Body of knowledge: Sunderland Museum and Art Gallery and the blind imagination

ABSTRACT

This article examines the cultural and philosophical intersection between visual and tactile knowledge and the emergent aesthetics of modernism. In the September 1913 edition of The Museums Journal, J. A. Charlton Deas published a paper entitled “The Showing of Museums and Art Galleries to the Blind.” The text, exceptional in its historical context, complicated prevailing assumptions about acts of “visual” art and blindness. Deas details a series of experiments undertaken at Sunderland Museum and Art Gallery from 1906 to 1913 that consisted of making accessible exhibits, specimens and paintings for blind children to touch. Unprecedented at the time, these experiments recast the persistent Western belief that the eye has privileged access to knowledge, instead asserting that knowledge is embedded within material corporeality. The physical, creative and intellectual inclusion of blind people into the formerly inaccessible space of the museum was unique in its reach and offers a refreshing new perspective of what those (authoritatively visual) spaces could be. Sunderland, a region which tends to be discursively separated from the ambitions and experiments of modernism, was at the center of modernist discussions about knowledge, sight and touch; and, disrupts modernism’s silence with respect to acknowledging unprecedented regional developments such as those detailed in “Showing.”     

Theoretical Perspectives of Male Sexual Abuse: Conceptualization of a Case Study

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the traumatic impact that sexual abuse can have on a young male's development by addressing mediating dispositions that can render a child vulnerable to the effects of sexual abuse. Consideration is given to three different theoretical perspectives that are not exclusive to male victims but shed light on the impact that sexual abuse can have on the development of a young boy. These perspectives include early family relationships and attachment theory, developmental psychopathology, and trauma theory. These theoretical lenses provide a conceptual understanding into why some victims are vulnerable to the effects of sexual abuse. Each theoretical view is applied to a case study of an adolescent male with a history of early trauma and sexual abuse. Clinical implications are discussed.     

Repositioning prevention in child protection using performance indicators

ABSTRACT

Performance indicators have both technical and value dimensions, capable of providing data for monitoring and reporting in addition to framing policy problems and their solutions. This paper considers the performance indicators proposed in a recent child protection inquiry in Australia that recommended ‘decreasing the numbers of children in the child protection system’ as a primary policy objective. The paper examines the context in which the indicators were set, the values and theories they endorse, and how they position stakeholders. The analysis shows how the indicators communicate that child protection services should be only for the most serious cases of child maltreatment, and the reach of statutory services should be curtailed. Children who have been maltreated or who are at risk of harm from abuse or neglect should be diverted from the child protection system (positioned as bad) to the family support system (positioned as good), and at the same time from the state to the nongovernment sector. The shifting relations between government, service providers, and families signified by the indicators can be seen in a broader international context of tightening the boundaries around child protection and concurrently advancing concepts of compliance within family support.     

Evaluation of Measurement Comparisons Using Generalized Least Squares: the Role of Participants’ Estimates of Systematic Error

We consider the evaluation of laboratory practice through the comparison of measurements made by participating metrology laboratories when the measurement procedures are considered to have both fixed effects (the residual error due to unrecognised sources of error) and random effects (drawn from a distribution of known variance after correction for all known systematic errors). We show that, when estimating the participant fixed effects, the random effects described can be ignored. We also derive the adjustment to the variance estimates of the participant fixed effects due to these random effects.     

An elliptically symmetric angular Gaussian distribution

We define a distribution on the unit sphere \(\mathbb {S}^{d-1}\) called the elliptically symmetric angular Gaussian distribution. This distribution, which to our knowledge has not been studied before, is a subfamily of the angular Gaussian distribution closely analogous to the Kent subfamily of the general Fisher–Bingham distribution. Like the Kent distribution, it has ellipse-like contours, enabling modelling of rotational asymmetry about the mean direction, but it has the additional advantages of being simple and fast to simulate from, and having a density and hence likelihood that is easy and very quick to compute exactly. These advantages are especially beneficial for computationally intensive statistical methods, one example of which is a parametric bootstrap procedure for inference for the directional mean that we describe.     

Identities in Northern Ireland: A Multidimensional Approach

The conflict in Northern Ireland is often described in terms of a clash of identities, national and religious. This study aimed to determine the relative importance of these identities using a multidimensional approach to examine the identity structures of students (N = 216). Analyses revealed that national and religious identities were accorded low salience and centrality relative to other identities. The study also investigated relations between a variety of identity dimensions derived from two identity traditions, social identity theory and identity theory. The differing patterns of relationships to emerge across groups and across identities suggest that the process of identification in Northern Ireland is a complex one. The implications of these findings for the analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict are discussed.