A Formal Model for the TIMESPACE Software

This paper proposes a formal model to underpin the development of the TIMESPACE software. This software can be used to produce very useful statistics regarding the use of rooms in houses. The statistics can be utilized for research related to the social aspects of life associated with the houses and the time people spend in the various rooms for various activities. This paper is therefore concerned with the storage and retrieval of time-related architectural spatial information. The proposed model caters for the representation of time in data structures, which are used to store data regarding architectural spaces. The representation of time is achieved through the extension of these structures with lifespans. The introduction of lifespans into data structures representing spaces and users of spaces will allow us to manipulate the stored data and produce very useful information related to the time and use of spaces. Few examples of possible questions/queries that we will be able to answer are: which space is used the most/least, which users use a space during a particular time, which spaces are used by different users at the same time, etc. In order to produce such information from the data structures, we need to define some operators on lifespans. Such operators can then be used either within a query language allowing ad-hoc or predefined queries, or within a programming language for predefined queries. In this paper we formally define these operators and provide their pseudo-code specifications. We also provide some pseudo-code specifications of possible queries to illustrate the use and usefulness of these operators

Space II

Space is a key geographical concept. Along with other core concepts such as place, landscape, scale, mobility, nature, and environment, it helps define the discipline as one that is explicitly spatial in its focus and thinking. Unsurprisingly then, geography is often described as a spatial science. As such, while human geographers are interested in social, political, cultural, economic, and environmental issues and undertake historical analyses, they do so cognizant of the role of space in shaping the world around us and using theories and methods that illustrate why space and spatial processes matter. This article details how thinking about space has evolved significantly since the 1950s, focusing in particular on how theorists have conceptualized the ontology of space. To illustrate the differences between the various ways of thinking about space, an example of how cities are understood within different ontological frameworks is used

Performative Methodologies: Geographies of Emotion and Affect in Digital Storytelling Workshops

This thesis advocates digital storytelling as a geographical methodology to understand how emotion and affect are produced. Digital storytelling is a flexible and workshopped methodology that captures experimental, creative and imaginative performances of emotion and affect. Through digital storytelling geographers may build understandings of how emotion and affect are experienced individually and collectively. I use 11 digital storytelling workshops, with more than 100 participants, as the primary sites for my research. The workshops were conducted in the United States and New Zealand and were modelled on the practice established by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, United States. It is argued that digital storytelling workshops co-create emotion, affect, people and place. Individual and group interviews, reflexive autobiographical journal writing, and digital storytelling workshop training, participation, and observing are used to access emotion and affect in digital storytelling workshops. A combination of qualitative research methods and critical social theories are used to highlight embodied, emotional and affectual geographies. Three findings frame my discussion. First, digital storytelling workshops are performative spaces for the staging and circulation of emotion and affect. The concepts of infrastructure, improvisation, and intimacy are critical for understanding the dynamic nature of emotion and affect in digital storytelling workshops. Second, a focus on relationality allows for an examination of psychotherapeutic practice and the transformative capacity of digital storytelling workshops. Workshop spaces are understood as ‘connective mediums’ in which a third position – the gap between the flow of emotions and the representation of that experience - is possible. Third, voice in digital storytelling is a political process of speaking and listening. A focus on voice permits an exploration of the acoustic politics of emotion and affect at individual and collective spatial scales. Digital storytelling workshops facilitate processes of seeing, hearing and experiencing emotion and affect as a way of interpreting the geographical worlds of research participants. The Center for Digital Storytelling’s model incorporates a commitment to social justice that honours and values emotional knowledge. As a practice-based research methodology digital storytelling requires researchers to be reflexive and negotiate their multiply layered ethical positionings. As geographers continue to experiment with innovative ways of conducting research, the messiness of digital storytelling can contribute to methodological debates about the ‘doing’ of emotion and affect in geographical research

The decisive reset: attainable governance for revitalising democracy

To improve democratic legitimacy, successful resolution of public policy challenges has to emerge from highly pressurised political predicaments. Increasing civic functionality requires integrative Civil Service practice, building trust in adaptive oversight. With the task of effective governance stretching out-of-reach in straining institutional arrangements, a proposition is developed for an “Attainable Governance” reset to revitalise democracy. Motivated by the need for progress that is sensitive to the reality and risks of the present and embodying requirements to hold open unforeseen possibilities for future action, the groundwork is laid for a new “decision architecture” that improves policy-framing and decision-making. With a mission to compose a conceptual framework for “facing the future” in the United Kingdom, I make the case for refreshing democratic arrangements, including a proposed structural intervention to the policy-making system with a correlative cultural step-change in leadership. Laying out a novel framework, the analysis draws widely on strands of thinking in social theory and political philosophy, public administration and policy-making, systems thinking and design, planning and strategic management, anticipation and futures, economics, and sociology. Taking an “integral” methodological orientation, in three parts I: (1) diagnose the converging Predicament, (2) develop a conceptual Proposition, and 3) sketch-out an approach to leadership that facilitates operational adaption in Procedures for applied practice. Positing that we have to deal with systems-of-problems (“messes”) and system-of-systems (“systemic messes”) with an analytic primacy on expanding temporal considerations to factor in more anticipative insights, I take a Complex Adaptive Systems-informed stance. The need for a “Decisive Reset” to refresh democracy, featuring phased systemic reordering and tactical modularity to produce better public decision-making that is responsive and agile in the short-run, while actively gauging medium-term realities and future-proofing for long-run uncertainties, results in a new decision architecture and methodology

Creating year 7 bubbles to support primary to secondary school transition: a positive pandemic outcome?

In this paper, we explore the benefits of new forms of in-school grouping for children moving from primary to secondary school during the COVID-19 pandemic in England. Our three-phase study with over 400 students and teachers found that protective measures to limit COVID-19 though year group ‘bubbles’ generated an environment more aligned to children’s previous primary school experience. This natural experiment smoothed the process of transition by providing a better correspondence with students’ developmental needs, especially for those on the cusp of adolescence. We recommend that physical, administrative and pedagogical school structures are reimagined for this age group to this end

Ontology in the Game of Life

The game of life is an excellent framework for metaphysical modeling. It can be used to study ontological categories like space, time, causality, persistence, substance, emergence, and supervenience. It is often said that there are many levels of existence in the game of life. Objects like the glider are said to exist on higher levels. Our goal here is to work out a precise formalization of the thesis that there are various levels of existence in the game of life. To formalize this thesis, we develop a set-theoretic construction of the glider. The method of this construction generalizes to other patterns in the game of life. And it can be extended to more realistic physical systems. The result is a highly general method for the set-theoretical construction of substance

GENTRIFICATION MOVES TO THE GLOBAL SOUTH: AN ANALYSIS OF THE PROGRAMA DE RESCATE, A NEOLIBERAL URBAN POLICY IN MÉXICO CITY\u27S CENTRO HISTÓRICO

This dissertation argues that urban neoliberal programs currently formulating in the Global South are unprecedented in historical México as well as in examined practices of gentrification and globalization. In this dissertation I specifically focus on the Programa de Rescate – an urban policy being amassed in México City’s Centro Histórico as a nexus of processes of gentrification, neoliberalization, and globalization. This work re-theorizes how gentrification functions when it is implemented in the Global South – as the neoliberalization of space

Temporal tensions: EU citizen migrants, asylum seekers and refugees navigating dominant temporalities of work in England

This article considers the role of temporality in the differential inclusion of migrants. In order to do this we draw on research which examined the working lives of a diverse group of new migrants in North East England: Eastern European migrants arriving from 2004 and asylum seekers and refugees arriving from 1999. In so doing we emphasise both distinct and shared experiences, related to immigration status but also a range of other dimensions of identity. We specifically consider how dominant temporalities regulate the lives of new migrants through degrees, periods and moments of acceleration/deceleration. The paper illustrates the ways in which dominant temporalities control access and non-access to particular, often precarious forms of work – but also how migrants attempt to navigate such restrictions through their own use and constructions of time. We explore this in relation to three 'phases' of time. Firstly, through experiences of the UK asylum system and work prohibition. Secondly for a broader group of participants we explore the speeding up and slowing down of transitions to and progression within work. Lastly, we consider how participants experience everyday temporal tensions between paid employment and unpaid care. Across these phases we suggest that dominant orderings of time and the narratives which make sense of these, represent non-simultaneous temporalities that do not neatly map onto each other