Representing ‘the Real’: Realism and Visual Culture in Tourism, Leisure and Ethnography

The collection and use of visual evidence is widespread in a wide range of academic and professional activities. The paper explores the similarities and differences of a range of related phenomena: realism, documentary and authenticity. The status of the ‘realism effect’ is evaluated in a range of leisure activities with an emphasis on tourism and the significance of realist texts in popular culture in narrative and nonnarrative forms. The creative treatment of the representation of reality in the documentary tradition is highlighted. The paper emphasises the pleasures to be gained from ‘experiencing the real’ using semiotics and film theory, in particular. There is a discussion of the possible ideological effects of these pleasures as well as more fundamental matters relating to the extent to which we are able to actually experience the ‘real’ in any meaningful way. The argument develops that the pleasures of realist cultural forms may also be found in academic work too. The representations of reality using written and visual forms in ethnography are explored: consumers of academic work as well as popular cultural forms employ a series of codes and conventions and these forms may be subjected to post-structuralist analyses

Making the most of housing and growth in the East Midlands: a report on removing the barriers to low public investment in the region

The Smith Institute, in association with the Economic Strategy Research Bureau at Nottingham Business School, has undertaken an investigation into the lack of central government investment in the East Midlands in housing and physical regeneration. The work has been based on desk research, two round tables with stakeholders (in Nottingham and Melton Mowbray) and interviews with over 30 decision makers, experts and opinion formers from across the region. The objectives of the report were: first, to quantify the reduction in central government investment in the region compared with other regions; second, to suggest reasons why this might have occurred; third, to consider the impact that this might be having on the implementation of government policies such as housing provision, “rebalancing” the economy and achieving greater value for money for government investment. The report concludes with a number of recommendations for local enterprise partnerships (LEPs), local authorities, the housing sector and central government

Effect of the application of cattle urine with or without the nitrification inhibitor DCD, and dung on greenhouse gas emissions from a UK grassland soil

AbstractEmissions of nitrous oxide (N2O) from soils from grazed grasslands have large uncertainty due to the great spatial variability of excreta deposition, resulting in heterogeneous distribution of nutrients. The contribution of urine to the labile N pool, much larger than that from dung, is likely to be a major source of emissions so efforts to determine N2O emission factors (EFs) from urine and dung deposition are required to improve the inventory of greenhouse gases from agriculture. We investigated the effect of the application of cattle urine and dung at different times of the grazing season on N2O emissions from a grassland clay loam soil. Methane emissions were also quantified. We assessed the effect of a nitrification inhibitor, dicyandiamide (DCD), on N2O emissions from urine application and also included an artificial urine treatment. There were significant differences in N2O EFs between treatments in the spring (largest from urine and lowest from dung) but not in the summer and autumn applications. We also found that there was a significant effect of season (largest in spring) but not of treatment on the N2O EFs. The resulting EF values were 2.96, 0.56 and 0.11% of applied N for urine for spring, summer and autumn applications, respectively. The N2O EF values for dung were 0.14, 0.39 and 0.10% for spring, summer and autumn applications, respectively. The inhibitor was effective in reducing N2O emissions for the spring application only. Methane emissions were larger from the dung application but there were no significant differences between treatments across season of application