Blogs

This essay considers ways of determining why terms become catchwords by using NLP methods.

Catchwords/phrases catch on, so their uptake is the starting point for thinking about them. This blog outlines some of the definitive features of catchwords/phrases, and discusses the frequencies of usage that characterise their catchiness

On Thursday, 6^th July, a small group of OCM members met in the fine city of Norwich, for a day of museum and heritage exploration.

On Thursday, 9^th March 2023, an intrepid band of OCM group members gathered in London to visit a couple of exhibitions that offered interesting and thought-provoking perspectives on using objects and collections to tell particular narratives.

This blog considers an open set of words and phrases which are descriptively qualified by a metaphoric prefix: ‘catch-’. Like ‘catchwords’, other sets of words and phrases are also named with metaphoric prefixes: ‘keywords’, ‘buzzwords’, ‘winged words’.

What is the future of UN peace operations and what new research approaches should scholars take to both understand and influence their evolution? These were the central questions academics explored during a two-day international conference entitled Multidisciplinary futures of United Nations peace operations on 20 and 21 February 2023.

The war in Ukraine has devasted infrastructure. How (re)construction will be undertaken – and who will pay for it – is becoming a key question. This entry considers the prospect of Chinese capital financing Ukraine’s recovery.

In trying to research the assembling of a major infrastructure project we must do many things which require inter-disciplinarity and multiple methods.

The majority of migrant health care workers across the world are women. Many migrant workers leave their own families behind in order to deliver vital care to others abroad. They provide invaluable services to our health systems, yet they are invisible in terms of rights.

In July 2022, the Welsh Government launched the basic income pilot for people leaving care in Wales. This pilot will add to debates about a universal basic income. A universal basic income is an old idea and can be traced back at least to works such as Thomas More’s Utopia published around 500 years ago.

Sexual misconduct at the core of Britain’s political establishment is the focus of a new book on Sexual Harassment in the UK Parliament, which draws on an intersectional feminist perspective and academic literature on Violence Against Women in Politics (VAWP) to examine the plight of female victims of sexual transgressions in Westminster.

Over the last three years the Moving MarketPlaces (MMP) project has been investigating how market traders in England produce inclusive public spaces. The team at The Open University organised a public exhibition at Walthamstow Market with two street photographers, Lourice Ramos and Lloyd Ramos.

Processes of citizenship are linked to the norms and patterns of social order, as discussed by Catherine Neveu. It may be productive to reframe issues in terms of processes and practices of ordering.

Looking at citizenship as a ‘living’ practice can show us how citizens themselves construct the concept of citizenship and how they negotiate, contest, claim and enact their positions as rights bearers vis-à-vis others.

Why do some developing economies have gender gaps in the movement of labour from agriculture to non-agricultural sectors? Looking at India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Egypt and Morocco, a research network aims to find answers.

Understanding of Europe as a territorial space is ambiguous and ambivalent. Overcoming longstanding contradictions will help alleviate infrastructure inequalities and assuage divided attitudes towards China.

We all use infrastructure every day. As a result, we all have of an intuitive understanding of what infrastructure is. But how do we, REDEFINE, understand Infrastructure?

As China’s political and economic influence across the globe increases what does this mean for how we think about the idea of development?

This paper was presented as part of the panel entitled Changing Cultures: Arts and culture as agends and means of change in migration socities (panel #166). Chaired by Jens Schneider, this third session of the panel aimed to analyse collaborative projects between research, arts and culture and their impact.

Several of our members took part in the 18th IMISCOE Annual conference in July 2021. This year the conference theme was Crossing borders, connecting cultures. This was the second year the conference was hosted online by the University of Luxembourg. In 2020, IMISCOE’s annual conference was hosted with the support of IMISCOE, The University of Luxembourg and The Open University.

Discover the herstories of migrant businesswomen in 1911 London. This walk traces the presence of migrant women who ran their own business in 1911. The walk is about 5.5 km/1.5 hr

Women who ran groceries and other food sales shops were much more likely to be married. Often, the occupation of their husbands was a grocer as well, suggesting a de facto partnership. However, there were substantial numbers of female grocers married to butchers, coal merchants and other food sales occupations.

Lodging house keeper tended to be older than dressmakers. The key requirement was some business capital in the form of a house, which was often only achieved at middle age groups. Renting out rooms provided a vital form of entrepreneurial income for women who otherwise might have struggled to support themselves and their families through waged labour.

Dressmaking stood out as a trade that allowed women to set up their own business from a young age, even compared to other parts of the clothes-making sector.

Of the migrant business women identified in our study, a third were single and never married and another third were married and lived with their husbands. Amongst the remaining one third, majority of the women were widowed, and a smaller group were women who were married but with absent spouses.

The census is a snapshot of a moment in time. Our data counts migrant women who self-reported as operating a business on 2 April 1911, regardless of how small this business was, its longevity, or success. Our data includes many women who people may not immediately think of as running their own business, such as foreign language teachers, artists, and masseuses. This post follows from our earlier disucssion examining the definitions which aided our search for migrant business women in the 1911 census.

Women business owners have largely remained invisible in discussion of entrepreneurship during Edwardian England. This is because of two reasons: the location of the businesses, and feminisation of skills Over 75% of the women entrepreneurs ran their business from home.

Non-British empire migrants lived almost exclusively in large towns, especially in London. In each census year, 44 per cent to 48 per cent of the non-British Empire migrants lived in London. In London itself, migrant communities were concentrated in the East End, with smaller communities in Westminster, Marylebone, Hampstead and St Pancras.

In 1911, the migrant population had a higher rate of business proprietorship than the English- and Welsh-born population. Migrant women made an important contribution to the economy by providing both goods and services, and employment. Many of their businesses were small and in areas of the economy, such as dressmaking or food preparation and retail, often considered by historians to be less important than industrial production.

We found over 3,000 women in London born outside the UK in the 1911 census who ran their own business. Around a third of them employed others in their business, the other women ran their business on their own. 

This first post serves to introduce the project, it’s aims, and its forthcoming outputs. This project brings together the work of Dr Carry van Lieshout on women entrepreneurs in census, and work of Dr Gunjan Sondhi on gender and migration. The aim of the project is to make visible the stories of migrant women entrepreneurs drawing from 1911 UK Census. It also offers a view into the contemporary landscape of migrantwomen entrepreneurs.

Kent Taylor’s vlog is based on his undergraduate research on American bass music communities, looking into the shift to online research methodology amidst social distancing, in the summer of 2020. Kent discusses the interface between our scholarly goals—that is, as researchers and representatives of the University—and the collective goals of the American bass music and EDM festival scene. His analysis of social media sources explores the real dimensions of this interface, as a forum where music scenes and university communities, alike, develop their ethics on pandemic, racial justice, and sexual misconduct.  

With the global spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, all countries of the world, and consequently most of the world’s religions, faced new conditions and unforeseen problems. One of these issues has been the religious interpretation of the epidemic, the duties of the believers in these circumstances, and the holding of religious ceremonies during the pandemic. Shiite Muslims also faced a large number of these challenges.

With the advent of COVID-19 around the world, areas with significant Shiite populations soon became involved in debating how festivals could be held. Shiite scholars generally refused to hold Ashura festivals in 2020 as these happened in previous years, whilst curtailing visits to shrines. On the other hand, Shiite theological arguments made it possible for some Shiites to perform pilgrimage remotely, by using modern technologies. However, these changes strongly challenged the issue of closeness in Shiite festivals.

Prof Tony Walter’s blog discusses the tensions implicit in Extinction Rebellion (XR) protestivals, as they warn of dire eco-catastrophe yet are often playful, carnivalesque. Intended to diffuse anger from police and bystanders, having fun while inconveniencing others can also produce negative reactions both in bystanders and potentially in XR rebels themselves. 

The changing landscape of music festivals, and the necessary movement online, is changing the way that individuals not only consume the festival experience but also the way in which these individuals interact within the music festival experience.