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An illustration from The Present You are never too young to debate questions of politics. That is the view of Dr Peter Haye s, Senior Lecturer in Politics.  He has just published a book called The Present , which introduces young readers to contested political issues through a story concerning Father Christmas. “Father Christmas is magic but his Christmas gift giving involves him in a number of serious real-world issues,” Peter explains. “These issues include the working conditions of people making Christmas presents; the regimentation and surveillance that underpins our modern consumerist society; the increasingly hard border between those within the industrial core and those outside it, and the contribution of consumerism to global warming.  All of these international political issues lie behind the annual appearance of Father Christmas.” The Present does not try to answer what we should do about all this, but it does raise questions, and encourages children and ...

Dr Susan Mandala has published an article in the journal Discourse, Context & Media. In ''Listening' to the Neanderthals in William Golding’s The Inheritors : A sociopragmatic approach to fictional dialogue' , Susan employs theory of mind and intentionality as analytical tools in order to ‘listen’ more closely to the Neanderthals in Golding’s 1955 novel. Paying particular attention to these characters as they express their religious beliefs, engage in storytelling, and work through interpersonal conflicts, she argues that readers are invited to infer that the Neanderthal characters are themselves inferring beings, and further demonstrate that this interpretation has implications not only for how individuals approach the novel, but for the way The Inheritors as a cultural text can be understood to participate in discursively mediating our relationship with the figure of the Neanderthal.

School of Culture PhD student Wjoud Almadani will be speaking at the first seminar in a series designed to showcase the work of PhD students across the university (details above). Everyone is welcome!

New Perspectives on the Great War, 6 December 2017, 4.30pm, Reg Vardy RV213 Ann-Marie Foster (Northumbria University): Family and Individual Remembrance as a Way of Breaching the Divide During the First World War, 750,000 British soldiers perished. As Adrian Gregory has argued, this means that roughly 10 per cent of the British population lost a close relative. Disasters provide a useful theoretical framework for examining experiences of loss in the Great War. Much like the loss of a Pal’s battalion, an explosion in a colliery could decimate a mining community. Miners often lost close friends and relatives, and newly created widows grieved using largely the same artefacts and ephemera as those who lost a loved one in war. Similarly, for those directly involved in the disaster, men who volunteered for rescue parties would have had to confront the mutilated remains of their companions, if the disaster was such that bodies could be recovered at all. This paper therefore explores individ...

Professor Angela Smith recently attended the 4th FoodKom Seminar at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.   Her paper, 'Tiny Print and Traffic Light Chaos', looked at how European food labelling regulations are applied in the British context to front of packaging.   Angela showed how the non-mandatory nature of the system has led to potentially confusing food labelling, exploring the semiotic properties of the packaging.   She concluded that the lack of standardisation and the non-mandatory nature of the system is often unhelpful and even confusing (particularly to those of declining eye sight), but that it could nevertheless be of use to the knowing consumer and so is of limited help.

Dr Alison Younger has contributed a chapter to an Edinburgh University Press publication edited by Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt. The volume, entitled The Victorian Male Body examines some of the main expressions and practices of Victorian masculinity and its embodied physicality. Alison's chapter - which explores dandyism and the gothic body - is called 'Monstrous Masculinities from the Macaroni to the Masher: Reading the Gothic 'Gentleman''.

The latest edition of Codex has been published . Are you interested in riots in South Shields or Turkish Gothic literature? If so, visit Codex for top work from our class of 2017 undergraduates at the School of Culture.