‘Handle with care’: literature,archaeology, slavery

This article examines the relationship between literary and bioarchaeological approaches to slavery, and investigates how the methods and priorities of each discipline might inform each other in understanding what it was like to be enslaved. Both bioarchaeologists and creative writers have attempted to access the inner lives of enslaved people, yet there has been little interaction between them. This paper offers an account of a research project which brought together a literary scholar, two archaeological scientists and seven creative writers to explore how writing might not only communicate a history understood through archaeological evidence, but could itself inform approaches to that evidence. We discuss two key themes which emerged from the project: Conversation and Caring. These themes were crucial to the interdisciplinary process, as it was only through attention to our relationships with each other that we could begin to reassess the nature of material in each of our disciplines.     

A short note on starch and xylem of Ipomoea batatas (sweet potato) in archaeological deposits from northern New Zealand

This study examines preservation of microfossils identified as introduced Ipomoea batatas in soils from northern New Zealand. Starch grains and xylem cells showed highly variable preservation, from good to extremely poor. For starch grains, the latter included brown-staining, expansion and distortion of the grain and vacuole, loss of the Maltese cross, pitting, cracking, fragmentation and disintegration. Degraded xylem showed similar brown-staining, occasional cracking, cross-wise fragmentation, with wall pits becoming progressively less visible or showing distortion, expansion and coalescence.     

Conveyor‐Belt Justice: Precarity,Access to Justice,and Uneven Geographies of Legal Aid in UK Asylum Appeals

Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no‐choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing upon the findings of a three‐year study of the asylum appeals process. Already precarious, we analyse the manifold spatial marginalisation of dispersed asylum seekers from sources of legal advice and representation. We identify the frames of luck, uncertainty and dislocation as ways to further a spatially cognisant understanding of precarity, alongside identifying strategies employed to counter precarious positionalities.     

Imaginary Success?—The Contentious Ascendance of Creativity

This paper posits that a set of “creative industries” centred around cultural practice have played a key role within a dominant “economic imaginary” in recent years. The success and stability of this role is considered, and a coherent position regarding the nature of creativity is outlined. Examination of the “evidence” gathering projects used to bulwark this position, however, reveals how the data which emerge from such projects may no longer appropriately serve to support the position the creative industries have come to occupy within the dominant imaginary. It is argued that this imaginary persists in providing a coherent framework for understanding and for action, however, regardless of the contradictions it contains. A tangible example of this “imaginary success” is briefly considered within the UK context, via an examination of developments around the staging of the European Capital of Culture programme in Liverpool, England in 2008. In this case, it is also argued that apparent contradictions are successfully concealed by dominant positions regarding culture and creativity. In conclusion, some explanations for this state of affairs are considered, and it is argued that the increased attention being paid to cultural creativity may render the continued concealment of these contradictions untenable.