This study aims at providing an overview of the state of the art in spatial structures and their irregular node connections, and employing the topology optimisation (TO) technique and additive manufacturing (AM) process to address the design challenges for these complex structural components.

TO opened a new gate into highly complex and efficient (weight-to-stiffness ratio) designs that were difficult to achieve using traditional manufacturing technologies (e.g., machining and casting). AM (Also known as 3D printing) overcomes many of the manufacturing limitations through a layer-based fabrication process. The current AM product market value is worth $6 billion and is projected to reach $10.8 billion by the year 2021 (Wohlers Report, 2016). This fast growing market has influenced the construction industry at a pace slower than other sectors. Therefore, it was considered necessary to study the relevant areas, review several case studies – including Arup’s recent attempt

to integrate TO and AM in a tensegrity structure (Galjaard et al., 2015) – and identify the key benefits and limitations of the technologies to help companies strategically invest their efforts in introducing 3D printed structural products to the construction sector and balance cost, time and efficiency.

AM and TO are effective and profitable in small size and unique components, which would be difficult and expensive to fabricate using classic methods. Within the infrastructure industry, the connections of spatial structures represent an ideal component to apply AM and TO techniques, due to their complex shape (arrangement of members) and their ideal (small) size meeting the standards of the current 3D printing machines. This review study focuses on highlighting the benefits of applying TO and AM in the fabrication of such type of connections and provides design and fabrication recommendations to help address some of the identified limitations. Finally, proposals regarding the future potential applications of these technologies based on ongoing research in other fields (i.e. prosthetics and aerospace) have been reported.

Keywords: Topology Optimisation, additive manufacturing, structural connections, spatial structures, reticulated space structures, reticulated shells, lattice structures, 3D printing, future applications, key factors, production technology

The ‘Coloniality of power’, a term first used by Peruvian Aníbal Quijano, was created to explore the legacy of colonialism in post-independence nations. It underlines the racial, cultural and political orders that were imposed by the various European empires on their colonies during the colonial period. The concept of the Coloniality of Power states that given the extent to which European empires forced their ideology onto the colonies, these ‘nation states’ have not been able to escape their position as was defined in the colonial world. Not only does it draw attention to the influence of Western values, but also the internal imperial behaviour of the military governments in Latin America comes to the foreground the more closely one compares the behaviour of the colonial period to the way in which governments exert power in contemporary Latin America.

This research employs Quijano’s model as a framework from which to analyse the extent the colonial period lies at the heart of the social discriminations and problems of cultural hegemony in the neo-colonial world for the independent Peru. I use the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa to look at key moments in Peruvian history and underline the parallels that are present between contemporary society and the colonial period as they provide a convincing depiction of the social, economic and political reality of the nation by exploring the experience of Peruvian society and the significance of the military in the development of its peoples.

The analysis that this research has given hopes to give rise to studies which increase awareness of this neo-colonial world and seeks to draw attention to the importance of the colonial past in approaching issues that rise in the modern world. Furthermore, I hope to open up the concept of post-colonialism to apply to Latin America, despite its earlier independence.

The slum-novelist Margaret Harkness remains a little-studied figure in comparison to her more famous counterparts within London’s literary, political community at the fin-de-siècle. However, what studies there are tends to discuss her position as an independent ‘New Woman’, involved with the Social Democratic Foundation, trade unionism and the Salvation Army. Attempts to situate Harkness by way of her association with various groups has led to numerous criticisms regarding what is deemed an ambiguous political position in her works and a pessimistic outlook regarding the state of the working class. This paper critically discusses Margaret Harkness’ narrative voice in her four major novels – that is, her three East London works A City Girl, In Darkest London and Out of Work of the 1880s, and the slightly later A Manchester Shirtmaker of 1890. I argue that the difficulty of categorising Harkness’ work is its strength, for it gives her work a somewhat unique place in the literature of this period – in a position of marginality, without fixed allegiance to one group or agenda, she is able to present the condition of the working poor with vivid accuracy and, above all, an overwhelming sense of convincingly genuine empathy. This study is particularly relevant to modern-day Britain, in which media discourses surrounding those in poverty are often highly critical. The twenty-first century culture of scapegoating in representations of ‘benefits Britain’ is essentially the same attitude that Harkness was attempting to combat, over a century earlier.

States in the developing world are extremely diverse. However, through all their differences, there are specific characteristics they share that make them similar and place them on equitable terms that allow them to interact with one another. These similarities have led to one category – namely the developing states – being used to describe these states.

One such similarity is the way in which the developing state interacts with its citizens and the way in which citizens respond. This is strikingly similar throughout the developing world, regardless of where you travel to. I begin by describing the main ways in which the state makes itself seen to its citizens and how its citizens respond to experiencing the state in the developing world. I define the three main ways in which the state makes itself seen to citizens: through government buildings (physical presence), through government personnel (person to person interactions) and through state-sponsored elections. I provide examples of how the State achieves this using Ghana’s health system to demonstrate the physical presence of the state; the Kransdorp municipal council in Cape Town, South Africa and the Nyarugenge municipal council in Kigali, Rwanda to demonstrate government personnel interactions and the elections that took place in Kenya in 2007/2008 to illustrate elections.

Towards the end of the essay, I highlight the passive, active and aggressive ways citizens respond to the way the state chooses to make itself seen. Finally, I give a short case study of South Africa and the Defiance Campaign, Sharpeville Massacre and Umkhonto We Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) that demonstrate the responses by citizens respectively.

To conclude, I mention the three ways the state makes itself visible to its citizens in the developing world. The opinion that the developing state is effective as citizen response evidences that the state is visible is one I explain as part of the conclusion.

New Yorkers and tourists share a unique and paradoxical relationship that can be determined through analysing primary sources from the residents of the city. The paradox explored is important, as it is an additional contribution to a body of work analysing the effects of tourism on native populations, which includes theorists such as Hal Rothman, who cites his arguments in The Devils Bargain. Although tourism is economically beneficial for the city, New Yorkers simultaneously view tourism negatively as it dilutes the culture of its famous neighbourhoods.

The SoHo example in relation to Rothman’s theory can explain how the emergence of mass tourism ultimately excludes the original inhabitants of the location; therefore, the population hesitates to embrace tourism positively. Historical analysis outlines the emergence of SoHo’s artist community, gentrification and mass commercial tourism. The findings of the paper align the SoHo example with Rothman’s theory on mass tourism as the profits generated from the site’s tourism would not be seen by artists who initiated its success; they are displaced out of the neighbourhood once it garners more economic potential. This means the SoHo artists are not able to reside or create art in the neighbourhood they created and fought hard to maintain.

The data was obtained through qualitative historical research from databases and libraries. Primary sources, such as interviews from artists and tour guide accounts, in conjunction with historical secondary sources were the foundation for the paper. It is hoped that this research can potentially raise awareness for the preservation of the SoHo art community.

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is the principal maker of monetary policy in the United States. The main instrument of monetary policy is the target federal funds rate, which is de facto the base interest rate of the US economy. The FOMC meets around eight times a year to discuss the economic outlook and decide on this metric. Throughout most of its history, the Federal Reserve (‘the Fed’) has been opaque about how it decides on monetary policy, but in recent years it has adopted a more transparent disclosure policy. Currently, for each FOMC meeting, a brief statement is released immediately after the meeting, summarising the economic outlook and target federal funds rate it will be implementing. Three weeks later, the full minutes of the meeting are released. Using the data and statistical analysis packages of R, this paper investigates if, and how, the release of the statement and the release of the minutes impact market volatility in the US equities market and the market for the federal funds rate in the sample 2007–2014. This period encompasses the recent financial crisis, recession and recovery years through a novel approach of looking at individual years and through two subsample groups, which represent the peak years of the crisis (2007–2010) and the period of gradual recovery (2011–2014). I use hypothesis testing to determine if the sample volatility of the different groups are significantly different from each other. For US equity markets, I found that the volatility on FOMC meeting days is significantly different from the volatility on a control set of non-meeting days, but during the Crisis subsample, average intraday volatility tended to be higher than the volatility on FOMC meeting days. This contrasts from the observations detected in studies of earlier years, which show that volatility on FOMC minutes days is larger than volatility on non-meeting days. Also, in general, FOMC meeting statements released immediately at the end of the meetings affected markets more than FOMC minutes, which were released after a three-week delay. In addition, I find that on days of FOMC activity, intraday volatility levels after the release of the information were significantly higher than before the release. Also, in contrast to studies of earlier time periods, we see that the market for the federal funds rate was overall, not as affected by the FOMC activities studied. A likely cause of this phenomenon is the unusual zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) enacted by the Fed from 2008 until the end of the sample (2014), which the Fed clearly communicated to the markets. This study is interesting because it shows that the years of financial crisis exhibit market behaviour that was different from normal market conditions, and further investigations can reveal useful insights on how markets behave under stressful and uncertain economic environments.

An often overlooked and neglected consideration when visiting a museum is the arrangement and layout of the exhibitions. While we attend museums to view the artefacts they hold, it is important to understand that the spatial display of these items adds to our experience and understanding of displays. Two of the world’s preeminent museums, the British Museum in London and the Louvre, Paris, hold extensive international artefacts and therefore will be used as studies to explore the topic of exhibition arrangement. By focusing on both a French and a British Museum, there will be the opportunity to compare not only the displays but also how the culture and history of the places have impacted upon the display design.

As the museums have such diverse and extensive collections, my focus will be purely on an exhibition that they both hold in common; Greek antiquities. I will consider the approaches of the Greek antiquities curators, such as Peter Higgs, when organising the artefacts for display and look at what factors are considered, e.g. environment, size of room, lighting, eyelines and thematic or chronological approaches to the layout. Through interviews with these curators, I hope to get a more in-depth, personal insight into the displays and their adaptations as well as diversifying my research from other studies, which are more focused on advising and instructing general museum display. However, my research will also consider how museums adapt displays to successfully appeal to their varied audiences, a topic that has already been considered in other studies but not in specific relation to these museums and exhibitions.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological account of shame characterises it as an emotion that arises when one is frozen by the gaze of another. To Sartre, shame alienated us from our true selves by making us aware of our inescapable physicality and outward appearance. Many feminists hold that women, through frequent objectification, internalise this shame, which then becomes what Luna Dolezal terms ‘chronic shame’. As something inherent to their lived experience, chronic shame can influence and visibly manifest itself in the work of women artists such as Louise Bourgeois. However male observers, seldom experiencing chronic shame, often fail to notice this. For example, The Secret of the Cells, a highly regarded book about Bourgeois, written by two men using exclusively male pronouns, fails to mention shame, objectification or gender outside of direct quotes from Bourgeois.

My research uses interviews with men and women based around a number of works of art to explore the question of whether the work of women artists can be fully understood (and thus appreciated and valued) by those who have not experienced and do not understand the chronic shame that such works are inspired by and allude to. If this is the case, the implications are vast. In an art world where buyers and critics are mostly men, their incomplete assessment of such works may go a way to explain their financial and theoretical undervaluing.

This research explores the diminishing role, value and agency of women in reproductive decisions, linking contemporary politics with dystopian and utopian fiction, ultimately aiming to answer the question of whether a stark change in gender relations to reproduction and its control is possible, and will it free or oppress women? This will be achieved through a discussion structured in four themed parts, each based around a feminist analysis of certain key texts. Part One: ‘The Beginning’, explores the iconic works of Margret Atwood; Part Two: ‘Female Only Utopia’, explores The Power, Her Land and The Wayward Pines Trilogy; Part Three: ‘Apocalyptic Medical Visions’ explores such texts as Never Let Me Go and Brave New World. Lastly, Part Four: ‘Women’s Rights of Tomorrow’, explores To Room Nineteen and Woman on the Edge of Time. These fictional texts will be analysed with the aid of key critical texts varying in publication dates and locations to provide an intersectional viewpoint of women’s plight across the spectra of race, gender identification, sexuality and class. The subsequent discussion highlights such areas as the history of changes to reproductive thought and female bodily agency, along with the rising technological and political control of reproduction and the effects of such control upon women. From the discussion and analysis of these past texts concerning the future, it is hoped that this research will provide timely and crucial insights into the current and future position of women in having the freedom to make, and indeed the power to make, their own choices regarding reproduction. This research caught the eyes of the publishing team at The Left Book Club, who are now organising to publish a digestible version of the research findings for a public readership.

Globalisation is a subject discussed in various fields and disciplines, but rarely in the context of cinematic genre. Although Hollywood has historically perpetuated standardised models, and essentially written the rules of genre adherence, little research has been conducted on the effect it has had on other cultures and their respective national cinemas. In the 1990s, South Korea began to develop its own national cinema that could compete with the importation of Hollywood films, and establish a national cultural identity. The films themselves suffered a quandary of desiring to be unique and nationally specific, while only having the American generic models to take influence from.

Following the recent trend that has found several popular South Korean filmmakers being invited to make films in Hollywood, my paper examines the work of one – Bong Joon-ho – in the context of globalisation and its relationship to genre. This paper focuses on three films – Memories of Murder (2003), The Host (2006), and Snowpiercer (2013) as a way of charting Bong’s artistic development and engagement with genre that culminates with his first foray into American blockbuster filmmaking. Using the existing literature on Bong’s filmography and theories of globalisation’s effect on culture by Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti and Paul James, I analyse the films closely and in their national and industrial contexts to unpick their engagement with genre, and their implications in the wider discourse of globalisation. The paper contributes to the discussion of globalisation and locality, to the threat of cultural specificity such a process poses, and to the ways film can inform us on these issues.

Third-culture and mixed heritage individuals are an increasing commonality in an increasingly globalised society. Cultural identity issues surrounding black-white mixes have been discussed, but the fairly recent nature of mixed-heritage groups mean experiences are narrowly explored regarding other mixes. Research is pivotal to gauge cultural identity issues surrounding this increasing trend. I therefore ask the question of how mixed-heritage individuals make sense of ethnic and cultural identity in everyday life from personal and social perspectives.

Literature has documented the evolution of mixed cultural identity, as individuals follow Phinney’s model of ethnic identity development. It is expected that varying factors are at play, but several commonalities between individual ethnic identity development may occur based on identity theory, social categorisation theory and the contact hypothesis. Three mixed-heritage interviewees from Warwick University of a similar demography but varying heritages are studied, finding similar commonalities in forming mixed-heritage identities, such as language, social environment and stereotypes. Defining where they are from is also analysed, finding conflict and collaboration in what ultimately determines each persons ethnic identity. The data is consistent with Phinney’s ethnic identity development model, demonstrating the three stages of unexamined ethnic identity, ethnic identity search and ethnic identity achievement.

Differences amongst interviewees are vast and each stage is exhibited in varying ways, supporting the consensus in literature that mixed-heritage identity is subjective, shifting and complex. The dynamic nature of some of the participant’s ethnic identity also concords with findings from broader mixed-heritage literature.

The study of navigational instruments has been incorporated into a wider narrative of scientific history. In this narrative, these tools are incorporated into the chronology of scientific discoveries and improvements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, studying these objects from a perspective of teleological scientific progress removes the instruments from their social and cultural contexts. In the pre-disciplinary cultures of Europe, articles of technology were perceived in ways beyond the scientific. The developments of cultural perceptions of navigational instruments during the early modern period reveal a network of interactions emerging in the eighteenth century. With the advent of the public sphere, navigation and navigational technology, for the first time, impinged on the popular consciousness. Within this public discourse, the importance of navigational technology to imperial and commercial expansion became apparent. As such, established imperial connotations of navigational instruments were consolidated in the eighteenth century. The significance of navigational instruments to expansionism derived, in part, from changes in the intellectual climate in the eighteenth century. As Enlightenment values of empiricism became prevalent in eighteenth-century society, navigational instruments, as mediums of ‘objective knowledge’, became essential to navigators and to the state. To ensure standardised technological and mathematical practice, successive naval administrations, from the seventeenth century, introduced new qualifying examinations and training in navigational techniques became necessary to pilot a navy ship. Navigational instruments, therefore, were a part of a wider network of the Enlightenment: their perception as conduits of objective knowledge in public spaces made them fundamental to imperial growth.

My research centred around the Achilleid, an unfinished epic poem about the life of Achilles by the Roman poet Statius. It acts as an enhancement of the Trojan cycle of myths, as we are introduced to the hero’s childhood and upbringing. The poem is of unique style and touches on the thematic of gender and transvestitism in ancient literature. But due to its fragmentary nature, the volume of commentaries and translations surrounding the work remains scarce.

With my project, I aimed to further explore the epic’s makeup by composing a line-by-line commentary of the Achilleid’s second book, focusing on its position within the epic tradition. There are few precedents for this, the most authoritative being Dilke (1954), which allowed for rare freedom while treating the text. My work mostly involved primary sources from both Greek and Roman authors (especially the Aeneid and the Homeric epics).

Besides providing a guide to translating the poem, my results allow insight into the work’s composition: it presents itself as a mediation between Homeric sources and the Latin language of epic, largely drawing on Vergil’s Aeneid. By applying a common method to a scarcely studied poem, my commentary adds to a growing set of writings on Latin imperial epic, enhancing our appreciation of a genre that has only recently begun to attract widespread attention.