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The article explores the complicity of children’s picturebooks in the construction and critique of world politics. Focusing on The Gruffalo, it argues that this spectacularly successful book: (1) stories the international as a pessimistic, anarchical world populated by self-interested, survival-seekers; (2) disrupts this reading and its assumptions through evocation of the social production of threat; and, (3) provides a more fundamental decolonial critique of the international through parochial privileging of its protagonist’s journey through a ‘deep dark wood’. In doing this, we argue, the book vividly demonstrates the world’s susceptibility to multiple incompatible readings, while rendering visible the assumptions, framing, and occlusions of competing understandings of the international. As such, it theorises both world politics and knowledge thereof as contingent and unstable. In making this argument, three contributions are made. First, empirically, we expand research on popular culture and world politics through investigating a surprisingly neglected example of the former. Second, theoretically, we demonstrate the work such texts perform in (re)creating and (de)stabilising (knowledge of) global politics. Third, we offer a composite methodological framework for future research into the context, content, and framing of complex texts like The Gruffalo.

In salmon aquaculture, the sustainable management of salmon lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) is limited by the adaptive capacity of the parasite. This is evident in the repeated evolution of pesticide resistance in the salmon louse population. To better prepare for resistance, we constructed a numerical metapopulation model that predicts the evolutionary dynamics of lice across an interconnected farm network. This model integrates within-farm population dynamics and between-farm louse dispersal, the latter using outputs from a state-of-the-art particle-tracking model. Distinct from previous metapopulation models, it also simulates spatial and temporal genetic variation arising from selection. The model was parameterized to simulate the evolution of resistance to the pesticide azamethiphos on farms in southern Norway. It successfully reproduced the rapid (within 10 years) evolution of azamethiphos resistance following extensive delousing treatments. It also identified strong spatial patterns in resistance, with regions of high farm connectivity being potential hotspots of louse adaptation. Rates of infestation and evolution were significantly reduced when highly connected farms were excluded from the simulation, compared to when low-connectivity or random sites were excluded. This model can be a valuable tool for coordinating pest management at a regional scale, in a way that slows or prevents the spread of resistance. A metapopulation model reveals connectivity-driven hotspots in treatment resistance evolution in a marine parasite

A successful digital society is, in part, predicated on people having secure access to digitally-delivered services when they need it. It has long been recognised that parts of society are not able to access digital services without assistance, often as a result of economic precarity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of third and voluntary sector organisations in providing assisted digital access has come to the fore. As access to essential everyday services moved to digital-only and family and friendship networks of support became disrupted by the pandemic, for many, voluntary and third sector organisations were the source of digital assistance to claim welfare, pay bills, take part in education and purchase food. Our study explores the types of assisted digital access that voluntary and third sector organisations have provided thus far during the COVID-19 pandemic. We capture the dimensions of this assistance and evaluate the steps such organisations take to ensure that this access is safe for both the assister and assisted. From these findings we set out a security strategy with supporting design principles that combines digital security with human security in a security approach we term 'positive-first'.

Selecting a wind farm layout optimization method is difficult. Comparisons between optimization methods in different papers can be uncertain due to the difficulty of exactly reproducing the objective function. Comparisons by just a few authors in one paper can be uncertain if the authors do not have experience using each algorithm. In this work we provide an algorithm comparison for a wind farm layout optimization case study between eight optimization methods applied, or directed, by researchers who developed those algorithms or who had other experience using them. We provided the objective function to each researcher to avoid ambiguity about relative performance due to a difference in objective function. While these comparisons are not perfect, we try to treat each algorithm more fairly by having researchers with experience using each algorithm apply each algorithm and by having a common objective function provided for analysis. The case study is from the International Energy Association (IEA) Wind Task 37, based on the Borssele III and IV wind farms with 81 turbines. Of particular interest in this case study is the presence of disconnected boundary regions and concave boundary features. The optimization methods studied represent a wide range of approaches, including gradient-free, gradient-based, and hybrid methods; discrete and continuous problem formulations; single-run and multi-start approaches; and mathematical and heuristic algorithms. We provide descriptions and references (where applicable) for each optimization method, as well as lists of pros and cons, to help readers determine an appropriate method for their use case. All the optimization methods perform similarly, with optimized wake loss values between 15.48 % and 15.70 % as compared to 17.28 % for the unoptimized provided layout. Each of the layouts found were different, but all layouts exhibited similar characteristics. Strong similarities across all the layouts include tightly packing wind turbines along the outer borders, loosely spacing turbines in the internal regions, and allocating similar numbers of turbines to each discrete boundary region. The best layout by annual energy production (AEP) was found using a new sequential allocation method, discrete exploration-based optimization (DEBO). Based on the results in this study, it appears that using an optimization algorithm can significantly improve wind farm performance, but there are many optimization methods that can perform well on the wind farm layout optimization problem, given that they are applied correctly.

Played by billions, videogames have become perhaps the pre-eminent way in which the public experience, engage with, and encounter the war on terror and its legacies. As Stahl argues, 9/11 and “the ...

Although the production of videogames by extremist and terrorist groups has markedly declined since a high point in the 2000s, game-based interventions remain highly significant, whether through the adoption of gaming-based iconography in extremist and terrorist social media campaigns or through the activity of modders and groups’ supporters who continue to make games championing extremists and terrorists. Building on Conway’s 2017 call to look anew at the nexus between violent extremism, terrorism, and the internet, we problematize existing work on the use of videogames by extremists and terrorists. First, we argue that research needs to move beyond viewing games as tools for recruitment: seeing videogames as sources of propaganda that work to reinforce the views of those already empathetic to and/or attuned to a group’s messages significantly expands our understanding of the interrelationship between players and extremist and terrorist videogames. Second, we argue that the present literature – whilst impressive – has overly privileged the “reading” of in-game representations, at the expense of attention to the central role of interactive gameplay in promoting the strategic communication and propaganda aims of a group. It is through the undertaking of in-game actions that a player comes to experience a group’s values and aims. Research on videogames, extremism and terrorism is at a nascent stage – this article seeks to provoke further thinking and open up spaces for debate in this crucial, yet under-studied, area.

The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) refers to the well-replicated finding that the presence of to-be-ignored sound disrupts short-term memory for serially-presented visual items. This phenomenon has proven useful in evaluating the structure, function, and development of short-term memory as well as characterising the interface between perceptual and mnemonic processing and providing recommendations for optimal working environments. Indeed, the ISE has achieved status as an important benchmark finding within cognitive psychology. This preregistered report focused on a methodological examination of the paradigm typically relied upon to study the ISE and sought to determine whether the ISE can be reliably studied using the increasingly popular method of online experiments. The results demonstrated that key signature effects of auditory distraction (the changing-state effect and the steady-state effect) can be successfully reproduced in online settings. There were no differences between Psychology students tested online and Psychology students tested in person. Participants from an online panel showed the same effects as Psychology students, but the effects were somewhat smaller in size. Our results confirmed the viability of online collection of data for auditory distraction research and provided important insights for the accumulation and maintenance of high data quality in internet-based experimentation.

Scholars of international relations frequently explore how states normalize the use of military force through processes of militarization, yet few have analyzed how new information and communication technologies impact on these processes. The essays in this forum address this gap, and consider the political significance of new technologies, new actors, and new practices that shape “Militarization 2.0” and normalize political violence in the digital age. The authors in this forum rely, to varying degrees, on common militarized tropes and dichotomies (such as authenticity, belonging, and (de)humanizing framings) that are key to militarization, including those devices that rest on gender, race/ethnicity, and heteronormativity. Moving beyond a military-centered approach to militarization, the authors’ questions cover ministries of foreign affairs; the embodied performances of celebrity leaders and insurgency groups; arms producers, the military video game industry, and private military and security companies; and violence entrepreneurs. The forum closes with reflections from Cynthia Enloe.

This article demonstrates the significance of military videogames, exploring the changes in representations (how war is depicted) and production processes (the links between the military and videogames industries) that have occurred from the 1990s to the present. It argues that representations have moved from a focus on the 9/11 wars to depicting conflicts set in the past and/or future, so depoliticising popular culture. In terms of production, there have been corresponding changes, with a loosening of the historic links between the military and videogames industry.

This article contributes to a small, but growing, scholarship on military videogames. Focusing, specifically, on diverse manifestations of temporality within these games, it demonstrates that this genre is both more diverse, and has greater critical potential, than is often recognised. The article begins with a brief overview of contemporary scholarship on temporality, war and global politics. A second section then identifies three different ways in which temporality features in military videogames: (i) as a horizon, or historical background, against which they are produced and consumed; (ii) as a dramatic setting around which games and their narratives are structured; and, (iii) as duration – which may be accelerated or decelerated – experienced by those playing these games. These three instantiations of time are then investigated via a new typology of military videogames, ordered around: mainstream military shooters, critical military shooters, critical procedural military games, and civilian-centred military games. This typology enables us, first, to show the centrality of temporal assumptions, arguments and experiences to the ways in which war is made meaningful across these games. And, second, to demonstrate the significance of distinct productions and experiences of temporality for the critical potentiality thereof.

Whilst there has been a recent rise in research within the social sciences which has sought to explore the topic of ‘precarity’, to date there has been very little discussion around the precarity inherent in the research process or in following an academic pathway, and its subsequent impact on the wellbeing and mental health of the researcher. Within this intervention piece, we expose some of the uncertainties and precarities experienced as part of the postgraduate research journey, in doing so, drawing upon our own personal experiences as doctoral researchers. These have included, for example, the potential of research to fail and perpetual anxieties around future academic careers, preservation and progression in the context of an unstable academy. Academia appears to have traditionally required a commitment to the silencing of emotions and feelings of uncertainty, with very few academics talking openly about the emotions involved in their everyday work. This piece calls for an environment which is more open, supportive and accommodating of both the emotions and mental health of postgraduate researchers.