RSS 1.0Welcome to ChesterRep - the University of Chester's Online Research Repository
ChesterRep is the University of Chester's institutional repository and an online platform designed to collate, store, and aid discoverability of the University’s research.
All University of Chester staff are expected to use the Current Research Information System, Symplectic Elements, to submit material to ChesterRep. Guidance on how to deposit and manage publications using Elements can be found here. You can also discover more about our editorial and open access policies here. Please note that you must be a member of the University to view these pages.
If you are a student at the University of Chester and want to submit work to ChesterRep, please contact researchsupport.lis@chester.ac.uk.
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Observational study of the pre-service vulnerabilities, in-service exposures and post-service antecedents of suicide in veterans of the UK Armed Forces, 2007–2018INTRODUCTION: Although there have been a number of epidemiological studies of suicide in veterans, there have been few in-depth studies of those who have died. Studies have not explored the relative contribution of pre-service, in-service and post-service factors. We aimed to investigate the adversities veterans face before they take their lives, their contact with support services that could be preventative and whether these differ in younger and older veterans. METHODS: Using national databases of discharged personnel and suicide deaths, we identified deaths by suicide in personnel who left the UK Armed Forces (UKAF) between 2007 and 2018. We extracted information on the antecedents of suicide in a random sample of these deaths from official investigations, mostly coroners’ records. RESULTS: In total, we obtained data for 145 individuals; 134 (92%) were male and 11 (8%) were female. Seven (5%) were from a minority ethnic group. The median age at death was 36 years (21–65 years). 18 (12%) veterans had experienced childhood adversity. Relatively few (10, 7%) experienced trauma relating to deployment on combat operations or had difficulty adjusting to civilian life (6, 4%). Most (140, 97%) veterans had been in contact with support services, particularly primary care (130, 90%), but undertreatment was common with only 10 (5%) veterans having received psychological intervention. Unemployment, alcohol and drug misuse, mental and physical ill health, workplace, housing and relationship problems were common antecedents. CONCLUSIONS: Veterans experience a range of challenges after leaving the UKAF. Common antecedents to suicide, such as self-harm, suicidal ideation and drug misuse, are open to intervention. However, despite most veterans seeking help from a range of support services, few were receiving psychological intervention. Prevention should also focus on addressing the needs of veterans beyond mental ill health, like employment and housing.
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Medium (un)specificity as material agency – the productive indeterminacy of matter/material (Russian Translation)In this article, I consider some of the debates brought to the fore by the proliferation of recent textile focused exhibitions; namely the tension between a continued allegiance to medium specific conventions and the richness, hybridity and heterogeneity afforded by the post-medium condition of contemporary art. Through a new body of sculptural and installational practice I propose a constellatory opening up of textile in which the medium specific can be (re)mapped in a fluid and fragmentary way. Drawing particular reference from Adorno’s conception of the constellation and mimetic comportment, this model of practice involves a mode of behaviour that actively opens up to alterity and returns authority to the affective indeterminacy of the sensuously bound experiential encounter. This is manifest through a range of practice strategies - “thingness”, “staged (dis)contiguity”, and the play between “sensuous immediacy and corporeal containment” - which mobilise a precarious relationship between processes of attachment and detachment. Acknowledging the critical currency afforded to textile through feminist and poststructuralist critique, the work moves away from “a rhetoric of negative opposition” and predetermined discursive frameworks, returning authority to the aesthetic impulse, privileging the ambiguous resonances of an abstract sculptural language over more overt strategies of representation.
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Home for the (Hollywood) holidays: Fathers, family, and the “true” meaning of Christmas on screenSince the 1940s, Hollywood has dominated the construction of the festive season in the Anglo-American cultural imaginary. The Hollywood Christmas film, commonly combining generic elements of comedy, drama, and/or romance, invariably centres on the family, whether its formation, its estrangement, or its idiosyncrasies, vulnerabilities and, inevitably, its resilience. Central to many such films, and building on a well-worn narrative that reaches all the way back to A Christmas Carol, is a man who must learn the ‘true’ meaning of Christmas. This lesson is invariably shaped by his fatherhood. (Re)discovering joy in the paternal role, or rejecting individual or financial achievement in favour of familial contentment, become pathways to masculine redemption. In exploring fatherhood in relation to this under-studied but commercially enduring form, this chapter examines examples including Elf (2003), Christmas with the Kranks (2004), Deck the Halls (2006), Four Christmases (2008), Love the Coopers (2015) and Daddy’s Home 2 (2017), interrogating the redemptive paternal narratives embedded within. In doing so, it acknowledges the particular construction of white, middle-class fatherhood in these films, and discusses this in the wider context of anxious white masculinity in post-millennial Hollywood. Into the twenty-first century, when Hollywood began to embrace a wider diversity of representation and express a tentative ambivalence towards the monolithic white, middle-class, American, heteronormative nuclear unit that has heretofore constituted the cinematic “family”, the contemporary Christmas film remains as a curiously nostalgic, conservative expression of family and, particularly, paternal values.
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Population dynamics of the Rodrigues fruit bat (Pteropus rodricensis): An analysis of long-term island wide bat count dataThe Rodrigues fruit bat (Pteropus rodricensis) is an insular Old-World fruit bat endemic to the Island of Rodrigues. The Mauritian Wildlife Foundation implemented a population monitoring program in 1974 and an estimate of less than 80 individuals was recorded in 1979. Following conservation efforts of reforestation of native flora, the population has experienced a steady increase, subject to decreases in numbers after severe cyclones. A standardized methodology was applied in 2016 creating a dataset suitable for population modelling and statistical analysis. The most recent population census (2022) revealed that the population has remained stable at around 20,000 individuals for the last 5 years. This study uses Generalised Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) to analyse 17 years of population monitoring data in order to identify the climatic factors potentially driving the population trend. We identified that the strongest factors driving changes in the population numbers were linked to resource availability. Most notable were annual precipitation levels, which had a positive relationship with population size (β=1.745, P<0.001), and cyclones, specifically relating to cyclonic strength, which was negatively related with the population size (β=-0.205, P<0.0001). This study also critically analyses the population count methodology and offers recommendations and suggestions for future research to be conducted on the species.
