“Tangled Passions”: Realism and Lyricism in the Plays of Peter Gill

This article argues that the work of Welsh theatre director and playwright Peter Gill occupies a unique place in post-1960s’ British playwriting. It explores Gill’s plays as – using theatre critic Susannah Clapp’s phrase – the “missing link” between kitchen-sink realism and more self-consciously poetic forms of theatre text. Gill’s plays make an important contribution to the history of working-class representation in UK theatre for three main reasons: first, the centrality he gives to Wales, Welsh working-class characters, and the city of Cardiff; second, his emphasis on the experience of women, especially mothers; and third, his focus on young male characters expressing and exploring the complexities of same-sex desire. The plays make advances in terms of realist dialogue and structure while also experimenting with layout, repetition, fragmentation, poetic description, and monologue narration. Gill’s work realistically documents the impact of poverty, cramped housing conditions, and social deprivation on his characters as part of a political project to show the lives of Welsh working-class people on stage. While doing so, Gill innovates in his handling of time, perspective, viewpoint, and genre. His plays occupy a distinctive place in the history of British, working-class, gay theatre, helping us to rethink what each of these three key terms means.

Când totul e pierdut, ai grijă să cazi cu stil. Istoria lui Iovănel: note, completări, provocări

I will analyse the correspondences between two critical ambitions cultivated a century apart, those of the liberal ideological critic Lovinescu and of a young literary critic who reads Romanian literature through a minimally progressive grid, sensible to liberal nuances and with leftist interpretative undertones (considering the evolution of class representation and of the “social”) in discussing recent literature, a point of view having a devastating effect on many writers (in light of the fact that the regime change has occasioned an upsurge in racism, sexism, and all other imaginable phobias, which have nonetheless been cultivated in the last stage of nationalist propaganda of the 70s-80s as well). I will pursue the evolution of several writers against the backdrop of the ideological mainstream, as well as the manner in which Iovănel interprets them: Mircea Cărtărescu, Adrian Schiop, and Lavinia Braniște. I will also attempt to establish the limitations of Iovănel’s approach, residing in the conflict between established literary criticism and a literary production which has been completely underprivileged within the free market, enjoying weak institutional support, and whose sales and popularity are rapidly diminishing. The literary critic, still part of a somewhat stable institutional network, seems to be confined in a depressingly marginal literary underbrush, whose growth was sparked by the cataclysm of anti-communist “cultural revolution” and savage capitalism. One of the greatest constructs of communist modernity, mass culture, which was to transform into one of the greatest post-communist utopias, commercial culture, was of great importance for the present debate.

Reappraising B. R. Ambedkar’s Thoughts of Inclusive Indian Nation

Dr B. R. Ambedkar, one of the makers of the Indian Constitution, is known best as the emancipator of the untouchables. Ambedkar’s effort to make India as a nation through ‘breaking the internal differences’ is much debated and not widely recognized as he has still been confined only to his identity as a ‘liberating leader of the Dalits’. Ambedkar’s ideas—caste annihilation, securing rights to the depressed class, representation of the oppressed in political affairs, egalitarian economic arrangement, women’s rights and thoughts on democracy—all have the potential to be linked with his ideas of a nation, which is inclusive in nature.

Attend and Discriminate

Wearables are fundamental to improving our understanding of human activities, especially for an increasing number of healthcare applications from rehabilitation to fine-grained gait analysis. Although our collective know-how to solve Human Activity Recognition (HAR) problems with wearables has progressed immensely with end-to-end deep learning paradigms, several fundamental opportunities remain overlooked. We rigorously explore these new opportunities to learn enriched and highly discriminating activity representations. We propose: i) learning to exploit the latent relationships between multi-channel sensor modalities and specific activities; ii) investigating the effectiveness of data-agnostic augmentation for multi-modal sensor data streams to regularize deep HAR models; and iii) incorporating a classification loss criterion to encourage minimal intra-class representation differences whilst maximising inter-class differences to achieve more discriminative features. Our contributions achieves new state-of-the-art performance on four diverse activity recognition problem benchmarks with large margins---with up to 6% relative margin improvement. We extensively validate the contributions from our design concepts through extensive experiments, including activity misalignment measures, ablation studies and insights shared through both quantitative and qualitative studies. The code base and trained network parameters are open-sourced on GitHub https://github.com/AdelaideAuto-IDLab/Attend-And-Discriminate to support further research.

Key Technology Considerations in Developing and Deploying Machine Learning Models in Clinical Radiology Practice (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED The use of machine learning to develop intelligent software tools for interpretation of radiology images has gained widespread attention in recent years. The development, deployment, and eventual adoption of these models in clinical practice, however, remains fraught with challenges. In this paper, we propose a list of key considerations that machine learning researchers must recognize and address to make their models accurate, robust, and usable in practice. Namely, we discuss: insufficient training data, decentralized datasets, high cost of annotations, ambiguous ground truth, imbalance in class representation, asymmetric misclassification costs, relevant performance metrics, generalization of models to unseen datasets, model decay, adversarial attacks, explainability, fairness and bias, and clinical validation. We describe each consideration and identify techniques to address it. Although these techniques have been discussed in prior research literature, by freshly examining them in the context of medical imaging and compiling them in the form of a laundry list, we hope to make them more accessible to researchers, software developers, radiologists, and other stakeholders.

Conflictual Complementarity: New Labour Actors in Corporatist Industrial Relations

Liberalisation of industrial relations entails the weakening of unions and a respective rise of alternative, ‘new labour actors’, altering traditional class representation by introducing new strategies. Research on this phenomenon has focused on decentralised contexts, where new actors are seen to pursue both independent strategies as well as cooperation with unions to contest rising employers’ discretion. Drawing on multiple qualitative methodologies, this article analyses the roles and contributions of new actors in the context of corporatist industrial relations, to find rising conflicts between them and unions. Combining social movement theories of strategic change with industrial relations theories of power and theories of institutional complementarity, reveals conflictual forms of complementarity between new actors and corporatist unions. Through interacting with new labour actors, corporatist union strategies are seen to change in a ‘spin-off’ form, reforming unions’ traditional power and dominance to (partially) counter previous liberalisation of industrial relations.

Russian Working Class Youth Media Representation: The Discourse Analysis Experience

The objective of this research is to investigate the recent discursive turn in working class representation in the Russian media. The means of creation and translation of normative class patterns, stereotypes and political agency within Russian media have been studied using the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis. The empirical basis of the research is the textual transcripts of the key communicative events marking the working class as a political subject. The qualitative analysis allowed us to distinguish the rhetorical techniques and semiotic resources of working-class representation in the political field: thematic repertoire, format, practices which interlocutors use in addressing each other, language style and naming. It has been established that the forgotten concept of a “working class” was actualized and entrenched in the official political discourse in 2011. It was borrowed from left-wing political forces and re-assembled as one of the means of ruling class positioning in the 2011–2012 electoral cycle. Industrial working class representatives were included in public discourse as a part of the political staging, the consequences of which led to minor social changes. The populist discourse of working-class politicians as a “voice of common people” was constructed to oppose it to the protesting “creative class” threatening the main political force. The short-term political goal of power agents was to represent working-class people and youth especially as a political subject loyal to the existing regime, embedded into the current political system and ready to defend it if necessary. The nostalgic rhetorical technics were primarily used to re-launch “working class project”. Keywords: working class, working-class youth, discourse analysis, populism, political discourse

REPRESENTATION OF SOCIAL CLASS IN FILM (Semiotic Analysis of Roland Barthes Film Parasite)

Social class differences have been formed long ago which can identify people's identities which are usually measured based on economic status. This class difference is depicted in Bong Joon-ho's Parasite film, telling of two families of different classes. The Kim family as a lower class and vice versa Mr. Park as the upper class. The core theme of the film Parasite is that of realistic drama about class domination which can also be seen around us. The paradigm used is critical interpretative, so researchers not only criticize but also make interpretations related to this Parasite film. In the analysis phase, this study uses Roland Barthes's semiotic analysis, which are signs in the form of words, images, sounds, movements and objects that are analyzed based on three things, namely parsing data based on the connotation, denotation and myths contained in the Parasite film scene. . Furthermore, representations produced through objects or images can produce meaning or processes that we understand or relate them to a meaning. Based on the first analysis of the film industry, Parasite Films are not included in the logic of most cultural industries but still succeed in penetrating the international market. Then, at the stage of representing social class markings in the film Parasite, it is found that there are at least five main points, namely: ease of life, fashion, boundaries, body odor, and color. Thus, the description of social class representation in the film Parasite is perfect both in its scenes, properties, and cinematography.