In recent years, the fairy-tale has been experiencing a revival with every year producing new adaptations and imaginings of canonical tales. These reimaginings, such as ""Snow White and the Huntsmen"", often superficially update the heteropatriarchal politics of the source tale with the aim to create a more palatable version of the tale for today's audience. Yet, implicit in this idea is the assumption that the possibilities for fairy-tales to explore queer identities and ideas occurs only in contemporary culture, and must be imposed on the text.

However, as this paper will argue, the possibility for queer readings and the exploration of queer identity already exists within the fairy-tale tradition, even in the classically heteropatriarchal texts.

Through an examination of the Brothers Grimm's 1812 tale, ""Little Red Riding Hood"", which has entered our popular imagination as a tale about the socialisation of girls and their obedience to the paternal authority, this presentation will argue that queerness is part of the fabric of the tale, often challenging the dominate heteropatriarchal ideology. This, in turn, suggests that queer identities and possibilities have always existed, and been explored, within the fairy-tale tradition.

Cultural and national identity are important elements of understanding who we are as individuals and collectively, as a people. It was no different in the medieval period. This paper seeks to explore how the Welsh, as a people, identified, distinguished and differentiated themselves from their neighbouring ‘nations’ at the time of, before and after, the Norman conquest of Wales in the 1080s; and how the incoming Normans, as a foreign power, perceived them. This will be explored through the method of close textual comparison of two primary sources, the Welsh ‘Chronicle of the Princes’, which records the events which took place in the years between 680 and 1282; and Gerald of Wales’ ‘Description of Wales’, written in 1194 from the perspective of the Normans. This research will provide an important contribution to the study of medieval British history addressing the lack of analysis of the way in which the Welsh, as well as the other native cultures of the British Isles, perceived themselves in the medieval period and how they were perceived by others cultures, such as the incoming Normans. This research attempts to address the gap in the literature regarding the identity of the Welsh at the time of and just after the Norman conquest of Wales in the 1080s."

The history of slavery is one that has been told within the scope of the European experience and as something exclusive to American history. This fundamentally underplays the African experience of the slave economy and fits into the wider misunderstanding of Africa as ‘the dark continent'. This paper therefore intends to focus on the history of slavery with regards to the African experience, whilst also seeking to understand the specifically female experience of slavery. To achieve this I will investigate three areas; firstly by returning to primary sources from African witnesses of the slave trade, as well as documents that explore the gendering of slavery both in the Americas and Africa. These provide the facts of the slave trade, which have seldom been understood from the female perspective. Secondly, by reviewing current historiographical trends that elaborate on the deep demographic ramifications of population transfer in West Africa, this paper intends to demonstrate how slavery violently altered the structure of society and ultimately transformed the life of the West African women. Thirdly, by looking beyond the period of slavery itself, this paper will explore how slavery came to stunt the future of the region, by facilitating colonial expansion and oppression for centuries after. In doing this, the rarely understood gendered implications of slavery will contribute to the development of African women's history. My research will therefore help to decolonise the often Eurocentric understanding of the Slave Trade and help to form a dialogue on the lasting legacy of slavery itself.

I come from Rural North Yorkshire- our most famous saying is 'there's nowt as queer as folk' this means there's nothing as weird as people. But, growing up queer in the Rural North, it felt like I was even weirder than this and utterly alone. I wanted to research how queer women like myself have historically and continue to navigate rural space. I wanted to affirm to myself and others that queer history is everywhere and that queer people have always existed. To do this, I seek to interview other queer women who like myself have navigated the complexities of queerness and ruralness. Through questionnaires, and in-person interviews I want to give a voice to other queer women. This seems important because of the historical erasure of queer voices and history and because I wanted to look beyond my own experience. Many women such as myself were fortunate enough to navigate their sexuality with help from online friends and worlds- this is not the case for women of the past and I wanted to understand their journeys. My work will be based heavily on archival history, understanding queer space through a historical lens. I believe my work will demonstrate the contradictions of rural space- the enforced heterosexuality, absence of partners, conservative values but also the privacy and safety of their own space. I believe I will also affirm my main research strand which is that understanding queer history, space, and voices are necessary

Abstract Background - Effective analysis of incident reporting systems in healthcare is essential in order for hospital departments to learn from mistakes and to optimise patient care. Reviewing past incidents allows us to take corrective measures to systems and inform clinical practise. This service evaluation will take stock of over 10 years of reports in the Plastic Surgery department of University Hospital Coventry & Warwickshire and reveal trends in causes and severity of incidents recorded on DATIX. Methods - DATIX is a web based patient incident reporting service used by many NHS hospitals. Each report contains information including the severity of harm, stage of delivery and a written description of what happened and steps taken to preventing it happening again. To access these reports we used a DATIX functionality to export the full list of completed (acted upon) incidents from the plastic surgery department since DATIX was adopted until the time of writing. The records were then manually assessed by the author and a colleague, and sorted according to the nature of the incident, using headings regarding operative causes, non-operative causes and the severity of each event. The labelled data was studied using SPSS and Excel. Results - frequencies of reported incidents have increased year by year, with an average increase on 85.2% across all years studied, with 2012 showing a particularly high number of reports. Conclusion - this increase is likely due to NHS plans to improve reporting and encourage staff to report any adverse outcomes they encounter.

This project investigates deep sequential learning techniques in context of the very complex, human and artistic challenge of musical composition: an application of artificial neural networks that encourages innovation through the implementation of cutting-edge research.

Model architectures are devised that exhibit progression in their ability to learn rich temporal and relative harmonic structures, as well as in generating music which is dynamic and conscious of a user-supplied mood or sentiment. To achieve this, models are trained with a generalised representation of digital musical scores incorporating data on analysed sentiment and dynamics.

The models are versatile and performant, such that they compete with and in some cases surpass the current state-of-the-art quantitatively, qualitatively and computationally. New functionality is also implemented such as the incorporation of sentimental input and independence from certain musical characteristics of the training data, e.g. key and genre. This is achieved through the unification of techniques spanning the field of deep statistical learning in order to minimise model complexity whilst maximising effectiveness.

Further work would likely leverage higher-quality datasets as they become available alongside any new developments surrounding artificial neural networks to aid in capturing the long-term dependencies present in musical data.

People spontaneously produce gestures when they speak. Gestures can be complementary to the speech and thus be a window into the speaker's mind, revealing what the speech does not reveal. Some factors, such as mutual visibility between the speaker and the listener, were found to have an influence on gesture production. Recent research has shown that people produce fewer gestures when they cannot see the listener.

The aim of this study is to experimentally investigate whether speakers adapt their speech in response to changes in mutual visibility between themselves and the listener. Following that, participants were asked to describe cartoons and were separated from the listener by a screen with different height settings.

According to the complementarity theory of the gesture-speech communicative system, we expect to observe a more informative speech in the full-height screen condition. That is, when unable to see the listener, the speaker may enrich the content of speech by adding information that would otherwise be conveyed by gestures.

This study is intended to deepen the knowledge around the importance of gesture into conveying communicative information. That may have a strong impact in Artificial Intelligence and the development of robotics, where gestures need to be taken into account in speech analysis. Moreover, job interviews using video calls might be less effective if gestures are not visible. Finally, teachers can fail to evaluate a student’s knowledge appropriately if they only focus on speech during an oral test.

The fourth industrial revolution progresses as the invention of cyber-physical systems is integrated into the modern workspace to simplify manual demand jobs with fewer human interventions in the near future. Our research aims to identify the correlation between higher education levels and economic performance among emerging economies within the Southeast Asian region, which is expected to lead as the fourth largest economy in 2030 behind the US, China and European markets in terms of GDP growth. The contemporary context suggests that local education systems is widely featured as a measure to a countries economic success, which is often accomplice by PISA scores and levels of developments in STEM programs. However, expansive technology advancements creates unwary bottlenecks in skill gaps and unemployment rates in the grey areas to the current workplace environment, suggesting that employees are required to re-skill themselves in the rise of automation and robots. These foreseeable outcomes looms the excitement of the future job prospects to be better off, or worse. The pinnacle movement in the context of Industry 4.0 brings us to research areas on the possibilities to reskill humans to be employees of the future, in avid to progress steady economic developments within South East Asian regions.

Affirmative Action (AA) is an extremely useful and common tool for introducing ethnic diversity in organisations. However, the major argument against AA is the resentment it breeds in the majority, towards the minority, as it may negatively impact their chances at moving up the corporate ladder. Keeping in mind this controversy surrounding AA, it is necessary to examine when and why people may respond well or poorly to minority leader how minority leaders can gain greater legitimacy and receive greater respect from their followers. This research aims to examine how contextual ideology (meritocracy vs. egalitarianism) and the minority leader’s behavior (proactive vs. reactive) influence followers’ perception toward the fairness of the selection system and the minority leader. We hypothesize: 1. When the ideology is egalitarian (vs. meritocratic), there will be higher perceived fairness of an affirmative action selection system. 2. The new minority leader’s proactive (vs. reactive) behaviors will moderate the relation of followers’ perceived (un)fairness of the AA selection system with their impression (perceived competence and warmth) of the leader. An online experiment was conducted with 206 undergraduates. The results showed that followers associated the AA selection procedure with lower fairness as compared to an identity-blind procedure, regardless of the organization’s meritocratic or egalitarian beliefs. Leader’s proactive behaviors strengthened the positive relation of fairness with perceived competence (but not warmth) of the new leader. The nuances and challenges of successfully implementing AA for minorities in meritocratic societies deserve to be explored further.