DORA

DORA (De Montfort Open Research Archive) is De Montfort University's research repository. It forms the primary public and institutional record of DMU research outputs. The breadth of research at DMU means that these outputs include articles, conference papers, books, book chapters, and other material available in a digital form. The record for each item contains descriptive information as well as, where possible, a version of the final research output. DORA also provides access to DMU PhD theses. This includes most PhD produced from 2009 onwards.

 

Recent Submissions

Item
A Tour of the Palace of Calculation: Some Laboratory Notes on ‘45 Days in the Company of Robert Walser’
(Shuddhashar FreeVoice, 2024-05-01) Perril, S. D.
This essay contextualizes my poetry sequence ‘45 Days in the Company of Robert Walser’, that appears in full in my book Two Duets with Occasion (Shearsman 2024). It discusses my use of Walser’s novel Jakob Von Gunten (sometimes published, and filmed as, Institute Benjamenta), and Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’. It also engages with ideas from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, and Jung’s writings on Alchemy and Psychology.
ItemOpen Access
PointCloud-At: Point Cloud Convolutional Neural Networks with Attention for 3D Data Processing
(MDPI, 2024-10-05) Umar, Saidu; Taherkhani, Aboozar
The rapid growth in technologies for 3D sensors has made point cloud data increasingly available in different applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and virtual and augmented reali-ty. This raises a growing need for deep learning methods to process the data. Point clouds are dif-ficult to be used directly as inputs in several deep learning techniques. The difficulty is raised by the unstructured and unordered nature of the point cloud data. So, machine learning models built for images or videos cannot be used directly on point cloud data. Although the research in the field of point clouds has gained high attention and different methods have been developed over the decade, very few research works directly with point cloud data, and most of them con-vert the point cloud data into 2D images or voxels by performing some pre-processing that caus-es information loss. Methods that directly work on point clouds are in the early stage and this af-fects the performance and accuracy of the models. Advanced techniques in classical convolutional neural networks, such as the attention mechanism, need to be transferred to the methods directly working with point clouds. In this research, an attention mechanism is proposed to be added to deep convolutional neural networks that process point clouds directly. The attention module was proposed based on specific pooling operations which are designed to be applied directly to point clouds to extract vital information from the point clouds. Segmentation of the ShapeNet dataset was performed to evaluate the method. The mean intersection over union (mIoU) score of the proposed framework was increased after applying the attention method compared to a base state-of-the-art framework that does not have the attention mechanism.
ItemOpen Access
The Necropolitics of Military Amnesty: Peacebuilding and Othering in Northern Ireland
(Sage, 2024-06-11) Sanders, Andrew; Beaumont, T.
Necropolitics, as described by Achille Mbembe, is the sovereign’s capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. In its delineation of which bodies can be killed and which bodies must not be killed, necropolitics is the framework through which governments assign value to human life that justifies killing in the name of the greater good. Proposed legislation in the UK Parliament from 2021 suggested the state intended to limit prosecutions of British service personnel for killings that occurred during Operation Banner, the UK military operation in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 2007. Interrogating the employment of military amnesty, we discuss the ways amnesty can maintain necropolitical organizations by working to reaffirm antagonistic relations between peacebuilding parties despite claims that it is a reconciliatory measure. Through a necropolitical lens, we examine historical approaches to military prosecutions by the UK alongside current proposals for amnesty over conflict-related homicides committed in Northern Ireland. Interrogating peacebuilding and reconciliation efforts made in the UK to address the conflict in Northern Ireland, we assert that the calls for amnesty remain under the same necropolitical organization that facilitated the Troubles to begin with and maintain narratives that Other Northern Ireland from Britain.
ItemOpen Access
Labour unions under neoliberal authoritarianism in the Global South: the cases of Turkey and Egypt
(Taylor and Francis, 2022-10-10) Erol, Mehmet Erman; Şahin, Çağatay Edgücan
This article analyses the trajectories of organised labour in times of neoliberalism in Turkey and Egypt and their current condition under securitised neoliberal-developmentalist regimes post-2013. Neoliberal experience in these countries was marked by continuing authoritarianism, challenging the view that economic liberalisation would lead to political democratisation. One of the most important areas of neoliberal restructuring has been labour markets. In order to achieve this, struggles over organised labour were of vital importance. Dismantling the power of dissident labour unions through coercive measures and containing other sections of organised labour through authoritarian corporatist relations has been crucial in these cases.
Item
The Condition of the Working Class in Turkey: Labour under Neoliberal Authoritarianism
(Pluto Press, 2021-09-20) Şahin, Çağatay Edgücan; Erol, Mehmet Erman; Çağatay Edgücan Şahin; Mehmet Erman Erol