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.
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Recent Submissions
Gender, Islamophobia and Romaphobia: Intersectional Insights
(Charles University Press, 2025-01-10) Easat-Daas, Amina
Islamophobia and Romaphobia or anti-gypsyism remain among the most significant, yet seemingly normalised racisms on the continent, if not across the globe. Both of these forms of racism have historical rootings and distinct gendered dimensions. This chapter seeks to understand and define how gendered Islamophobia and gendered Romaphobia can be understood through theoretical lenses to understand the intersections of the two, and I look forward to potential future research avenues in this novel area of inquiry.
From food emergency to poverty prevention: The changing function of food banks in Leicester.
(University of Leicester, 2025-01-17) Arrieta, Tania; Davies, Jonathan S.
This independent policy brief explores the evolving social function of food banks in Leicester. From our academic perspective, the intention is to support the city’s food bank network, the Leicester Food Partnership, the development of a Food Health Needs Assessment in the city, and the wider network of stakeholders constituting the Feeding Leicester Steering Group.
While food banks continue to support people with the provision of emergency food parcels, they increasingly support the prevention of poverty in different ways. Poverty prevention refers to the wide range of functions that food banks are undertaking in relation to social welfare, including employability and financial management support. The increased need that the city has experienced recently, in particular after the Covid19 pandemic, led to the development of the Leicester Food Partnership (LFP), an informal arrangement between 22 food banks. This policy brief focuses on the LFP and its poverty prevention work in local communities.
Unprofessional vision? Politics, (video)evidence and accountability after the work of Michael Lynch
(Hosted by ZHB Luzern/University Library Lucerne, 2025-01-14) Elsey, Christopher; Holder, Alexander; Kolanoski, Martina; Mair, Michael; Allen, Olive
As part of an ongoing critical dialogue with Charles Goodwin’s work on “professional vision” (1994), Michael Lynch has observed on a number of occasions that ‘viral’ videos—often those depicting instances of police and military misconduct—are publicly circulated artifacts that “vulgarise” and thus render perspicuous issues of ‘evidence’, ‘expertise’, ‘accountability’, and ‘visibility’ as matters of practical rather than philosophical concern (Lynch 1993, 146; see Lynch 1999, 2014, 2018, 2002; Lindwall and Lynch 2021). Alongside the video of Rodney King’s beating and, more recently, the murder of George Floyd, one such video to have gained particular global notoriety is WikiLeaks’ 2010 “Collateral Murder”, which presented leaked gun camera footage from a 2007 US Army Apache helicopter combat patrol in a Baghdad suburb in the course of which, among others, two journalists were killed, two children shot and seriously wounded, and a building in a residential area destroyed with missiles. As with the King and Floyd cases, Collateral Murder, in the form of WikiLeaks’ edited version of the video, was watched in revulsion by millions as a transparent example of egregious wrongdoing—the killing, wounding, and harming of innocents. In this contribution we revisit the unedited footage, extending consideration to its less examined second half in which the Apache team attacks and destroys a building, where we are among the first to do so in any detailed manner. We do that to explore Lynch’s ethnomethodological insights into politics, evidence and accountability as they are rendered—or fail to be rendered—perspicuous by this case. Rather than seeking to establish our own form of ‘professional vision’ as a competitor to the Apache crews’, we suggest that Lynch’s work, if taken seriously, asks us to embrace its ‘vulgar’ counterpart by working through whatwe can make of the video by drawing on our vernacular competencies as ordinary members and the problems we encounter in doing so. We will tease out what might be at stake ethnomethodologically—not an ‘unprofessional’ but practical understanding—with reference to the ‘raw’ Collateral Murder footage and what, as video, it does and does not make available to the viewer. We end by reflecting on “ethnomethodology’s program” (Garfinkel 2002) in light of the issues this strand in Lynch’s work raises, more specifically the care we need to exhibit when we seek to gain instruction in worldly practices and their equally worldly evaluation.
Race to Zero Carbon Accelerator: Evaluation Report
(2022-10) Lee, Sandra; Reeves, Andrew; Mistry, Asha; Ahmed, Mahfuja; Jackson, Alice
Leicester and Leicestershire’s three universities (University of Leicester, De Montfort University and Loughborough University) partnered to provide Leicester City small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with a fully-funded direct sustainability support package to help businesses work towards net zero.
This programme offered a comprehensive sustainability support package including:
• Sustainability Audits
• Funding to Employ Students
• Carbon Reduction Plan
• Climate education and support
This proved to be highly appropriate and, as well as the existing informal professional relationships, the three universities have now signed a formal Civic Universities Agreement (the Universities Partnership) and this project formed one of its first, and so far biggest, formal undertakings, which will hopefully also provide a platform to continue delivering from.
One of the aims of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund is to contribute to a better evidence base for supporting local business support interventions. The launch of the Universities Partnership between all three Leicestershire universities has formalised an already strong collaborative approach and provides an ideal opportunity for us to respond to SPF guidance to deliver interventions at the regional scale in order to obtain higher value for money and better outcomes for local people and businesses. Findings from this project are informing the future direction of the Universities Partnership Environmental Sustainability theme.
Photokinetics of Photothermal Reactions
(MDPI, 2025-01-15) Maafi, Mounir
Photothermal reactions, involving both photochemical and thermal reaction steps, are the most abundant sequences in photochemistry. The derivation of their rate laws is standardized, but the integration of these rate laws has not yet been achieved. Indeed, the field still lacks integrated rate laws for the description of these reactions’ behavior and/or identification of their reaction order. This made difficult a comprehensive account of the photokinetics of photothermal reactions, which created a gap in knowledge. This gap is addressed in the present paper by introducing an unprecedented general model equation capable of mapping out the kinetic traces of such reactions when exposed to light or in the dark. The integrated rate law model equation also applies when the reactive medium is exposed to either monochromatic or polychromatic light irradiation. The validity of the model equation was established against simulated data obtained by a fourth-order Runge–Kutta method. It was then used to describe and quantify several situations of photothermal reactions, such as the effects of initial concentration, spectator molecules, and incident radiation intensity, and the impact of the latter on the photonic yield. The model equation facilitated a general elucidation method to determine the intrinsic reaction parameters (quantum yields and absorptivities of the reactive species) for any photothermal mechanism whose number of species is known. This paper contributes to rationalizing photokinetics along the same general guidelines adopted in chemical kinetics.