University of Southampton Blogs

Understanding how to improve antibodies targeting OX40 for the treatment of cancer

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 09:29:41 GMT

Scientists at the Centre for Cancer Immunology have gained new insight into how the immune system can be better used to find and kill cancer cells.

Professor Mark Cragg

Working with BioInvent International, a team led by Professor Mark Cragg and Dr Jane Willoughby from the Antibody and Vaccine Group, have shown that antibodies, designed to target the molecule OX40, give a more active immune response when they bind closer to the cell membrane and can be modified to attack cancer in different ways.

OX40 is a ‘co-receptor’ that helps to stimulate the production of helper and killer T-cells during an immune response. One of the ways cancer avoids detection is by suppressing immune responses to stop functional tumour specific T-cells from being produced.

In the study, which has been published in Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, the team also discovered that switching the antibody’s isotype (the part of the antibody that engages with cells of the immune system) could change the way the antibody worked.

When the mIgG2a isotype was used, the antibody could delete cells called Treg cells which are suppressive in the immune system. When the mIgG1 isotype was present, the antibody could stimulate killer T-cells to increase and therefore kill more cancer cells.

Professor Cragg said: “Clinical trials with anti-OX40 antibodies have shown that the body can tolerate these drugs but unfortunately have also shown disappointing clinical responses. We need to understand why this is.

“This new data shows us that when there is a cancer with lots of Tregs we could use the equivalent of the m2IgGa isotype and in patients where we feel we need better cytotoxic T cells we could use the equivalent of a mIgG1 isotype to boost the immune response. This information is important for developing the next generation of OX40 antibodies that we hope will be more effective in treating patients with cancer.”

Reference: Jane E Willoughby, Mark S Cragg et al, Domain Binding and Isotype Dictate the Activity of Anti-human OX40 Antibodies; Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, https://jitc.bmj.com/content/8/2/e001557

Masks: The Face Between Bodies and Networks

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 11:46:05 GMT

By way of a welcome back from the Winter Break, a link to some interesting reading: Yiğit Soncul (recent PhD alumnus; now Associate Lecturer at UAL) and Jussi Parikka (Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at WSA) on the significance of the mask. The essay is published in issue 66, “State of Emergency”, of Neural, of which WSA’s Alessandro Ludovico is the chief editor. It can also be read here.

Masks: The Face Between Bodies and Networks

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 11:46:05 GMT

EXPERIMENTAL ZONE 1: Re-Thinking Methodologies at Intersections of the Arts and the Humanities

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 09:00:32 GMT

EXPERIMENTAL ZONE 1: Re-thinking Methodologies at Intersections of the Arts and the Humanities is the first of a series of planned events organised by a group of scholars and artists at Linköping University (Linköping, Sweden) under the tentative and temporary heading: Bureau for Alternative Methodologies (BAM). The following report on the event was kindly provided by Ana Čavić, a current WSA PhD candidate.

EXPERIMENTAL ZONE 1 poster

The one-day symposium, which took place on Zoom on Thursday 19 November 2020, was not recorded. So, here is my admittedly subjective take on what was a very stimulating event exploring “alternative methodologies” from all sorts of angles. I am reporting on the event to encourage you to attend future BAM events, not only because the topic is relevant to many of us but also because this project is committed to re-thinking methodology. In order to make sense of it for those of you who were not in attendance—and for myself—I have written my impressions down and attempted to put them into some sort of logical order, highlighting some of the main themes. I hope you will find my report informative and an interesting read.

In summary, the event was a kind of “think tank” about what might be defined as “alternative methodologies” today and what they might look like in the future, specifically in relation to the presence of creative practitioners in different research fields, the idea being that the alternative methodologies (new modes and new methods) creative practitioners bring to the table are a positive contribution to research across fields, even as they challenge accepted definitions of research methodology by presenting alternatives to what has existed before and what exists now.

A recurring theme was the pragmatics of how creative practitioners might operate in or across fields, how they themselves might recognise the “new” methodological operations at work in their creative practice when they do emerge and how they might use them to forge new paths in their discipline and across disciplines. The event explored decidedly approaches to research with an emphasis on collaboration and co-creation and a commitment to continue to reconfigure and redefine what is possible in the realm of creative practice and ‘practice as research’ through a recognition of the validity of not only “methods in action”, but also the “works in progress” that such practices might entail. was also a sensitivity and subtlety to the discussion, for example, there was talk of how to begin to describe a type of creative research that “teases out the methodology”, rather than “hammering it out”. Essentially: an emphasis on process and on methodology emerging out of process. Something, I think, a lot of us can relate to.

Jussi Parika (Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art) was one of two keynote speakers; he screened an interesting collaboratively-made as part of his presentation. The video essay—as an alternative mode of production and presentation of academic writing was a recurrent theme; several were presented on the day.

Lecture performances also, which speaker Katja Aglert (artist and artistic leader/co-director of ) defined as “a hybrid of an academic lecture and performance art”. For example, she used her as ‘scores’ for lecture performances. She also proposed the notion of the “rehearsal” as a method, by which she meant “repeating, but with a difference”; again, highlighting the processes of research over the product, while at the same time prompting us to consider how to tease out a methodology in cases when the outcomes are not meant to be definitive, but a series of endlessly deferred rehearsals. This made me think of Italo Clavino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveller, consisting of first chapters only, each written in a different novelistic style. Is it an example of rehearsal as methodology, rather than a pastiche or an homage of the novel? Whatever the case may be, it is this sort of borrowing of methods and modes from one discipline (in this case, the performance discipline, as in “the rehearsal”) and applying them to another discipline (in this, case academic writing) that was identified as a possible “alternative methodology”. Anyway, both were part of a larger discussion about rethinking the production and the presentation modes of academic research. There was also a semi-serious suggestion by one speaker that publishing fiction might be one possible mode of dissemination of academic research in the future.

Dr Sarah Hayden (Associate Professor in Literature and Visual Culture, in the English Department at UoS), was also in attendance. She asked Parikka whether the medium and mode of presentation—the video essay—influenced or informed his mode of writing on that particular occasion, methodologically speaking. The simple answer was ‘yes’, but the more complex answer, which was what everyone was grappling with, had to do with a tentative suggestion that materiality and embodiment were integral to knowledge production (or as speaker Madina Tlostanova alternatively called it “knowledge creation”). Or, in Parikka’s words, that “problems are organised through materials” and that “problems are practiced”. Hence, the aforementioned “methods in action” and the related notion that “thinking is performative”, which was articulated by speaker Sven Anders Johansson (Professor of Literary Studies). His presentation, ‘Body as Knowledge’, foregrounded cognition as a bodied experience. Tlostanova, a Professor of Postcolonial Feminism, spoke of “the body as an instrument of perception” and of “the affective and corporeal aspects of cognition” and how, in order to appreciate embodied “knowledge creation” as research, “one has to set aside existing, dominant knowledge schemes”, echoing Johansson when he said that, generally, there is a “need for new methods in research”.

Jesper Olsson (Associate Professor of Literature, Media History and Information Cultures), spoke of “knowledge as a process and experience… rather than a product”, again emphasising process as well as highlighting another prominent theme: “the experiential, as an interface”. Of course my mind went straight to Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller’ in which he argues for a type of knowledge that is enacted (again, embodied), through storytelling: an ancient experiential mode of sharing of knowledge (even “wisdom”, according to Benjamin), as opposed to sharing mere information. Aesthetics, defined as understanding through sensory perception, also came up in relation to the experiential. Related to that was the notion that artistic enquiry was capable of creating experiences that could put concepts “into more immediate relational effect”, as Tlostanova phrased it.

On the subject of storytelling, Aglert introduced the notion of “more than human storytelling” as means of accessing “more than human perspectives”, literally encompassing everything other than human—the alien. Embracing the alien came up more generally as a strategy, with Olsson suggesting that we might import the poetic strategy of “making strange” from the literary field into other fields in order to gain a new perspective on the research object.

The second keynote speaker, Helen Palmer (Senior Researcher at the Vienna University of Technology, TU Wien), also touched on “making strange” as a methodology. She practices, in her words, “defamiliarisation as a methodology” as a means of “shifting the perception of a thing”. For example, in her writing practice she explores philosophical concepts in a playful way, through “intra-sensory entanglements”, as a way of trying to understand difficult concepts. On the day, this resulted in a part-fictional, part-factual lecture performance in which concepts were “explored through the ficteme: a speculative unit that mobilises material objects or concepts through setting them to work on a fictional stage.”

“Which methods do we need to understand these practices?”

Whether working with new research objects or old research objects newly perceived, how do we deal with the alien, the defamiliarised, the alternative? Along these lines, speaker Stefan Jonsson (Professor of Ethnic Studies) asked what was for me the key question of the day: “Which methods do we need to understand these practices?” This is a question that I pose to myself every time I come across objects of study in my research—for example, a painting used during storytelling performances that cannot be evaluated using traditional (Western) methods of analysis. This is because it is not a painting as it is conventionally understood. Instead it is a storytelling prop, or a memory aid, or an “operational image” used in a system of performance; it just happens to be painted. The “operational image” was a term that came up often, meaning an image that is not necessarily intended to function as an image to be viewed and evaluated in the conventional manner, but one that serves an enabling function in an operation. Parikka is the person to talk to about this, if you are interested in “operational images”.

Escaping the hierarchy of language was also, including through what Tlostanova called “polysemic approaches”, in her case, “to escape censorship”. Making use of the ‘hybrid’ and adopting new writing strategies in combination with other presentation modes and media not reducible to writing came up as a possible alternative methodology, toward an expanded academic writing that is more relational, engaged and attentive to the reader. A key question was posed: “How does an author conceptualise a reader when writing?” It was a question that hung in the air and turned into proposals for how an author might engage the reader when it comes to academic writing, including: make the writing more enjoyable, pleasurable even; use a combination of text and image and try to put them into relation, into systems of relation; and negotiate the levels of accessibility in the writing, taking into consideration what might exclude or alienate a reader and what might enlighten a reader.

Finally, I would like to share an insight that took me by surprise. One of the speakers, Professor Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, an intellectual property researcher, pointed out that even patents preserve some element of the invention’s . She explained that patents are designed in such a way as to not say everything. How then do we make sense of something that doesn’t manifest entirely, something in which secrecy is a constitutive element? This led me to question whether secrecy is a constitutive part of research—and whether secrecy and value are connected.

Optimistically, the symposium concluded with the claim that methods can reform institutions by functioning as institutional critique and a transformative force, that inter-, trans- and multi-disciplinary creative practices are well placed to offer alternative methodologies that can be deployed across disciplines to generate new strategies of production, dissemination and reception of knowledge in order to engage audiences in more effective and affective ways. Interestingly, Palmer also suggested that “transdisciplinarity is one way of defamiliarising the institution”, by introducing alternative systems and structures that operate across disciplines and bring them into new relations.

For further information and future updates regarding The Seed Box programme and BAM activities please visit The Seed Box (interdisciplinary and international Environmental Humanities research program) based at Linkoping Universitet, Linkoping, Sweden.

EXPERIMENTAL ZONE 1: Re-Thinking Methodologies at Intersections of the Arts and the Humanities

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 09:00:32 GMT

EXPERIMENTAL ZONE 1 poster

“Which methods do we need to understand these practices?”

The Lockdown Larder Cookbook Challenge

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 10:02:36 GMT

One thing the pandemic revealed was the strong sense of community amongst WSA’s staff and PGRs. Below, (then a PhD candidate and now an alumna) reflects on her Covid-19 project with Lesia Tkacz (currently a PhD candidate), The Lockdown Larder Cookbook Challenge.

cover of the Lockdown Larder Cookbook

Covid-19 lockdown

2020 has been the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. We have experienced two lockdowns so far, with the first introduced at the end of March. Many tried to remain resolute and hopeful despite the uncertainty and growing anxiety. People commented on the renewed sense of community as the disease brought people together in different ways. But the pandemic also drew attention to the ugly side of human nature as people began to panic buy, emptying supermarket shelves and causing food shortages for those in need. Shoppers were limited to 3 of each items and police had to be brought in to monitor the toilet roll aisles.

Common food items such as flour, yeast, dried pasta and eggs suddenly became difficult to find. Store cupboard recipes (such as ‘40 ways to use up potatoes, tins of tomatoes, tuna and more’) began to appear on the Internet. People either had to make do with what they could get hold of from the shops or be creative with a dusty tin of chickpeas that they managed to find in their kitchen cabinet; it became clear that food shopping, cooking and eating was going to be very different during lockdown.

The Lockdown Larder Project

As the world grappled with the global pandemic, the PGR community at WSA also found themselves having to adjust. PhD research can be a lonely journey at the best of times, but for many the lockdown created restrictions and challenges that impacted not only their research but also their everyday lives.

In order to keep morale high and stay connected while having fun, Lesia and I organised a cookery challenge for the PGR community at WSA that involved creating innovative and ridiculous dishes from four categories: ‘Pasta Dessert dishes’, ‘Hybrid dishes’, ‘Lockdown Classic dishes’, and ‘1970s Dinner Party Disaster dishes’. Staff and students participated, entering a category by submitting an image of the finished dish, details of the ingredients and methods, and a short description of how the dish was conceived.

Unicorn Pizza Recipe Medieval Style by Ana Čavić

The culinary challenge produced some amazingly creative and mouth-watering dishes. The imaginatively named dishes included Jelly Brains, Forbidden Rice Ball, Air Soup and Wind Pudding, Scarlet, and Order 42 #7EE9F2—each were entertaining as well as visually stunning, with a ‘dish biography’ that provided intriguing insight into how and why the dishes came about.

Jelly Brain by Megen de Bruin-Molé

The project demonstrated how much we can express through food and the joy and sense of connectivity that it can bring even in challenging times. The collective efforts of the PGR community at WSA has resulted in the Lockdown Larder Cookbook, which can be accessed here.

We have recently come out of a second lockdown, which was put into place to stem the rise of new Coronavirus infections. We wondered if there would be panic buying again, but supermarket shelves remained pretty well stocked. We don’t know whether this was due to people being simply ‘Covid fatigued’ or were still working their way through hoarded dried pasta and tins of food. Maybe we have just gotten better at coping with the pandemic. [AGD notes: at time of writing, Covid restrictions over Christmas were due to be considerably lighter than they ended up being. But still once new restrictions for Christmas were imposed, people didn’t seem to be panicking as much as they might have done.]

Order 42 #7EE9F2 by Lesia Tkacz

Once WSA campus fully reopens, we can produce printed copies of the Lockdown Larder Cookbook. The digital version allows for easy access but there is something satisfying about being able to hold a physical book in your hand. The book can also act as a reminder that even in difficult times, a lot can be made possible (and fun can be had at the same time) with a little imagination and creativity. There are also ambitions to create a Lockdown Larder Cookbook Kit so that anyone who wants to start their own cookery challenge can do so in the event of another lockdown.

The Lockdown Larder Cookbook Challenge

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 10:02:36 GMT

cover of the Lockdown Larder Cookbook

Covid-19 lockdown

The Lockdown Larder Project

Unicorn Pizza Recipe Medieval Style by Ana Čavić

Jelly Brain by Megen de Bruin-Molé

Order 42 #7EE9F2 by Lesia Tkacz

The Lockdown Larder Cookbook Challenge

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 10:02:36 GMT

One thing the pandemic revealed was the strong sense of community amongst WSA’s staff and PGRs. Below, Noriko Suzuki-Basco (then a PhD candidate and now an alumna) reflects on her Covid-19 project with Lesia Tkacz (currently a PhD candidate), The Lockdown Larder Cookbook Challenge.

cover of the Lockdown Larder Cookbook

Covid-19 lockdown

The Lockdown Larder Project

Unicorn Pizza Recipe Medieval Style by Ana Čavić

Jelly Brain by Megen de Bruin-Molé

Order 42 #7EE9F2 by Lesia Tkacz

Boundary2 Special Issue: Frictionless Sovereignty

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 10:14:37 GMT

Boundary2’s online journal recently published a special issue, edited by WSA’s Ryan Bishop, on “Frictionless Sovereignty”. The special issue can be accessed from the journal’s website. Here, Ryan talks about the collaborations and research interests from which the special issue grew.

This special issue has a long and strange gestation actually. Its first instantiation comes out of work in a collaborative group between WSA (Jussi Parikka and myself), Univ of California San Diego (Ben Bratton and Jordan Crandall) and the New School in New York (Ed Keller), in which we examined remote sensing systems, computational platforms, algorithmic culture and governance, and robotics from theoretical and artistic perspectives. We co-curated an exhibition at UCSD, held panels and at transmediale (Berlin). This collaborative endeavour began in 2012 and continued for a few years. I generated a number of articles related to this research and then put it aside to pursue some other book projects. Once done with those, I began to be revisit my earlier articles from the research collaborative agenda as I had become interested in the changing nature of some foundational elements of political philosophy wrought by these autonomous remote sensing systems and how they might affect notions of the political subject and state sovereignty.

Around this time, the journal Theory Culture and Society (whose editorial board I serve on) and the Association of Philosophy and Literature began considering jointly hosting a conference in Klagenfurt Austria. As we kicked around ideas for conference themes, streams and panels, sovereignty emerged as a potentially productive site. I agreed to put a panel together for this, but one panel turned into three as I spoke to friends and colleagues from the UK, the US, Singapore, Egypt and elsewhere, including my AMT and WSA colleague Mihaela Brebenel. The panels came off well, and I thought they could make a tidy special issue so I approached the journal boundary2, one of the leading critical theory journals in the world, and a venue I had published related material in. They had an initiated a new journal-based online platform that fit the agenda of our issue perfectly. I worked very closely with the editors of the online version of the journal, especially Arne De Boever, who also contributed to the issue. This allowed me to work a wide range of diverse scholars from different disciplines whose work I admire greatly as I edited the issue.

New Book: Technocrats of the Imagination

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 10:41:00 GMT

John Beck & Ryan Bishop Technocrats of the Imagination, recently published by Duke University Press, is about a particularly striking form of interdisciplinarity: the Cold War cooperation between the military-industrial complex and avant-garde art. Below, Ryan shares some of the background related to how he came to co-author the book, the experience of writing the book and the continued necessity of understanding the Cold War.

The book grew out of an earlier edited collection John Beck and I did in 2018 called Cold War Legacies: Systems Theory Aesthetics (Edinburgh UP), which in turn grew out of a workshop we ran at the University of Westminster in 2016, at which the contributors to the edited volume (including Jussi Parikka) presented working versions of their individual contributions. When John and I were writing the introduction to the edited volume, we would often meet or talk by phone about what to include or exclude from the introduction, and we concluded that the introduction could just go on endlessly due to the complexity of the subject matter and main thesis (which is the Cold War continues to constitute almost all elements of our collective contemporary moment in material and immaterial ways).

One possible continuation of that introduction is this new co-authored book. We discussed over several months an outline and proposal for the book, and wrote an article outlining some of the main concerns to be addressed in the book: an abbreviated take of some of the argument. Once we had the book contract, we divided up chapters for initial drafts and got to work. After a chapter draft was completed by one of us, we sent it to the other, who responded and wrote through it. When this came back, we spoke on the phone about possible directions. All parts of the book were fully co-authored. I have known John Beck for over 15 years and worked with him on many projects, with both of us writing individually on the Cold War in different articles, book chapter and books. I have commissioned pieces from him for different projects and long admired his intelligence, wit and writing, so it was a real pleasure to collaborate on these projects and more might be coming.

An electronic version of the book is available via the Open Research Library

Why did Britain Abolish the Slave Trade?

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 21:36:32 GMT

How human rights and the national interest converged to bring about a defining moment in world history …

Validation of a method to quantify microfibres present in aquatic surface microlayers

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:15:37 GMT

Joshua Birkenhead, Freya Radford, Jessica Stead, Prof Andy Cundy and Dr Malcom Hudson.

Journal: Scientific Reports Volume: 10 Article number: 17892
ISSN (Print): 2045-2322
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-74635-3

Published on 21 Oct 2020

Abstract

Many of the methods for microplastics quantification in the environment are criticised creating problems with data validity. Quantification of microplastics in the surface microlayer of aquatic environments using glass plate dipping holds promise as a simple field method, but its efficiency has yet to be validated. We tested a standard glass plate dipping method to assess recovery of four common polymer microfibres and two common natural fibres, under three different salinities (freshwater, brackish water, saltwater). Overall recovery rates were low (26.8 ± 1.54%) but higher recoveries were observed under saltwater treatments (36.5 ± 3.01%) than brackish water (24.5 ± 1.92%) or freshwater (19.3 ± 1.92%). The fibre types showed different recovery rates, with acrylic yielding significantly higher recovery rates (37.0 ± 2.71%) than other fibres across treatments. No clear relationship between the density of the fibres and the recovery efficiency was seen. We suggest that, where this method is used for monitoring microplastics, the results will typically underestimate the total amount present, but that recovery is sufficiently consistent to allow comparison of differences between sampling locations. When comparing data across river-estuarine or similar transects salinity should be monitored to account for salinity-induced differences in sampling recovery.

International project seeks to improve cancer-fighting therapeutics

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 12:46:22 GMT

Scientists at the Centre for Cancer Immunology have begun a new collaborative study to understand how therapeutic antibodies stimulate the body’s immune cells to kill other cells that contribute to a wide range of diseases, including cancer.

Working with researchers at South Dakota State University, the team will examine how specialized immune cells called macrophages, recognize and destroy target cells and why they sometimes do not.

The results will help increase the effectiveness of antibody therapeutics designed to fight cancer and target autoimmune disorders, such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

Macrophages are able to recognise target cells that are ‘tagged’ for destruction by antibodies bound to the target cell surface however, sometimes the macrophages either do not respond or actively clean the antibody off the target cell and then let it go—they do not kill it. This deactivation makes the antibody therapeutic ineffective and allows the target cells to escape

The team at South Dakota State University will use the CRISPR gene-editing tool to identify which genes promote or inhibit the macrophages’ ability to use antibodies to destroy target cells. They will also use powerful computational bioinformatics approaches to analyse which genes are expressed in the different circumstances.

The Southampton research group, composed of Professor Mark Cragg alongside Professor Stephen Beers and Dr Stephen Thirdborough, will then study the genes identified through the CRISPR screenings in mice experiments to verify their importance. In addition, they will analyse data from patients who received antibody therapeutics to treat cancer and autoimmune disorders to confirm their results.

Professor Cragg said: “Antibody therapies can be very powerful – however, sometimes the immune cells stop killing the disease-causing cells. We want to understand the pathways and immune signals that control macrophage activity to allow us to make them more potent killers of cancer cells.”

The five-year $1.78 million study is funded by the National Institutes of Health in the USA and will involve postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students. It is one of six projects that were funded as part of a focused effort aimed at improving the effectiveness of therapeutic antibodies— and one of the few that involves an international collaboration.

Professor Adam Hoppe, of South Dakota State University, said: “We want to understand what is deactivating the macrophages and we want to know why those antibodies can perform so well in some patients, but fail in others.”

Speaking about working with the Centre for Cancer Immunology he added: “They are the world’s experts on therapeutic antibodies that can target autoimmune or malignant B and T cells,” noting that they recently discovered how immune activation of macrophages is one the key components for effective antibody therapeutics.

University of Southampton Psychology Post Graduate Research Conference – presentations

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 10:48:10 GMT

The Southampton PGR conference recently concluded – the ninth psychology conference but the very first to be carried out online. We were delighted by (and very proud of) the contributions of the Ed Psych Trainees to the conference, which included Year 2 research posters, Year 3 thesis presentations and two members of the Year 2 cohort – Sophie Smith and Amber Newell – sitting on the four person conference planning committee (and what an incredible job they did under these exceptional circumstances).

Please find below two great examples of the Ed Psych thesis presentations, presented by Caroline Bird, Jesvir Dhillon, and Annie McGowan:

Caroline Bird: Attributions of Challenging Behaviour from Looked After Children

Jesvir Dhillon A qualitative exploration of facilitators and adolescents experiences of a school-based iCBT

Annie McGowan: Exploration of the Views and Experiences of Transgender Youth in Secondary Education

9th STONEWALL LECTURE: The Real Gentleman Jack

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 07:26:21 GMT

Writing Anne Lister: The Real Gentleman Jack was the title of the 2020 Southampton Stonewall Lecture, held at Avenue Campus in February as the key event to mark the university’s LGBTQ History Month. Facing an audience of over 120, Dr Jill Liddington from the University of Leeds spoke vividly on a subject on which she is a rare expert, having deciphered and published large sections of the secret diaries of Anne Lister. Sometimes called the ‘first British lesbian’, Anne Lister (1791-1840) was a true Renaissance woman: Yorkshire landowner, coal mine exploiter, mountaineer, scientist, polyglot, European traveller, trained in the classics as well as being a high Anglican and staunch Tory. Her colourful exploits have now been shared with many through the BBC drama series Gentleman Jack. In her lecture Dr Liddington explained the complex task of deciphering the diaries – long passages in code alongside impenetrable handwriting – and their subsequent history and significance for queer heritage. While the diaries were suppressed for 150 years, deemed too shocking for the public gaze, an extra blow came with the Thatcher government’s Clause 28 since this had the effect of silencing publicity about Anne Lister’s homosexuality. In the past year however a tourist industry has erupted around the Lister home in Halifax, and Dr Liddington has a full-time schedule of talks as well as leading the ‘Lister walks’ in Yorkshire.

The Stonewall lecture was chaired by Professor Mark Cornwall, who has organized it since 2012. Over £100 was raised for the Stonewall charity and Dr Liddington afterwards signed copies of her two transcribed diaries, Female Fortune and Nature’s Domain.

Nothing to See Here: A (Visual) Culture of Exchange

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 16:22:25 GMT

This interview was originally posted on the Tate website. It is shared here on behalf of Professor Sunil Manghani.

A podcast project, Nothing to See Here, developed in response to Tate Exchange’s annual theme of power, was one of many events cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, Tate Exchange Associate Sunil Manghani reflects on the intended programme and interviews scheduled guest speaker Nicholas Mirzoeff (Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University) about who has the right to hear and look, to be heard and seen; about the museum’s shifting role as venue for participation and collective processing; and about new potential for digital proximity and exchange.

Tate Exchange at Tate Modern opened in 2016 and describes itself as an open experiment exploring the role of art in society. It offers a unique platform that combines curation, education and social participation. In doing so, it brings together the work of international artists, members of the public and contributions from over sixty ‘Associates’ who represent an array of organisations, large and small, from diverse fields within and beyond the arts, including education, youth engagement, health and wellbeing, and community advocacy. Crucially, Tate Exchange has afforded its Associates a great deal of freedom to devise and curate their own contributions for an annual themed programme, allowing for an entire floor of Tate Modern’s new building to be dedicated to participatory artworks, workshops, activities and debates.

In 2019–20, the overarching theme was power. In response to this, two Associates, Winchester School of Art and Stance Podcast, sought to direct a project called Nothing to See Here. The aim was to foster social proximity with three other Tate Exchange Associates – Valleys Kids, People Empowering People, and John Hansard Gallery – each of which work in highly creative ways, deep within local communities (way outside of the ‘art world’ bubble), often working through very live issues of social and economic hardships. Everyone involved was due to join together to produce a podcast series, which would explore the value of art and creativity as it actually takes places within the local circumstances of the collaborating Associates. The series was to be launched at a special event at Tate Modern at which the audio would provide an invisible soundscape across the entire floor of Tate Exchange, which would otherwise be completely ‘empty’ (‘nothing to see there’). A dedicated forum had been planned, inviting the collaborating Associates and their communities, guest speakers and members of the public, to engage in critical dialogue about the ‘values’ of art and creativity, about the voices that are allowed to be heard, and the right for us to look.

One such guest speaker was Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, and author and editor of key texts on visual culture, including An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999), Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (2000), Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005), The Right to Look: A Counter-History of Visuality (2011) and How to See the World (2015). Mirzoeff had been a key inspiration for the project concept, not least due to his use of the phrase ‘nothing to see here’. As it turned out, however, there really was going to be nothing to see.

The home of Tate Exchange on the fifth floor of the Blavatnik Building at Tate Modern

The COVID-19 health crisis swept across the globe just as the project was finding its footing; just as the collaborators were working out when and where they could meet, among their other pressing activities and duties. There was a great deal of good will, excitement and anticipation for what this ‘open brief’ project was going to bring. Yet, as country after country went into lockdown, social distancing rules were being enforced precisely when the project collaborators were working towards proximity and exchange. As a form of observing the ‘passing’ of this event, to acknowledge the fact that nothing can now be shown for its endeavour, and yet that this very precarity of our right to be seen was always at the heart of the project, the following interview with Nicholas Mirzoeff explores some of the conceptual concerns, which also, inevitably, come to be framed within this unprecedented global event.

The right to look is not about seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each person inventing the other, or it fails … It is the claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable. The right to look confronts the police who say to us, ‘Move on, there’s nothing to see here.’ Only there is, and we know it and so do they.1

Sunil Manghani: This quote is taken from the opening of your book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011). Can you say more about your understanding and application of our ‘right to look’? And perhaps to connect this to the eco-system of arts and culture organisations, large and small.

Nicholas Mirzoeff: I’m writing this in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis. While three police restrained Floyd, as the world now knows, one knelt on his neck and killed him, while a fourth attempted to disperse a small crowd of bystanders turned protestors. ‘Nothing to see here.’ Because a seventeen-year-old happened to capture this moment with her phone, one of the more than 1,000 police killings per year in the United States was made visible. ‘Nothing to see here’ is a structural lie, designed to sustain white supremacy.

I did not write it that way in 2011 because it was very hard at that time, ten years after 9/11 and in a decade of war, to imagine what a counterhistory to that way of seeing felt like and looked like. Almost as soon as I finished The Right to Look, the uprising in Tunisia spread to Egypt and people began to gather in spaces where they were not supposed to be, from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street. In those spaces, I began to experience what it was to have the right to look. At the same time, I learned what I should already have known: that this ‘right’ was systemically and structurally uneven. Black Lives Matter, founded in 2012, became national in 2014 when Eric Garner was murdered in New York City, saying ‘I can’t breathe,’ just as George Floyd would do in 2020, and just as psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon had written in 1952.2 In the US, the spaces in which we gather to protest are (nearly) all stolen land, taken from the Indigenous by deceit and force, after viruses, slavery and war had killed an astonishing 40 million people in the Americas between 1492 and 1610.

Protesters calling for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, 9 June 2020

It may seem that these long structural histories of violence have nothing to do with art and arts organisations. Importantly, curators in the UK have insisted that the conversations that began before COVID-19 must continue. Museums cannot take funding from fossil fuel companies – credit here to Tate for finally ending these sponsorships, and the British Museum must follow suit. Nor does the concept of the ‘universal’ museum make sense in the context of social distancing, quarantine and highly limited travel. Cultural property like the Benin ‘bronzes’ and the Parthenon Marbles must be returned. In the US, where protestors have continued to insist that making public space a space in which there might be a right to look, the possibility to encounter each other freely depends on the removal of monuments to past oppression. In Louisville, Kentucky, a protestor removed the right hand of a statue of King Louis XVI: the French Revolution continues. In Richmond, Virginia, Monument Mile, filled with Confederate statues, was the scene of widespread graffiti tagging: the Haitian Revolution continues. In Philadelphia, protestors forced the removal of the statue of racist police officer Phil Rizzo: Rhodes Must Fall continues.

Sunil Manghani: The planned project, Nothing to See Here, was about the empowerment of those engaged in local arts and culture, and was concerned with wider debates about how we value arts and creativity as democratic forms. Based on extensive public engagement, Arts Council England’s Strategy 2020–2030, for example, reveals tremendous appetite for creative and cultural opportunities and a genuine valuing of ‘everyday creativity’.3 Interestingly, participants relate to a wider range of creative, rather than cultural, activities. Barriers to opportunities vary but include the perceived lack of available spaces and facilities, the lack of self-confidence, and too few opportunities to succeed in creative industries – something that is exacerbated in smaller communities and disadvantaged groups. How might this relate to ideas of the ‘distribution of the sensible’?4

Nicholas Mirzoeff: At first, COVID-19 was hailed as a leveller, a virus that did not observe boundaries. As the pandemic spread, it moved past celebrities and global travellers and took hold in urban areas already marked by deprivation and inequality. Like AIDS before it, COVID-19 has proved to be profoundly illuminating. It takes the path of least resistance, which is to say, that of greatest inequality. Locality is destiny. Where community has often been used as a bureaucratic talking point, many of us have experienced it differently in the pandemic, in everything from mutual aid projects to collective clapping for carers, and now the reclaiming of streets and time from the police.

The ‘distribution of the sensible’ is French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s concept for designating how the visible relates to the sayable: how does a person describe what they see? When is a picture worth a thousand words? Conversely, when there are ‘no words’, what happens? In the extremities of the epidemic and racialised violence, such intense sensory experiences are happening almost every day. They are precisely not ‘everyday’ in the sense of routine or banal but they highlight how the experience of everyday life – shopping, walking, travelling – has become an emergency.

In a possible future that now feels remote, where the intensity of this emergency has subsided, all who went through it will need to find ways to express and work it through in ways that do not flatten its uneven and unequal characteristics. Creative spaces in which to do this work should be thought of as public utilities in which the ‘output’, to use the dreadful bureaucratic jargon, will be a new form of the common good. Not one public enquiry led by the usual titled old white man but a series of local enquiries into what the public should now become, which is to ask: what common provisions are needed for the possibility of human life where you live?

Sunil Manghani: The Associates provide a collective programme that Tate Exchange describes as ‘brave, risk-taking’ and as fostering ‘new thinking on the museum’.5However, despite the focal point Tate Exchange provides for Associates to explore and promote their own interests, it is also the case that the space exerts a certain gravitational pull, centring all eyes upon what Associates do at Tate, rather than the everyday work they do within their own communities elsewhere, away from Tate. There is arguably a necessary trade-off between spectacle (that can draw us together) and visibility (through which we can act). Interestingly, the nomenclature surrounding Tate Exchange is unstable and contested. It is hard, sometimes, to explain exactly what it is and how it situates within museum. This is seemingly testament to the fact that it is offering something different.

Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall during Tania Bruguera’s 2018 Hyundai Commission

The work of the artist and activist Tania Bruguera, who acted as both a lead artist for Tate Exchange and as Turbine Hall commission artist in 2018, is a good point of reference. Her dual role raised important questions and opportunities for thinking through the relationship between the art establishment and socially engaged practice. Yet, one of the difficulties of curating an artist such as Bruguera in the context of a large, complex museum such as Tate, which is driven in many respects by the needs of spectacle and consumption, is that the exhibited outcomes, as with Bruguera’s Turbine commission (and its interaction with Tate Exchange itself), do not necessarily do justice to the underlying working processes. Nonetheless, when engaging directly with Bruguera, witnessing her working practice of ‘being together’ with others within the setting of Tate Exchange, we can begin to understand a more complex notion of agency: as that which goes beyond the unique property of specific individuals, towards more fluid and transpositional creative engagements. Picking up again on what you describe as being mutual in our right to look, perhaps you can reflect further on how social participatory art (and artists) can be appropriately framed within the art museum, and how that might evolve.

Nicholas Mirzoeff: I think we want to start by not assuming it’s obvious what words like ‘art’ or ‘museum’ mean or should mean. Some have seen art as a form of social justice organising, community building, storytelling, environmental action, and so on. How can a ‘museum’ act as a venue where all of these meanings can be kept in dialogue with each other and with the public? In a time of social distancing, what does participation now mean?

One example that comes to mind, drawing on the past work of groups like Black Audio Film Collective, is Autograph. They hold gallery shows in and around the area of Black British photography in their Shoreditch space but they also make an ‘exhibition in a box’ that can be given to schools or community groups to make their own exhibitions. Not stopping here, Autograph also project work from their shows outside busy Underground stations used by Black British people.

A question that I’m working on as a writer, curator and activist asks: what kind of projects might be effective in having people identified and identifying as white find a similar level of engagement with their histories? Just as white people think of themselves simply as people, white artists and their work are not considered as part of whiteness unless they explicitly address the issue. I’m partnering with Magnum Foundation in New York City, where I happen to live, on a project about the visual politics of whiteness. It was set to have an exhibition, an online publication, meetings and so on. All that will need to be revisited as the sheer violence of white supremacy has again become so visible.

Sunil Manghani: As a way of looking back on your long engagement with visual culture studies, and yet equally to ask you something about the particular circumstances we find ourselves in right now, I recall an occasion, in a research seminar, probably around the year 2000, in which you reflected on the first edition of The Visual Culture Reader (1998). You were then working on the second edition and suggested you had perhaps not previously picked up enough on the significance of digital culture. Subsequent editions have, of course, addressed this matter in detail, but it always struck me as an interesting observation about how we must work through our contemporary conditions. We are embedded in certain infrastructures and technologies that do not necessarily reveal their full significance all at once. The health crisis we are currently living through has been utterly awful, decimating lives and social ties. Yet, typically of demotic culture, there have been tremendous levels of creativity, which primarily has had to involve digital, networked media. I wonder what your thoughts are on this matter and how things might shape our engagement with the arts; how, for example, Tate Exchange and prominent art museums, such as Tate, might find themselves responding?

Nicholas Mirzoeff: In 1999, I wrote ‘modern life is lived on screen’.6 It was received by art history as a controversial statement. In the present Zoom-mediated society, where cell phone video is the primary vector of social change, it might be better understood as prefigurative. By that, I mean the small number of people online in 1999 prefigured a future that is now upon us. The raw numbers tell the story: 23 million had internet access in the US in 1999; 288 million today. That’s still just 87% of all people so digital access is not universal.

Worldwide, about 54% of people are estimated to have internet access of some kind. It’s one of several indices of change. Most people now live in cities (since 2011) and most people are aged under thirty (since 2008). What kind of world does this young, networked, urban majority want? Before the pandemic, there were some clear indications on priorities, such as climate catastrophe, violence and racism.

They’ve also created their own media forms. First came the selfie, initially despised, now universal. The social media ‘story’ was next, and the short video-clip, first as Vines, now Tik-Tok. Video as citizen journalism, like Darnella Frazier recording the murder of George Floyd, has more impact than most professional journalism. Not much of the existing cultural institution repertoire translates well into this mediated world. Talks and panels are fine but that’s about it. The digital exhibition or museum visit hasn’t been very inspiring as of yet because they are translations. Born-digital exhibitions could certainly work.

But what would a digital exchange that was about sharing look like? For the most part, the internet exists to facilitate commercial exchange or, simply put, shopping. In social media, the user agrees by clicking on an unread document to exchange their data for access to platforms where they supply the content. How can museums become a platform for people to supply content without either of these forms of exchange as part of the revived common good? I look forward to seeing Tate lead on this issue!

NOTES

1. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham, North Carolina 2011, p.1.
2. ‘It is not because the Indo-Chinese discovered a culture of their own that they revolted. Quite simply this was because it became impossible to breathe, in more than one sense of the word.’ Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York 2008, p.201; originally published in French as Peau noire, masques blancs, Paris 1952. Fanon’s sentiment was widely shared across social media following the killing of Eric Garner, though in an altered form: ‘When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.’ Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades, London 2015, p.1.
3. Arts Council England, Let’s Create, Strategy 2020–2030, https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Strateg…, p.10.
4. Rancière defines the distribution of the sensible as ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London 2004, p.12.
5. Tate Exchange Associates, https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-exchange.
6. Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, London and New York 1999, p.1. The original wording is: ‘Modern life takes place onscreen.’

Sunil Manghani is Professor of Theory, Practice and Critique, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

Nicholas Mirzoeff is an activist and Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University.

HOW TO CITE

Sunil Manghani and Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Nothing to See Here: A Visual Culture of (Tate) Exchange’, Tate Research Feature, July 2020, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/features/nothing-to-see-here-tate-exchange, accessed 20 July 2020.

Paper on teaching about epigenetics in schools

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 09:53:46 GMT

MSHE members Marcus Grace, Andri Christodoulou, Carys Hughes and Janice Griffiths have just published a paper in School Science Review calling for the urgent need to teach about epigenetics in secondary school science. The rapidly growing field of epigenetics has transformed biological theory, and yet many of us are unaware of its significance. The research found that only a minority of trainee science teachers were familiar with the term, but with further structured discussion they were readily able to engage with social, ethical and health promotion implications relating to epigenetics.

https://www.ase.org.uk/resources/school-science-review/issue-377/case-including-epigenetics-in-school-science-curriculum

#WebSci20 – Paper Session 7: Bias and fairness by Robert Thorburn

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 09:25:05 GMT

Posted on behalf of Robert Thorburn

Chair: Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda

The seventh session of Web Science 2020, chaired by Katharina Kinder-Kurlander, presented papers focused on issues of bias and fairness. As with other paper sessions at the conference, the speakers represented universities from across the globe and had widely divergent focus areas within the broader theme. The four papers presented covered peer-to-peer discrimination in the sharing economy, fairness in clustering, bias mitigation in facial imaging, and a systematic media frame analysis.

Although these papers covered wide ranging of topics they did have notable areas of overlap, such the prominence of unintended or unconscious biases and the potential challenges these pose to academic studies in the field. In peer-to-peer systems these issues are further complicated by interactions being multidirectional, implying that the impacts of biases flow along multiple vectors. A further notable example of such bias is the use of facial recognition systems to determine gender, where such determination is binary only. Not only does this fix a discriminatory practice in the system’s code base, but there is no clear reason to do so in the first instance. This is due to gender data generally not being needed in facial recognition systems, while such systems could actually be used to discern a wide range gender and sexual orientation groups if the associated ML systems were trained to do so. However, this raises clear ethical concerns around the application of such systems, especially since it is easy to imagine how repressive governments might use facial recognition systems in targeted abuse.

During general discussion this issue was further distilled by the presenters, by focusing on fairness through representation. The issue of lacking representation was pinpointed as a central gap in not only related research but also in ML systems in general. Without representative training data such systems could never produce fair results. Conversely though, broader representation can be used to achieve unfair and even inherently unjust outcomes if contained within a system aimed at discriminatory practices.

#WebSci20 – Paper Session 6: Text, Topics and Trends by Robert Thorburn

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 09:19:45 GMT

Posted on behalf of Robert Thorburn

The sixth paper session at the 2020 Web Science conference presented a broad scope collectively titled as “Text, Topics and Trends”. Presented by academics from Europe to Japan, the papers in this session tackled topics ranging from an exploration of linked subcultures to a classification of information exchanged during disasters. Although these areas might at first seem somewhat unrelated, there is significant overlap in what is being studied and how such studies are carried out. This is because language use within a set group or period is the central area of investigation, while techniques such as Natural Language Processing are commonly used. Consequently, when the first presenter described their work as “trying to understand how communities differ from the broader hegemony”, we can see this sentiment echoed through all the papers.

There were, however, also significant differences between some of the groups who’s language was analysed by the various papers. So for instance, cultural subgroups were brought together by their pre-existing beliefs, often deterministic in nature, while other groups were brought together by circumstances which were often short-lived. This reflected in the nature of language used with groups coalescing around pre-existing beliefs or shared topics of interest, having a high tendency towards creating or employing neologisms. A site like The Urban Dictionary is a prime example of this since it hosts not only such new words but also presents lexicological entries for them. Of course, a fair few of these entries are fake or humorous. There is certainly also a case to be made that such activities could, over time, impact on linguistic shifts.

The level of involvement of such sites may be incidental though, with individual influencers having much more sway with their followers than a platform in general. Accordingly, agency in such shifts rests with leadership figures while the platforms concerned are “simply” points of congregation for those interested in, or affected by, the topic at hand. These points of congregation do, however, make things notably easier for researchers since there is a clear point for data collection. This allowed for data from set time-periods to be collected after the fact and processed as needed, which positively impacts on the technological overhead for such a study. As a result, even modestly funded projects could cope with computational needs, though the researcher all generally agreed that more resources would be needed to conduct such research at scale, which is significant since larger projects are needed to drive the research forward.

#WebSci20 – Paper Session 8: NLP+CSS by Robert Thorburn

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 09:15:48 GMT

Posted on behalf of Robert Thorburn

The eighth and second last paper session at Web Science 2020 dealt with the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the Computational Social Siences (CSS). Unsurprisingly, NLP techniques were employed by a number of researchers in other paper sessions, but the need for a more focused session was clear, given the utility of such techniques for CSS studies. Papers presented during this session included predicting symptoms of depression, studying political stance changes, online identity and content propagation, and the reception of education reforms through the Blogosphere.

Although each paper put the combination of publicly available data and powerful NLP techniques good use, the standout feature was the depth of divergent knowledge which could be gained through the application of similar techniques. So, for instance, the first paper developed a representation of social media users’ mood over time as a predictor for depression. This time wise study being key in differentiating between mood and short-term emotion. The final paper on the other hand explored the way in which teachers and connected individuals discussed, reacted to, and lobbied against education reforms over a set time period. In addition to the differing areas of inquiry it is also interesting to note that differing data sources yield different ethical concerns. Per example, Twitter may be used anonymously and contains very short messages intended for a global audience while blogs can be deeply personal and do not necessarily have the same anticipation of a global audience. Although blogs can be anonymous, this functions differently and caries different expectations.

A further interesting issue raised by presenters was that of silence. When an individual is not posting content, this could simply be seen as a blank space and ignored or averaged out in calculations. However, if the issue at hand is one of mental health then such silence could actually be meaningful and must be considered with greater care and possibly also directly reflected in the data under analysis.

Lastly, during open discussion, the presenters focused on the issues of data persistence and platform limitations. Data persistence is a nuanced and changeable issue in as much as the retention and deletion of data might be beyond the control of any one party. Major role players include the data subject, the platform hosting the data, data repositories, the Internet Archive, legislation, etc. The impact of platforms is specifically notable since they not only play a major role in data storage but also in data creation. This is not only due to potential content restrictions but also due to format limitations such as Twitter’s character limit.