Doctoral College
Summary
The proposed project takes as its starting point the paintings of English artists Rita Donagh and Ralph Lillford, both of whom made work directly related to Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. Crucially, Lillford had made regular visits to Belfast during this time, contrasting to Donagh’s relatively distanced approach, thus raising questions about the necessary proximity required for an artist to effectively and meaningfully respond to the events their work addresses.
At this same time, artists based here were also responding directly to the political and social unrest, and in 1993 the Doubleband Films documentary ‘The Trouble With Art’ brought focus to Northern Irish artists dealing with the social and political conditions of their time. As a result, the film revealed a more direct and embedded approach to artistic production, with those featured commenting on the commitment and effort required to being an artist in Northern Ireland. Twenty-sev
Doctoral College
Summary
Ulster’s ready-made shirt making industry, located largely in the north west of Northern Ireland, was an important but little known industry. Its origins lie in the early 19th century, when local man William Scott established a shirt making enterprise in Derry in 1831. Having spotted a demand, among fashionable society, for cotton shirts with embroidered linen fronts, he expanded his making, via outstations, into manufacture and by 1850 was thought to have one of the highest wage bills in the city. His early success paved the way for others, who took an industrial approach to shirt making.
Technological advances, such as the introduction of the sewing machine, allowed further investment in the city and industrialists to construct purpose built factories. The Tillie & Henderson factory at 19,000 sq ft, opened in 1856, was the largest of its kind in the world. By the 1902, there were 38 shirt factories in Derry, employing 18,000 workers and 80,000 outworke
Doctoral College
Summary
Young people in care face many challenges in terms of their physical and mental health (McSherry et al., 2015; 2016). They are disproportionately children of single mothers who themselves are likely to have been in care due to experiencing child maltreatment, suggesting a pattern of intergenerational transmission of maltreatment and trauma (McSherry et al., 2010; Stratford, Julian & Shelley, 2019).
Data from the Department of Education (2015) indicates that 25% of girls in care fall pregnant before the age of 18, and are three times more likely to get pregnant that non-care peers. They are also at increased risk of having their child removed (Broadhurst et al., 2015). The authors are unaware of any interventions to date that have attempted to break this intergenerational cycle.
Summary
Political transitions from conflict to peace tend to be seen through temporal and socio-political frames that are essentially linear and diachronic. In these understandings, ‘peace’ is treated as an end-state – one towards which a society or groups are progressing or regressing. This object can be endangered through exclusionary electoral or legislative practices or through the residual presence of spoiler groups or ideas. Alternatively, it can be encouraged through pluralization of the political sphere, acceptance and promotion of liberal democratic norms and the bestowing of recognition by the international community.
Specifically, the project asks how activists work to (re)produce Northern Ireland’s historical and traditional left-wing scepticism about ethno-nationalist norms and ideologies. This activism, which has arguably flourished in the past decade, includes trade unionism, grassroots pressure groups and outsider political parties and movements such as Peop
Summary
Digital displays are ubiquitous in modern daily life. In many areas, such displays have replaced, or are in the process of replacing, conventional items such hard-copy books, analogue watches and car dashboard gauges. Similarly, many clinical vision tests are increasingly being presented on a range of modern visual displays ranging from LCD monitors to OLED displays for use in the home and clinical settings; a move away from antiquated (but still regularly used) non-digital systems. Measurements obtained from these devices are relied upon by clinicians to make decisions about patient wellbeing and treatment, and therefore need to be fit-for-purpose to meet the challenges of modern-day clinical practice. Despite the positive move to more modern platforms, it is still imperative that legacy measures, often collected over decades, can be incorporated into the determination of disease stability or otherwise. Thus, there is a need to ensure that the benefits of novel platforms ar