. However, even during these first two years we introduced some new activities, which are still a part of our core activities today. We introduced our Student Career LaunchPads, initially in collaboration with Campden BRI, in 2011, gradually adding new venues until we were reaching around 400 undergraduate students a year across six locations. We have continued to work closely with Campden BRI in support of our future talent with the introduction of our UK Ecotrophelia competition in 2013. This year we celebrated the competition's 10th anniversary and it is still hugely well-regarded by the universities taking part and by the industry ‘dragons’ who are our judges. The institute celebrated its 50th Jubilee in 2014 with a wide range of special events and activities – those of you who were around then may remember the packets of sunflower seeds we sent out with your FS&T magazines to mark the occasion – with the request to send in photos of your growing efforts. We timed our new branding to coincide with the Jubilee – out went the old ‘Hoover’ logo - and 10 years on, our current brand and logo is still looking strong. We even had a special IFST cocktail created to match the new brand colour! Alongside the more fun and frivolous activities we also used our Jubilee year to launch our Register of Food Safety Professionals. This has proved to be a slow burn but continues to grow in numbers and recognition. We recognised our original strapline ‘The voice of the food profession’ rang a bit hollow. We did not even have a specific communications function in the first few years of my role and so the introduction of a Communications Coordinator role in 2014 was a big step forward in increasing our ‘voice’. Our voice grew louder in 2015 with the introduction of a part-time Scientific Policy Director and again in 2018, with the addition of a dedicated scientific resource in the form of a Scientific Affairs Manager. Our relationship with governmental departments and key industry stakeholders is now very positive and strong – as it should be for a professional body. Fast forwarding to the last few years, we have had COVID to contend with. However, our move to remote working proved to be a relatively positive one. Obviously, engaging remotely has its limitations, but our ability to work with our active members through online meetings has proved to be a very effective model – evidenced, for example, by the incredibly nimble activities of our COVID working group, who have since replicated this model to introduce a series of new ‘knowledge hubs’ – providing must-go-to resources for food professionals. I need to also mention the huge growth in both scale and credibility of our International Journal of Food Science and Technology. I've purposefully not mentioned individual names in this piece, as it would be so difficult to acknowledge all of those who have contributed to the Institute's success, but our current Editor and editorial team have done an incredible job in raising its status. I have mentioned earlier a few of the newer roles in the executive team but must thank and acknowledge all of the amazing colleagues I have worked with during my 12 years – past and present. I've received some very kind words from members since I announced my departure, but the Institute could not have achieved any of the successes it has without the incredible hard work and commitment of my close working colleagues. My personal motto during my time has always been ‘We have a serious job to do – but we can have fun doing it’. So, thank you to all of you for allowing me to have such fun! The Institute has been awarding its prestigious Honorary Fellowship Award since 1966, the first very aptly being awarded to one of the Institute's founding members, Professor James Mounfield. Until this year, Honorary Fellowship has only been awarded to recognise a Member or Fellow who has made extensive personal contributions to the working and progress of the Institute and to the food science and technology profession. Nominations are currently invited from professional members (Members and Fellows) and are made without the nominee's knowledge. However, a small working group of the Board has been reviewing our awards and, in particular, whether we should also be recognising those outside the Institute who have made a wider contribution to the food sector. This latter option may be an IFST professional member, but the Board is keen to open this second option to potentially consider outstanding professionals who are not currently IFST members. It is important that these awards recognise and celebrate the huge contribution of our very finest and most dedicated food professionals, both in the UK and beyond. By offering this new category the Institute will now be able to do this. We will be publishing the new rules, judging criteria and nominations process on our website very shortly and hope this will stimulate you to start thinking about who, from your perspective, has made the biggest difference to the world of food science and technology. A team of students from the University of Nottingham, named The Green Feathers, won the gold prize at Ecotrophelia UK with their Cracker(ed) it Crackers. Each member of the gold-winning team took home a share of £2,000. Now in its tenth year, Ecotrophelia UK is a ‘Dragon's Den’ style competition that challenges teams of UK students to develop an innovative, eco-friendly food and drink product. From idea generation through to the final packaged product, the teams get a hands-on experience of what it takes to bring an eco-friendly food or drink product to market. The finalists pitched their products on 7 June 2022. The awards were introduced by the competition's Chief Judge and Chair of the IFST Science Committee, Chris Gilbert-Wood, and presented by James Williams of PepsiCo (which also sponsored the prizes). Laura Hill, a food science student at the University of Nottingham and captain of Team Green Feathers said, “We are honoured to be awarded gold in the UK finals, every team in the final had fantastic products and exceptional standards. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to go to Tesco to present our crackers and meet the dragons and other finalists in person. We are so excited for Paris; we can't wait to meet all the teams and find out about their products and present our crackers!” The ‘Fortifiber’ team from Manchester Metropolitan University secured the silver prize and £1,000 with their product ‘FiBAR’. The bronze prize and £500 were awarded to team ‘Avena Grains’ from Nottingham Trent University with their product ‘Granola Infusions Superberry’. All three prizewinning teams will also receive a one-year IFST membership. The teams pitched their ideas to judges from top names in the food and drink industry including PepsiCo, Nestlé, Food Manufacture, Coca-Cola, Sainsbury's, Unilever, Mondelez, Warburtons, Tesco, Institute of Food Science and Technology (IFST) and Campden BRI. The winning team from the University of Nottingham with ‘Crackered it’ Left to Right - Megan Holden, Laura Hill, Katy Tolson and Kieren Spouge. Jon Poole, Chief Executive of IFST commented; “It was a particular pleasure to be hosting this Ecotrophelia UK final this year - it was the first opportunity to be face-to-face again and, on top of that, we were celebrating ten years of the competition in the UK. Well done to all the teams on excellent submissions and presentations.” Ecotrophelia teams, dragons and sponsors at the finals Delia Mertoiu presenting Quorn with a group scheme certificate. Natasha Medhurst, Senior Scientific Affairs Manager at IFST (left), Hannah Theobald, Head of Nutrition at Quorn, centre Here we take the opportunity to explore some of the organisations which have set up group membership schemes to see how they benefit. One of our longest standing group scheme members, Marks & Spencer, has embedded IFST membership into its career progression framework. Staff have their continuing professional development reviewed annually by IFST as part of their personal development plans. At the other end of the timeline is one of our newest group scheme organisations, Quorn Manufacturing, based in Teesside, which produces mycoprotein products. Hannah Theobald, Head of Nutrition of Quorn, commented on their experience of an IFST group scheme “Our collaboration with IFST started a few months back. As part of the group scheme onboarding, we've held one IFST Connect session, where members have heard first-hand about the benefits of IFST membership and ways in which they can get involved in IFST activities (and we have another one planned)”. Delia Mertoiu and Anne Marie Flynn, Technical Manager at Grŵp Llandrillo Menai The beauty of an IFST group scheme is that it is available to organisations of all sizes. One of the largest schemes in place is that of Food Standards Scotland with over 100 members. On the other end of the spectrum is The Food Technology Centre, Grŵp Llandrillo Menai, with just 10 members. Anne Marie Flynn, Technical Manager at Grŵp Llandrillo Menai is pleased to report “IFST group membership provides a great resource for our staff and evidence to my team that we take professionalism seriously and encourage our colleagues to develop themselves on a personal and professional basis. I would encourage others to make this available to their teams. The process has been very straightforward.” Deborah Kendale & Delia Mertoiu presenting Tesco with a group scheme certificate. From left to right: Stuart Challenor, Category Technical Manager – Health, Beauty, Wellness, Household, Pet, Export & Fuel, Caron Lacey, Lead Technical Manager, and Emmanuelle Lerges, Food Technical Director. The Tesco Team hosting Ecotrophelia 2022. Left to Right: Naomi Kasolowsky, Group Insight & Foresight Director, Sarah Bradbury, Group Quality Director, Karen Poole, Head of Healthy and Sustainable Diets, Stuart Challenor, Category Technical Manager – Health, Beauty, Wellness, Household, Pet, Export & Fuel, Emmanuelle Lerges, Food Technical Director, Bertrand Emond, Membership Ambassador-Professional Development and Culture Excellence Lead at Campden BRI. IFST membership is available to international organisations as well and this year we were pleased to welcome Universitas Syiah Kuala in Indonesia. As a group scheme, academic staff will be benefiting from food safety and food science resources and being a part of the IFST Community. In addition, all members have access to the research power of the IFST's journal IJFST as well as regular technical updates through webinars and our Food Science and Technology magazine. Delia Mertoiu, IFST's Marketing and Business Development Manager, explains “a major part of my work is liaising with IFST's group schemes. We help food sector organisations demonstrate best practice, high standards and regulatory compliance.” IFST's multidisciplinary team looks after each group scheme. The team includes Natasha Medhurst, Senior Scientific Affairs Manager and Sarah Drumm, Registration and Accreditation Manager. Natasha commented “Members are benefitting from joining discussions on IFST Community covering processing, innovation (product and packaging), regulatory, sensory science and food safety, as well as sharing their knowledge and experience, and collaborating by providing valuable scientific resources and hosting topical events.” Sarah added “professional recognition for individuals within a group scheme gives the organisation an important external validation of its efforts to promote professionalism and good science.” For details of the benefits of group scheme membership and a full list of IFST's 50+ group schemes please visit ifst.org/groupschemes-org If you are interested in finding out more about the benefits of a group scheme for your organisation, please contact our Marketing and Business Development Manager, Delia Mertoiu, via d.mertoiu@ifst.org ‘What is Food Science?’ Is the most common question asked by prospective Food Science and Nutrition students during university open days or other outreach events. The Food Science Addict Podcast is the way Dr. Veronica Giacintucci (Teaching Fellow in Food Science at the University of Surrey) addresses this question. This podcast was born from the need to generate a community of young food scientists and raise awareness of what food science is and the many professional roles a food scientist can cover. To hear to the podcast visit thefoodscienceaddict.com In the Autumn, Nominations Committee again will be inviting Members and Fellows to put themselves forward for key trustee vacancies. IFST can only deliver through the invaluable contribution of members and this is your opportunity to shape the future by becoming a member of the Board of Trustees. Look out for the call for nominations which should arrive by email in November. The Food Innovation (Product and Packaging) Special Interest Group (SIG) is on a mission to connect and support IFST Members involved with innovation. Susan Arkley and Valia Christidou explain the group's latest project - an Innovation Toolkit - and ask for members’ input to help create it. The Food Innovation SIG is one of the youngest special interest groups at IFST. It was created in spring 2020, and celebrated its 2nd anniversary this July. Prior to this, the IFST did not have a group representing members working in the areas of NPD, R&D and innovation. Having identified this opportunity, the Food Innovation SIG was formed by bringing together a group of food professionals who are all passionate about innovation. The group consists of IFST members from across the whole food sector including academics, R&D professionals, food industry consultants, NPD specialists and students. Team behaviour models expect newly formed teams to go through the phases of forming, storming and norming before they start performing. This team came together from day one, united by a common passion for innovation in the food industry and full of ideas and ambition on what it can offer the Institute's members. The first challenge was to agree a common definition of innovation. This was no easy task, as anyone working in innovation will know, and it generated much discussion and debate. A review of the competitive landscape and a gap analysis was carried out to help define the space where the innovation SIG would sit. This work proved to be an important phase in bringing the group together, enabling each other's opinions to be understood and respected. The word cloud (Figure 1) summarises the themes, words, phrases and ideas that came out of the very lively discussions. From this, a very clear purpose was agreed for the SIG: ‘To promote and inspire excellence in food product and packaging innovation’. The monthly Food Innovation SIG meetings always start with an ice breaker, which is a great way to ‘get into the zone’ and try out new techniques. This is followed by an ‘Inspiration Space’, which is an input, learning or training opportunity, either from a guest speaker or a SIG member on a pertinent topic. This can be a review of recent innovations and trends or talks and experience sharing from other businesses and groups. Meetings close with updates on plans for events and other activities. The innovation SIG is very excited to be working on the Innovation Toolkit, a priority project for 2022. This has been one of the key initiatives of the SIG since it was created back in 2020. Work on the Toolkit started last year. A small team of Innovation SIG Members worked with Dr David Hall of the Ideas Centre (and guest speaker from the Unlocking your Inner Superhero webinar) in a creative session to start generating ideas for the Toolkit. Aligned to IFST's mission, the Innovation Toolkit will promote excellence in innovation based on science, data and best practice. It will serve as a trusted source of inspiration and guidance for those seeking to innovate, those wanting to teach others how to innovate and those aiming to improve their innovation skills. It will help facilitate the innovation process by bringing together tools, tips and techniques as well as examples of industry proven protocols and methods. By promoting best innovation practice in the food industry, the Toolkit will serve to underpin the implementation of any successful product development process. The aim is to create a dynamic space where one can find creative tools and techniques, information about the innovation process, the latest trends and consumer related insights and some inspiring journeys of innovators in the food sector. The Innovation SIG is looking to harness the collective knowledge and experience of the Institute's membership to curate this dynamic space of tried and tested tools as well as knowledge from experts in the field. The Innovation SIG has been collecting inputs for the Toolkit since the start of its activities. Every time the SIG collaborates with an individual or organisation, whether as a guest speaker at the monthly Inspiration Space or at an organised event, they are asked the same question, ‘what would you put in the Innovation Toolkit?’ Here are some of their answers: Read and consume as widely as you can, look beyond the food industry and try to think like a paranoid CEO Charles Banks, thefoodpeople, How to spot trends and influence people webinar, June 2021 Don't worry about refining your product, a minimum viable product is all you need to start Mike Faers, Food Innovation Solutions, Inspiration Space guest speaker, June 2021 Understand what resonates with your consumer. Consumers often like being part of the solution Gavin Milligan, Green Knight, Inspiration Space guest speaker March 2021 Apply the theory of TRIZ Tom Hollands, Raynor Foods, Smart Innovation Session, IFST SC21, May 2021. In addition to the insights and suggestions collated from these collaborators, the Innovation SIG is also looking for inputs to the Innovation Toolkit from IFST members. The Toolkit will be a dynamic and ever evolving resource, so its contents will be refreshed and updated on an ongoing basis, meaning there will be opportunities to add to and update content to ensure that it remains current and relevant. As it is an Innovation Toolkit for IFST Members, the Innovation SIG would like to ‘member source’ ideas from members to help shape its content. Join the Food Innovation (Product and Packaging) community on the IFST Community platform community.ifst.org/group/ innovation-sig where you can post your ideas and suggestions. The Food Innovation SIG looks forward to welcoming you to the Food Innovation Network and working with you to ‘member source’ the contents for this valuable resource. This article is the first in a series addressing IFST's commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). It looks at what is meant by these terms and the strategy developed to ensure they are embraced in IFST culture. IFST's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion statement, (ifst.org/about) is as follows: ‘We recognise the importance and benefits of equal opportunities, diversity, inclusion and eliminating discrimination in every aspect of our work. We aim to ensure that no individual or group (including members, employees, job applicants, officeholders, volunteers, consultants, members of committees and panels or participants in research) is treated more or less favourably than others on grounds of gender, age, marital status, disability, race, ethnic origin, nationality, sexual orientation, pregnancy, maternity/ paternity or religion. We work to comply with all the legislation related to equal opportunities to ensure that the culture, philosophy and processes within IFST are free from bias of any kind.’ Diversity is the presence of differences that include race, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, language, nationality, age, or political perspective. Note that this list is broader than just protected characteristics as specified by the Equalities Act 2010. For some, the term ‘diversity’ is used to describe non-dominant identities. Identities, such as being dark-skinned and transgender, might be regarded as non-dominant. Identities, such as being white, heterosexual or speaking English, might be considered dominant. Organisations and teams should, where possible, be diverse as this brings different perspectives not just through roles, skills, experience or physiological criteria but also in personal preferences and priorities i.e. the way we look at the world. This is known as ‘thought diversity’; it is not easily visible but is critical to broaden our thinking and bring true perspective to the discussion. Whilst equality is enshrined in law and sets out duties and responsibilities relating to discrimination and harassment due to certain personal characteristics, this surely should not be the only reason for action. Neutral and fair distribution of resources, status, rights and opportunities by organisations and their policies, procedures and systems is equality in action. In an organisation with a diverse culture people have differences; equality requires accepting that everyone has different needs, experiences and opportunities. Welcoming those who feel different and making them feel like everyone else is called inclusion. For some, diversity and inclusion may be confused with each other. Diversity is being asked to the party, inclusion is being invited to dance… (Vernā Myers). Diversity may be adopted in an organisation, but that does not necessarily mean that less dominant identities are welcomed, or even valued. Actions often speak louder than words. Organisations cannot simply ‘include’ people from diverse backgrounds’ they must first embrace a culture that celebrates diversity. It is the general expectation that all IFST staff, members, volunteers and others, who may be working on behalf of IFST, will behave acceptably – treating others with courtesy, respect and consideration and conducting themselves professionally when interacting with members of the IFST community. Unacceptable behaviour, including bullying, harassment and victimisation or discrimination – including but not limited to the protected characteristics covered by the Equality Act 2010 – will not be tolerated. Alastair MacGregor, IFST Trustee (Chair of Education) and Trustee Champion for EDI. This study investigated the effect of high shear homogenisation (SH) on physicochemical, microstructural, particle size, dietary fibre and volatile composition of residual pineapple pulp (RPP). Shear homogenisation with three levels of rotor speed, that is 5000, 15,000 and 30,000 rpm, was employed for 5, 10 and 15 min.A shear speed of 15,000 rpm for 10 min was relatively better in colour retention and enhanced soluble dietary fibre (SDF) by 48%. Increased levels of SDF after treatment help in the utilisation of RPP and its suitability for food supplementation. A gradual reduction in particle size from 40 to 400μm was observed with shear homogenisation. Optical microscopy images showed that larger cell fragments, fibrous nature and dense hairy mass of pomace were disrupted at 15,000 rpm. Moderate shear speed triggers the release of additional aroma volatiles, whereas higher rpm and time resulted in degradation of volatiles. The shear homogenised RPP was used for the development of fibre-enriched yoghurt and incorporation at a 5% level resulted in acceptable sensory scores. This review article highlights edible insects as an alternative and sustainable food source. Edible insects can transform a wide variety of organic products, including agricultural and food wastes, into high-quality proteins with essential amino acids. Edible insect oil contains healthy fatty acids, such as lauric acid, oleic acid and omega-3 and 6 commonly found in coconut oil, olive oil and fish oil with health benefits. Substitution of edible insects in some food products with low nutritional value can increase protein content up to 100%. Farming edible insects can be an effective solution to food waste management, which is a global problem. September: Protein isolates Proteins isolates and hydrolysates: structure-function relation, production, bioactivities and applications for traditional and modern high nutritional value-added food products. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijfs.15565 Susan Arkley FIFST is a Product Development and Innovation Specialist, Food Consultant and Lecturer, Chair of the IFST Food Innovation Special Interest Group and Secretary of IFST Midlands Branch Valia Christidou FIFST is a mentor and lecturer in New Product Development and an Innovation and Product Development Consultant to the Food Industry You can also reach out to the Food Innovation SIG Committee through the members’ platform by messaging: Susan Arkley Chair Lindsey Solomons Vice Chair Devyani Bali Secretary Valia Christidou Communications web community.ifst.org/group/innovation-sig

A New Workshop Hub Design for University in The Post-Pandemic period

It turns out that Covid-19 has not only affected our health, but also influenced our surrounding areas where we live, work or study. Nowadays, in the post-pandemic era, universities reopen instead of taking virtual teaching, keeping social distance is still of great importance. This essay aims to design a new place for students and academics to study, with a priority of their safety in the post-pandemic campus. Engineering Building of Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University and the Benzie Building of Manchester Metropolitan University have been selected as case study since they have a similar building use and made different changes after Covid-19 breaking out. To collect enough information before making a design proposal, a number of interviews and questionnaires have been individually taken place in two buildings. By analysing results from research, good design will be considered into our final design while shortages will be improved. Our design will be based on Engineering building in Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University to make a new workshop hub with the purpose of ensuring safety, enhancing interaction and achieving sustainability.

The Evasion of Literary History

The origins of most literary genres are lost, either in scholarly controversy or the dark backward and abysm of time, but the Gothic novel presents an admirable clarity. The antiquarian and aesthete Horace Walpole, inspired by a nightmare involving “a gigantic hand in armour,” wrote a novella-length narrative published in December 1764 as The Castle of Otranto. It was akin to similar forgeries evoking the Middle Ages that appeared in the 1760s, like James Macpherson’s “translations” of Ossian and Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems. But unlike the other forgeries, Otranto had legs: it stimulated the historical romance, developed by Clara Reeve in The Old English Baron (1777) and Sophia Lee in The Recess (1783–1785), which reached something like canonical status with the medieval romances of Walter Scott.The supernatural terror Walpole’s tale evoked took longer to erupt. It was not until the last decade of the eighteenth century that thrilling tales of horror set in Italian castles and Spanish monasteries began to crowd out novels of manners set in London townhouses and Hampshire mansions. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), by Ann Radcliffe, and The Monk (1796), by Matthew G. Lewis, spawned hundreds of imitations in a craze whose original impetus carried it into the next century. A dozen, perhaps, were works of talent and genius, among which were Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). By then, the original impulse of the Gothic romance had played itself out, although the tale of terror was to survive as an element within and as an influence upon mainstream realist fiction through the Victorian era, and in its purest form as a minor component of the house of fiction in both serious and popular narrative up to the present.This narrative of the Gothic’s origin, development, effulgence, and fall is a familiar story; it began to be told almost exactly a century ago, when Edith Birkhead published her learned and balanced study, The Tale of Terror (1921). English literature had long been a subject of scholarly inquiry, but it wasn’t entirely clear in the early twentieth century that the Gothic novel could be considered “literature” in the evaluative sense of the word, so Birkhead was something of a pioneer. Only a handful of books on the Gothic followed over the next fifty years, but around 1978 there began a major revival of interest by literary scholars and critics that has shown no sign of stopping. Part of the impetus may have come from feminism and gender theory—many significant Gothic novels were written by women and gay men, and as a genre the Gothic was also gendered as female reading—so it is no accident that some of the groundbreaking studies of Gothic were written by queer theorists Eve Sedgwick, George Haggerty, and Jack Halberstam, or that feminists Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar viewed canonical texts by women through a Gothic lens. But that era was an age of theory generally, so we should not be surprised that the Gothic was also psychoanalyzed by David Punter and Michele Massé, viewed through the New Historicism by Nancy Armstrong, and deconstructed by Tilottama Rajan. My own contribution to this welter of words about the Gothic, The Progress of Romance (1996), was an attempt to understand the history of the Gothic in its first flowering 1764–1820 in three different ways, as an outgrowth of inexorable tensions within Georgian society, as an institutional form of narrative, and as texts that altered the literary responses and motivations of the reading public.A century after Birkhead the Cambridge History of the Gothic has arrived, a monument in three volumes, not a monograph but a collection of sixty-odd essays headed up by three general editors evidently led by Dale Townshend of Manchester Metropolitan University, the only name on all three volumes. I’ll be reviewing the first two volumes, which is all Cambridge was able to send me,1 and I’m going to discuss a few of the most interesting essays before analyzing the curation of these volumes and the business model of academic publication that brought them into existence.But right at the start it is hard to avoid noticing what an awkward idea it was, for both the writers and readers of the Cambridge History, that the volumes break at 1800 and 1900. Since the first heyday of the Gothic continues through about 1820, it might have made more sense for Volume I’s “Long Eighteenth Century” to have ended there; Volume II could reasonably end at World War I.2 Only a few essays in Volume I deal with the period before 1740, while those in Volume II were often forced to cover a lengthy and diverse period in a very few pages. Charles L. Crow’s essay on “The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century America,” for example, took us from the New England radical Charles Brockden Brown to Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers (II: 376–93). Crow managed to get it all in, using a series of nine short segments that concisely capture a variety of disparate text types. One segment, “Power of Blackness,” dealt with the three key figures of dark romanticism: Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. But others, like “Mysteries of Philadelphia and the Hudson Valley” discussed writers previously unknown to me like Rebecca Rush, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Robert Montgomery Bird, and William Gilmore Simms, along with canonical authors like Washington Irving. Crow’s incisive writing makes the journey enjoyable, but we are clearly on a bullet train covering a continent over a century, and the authors and titles flicker by as we pass. (By contrast, Angela Wright gave herself a chapter on “The Summer of 1816.”)One of the genuinely excellent essays in Volume I was James Uden’s “Reassessing the Gothic/Classical Relationship” (I: 161–79). A classicist at Boston University, Uden finds three stages in this opposition, all of which demonstrate the Gothic writer having serious fun at the expense of the classics. At first, the authority of the classical is directly challenged: the classics are not merely ignored but elaborately spoofed. Horace Walpole “scrambl[es] ancient texts and myths”—and Uden cites the Latin epigraph of The Castle of Otranto, taken from Horace’s Ars Poetica lines 7–9 but cleverly misquoted so as to reverse Horace’s recommendation of artistic unity. Second, there comes a reaction against the challenge. Clara Reeve’s Old English Baron is the example here. Rather than being a tame version of Walpole’s Gothic, Uden suggests that it should be read “as a meld of Plutarchan moralism and contemporary narrative form.” Reeve’s critical essay on the novel, The Progress of Romance, reframes the epics of Homer and Vergil as an important element of the tradition of the contemporary novel. “Reeve reassesses the distinction between the Gothic and the Classical by making the two look surprisingly alike” [171]. Finally, “the Classical world is seen through a Gothic lens.” One of his examples is Matthew Lewis’s “The Love of Gain” (1799), which “frequently deviates from its Latin original [Juvenal’s Satire XIII] to incorporate scenes reminiscent of The Monk and his melodrama The Castle Spectre, so that the Classical imitation becomes an implicit commentary on his own Gothic literary works” [175]. Another is Frankenstein, seen as Shelley’s imitation of both Ovid and Aeschylus (Metamorphoses I: 80–87 and Prometheus Bound, respectively).My favorite of the essays in Volume I was Robert Miles’s “Time in the Gothic” (I: 426–49). Miles, now at the University of Victoria, started his career with Gothic Writing: A Genealogy (1993) using Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses, with its notion of a historical coupure between the Classical and the Modern epistemes, as the can-opener to understand Gothic as a mode of écriture, a discursive practice, that bridges the void between the Age of Sensibility (within the Classical Episteme) and the Age of Romanticism (Modern Episteme). His essay in the Cambridge History patriotically adopts a Canadian rather than a French can-opener, in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2013). Like Foucault, Taylor is interested in explaining how modern thought and the modern self emerged, and as in Foucault, the coupure is located around the time the Enlightenment gives way to Romanticism around the turn of the nineteenth century.Different from Foucault, but not all that different: as before, the texts Miles is most interested in straddle the boundary between the premodern and modern ages. Radcliffe has not quite crossed the divide to secularity: for her “the autonomous self is forever on the point of inward collapse.” Miles draws out in his essay the consequences for Radcliffe’s Udolpho, Bürger’s “Lenore,” and Coleridge’s “Christabel” of the Gothic being on the cusp of secularity, with one world dead, the other powerless to be born. If one has a sense that Miles is playing new innings of a game he played three decades ago, his essay nevertheless gives one a sense of discovery rather than a duty dance with the old familiar texts.Not my favorite but an essay I wished longer was Peter N. Lindfield’s “Gothic Revival Architecture before Walpole.” Lindfield, of Manchester Metropolitan University, gives us a sure-footed and serviceable guide to late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gothic revival architecture, and we hear about most of the usual suspects: Wren, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh, Kent, and the “notorious” Batty Langley. Lindfield stops the show with Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, but does not go on to consider what many think is the choicest morsel of Gothic Revival connected with literature: William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, designed and built by James Wyatt beginning in 1796. It was far more spectacular than Strawberry, but we know it only from sketches because the structure—including a 300-foot tall octagonal tower—was unstable and fell into a Gothic ruin about a dozen years after it was completed. It seems a shame that Beckford’s Vathek is treated in Volume I but not his Gothic revival home. And would that Lindfield had also been turned loose on the innovations in landscape architecture of the period.The equivalent essay in Volume II was Alexandra Warwick’s essay, “Nineteenth-Century Gothic Architectural Aesthetics: A.W.N. Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris” (II: 118–38). Warwick, from the University of Westminster, leads off with a propulsive narrative about the destruction by fire of the Houses of Parliament in 1834 and the competition for a design for rebuilding them in a style that would mesh with the medieval buildings that had been saved. Like several others, she notes that the Gothic was political and that for the nineteenth century it signified a myth: the free and democratic institutions of Teutonic tribes standing up to Roman and Norman invaders with autocratic ideas of divine right. Warwick traces this political aesthetic through the three figures she discusses, even though they had little influence on each other. (And she mentions, though she does not discuss, Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey.)Another essay in Volume II that taught me a great deal was Anthony Mandal’s “Gothic Fiction, from Shilling Shockers to Penny Bloods”(II: 139–61). Mandal, from Cardiff University, gives us a clearly written and straightforward account of cheap popular fiction in the nineteenth century, “blue books” and chapbooks in the early part of the century, contemporary with the vogue of the Gothic, “penny bloods” in the midcentury (1840–1870), and “penny dreadfuls” around the fin de siecle. The blue books were imitations or plagiarized abridgments of longer Gothic novels like The Monk and The Italian. In his article on the Sadleir-Black Collection at the University of Virginia, Frederick Frank called these texts “the toxic literary waste . . . of the period.”3 It’s hard to write anything very interesting about the recycling of earlier texts, but Mandal discusses some of the innovations in pamphlet and book production that made the blue books and chapbooks profitable, and he finds a couple of auteurs, Isaac Crookenden and Sarah Wilkinson, who put their personal stamp on the mechanical product. In the midcentury period, novels were often published as serials, and here Mandal focuses primarily onG. M. W. Reynolds’ sprawling 1844–1848 serial, Mysteries of London. Written in imitation of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris, it had a working-class sensibility in that revolutionary era: instead of evil abbesses and marquises, the power that threatens to crush the protagonists is wielded in the 1840s by the establishment: “politicians, financiers, lawyers, and venal public servants” (153). It’s a text whose vision bears comparison to Dickens’ Bleak House (1852–1853), though Mandal does not go there. Around the same time (1846–1847), Lloyd’s Weekly Magazine serialized A String of Pearls, by J. M. Rymer and T. P. Prest, best known today as the novel behind the late Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street with its mordant view of the rich who feed off the poor and, with the aid of Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, vice versa. Mandal has only a few pages for the “penny dreadfuls” of the 1860–1890 era, which he differentiates as periodicals with tales of violent action and crime aimed specifically at children, with heroes like the eighteenth-century highwayman Dick Turpin and the adventurous Jack Harkaway.Perhaps, my favorite essay in Volume II was Maximiliaan van Woudenberg’s “Fantasmagoriana: The Cosmopolitan Gothic and Frankenstein” (II: 41–64). Everyone who has read or taught Frankenstein in the 1831 revision is likely to be aware of Mary Shelley’s account of the genesis of the novel, how in June of 1816 “some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands” and that it was under their influence that Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. Woudenberg, a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge, identifies the volumes as Fantasmagoriana and views the moment as “a particularly cosmopolitan event: an English literary coterie reading a French-edited translation of popular German ghost stories acquired from a Swiss library or bookstore that inspired English Gothic classics of enduring fame” (II: 55–56). It’s a clever sentence, but the excellence of Woudenberg’s essay lies in the careful way he traces the text of Fantasmagoriana backwards and forwards. Woudenberg works backwards from Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès 1812 translation/edition of the narratives to the German sources from which they were selected, primarily the first two volumes of the Gespensterbuch (1810–1811) of Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun. In addition, Eyriès included a folktale by Musäus, an earlier story by Apel, a story by Heinrich Clauren, and, most complex, a told-as-true narrative of ghostly visitation written by Clauren for one Berlin periodical, which was queried and rewritten by Apel for a different periodical, two versions that Eyriès wove together as a single pastiche. The very title of Eyriès’ volumes, Fantasmagoriana, alludes to the magic lantern shows presenting ghostly images that became popular entertainments starting in Germany in the 1770s, then spreading like the ghost stories from Germany to France and then to England, where Byron and the Shelleys probably experienced them in London. Some versions of these fantasmagoria included experiments with the new phenomenon of electricity—like producing Galvanic responses, temporary movements in dead bodies—that directly influenced Mary Shelley’s narrative. Woudenberg then works forwards, discussing the specific stories in Eyriès collection and how certain elements from them worked their way into Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s a synthetic as opposed to an analytic essay, one that gives us a fascinating sense of how disparate influences combined in the crucible of Shelley’s mind to produce her masterpiece.With limited space, I cannot do justice to all the excellent essays in the first two volumes. Let me merely mention Deborah Russell’s “Domestic Gothic Writing after Horace Walpole and before Ann Radcliffe,” which fills in that embarrassing quarter-century gap; Yael Shapira’s “The Gothic Novel Beyond Radcliffe and Lewis,” which makes a case for the originality of some of the lesser-known competitors of the most celebrated Gothic writers; Barry Murnane’s “The German ‘School’ of Horrors: A Pharmacology of the Gothic,” on a group of German texts of the late eighteenth century whose translation into English influenced and invigorated Gothic writing in Great Britain; and Tamar Heller’s “Victorian Domestic Gothic Fiction,” about the “sensation novels” of Bronte, Braddon, and Woods, focusing on the moral panic into which the staid Victorian reader was thrown by the sympathy with which these texts invested women’s deviant desires. That said, with about a dozen exceptions, the writing for these volumes is dull and routine; few of the contributors write cogently, or incisively, or even with a sense of discovery. Most of them, including the general editors in the articles they assigned to themselves, seem to be dutifully surveying well-traveled ground. A few peddled minor bits of misinformation.4 One can hardly imagine anyone other than a reviewer reading these volumes straight through.So exactly what did the general editors have in mind in creating three volumes with sixty-seven separate essays titled The Cambridge History of the Gothic? The editors define their task as “the compilation of a comprehensive cultural history of the Gothic that runs from antiquity to the present day” (I: 18). Comprehensive is not the key word here: although texts written in languages other than English are occasionally discussed, the focal culture is British.5 The key word is “compilation”: they want to chronicle “transitions” and “significant moments” and “cultural events.”But literary history in a strict sense, trying to understand why the Gothic novel originated and developed, when and where and how it did so, is not really what they should even be trying to write, because they do not think it is what the Gothic wants. “To write a history of the Gothic is thus to engage with a literary mode that resists the tidy, linear and teleological compulsions of history itself, compulsions all too often associated with the Gothic through the numerous ‘Whiggish’ critical accounts of its ‘rise’ and ‘development’ across time” (I: 11). So the editors are “jettisoning the more familiar ‘generic’ or ‘formal’ approaches to the field”; instead they “are guided by a strongly revisionist impulse”: they want to “counter the inveterate tendency” to trace the origin of the Gothic novel to The Castle of Otranto,6 or to “collectively change the once-prevalent argument that held that, following Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer of 1820, the gothic went ‘underground’ … prior to enjoying a concerted ‘renaissance’ in popular fiction in the Victorian fin de siècle” (I: 18–19).7The general editors never tire of claiming that the Gothic is not a form or a genre, it is a rather a “mode.” In the Introduction to Volume II, Townshend claims that after the 1820s the Gothic “loses much of its formal and generic stability, fragmenting and dissolving into a mercurial mode” (II: 16). Even that may sound too much like a historical judgment for Townshend’s antihistorical frame of mind, and he cannot help deconstructing it: “even in the earlier period, the Gothic had always been more a fluid ‘mode’ of cultural expression than a fixed and static literary genre” (II: 16, emphasis mine). Catherine Spooner, the editor of Volume III, in her introduction has the same insistence on treating the Gothic as a “mode,” although unlike Townshend and Wright, Spooner sees the defects as well as the virtues of doing so:A mode is an aspect or set of aspects whereby one cultural production can be seen as analogous to another. But analogical relationships are not causal, and thus a mode cannot have a coherent history any more than there can be a history of all the novels with a heroine named Sarah or of all the poems that begin with the word When. So I find it ironic that these volumes, filled with random-seeming chapters,8 contemptuous of Whiggish critical accounts, should be called The Cambridge History of the Gothic.And why are they so called? The acknowledgments page of Volume I lets us know that the project was initiated not by its editors but by the then editorial director of the Cambridge University Press, and it was under her encouragement that it expanded from a one-volume to a three-volume opus. Its editors should be properly proud that its publication is mentioned explicitly in Cambridge University Press’s Annual Report for 2021:In this overview of the ecology of academic publishing, there are individual titles, presumably of monographs, presumably eminently worthy of publication: Cambridge is clearly not stinting at its traditional role. But at the pinnacle are the Cambridge Histories, which will be sold collectively by subscription to university and municipal libraries, primarily as e-books, which cost little to typeset and nothing at all to print or to warehouse. And then there are the handbooks, similar to the Cambridge Histories in being compilations of separate essays rather than monographs, but mere one-volume productions.On the subject of handbooks, the editors’ dig at “the more familiar ‘generic’ or ‘formal’ approaches to the field” is footnoted with a list of ten “available ‘Companions’ to the Gothic” published between 2002 and 2019 (I: 18). That was by no means an exhaustive account: I take the liberty of supplementing their list with fifteen others found through the database WorldCat:What is striking is not only how many of these “handbooks” and “companions” there are, but also the exponential increase in the period from 2017 to the present: from ten published between 2002 and 2016 to fifteen in only the last five years. (Striking also is the overlap between the editors of these collections and the authors of chapters in the three volumes of the Cambridge History of the Gothic.)This is the way we publish now, in overlapping handbooks and companions and supersized companions in three volumes labeled as “history.” This is also the way our university libraries’ limited budgets for books and periodicals is expended, almost certainly at the expense of monographs expressing individual voices and visions. This is where the dream of open access has gone to die.

Digital Gothic: An Interview with Xavier Aldana Reyes

&#x0D; Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader/Associate Professor in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He is author of Gothic Cinema (2020), Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror Film and Affect (2016) and Body Gothic (2014), and editor of Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (with Maisha Wester, 2019), Horror: A Literary History (2016) and Digital Horror (with Linnie Blake, 2015). Xavier is chief editor of the Horror Studies book series at the University of Wales Press, and has edited anthologies of Gothic and horror fiction for the British Library. One of Xavier's research interests is the optical dynamics of found footage horror films. On this topic, he has published an article on narrative framing for Gothic Studies, and chapters on affective immersion in the film [REC] (2007) and viewer involvement and guilt in The Last Horror Movie (2003). More recently, he wrote a chapter on 'Online Gothic' that considers social media found footage horror for the collection The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2022).&#x0D;

Vampire and Monster Narratives: An Interview with Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

&#x0D; Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is a senior lecturer in film studies and American studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. She specializes in gothic studies, horror cinema, popular culture, and American studies indeed. Her work is focused in particular on vampire and monster narratives. She has published a long list of essays and several books, among which the collections Our Monster Skin: Blurring the Boundaries Between Monsters and Humanity(2010), The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films (2010), Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (2017), and her monograph Postmodern Vampires in Film, Fiction and Popular Culture (2019).&#x0D;

Case Study: Using H5P to design and deliver interactive laboratory practicals

We describe the use of HTML5P (H5P) content collaboration framework to deliver an interactive, online alternative to an assessed laboratory practical on the Biomedical Cell Biology unit at the Manchester Metropolitan University, U.K. H5P is free, open-source technology to deliver bespoke interactive, self-paced online sessions. To determine if the use of H5P affected learning and student attainment, we compared the student grades among three cohorts: the 18/19 cohort who had 'wet' laboratory classes, the 19/20 cohort who had 'wet' laboratory classes with additional video support and the 20/21 cohort who had the H5P alternative. Our analysis shows that students using the H5P were not at a disadvantage to students who had 'wet' laboratory classes with regard to assessment outcomes. Student feedback, mean grade attained and an upward trend in the number of students achieving first-class marks (≥70%), indicate H5P may enhance students' learning experience and be a valuable learning source augmenting traditional practical classes in the future.

Moderation: concept and operationalisation in UK universities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the way “moderation” is defined and operationalised at UK universities. It is hoped that this investigation provides pointers for modifications in university documentation and practices, as well as indicates possible areas for future research.Design/methodology/approachThis paper begins with a review of relevant scholarly literature, first tracing the history of the concept of moderation (essentially meaning the avoidance of extremes) in western thought and then proceeding to show how moderation is understood and operationalised in UK universities. Relevant documentation from 10 UK universities, all in the public domain, is analysed to show both commonalities and differences in definition and operationalisation of moderation.FindingsThis paper shows that universities differ in their understanding of the scope of moderation, with some seeing it as covering the evaluation of draft assessment artifacts. It is also noted that the distinction between moderation and marking is not always expressed in university documentation in ways that distinguish between the two with maximal clarity.Research limitations/implicationsLimitations include the relatively small sample of documents examined. Conversely, ancient universities (e.g. Edinburgh), long-established universities (e.g. Manchester) and 1992 and more recent universities (e.g. Manchester Metropolitan University and Suffolk) are contained in the sample, so moderation practices from across the sector are included.Practical implicationsThe main findings are that some universities see moderation as including drafting, redrafting and approval of assessment artifacts, whereas others do not. In addition, although all universities stress that moderation and marking are separate activities, some documentation discusses both the activities in tandem; thus, undermining the contention that they are discrete. Both these findings have implications for UK university documentation in terms of both document structure and precise wording.Originality/valueThe approach taken, in which a sample of publicly available university documents is scrutinised and evaluated, casts a new light on understandings of “moderation”, which is a term and concept that may not always be examined critically by lecturers and quality assurance professionals involved in higher education.

City Profile: Manchester, England

City ProfileManchester, England Joshua Allan (bio) Books for Your Table in Chetham’s Reading Room Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi Manchester Happened Oneworld, 2019 Elizabeth Gaskell Mary Barton Penguin Classics, 1997 W. G. Sebald The Emigrants Trans. Michael Hulse New Directions, 2016 Click for larger view View full resolution “THE CITY CENTRE was at once beautiful and scary. . . . The infrastructure alone— of brick and stone—was forbidding. The skyline—dotted by conical, sharp church steeples and tall chimneys—made him feel trapped. . . . Manchester brought to mind a Christian heaven of arches and arches, spires, steeples, pews and church bells. But why would the British sculpt snarling devils on their walls when they lived in such dark misty environs?” This is how Manchester looks to the outsider, or more specifically to the Ugandan immigrant Abu, the protagonist in the first story in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s new collection, Manchester Happened. The date is 1950, but it could just as easily be 1800, when church steeples and mill chimneys clogged the smoky skyline like a chessboard midmatch. And it could just as easily be today, when, even though spire and chimney have given way to flat and office block, the city is still renowned for its gloomy atmosphere and the gothic, industrial architecture that confronts visitors at every turn. Despite—or rather, because of—Manchester’s tenebrous reputation, the city has continued to attract writers for centuries. The beginning of Jane Eyre was written on the site where Manchester Metropolitan University now stands. Head north and you’ll find Chetham’s Library, the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, where Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her novels in a house on Plymouth Grove—you can still visit it. W. G. Sebald, who came to Manchester to teach, set the final, and most melancholic, part of The Emigrants against the foggy backdrop of “the sprawling mass of Manchester . . . a fire almost suffocated in ash.” My brother lives in a converted mill featured in one of the novel’s black-and-white photographs. If the photo had been taken from the other side, a few decades later, it would have displayed a sign that my brother misread as “burgers” (American cuisine is now ubiquitous in the city). It is in fact a sign for the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, a tribute to the writer who took the opposite trajectory from Sebald by leaving the city as soon as he could. But the “Manchester of frightful slums and hard-head magnates and cotton brokers gorging red meat in chophouses,” “the mother of liberalism and the cradle of the entire industrial system,” never left him. I find myself in a similar position to Burgess, being continually drawn back to Manchester. The city has a staggering literary history, but it is perhaps more dynamic nowadays than it has ever been. Both universities boast renowned creative writing courses, with past and present teachers including Martin Amis, Jeanette Winter-son, Lemn Sissay, and Carol Ann Duffy. In 2017 it was named a unesco city of literature. And as the most linguistically diverse city in western Europe, the city’s status as a cultural wellspring has become indisputable. The “dark misty environs” might remain, but now anyone can feel at home. [End Page 5] Joshua Allan Joshua Allan works for Routledge books in Oxford, England, and writes extensively on the side. He has published in WLT, the Oxford Review of Books, Undercurrent Philosophy, Full Stop, Eunoia Review, and other magazines. Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma