Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1

iv ! Editors’ Note Welcome to the first edition of Under Construction: Keele’s first bi-annual postgraduate journal in the humanities and social sciences. We are delighted to provide a note of introduction as the journal’s editorial board, promoting the realisation of a collective and broad research environment in the faculty via this outward facing publication. This journal provides a platform for postgraduate students to publish their work at various stages of development, including theoretical based, conceptual and creative pieces. It also functions as a bridge between a peer review internal publication and external peer assessment. We hope this will make the journal a valuable resource for early career researchers. We are particularly excited about the interdisciplinary nature of this publication, as it welcomes contributions of scholarly work from all fields of the humanities and social sciences. The papers that make up this edition reflect the high standard and diversity of work undertaken by postgraduates at Keele. All five articles, when considered collectively, offer an exploration of the passing of time and how the modern is so closely interwoven with that which has gone before it. Articles include a study of the relationship between religion and the death penalty from the pens of Victorian writers; an examination of Alice Munro’s short stories and their portrayals of the social construction of the maternal body from the perspective of a creative writing postgraduate student; a survey of the life of 17th Century rationalist Anne Conway, a female voice amidst the white male dominated narration of the history of philosophy; an introduction to a research project that will assess the similarities and differences between musical engagement and knitting in terms of their impact on wellbeing, and an examination of interactive genetic algorithm implementations that have informed the development of evolutionary sound design environment (ESDE). All of the submissio

Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 6