Aerodynamic Shape Optimisation of a Camber Morphing Airfoil and Noise Estimation

In order to decrease the emitted airframe noise by a two-dimensional high-lift configuration during take-off and landing performance, a morphing airfoil has been designed through a shape design optimisation procedure starting from a baseline airfoil (NLR 7301), with the aim of emulating a high-lift configuration in terms of aerodynamic performance. A methodology has been implemented to accomplish such aerodynamic improvements by means of the compressible steady RANS equations at a certain angle of attack, with the objective of maximising its lift coefficient up to equivalent values regarding the high-lift configuration, whilst respecting the imposed structural constraints to guarantee a realistic optimised design. For such purposes, a gradient-based optimisation through the discrete adjoint method has been undertaken. Once the optimised airfoil is achieved, unsteady simulations have been carried out to obtain surface pressure distributions along a certain time-span to later serve as the input data for the aeroacoustic prediction framework, based on the Farassat 1A formulation, where the subsequent results for both configurations are post-processed to allow for a comparative analysis. Conclusively, the morphing airfoil has proven to be advantageous in terms of aeroacoustics, in which the noise has been reduced with respect to the conventional high-lift configuration for a comparable lift coefficient, despite being hampered by a significant drag coefficient increase due to stall on the morphing airfoil’s trailing edge.

Pensions and the Extending Working Lives Agenda in the UK: The Impact on Women

Extending working lives (EWLs) has been a key policy response to the challenges presented by an ageing population in the United Kingdom (UK). This includes the use of pension policies to encourage working longer. However, opportunities and experiences of EWLs are not equal. While much has been written about EWLs more broadly, limited attention has been paid to connecting those EWLs policies associated with pensions and their potentially unequal impact on women. This article aims to address this gap, taking a feminist political-economy perspective to explore the structural constraints that shape EWLs and pensions. Initially it briefly introduces the EWLs agenda, before focussing on pension developments and their implications for EWLs, considering the gendered nature of these policies. Finally, it touches upon potential policy measures to mitigate the impact of these developments on women. It demonstrates how women’s existing labour market and pension disadvantages have been largely overlooked in the development of EWLs policy, perpetuating or expanded many women’s financial inequalities in later life. It highlights the need for a greater focus on gendered pension differences in developing EWLs policy to ensure women’s circumstances are not adversely impacted on.

My mother-in-law does not like it: resources, social norms, and entrepreneurial intentions of women in an emerging economy

This paper provides new evidence at the intersectionality of gender, family status, and culture by focusing on a previously little researched group of middle-class women in an emerging economy. While the existing literature examines both structural and normative constraints for women entrepreneurship, little is known about the gains from relaxing structural constraints for women when compared to men. In addition to examining this new question, the paper sheds light on the binding nature of normative constraints for women entrepreneurship that persist in a patriarchal developing economy even when structural constraints are significantly eased. Using a mixed-methods approach, the empirical results suggest that higher resource availability differentially impacts the entrepreneurial intentions of women when compared to men indicating the strong presence of normative barriers that inhibit their entrepreneurship. These normative barriers emerge through the roles people play within women life spheres inhibiting their entrepreneurial intentions.

The Italian energy transition in a multilevel system: between reinforcing dynamics and institutional constraints

The article analyses drivers as well as coordination mechanisms and instruments for the energy transition in Italy from a multilevel governance perspective. It addresses the structural constraints that influenced the decision-making processes and organisation of the Italian energy sector and the socio-technical challenges opened up by enhancing renewables. The current energy system is making the move from a centralised, path-dependent institutional and organisational structure to a more fragmented and pluralistic one. Renewables and decentralised patterns of production and consumption are key elements of this paradigmatic shift, which is paralleled by a multiplication of decision-making arenas and actors. These actors follow different interests, problem understandings and green growth narratives, increasing the complexity of governing the energy transition. Against this background, community-based renewable energy policy is assuming a very important role and Italy is putting efforts to establish an enabling framework in line with the requirements of the European Union. The goal of this strategy is to foster a positive link between acceptance of the energy transition and decentralised local activities. In the conclusion we address problems and barriers to new modes of governance, and discuss possible approaches to improved cooperation.

What Space Is This Time? Historiography in the Space of History

In asking the question embedded in the title, this article explores the tension between inertia and change in cultural historical studies. Inertia in this context does not mean inactive or inert (i.e., without active properties), but the structural constraints that are revealed when codes, forms, practices, roles, etc., contest. What kinds and forms of socio-cultural knowledge, values, or structures are maintained, developed, or abandoned across geographies and throughout a system’s history? Rather than thinking in terms of core and margin and related binaries of difference and “othering,” inertia and change as historiographical strategies focus on the dynamics that affect social systems and structures, preserving some systems to conserve energy while introducing or forsaking others. In the process of exploring these spaces in historiographical time, this article draws historical examples from attempts among scholars and performers in the United States in the latter nineteenth century to stage “American” histories that stored, rejected, and created past and contemporaneous historical spaces at such sites as Lewis Henry Morgan’s view of Ancient Society (1877), the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

How political choices shaped Covid connectivity: The Italian case study

The importance of implementing new methodologies to study the ever-increasing amount of Covid-19 data is apparent. The aftermath analysis of these data could inform us on how specific political decisions influenced the dynamics of the pandemic outbreak. In this paper we use the Italian outbreak as a case study, to study six different Covid indicators collected in twenty Italian regions. We define a new object, the Covidome, to investigate the network of functional Covid interactions between regions. We analyzed the Italian Covidome over the course of 2020, and found that Covid connectivity between regions follows a sharp North-South community gradient. Furthermore, we explored the Covidome dynamics and individuated differences in regional Covid connectivity between the first and second waves of the pandemic. These differences can be associated to the two different lockdown strategies adopted for the first and the second wave from the Italian government. Finally, we explored to what extent Covid connectivity was associated with the Italian geographical network, and found that Central regions were more tied to the structural constraints than Northern or Southern regions in the spread of the virus. We hope that this approach will be useful in gaining new insights on how political choices shaped Covid dynamics across nations.

Identities and Ideologies in Study Abroad Contexts: Negotiating Nationality, Gender, and Sexuality

<p>This thesis examines the discursive negotiation of identities in study abroad (SA) settings, examining how university exchange students in New Zealand and France use language to enact, reflect on, and problematise social identities in interaction. I push beyond the more common focus on language learning as the end goal of identity scholarship in SA, focusing instead on an emergent approach to social identities for participants as they encounter ‘new’ Discourses and norms in their exchange settings. The post-structural perspective of identities as multiple, dynamic, and a site of struggle is enriched by attending closely to how identities are discursively co-constructed at ‘ground level’ in interactions with attention to wider sociocultural Discourses and ideologies. I approach this complexity by weaving a strong theoretical thread throughout the thesis, acknowledging (and problematising) the social categories, knowledge, Discourses and ideologies we (re)construct for ourselves, yet recognising the structural constraints that these constructions provide for identity negotiations at any point in time in the guise of social reality. Methodologically, I adopt a novel bidirectional approach to examine the whats and hows of identity co-construction for my participants in France and New Zealand. Data collection spanned a period of sixteen months and involved multiple sources, prioritising naturalistic interactional data and interviews. This was supplemented by an ethnographic data collection which included extensive field notes, time spent with participants, interviews with other key people (language buddies and tutors), and social media. Analytically, interactional sociolinguistics provides valuable tools for a rigorous discourse analysis which considers both micro and macro factors. The analytic focus on the processes of identity negotiation in interaction, underpinned by a social realist approach, provides a fertile platform from which to investigate identity construction in its intersubjective complexity, and to move beyond the reliance on student perspectives as the main source of accessing identity in SA. My findings show that particularly salient identities for participants hinge on constructs of nationality (which interacted with ethnicity), as well as gender and sexuality. These identities were often ‘triggered’ by the activation of ‘discursive faultlines’ in exchange settings and ideologies (associated with the above categories) were pervasive in all participants’ ensuing identity negotiations. The emphasis on the social embeddedness of participants and the researcher has rich implications for understandings of the relationship between structure and agency, and analysis shows that even ostensibly agentive acts are constrained by ideological structures, which act as vehicles of power. I conceptualise agency as being co-constructed, dynamic, and multifaceted, and as involving resistance, perpetuation, complicity, and strategic harnessing of Discourses - both conscious and unconscious. Within these broad parameters, my data provides evidence of greater transformative potential in forms of ‘oppositional’ agency, and at the same time, fledgling potential in what I term agency in a germination phase. I argue that ‘seeds of agency’ are planted for some participants in their new settings and that reflecting on the arbitrary nature of ideologies and accepted truths was a more common outcome for participants who had prior experience of marginalisation. In this sense, the study also speaks to notions of study abroad as social change. What study abroad contexts afford, by virtue of movement across geographical and discursive space, is unique access to how identities are negotiated in light of ideological constraints by young people living in an increasingly mobile and globalised world. Moving beyond singular portrayals of SA university students as language learners and adding depth to existing treatments of identity has crucial repercussions for the way we conceptualise study abroad participants. My study firmly positions them as ‘whole people’ who continue to experience real world issues on exchange, in contexts where the revered immersion experience has been replaced by mobility and connectedness through technological advances. The increasing internationalisation of education adds economic implications to the social, emphasising the need for deeper understanding of the connections between language, identity, and ideology as impacting the study abroad experience. These understandings have the potential to benefit many groups of people, including academics, educators, policy writers, and not least the students themselves.</p>