The 'Parekh Report' - national identities with nations and nationalism

‘Multiculturalists’ often advocate national identities. Yet few study the ways in which ‘multiculturalists’ do so and in this article I will help to fill this gap. I will show that the Commission for Multi-Ethnic Britain’s report reflects a previously unnoticed way of thinking about the nature and worth of national identities that the Commission’s chair, and prominent political theorist, Bhikhu Parekh, had been developing since the 1970s. This way of thinking will be shown to avoid the questionable ways in which conservative and liberal nationalists discuss the nature and worth of national identities while offering an alternative way to do so. I will thus show that a report that was once criticised for the way it discussed national identities reflects how ‘multiculturalists’ think about national identities in a distinct and valuable way that has gone unrecognised

Sound archaeology: terminology, Palaeolithic cave art and the soundscape

This article is focused on the ways that terminology describing the study of music and sound within archaeology has changed over time, and how this reflects developing methodologies, exploring the expectations and issues raised by the use of differing kinds of language to define and describe such work. It begins with a discussion of music archaeology, addressing the problems of using the term ‘music’ in an archaeological context. It continues with an examination of archaeoacoustics and acoustics, and an emphasis on sound rather than music. This leads on to a study of sound archaeology and soundscapes, pointing out that it is important to consider the complete acoustic ecology of an archaeological site, in order to identify its affordances, those possibilities offered by invariant acoustic properties. Using a case study from northern Spain, the paper suggests that all of these methodological approaches have merit, and that a project benefits from their integration

Rethinking the social impacts of the arts

The paper presents a critical discussion of the current debate over the social impacts of the arts in the UK. It argues that the accepted understanding of the terms of the debate is rooted in a number of assumptions and beliefs that are rarely questioned. The paper goes on to present the interim findings of a three‐year research project, which aims to rethink the social impact of the arts, with a view to determining how these impacts might be better understood. The desirability of a historical approach is articulated, and a classification of the claims made within the Western intellectual tradition for what the arts “do” to people is presented and discussed

PIT telemetry as a method to study the habitat requirements of fish populations: application to native and stocked trout movements

Passive integrated transponder (PIT) technology was used to study the behaviour of fishes during the summer season in two headwater streams of northeastern Portugal. A total of 71 PIT tags (12 mm long x 2.1 mm diameter) were surgically implanted in 1+ stocked (39) and native (32) brown trout of two size classes (< 20.0 and ≥ 20.0 cm). Eight independent antennae, connected to a multi-point decoder (MPD reader) unit, were placed in different microhabitats, selected randomly every three days during the observation period (29 August to 9 September in Baceiro stream and 19 September to 4 October in Sabor stream). The results confirmed this method as a suitable labour efficient tool to assess the movement and habitat use of sympatric stocked and native trout populations. About 76.9% of stocked and 59.4% of native PIT tagged trouts were detected. Multivariate techniques (CCA, DFA and classification tree) showed a separation in habitat use between the two sympatric populations. Stocked trout mainly used the microhabitats located in the middle of the channel with higher depths and without cover. Furthermore, these fishes displayed a greater mobility and a diel activity pattern different to native trout populations

In The Shadows: Conservative Epistemology and Ideological Value

This article intervenes in the debate about the nature of conservatism. Some contributors to this debate have claimed that this ideology can be defined as an adjectival disposition. They claim, that is, that a conservative possesses an attitude towards shared values rather than a distinct set of substantive values. The following discussion interrogates this account of conservatism and concludes that it can only be coherent if we ignore the epistemological limits of conservative thinking

National identity - A multiculturalist's approach

‘Multiculturalists’ in Britain have advocated the importance of national identity since the 1970s. Yet many claim that multiculturalists do not do this and few study how they do it. We thus do not know why and how multiculturalists in Britain advocate the importance of national identity. In this article I will examine how one of Britain’s most prominent multiculturalists, Bhikhu Parekh, has done so since the 1970s. I will show that Parekh’s way of thinking about national identity is distinct from the ways in which other prominent thinkers discuss such an identity, and valuable, as Parekh has insights into what such an identity is and why we should value it. This article will identify a previously unnoticed, distinct and valuable way of thinking about national identity, which comes from a multiculturalist in Britain

What was Progressive in ‘Progressive Conservatism’?

In January 2009 David Cameron announced that the ‘underlying philosophy’ of his government would be progressive conservatism. Despite the ambiguity about this term, it was generally interpreted as a signal that Cameron was moving his party to the left.To some commentators, Cameron was allying with the progressive ‘one nation’ strand of conservative thought.To others, particularly in the media, he was drawing on the more immediate influence of Phillip Blond’s ‘Red Toryism’. However, the focus on the market (as opposed to state or community) found in both Cameron’s speech and subsequent policies sits uneasily with both of these interpretations. Cameron’s progressive conservatism has more in common with Thatcherism – an earlier conservative modernising project – than it does with centrist forms of conservative progressivism. Cameron’s progressive conservatism is progressive, but only in particular, less commonly used, ways – not as a rediscovery of social justice

Digital transformations and the archival nature of surrogates

Large-scale digitization is generating extraordinary collections of visual and textual surrogates, potentially endowed with transcendent long-term cultural and research values. Understanding the nature of digital surrogacy is a substantial intellectual opportunity for archival science and the digital humanities, because of the increasing independence of surrogate collections from their archival sources. The paper presents an argument that one of the most significant requirements for the long-term access to collections of digital surrogates is to treat digital surrogates as archival records that embody traces of their fluid lifecycles and therefore are worthy of management and preservation as archives. It advances a theory of the archival nature of surrogacy founded on longstanding notions of archival quality, the traces of their source and the conditions of their creation, and the functional ‘‘work of the archive.’’ The paper presents evidence supporting a ‘‘secondary provenance’’ derived from re-digitization, re-ingestion of multiple versions, and de facto replacement of the original sources. The design of the underlying research that motivates the paper and summary findings are reported separately. The research has been supported generously by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services.Institute for Museum and Library ServicesPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111825/1/J26 Conway Digital Transformations 2014-pers.pdfDescription of J26 Conway Digital Transformations 2014-pers.pdf : Main articl