The fundamental premise of this chapter is that technology-mediated remote work in and of itself is not necessarily a panacea for disability inclusion. This necessitates a focus on what technologies enables individuals to do (and not do). This chapter draws on a mixed-methods (a survey and qualitative interviews) study of disabled workers in Belgium and the United Kingdom guided by the overarching question of which affordances and constraints are experienced by disabled workers when interacting with remote work technology during the initial two lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Poor work-life balance (WLB) has been linked to negative outcomes such as increased stress, anxiety, depression, and a perceived reduction in the overall quality of life. At an institutional level, these may include lowered employee commitment and decreased productivity at work. The advent of COVID-19 has necessitated fundamental alterations to work experience and the ways in which WLB may be perceived. This phenomenological study employed qualitative, in-depth interviews to explore higher education academics’ lived experiences of remote working and how they perceived this had impacted their well-being (WB) and WLB. Using purposive samplings, respondents were drawn from HE sectors in the Netherlands, and the UK. The findings offered an understanding of how remote and hybrid teaching delivery during the pandemic affected academics’ actual experiences of WB and WLB. These findings serve to enhance policymakers’ understandings of significant occupational health and WB issues within a post-pandemic education service paradigm.
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This research report contains the findings of an international study consisting of three online ‘living’ surveys. The surveys focused on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted sign language interpreters’ working practices, how this was experienced by them, and how digital disruption caused by the pandemic is impacting and innovating the sign language interpreting profession. The study was carried out between April 2020 and July 2020; the largest contingent of respondents over all three surveys were from the U.S., followed by the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland and Belgium. Respondents commented that the crisis will probably accelerate the need for remote interpreting training in interpreter training programs. Another resurfacing issue was the perceived need for sign language interpreting students to have face-to-face practice and live mentoring. Respondents commented on what benefits they thought remote interpreting might bring to the table, both for themselves and for deaf people. In general, the most significant benefits that were mentioned were flexibility and the possibility to improve efficiency and availability of sign language interpreting services. Notwithstanding these benefits, a significant number of respondents claimed that remote interpreting is more stressful than face-to-face interpreting and requires a heavier cognitive load.
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Society continues to place an exaggerated emphasis on women's skins, judging the value of lives lived within, by the colour and condition of these surfaces. This artistic research will explore how the skin of a painting might unpack this site of judgement, highlight its objectification, and offer women alternative visualizations of their own sense of embodiment. This speculative renovation of traditional concepts of portrayal will explore how painting, as an aesthetic body whose material skin is both its surface and its inner content (its representations) can help us imagine our portrayal in a different way, focusing, not on what we look like to others, but on how we sense, touch, and experience. How might we visualise skin from its ghostly inner side? This feminist enquiry will unfold alongside archival research on The Ten Largest (1906-07), a painting series by Swedish Modernist Hilma af Klint. Initial findings suggest the artist was mapping traditional clothing designs into a spectral, painterly idea of a body in time. Fundamental methods research, and access to newly available Af Klint archives, will expand upon these roots in maps and women’s craft practices and explore them as political acts, linked to Swedish Life Reform, and knowingly sidestepping a non-inclusive art history. Blending archival study with a contemporary practice informed by eco-feminism is an approach to artistic research that re-vivifies an historical paradigm that seems remote today, but which may offer a new understanding of the past that allows us to also re-think our present. This mutuality, and Af Klint’s rhizomatic approach to image-making, will therefore also inform the pedagogical development of a Methods Research programme, as part of this post-doc. This will extend across MA and PhD study, and be further enriched by pedagogy research at Cal-Arts, Los Angeles, and Konstfack, Stockholm.
The integration of renewable energy resources, controllable devices and energy storage into electricity distribution grids requires Decentralized Energy Management to ensure a stable distribution process. This demands the full integration of information and communication technology into the control of distribution grids. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is used to communicate measurements and commands between individual components and the control server. In the future this control is especially needed at medium voltage and probably also at the low voltage. This leads to an increased connectivity and thereby makes the system more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. According to the research agenda NCSRA III, the energy domain is becoming a prime target for cyber-attacks, e.g., abusing control protocol vulnerabilities. Detection of such attacks in SCADA networks is challenging when only relying on existing network Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). Although these systems were designed specifically for SCADA, they do not necessarily detect malicious control commands sent in legitimate format. However, analyzing each command in the context of the physical system has the potential to reveal certain inconsistencies. We propose to use dedicated intrusion detection mechanisms, which are fundamentally different from existing techniques used in the Internet. Up to now distribution grids are monitored and controlled centrally, whereby measurements are taken at field stations and send to the control room, which then issues commands back to actuators. In future smart grids, communication with and remote control of field stations is required. Attackers, who gain access to the corresponding communication links to substations can intercept and even exchange commands, which would not be detected by central security mechanisms. We argue that centralized SCADA systems should be enhanced by a distributed intrusion-detection approach to meet the new security challenges. Recently, as a first step a process-aware monitoring approach has been proposed as an additional layer that can be applied directly at Remote Terminal Units (RTUs). However, this allows purely local consistency checks. Instead, we propose a distributed and integrated approach for process-aware monitoring, which includes knowledge about the grid topology and measurements from neighboring RTUs to detect malicious incoming commands. The proposed approach requires a near real-time model of the relevant physical process, direct and secure communication between adjacent RTUs, and synchronized sensor measurements in trustable real-time, labeled with accurate global time-stamps. We investigate, to which extend the grid topology can be integrated into the IDS, while maintaining near real-time performance. Based on topology information and efficient solving of power flow equation we aim to detect e.g. non-consistent voltage drops or the occurrence of over/under-voltage and -current. By this, centrally requested switching commands and transformer tap change commands can be checked on consistency and safety based on the current state of the physical system. The developed concepts are not only relevant to increase the security of the distribution grids but are also crucial to deal with future developments like e.g. the safe integration of microgrids in the distribution networks or the operation of decentralized heat or biogas networks.
phōnē – Giving Minority Languages a Voice is a project application to safeguards and promotes cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe. We will connect people who belong to a language minority in their countries with European values across language and cultural borders. 10 institutions will cooperate for the first time, breaking new ground for the RML theatre sector and improving their standing nationallyand internationally. phōnē will be the first ever major international collaboration between theatres working for minority languages.“Languages are vehicles of our cultures, collective memory and values. They are an essential component of our identities, and a building block of our diversity and living heritage.”The loss of a language means not only the loss of a basic element of communication, but also of a complete system of knowledge developed over time. The disappearance of a language also means the loss of a unique, unrecoverable universe associated with a particular environment. It means the loss of diversity.Phōnē wants to make an active contribution to the vitalisation of endangered minority languages. In order to keep endangered languages alive, theatre is one of the most suitable media because it provides a space for language, but also because it uses non-language-based forms of communication. In this way, theatre in particular makes it easier for people who do not yet have a confident knowledge of theminority language to get started. This will safeguard cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe. Strengthening the cultures and their languages will also strengthen the economic basis of the theatres working in these minority languages.phōnē is aiming for three main objectives to strengthen theatre in its role of vitalising endangered minority languages.A – Giving Minority Languages a voiceTogether we will search for narratives that tell about the people in their minority language region. Thestories are about and from people who live and work in remote regions of Europe and are written anddeveloped in the respective minority language.B – Giving Minority Languages a European stageThe developed texts need a stage to reach the widest possible audience. As different as the expectednarratives will be, so different will be the stages (outreach / site-specific / digital) on which they are presented.Different formats support the goal of addressing the broadest possible audience in the communitiesand involving them both passively and actively in the use of their minority language.
